Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; Helen Vendler on the Last Books of Five Great American Poets

This evening I'm very pleased to welcome him and critic and Professor Helen Vendler. She joins us to discuss her latest publication last looks last books Stevens Plath lol. Bishop and Meryl last looks last books was born of a series of lectures by Professor van there gave in 2007 as part of the National Galleries of arts and Mellon lectures. Here she explores five of the great modern poets and their final contemplations of death and the lives they're about to leave behind. With Wallace Stevens rock the rock Sylvia Plath's Arielle Robert Lowell's a day by day Elizabeth Bishop's geography three and James Merrill's the scattering of salts we find five strikingly unique attempts to deal with the end of life and of death without the comfort of an afterlife. Professor Helen Vendler as I'm sure many of you know is one of America's leading critics of poetry and is the a Kingsley Porter university professor at Harvard University. Her many books include invisible invisible listeners lyric intimacy and Herbert Whitman Ashbury as well as the art of Shakespeare sonnets as well and also studies of Keats Yeats and

others. In 2004 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Professor Vendler for the Jefferson Lecture the US government's highest honor for achievement in humanities. She is a frequent reviewer for The New Republic The New York Review of Books and other publications. Professor poet Seamus Heaney has called Professor Vendler quote the best close reader of poems to be found on the literary pages. We are very honored to have her here with us tonight. Please join me in welcoming Professor Helen Vendler. Thank you. The Mellon lectures are normally about visual arts. So when they called and asked me to give them I said I can talk a lot I don't know anything about art. I mean I've given talks on art but that was informal and I said I only talk about poetry because that's the only thing I understand and so then they had to go away consult us they said their rubric to find out if poetry fell under the label. And they finally decided that it did so that's how these lectures took

place. And I was very grateful to them because it's good to be commissioned to think about something that you might not have thought of yourself. It puts your thoughts in a different direction and especially if you told us a certain number of lectures you have to have that number of chapters sort of it's all it's all structured for you and I think that a relief sometimes instead of trying to think up my own structures. How would Gardner is doing a study with some of his graduate students on what is good work in various professions. And he's asking about good work in poetry. So I began to think what is good poetry and people concerned with PUT YOU TEACHERS of poetry critics of poetry scholars of poetry etc. and. So I thought I'd begin by saying why do I want to put this kind of work in front of the public at this point. Partly it's that I'm old and when you're old you think more about dying because your friends are dying and if you're not yourself so that it requires that you

think through how you should look at yourself when you know you are dead already. I took people who knew they were dead already so to speak because they couldn't avoid the issue of how to represent themselves in this peculiar state of pre posthumous posthumous innocence something Keats referred to my posthumous life and he meant the life he was living at the top of the Spanish Steps there in Rome so that you could have a posthumous life while just still are alive. I was interested in that state of mind and also instead of representation of the self when it is divided into a body that is essentially useless or about to be so. And a spirit which is as yet said he was never more young that as he says in the tower. Then when he had this awful old body tied to him as a kid hand to a dog's tail I think he said so that. I had thought about this already

with respect to Yates to some degree but not specially. That was not my real purpose in thinking about some of those poems though it could be brought. They could be brought to that purpose. The reason I could have looked at Lost Books by other poets or other. I decided I would speak about American poets that was the first decision and modern American poets because they aren't known well enough yet everybody knows about Whitman everybody knows about Emily Dickinson but not everybody knows about James marrow. Not everybody approves of James Merrill as far as that goes. When he won the Bowen prize there was an editorial in New York Times essentially saying why give the prize to somebody like this. I mean it's an astonishing thing for them to do to second guess the falling in the prize but they wanted to go to some more hearty representatives of the United States. So also I find when I travel that people don't know these poets. Many of them they know Stevens maybe but later than that not me not usually so this is partly a work of advertisement which I think is one of the good works that you can do. It's partly

