[In the following essay, Bartholomay closely examines Nemerov's complex concepts of language, imagery, and the poetic imagination.]

In a recent poem, Howard Nemerov describes the artist as one who “sees / How things must be continuous with themselves / As with whole worlds that they themselves are not, / In order that they may be so transformed.”¹ These words also transcribe the poetic intelligence and imagination which inform Nemerov's poems. His lens is prismatic, and his ear is attuned to fresh articulating possibilities in all areas of being. He sees paradox in all phenomena and how the most unlike things define each other and, in so doing, gain their identity. Therefore, his imagination, moving on many levels of experience, is paradoxical, reflexive, and generative. It mirrors the dynamic tensions and continuity between the one and the other which, in the course of their becoming, are transformed through language. For a moment in eternity, that which is spatial and temporal becomes actual in the poem. This capacity of the mind, limited though it is, to perceive, imagine, and articulate the invisible, is clarified best by the poet:

Language, then, is the marvelous mirror of the human condition, a mirror so miraculous that it can see what is invisible, that is, the relations between things. At the same time, the mirror is a limit, and as such, it is sorrowful; one wants to break it and look beyond. But unless we have the singular talent for mystical experience we do not really break the mirror, and even the mystic's experience is available to us only as reflected, inadequately, in the mirror. Most often man deals with reality by its reflection. That is the sense of Perseus' victory over the Gorgon by consenting to see her only in the mirror of his shield, and it is the sense of the saying in Corinthians that we see now as through a glass darkly—a phrase rendered by modern translators as “now we see as in a little mirror”

(“The Swaying Form,” in Poetry and Fiction: Essays [hereafter cited as PF] 11-12).

To discover Nemerov's vision, as it is articulated in the mirror of language, requires some understanding of his purpose and method, for poems, whatever their ultimate concern, are produced by human beings and are functional—not in a pejorative way but in the sense of Marianne Moore's adjective “useful.” As Nemerov and other thinkers have noted, much of modern poetry tends to have a single reflexive dimension pertaining to the process of composition itself. In fact, this development of the mind curving back upon itself may always be a limit for every kind of thought. Shakespeare observed, without considering it strange at all, that “speculation turns not to itself / Till it hath travell'd, and is mirror'd there / Where it may see itself.”² But in the world today—“that palace of mirrors where, says Valery, the lonely lamp is multiplied”³—man feels estranged. As Nemerov suggests, the problem of identity may underlie the fact that so much reflexive poetry is being written and that so many poets have sought to analyze and define the creative process and the poem. Since the poet refers to himself, as well as to his contemporaries, the study of his work may properly begin with his concept of poetry and the creative process, his belief in imagination as the agent of reality, and his use of reflexive imagery to express, in the mirror of language, the invisible relation between mind and world.

With Nemerov, as with all true poets, the vision and its articulation are one in intention, inasmuch as poems define themselves through their own creation. As the poet writes in a letter, referring to Richards, Empson, and Burke, “These men see how in some sense, not invariably a visible sense, words always have to be about themselves, hence how poems, whatever they say they're about, are also talking about their own coming into being.”⁴ Recognizing the problem of definition, Nemerov has, nevertheless, meditated deeply on the question of “what is a poem”—in numerous essays, in Journal of the Fictive Life, and throughout his seven books of poetry. Characteristically, such inquiry has produced no pat answer nor aesthetic theory about art and life, but rather a series of reflections on a theme—a continuous redefinition of poetry as a way of being:

                    one way of doing
One's being in a world
Whose being is both thought
And thing, where neither thing
Nor thought will do alone
Till either answers other;
Two lovers in the night
Each sighing other's name
Whose alien syllables
Become synonymous
For all their mortal night
And their embodied day:
          Fire in the diamond,
          Diamond in the dark.

(“One Way,” in The Blue Swallows [hereafter cited as BS], 86)

Another way of saying this: “poems are arrangements of language which illuminate a connection between the inside and the outside of things.”⁵ This thought, like the mirror concept, points to the source of poetry, the “great primary human drama,” or, as Shakespeare says, echoing Dante, “all the story of the night told over.”⁶ Nemerov describes human drama as being all that mankind does and suffers in this world, the dark source to which the poet must always return: “Lyric poetry, just because of its great refinement, its subtlety, its power of immense implication in a confined space—a great reckoning in a little room—is perpetually in danger of preferring gesture to substance. It thins out, it goes through the motions, it shows no responsibility. I conceive this responsibility of poetry to be to great primary human drama, which poets tend to lose sight of because of their privilege of taking close-ups of single moments on the rim of the wheel of the human story” (Journal, 21).

