Synopsis
As one of the first and most eloquent spokesmen for the New Criticism, R. P. Blackmur achieved a place of rare distinction in American letters. He preferred to think of himself as a poet, however, and this volume shows that his poetry was in its own right an enduring contribution to literature. Included here are The Second World (1942) and The Good European (1947), as well as From Jordan's Delight (1937), described by Allen Tate as "one of the most distinguished volumes of verse in the first half of the century."
Blackmur was a formalist and a master of traditional versification, a poet whose work did not show the influence of Pound and Eliot although he read them closely. His poetry impresses the reader with its strength, gravity, and musicality.
During his career, Blackmur lectured widely in the United States and abroad. He was the first man of letters to hold the Pitt Professorship of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University, and he was Professor of English at Princeton University, where he conceived the Christian Gauss Seminars in Criticism. He was a Fellow in American Letters at the Library of Congress, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Vice President of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
Originally published in 1978.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
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Poems of R.P. Blackmur
By Richard Palmer BlackmurPRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1977 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-01337-4All rights reserved.
Contents
Introduction by Denis Donoghue, ix,
FROM JORDAN'S DELIGHT, 1937,
From Jordan's Delight, 3,
Of Lucifer, 13,
An Elegy for Five, 16,
For Horace Hall, 19,
Sea Island Miscellany, 21,
Judas Priest, 29,
Views of Boston Common and Near By, 31,
Witness of Light, 33,
October Frost, 34,
Steriles Ritoumelles, 35,
Petit Manan Point, 36,
Three Songs at Equinox, 38,
The Cough, 40,
Phasellus Ille, 43,
Scarabs for the Living, 44,
Since There's No Help ..., 50,
Simulacrum Deae, 51,
Pone Metum ..., 52,
River-Walk, 53,
Dedications, 55,
A Labyrinth of Being, 59,
A Funeral for a Few Sticks, 65,
THE SECOND WORLD, 1942,
The Second World, 73,
Missa Vocis, 74,
Una Vita Nuova, 75,
For Comfort and for Size, 76,
Rats, Lice, and History, 77,
Before Sentence Is Passed, 79,
The Cellar Goes Down with a Step, 85,
The Idea of Christian Society, 86,
The Dead Ride Fast, 87,
THE GOOD EUROPEAN, 1947,
Twelve Scarabs for the Living: 1942, 91,
Three Poems from a Text: Isaiah LXl:1-3, 95,
Thirteen Scarabs for the Living: 1945, 99,
The Good European: 1945,
I. A Decent Christian Burial, 103,
II. Phoenix at Loss, 106,
III. Dinner for All, 107,
IV. Coda: Respublica Christiana, 109,
Sunt Lacrimae Rerum et Mentem Mortalia Tangunt, 110,
Boy and Man: The Cracking Glass, 111,
Miching Mallecho, 112,
The Rape of Europa, 113,
Ithyphallics, 114,
The Communiques from Yalta, 115,
PREVIOUSLY UNCOLLECTED POEMS,
Autumn Sonata: To John Marshall, 119,
A Testament on Faith, 124,
Mr. Virtue and the Three Bears, 130,
Alma Venus, 132,
Last Things, 134,
Effigy, 135,
Three Poems,
Water-Ruined, 137,
Flower and Weed, 137,
Of a Muchness, 138,
Ides of March to April Fool's, 139,
Night Piece, 143,
Less Love Than Eachness, 144,
Resurrection, 145,
The Bull, 146,
By Definition, 147,
On Excited Knees, 148,
Half-Tide Ledge, 149,
All's the Foul Fiend's, 150,
Nigger Jim, 151,
And No Amends, 152,
Threnos, 153,
Acknowledgments, 154,
CHAPTER 1
From Jordan's Delight
Redwing
What is that island, say you, stark and black —
A Cythera in northern exile? sung
Only by sailors on the darkward tack
Or till the channel buoy give safety tongue?