also a work of brokering poetry to a public that loves poetry but often finds a new poem that's we all too disconcerting a certain kind of poet. And I also thought that though I could have written about other poets John Berryman and. Archie Ammons both of them poets I love came to mind but I didn't think their last books were as strong as some of the preceding books and I wanted to take work that was non-power a so to speak and equalled in earlier books and I don't think that's true for them and so I don't think it's true of the late late poems Berryman. So I ended up with these five poets and I was glad that they turned out to include some women and some men although I found out the gender didn't make that much difference finally in the contemplation of the ageing body perhaps because all aging bodies are sort of the same. And here you can't avoid the

wreck of the body as hit's calls it. The people I write about either knew they were going to die quite soon. Stevens had allowed his collected poems to be published for the first time he had kept staving off not sure that if he published a collected poems he would instantly die. Archie Emmett's never let them do it collected poems are good people are very superstitious about saying this is my work. But finally Stevens allowed the book to be published on his seventy fifth birthday and he was steady a year later. James Merrill of course knew he was dying from AIDS he didn't know exactly when it would be but by the time he published his last book which has all kinds of valedictory poems and if he knew it would be soon. Elizabeth Bishop though she had no mortal disease when she did her last book has scattered throughout her letters. Intimations says she doesn't think she'll last much longer she has had lots of things wrong with her. She had fragile health had almost died a few times from terrible asthma and

allergy attacks and so was accustomed to the failure of the body if not its imminent demise. Sylvia Plath as I say in the book was always a posthumous person she says to her father an elector on the set. When you and I died when you went into the dirt so that she felt she died when she was eight when her father essentially committed suicide by neglecting his health so that he became septic from undiagnosed diabetes. I was convinced he had cancer. I got imagine when I just stayed upstairs in bed until he died and I hauled off to the hospital and had a leg amputated at the end. It's very strange with two young children to so neglect yourself that you will die when your daughter is eight. I think he probably suffered from the same depression that she did and that that was what kept him upstairs in the room for so many months. But nonetheless it left her feeling forsaken and abandoned because he didn't have to die. So you feel he couldn't have loved you very

much if he didn't think you were worth hanging around for so to speak when he was mortally ill. I was just imagining that it was you. Lowell has interesting Lowell died young. He died at the age of 60 and in 1977 he was born in 1917 and he speaks in one of his poems in 1976 the year before he died 1976 he says a date I dare not affix to my grave. But his expertise soon. He thought it was pretty soon that he would be f fixing a date very close to that. He had congestive heart failure and had been hospitalized for it already before he finally died of a heart attack a year not quite a year after his previous hospitalization. So they were all. Required to contemplate what it was like to come to the end of a life and they all believed without exception that the end of life meant personal extinction. None of them had any faith in the

prolongation of life in any supernatural way. What interested me about this predicament that these authors find themselves in is that we are probably the first century in which you could take five major poets and find out that none of them were religious believers at all so that they thought the question was foreclosed. Eliot had a sorry lolo had a flirtation with Catholicism because his wife was a Catholic for three years. But in the asteroid long and when I asked him why he was being buried in the Church of the Adventist religious service he said that's how we're buried at the low. It's perfectly simple. I had nothing to do with religious belief it just had to do with family custom. So. You know we want some more years OK so.

The question of elegy immediately arises and you all know that according to the standard rubric for Elegy it has to have several parts and these parts are of course taken from the funeral service itself. You always have the corpse and that has to play a sort of central role in any Elegy viewing of the dead body. Secondly it has to have some mourners around at least one mourner like Henry King mourning his wife. You usually have some flowers as the affirmation of life over against death and when Milton's friend well fellow classmate Edward King died by drowning in the Irish Sea. Milton felt keenly the lack of a place to put flowers and so he invents a beer be it that's a beer on which one can place flowers in fantasy. So to interpose a little piece that I'll Frale thoughts dally with false surmise. And that was a late addition

