SOURCE: Walters, Thomas N. “A Look at Selected New Lyric Poems by Archibald MacLeish.” In The Proceedings of the Archibald MacLeish Symposium, May 7-8 1982, edited by Bernard A. Drabeck, Helen E. Ellis, and Seymour Rudin, pp. 28-35. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1988.

[In the following essay, originally delivered as a speech in 1982, Walters praises MacLeish's mastery of the impassioned and human lyric.]

What I mean by love is … the kind of relationship which gives itself in praise and wonder and awe … something that is beyond the reach of the imagination to understand, and … worth believing in.

The Dialogues of Archibald MacLeish and Mark Van Doren

In his Poetry and Experience MacLeish quoted from Lu Chi's “Fu” concerning the poet's art, citing these words: “We poets struggle with Non-being to force it to yield Being; / We knock upon silence for an answering music. / We enclose boundless space in a square foot of paper; / We pour out deluge from the inch space of the heart.”

Those words impress with their eloquent power. And the quotation serves well as an adopted credo remarkably significant for the influence it had upon MacLeish's achievement as poet. Well known is how MacLeish met the often harsh demands of his roles as man, husband, father, lawyer, professor, as maker of deep and lasting friendships, as adviser to politicians and national leaders, as champion of democracy and individual man, as librarian, scholar, journalist, editor, essayist, as penetrative commentator on his nation's heritage, change, growth, and purpose, and as thought-provoking playwright for radio and stage.

Undergirding all these roles has been the continuing one, the major, the most profoundly heartfelt one: MacLeish as poet—as private, American poet.

In addition to the foundation which his epic, public poetic concerns have provided all his other activities, he has been able always to pull back inside himself and write the personal lyric. And there seem to be two levels of these personal poems. There are the poems, for instance, about his love and admiration for friends and individuals caught in their times, in their lives. Then, at base, there are the intensely personal poems and expressions of his love of family—especially of his love for Ada.

It might seem easier to grasp and treat objectively those sweeping cultural or political concepts in a poetic mode than to discover and depict the complexities of even one individual. Love and caring make objectivity difficult. It is easier generally to judge ideas and emotions in relation to groups than in relation to one person. MacLeish always did both. There is, for instance, his recent expression of the horrific facelessness of blind politics in his sad and angry poem, “National Security,” in which the “three names” (of Cambodia, Laos, Viet Nam) are “not to be spoken.” And there is—in his “Night Watch in the City of Boston”—that startling picture of our Time: “The darkness deepens. Shrieking like a whirling paper in a street / tears at itself where shame and hatred meet.” These subjects—war, perversion of democracy, national subterfuge, cultural alienation—are enormous and difficult ones. But complementing them, balancing these larger, more general canvases, are the intimate cameo portraits of such difficult-to-render individuals of concern to him as Hemingway, Brooks Atkinson, Mark Van Doren, Pablo Casals, Carl Sandburg, E. E. Cummings, and Edwin Muir. How did MacLeish, then, go about retaining power of vision and expression when viewing the exact, magnified heartbeats and heartbreaks of a personal friendship, of a love? MacLeish—in his exact and specific capsule statements of understanding, of gratitude, of love, of delight in such persons, celebrated them as exempla of the human mystery. In these lyric poems he persisted in being candid, affirmative, graceful, and—typical of his “cranky-yankee,” against-the-grain classicism—he remained unfashionably, penetratingly and compassionately wise. And loving.

Of MacLeish's considerable array of strengths, of his mastery of stylistic methods, his mature accomplishments through poetic arrangement, selection, diction, emphasis, a selection of only four discernibly recurrent devices may be useful here to suggest how the poet grappled with experience which touched him not just philosophically, but personally, vitally. Even such a stringent selection will show how he heightened, through calculated poetic restructuring, that experience above any prose form its account could have taken.