Here is no Eldorado on the wane:
New Sirens draw us in, in silent seine.
Men do not come to live here, but to spend
Memory, time, and the long sense of flight,
And find by spendthrift each one image friend
That might outlast him and himself benight:
In spending tides, spent winds, and unspent seas
Find out the flowering desert dark, soul's ease.
Redwing was driven so and so drawn in,
A bearded fisher in his own annoy
Hearing without all hallowed within,
The hermit prison-crying in the boy,
The broken promise cutting the inward grain,
The heart throstling the sweet-tormented brain.
Redwing was jilted forty years ago;
What wilted waits for water still, what winced
Still tenders when his fingers free and fro
The mooring-buoy, and he, each fair tide since,
Full-bearded, full awry, takes second sight
Of exile in the black isle, Jordan's Delight.
(Once I was with him, he within me yet,
When while the ash of dawn was colding through
And the ashen tiller stick was creaking wet
He sang of Oh, the foggy, foggy dew! —
Then felt, and lost, the long, low-running swell
That buoyed his words up, voice that made them spell.)
All broken ground and ledges to the east
Awash and breaking, this island has a loom
Never to be forgotten from the west
And never to be left without sea-room.
O Redwing, by your ruddied beard I swear
Jordan shall wreck you yet, and wrecking spare.
This stony garden crossed by souring cries —
Gull bleat, hawk shriek, mouse and eagle screams —
Retrieves, O Redwing, silence in your eyes:
It is excruciation that redeems;
Redeems, O Redwing, by your blood I swear,
The still brain from anhungered sirens there.
ii
The Foggy Foggy Dew
O Jordan young Jordan O sailoring friend,
I'm sailing for ye that sailor no more;
Though the moon's shut in and sun shut out
And all the sea's a drif ting shore,
Though tide-rips clout and put me about
And the lather of cross-slops crab my oar,
I'll sail her true and 'cordin' to;
— And oh, the foggy foggy dew!
Where were your eyes that day, young Jordan,
For the rocking rise, the glimming land-loom?
Where your ears, my gooding boy,
For the smalling seas that shift the shingle?
Where was your feel for a shoaling keel,
The shiver and shawling, yawing of doom?
Your grandfather knew, and so now you;
— And oh, the foggy foggy dew!
Your first grandfather first, young Jordan,
Old he that in his shipwrecked thirst
Sucked sea-fog off his aching lips
And sucked but caking salt — and slaking
Followed voices on the sea.
As then came you, now I askew;
— And oh, the foggy foggy dew!
Hear now, young Jordan, salt that you are,
Where was your dread and where now mine?
The trough and the surge, the urge of the dead,
These are our manna, salt for wine.
O heaven-swell, O passing-bell,
Hearing I know ye, all ye spell;
Hold me true in long haloo:
— And oh, the foggy foggy dew!
iii
All Things are a Flowing
Flowers do better here than peas and beans,
Here nothing men may save can save its mark;
Reason a glitter flowing blues to greens
Beyond the offshore shoals gains ocean dark.
The poor within us climb the cliff and stare
Through second eyes and are sea-beggared there.
Sun warms the flesh, but in the marrow, wind;
The seagulls over head and neater tern
Scream woodthrush in the birches out of mind.
How warm a marrow cold enough to bum!
There is no shelter here, no self-warm lair,
When every lung eddies the ocean air.
All's weather here and sure, visible change;
It is the permutation of the stone,
The inner crumbling of the mountain range,
Breathes in our ears sea rale and moan.
And this the steadied heart, our own, must bear:
Suncalm and stormcalm, both in breathless air.