The Muse, then, is chiefly concerned with life and death—with the self in all of the many worlds in which it lives and dies each day.⁷ A jealous Muse, she demands all of the poet's devotion, integrity, and dedication to his art. He must name a situation, as honestly and accurately as possible, but always a situation which he himself is in. The name he applies must be so close a fit with the actuality evoked that no room remains between “inside and outside”; as Dante said, the thought must be “like a beast moving in its skin.”⁸ This involves participation of the conscious/unconscious and of mind/body in reference to nature and the nature of things. The process is reflexive and cyclical—“a matter of feedback between oneself and ‘it,’ an ‘it’ which can gain identity only in the course of being brought into being, come into being only in the course of finding its identity.”⁹

The means of becoming related to the nature of things is the “swaying form,” suggested to the poet by Florio's translation of Montaigne: “There is no man (if he listen to himselfe) that doth not discover in himselfe a peculiar forme of his, a swaying forme, which wrestleth against the art and the institution, and against the tempest of passions, which are contrary to him.”¹⁰ Nemerov adds that this form is “simultaneously ruling and variable, or fickle; shifting and protean as the form of water in a stream,” and can be identified with the libido, or impulse to art. Because this form escapes definition, refusing ever to become fixed, it corresponds to the poet's vision, which likewise can be described only according to its characteristics. As the poet tells us, “‘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.” Because “the vision is itself alone,” without verbal equivalent, it is untranslatable to the rational understanding. The poet adds that a “fine description is given by Antony, the vision being disguised as a crocodile:

It is shaped, sir, like itself; and it is as broad as it hath breadth. It is just as high as it is, and moves with its own organs. It lives by that which nourisheth it; and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates … & c., ending with the information that it is a strange serpent, and the tears of it are wet.”¹¹

Vision is the life substance of a poem: “for poetry exists only by a continuing revelation in a world always incarnate of word and flesh indissolubly, a world simultaneously solid and transpicuous. … Poetry and institutionalized religion are in a sense the flowing and the static forms of the same substance, liquid and solid states of the same elemental energy.”¹² For this reason the poet and the prophet have always borne close association. Without meaning to (and perhaps without especially wanting to), poetry changes the mind of the world.¹³

The revelation (or “opening of the ways”) occurs wherever a poet illuminates our human consciousness, or our sense of what it means to be human.¹⁴ Communication is not effected by a universal truth or a moral value implied in the poem, but rather through the voice of the poet and his way of speaking. As he tells us again the story of the night, a transfiguration happens—in the poet's mind, in the mind of his audience, and, finally, in the minds of all who have ever retold the story. The tale thus “grows to something of great constancy” and harmony so that it “constitutes on its own a world of ordered relation, rhythm, and figure.”¹⁵ The poet, responding to primary human drama, brings forth numerous parables which his audience is responsible for interpreting. Such parables may contradict but they never exclude each other.

The difference, then, between poetry (or art) and life is a formal one. As Nemerov defines it, “Civilization, mirrored in language, is the garden where relations grow; outside the garden is the wild abyss. Poetry … is the art of contemplating this situation in the mirror of language.”¹⁶ The poet recalls that a philosopher of language once said that “see” and “say” derive from the same root, for “to say” is to make someone else “see” what you have seen.¹⁷ In this sense, to name a situation is to illuminate again what has been there since the beginning of time, or since the beginning of the Word. Said another way, the poetic art is an intimate relationship between the visible and invisible—a continuous dialogue between form and substance and between the light and the darkness. Poetry endures where systems of religion, philosophy, and law fail, because it perpetually redefines itself, always reaching its beginning again.¹⁸ “For the whole business of poetry is vision and the substance of this vision is the articulating possibilities still unknown, the concentrating what is diffuse, the bringing forth what is in darkness.”¹⁹

Poetry has its secret beginnings in the garden, before the first moment of recognition that we know “that we know” and, therefore, are naked, divided, doubtful, and afraid before the Mystery. Aware of the darkness beyond the paradoxical mirror image, Nemerov writes in the Journal: “perhaps it was looking at that likeness of myself, seeing myself as a stranger, a mystery, that represented the secret beginnings of art, that mystery which brings me now to search the self in a spirit of guilt and isolation and some secrecy. Or else there is some meaningful episode belonging to the portrait, which I am unable to bring back because it represents something I can't look at” (75).