to the poem was then there's this rain of flowers. Beautiful names like daffodil is fill it cups with tears. So that you need the corpse you need the mourners you also need flowers to counteract. Then you need a praise of the dead person you have to show why this person was a good person so you have a eulogy. You also then have to have a formal grieving of the death in a dirge so he will also have a death song of some kind which elegies are. Then you have the most taxing part of an elegy which is called Usually by its Greek name apotheosis. That is the afterlife of the person who has died. Where will you put him in his afterlife. Well Miss Milton who was a pagan and a Christian at the same time as we all know decided that you had to have two left to life solicit us and the first afterlife was going to be up in heaven. That was clear. Because Milton was

a Christian and so we find was that as translated to heaven among solemn saints and sweet societies who sing and sing in their glory move and wipe the tears forever from his eyes so that solicit us with solemn saints and sweet societies. That's one of my teachers said just like Cambridge a reconstitution of Cambridge up in heaven. But Milton one of the pagan Milton wanted a pagan apotheosis an afterlife of some kind for his licit ass and so he gave him a pagan. Afterlife as the genius of the shore. When they. Were listed as would walk by the sea where he drowned and would be good to all the parish in the something flood so that he has a natural life as a nature spirit the genius lowside the genius of the place while he's also having his Christian life up in heaven. That is you might say cheating

the apotheosis I don't know anybody else who has a double apotheosis I have it both ways but anyway Milton with his genius does do that. But what is the modern poet to do. He has no afterlife in which to put himself. He has no redeemer listed as His redeemed through the DMI have him who walked on waves. But that doesn't exist as a consolation. A re gaining of the body in its beautiful St. Thomas Aquinas thought we would all be thirty five I think in heaven. And so you will get back your body and as a glorified body. And that's consoling but the bottom Pola top promise him self that he can't promise himself a journey even in the classical sense where Karen takes you beyond the Styx and so on and then you go to live in Hades another afterlife so that. It's very hard to understand what the modern poet

can put in place of the apotheosis to end with some kind of consolation for one's own death since these people are writing not about other people's death about their own death although all poets are always writing about themselves as the same time they write about the subject at hand. They can't help because in this style which is the expression of themselves so there is always a personal component. So I decided to find out what they push and how they were responding and what their moods where I believe with Yeats. The only permanent thing in the world is mood moods. He has a lovely poem called the moods and in which he says that everything ends goes away to case vanishes except for moods that all through human history people have felt sorrow people felt joy people have felt depression people have felt out of exaltation and there is no human being no biological human being born that has not had these fluctuations in these moods and maybe

different names for them in different cultures but nonetheless they are the recurrent thing about human nature which culture cannot much change. They come back no matter which culture you have. Seeing someone grow up in they can be differently handled by cultures stoic cultures that forbid the expression of the moods but it doesn't mean that the mood isn't there. I. You're not allowed to talk about it. But so Gates writes in the oh Gates thinks of is remembering the four levels of the elements. Earth at the bottom and then water and then air and then fire at the top and the fiery place. Sage is standing in God's holy fire the fiery place is the place where nothing can die. It is the immortal realm above earth water and air. So anything that is born in the realm of fire can never die. It is always a mortal so the Gates writes a beautiful little poem called the moods

in which he says time drops and decay like a candle burned out. In the mountains and woods have their day half their day. One in the route of the fireball moods has fallen away. The answer is not of course. Everything else even time drops and decay but the moods are eternal and there is a row with moods a wonderful word that he uses because it intimidates the passion of moods they are not tranquil and temperate presences. They are they come in a rush. They come in a day like Oh Mrs. Roche in Milton they come in a disorderly crowd and. They come and they go but they never fall away. So looking at the moods that these states of life provoke in these poets and what the poets have to do to acquire a style appropriate to the new state of you might say quayside posthumous life interested me and I was brought to the whole topic in the first place by trying to figure out a poem by Wallace Stevens Some of you know called the Hermitage at the center.