Here men wear natural colours, mostly blue,
Colour of fusion, shade of unison,
Colour of nothingness seen twice, come true,
Colour the gods must be that come undone:
Colour of succour and mirage, O snare
And reservoir, death ravens in arrear.
iv
Con coloriti Flori et Herba
O flowering mosses
Flowering stone
Above the barnacles and sea urchins
Above the lichen and washing weed
The slow heave the pull the give and lift
O fugitive
Quiet almost it is so far and freed
Translucent waters are
When the wave crosses
Above them all on the vain edge
Crawl, crawl out O flowering cliff
And look you down
Heave and give to the easy all uneasing swells
Look where if you fall
To the washing ledge
O blessed Francis
Such is the red stonecrop
The purpling pink sea-pea
The blue legume with bluest bloom
And blue harebell
Laced in the fissured dripping rock
Where if you fall
Falling and calling
Tenacity of fingers
Of suddenly resourceless eyes
So frail so far O Francis
This and the flowers are
So long it lingers
This good and evil chance is
You batter and you blessed drown
v
Midlight the Stable Place
Below the southern, seaward ledges, where,
Such is the heavy weathering away,
No flower grows, no silence hearts the air,
Each rock gives slowly from its utmost bay,
There comes the day's calthumpian, all afleer,
In his midwaste quotidian King Lear.
His great moonface rumridden and windshot,
His voice the cleaving of the wind to sea,
He drives full speed head on and sets his pots
In his own image and without a lee,
Safe in the backwash of the ledge at bay,
An act of God who does not die this day.
It is midwaste of breaking and the foam,
Midblack the upward curve, the flecking lace,
There always order gives disorder room,
There always midlight is the stable place.
There in the blossoming of waywardness,
O stalwart Lear, you eddy and confess.
vi
O Sleeping Lear
Wayward the wind weighs
For us who merely be
Westly on warm days
Eastly to rough the sea
Here wayward fishers come
Full twelve on the rock beach
To split a salvaged drum
Red rum and ruddy speech
Here one came all undone
Shirt out and jaw askew
Slipping jarred his gun
And blood ran ruddy too
What blood was that what gale
What yelling, belling cry
What signal in wind's wail
What fading frosting eye
Wayward the wind weighs
For us who merely be
All steady north these days
And no mirage asea
The blessed man got up
From rum and lobster ran
Huge to the north cliff top
And giant there began
Heaving the island down
And heaving the boulder word
Earth clods wood red, root brown
Until he fell and snored
Who shall the sleeper mock
Who smoothe his thinning hair
O eddy of whorled rock
O eddying headlost air
vii
Cythera without Disguise
It is the place of exile we divine
Will be uncovered in this ocean dark,
The place in all ill falling that we mark
Bottom: the drif ting place in rock and wine.
Look there, the closing of the sea in night,
The falling of all human dark, eye-bright.
Ah, Dorothy, deny me if you can;
Here on this isle, exile and ever home,
This Jordan spating the full sea to foam,
Deny all that is inmost and no man.
There's no revulsion, but certain undisguise:
The fear, the Siren, birth in extinguished eyes.
"Ah, Dorothy, on your isle I find upright and just
Only the gibbet where there hangs our double image.
Ah, Lord our common God, give me the strength and
courage
To contemplate this heart this flesh without disgust."
Here to my ghost of need provide expense,
All ravening seed, all summoning violence.
x
All Sirens' Seine
Here under Jordan's seamost ledge
On splintered shale and chowdered sand
Always it is gulf's dragging edge
Where we await highwater stand.
Here all the tides of Sirens climb,
Borne upwards from the settling waves,
Borne upwards and over and back,
From spring to neap, and each its slack.
How sing they of our washing graves,
How lift and draw us in, how heave
And buoying snare us in heaven's seine,
Who in our dying parts still climb,
And falling strand our living gain.
The rising and falling, lag and retrieve,
Sun heave and withdrawing,
Moon lift and imploring,
The spring of hours and neap of time,
The drift, the range, spindrif t, the soaring:
What bench-mark harks the ever change?
All waves are angel messengers
Horizon outwards and away,
All steady swells the summoners:
The voices in us where we sway.
They are the crying spites the ear,
The silence in us, all the fear,
Ringing where we cannot reach:
The nothing-hope that cravens speech.
