[In the following essay, Kiehl briefly analyzes numerous poems by Nemerov, suggesting that the poems excite the imagination and enhance the reader's understanding of the world.]

Despite my abstracting a phrase from “Blue Swallows” and for the moment seeming to return it to a banal notion that poems are merely ornamental, I believe that Nemerov's poems are often great imaginative instruments that lead us far out. They take us to the ground of being to watch the dragonfly become, transformed from brutal night below and ascending to the sun (“The Dragonfly”). They further lead us, as in “The Beekeeper Speaks … And Is Silent,” to listen to the stars beyond the sun. And despite the typical lucidity of Nemerov's poems and despite his usual achievement of splendid images, his poems are not always easily grasped. “Celestial Globe,” for example, “Turns all things inside out,” including the human head, until the poem virtually baffles thought. “Interiors,” presenting a medieval milieu, is only obscurely lit and dimly figured according to human sexual sensation.

Often Nemerov's poems lead us into thought, about ourselves and our circumstances, beyond our usual conceptual and perceptual categories. We are offered passages across boundaries as formidable as death itself if we can come to see that “flowers light the sun”: “When you have known how this may be / you have already lived forever …” (“Small Moment”). And before the poet of “Blue Swallows” himself falls into stoney-eyed silent rapture before the world he would take us to, he at last disclaims even his own medium as if most certainly to point the way one last time:

O swallows, swallows, poems are not
The point. Finding again the world,
That is the point, where loveliness
Adorns intelligible things
Because the mind's eye lit the sun.

The world referred to is clearly not our usual world of conventionally “Remarkable things” (“Sightseers”):

Click, the Vatican,
Click, the Sphinx,
Click, in the Badlands,
The enormous nostrils
Of the Fathers. …

Us usual sightseers, bearing “Tabernacle or pyx / Priestly with symbols / In silver and black,” come to worship only graven images.

Nemerov's poems would lead us instead to the wonderful, unaccounted for, and hitherto scarcely spoken of world of “everything that is.” They lead us to everything “In the world” beyond our usual categories of apprehension such as angel (spirit) at one hand and stone (substance) at the other (“Angel and Stone”). They take us to “the incommensurable” world scarcely imaginable beyond our motion picture thinking (“The First Day”), to the unclockable “now” (“Moment”), to the uncharted “somewhere” (“Somewhere”) beyond where “history is” (“Blue Swallows”) or “history was” (“Sightseers”). His poems would take us back to the miraculous otherworld all our philosophers derive us from. “Firelight in Sunlight” offers a splendid phenomenal paradigm of such returns, as it shows us how sunlight (the world's primary energy) returns to itself. If our mood is yet more flamboyant, our home with the gods, in “The First Point of Aries” or in “The Companions,” will make best sense to us. Or perhaps we will most plausibly get home to the undivided self through the dream-poems like “Sleeping Beauty” or through reveries, by smell, to the child's sense in “Burning the Leaves” or to the beloved vision of “Two Girls.”

Seldom are we much aware of our own perceptual conventions. The witty viewer, who speaks to us while watching T.V. in Nemerov's satire “A Way of Life,” is at least partly aware that he confuses several planes of illusion: television fiction, commercial advertisement, and ordinary consciousness. But we are usually quite unaware that we thoroughly order our worlds with our concepts and our language and, consequently, that we get locked into narrowly exclusive views. The pitiable plight of the man, much like ourselves, confined to “a view where every last thing / Is rimed with its own shadow / Exactly” (“The View”) shows us our own perceptual predicament. Usually we unwittingly run our hellish race to nowhere (“The Race”) and are at last “taken by the darkness in surprise” (“Blue Suburban”). Rarely do we noticeably cross boundaries of being so that, like the people in “Going Away,” we are touched “with a strange tonality” of what we have been and, implicitly, of who and where we are. Moreover, such boundary-crossings are risky. In “Brainstorm” we see a man that sees through some of the usual human conceptual categories. He sees himself related to his circumstance—his house assailed by the wind and outside his house, the crows—with unusual but marvelously creditable vision. He sees, for example, that “Houses are only trees stretched on the rack.” Thus he brilliantly intuits the total integrity of nature, but his consequent guilt at his usual ignorant human abstraction threatens to entirely overwhelm his ordinary sense of things. And so he sees his own opening awareness as a horrifying craniotomy.

Psychologists, semanticists, and other scientists and philosophers of all sorts have long warned us that the real world is not necessarily coincidental with our words referring to it, our ideas ordering it, or our compelling illusions about its forms and appearances. Nemerov's many dream-poems typically test our senses of reality. His difficult epistemological poem “One Way” describes how words wed thing (other) and thought (self) to bring the world into being for us or, perhaps, to bring ourselves into being, but it concomitantly discloses and warns that our words are not coextensive with the world. Like the ancient prophets and patriarchs that Nemerov thought of in composing “The View from Pisgah,” scientists warn us of the folly in mistaking our particular maps for the real territories they refer to and represent. “Projection,” about us fearfully coming to the end of our Renaissance self-assurance and certainty, beautifully expresses Korzybski's metaphor.

Our amazingly complex human cultures indicate that, apart from our more notorious conceptual disagreements (about economics or politics or religion), we have been incredibly successful at perceptual and verbal socialization. Highly prizing social order, we determinedly indoctrinate ourselves thoroughly into our languages. “To David, about His Education” describes, with amusing irony, the way we condition ourselves:

In order to become one of the grown ups
Who sees invisible things neither steadily nor whole,
But keeps gravely the grand confusion of the world
Under his hat, which is where it belongs,
And teaches small children to do this in their turn.

And the oldest wisdom poetry preserves for us intimates that the human experience of mind is essentially an achievement of imaginative fixation and conventionality. Referring to both Beowulf and Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” notices, for example, that “Our human thought arose at first in myth, / And going far enough became a myth once more.” In “The View from Pisgah” human mind is mirages and idolatries, with which to figure the void and by which we seem to escape the unbearable wilderness.