From first awareness of self, which is primarily sexual and religious in its concern about life and death, the poet grows to awareness of the physical world, which is primarily philosophical in its everlasting WHY?. The vast and complex vision of nature and its processes is reflexive with the image of self; both are paradoxical, changing, and both involve the notion of living and dying, simultaneously, or of being and becoming. This generative relation between self and world is the creative process in art, described in the following excerpt from the Journal in which the poet recalls a “passage from Valery when he talks about Nature's always constructing her solid forms out of liquids,” and adds: “It seems as though I have been saying, in a confused and ‘historical’ way, that art is the secret (holy, forbidden) observation of this process and its reverse, having to do with metamorphosis and the relation, or identity, of the evanescent with the enduring; that the model for this process is sexual and generative, so that one approaches it always with equal fascination and fear, as Milton approached the Spirit that ‘from the first / Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread / Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss / And madst it pregnant …’ in a passage that began with Man's first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree, & c.” (147). This fascination with the Mystery of Creation is fundamental to Nemerov's work, and the generative model is frequently ritualized in his poems as well as in the poetic process. The garden remains an infinite parable suggesting the articulating possibilities and limits of poetry as Nemerov imagines them; beyond the garden is the vast abyss. Out of this situation the poet's vision evolves, for, like all true poets, he is ultimately concerned with the mystery of being, that is, with creation and its reverse process—metamorphosis and the relation, or identity, of the evanescent with the enduring.

The substance of the vision, born out of darkness, is brought to light through the mind's eye, or imagination. In one sense, the imaginative process is limited, for what the mind invents, it also discovers. The less murky our glass becomes, the more we are stricken in the light of what we see—our own image bared in that of the Other. This dual aspect of envisioning is a constant theme in Joseph Conrad's work, to which Nemerov refers directly in “Runes,” XIII New and Selected Poems [hereafter cited as NSP]:

… The sailor leaned
To lick the mirror clean, the somber and
Immense mirror that Conrad saw, and saw
The other self, the sacred Cain of blood
Who would seed a commonwealth in the Land of Nod.

Here is the limit of mind imagining. In his own way, Nemerov affirms the meaning of T. S. Eliot's statement that “human kind cannot bear very much reality.” Truth, as it is revealed to us, is necessarily reflected and limited by imagination which is not only a mirror but also a shield to protect us from the blinding light of reality and to cover our own nakedness and vulnerability. Without this shield, man is stricken when he comes face to face with the Gorgon, as Nemerov tells us, speaking in his own voice as “A Predecessor of Perseus”:

… But he rides his road
Passing the skinless elder skeletons
Who smile, and maybe he will keep on going
Until the grey unbearable she of the world
Shall raise her eyes and recognize, and grin
At her eternal amateur's approach,
All guts no glass, to meet her gaze head on
And be stricken in the likeness of himself
At least if not of Keats and Alexander.

(The Next Room of the Dream [hereafter cited as NRD], 16)

However, in another, more primordial sense, imagination is as unlimited as the sea in which infinite possibilities of expression exist in the rhythm and song of the tide. Poetry, after all, is an aural art which grew out of the song and dance of religious ritual, patterned after the natural cycle. In the last two lines of “Painting a Mountain Stream” (NSP, 58), the poet says: “Steady the wrist, steady the eye; / paint this rhythm, not this thing.” Poetry was born of the spoken, not the written, word—this Nemerov remembers. In discussing the marked changes that have gradually appeared in his work, he cites his growing consciousness of “nature as responsive to language or, to put it the other way, of imagination as the agent of reality.” He adds that this is a “magical idea and not very much heard of these days among poets—practically never among critics.”²⁰ The same thought is expressed in Journal of the Fictive Life: “My imagination is dominantly aural, and poetry for me is not primarily ‘imagery’ but a sequence of sounds which with their meanings form the miraculous equivalent of something existing in nature” (84n).

This aural communication with reality remains a mystery to Nemerov, for “why should a phrase come to you out of the ground and seem to be exactly right?” Yet, he believes this mystery to be a poet's proper relation with the nature of things, “a relation in which language, that accumulated folly and wisdom in which the living and dead speak simultaneously, is a full partner and not merely a stenographer.”²¹ This mysterious relation, or dialogue, with nature is illustrated in the poem “A Spell before Winter,” which is about Vermont at the end of fall, “when the conventional glory of the leaves is over and the tourists have gone home, and the land not only reveals itself in its true colors but also, in the figure of the poem, speaks.”²² The last verse of the poem is quoted below:

Now I can see certain simplicities
In the darkening rust and tarnish of the time,
And say over the certain simplicities,
The running water and the standing stone,
The yellow haze of the willow and the black
Smoke of the elm, the silver, silent light
Where suddenly, readying toward nightfall,
The sumac's candelabrum darkly flames.
And I speak to you now with the land's voice,
It is the cold, wild land that says to you
A knowledge glimmers in the sleep of things:
The old hills hunch before the north wind blows.

(NRD, 19)

This is a miniature tone poem in which mood and meaning are conveyed through sound and rhythm rather than through image, symbol, or metaphor. Visually, of course, these lines paint a landscape, an arrangement of contrasting colors and shapes, blended into a single impression. But thematic unity is created by aural rather than visual means—through the deft use of tone, stress, and cadence. The standard poetic musical devices (alliteration, assonance, internal rhyme, etc.) are used here with discretion, since the poet does not depend on them. Each syllable has the quantity and quality of a musical note; each phrase is a musical entity in relation to the whole tonal pattern. “A Spell before Winter” and “Painting a Mountain Stream,” more than any of Nemerov's poems, combine the imaginative concept and process, displaying the purity and power of the poet's sensitive but disciplined ear.

