A Long Shadow and a Light Sound

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Sometimes the faintest of foreign accents ripples through an English poem and lends an unexpected timbre to the words. A slight strangeness gives a delicate spin to the lines. Pound employed this often,sometimes to great effect, but his extrapolations are always obvious, as when he begins a section of “Homage to Sextus Propertius” with the line “Me happy, night, night full of brightness,” with its echoes of Latin word order. And this device, which falls somewhere between translation and outright assimilation, gives much of Eliot’s verse its distinctive intonation (“Because I do not hope to turn again …”). But in these, and in other wellknown examples by poets from Marianne Moore to Robert Lowell, the oddness of the diction calls attention to itself; it is meant to register as intrusive. I like it best when the effect is more surreptitious.Then the little spin imparted to the words isn’t a question of mannerism but seems to come from within.

The American poet Louise Bogan, who died in 1970, had a sly mastery of this unobtrusive twist. Though not much read anymore, her best poems have a compressed ferocity made all the scarier by their intense formal perfection. She’s often typecast as a “poet of grief,” and certainly she gave memorable, if oblique, expression to her sorrows. In “Solitary Observation Brought Back from a Sojourn in Hell” – the title is longer than the poem – she concocts a sort of elegiac quip: “At midnight tears / Run in your ears.”

This owes something to the conventions of light verse but it isn’t very funny. It’s an ugly poem, and meant to be, for all the metrical finesse of its stubby lines.Tears did run in her ears, but like tunes she couldn’t shake off, she learned to convert them, drop by drop, into a subtler music.

Water in all its forms enchanted her, from tears to fountains, and from inlets to the open sea. In the first two stanzas of “Roman Fountain,” she captures the hovering rush of water shaped by the fountain’s form:

Up from the bronze, I saw
Water without a flaw
Rush to its rest in air,
Reach to its rest, and fall.

Bronze of the blackest shade,
An element man-made,
Shaping upright the bare
Clear gouts of water in air.

The inversion of the opening line confuses; is the speaker “up from the bronze” or the water? I think the displacement of subject is deliberate.This isn’t only bad grammar put to strong effect; it has a more secret echo. Bogan is here imitating a famous German poem by the Swiss poet Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (1825-98), also entitled “Roman Fountain,” and which begins, literally, “Up climbs the stream and falling fills / the circle of the marble shell.” Meyer’s poem is what Germans call a “thing-poem,” a compact evocation of an object through poetic sound. I don’t think Bogan cared if anyone noticed this echo; it was out of the colloquy between herself and the foreign poet that the shape of the poem arose. And her poem is quite beautiful whether you’ve heard of Meyer or not. But the tiny shadow of a strangeness falls over the poem from her hidden source, just as the water jets and spills from basin to basin in both poems.

In other poems there are French and Spanish, as well as classical, accents. “Knowledge” has the kind of melodious asperity that might have occurred if Paul Verlaine and Emily Dickinson had collaborated:

Now that I know
How passion warms little
Of flesh in the mould,
And treasure is brittle, –

I’ll lie here and learn
How, over their ground
Trees make a long shadow
And a light sound.

Bogan was not only a remarkable poet but an excellent translator. She published a fine selection from the “Journals” of Jules Renard, the most fastidious French prose stylist of the turn of the last century. His persnickety and caustic phrasing appealed to her. As the “poetry critic” of the New Yorker magazine for almost forty years, she was immersed in the best and the worst poetry then being written, and seems to have survived the immersion. Her collected poems are still in print under the title “The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 136 pages, $15). Some of her poems can seem dated. I doubt that many women readers will warm to her poem “Women” which begins, “Women have no wilderness in them / They are provident instead.” But even when her diction sounds prissy, and her opinions appear unfashionable, none of the 100 or so poems she chose to preserve is without some distinctive felicity. Unlike her great contemporary Elizabeth Bishop, Bogan wrote lyrics other poets can learn much from.

My own favorite of her poems is “Night,” written two years before her death. It has all her fabled precision of phrase but with a fullness of feeling that moves outward, like the ocean vista it describes:

The cold remote islands
And the blue estuaries
Where what breathes, breathes
The restless wind of the inlets,
And what drinks, drinks
The incoming tide;

Where shell and weed
Wait upon the salt wash of the sea,
And the clear nights of stars
Swing their lights westward
To set behind the land;

Where the pulse clinging to the rocks
Renews itself forever;
Where, again on cloudless nights,
The water reflects
The firmament’s partial setting;

– O remember
In your narrowing dark hours
That more things move
Than blood in the heart.

Here, I think, the alien accents that give so grave and distinctive a voice to Louise Bogan’s poetry, are no longer those of human language, foreign or our own, but the cadences of ocean and shore, rock and star. No wonder this is where, in her sly play on words, the pulse “renews itself forever.”

eormsby@nysun.com


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