And so, we greatly value the way that language orders our experience for us and are like the absent-minded professor's bright replacement, who prefers the papers to the leaves (“Absent-Minded Professor”). We prefer to stay inside with the orderly and manageable illusions; we are fond of the sense they convey that we control our life and experience. Prizing the order, coherence, and closure—the definition, we say—that our languages furnish, we are disposed to ignore that they are also a “limiting tradition” (“Cybernetics”). Nemerov's Phi Beta Kappa poem on how “the dreams of the desert are digested in art” is fiercely angry that we benignly frame, tame, and pervert the savage otherworldly intuitions that might wake us from our solipsisms (“A Relation of Art and Life”). His Arabian Nights poem, “Somewhere,” warns at last that the accounts of life we listen to, the stories we tell ourselves, before we go to sleep betray us by turning life into soporific “sweet seductions / Punishable by death.” “The Companions,” on the sense of dying to the world's magic and marvel—“There used to be gods in everything, and now they've gone”—is perhaps a complement for “To David, about His Education.” More than poignant, the speaker's awareness of having turned away from the world and wonder is redeemingly tragic:

I must have done, I guess, to have grown so abstract
That all the lonely summer night's become but fact,
That when the cricket signals I no longer listen,
Nor read the glowworms' constellations when they glisten.

But ordinarily we have only grown abstract and only come to fact. We have unwittingly come to assume that our particular categories are indigenous to nature. Our ignorance is an insidious trap, and even intending to avoid it may not save us from it. Consider the gentle ironies in “Elegy for a Nature Poet” about how a man, more than usually sensitive to the world, died:

And now, poor man, he's gone. Without his name
The field reverts to wilderness again,
The rocks are silent, woods don't seem the same;
Demoralized small birds will fly insane.
Rude Nature, whom he loved to idealize
And would have wed, pretends she never heard
His voice at all, as, taken by surprise
At last, he goes to her without a word.

Especially in our own time, however, the best thinkers, in the natural sciences and elsewhere, are more and more aware that they approach absolute limits in their capacities to describe and order the world. One of the characters in Nemerov's little drama, “This, That, & the Other,” observes: “The physicists are vexed between the wave / And particle.” The poet in “Angel and Stone” concedes “it is hard to imagine what life must be like.” “The First Day” begins:

Below the ten thousand billionth of a centimeter
Length ceases to exist. Beyond three billion light years
The nebulae would have to exceed the speed of light
In order to be, which is impossible: no universe.
The long and short of it seems to be that thought
Can make itself unthinkable, and that measurement
Of reach enough and scrupulosity will find its home
In the incommensurable.

One response, by the sciences, to such limitations is to come back upon themselves to devote attention to their own modes of expression and perception. They are at last noticing that their own modes are analogic and metaphoric, and consequently they are learning the same sort of diffidence poets acquire as a “negative capability.”

It is especially this new scientific awareness, I think, that explains why Nemerov noticeably exploits “scientific” images and concepts. Particularly important to him is the idea that our mode of observation significantly determines what we see or, more broadly, that being is not a thing but a Gestalt. Correspondingly, so many of his finest poems are reflexive—that is, they present the topic of their own expressiveness—exactly because he recognizes that the limit of expression is such a universally important intellectual problem. In “Writing” the poet makes lovely analogies, such as skaters' marks scored in ice and looking like script in a foreign language, and seems to conclude: “It is as though the world / were a great writing.” But he sees further, and the poem continues:

                                                                      Having said so much,
let us allow there is more to the world
than writing; continental faults are not
bare convoluted fissures in the brain.
Not only must the skaters soon go home;
also the hard inscription of their skates
is scored across the open water, which long
remembers nothing, neither wind nor wake.

In “Blue Swallows” the poet urges us “to see / The real world where the spelling mind / Imposes with its grammar book / Unreal relations on the blue / Swallows.” And in “Holding the Mirror Up to Nature” the poet speaks as if frustrated and distraught:

Some shapes cannot be seen in a glass,
those are the ones the heart breaks at.
They will never become valentines
or crucifixes, never. Night clouds
go on insanely as themselves
though metaphors would be prettier;
and when I see them massed at the edge
of the globe, neither weasel nor whale,
as though this world were, after all,
non-representational, I know
a truth that cannot be told, although
I try to tell you. …

This sort of distress, perhaps traditionally suffered by “the serious poets with their / crazy ladies and cloudy histories” and mostly disdained by scientists we suppose, has now become the hardcore study of our sciences. Striving for ever more-precise descriptive accuracy, they have anxiously come at last to uncertainty principles and may yet lose themselves in Nemerov's Black Museum “When all analogies are broken” and “The scene grows strange again” (“The Black Museum”). And so, “The Human Condition” portrays the recently-familiar modern sensibility:

In this motel where I was told to wait,
The television screen is stood before
The picture window. Nothing could be more
Use to a man than knowing where he's at,
And I don't know, but pace the day in doubt
Between my looking in and looking out.

Or, from a radically different point of view, the poet, as if one long suffering, will vindictively and almost hysterically celebrate the breakdowns of the “iron characters,” of all the self-righteously certain “keepers of the public confidence” (“The Iron Characters”).

In some of Nemerov's poems, such as “The Daily Globe,” the poet is simply detached from and amused at the psychic bondage into which we have fallen and at the instruments by which our illusions are sustained. The newspaper comic strip recurs, we notice, as one of Nemerov's expressions of our simple-minded stupor. In “Life Cycle of the Common Man,” for example, we “behold the man”:

Walking into deep silence, with the ectoplastic
Cartoon's balloon of speech proceeding
Steadily out of the front of his face, the words
Borne along on the breath which is his spirit
Telling the numberless tale of his untold Word
Which makes the world his apple, and forces him to eat.

