A New Project? Let's See How Long it Lasts

Been a while since I posted. My apologies, faithful readers.

Rilke says somewhere in his letters to a young poet that a true writer writes because that’s what he is, and that if the young poet isn’t writing, then he isn’t a poet. I’m not sure what I am (at 35? - O my!), but I find that while I can get away with not writing, I am unable to be happy about it. Sooner or later, I have to start setting things down, even though that is sometimes more stressful than the thoughts that beg to be set down.

Often, though, the things don’t beg. I have no end of unfinished poems, ... well, scratch that, I have an end to them, but not an end I’ve approached. And I often have ideas, but I am not chomping at the bit with them, certainly not with plots. My ideas seem more meet for the lyrical essay or verse, and they don’t come too often. One idea that has persisted is that is this: I have wished to reread the novels of Charles Williams and write about them. I have no fully formed thesis; I simply have upsurgings of thought that arise when I read them. All these upsurgings are quite possibly both coherent and synthesizable. So finally, after reading all of them last Spring – I had previously read three or four of them, at widely spaced intervals over the last ten years – I am feeling ready to start. So I went to the shelf and pulled out Williams’ novel War in Heaven.

Naturally enough, I also pulled out a completely unrelated book of poems, Patrick Kavanagh’s (“kav'-an-ah,” I was admonished by a blonde in Dublin, not “kav'-a-naw'”) Collected Poems, and decided to read that instead before I started writing. This book is special to me, for I plucked it at random out of a bookshelf in a covered red brick market somewhere south of the Liffey and near St. Stephen’s Green, if I remember correctly, read a poem or two, decided it was good enough, and later found Kavanagh to be one of my favorite poets, even if I do regard him as a minor. I feel close to the guy as a part-time poet, as an underachiever, and as a dreamer. Besides that, and more importantly (there are many dilettantes I could love), he says things both beautiful and true.

So here’s another project: every few days, or more often, I will pick out a poem by Kavanagh and write about it. I’ll start with the first, my favorite, one of the few sonnets I can come close to quoting from memory: “Inniskeen Road: July Evening.”

The bicycles go by in twos and threes –
There’s a dance in Billy Brennan’s barn tonight
And there’s the half-talk code of mysteries,
The wink-and-elbow language of delight.
Half-past eight, and there is not a spot
Upon a mile of road, no shadow thrown,
That might turn out a man or woman, not
A footfall tapping secrecies of stone.

I have what every poet hates, in spite
Of all the solemn talk of contemplation.
Oh, Alexander Selkirk knew the plight
Of being king and government and nation.
A road, a mile of kingdom, I am king
Of banks and stones and every blooming thing.

When I teach sonnets, I don’t bother with the whole “Shakespearean, Spenserian, Miltonic” thing. I see it as beside the point and too terminological for high school. I teach the basic structure: most every sonnet will be a 12-2 or 8-6, that is, a trio of quatrains, followed by a couplet, or a pair of quatrains (an octet), followed by a sestet. And the reason this structure is important, I tell them, is that it gives us a clue to the true structure, the thematic structure, of the poem. A sonnet is almost invariably composed of two parts: the situation and the resolution (there are plenty of exceptions, of course). A 12-2, or three quatrains and a couplet poem, is more likely to have its situation explained over the course of twelve lines, and resolved (or even solved) in the last two. An 8-6, or an octet-sestet poem, will lay out the situation in only eight lines, and resolve it over six.

There are, however, any number of poems that do not hold to these generalizations, and “Iniskeen Road: July Evening,” is one of them. It seems obvious that there is a break after line eight, symbolized by the line break, but that the sestet is not a wholly unified statement either. The octet evokes the intimacy of a country dance in a local barn, in which the participants are so close they converse non-verbally, through a “half-talk code of mysteries,” and through the universal “wink-and-elbow language of delight” (3-4). At “half-past eight” (5), however, the speaker is alone on the road, no “man or woman” with him (7). The last line of the octet tells us that there is not “a footfall tapping secrecies of stone,” an evocative line from a poet who throughout his poetry seeks searchingly – but perhaps more futilely than even the Romantics did – for the sources of the magic of Creation.

The sestet represents a clean break, and contains what may be Kavanagh’s most perfect two lines, in their hopeless truth:

I have what every poet hates in spite
Of all the solemn talk of contemplation.

Those are lines I remember, in spite of my faulty synapses. Those are lines that the Goblin Bee of truth states quite loudly in its sting for a lonely, unproductive expatriate. When I read it, I was plumb sick of being king of my little rented room off North Strand Road, just past the tenements with the mismatched doors. I was king indeed of my little world, had the run of a miniature Georgian house, and simply wanted to go back home. I wrote more than I’ve ever written since, and it wasn’t much. I had what every poet hates, I didn’t do much with it, and I don’t much wish for it back, though in my weaker moments I blame my empty blog and journal on its lack.

Kavanagh’s poem is ultimately an 8-6, but his final two lines are a couplet – they are not integrated into the sestet – because they solidify and cry out his frustration over this loneliness and his resulting petty power: “A road, a mile of kingdom, I am king / Of banks and stones and every blooming thing.” Lonely is the head that wears the crown.