This poem makes absolutely no sense when you read it down the page. It's in little stands as little stanzas of three lines. There's no hermit in this apparently no center read either but this is the Hermitage at the center. When you catch on to the poem you realize that the first line of each of the three lines of each stanza. If you take out the first line and move it to the left first line stance of one first line stanza to first line stanza 3 and then you take the other two lines of each stanza and move them to the right and then you read down you have two terrific poems and so on. One is the poem of the tottering body and see approach of death. The other is the poem of The Eternal Recurrence of generation in nature. And so. The first one indeed has the great thing tottering and the wind sways like a great thing tottering and the body is going down into final fall after the tottering and then on the other

side you see the inamorata reclining in the temperature of heaven as he says. And at the end he must do something with these two poems and so the last stanza brings them together and says and he sees the anomaly of reclining in the duck pond at his favorite place Elizabeth Park this in New Jersey that we walk through every day to get to work and so he puts the goddess of nature Flora. Series. In the middle of the duckpond and he says gives a last salute to the duck pond and the ducks as he's going to die. And he says at the end and one last look at the ducks is a look at loosened children round her in a rage. There will always be loose of the children. But what he has done with his two poems because this simultaneous the tottering body and the regeneration of nature are both taking place at the same time. So he has introduced you tainted the two poems. That's why it doesn't make any sense when you read it straight down you have to enter did you

take that if there is any such word and get them into their separate selves and then you can see him bringing them together at the end. I thought that is a really extraordinary distortion for me to do that to a poem to make it unintelligible on the surface when the reader's side runs down it means that you're being twisted by a very strong emotion yourself that can only be rendered by this extraordinary distortion and twisting of the normal lyric form. And that was my first example about the difficulty of putting together these two halves of yourself when one is dying and the other half is still generative. The second poem that interested me in this way was as of immense torsion of style was James Merrill's Christmas tree which he wrote so late that it couldn't be included in his collected poems. I'm sorry couldn't be included in his last volume of poems. It was published afterwards and his collected

poems. But it was free floating after the last volume came out between the bottom. I don't know only a month or so between the appearance of the last volume and the actual death of Merrill. A Christmas tree is a shaped poem probably coming up here as a single pair. There was a shaped you know about shapes poems like Herbert's Easter wings and so on they usually nails the mouse's tale where the poem goes down like that there are beautiful ones of all and very imaginative. And so when Daryl writes his poem called Christmas tree. The margin the flush left margin is still straight down sliced down and then you realize the right hand margin goes like this. And then it's across a Christmas tree. The missing left is of course the ghost of the Christmas tree because the trysts Christmas tree is already dead because it has been cut down.

And it begins by telling him that it has been brought down from the sighing mountain. And the real horror is looking at the poem and then suddenly realizing what he's doing and seeing that the missing left is the ghost of the Christmas tree which is present while the posthumous body of the Christmas tree speaks after it's been cut down. It's a very beautiful poem I think he probably took some inspiration for it from Elizabeth Bishop Spong called the gentleman of Shalott in which the gentleman is half of them as in the mirror representation of the other half as in real life. And he represents himself at the end as saying half is enough. But it's not enough in that. In the Christmas tree poem because of course the Christmas tree is going to be thrown out and die and it's already his life as such rooted in the ground has ended. And I thought let's take those two extremes of style that a shocking in their difference from the normal unfolding of a poem and

say. Think about how other people have done this and whether it was different before. So I took some other poems of people who were believers which my favorite was when Edmund wallers poem called of the last verses in the book. Beginning when Leif aged could neither read nor write. And so he's blind and he can't see and he's writing the last poem from the last book. And he at first grieves and then sees compensation in the traumas of the body which serve as chains to let in new life the souls dark cottage battered and decayed lets in a new light through the chinks that time has made. And he represents the soul as standing. On the threshold between this life and the next and says. Leaving the old. Two worlds at once they view. That