In “Sunday” we are reduced to supposing that our lives and sensibilities are “the horrible funnies flattened on the floor” that God may read on his day off. The movies-idea, which appears in “The First Day,” is perhaps Nemerov's most fully elaborated analogue for consciousness—for the conventionalized awareness—that may be mistaken for vital being. But if all these instances imply contempt for our condition, in other poems, like “Projection,” the poetic voice seems inclined to pity our plight as victims of our own illusions: “They were so amply beautiful, … who could have blamed / Us? …”

No matter what tone he takes, however, the poet's recurrent recognition that we are typically locked into particular modes of perception helps him to counteract his accustomed sense of things and to try to see, for a change, how flowers—perhaps Nemerov's metaphor for our sensory organs—may be said to light the sun (“Small Moment”). If the recognition is at first mostly intellectual it nevertheless prepares him and us to seize upon and treasure experiences of grace when they come. With a genius for selecting the objective correlative (and an eye to the antique tradition that souls travel on odors), the poet reports, for example, that while burning leaves “the smell of smoke takes memory by surprise” and marvelously transports him (“Burning the Leaves”). In a poem that amply prepares us for the visual realization, he fuses his view of his own children playing about the fire with an extravagant and poignant sense of himself as a child. In “The Companions” the poet remembers that he once saw the world wonderful. Thus he prepares us to look for the eyes in the stone, to listen for the voice from the elm branch, to discover the glowworms' constellations when they glisten, to be with the gods again.

Actually, Nemerov seldom exploits the vatic myths about poesy or comes on as a prophet. Occasionally, however, he satirizes such posturing. The poet in “On the Platform” scorns the modern poet's podium-persona and the audience that patronizes it. Taking the rostrum on a traditional prophetic occasion, the college commencement, the poet in “A Relation of Art and Life” savages false prophets. But more usual for Nemerov is the lament, with its gentle irony, for the poet as failed prophet in “Elegy for a Nature Poet.” Both “The View from Pisgah” and “The Poet at Forty” expose the poet's sense of inadequacy with regard to the tradition. About as close as Nemerov comes to sincerely taking the prophetic stance is in his offering, from high up in the head of the house, “The View from an Attic Window.”

But if he doesn't often or easily posture, Nemerov nevertheless insistently asserts the substance of the great tradition and reaffirms that the poet is a visionary. Here are some of his remarks in “The Muse's Interest,” his address to the National Poetry Festival at the Library of Congress in 1962 and printed in his book Poetry and Fiction: Essays:

The poet hopes to articulate a vision concerning human life; he hopes to articulate it truly. He may not be much of a poet, he may not be much of a human being, the vision is not so special either; but it is what he hopes to do.

This “vision” need not be thought of in religious terms, as a dramatic one-shot on the road to Damascus; its articulation may be slow indeed, and spread over many works; the early and late parts of it may elucidate one another, or encipher one another still more deeply.

For the substance of this vision the poet listens, he watches, and when he speaks in his character of poet it is his conviction, possibly his illusion, that something other speaks in him.

As special vision is the soul of poetic experience, the poet's art or craft is to remodel language so that it can embody and express the new reality he sees. The most usual way this is done is to make unusual comparisons of things or events so as to partly redefine them and alter their appearances to us. Such figuring is abundant in Nemerov's poems, and it is sometimes more witty than it is earnest and purposeful. Pleasant instances are the power lawn mower likened to a dinosaur (“Suburban Prophecy”), the corsetted lady as an antique whaling vessel or as the whale itself (“I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee”), or boarding an airliner and taking off as the rite of Eucharist (“At the Airport”). Others of his analogues are richly thoughtful and illuminating. In “Sanctuary,” a thought taking shape in the human mind is like a trout in a pool, coming up toward the surface where it can be seen. And some of his comparisons are deeply disturbing: an American poet in bed, cowering under his electric blanket is like a Vietnamese Buddhist priest who immolates himself in gasoline fire (“Christmas Morning”).

With respect to our language's usual appearances, operations, and uses, poetry is our language turned extravagant and used somewhat out of bounds. Good examples are Nemerov's many dream poems that upset the definitions of human waking and sleeping, perhaps by simply inverting them. “Sleeping Beauty” is a superb instance. Not only is it about dreaming as a traditional borderline experience for the human sensibility but it is additionally modeled on the child's fairy tale, another conventional borderline concept. Frequently then, as in “Sleeping Beauty” but as is especially apparent in “Winter Exercise,” the inversion of waking and sleeping is extended to a reversal of life and death and of our values for them. You will notice, of course, that I have chosen to characterize Nemerov's poetry generally with one of his own expressions that demands just such simple inversion. “Because the mind's eye lit the sun” not only are things finally lovely but they are even discernible as things in the first place.

Beyond the mental play of simple inversion, then, many more of Nemerov's poems broadly effect various boundary-crossings and enlarge upon our usual senses of the language. “At a Country Hotel” presents a dead man who watches from another state of wakeful being, not unlike a dream perhaps, as his widow supervises their children's play with toy boats on the pond. At last, as the children are asleep, their planes of being may, if they dream of their boats, meet with their father's dreams of sailing home to them. In another poem, darkness falls in the public park and longing statues tremble at the brink and nearly spring to life and love (“The Statues in the Public Gardens”). In “The Goose Fish,” too, lovers at the shore are haunted by the grinning dead fish, whose judgment of them they try to infer. And in “The Breaking of Rainbows” it is a polluted stream, not even a conventionally animate phenomenon, that is personified and vitalized.

Because poetry is, in various ways, language turned inside out or upside down it is more noticeably challenging to hearers and readers than is the language of ordinary usage. If it often more easily excites visual, aural, and kinesthetic responses, it also demands more active intellectual engagement. It often poses riddles. How, for example, are human limbs like flower-stalks (“Sunday at the End of Summer”)? How can flowers be said to light the sun, and how could battlefield be marriage bed (“Small Moment”)? What other way could the grinning corpse (“The Goose Fish”) tell lovers how to make a world their own than by their making love? And sometimes, as in “Celestial Globe,” the riddles about a globe “Whereon I stand / Balancing this ball / Upon my hand” are so acute and mind-baffling, so much “Turn all things inside out,” that we become frustrated with language. We may come to sympathize with Nemerov's 40-year old poet in “Lion & Honeycomb,” who had had enough of skill, of cleverly managing the verbal medium, and at last recognizes that he wants only “words that would / Enter the silence and be there as light” to establish “Only a moment's inviolable presence / … Perfected and casual as to a child's eye / Soap bubbles are, and skipping stones.”