These arbitrarily selected poetic devices include (1) his acutely rendered, though sometimes deceptively low key and straightforward use of the exact image. (2) He employed, too, a keen sense of how the rhythms of human speech—whether the voice is being witty, pensive, or angry—can be intensified through subtle syntactical re-ordering, through repetitions, hesitations, so as finally to make both common and uncommon sense of speech. (3) He consistently used, too, the telling juxtaposition—of image, of idea, of word—exploring the startling opposites of light and dark, sleep and wakefulness, quiet and sound, quickness and death. And (4) he employed an intentional ambiguity, a balance of possibilities, achieved through calculated wordplays or, as often as not, through elliptical constructions. Usually found at the end of his poems, this “mystery” is provocative, tantalizes the reader toward translations, and often provides a redefinition—making possible, finally, a fuller understanding, even an acceptance—of the experience being explored.

Having coped epically over a long career with the deaths of thousands of cared-for but faceless warriors in far too many wars, MacLeish wrote, on the smaller, more difficult scale, several obviously personal and pain-filled lyrics about the death of his beloved brother, Kenneth, in the first world war. Each of these poems reapproached, rearranged—added possibilities of impact to—the flat words: “Kenneth MacLeish, a Navy Flier, was shot down over Belgium.” MacLeish's most recent attempt to re-order this experience poetically is the poem “Family Group.” In terms of MacLeish's continuing style, consider the electrifying effect of the last five lines in that work: “The faceless figure on its back, the helmet buckled, / wears what look like Navy wings. A lengthened shadow / falls across the muck about its feet. / Me? I'm back in Cambridge in dry clothes, / a bed to sleep in, my small son, my wife.” The humanly natural, and yet elevating, emotional rhythm of the earlier, questioning line, “Someone's lengthened shadow—the photographer's?— / falls across the road, across our feet,” becomes more than rhythmically effective when it is echoed by the image—this time unidentified, unquestioned, and with that anguished change of pronoun—in the second stanza concerning the second photograph in this “family group”: “A lengthened shadow falls across the muck about its feet.” Still apparent in this poem, half a century after the fact, are the pain, guilt, and poetic bravery of facing fully two ironically different kinds of reclining—different beds—different kinds of sleep: one buckled, alone, in muck; the other in dry clothes, surrounded by ongoing lives. Thus the poem redirects our attention to its title, and becomes a provocative redefinition of “family group.”

His early friendship with—and subsequent estrangement from—Ernest Hemingway, too, presented ongoing emotional difficulties for MacLeish. Again, a prose statement of the situation would have been “easier”: “The laughing, handsome man, who was loved by my child Mary Hillard, eventually was changed by too much war, by artistic paranoia, by disappointments in love.” But consider the exact imagery of MacLeish's evocation of Hemingway's fear in the line “He knuckled his hard, small hands,” from the poem, “Whitehaired Girl.” And consider, too, the mysterious and possibly ironic last two words of that poem: “You see!” There is also the contrast between the black beard Ernest has grown in Switzerland and the white-haired, exquisite girl. There is, as well, the remarkable staccato beat, the rhythms of the lines evocative of a child's frenzied feeling of betrayal: “She ran to him, stopped, looked, screamed. It wasn't Ernest! / Wasn't Ernest! / Wasn't … / She raced up the stair.”

In the poem “A Good Man in a Bad Time,” MacLeish celebrated the impassioned rhythm and dignity of intelligent, reasoned utterance. In one stanza he illuminated the horrific juxtaposition of Jerome Wiesner's sanity and wisdom regarding the proper uses of science—and the belligerent ignoring of such sane counsel by governmental powers out of control. The lines read: “He addresses presidents. He says: / ‘Even now a government still has to govern: / no one is going to invent a self-governing holocaust!’ / The Pentagon receives his views: ‘Science,’ he says, ‘is not a substitute for thought. / Miracle drugs perhaps: not miracle wars.’” This poem ends with an image significantly set in italics like a dream sequence. It is an image of cleansing, of renewal, of communion; possibly only ironic and defiant, for ours is a time crazed with its potentials for self-destruction; it is a time when, as the poem states: “Nobody speaks of a good man, now: / only the knave in office, public liar, / pardoned president, and all the rest. / Even the word is out of fashion: ‘Good!’” In that sort of hideous ambience, our world's waters grow increasingly wasted and tainted with mercury, with strontium-90, with acids and PCB's—rather than with the poet's avowed tasting of “… mint, of spring water.” The image and the idea of renewal are brave ones, sad ones, relying for their power not so much upon reality as defined by bureaucracies, but upon reality as defined by the tendoned mystery of the human heart, its power to renew, despite all.