stand upon the threshold of the new. So it's the moment where you can look in both directions back to Earth forward to heaven so that he locates the very state that he's at the threshold state of the liminal state is that we like to call it taken from borrowing from anthropology that there are these moments that are unstable moments because you can't go back and you can't go forward and you stand there. Stevens took that up in his beautiful poem to Santana who is dying in Rome and he represents Santana is on the threshold between this realm and the more merciful room beyond which is the idealizations of religion essentially Santayana's famous for saying there is no God and Mary is his mother. That is you cannot be ready for the cultural past just because you cease to be a believer. So there was always the picture of that more merciful room beyond even if you didn't believe in it. And it's a very beautiful ending where he stands upon this threshold to

statements and he has built an edifice that he can now see completed in its structure. I also write a bit about Dunn but that can wait. That good stuff. Then I having established that the various ways of looking at it in the past is the threshold or the compensatory life and so on. I looked at the people who were as I say in the Stevens chapter facing the worst and one not only did Stevens have facing the best one last look at the docks is a look at losing children round her in a ring. But he also faced the worst and has a horrible last late poem called Madam life really is about the Goddess Flora who was the beautiful goddess of the spring when he first knew her and now she's turned into this awful person like Bluebeard. She's a bearded Queen Wickett in her dead light and she's going to devour him. And so I'm left with he has turned into this horrible fate he knows that he's going to be

devoured by nature and that's everybody's fate. So he goes on looking at the worst over and over Stephens does in very harsh poems a student of my called me the other night and said I just kind of take you know Steven's poems they're too awful for us and them meant to be. But that's not very simple a young person should know their full awfulness intimately. Love this I said was always a posthumous person. But what she had to learn to do was have a posthumous style. What she did was graft a living style that is to say the style of the suffering person but the decay of the body or the threat of suicide or whatever is putting you into the grasp of death at the moment. She had to consider how she could get out of her own eight year old rant you might say she did put good poems in that rant screaming at Daddy control because

he because she was a is all and that's the way she felt when she was a representing herself as the sufferer being victimized by daddy. And then she discovered alas late that her short life that the way to do a poem that would last aside from sensationalist purposes the way that he will last a sensationalist purposes but the most serious lasting would be had if you could learn to look at you know suffering. Not with the vocabulary of a child daddy daddy you passed through but with the vocabulary of an adult not forgetting the suffering. Being able to immerse yourself back into it. But to speak about it with an objective eye on it as well. An adult. So that plot is interesting for us starting with the most awful poems in her juvenalia that she was writing at Smith which luckily we have in the back of the Collected Poems and they are full of the violence which had taken root in her nature and that she was going to have to use she couldn't get rid of it

because it had happened too early into a traumatically. But the early poems take pup about taking a skull in yet two hands and crushing it and making it crack. Me thinks that. Maybe equivalence of her suffering as a young person but are melodramatic and grotesque as equivalents of that suffering she found much less melodramatic in grotesque ways through one poem that I write about in the chapter on Plath which is a poem called Bear and it's the poem by she stops using I in the 200 odd lines of bear. Plus there are only seven lines with the word I in them if you know. Plus all the poems you know that I and the younger poems plays a big big part at the end when she writes something like Edge The woman is perfected. It's in the third person she again gets outside the suffering of the personal enough to speak about it instead of speak from it. But she speaks from

it as well but from it with the eye looking at the speaker and not the speaker drowning in the grotesquery of the melodrama of her own situation. Full like this trying to think how to write about LOL is so much of local and day by day is such a rich book I could hardly think what to abstract from it to take as his way of reacting to his very fragile health. In that last year of his life his parents had both died at 60 so he was perfectly certain that he was going to die at 62 and he wasn't wrong. So I mean the family genes were not favoring a long life and I decided that what he did more than anything else was to use the trope of subtraction. He was always talking about subtraction. I hadn't noticed it for a while and then it was everywhere when I began to look. But if you have now it's going to be taken away. And his shortest example of this is when you're in the hospital and you've died