And so it may be that the ultimate refinement of the poet's craft or art in behalf of his vision is to do the thing in words that is as near as possible to doing without words. For it is words and thinking that are in some senses destructive to fullest human life, as Nemerov suggests in his elegy “These Words Also,” on the suicide of a young woman. In opposition to the beautiful, vital flower garden outside, inside, letters and nighttime talk and telephone ringing haunted their victim till she died. Perhaps the poet best expresses his vision by the compelling understatement of simply drawing “A Picture”—“Of people running down the street / Among the cars, a good many people. / … (hunting down / A Negro, according to the caption)”:

A pretty girl tilted off-balance
And with her mouth in O amazed;
A man in a fat white shirt, his tie
Streaming behind him, as one flat foot
Went slap on the asphalt. …

By praising Flaubert's wish to write a novel about nothing—“It was to have no subject / And be sustained upon style alone”—and even more by his gratitude that Flaubert “never wrote that novel” thus leaving it “not deformed by style, / That fire that eats what it illuminates” (“Style”), Nemerov wittily expresses the poet's ambition to transcend his art that so often betrays his vision.

Possessing a brilliant objective correlative, Nemerov's justly celebrated “Vermeer” begins by the poet composedly remarking both on Vermeer's manner in his paintings and on what the poet hopes will be his own manner in celebrating Vermeer's manner: “Taking what is, and seeing it as it is, / Pretending to no heroic stances or gestures, / Keeping it simple.” But the poet is soon drawn into a paean on the “marvelous things that light is able to do” and, finding himself “At one for once with sunlight falling through / A leaded window,” verges on “the holy mathematic” that “Plays out the cat's cradle of relation / Endlessly” in the composition. Then, as if sensing that again in his art his medium will betray his vision, he changes tactics, self-consciously retreats from the subject, and surprisingly finds it:

If I could say to you, and make it stick,
A girl in a red hat, a woman in blue
Reading a letter, a lady weighing gold …
If I could say this to you so you saw,
And knew, and agreed that this was how it was
In a lost city across the sea of years,
I think we should be for one moment happy
In the great reckoning of those little rooms
Where the weight of life has been lifted and made light,
Or standing invisible on the shore opposed,
Watching the water in the foreground dream
Reflectively, taking a view of Delft
As it was, under a wide and darkening sky.

Nemerov appropriately names his poem Vermeer—instead of Light, for instance—to indicate that illumination comes to us exactly because it is framed.

No doubt, various artists are of differing visionary genius and of differing skill in expression, which partly accounts for the difficulties that poetry may impose on hearers and readers. In several poems Nemerov satirizes would-be poets of little genius. “A Modern Poet” presents a poet not crossing Brooklyn Ferry at sunset and rhapsodizing on the gloriously transfigured cityscape but instead riding a bandwagon “crossing at rush hour the Walt Whitman Bridge” and meanly calculating routes to fame. “Make Big Money at Home! Write Poems in Spare Time!” portrays the wooden-headed would-be poet trying unsuccessfully to write verses on a tree while holding his wooden pencil poised above his pad of wooden paper on his wooden table in his whole wooden house. In yet other poems Nemerov refers more generously to the plights of those who may possess worthy vision but whose skill falls short of expressing it. In “To H. M.: On Reading His Poems,” for example, Nemerov consolingly makes a pretty figure to suggest that even should the poet fail at his intention his verse may yet be inadvertently felicitous and worthy. And in “Trees” he touchingly redeems the much-ridiculed verses by Joyce Kilmer.

Furthermore the language of poetry may be regarded as variously challenging because, possibly apart from considerations of vision and expressive skill, poets may choose how much difficulty to impose upon hearers and readers. Poets make decisions, probably not always conscious ones, about how an accommodation should be made in the conflict between requirements of the vision that strains language conventions on the one hand and language recognition needs of the audience on the other hand. In several poems Nemerov portrays poets' awareness of the need to adjust the mode of expression to the audience. “On the Platform” presents a sarcastic poet contemptuous of both himself and his audience for having compromised his vision by his offering and their taking or mistaking a mode of expression he at last discovers to be infelicitous. “From the Desk of the Laureate: For Immediate Release” is about seeing little and, even worse, possessing only an outworn mode of expression not at all suited to an “audience” that is deaf to any music and only reads the news. The poem portrays a spent poet resigning from the front office of the grand old heroic style no longer in vogue (Great Pan, Helicon, the Birthday Ode, Astraea, etc.). With what little dignity remains he retires from that archaic reference and idiom in the early stanzas to anesthetized, antiquated privacy and wry self-deprecation in the tightly rhymed last stanza. Thus not only do various poets compose for different audiences but any poet may vary his sense of audience from one poem to another, as Nemerov appears to do.

Considering the whole spectrum of poetic subjects and styles, we can notice that at one side some poems are relatively private; they are composed only for the poet himself or for a coterie. Most of Nemerov's reflexive poems—that is, poems about poetry—are surely of this sort. In addition to those I've already cited—“Writing,” “Holding the Mirror Up to Nature,” “The Blue Swallows,” “Vermeer,” “Lion & Honeycomb,” and “In the Black Museum”—we should also notice: “Maestria,” “To Lu Chi,” and “Shells.” And perhaps commanding an even smaller audience are Nemerov's poems on mind and thought. Some of these, though rich and difficult, are relatively easier than others, however, because they develop a substantial coherent image. “The First Day” with its movies-metaphor for human thought and self-consciousness offers a good example:

It may be said that within limits the Creation is
A going concern, imaginable because the film supplies
An image, a thin but absolute membrane whose surfaces
Divide the darkness from the light while at the same time
Uniting light and darkness, and whose linear motion,
Divided into frames, or moments, is at the same time
Continuous with itself and may be made to pace itself
Indistinguishably from the pace of time; being also
Able to be repeated, speeded up, slowed down, stopped,
And even run backwards, its model represents to us
Memory, concentration, causal sequence, analysis,
Time's irreversibility together with our doubt of this,
And a host of notions that from time long out of mind
Belong to the mind.