The themes of these three poems: death, change, the horror of arrogant ignorance, are harrowing ones. Yet in each of these closely personal explorations, MacLeish artistically transcended any sentimentality, or private fear, or the flatness of such mere statements as we hear all the time: “My brother died. Nothing stays the same. We continue to know more and to understand it less all the time.”

Until April 20, 1982, nearing ninety years of age, with his wife of some sixty-seven years at his side, MacLeish continued to confront the closest of personal experiences—his own mortality, his own love. He continued to employ and refine his hard-earned poetic strengths to create lasting art out of the very passage of his own lifetime, as well as making art out of the mysteriously renewing relationship of love between himself and his treasured Ada.

In the very recent poem “Definitions of Old Age,” for instance, MacLeish first created a simile of age in “old-fashioned” agrarian terms: “When apple trees are old as you are, / over-aged and crooked grown, something / happens to their occupation.” Then he makes the image contemporary: “… the time when men resign from their committees / … [yet] still get up at seven every morning / right on time for nothing left to do but / sit and age / and look up ‘dying’ in the yellow pages.” Attend, still, to the suggestive resonance, the rhythm of these two lines: “What's the use, this late, of bearing apples? / Let the apples find a father of their own.” Note also the ponderable, the translatable impact of that last line. Are those apples poems? Are they others' lives? And the poem ends with a sweetly masculine, reasoned acceptance, a resolving re-definition of old age: “… level light / evening in the afternoon / love without the bitterness and so / goodnight.” A similar recognition of advancing age is in his poem “Dozing on the Lawn.” Who but MacLeish would have given us that poem's surprising image and dictional choice of “… warm sun by the humming trees”? Or given us such rhythmic, naturally human repetitions as its lines: “… but I wake too soon: / wake too soon and wake afraid / of the blinding sun, of the blazing sky.” Or, who else would have given us its calmly accepting resolution, its powerful contrasts of sunlight with darkness—deceptively straightforward and even neutrally stated—in these last two lines: “It was dark in the dream where I was laid: / It is dark in the earth where I will lie.” Here was the man, the poet considering, clear-eyed, through a faith so calm as to seem laconic, his own death. Yet the confrontation became art through MacLeish's stringent exercise of control, vision, through his reliance upon trained human intellect and God-given spirit.

Refined to its sharpest focus, this suggested difficulty of viewing and treating the intensely personal may be examined in some of MacLeish's observations about his wife. Not always poetic in form, a record of gestures and prose statements, when accompanied by the poems, reveals an impressive pattern of a relationship nurtured and made beautiful by two gifted, thoughtful and committed individuals. Like any marital relationship, the MacLeish marriage did not know unrelieved bliss. It required hard work, compromise, giving. Nearly sixty years ago, as early as 1924 in The Happy Marriage, MacLeish was interested in analyzing the dynamics, the ingredients of love, interested in describing “the subtle relationship between a man and wife, the separateness in intimacy, the play of desire and surfeit, the intuitive understanding and the doubt, satisfaction and discontent, the dream and the awareness of time, beauty and death” (Falk, Archibald MacLeish). Through the inevitable trials, MacLeish remained loving, admiring, grateful to his Ada for her belief in him. Fifty-four years after The Happy Marriage, for instance, in his essay “Autobiographical Information,” MacLeish wrote this moving testimonial to his girl-wife, with whom he could “… laugh about [pressures and problems] but not laughing.” He shows them having a vermouth cassis in Paris: “She rises, runs in dance-step down the street. I follow, catch her … clinging hands …” (Riders on the Earth). Of her tangible support during those risk-taking years of seeking, of her maintenance of their stable attitude in the face of disapproving inquiries from their staid families back home—families who expected results, he wrote: “And then the letters home. She wrote, I couldn't. They were charming letters. Paris days and not a word about the nights between them, nights above our little courtyard side by side, keeping our common secret from each other. When would those twenty lines be written—ten lines, even—five—those five lines that would justify … ?”

Coming some sixty demanding, experience-filled years after that long-ago “happy marriage” (the event, not the poem), MacLeish's most recent collection, New and Collected Poems, 1917-1976, has, as its simple dedication, “for Ada.” How fortunate MacLeish knew himself to be. How felicitous his phrasings of gratitude, respect, love.

