[In the following essay, Russell says that Nemerov embraced the idea of an ordered universe bound by natural law.]

Throughout the body of his poetic works Howard Nemerov charted the way out of a world which modernists claim has fallen into fragments and which “post-modernists” chortle has always and only been fragmentary. In his own way Nemerov was as much ahead of his time, yet based in ancient insights, as the new science of chaos that looks at apparently random elements of the world and finds within them a persistent and ineluctable order. Not surprisingly this order looks more than a little like that which Plato, Aristotle, and the Western tradition had always said was there, although they had insufficient science to prove it.

Like so many of these scientists Nemerov is reluctant to attribute perceptible order to an orderer or “God.” Thus his poetry often seems like the art of a verbal matador, avoiding the charge of the bull that Flannery O'Connor depicts in her great short story “Greenleaf” as a natural yet violent sign from God, ready to bury himself in us and at once bring life and death to a sterile, rational world. The very absence of an explanation for the mysterious and persistent order in Nemerov's poetry is one of its most piquant characteristics, luring the reader ever further into his work, waiting to see if he will ever tire of the road itself and come to a conclusion.

“The Dependencies,” a poem from his 1975 volume, The Western Approaches, may stand as an emblem for much of his effort. Nemerov begins, “This morning, between two branches of a tree / Beside the door, epeira once again / Has spun and signed his tapestry and trap.” From the first words, “This morning,” he places the discrete and urgent moment against the continuity of “once again.” Each specific of this small picture must be found in relation to each other if the events of the poem are to occur. The door must be beside the tree or the spider's web might not be seen; the branches must be near enough that the web may be woven; the web cannot escape its dual role as a work of beauty and as a trap. Yet doors, webs, and trees are common things, as is a man seeing them, until a larger pattern is revealed.

The observer in the poem taps upon the web to test the “early-warning system” of the spider, only to confront his own ignorance of the genie he so casually summons when he sees on the spider's back “The yellow hieroglyph that no one knows / The meaning of.” This simple mystery unleashes a succession of seasonal signs: “yesterday at dusk the nighthawks came / Back as they do about this time each year” and “soon the monarchs will be drifting south, / And then the geese will go, and then one day / The little garden birds will not be here.” These are the recurrent miracles of the seasons, orders somehow conveyed to animals that traverse continents with no map but a pellet of mind.

On the one hand these great movements affirm the continuity of the world, yet each great spring migration or autumnal turn of leaves must begin at some particular, if unknown, instant. Nemerov's poetry is often an attempt to capture the mystery of that instant: “Change is continuous on the seamless web, / Yet moments come like this one … The definite announcement of an end / Where one thing ceases and another starts.” These are the moments which we do not know how to place or speak of unless we resort to the futile fiction of numbers. When does the day begin and the old night end? When do we move from manhood to middle age? Yet Nemerov, a keen disciple of Western philosophy, denies that all parts of the continuum are one, even if we cannot discern the distinctions. There is a real spring, a real and separate summer, even as both are embraced in the order called the seasons and the years.

If the great things of the world (and the spiders) are enmeshed in this dialogue between identity and continuity, so is the heart of man. For “like the spider waiting on the web / You know the intricate dependencies / Spreading in secret through the fabric vast / Of heaven and earth.” That vast fabric and the seamless web which Nemerov calls upon so often is a reality of which he never lets go, never lets us forget. It is a web that includes artistic and mythic dimensions, as he writes in the poem “The Western Approaches,” since “any man dissolves in Everyman / Of whom the story, as it always, did, begins / In a far country, once upon a time, / There lived a certain man and he had three sons.” The simple stories of life resonate with the greater stories they imitate and sometimes merge with, as if we live out our own small intentions and yet take part in a greater, more cosmic drama.

This sense of heroic life is reminiscent of the British poet, Edwin Muir, for whom tired men returning to the suburbs may echo the virtues and the idealism of those who returned to their homes after long wars fought to stem a murderous tide. Even if there is no cultus that the poet clings to except the world and the word, his is a sacramental vision of life, where each event in time is uplifted and given permanent meaning through its relation to the order of the creation. While Nemerov celebrates this greater world in poem after poem, he is also aware of the darker side it presents as we live in time, in love with time's pleasures: “For all the skill, / For all the time of training, you might take / The hundred steps in darkness, not the next.” These lines, from “Night Operations, Coastal Command RAF” use the image of the confusion of the air war to emphasize how limited are our abilities to discern the nature of the paths we walk, which always end at unknown times. On many occasions Nemerov can be quite bitter about an order which “killed this one already / And is going to do the rest of us,” yet even these lines resolve within a poem that ends “God doesn't matter. Adoration does.”