Others, like “Truth” with its buzzing fly that presides over the sleeper's dream and “The Sanctuary” with its trout, are difficult despite elaborately sustaining an image. Perhaps responding to these as a group, including others such as “Thought” and “Idea” as well, is the surest way to fathom their depths.

At the other side of the poetic spectrum are Nemerov's more public compositions; these, by their subjects and modes are much more easily available to many of us who share the common language. And in “The Muse's Interest” (the National Poetry Festival address) Nemerov remarks, indeed, that he believes his own poems are readily accessible: “I do not think my own efforts in the art raise such barriers of intellect, learning, subtlety, as would defeat the well-intentioned effort of any ordinarily literate person to read what I produce.” Obvious examples are his topical poems on exceedingly commonplace things, events, and values. He discourses on the iconography of the U.S. nickel (“Money”). He remodels power-mowing our suburban lawns as a sort of primitive-beast fable (“Suburban Prophecy”). He reinterprets our photo-journalism history of the atomic bombing in “August, 1945.” And in “Santa Claus” he invites our indignation at the commercial travesty of our social and religious sentiments. We also get easy access to other poems—“The Distances They Keep” and “Learning by Doing,” for examples—because we are well-prepared with socially credited attitudes on fashionable topics of human experience such as depredations of the natural environment. Yet others among Nemerov's poems are broadly available because they employ vulgar idiom. “The Great Society, Mark X” speaks to us the language of the auto ads. “To the Governor and Legislature of Massachusetts” offers us juvenile education and adolescent sport. In “The Sparrow in the Zoo” we get homely literary kinds like fable and proverb. Witty and amusing as they often are, however, these are poems in which “loveliness adorns intelligible things” only in the most peripheral and feeble sense of Nemerov's essential meaning in “Blue Swallows,” with which we started.

Nemerov's success at composing in a public voice is nevertheless commendable, as it serves to counter obscurantist fashions that have polluted modern verse and its appreciation. “On Certain Wits: who amused themselves over the simplicity of Barnett Newman's paintings shown at Bennington College in May of 1958” renders unmistakable his contempt of poseurs. Or consider Nemerov's revulsion to verse of no vision tortuously expressed only to indulge pretensions. “On the Threshold of His Greatness, the Poet Comes Down with a Sore Throat” mercilessly lampoons Eliot's sort of anti-heroic poem that offers an excursion through an esoteric wasteland to presumed transcendence at last but that really only sinks at last into babbling idiocy and graceless self-exegesis.

Nemerov's most primitive and simple poems are related to the ancient riddling and proverb traditions in poetry. “Don Juan to the Statue” exploits vulgar euphemism and turns on several senses of “erection.” Similarly, “The Dream of Flying Comes of Age” wryly notices that the pilot's “joystick” has become a “control column.” Gnomishly Nemerov is tempted to transform “boys and girls” to “bars and grills” to resolve love-pangs (“Gnomes”). And he portrays the entire course of a human life, by ringing changes on a single word, “innocense”; a single phrase, “That was it.” “A Primer of the Daily Round” surveys the alphabet personified, as if cataloguing an entire society's interaction, and ends by remembering how it began by peeling an apple. “Drama,” staged in esoteric nomenclature, mock-heroically plays out molluscan love and death beneath the sea. Largely whimsical, these witty stunt-poems disclose Nemerov's foundness for verbal play. In some sense, of course, all poetry is play with the language for new expressive purposes. But these stunt-poems are made mostly for the sake of play itself rather than for any earnest intention to express vision or wisdom.

More purposeful and earnest play with the language occurs with Nemerov's management of elaborate verse forms such as the sestina that helps to measure the sun's descent in “Sarajevo”; the symmetry that facilitates our access to the center or bottom of things in the whole group of his “Runes”; or the several compositional symmetries in “The Human Condition,” symmetries that mimic the predicament of the poem's speaker who languishes in a limbo between the world and his view of it:

Once I saw world and thought exactly meet,
But only in a picture by Magritte,
A picture of a picture, by Magritte,
Wherein a landscape on an easel stands
Before a window opening on a landscape,
and the pair of them a perfect fit,
Silent and mad.

But we have already remarked (in “Lion & Honeycomb”) that ultimately the poet comes to repudiate his whole bag of tricks and to desire only “words that would / Enter the silence and be there as light.” This brings us, then, to “The Junction, on a Warm Afternoon,” an exquisite sensory poem where we stand at a rural railroad-crossing and watch a slow freight train rise into view around a bend. We watch it pass us, then, so that we can see and ponder its crew looking back at us and acknowledging us looking at them; then at last we watch the train disappear into the distance. The miracle of this poem is mimetic perfection. Out of an initial sketchy and tangled abstraction, corresponding to “The roadside scribble of wire and stick / Left over from last fall,” the imagery rises in slow motion to detailed substantiality as it describes the approaching slow freight and the appearance and manner of its crew. At the exact center of the poem and middle of the train's passage past us through the junction, we are led past the old men's meditative pipe-smoking and courteous but remote nods to us to emphatically cross into their feelings and their sense of warm sunlight. Then past the poem's center, we are returned back out to the rich imagery that restores our more-objective view of the slowly passing train. And we are also turned to thoughtfulness about the growing obsolescence of both the old men and their engines. At last the freight disappears “among small trees, / Leaving empty the long, shining rails / That curve, divide, vanish, and remain.” And correlatively, the rich imagery has diminished into the lean images that approach severe abstraction. Thus Nemerov's great poem is not only profoundly skillful, even though “He didn't want to do it with skill,” but it utterly depends on his skill.