and the wristwatch is taken from the wrist a wrist watch. Subtract wrist and you have watch. That's all that's left. And it was in the little ways of talking about it like that wonderful ways about the diminution of life. He look goes back to his old apartment and sees furniture he inherited from his family and the older he gets the younger the furniture cats because he associates it with his childhood and the furniture is becoming almost weightless. So that's my an asymptotic approach. There won't be any furniture anymore and he will be dead and it will all. Pattern itself. There are very beautiful instances like that especially into poems addressed to his friend Peter Taylor who was that Kenyan with him when they were undergraduates Peter Taylor the fiction writer and it's close to points to Peter Taylor called Afterlife. Roman numeral 1 an hour after life Roman numeral 2 that is. That is a challenge thrown to

the reader. What is this afterlife that is not an afterlife. It's very beautiful poems. Where there he loses the bloom of early promise is lost they were both young comers when they came up in the world. Lowell had the Pulitzer Prize almost instantly as soon as he published a book. So what were his castle and Peter Taylors stories became famous but he says the bloom is off the promise something like that I can't quote exactly. And then the malicious way he adds The Inheritors there nodding nobody nodding. The new rose is just waiting for you to be the last rose of summer and then it will have the bloom of promise in your place. So the. I wrote about all his subtractive gestures in that last book of his. Day by day who does have to lose both bishop and James Merrill. Do I have time. Yes yes OK.

For Elizabeth Bishop I was struck in her last book opposite after her last book by the her beautiful little poem called sonnet and sun it is a known form of course in English. What does a sonic too when you make it only two beats wide it turns into a long thin thing instead of a broad square thing the way it is on the page. So first of all she makes it long and thin and then she turns it upside down which was not unprecedented colors done that too. Instead of having eight lines and then six they both coloration work without hope and bishop in sonnet. Turn it upside down and have six lines followed by eight. So this a disproportion So she's doing two twists to the sonnet form. I want to narrow it one to up end it. And she thinks of lots and lots of beautiful that physical tropes really for the body. All of them.

Coffin shaped. No one isn't. All the rest of them a coffin shaped one is the spirit level where you have the long thin wooden thing and the little bubble of life and the spirit level. Another is the thermometer. The long thin thing the Mercury the fluid mercury inside another one is the bevel on the edge of a mirror which is the slanted part the cut part of the long thin cut part at the edge of the glass of the mirror. If you bought an expensive mirror Shakespeares don't have bevelled edges expensive barrister. So she keeps thinking of containers you might say for the body and images for the body's condition. The other one is the compass. And in each of these she detects something trapped in the spirit level. The bubble is trapped in the compass the needle is trapped and is wavering in the thermometer. The mercury is trapped and in the bevel light is trapped. Then in this upside down sun at

the first six lines prefaced by the word caught that's about the soul always feeling trapped to some degree in the body and. Paint in that trap Inus the SST last. You might say of the sonnet the big part of the eight lines is headed by the word freed. So you have the cockpit and then you have the fried fish and in the cockpit you see the needle wavering and the spirit level and then in the freed part you see the thermometer which is broken with the mercury which of course is called Quicksilver running away and you see the light from the bellow of the empty mirror that's nobody anymore to be reflected in the mirror. Light from the bevel of the empty mirror flying wherever it feels like for the first time and you know she could never fly where she felt like in childhood and then in adulthood for the various circumstances of her life most of which you

may know but. Her parents died so young when she was so young. Her father when she was a year and a half old her mother when she was was confined to an asylum and never saw her again. The bishop was five and then she was with relatives who I think she was in boarding schools and then she was in Vassar but she was always someplace that wasn't her own home really and then for so many years she went and lived in New York far from the Nova Scotia and Florida far from the Nova Scotia she was raised. And then finally she had her 13 years of living in Brazil. So she was never really free to move in what was stablished her own dumbest city. She didn't want to particularly she wanted to be taken care of by somebody or other all the time. But nonetheless the sense that the body had duplicated the constraint of her external circumstances means that when she can when the light can and the emir is finally empty the light can fly wherever it feels like. So I was thinking about cutlass and freedom

