On the occasion of Merwin’s being named Poet Laureate, it’s worth taking a look at a 1960 poem that marked his move from formal and referential to vernacular. He also started telling short stories in poems.

The opening phrase, “For a good decade,” is casual, American slang: it means, “For a decade at least.” But the word “good” also poses a question. Was there a good period after the construction and abandonment of the furnace (which may have poisoned the creek and stripped the valley) and before its occupation by “someone”? Was the furnace better empty than turned into a “bad castle”? I think its re-use is “bad” only from the perspective of the Reverend and his flock of haters, but the question floats.

This poem is no allegory–it resists decoding–but we are entitled to explore associations between things in the text and objects outside. For example, what if the gully is our natural world and the furnace is our industrial exploitation of it? Or what if the abandoned landscape is poetry and the person inside the furnace is managing to get some “twists of smoke” out of the old sounds and forms? (He seems to be comfortable in there, and enjoying himself.)

There are three sets of characters on stage: the person “cosily bolted behind the eye-holed iron / door”; the observers who start in ignorance, become astonished, speak (I think) in the third stanza, and “hate trespassers”; and finally, their “witless offspring” who, at the end “Stand in a row and learn.” The guy inside is surely the hero–in fact, there is a vague air of disciples and sermons on mounts. His “spirits” aren’t necessarily alcoholic, despite the title. If it’s a self-portrait, it’s modest but also very bold. When all the old forms have crumbled, it takes brains and hard work to create regular, seven-line stanzas that can make the young “stand agape.” At 82, Merwin is still hammering and anvilling away.

(In Portsmouth, New Hampshire) In a review by John Carey, I came upon a strange and wonderful John Donne poem, “The Ecstacy.” Here it is in the left column with my literal paraphrase to the right. (Literal interpretation seems to me a necessary first step in understanding metaphysical poetry, or any dense verse.)

The movement of the poem is from static bodies upward to thoughts and then back into animated bodies. At the beginning, “we” are two separate motionless physical objects (we “sat”; we “lay”). In the middle verses, “we” are one disembodied consciousness, addressing a passive third party and deciding whether to reenter our bodies. At the end, body and soul are one.

I read the poem as an argument by a male narrator to a female lover that they should have sex, because it will be like “ecstasy” (a religious “state of rapture that stupefies the body while the soul contemplates divine things”). In that case, the claim that both souls speak as one in the middle of the poem is more of a hope or a lure than a fact. There is some irony in the poem–a gap between what the narrator means and what he says, and perhaps also between how he sees himself and how we are supposed to see him. But the irony hardly cancels the sensuality of this poem that begins with pregnant swelling banks and ends with souls gone to bodies in plain view of an approving observer.

I just finished Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf. I haven’t done any background reading or learned anything about the social context or critical debate, so these are untutored thoughts (fit for a notebook, which is what my blog really is).

1. A gift economy: Beowulf learns that Hrothgar, king of the Danes, is suffering from the scourges of a monster, so, unbidden, he sails to Denmark to offer his services. After he has killed Grendel (a whole day after, in fact–see line 1784), Hrothgar allows him to choose treasures from his store; Beowulf is “paid and recompensed completely” (2145). The hero sails home and gives everything he has received to his king, Hygelac (2148). Hygelac responds by giving Beowulf an ancient sword, land, hides, and a hall and throne.

None of this is negotiated in advance. The great anthropologists Bronislaw Malinoswski and Marcel Mauss showed that gift-giving is sharply distinguished from negotiation in some societies. We still have vestiges of a gift economy (for instance, our exchanges of dinner invitations and birthday presents). However, in other cultures, the gift is the main medium of exchange, the means by which goods circulate and incentives are created. As Hrothgar tells Beowulf (in Heaney’s translation):

For as long as I rule this far-flung land

treasures will change hands and each side will treat

the other with gifts; across the gannet’s bath,

over the broad sea, whorled prows will bring

presents and tokens. (1859-63)

Queens and other wives are also gifts (see 2017), which is not to say that they are powerless. Great Queen Modthryth, for instance, orders men shackled, racked, tortured, and killed for looking directly at her face.

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