Another sort of playful poem by Nemerov is founded on learning, that is, on somewhat special information. These poems correspond, in a way, to the ones we've already noticed playing with sounds and meanings of words. These learned poems play with public facts and traditional ideas. They are plentifully referential and elaborately allusive, sometimes only for the sake of the play itself and to offer us enjoyable recognitions if we are knowledgeable. Both “The Second-Best Bed” and “Polonius Passing through a Stage” tease Shakespearean lore and literature to something like interpretive variations on traditional themes, for our pleasure. And “Metamorphoses: according to Steinberg” is mostly a descriptive panegyric to the great cartoonist's extraordinary vision and his incisive style that is itself the principal substance of his vision. Others of Nemerov's learned poems are made more for thematic purposes beyond their play. Ulysses appears in the second and fourteenth “Runes” as a traditional intellectual marker that helps direct the entire sequence's passage by water to the still center of being. “To a Scholar in the Stacks” describes traditional bookish scholarships as the scholar's tragic self-incarceration in the depths of cerebral illusion. Appropriate to the scholar's imagination, the depths are rendered in figures from ancient legends about lost wanderings in the Cretan labyrinth:

Sometimes in darkness and in deep despair
You will remember, Theseus, that you were
The Minotaur, the Labyrinth and the thread
Yourself; even you were that ingener
That fled the maze and flew—so long ago—
Over the sunlit sea to Sicily.

Making involuted reference, not unlike that in Keats's “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer,” Nemerov's “Celestial Globe” supposes children at the Museum watching “some amateur / Copying Rembrandt's painting / Of Aristotle contemplating / The skull of Homer, that / Dark fire fountaining forth / the twin poems of the war / And of the journey home” as if Homer's mind were either the Museum in which the children stand or the world on which they stand. Although the poem seems immensely playful as the poet imaginatively juggles and compares celestial (inside), terrestial (outside), and cranial (inside and outside) globes, it nevertheless earnestly expresses Nemerov's centrally important idea that the mind's eye lights the sun. All these learned poems, both playful and purposeful, are to varying degrees exclusive. They are, by their erudition, not altogether public and easily accessible. But what is usually not obscure about them, even to the ill-informed hearer or reader, is why or how these learned poems are challenging. Most of us easily enough appreciate that grasping this sort of poem turns mostly on recognizing what are obviously the proper names that occur in it.

Another sizeable group of Nemerov's poems, his satires, are also somewhat more complex and demanding than the poems of simple play. For though the satires do play to some extent, they are also visionary, often in the reactive sense that they show us the failures of vision. By Nemerov's dramatic irony, for example, we can patronize Oliver's failure to see the “reality” under his nose (“Make Big Money at Home! Write Poems in Spare Time!”). But the satire does more than merely ridicule an ignorant blockhead. Without accusing us exactly, it compels us to adjust what was likely also our supposition: that a tree as the subject of a poem ought to be “The axle of the universe, maybe, / Or some other mythologically / Respectable treecontraption / With dryads, or having to do / With the knowledge of Good and Evil, and the Fall.” And by further directing our attention so much to wood, the poem leads us to see what we otherwise wouldn't. Or look beneath the hood and notice that Nemerov's parody of the auto-ad hucksterism in “The Great Society, Mark X” does more than merely indict us for being too willing to “buy” a dangerous social machine, inimical to human welfare. A look at the poem's controlling image further shows us that it is literally our obsession with the things we consume, such as autos, or with being hell-bent on getting somewhere, as in “The Race,” that jeopardizes us.

The satirist's method, typically, is to draw us to his side in a contest he portrays between his views and values and some others. In “Boom!” he mimics the prophetic stance of his adversary the Eisenhower clergyman and pretends enthusiastic assent to the preacher's smug satisfaction with the affluent society. But the satirist's ranting panegyric and his bizarre catalogue of the affluent society's material and spiritual wonders soon imputes madness to the preacher and his values. In “One Forever Alien” the satirist speaks as if a long-suffering immigrant martyred at last to American chauvinism. As if a moldering corpse speaking from the grave, he bitterly describes his outsider's frustration and suffering in terms that ironically realize Whitmanesque vision and prophecy about the assimilation of aliens to the American experience:

When I become the land, when they will build
Blast furnaces over me, and lay black asphalt
For hundreds of miles across my ribs, and wheels
Begin to bounce interminably on the bone;
When I enter, at last, America, when I am
Part of her progress and a true patriot,
And the school children sing of my sacrifice,
Remembering the burial day of my birth—
.....When I shall come among you fleeced as the lamb
And in the diaper of the grave newly arrayed. …

Thus we are moved to empathy with the pitiable outsider's view and to scorn for the traditional American sentiment that might otherwise have been ours. But however he wins us exactly, however he establishes normative views, the satirist's intention to do so constrains him, after all, to make and keep his values clear to us, to express himself in a relatively public way.

As we examine “One Forever Alien” we should notice that, unlike the other satires, it does not invite ridicule of a speaker who sees things in ways that we find ridiculous or contemptible; it does not present a speaker with views and values inferior to our own. To the contrary, it presents a special point of view in which we can vicariously participate and so gives us a new view of things, and, perhaps, an altered sense of ourselves. Thus we come to Nemerov's dramatic poems. “Drama” is a delightful melodramatic play of love and death, between aloof Elysia and importunate Wentletrap. “Debate with the Rabbi” presents the witty play and definition of ethnic experience and wisdom. Richer in vision is the epistemological debate, between This (percept) and That (concept), on snowflakes and sunlight falling on the open water (“This, That & the Other”). The two characters harmoniously conclude (their colloquy ends as if it had been a litany) as if both apprehension and comprehension have failed:

The Other is deeply meddled in this world.
We see no more than that the fallen light
Is wrinkled in and with the wrinkling wave.

But if we heed their own Shakespearean proverb—“‘By indirections find directions out’”—we see that their culminating vision is a scintillating and dazzling image that figures for us no failure at all.

Only a few of Nemerov's poems, however, actually present several speakers engaged in dialogue and conflict. Instead, I designate as dramatic mostly those among his poems that are expressed not in the vaguely defined “poet's” voice of so many poems but in various voices of other better individuated personae. And I find that typically these dramatic poems function to portray the personae speaking as much as to express their particular views. Or as is so clear in the special drama of the satire, there are in these poems several views—for example, both the persona's view of things and Nemerov's implicit view of the persona—which the hearer or reader must accommodate. Having already noticed “One Forever Alien,” let us go on to “Redeployment,” in which a survivor of warfare seems uncertain that the war is over: “They say the war is over. But water still / Comes bloody from the taps. …” He suffers what we rather easily infer are disordered views of his circumstance, and we suppose he is deranged. We come to a strange dilemma, however, as we notice that we depend on his expression for our views of him and that he is somewhat aware that all is not well with him:

The end of the war. I took it quietly
Enough. I tried to wash the dirt out of
My hair and from under my fingernails,
I dressed in clean white clothes and went to bed.

