SOURCE: Nemerov, Howard. “The Current of the Frozen Stream.” The Sewanee Review 67, no. 4 (October 1959): 585-97.

[In the following essay, which was originally published in 1948 in Furioso, Nemerov provides a stylistic examination of Tate's verse, focusing on a “major duality in his poetry.”]

My occasion is the publication of Mr. Tate's collection, Poems 1922-1947 (Scribner's, 1948), my purpose the elucidation of a major duality in his poetry, which I would regard as in some sense its generating or operative principle. In some sense … those beautiful precautionary and beforehand words which serve the critic so well through all life's appointments and will make him a satisfactory epitaph; but used here with particular intent to deny that the results of this (or any such) study are conceived as historically applicable, as suggesting the origin of the poetry. I am concerned to show the design that exists in the poetry; this does not extend to saying that the design has ‘caused’ the poetry, though it may extend, if the distinction is permissible, to showing that the design could have caused the poetry to be what it is, that the design is a sufficient reason of the poetry though not its specific occasion, and may therefore be taken as really a ‘generating’ principle. The design is a formal, though not a proximate, cause.

It will be objected by some, I think, that any method which commits itself to the discovery of a ‘major duality’ in any body of work offends against right practice by reducing the text to that point of abstraction at which, as the design becomes clear, the poetry vanishes. I do not see that this need be so, not more so at least than is general with analytic criticism. All will depend, naturally, on the success of demonstration from the text, on the right election of essences, on showing that the figuration of the poet's thought in a pair of abstract terms may legitimately be drawn from particular antagonisms or juxtapositions in the poetry:—the distinction of light from darkness does not exclude any shadings of civil, solar or sidereal twilight, and the local weather will also have much to do with the color of the sky.

Now there is, I conceive, one duality that underlies a great deal of poetry, especially the kind of poetry that is called (aptly, as I think) ‘metaphysical’: it is, in largest terms, the duality of the One and the Many. Metaphysical poetry is a poetry of the dilemma, and the dilemma which paradoxes and antitheses continually seek to display is the famous one at which all philosophies falter, the relation of the One with the Many, the leap by which infinity becomes finite, essence becomes existence; the commingling of the spirit with matter, the working of God in the world. This is not precisely my theme, and I cannot give space here to supporting it (but it is a fairly well-known position and the objections to it are also sufficiently current), yet it seemed proper to notice it at the beginning, since my considerations will indirectly refer back to it.

The central concern of Allen Tate's poems is with time and history, their major theme man's attachment to the past, the allegiance of his blood, the queer liaisons of his mind. But to put this statement in a right relation with Tate's text it is necessary to add that it does not mean the entertainment known as ‘world-history’ in which scholars seek to demonstrate the ultimate likeness of the world to an Automat. The past for Tate is seen as always, in times not necessarily less confused or angry than the present, first-rate poets have seen it—as the composition of the human will with the unknown and implacable justice or injustice. History, in Tate's poems, is history in the same kind as Judges, Samuel, Chronicles, Kings, where the existence of idea and theme is known through the violence of individuals, and especially in the same kind as The Divine Comedy, where people named Ulysses and Boniface and Frederick have exactly the importance of people named Lano and Jacomo da Sant' Andrea and Pier delle Vigne; and in the same kind as the histories of Shakespeare whose heroes and antagonists are demonstrated actually to have fought for what, the sociologist tells us, would have ‘inevitably’ happened anyhow. For Tate history is primarily a matter of generation and choice, that is of myth, not of pattern and system; the situations of history are family or at least local situations, not paradigms composed of least common denominators called wars, truces, migrations and laws. As Yeats wrote, “A father, mother, child (a daughter or a son), / That's how all natural or supernatural stories run.” And the following passage from Paul Valéry (with whose thought Tate's is at many points in accord) gives the matter the clarity of definition:

Le caractère réel de l'histoire est de prendre part à l'histoire même. L'idée du passé ne prend un sens et ne constitue une valeur que pour l'homme qui se trouve en soi-même une passion de l'avenir. L'avenir, par definition, n'a point d'image. L'histoire lui donne les moyens d'être pensé. Elle forme pour l'imagination une table de situations et de catastrophes, une galerie d'ancêtres, un formulaire d'actes, d'expressions, d'attitudes, de décisions offerts à notre instabilité et à notre incertitude, pour nous aider à devenir … L'histoire alimente l'histoire.