In the 1968 poem “Late Abed,” there are strong autobiographical elements in the imagery of its opening lines: “Ah, but a good wife! / To lie late in a warm bed / (warm where she was) with your life / suspended like music in the head.” Ada's internationally recognized singing voice hangs in the air of that lyric. There is in this poem, too, MacLeish's rare ability to suggest the duality of effect of an event or action through his exact, momentarily mystifying word-choice. Hear the rhythms, the repetitions of beat as well in these two lines: “and she moves here, she moves there, / and your mouth hurts still where last she kissed you.” Finally there is the provocative ending of that poem, suggesting that dreams of the peaceful sanctuary of a woman's love transcend art or work: “You lie there listening and she moves— / prepares her house to hold another morning, / prepares another day to hold her loves … / You lie there thinking of nothing / watching the sky. …”

In the poems “The Old Gray Couple (1)” and “The Old Gray Couple (2),” MacLeish masterfully fused his intensely personal subjects of age and love. Again, too, he triumphed artistically over the inescapable difficulty of looking closely at one's own predicament.

Printed back to back in this collection, these two poems reflect light on each other, though they differ markedly in form. “The Old Gray Couple (1)” is a tightly structured, more formal, three-stanza, twelve-line poem with some near, and some full, rhymes. “The Old Gray Couple (2)” is couched as a dialogue, a brief play, between a he and she who sound remarkably like an Archibald and an Ada. It is significant of MacLeish's ongoing restlessness about achieving the best possible means to effect an observation that he wrote two versions of this poem. Each of these poems is a graceful, witty, wise exploration of and declaration about the communicative ability, the mature, worked-at, grateful relationship which a man and his wife have developed. The problems faced by the young couple in The Happy Marriage have not gone away; the strengths by which the couple face those problems, however, have grown with the passage of time. They are at ease, at one with each other, form an entity together. The poem's middle stanza reads: “They go off at an evening's end to talk / but they don't, or to sleep but they lie awake— / hardly a word, just a touch, just near, / just listening but not to hear.” And in the final stanza, the rhythms of repetition, the very cyclical, cadenced quality of the structured language is part of the stated, stately acceptance of their final, essential separateness: “Everything they know they know together— / everything, that is, but one: / their lives they've learned like secrets from each other; / their deaths they think of in the nights alone.”

In the dialogue of “The Old Gray Couple (2),” MacLeish brings in yet another element: that of the effect of poetic artifice on their relationship. The couple discuss the sustaining quality for men of the “unreal,” of the “beautiful, supportive lie,” which is its own kind of truth. The woman speaks first: “She: Love, says the poet, has no reasons. / He: Not even after fifty years? / She: Particularly after fifty years. He: What was it, then, that lured us, that still teases? / She: You used to say my plaited hair / He: And then you'd laugh. / She: Because it wasn't plaited. …” Midway in the poem, the man says, “Love has no reasons but old lovers do.” The woman quickly adds, “And they can't tell.” To which, the man, more remindful than reproving, professing an old, old love still, says: “I can and so can you. / Fifty years ago we drew each other, / magnetized needle toward the longing north. / It was your naked presence that so moved me. / It was your absolute presence that was love.” Still, however, the woman persists by teasing him about his use of the past tense, saying, “Ah, was!” Not to be deterred, seeking to express for them both finally the essence of what they are together, the man continues, his passion is tempered, his words sure and dignified by love. He says: “And now, years older, we begin to see / absence not presence: what the world would be / without your footsteps in the world—the garden / empty of the radiance where you are.” Then using once more his sad juxtaposition of light and dark, in a stately speech of calm acceptance, MacLeish's man's voice closes the poem: “Ours is the late, last wisdom of the afternoon. / We know that love, like light, grows dearer toward the / dark.”

So, there it throbs again: that virile, thoughtful man's voice speaking to his attentive love about the dearness of love, the dearness of light when both are fading. There, still, is Lu Chi's poet struggling against Non-being—knocking upon silence for an answering music; there again is the lover pouring out deluge from the inch space of his heart. How marvelously well, how lovingly, MacLeish did it all.