His barely expressed suspicion that warfare may not be over but that warring forces may be only displaced from the public world to be redeployed within himself poignantly portrays that he is not altogether mad. If we are at all sensitive, we begin to see, I think, that war, far more than its victim, is horribly insane. And we may be moved to adjust somewhat our own presumed healthy sensibilities and conventional sound judgments that certainly affirm the war is over and patronizingly pity the deranged victim. Or consider “History of a Literary Movement” as another dramatic poem that involves us in the interplay of several points of view. Here an anonymous speaker sadly chronicles for us the disintegration of a literary coterie. But the very manner of his expression discloses that his judgments about others are capricious and that he is an unreliable reporter. About his former comrade Brumbach he petulantly remarks: “He was a fat man / Fat men are seldom the best / Creative writers.” Finally he unwittingly discloses that he is undergoing treatment that, by both the manner and substance of his expression, we suspect is psychiatric:

Only Impli and I
Hung on, feeling as we did
That the last word had not
Finally been said. Sometimes
I feel, I might say, cheated.
Life here at Bad Grandstein
Is dull, is dull, what with
The eternal rocks and the river;
And Impli, though one of my
Dearest friends, can never,
I have decided, become great.

Thus we are reduced to little certainty at all about the reality of what happened apart from the patient's unreliable views, and we come to an unanticipated possibility in the poem's title. Perhaps the movement referred to is the development of conflict, uncertainty, and ambiguity in the very best expression of human vision; that is, in literature; certainly in this fine poem.

As a last instance of Nemerov's dramatic poem and its lesson for us about how extraordinary vision is successfully expressed, let us look at a paradise-lost poem, “Landscape with Figures,” in which an acutely self-conscious speaker tells us about his nearly seducing Mrs. Persepolis, who is in the garden with him. Only his awareness, he tells us, of her awareness of his lustful impulse (and hers too, perhaps: “her glittering eye”) prevents the moment and precludes their spontaneous falling into love-making. Whereupon the speaker turns from us, as he and she go into the chilling shade of the house, to reflectively address her about what nearly befell them:

                                                                      my dear
Mrs. Persepolis, beautiful
Exile from childhood, girl
In your rough and wrinkled
Sack suit, couldn't you cry
Over that funny moment when
We almost fell together
Into the green sleep of the
Landscape, the hooded hills
That dream us up & down?

Our first appraisal of the poem's imagery is likely to be that the fall of man has nearly recurred. But as we more carefully puzzle over the odd specifications about the characters' appearances and manners—his thinking that the hills are “Brooding some brutal thought / As it were about myself & / Mrs. Persepolis”; her venomous and hissing name; her “Wrinkling skin at the wrist / Patterned in sunburnt diamonds”; her “glittering eye” that takes his thought “exactly / as the toad's tongue takes a fly”; or their sudden cold-blooded chill as they leave the sunlight—we come to guess that the two of them are snakes. Then we may recall another of Nemerov's fables, “The Race,” in which he revalues the traditional outcome of the contest between tortoise and hare to suggest that the earnest, purposive participant is insane relative to the favorite in his idyllic recumbency. In “The Race” it is not our wholesome animal nature that fails us after all, but our purposeful abstracting minds that make us “The silent families / Mounted in glass / Facing the front” and “strictly passing / Away. …” Thus we are disposed to see that in “Landscape with Figures” Nemerov regards self-consciousness (knowing) as distancing us—inside our gardens and houses—from the containing landscape and as precluding the dream. Perspicaciously, he sees that our failing is not sensual experience so much as it is our taking thought so much.

Despite their extravagant vision, these dramatic poems presenting alien points of view are often gratifyingly public in manner because the human persona is a traditional intellectual mode for conceptual coherency. That is, we expect the various expressions of whatever phenomena have any presumption to human form to be sufficiently self-consistent to establish a recognizable type or variant. Further, Nemerov's poems such as “Learning by Doing,” “Sunday at the End of Summer,” “The Pond,” and “A Day on the Big Branch” are yet more public and comprehensible in presenting their visions because their manner is substantially narrative, which is undoubtedly our richest rhetorical mode. Even beyond the personal convention available in the dramatic poems, narrative is a framework that furnishes much circumstantial information toward our understanding. Both dramatic and narrative poems provide settings for percept and concept; we get not only views but sure ways of judging the views.

Many of Nemerov's poems are lyrical in mode, not dramatic or narrative. That is, they not only present a single point of view exclusively but they also appear as if they address virtually no audience. They are poems the poet makes for himself. Conscious address to any other audience would, of course, dramatize the speaker, alter his “voice,” and remove us from extremely close proximity to the poet's visionary experience. The very great advantage of the lyrical mode is that it offers us, through only an anonymous and mostly negligible personal lens, most direct possible access to human thoughts and feelings other than our own. Such poems are not necessarily lyrical in the primitive sense of being suitable for singing, although some of Nemerov's compositions, like his “Carol,” are to be sung. Others such as “Sarabande” and “The Breaking of Rainbows” at least refer to musical sensations, and some of the sonnets are, according to their convention, especially musical. “The Fall Again,” for example, is a Noah-poem that sounds according to the rainfall and water running in gutter and creek portrayed in it.