as in other poems of Merrill and finally a sign of the poems of Bishop and finally to Meryl began as I said with Christmas tree began the book in the first chapter showing these tortious of style to accommodate the dying body the dying animal as Yeats calls it and sailing to beis a.m.. When he says that his soul knows not what it is because it's fastened to a dying animal. The first part of his body to die has died that is to say he is impotent and so he already knows what it feels like to have a paralysis attack one part of his body and surely the rest will follow pretty soon so that the perplexity is what you do with this dying animal that you into your soul spirit are attached to. Merrill had wonderful wonderful series. I think it's the most interesting series of self-portrait since Rembrandt. He thinks of himself in so many different ways he thinks of

himself posthumously as a piece of human tissue on a slide being examined by the pathologist. He thinks of himself as being a crystal his brain is a crystal that is being crystallized. He thinks of himself as a light bulb in which the filaments have gone crazy in it. He thinks of himself as in one of the most extraordinary poems the PUK the self-portrait Tyvek windbreaker it's too long really to talk about but it's a remark remarkably comic late self-portraits when he buys one of these idiotic windbreakers that has the globe on it and he thinks this is it right to wear when you're dying because it's really nice nice white jacket and that's all about life and everything. Finally he sees somebody walking past in exactly the same jacket only it's black and it has the constellations on it instead of having the maps of the world on it. And then he sings his final air. But as he sings his final air

of some of the words drop out he can't find all the words so it's a fragmentary last poem. That's very beautiful. The last one that he record that he depicts himself as borrowing from Tennyson's immemorial is the evening star as it turns into the morning star comes from south in the first instance and that was taken up by Tennyson. Oh has before us power double name. Beautiful evening in tennis and then the morning waking up. He does the same thing in a poem called an upward look when he tucks the torsion of style there is that there's a gutter running down more or less the middle of the page we don't have that in poems. I mean the lines go away across. But what is this space. Every line is divided into two lines and you say that he's imitating the Anglo-Saxon lines not to follow their procedures exactly not to have the same sort of alliteration. This usually alliteration. And this is written in couplets the most primitive form of course of rhyme

except there's a terse it in the middle and the tears and so one is the hinge on which the whole point turns. And what happens in this poem is that he sees as he says of the clue so that the Evening Star and Morning Star harvest halves of a single review you might say a life in which there is always the decline and there is always the coming back. Too. What shall I say to regeneration but he does it in the opposite way from tennis and instead of having the evening turn into the morning he has the morning turn into the evening so he has done it in the way of life scrum Knology and the wonderful crystallizing of the evening star out of the dark blue of the late afternoon sky is a wonderful thing when it happens of the poem. So with all these pictures of the self none of us who expect extinction have to feel deprived of a way to think about ourselves in that circumstance. And I really think it's a great

service. All representations of life are a great service because that's the way life speaks back to us and then you say with Elizabeth Bishop heavens I recognize the place. I know it. And that's what that representation can give you is a recognition of that mood or whatever but the. I think we need representation. And my biggest grief as a poetry reader. Some of you may have heard me say this in class or something was when I became a mother and there were many poems about motherhood you know where I was the Milton of motherhood. Where was the Shakespeare of motherhood. Where was the George Herbert of motherhood. Motherhood I think. It was nobody else fit to reflect my experience back at me. So your plan has written good poems of motherhood but she is about the best there is. That's great but we don't have an epic of motherhood gods no less now and I just couldn't find anything to read and it just drove me crazy. I couldn't imagine I think Plath's latest writings have not yet come out. When I had a child