—Regards Sur le Monde Actuel

This sort of history will perhaps always be a scandal and an offense to those pragmatical positivists who are reassured to see the creation programmatically ‘working itself out’ in terms of ‘trends,’ ‘forces,’ ‘cycles’ and ‘designs’; because these terms in excluding the will exclude also man's responsibility, and because the mind that is satisfied with such terms finds it unlikely that the local, the named, the limited, should assume mythic and universal importance, since after all (they might protest) the world is so full of a number of things. To this view it is unfriendly of the Word to put on flesh, and tends to give a particular a depth of meaning disproportionate to its statistical value. But it is the theme of Tate's poetry, and the theme of tragedy, that man chooses the accident of his fate and by his choice creates necessity, which is his sole dignity. Against this choice the poet places our society, which with its abstract and statistical regard for the past provides a context in which choices are said not to matter, in which we are violent without idea and condemned to self-violence, suicide, “self-inflicted woe.” The only possible prayer is not for goodness but for a situation in which good and evil have some reference:

O God of our flesh, return us to Your wrath,
Let us be evil could we enter in
Your grace, and falter on the stony path.

—“Last Days of Alice”

Mr. Tate has said in a note to Poems 1928-1931 (I regret that I have not his exact words available) that all the books of a poet should ultimately be regarded as one book; at any rate that it was to this end that he worked. This statement, though it evidently does not license us to disregard the individuality of particular poems, suggests the poet's responsibility towards his themes, attitudes, evaluations, and implies our permission to use on one poem what we have found more fully or more clearly elucidated in another, to expect throughout the work certain recurrent elements not only of theme but of manner and imagery as well. Having just now discussed theme as much as possible in isolation and abstractedly, I wish at this point to begin afresh by considering more particular matters and to be led back to the theme by way of illustration and example.

The composition of the poems may be divided into two general sorts, roughly correspondent to a fundamental distinction of the thought: “there is that / Which is the commentary; there's that other, / Which may be called the immaculate / Conception of its essence in itself.” The first sort is reflective, meditative, rhetorical in manner, executed often in a considerably distorted blank verse and given over to the explicit discussion of theme: such poems as “Causerie,” “Fragment of a Meditation” and “Retroduction to American History” are of this kind. The other manner is characterized by brevity, concision, great formality of rime and meter and (for the reader) those difficulties which must go with subtle thought of which the connections are allowed to remain implicit by a kind of lyrical absolutism: “Ode to Fear,” “The Traveler,” “The Paradigm,” “The Cross.”

The two modes are not always to be found in isolation; often both hold place in a single poem, as in “To the Lacedemonians,” for example, which begins as public speech and ends with a lyric of six quatrains; or less obviously in “The Meaning of Life,” whose explicit discussion of its material issues at last in a splendid and inexhaustibly allusive figure; or in the “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” where the rhetoric is controlled by rime and by the dramatic situation.

In these two modes of composition, as I have suggested, we may see the attenuated and formal replica of a duality, a basic division—mentioned above as Essence and Commentary—which is central to Tate's poetry and creates his myth, giving rise to the kind of recurrent figure which is this poet's ‘representative anecdote’ about the world. The crucial antithesis is most clearly and explicitly presented in two coupled poems, “The Meaning of Life” and “The Meaning of Death,” the first “a monologue,” the second “an after-dinner speech.” The first begins:

Think about it at will: there is that
Which is the commentary; there's that other,
Which may be called the immaculate
Conception of its essence in itself.
It is necessary to distinguish the weights
Of the two methods lest the first smother
The second, the second be speechless (without the first).

And immediately afterward the poet shows his awareness of the two modes of composition, and of their implications (“I was saying this more briefly the other day / But one must be explicit as well as brief.”)