Because lyric invites the poet to “speak” as if he were not overtly expressing himself but only feeling and thinking to himself, we might suppose that the poet's vision would be less conventionally intelligible to us, despite our closer proximity to it. If we get to it with as little medium as is possible, we should nevertheless anticipate difficulty sharing its substance. We might expect that vision to be quite private, as if a human mind merely indulged itself in its own association of images and concepts, as if such poems dispensed with objective correlatives. And were we denied the exquisite and richly developed initial image of the trout poised in its pool, the experiences of thought and mind the poet reflects upon in “The Sanctuary” might indeed be indecipherable: “Pure thought, in principle, some way, is near / Madness” … (“Idea”). But, in fact, many of Nemerov's lyrics are among his clearest expressions and powerfully draw us into his vision. Some of these lyrical poems, like his sonnets for example, are accessible because their form or topic is either conventional or recognizably variant. But perhaps mostly his lyrics are typically accessible because they are often, at their beginnings, poems of vision in the most common, literal sense. For example, Nemerov, like many poets in the American tradition, is fond of homely images. Like his own fondly elegized Nature Poet, he especially enjoys drawing them from the Book of Nature. The dragonfly, with which he begins the last stanza in his elegy for Christopher, the drowned skater (“The Pond”), is a good example. Nemerov returns to it, we notice, in “The Dragonfly,” one of his Emblems in The Next Room of the Dream collection. Another easy instance occurs in “Dandelions” that develops the ephemeral plant as an emblem of human life's transiency. And perhaps I best cite “Runes,” III, which richly describes the mature heavy-seeded sunflower while also personifying it as a selfish imperialist merchant who is at last over-extended in self-aggrandizement. Altogether the poet sees the flower's fall as deserved, according to human moral principles, and concomitantly delights us by permitting us a growing realization that such principles of ours are rooted in the economy or integrity of our natural environment.

Nemerov's lyrics are often substantially descriptive. Here, for example, is the first stanza from the voluptuously rhymed and timed “Summer's Elegy”:

Day after day, day after still day,
The summer has begun to pass away.
Starlings at twilight fly clustered and call,
And branches bend, and leaves begin to fall.
The meadow and the orchard grass are mown,
And the meadowlark's house is cut down.

But perhaps “The Cherry Tree” yet more cogently develops and sustains a single image. The tree, flourishing between the earth and darkness beneath it and the light and sun above, is seen as the durable nucleus of a whole vital system, of “a minor universe.” Moreover, at first in the poem, the colorful tree is ripening its cherries “from white to pink, and to blood red.” It is regarded as lighting “its many suns,” as if the tree expressed sunlight and as if the tree nourished all life and were itself the source that gave being to the universe. But at last in the poem, the tree, having relinquished its fruit, casts its shadow on the earth to disclose that the “one sun” gives light to the tree yet more certainly than the tree gives light to the sun. Thus “The Cherry Tree” suggests that all being occurs in reciprocity between above and below, between light and dark. For indeed, the “bloody stones” and “rotting flesh” fallen to the ground may rise again as the tree renewed. In another poem—“Runes,” XII—the poet directs us to “Consider how the seed lost by a bird / Will harbor in its branches most remote / Descendants of the bird. …” “The Cherry Tree,” we can see, like “Blue Swallows” comes near to showing us that if things are lovely because intelligible, they are intelligible because lovely.

To a considerable extent, all this is delightful play with an image, but unlike the play for its own sake in the stunt-poems, this more advanced play carries us beyond the image and our usual common vision to see more deeply into our condition and circumstance. Consider how exquisite is “The End of Summer School.” Most of its stanzas describe delicate autumnal phenomena: a spider's web is silverly bedewed, leaves loosen and begin to fall, slowly ripened apples redden suddenly, seeds spin down, and baby spiders sail away on golden shining threads. But as these soft beauties are observed, their gradual cumulation inexorably becomes the immense hard fact of the cosmos:

And of the strength that slowly warps the stars
To strange harbors, the learned pupil knows
How adamant the anvil, fierce the hearth
Where imperceptible summer turns the rose.

Some of these poems by Nemerov look as if their sense or vision demanded expression in the particular image found or made. Such is “The Rope's End,” a jeremiad that compares the world to a great rope. The poet contends that we have never been sufficiently respectful about the integrity of all being. He indicts us for being vainly puzzled about the world's order—that is, nature—and for not regarding it as the creation that his paradoxically artificial image insists it is. He despairs that our examination itself unravels the rope we presume to examine, undoes the marvelous order we think to comprehend:

                                                  All this
In the last analysis
Is crazy man's work,
Admitted, who can leave
Nothing continuous
Since Adam's fall
Unraveled all.

In others of Nemerov's poems that sustain elaborate images, the poet plays with an engaging image and finds something in it. “Enthusiasm for Hats” is like this. Beginning with puzzled amusement at strangely showy Sunday headgear, the poet first supposes such bizarre costume mysteriously suitable somehow to occasion for worship, despite the apparent indecorum. But he finally suspects that the extravagant hats may unwittingly express, “As manifestations from the mind itself,” otherwise hidden sins and covert madness.

At last we appreciate that our query about whether the vision demands its image or whether an image comes to disclose truth is correlative to our earlier puzzle about whether things are lovely because intelligible, or intelligible because lovely. Do we see things because they are there in nature, or do things exist—that is, are they discernible as things—because we see them? In “Blue Swallows,” we recall, the poet, in reaction to our common sense, ambiguously insists on the latter proposition “Because the mind's eye lit the sun.” But in another mood—in “Projection”—he forgives our presumption:

They were so amply beautiful, the maps,
With their blue rivers winding to the sea,
So calmly beautiful, who could have blamed
Us? …

And we come to feel that both attitudes are the truth, that as Keats's urn says, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.” This is the truth, we see, in Nemerov's great meditative poems: some, like “Sanctuary” and “Blue Swallow,” leading us in amazement from wonder at our circumstances to wonder at ourselves; others, such as “The Beekeeper Speaks … And Is Silent,” principally leading us from the self to other; but all of them, after all, reciprocal. Finally we should notice that in “Shells,” his superb poem about poems among other things, Nemerov explicitly instructs us in this reciprocity. He observes this of the shell, of the poem:

Its form is only cryptically
Instructive, if at all: it winds
Like generality, from nothing to nothing
By means of nothing but itself.
It is a stairway going nowhere,
Our precious emblem of the steep ascent,
Perhaps, beginning at a point
And opening to infinity,
Or the other way, if you want it the other way.
Inside it, also, there is nothing
Except the obedient sound of waters
Beat by your Mediterranean, classic heart
In bloody tides as long as breath,
Bringing by turns the ebb and flood
Upon the ruining house of histories,
Whose whitening stones, in Africa,
Bake dry and blow away, in Athens,
In Rome. …