Savour of first tear
Clamour of last denial
Wolf-need and hunger of trust
The aching all-folly of trial
Judgment of foam prison of dust
Cover the hush; all we have lost
And have believed, annihilate;
Cover the nothing that is there.
Here on this rock and rocking beach,
Uncover us, we are the cost,
All that is washed inviolate
When our full tidings seaward reach.
A new nothingness is left bare.
See there upon full sea the still
Blossoming of Jordan's heath,
And on the change, all living ill:
O eddying, bodiless faith.
xi
The Journeyman Rejoices
Some irony out of the common mind,
Some wisdom gathered, and returned, like night,
Saw half-united, half at odds, the blind
Conjunction in the name, Jordan's Delight.
What Jordan's that? — Some journeyman of despair
Lived here and died fishing foul weather fair.
And what delight?-Some bleak and gallant face,
Lonely in words, but under words at home,
Might look, might almost see, a first wind-trace,
What hardness rock and flower overcome.
It is the sea face that we hidden wear
So still, rises, rejoices, and is bare.
Of Lucifer
i
The Seed
Renounce, O Lord my God, renounce for me,
O giver-up of life and love and ghost,
not pride nor contumely — renounce most
the bitter-sweet sin of gross humility;
that taken, and annulled, from memory,
I might, reprieved from wanhope's whipping post
and half-consuming fires, once more be lost
in imperfection and necessity.
I need no Lucifer, O Crucified!
to bush the light that blossoms in my eyes,
no Adversary to out-pride my pride;
there is the animal welling in my thighs
that, over-weened, out-towered by his own need,
spends his intolerable, unappeasable seed.
ii
The Trope
The weather, and the earth that suffers it,
the water, and what the waters bear and hide,
these, and the burning stars, together lit,
O Lucifer, the meteor of my pride
in my own sight; that is, the soughing trees,
the rise of a calm tide, the covered ledge,
the star-height thought in minutes and degrees
made me Apollo new to the light's edge.
My island knowledge mounts — such is my fright —
a continent, and mounting raises me
upon a windless, sealess, starless night
apart. Grant, Lucifer, my fall may be
like thine a meteor burnt in its own light;
— and all take cover in a fallen sea.
iii
The Fruit
Ah, Lucifer, the mind is lonely, love
still lonelier, that knows the soul is thine;
all given things must be as treasure trove
received; all taken, dug from the soul's mine.
It is the looking-glass makes evil-browed
and cold the isolated self reviewed;
it is discovery that makes pride proud,
the crying out that echoes solitude.
Therefore we turn to thee to feature forth
for us, as in an actor's strut and voice,
the needs that all unadded add our worth,
that, bottoming despair, let us rejoice.
Thine, arch rebel, these words, thine all we lose:
the sum of vain hopes that we cannot use.
iv
The Entropy
I have lain down, enacting emptiness
within a sleep: heaven is empty so,
a sleep without the body's sloth for dress,
without the wakened loss the mind must know;
have risen up, resuming the bright blood,
the pumping heart, still brain, and feasting eye
and am thus sheathed and trapped in solitude:
a separated life that still can die.
How shall I ponder these in the cold stream,
the wordless and unsummoned sense that springs
indifferent beneath all words? "Which dream,
humble or proud, shall smoothe these sufferings?
Ah, Lucifer, this is the truest hell,
where death alone shall be impossible.
An Elegy for Five
When I lay sick and like to die
five chosen friends came out to call;
for each I put my bottles by
and arched my back against the wall.
The live man visiting the sick
within him finds his own death quick.
Each was embarrassed, and the first,
who could not give his hand the most;
he kept ten fingers tightly pursed
to clasp his own half-given ghost.
His whitened knuckles more than mine
showed how death climbs live veins, a vine.
My friend believe me, even you
for whom all friendship is caress,
no hand can ever touch the blue
background of others' nothingness.