It is the speechless conception which is life, which bears its ‘meaning’ in itself or (no matter) has no meaning, and needs none. This is demonstrated by anecdote: as a boy the speaker wished not to be like the old men in Kentucky who “shot at one another for luck”; at twelve he decided he would shoot only for honor, at twenty he thought he would not shoot at all; but at thirty-three, that age of crucifixion, “one must shoot / As often as one gets the rare chance— / In killing there is more than commentary.”

There is a history here, in brief, of rationale, or the explication of motive, of commentary: the old men who shoot at one another for luck live in a universe of possibly placable demons whose will is unknown; they are offensive to secular codes of behavior (honor) and the rational principles of ethical religion (there is no God but if there had been He would have wished us not to shoot at all), but their behavior is not superficially distinguishable from a mystical insistence on mortal and all-committing action.

Before dealing with the concluding figure of “The Meaning of Life” I will consider the antithetical poem. In “an after-dinner speech” the meaning of death is ironically presented as the meaning of life:

                    Time, fall no more.
Let that be life—time falls no more. The threat
Of time we in our own courage have forsworn.
Let light fall, there shall be eternal light
And all the light shall on our heads be worn …

It is, is it not, the earthly paradise currently called the World of Tomorrow? It is to depend on the denial of time, the legislation of eternal light and on “our own courage,” on that modern combination of virtues and vices which Dostoevsky called “enlightened greed” and “titanic pride.” A program for further action is outlined towards the end of the poem:

                    Gentlemen, let's
Forget the past, its related errors, coarseness
Of parents, laxities, unrealities of principle.
Think of tomorrow. Make a firm postulate
Of simplicity in desire and act
Founded on the best hypotheses;
Desire to eat secretly, alone, lest
Ritual corrupt our charity …

The antithesis between the two poems is wonderfully clear at this point simply as a matter of argument and exposition; the speaker in the second poem, taking the attitude of protestant scientism, rejects the past because ‘what happens is therefore imperfect,’ rejects ritual because ritual rejoices in the repetition of the past and stresses ‘useless’ elements in ‘useful’ charity: he proposes an action based on “the best hypotheses.” This attitude, then, would rid itself of the world; it is the attitude of the successful revolutionary who cannot bear, in his triumph, that common things should be called by their ancient names and so invents a new calendar.

But in their concluding imagery the two poems ironically develop the opposition by metaphors that have the same scene. “The Meaning of Life”:

One's sense of the proper decoration alters
But there's a kind of lust feeds on itself
Unspoken to, unspeaking; subterranean
As a black river full of eyeless fish
Heavy with spawn; with a passion for time
Longer than the arteries of a cave.

And “the Meaning of Death”:

Lest darkness fall and time fall
In a long night when learned arteries
Mounting the ice and sum of barbarous time
Shall yield, without essence, perfect accident.
We are the eyelids of defeated caves.

Life exists speechlessly but essentially in the fish heavy with spawn, who are not blind, not defective, but simply “eyeless,” sight being not an ‘essential’ quality (compare, in “To the Lacedemonians,” “The white face / Eyeless with eyesight only, the modern power—”). In the revulsion from time and all continuance, in the election of science, which leads to “perfect accident,” is death, and the after-dinner speaker by a superb turn of irony and drama is permitted to know it and to say it, to realize where his program is taking him. The fish are eyeless, but the speaker and his audience in the cold sleep of science close the eyes of the world.

Mr. Cleanth Brooks, in his admirable analysis of these two poems (Modern Poetry and the Tradition), has this to say of the closing figure of the first: “The symbol of the concrete, irrational essence of life, the blood, receives an amazing amplification by its association with the cave. The two symbols are united on the basis of their possession of ‘arteries.’ The blood is associated with ‘lust,’ is ‘subterranean’ (buried within the body), is the source of ‘passion.’ But the added metaphor of the cave extends the associations from those appropriate to an individual body to something general and eternal.”

Precisely. And I think this insight may be carried further, and that the division it offers is, in various guises, at work throughout Tate's poetry, of which it is the radical judgment and generative principle. I will try to demonstrate this.