Nemerov, like Frost or William Stafford, makes the argument of natural law. All take seriously the Wordsworthian project of letting an art based on observation of nature lead us to non-doctrinal religious insight. It may or may not matter to the reader that epeira comes from a word which denotes the bodies of water that are surrounded by the land yet linked directly to the sea, like Hudson Bay, or that epeira is the “orb spider” found in all parts of the globe. Yet Nemerov makes the very act of “naming” unfold the mysterious unity which he perceives in nature and in words. What makes Nemerov different is his ability to apply the terms of philosophical inquiry to the poetic situation. In poems like “De Anima” he embodies Aristotle's great idea of the unmoved mover as the soul of the universe while also making it easy to enter deeply into his story of a lover and self-love.

Fully a man of his time, Howard Nemerov considers the relation of mind and art to the world and how difficult it is to see the real world behind the codes we make to express it. Poems like “A Relation of Art and Life,” “The World as Breughel Imagined It,” or “The Painter Dreaming in the Scholar's House” bear this burden. But persistently the poetic eye sees the order behind the arbitrary, whether in code or object. The brief poem “Analogue” reminds us that “You read the clicking keys as gibberish / Although they strike out sentences to sense.” If we do not see the argument, the direction of the life we lead, Nemerov reminds us to keep watching, for “in the fluttering leaves, the shoaling fish, / The continuum nondenumerable and dense, / Dame Kind keeps rattling off her evidence.” Much given to use the expression “Dame Kind” where others might use Nature, Nemerov reminds us in his poetry that nature creates “kinds”—types and families—rather than random, mutated products. One of his greatest strengths is the ability to show us similarity, belonging, and unity where others see only fragments, randomness, or isolate facts.

His poetry returns consistently to that unique moment:

When like the spider waiting on the web
You know the intricate dependencies
Spreading in secret through the fabric vast
Of heaven and earth, sending their messages
Ciphered in chemistry to all the kinds,
The whisper down the bloodstream: it is time.

Here Nemerov links the individual and his expectations and schemes with his place in heaven and earth. He redeems the chemical code from the post-modernist delusion that codes are all arbitrary examples of man making up the world in his own mind. This code, ciphered as it is, is no plaything for the semiotic theoretician. Here the code is passed from objective reality to lives that are also objective realities. Moreover they are united in “kinds,” groupings which are not political, ethnic, or symbolic, but based on the nature of what Aristotle called their “form.” They are linked in a common nature which they neither make nor can escape.

In the brilliant last line of his poem, Nemerov's use of the word “whisper” recalls the logos, the word by which all creation subsists. That word is, for him, built into our physical being, turning the bloodstream from some barbarous, pseudo-savage vision of D. H. Lawrence to the more balanced ideal of Western tradition of a blood nature that includes both flesh and the ordering word. Always, the apparently wild and random biology as well as the ordering word must live within time, the great continuum against which we can measure our own discrete existence, and yet into which birth and death irresistibly flow.

Howard Nemerov wrote beautiful, intellectual, deceptively simple poems that celebrate our human sense that order embraces the tragic fears of fragmentary meaninglessness. This in a time when much verbiage was celebrating the death of meaning and proclaiming man's authority to make words mean, as with Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty, whatever we say they do. For Nemerov, life, death, and words have terribly specific if yet mysterious meanings—especially that critical word, poetry. Not a theoretician but an embodier of truths, Nemerov answers those who would make art consist of any set of fragments they would care to put together, like those writers he cites in “Literature” as “liberated sex-maniacs, psychologists / With an eye to higher things, and novelists / Convinced they are psychiatric social workers / With a mission to the slums of the human heart.” In his improbably and satirically titled short poem, “Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry,” Nemerov offers a constructive alternative to the contemporary and fragmentary vision of art and life, demonstrating the measured power of poetic truth:

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned into pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.
There came a moment that you couldn't tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.