I really felt so angry at the whole world that it had been bred a woman to tell me what I had just been through what I was going through and what I was going to go through. You feel un true did an unschooled. How am I going to do this if nobody has shown me how the only way that showing comes alive for me is in a live voice. So that is yet yet an accomplished thing. And will I hope be accomplished but I need I need the mirroring back of poems to tell me where I am and who I am a lot of the time. And so I'm waiting for more of those. Sylvia Plath's beautiful poems child. And Nick and the candle stick really beautiful poems about motherhood. It's only a couple of them and that's not enough. So with that I will close saying that's what's in the book and it's about the dying body the undying spirit in an image and. Send over is a big allegory as you know and the universe is Rolo ruled a

star you know ruled over by God B who is biology as you know and the people help culture change towards the future. Doing any work you know and that is it has the impersonality of epic talking about you the universe and its being something like that and it has almost allegorical figures that he picked up from Spencer and people like that in that sense it's about the life of man rather than the life of James marrow and it is intended to be timeless in some way. So while you're writing your time with think about the life of the universe you can also be writing poems about your own wrecked body. Well in the sense that she revisit the landscape which she has first described. We are talking about the same poem right which is first described in objective terms about the size of an old style dollar bill she says it was done by her. Her. Great great Uncle Ike as he was and her

aunt says Do you want it I don't want it and hands it over and then there's a very objective scrutiny and it's not very interesting as not very good painting and so forth. And then there is the great moment of recognition. And she says heavens I recognize the place I know. Are you not thinking about what you know. Well people have seen it as such I mean it has been said it doesn't convince me because she never wanted to be pigeonholed either as a woman and not as a poet. She didn't want to be called a woman poet she was a poet. She didn't want to be in anthologies of gay and lesbian literature she refused to be included. And she wanted to claim the title hole for herself and I think she wouldn't have sidled off into a confined Giora. That that point. I don't know we'll never know. Yes but I mean we didn't talk about school so my opinion is no better than anybody else's.

I didn't form his words after all and I don't think she would have used the word in that new sense either she would have wanted to keep it as the eighteenth century. Word for an important mood. Well there are lots of reasons because as you know it's a long poem. I could have taken another poem less good I think called the courage of shutting up when she decides to fold the death race of her back in the sort of image of oneself this terrifying. But she finally learned the courage of shutting up and not doing everything at the top of her voice. And although she had done things not at the top of her voice before they were not among the most original poems that she had done so when she takes Percy keys death from lung cancer is another poem earlier about him walking after the operation that was unsuccessful. She talks about in the middle of after she goes to see him being

waked. It's a coffin in the funeral parlor where his face is exposed as it used to be in the olden days. Maybe still is some places it still is in fact in some places. She says finally at the end of that particular section the date when the brass plate on the coffin and grading itself the raw date engraving itself with marvelous she learns that you can and grave something wrong with marbles. Come and for me its where she discovered that poetics and that was one reason it was important to me. The other is that she had a way of deflecting of the suffering. She was so wrapped up in her own she was younger. And the poem begins in the beach where she and Ted Hughes had gone and the beach was next to a hospital for crippled. And so she goes out on the beach and there are all these people with crutches and prostheses and missing

legs and everything. And she says I have two legs. I can move. I can smile. I mean she's defending against the pain of others really. And then when she comes around to seeing that the way it's not to repudiate them but to go and see the hole in the sky pours in like plasma and then it is given up. I think it's a poem which she does a lot of learning by going outside herself as you said to talk about somebody else. But it begins with that just you really don't want to think about that which is a good way for a poem to get somewhere to begin with a gesture that later will refute it at least temporarily. Well he certainly was not unacquainted with zoos and suchlike things but it wasn't a particular fascination of his the person that you need for that is. Oh dear. It's the same person who says oh the Holywood is Randall

Jarell. He grew up in Hollywood and he has beautiful poems about himself as a child out there but I don't think it was that important to Meryl. Oh I know the woman who has this talent of the song Spirit where is our Shakespeare our female Shakespeare to write about motherhood. Well think about all the dynastic treatments and Shakespeare was so interested in Father Son and dynastic KING SON things over and over and over he treats the relation of the younger male generation to the older male generation from both directions. Now I just wish that we had the car the same thing for us. Well women would like something about mothers and us perhaps whatever. And with that degree of gift being involved in it. OK thank you.