The blood, and the cave: liquid and solid, the hot and the cold, that which is fluid and that which is rigid. The combination occurs over and over in the poems, though it need not take the form invariably of blood and cave; it is the relation which is so insistent. It is used to characterize the relation of becoming to become, of life to death, of process to result; in its more general form it suggests the common metaphor whereby forms ‘harden’ or ‘freeze’ into lifeless conventions, and means that civilization is achieved by ‘hardening of the arteries,’ that all effort produces monuments. In “Aeneas at Washington” the hero stands by the Potomac and confesses in these terms, “The city my blood had built I knew no more.” In “To the Lacedemonians” the old soldier says, “I was a boy, I never knew cessation / Of the bright course of blood along the vein.” And later, “Life grown sullen and immense / Lusts after immunity to pain.” And the abstract statement completes the figure: “There is no civilization without death.” Likewise the “Romantic Traditionists” are accused of neglecting the essence for the commentary: “Immaculate race! to yield / Us final knowledge set / In a cold frieze, a field / Of war with no blood let.”

Sometimes the symbol for generation is water instead of blood, and it is set against ‘ice,’ as in the beautiful line from the “Ode to Fear” which I have used as the title of this paper, where Fear is addressed: “You are the current of the frozen stream, / Shadow invisible, ambushed and vigilant flame.” (Often flame is equated with generative force, as in “Sonnets of the Blood” II and VI). And again in “Winter Mask” where the poisoned rat, “driven to cold water, / Dies of the water of life”; by this inversion the figure is seen also as Cocytus, the lowest hell where the traitor is “damned in eternal ice.” There is more than a hint of the metaphor in “The Oath” when the speaker decides “what it is in time that gnaws / The ageing fury of a mountain stream” (where ‘gnaws’ carries over to suggest the action of the stream on its bed, which confines it) and thinks he hears ‘the dark pounding its head / On a rock, crying: Who are the dead?” And in the ninth of “Sonnets of the Blood” the sestet employs the relation. The octave has warned the “captains of industry” against their “aimless power” which will lead to the plundering of “the inner mansion of the blood”:

Yet the prime secret whose simplicity
Your towering engine hammers to reduce,
Though driven holds that bulwark of the sea
Which breached will turn unspeaking fury loose
To drown out him who swears to rectify
Infinity, that has nor ear nor eye.

The prime secret (he has already mentioned prime numbers) is the secret of that which is indivisible and thus closed to analysis and commentary; were this not so, and could the towering engine reduce the bulwark, which is regarded as, generally, form, structure, the continence of life, the sea (which is in the terms of the sonnets the blood) would “turn unspeaking fury loose,” life would turn destructive once its form had been violated, and would stain the earth, as in Yeats' poem, “The Gyres,” with “irrational streams of blood.”

As the blood may be conceived as water, as ocean or stream or pond, so the other term, the cave, has thematic extensions, as a well (“Seasons of the Soul”), as the depth of the Inferno, the “vast concluding shell,” as womb and tomb (Christ's tomb especially) and Plato's cave; all of these seem to work into one fine passage:

It [light] burns us each alone
Whose burning arrogance
Burns up the rolling stone,
This earth—Platonic cave
Of vertiginous chance!
Come, tired Sisyphus,
Cover the cave's egress
Where light reveals the slave,
Who rests when sleeps with us
The mother of silence.

—“Seasons of the Soul,” IV

This relation, some form of which seems to pervade the work, is in my opinion the central irony of Tate's poetry and fully involves his judgment of the world and of the human situation. In “The Meaning of Life” essence and commentary were described as antithetical elements, both of which in composition form the life of man: the problem is of a certain proportion that must be maintained, and in modern society is not maintained (see “The Meaning of Death” and the ninth “Sonnet of the Blood”). The Freudians employ a somewhat similar trope in their division of the ego and the id; life is of the id, dark, irrational (what Blake called Energy?) and the ego draws on this stuff for the creation of order, but if the ego rejects, out of pride, its rude and raw basis, it rejects its roots and must wither (John Crowe Ransom has a poem, “A Painted Head,” which deals with this division). But again I find in Valéry a lucid and beautiful description. In a piece called “Man and the Shell,” translated by Lionel Abel and printed in the second number of The Tiger's Eye, a periodical, he says:

I note first of all that “living nature” is unable to fashion solid bodies directly. In this state, stone and metal are useless to it. Suppose the problem is to produce a lasting object of invariant shape—a prop, a lever, a rod, a buckler; to produce a tree-trunk, a femur, a tooth or a shield, a skull or a shell, nature always makes the same detour: it uses the liquid or fluid state of which every living substance is constituted, and strains off the solid elements of its construction. All that lives or lived results from the properties and changes of certain liquids. Besides, every solid has passed through a liquid phase, melted or in solution. But “living nature” does not take to the high temperatures which enable us to work “pure bodies,” and give to glass, bronze or iron in liquid or plastic states the forms desired, and which cooling will make permanent. Life, to model its solid organs, is limited to the use of solutions, suspensions or emulsions.

Certain kinds of perfection, then, do not belong to life but to death. In various thematic combinations this distinction of the poet's thought is developed, applied, enriched. The blood and the cave are extreme terms for extreme kinds of life, of man, of society. Characteristically, in the War between the States, the South is regarded as the way of life most representative of essence, of blood and so of ritual and tradition, while the North is conceived as protestant, scientific and without history; speaking of the present, the old soldier in “To the Lacedemonians” says, “All are born Yankees of the race of men / And this, too, now the country of the damned.” Again,

And in that Blue renown
The Gray went down,
Down like a rat,
And even the rats cheered.

The tragedy, for Tate, is the loss of the possibility of value through the suggestions of positivism, ‘social science’ and all modes of merely statistical consideration, that man is without sin, is ultimately and progressively perfectible, is through with the past. This is the philosophy of the cave, of the commentary. Against this there is the myth of the blood, the “unspeaking fury,” the “lust” that feeds on itself, which insists that the past is undeniable, insists on the necessity of finding and seizing one's tradition with (and not despite) all the many imperfections that are the simple result of existence, and on the impossibility of a life cut off from its roots in the personal and deeply familiar earth of time.

I hope I have not too much simplified this matter; probably I have, but necessarily when one is exercising oneself to make the theme clear there will be other matters to which one is not (not verbally, anyhow) attending. It seemed an important subject, to consider as closely as possible what is the myth of this poetry, the assumption by which it operates and about which its meanings are organized. The matter of the duality seemed especially worth noticing in some detail, if only because of what reviewers are still likely to call the ‘obscurity’ of these poems. The poems are, I think, hard, but the complaint about obscurity does not seem just, and may deserve some suspicion of being a rather easy disguise for a very hard moral complaint: some may find it more comforting not to know what the poet is doing than to be forced into a coherent attitude towards his work, and in this sense Mr. Tate's poems still suffer at the hands of critics whose idea of what a poem is has not the splendid certainty to be found in their idea of what Mr. Tate ought to be. Thus, recently, a professor of English: “It is no longer possible to dismiss Mr. Tate's poetry with such adjectives as cultivated, fastidious and morose.” Ah, would it were still possible, meanwhile remarks his tone, those were the halcyon days—something we would perhaps not be entitled to say had we not found later in his review what we expected to find: … “It is much easier to discover what Tate is against than what he is for.” And, at last, a poet like Tate is “recusant to the wholeness of humanity and it is unlikely that he will attain a higher status than that of poets' poet.”

Strong words, and on the whole remarkably without meaning: if one does not know what the poet is “for” one does not know that he is “recusant to the wholeness of humanity,” whatever all that may mean. And the question, what a poet is for, with its delicately swaddled ambiguity (what does he like? how can we use him?) may not be, after all, the right kind of question to ask. What, after all, is Shakespeare for? Or what is Yeats for? the poet whose themes Tate's perhaps most closely resemble, and who wrote

Even the wisest man grows tense
With some sort of violence
Before he can accomplish fate …

But the antitheses are present always, the ranges in which value roams: what happens and history; violence and idea; accident and necessity. You have, the tragic poets say, your choice.