As night horizons close the sea
in you death closes death in me.
The second brought a singing voice
as if, such was her rising fear,
she might by heaping noise on noise
delude a little her inward ear.
Hot with the longing in her brain
her pink shells reddened in refrain.
And now my friend believe me, death
that ends voice, has none of its own;
no slightest sibilance of breath
can ever give to silence tone, —
nor friendship ever in a word
escape separate silence heard.
The third kept taking from the air
half-savoured morsels of disease,
the hope that garnishes despair;
and tasting swallowed all his ease.
Upon his purpling lips I saw
death rise ruminant from his maw.
Believe now, friend, this is the gist
of old friendship and all its savour:
the unpredictable last tryst
when neither feeds on other's favour,
but each can in his salt blood taste
the sea that rising lays us waste.
The fourth put lilies in a vase
to mix the scent of their distress
with mine, and prayed the two bouquets
might fuse themselves, and coalesce.
Immovable, her nostrils meant
she smelt herself, intent.
Believe, now more than ever, friend,
odours are omens on the air,
signals that interchange and blend
solitudes they cannot impair.
Death, as it signals us, perfumes
the ecstasy the flesh resumes.
The fifth, by grace, came late at night
when I was thoughtful, and his eyes
absorbing mine absorbed their light
and the dark image that in them lies.
Across his naked face he wore
the long shudder of one death more.
Wherefore, my bitter friend, believe
friendship that wears to nakedness,
like life, like hope, leaves least to grieve
and most, O sweet unknown, to bless:
the sight that proves each man alone —
unknowable death, as such, made known.
For Horace Hall
i
This man was yours, O Death, these fifteen years:
he who had been best dead when gassed, in battle,
was mortgaged out a kind of living chattel,
for a late funeral and rehearsed tears.
At one side of his grave there stood his wife
and the three girls he spawned of dead man's stuff;
three Legion buglers blew, for his cast slough,
a mid-day taps. There was no drum or fife.
Now, Sire, you have him, may your majesty
lecher again beneath his striped shroud;
let us who must remember him, now see
upon whose service we stand here, bowed.
That much we earned when his expiring breath
removed from us a fifteen-year-big death.
ii
Wilson, the man was yours that April noon
you saw your people's clutching hand as mailed
and, to the bluster of a British tune,
the passionate peace of Jefferson was staled.
If Page and Colonel House were gulled-by Grey,
you, poor Messiah, were worse gulled by them:
content you on this loud inglorious day,
this dust the soil you spilt on Clio's hem.
The man was yours, is dead as you are dead;
like you, who in the textbooks of the schools
gain glory daily, of him it shall be said,
likewise: Always, in death, the hero rules.
God grant we know, and never know again,
your lives found ignominy sovereign.
iii
The sword comes first to mind but not to hand;
the argument was bloodier and the game
much slower than the sword can understand
unless the blade be twisted out of name.
And so it is the man is yours, O Lord,
twisted by rule until his blood-drenched lung
made mustard gas seem more the threatened sword
than Saladin's when the true Church was young.
But yours as well, O Lord, another way;
this scapegoat of a scapegoat might heap up
his after-knowledge on a pyre and pray:
his the last blood in the armed idol's cup;
the last, in nineteen hundred years' increase,
Prodigal of that Lord who brought, not peace.
iv
Let public feeling go, there Horace Hall
lies in his fortune and his country's flag.
Lift him, it is the weight of death will fall
and in the bottom of your belly sag.
Touch him and in your bowels the new cold
is not imagined but a manifest —
that you, oblivious, already fold
and nurture a cold passion for cold rest.
What hope is that you swallow, seeing death
put under earth and firmed with prim, saved sod?
What hope that saps you like a fear? What breath
is that which leaves you, leaving a full fraud?
I think that each man dying sows the wind
and we the dry seed pods he leaves behind.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Poems of R.P. Blackmur by Richard Palmer Blackmur. Copyright © 1977 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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