Despite the simplicity of statement and grace of style in these lyrics (and in others like them), Nemerov's concept of imagination and his multivalent imagery are too complex to be defined in strictly aural terms. Imagination is both limited (visually) and unlimited (aurally), as has been noted. Perhaps this basic perceptual dualism underlies the two different, though not necessarily antithetical, attitudes which appear consistently in the poet's work. On the one hand, he is very much the witty, sophisticated, and urbane man of his time, particularly when he writes in the satirical vein. Aware of man's dehumanization in an automated mass society where the split human condition is intensified, Nemerov often views life with a humorous but bitter irony. When he spoofs society, the visual impact is strong; witness “Blue Suburban,” “Mrs. Mandrill,” “Boom!,” “Keeping Informed in D.C.,” or “Life Cycle of Common Man”²³—the last lines of which are quoted below:

Consider the courage in all that, and 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.

(NSP, 17)

On the other hand, the poet perceives the world ontologically. His experience may be philosophical, subjective, lyrical, or even mystical. In the poems where his vision moves outward or inward toward the Mystery, his imagination is dominantly aural. Poetry becomes a matter of listening to the landscape, and he envisions a world made intelligible through imagination, through language—spirit and word: “… I do not now, if I ever did, consent to the common modern view of language as a system of conventional signs for the passive reception of experience, but tend ever more to see language as making an unknowingly large part of a material world whose independent existence might be likened to that of the human unconscious, a sleep of causes, a chaos of the possible-impossible, responsive only to the wakening touch of desire and fear—that is, to spirit; that is, to the word.”²⁴

The dual aspects of Nemerov, as a man and poet, are not unique in themselves, but what is original is the way in which his imagination reflects the vision that has evolved over the years through his poems. While there is no particular period when one or the other attitude dominates, a parallel does exist between the development of the man and that of the poet. His first three books, filled with wit, satire, irony, and ambiguity, are primarily the work of a young urban poet who writes of what he knows: the city, war, and the paradox between the ideal and actual—all fairly universal topics. The titles of these books read like a Baedecker of the postwar world: Guide to the Ruins, The Image and the Law, and The Salt Garden. However, even in these volumes, the identity of the poet is emerging in such poems as “Under the Bell Jar,” “Lot's Wife,” “Unscientific Postscript,” and “The Scales of the Eyes.”²⁵ The following lines suggest the unique vision and concept of imagination to come:

There is the world, the dream, and the one law.
The wish, the wisdom, and things as they are.
Inside the cave the burning sunlight showed
A shade and forms between the light and shade,
Neither real nor false nor subject to belief:
If unfleshed, boneless also, not for life
Or death or clear idea. But as in life
Reflexive, multiple, with the brilliance of
The shining surface, and orchestral flare. …

(“Unscientific Postscript,” in The Image and the Law [hereafter cited as IL], 69)

While originality in image and style are not quite reached in the early books, their tone is distinct and they contain a number of excellent poems. Aware of his imperfections, the poet comments: “Stylistically, I began under the aegis of notions drawn, I suppose, chiefly from T. S. Eliot. Along with many other beginners, I learned to value irony, difficulty, erudition, and the Metaphysical style of composition after the example of John Donne. … I now regard simplicity and the appearance of ease in the measure as primary values, and the detachment of a single thought from its ambiguous surrounding as a worthier object than the deliberate cultivation of ambiguity.”²⁶ He adds that, “brought up to a poetry of irony, paradox, and wit as primary means of imagination,” he cannot sharply divide the comic from the serious, or even from the sorrowful. However this penchant for humor has been honed over the years to a powerful talent, and it is in the tragicomic paradox that the two dominant strains of the poet's voice most frequently synchronize. As James Dickey writes, Nemerov is “one of the funniest, wittiest poets we have”: “And it is true, too, that in his most serious poems there is an element of mocking, or self-mocking. But the enveloping emotion that arises … is helplessness; the helplessness we all feel in the face of the events of our time, and of life itself. … And beneath even this feeling is a sort of hopelessly involved acceptance and resignation which has in it far more of the truly tragic than most poetry which deliberately sets out in quest of tragedy.”²⁷

While irony, wit, and paradox, often expressed through punning, are still part of Nemerov's imaginative process, the years of apprenticeship were brief and, with the publication of The Salt Garden in 1955, it was apparent that the real poet had come into his own. In many of the poems in this volume, the city and the early guideposts recede, and the poet has found his sense of direction. Speaking to this point, Randall Jarrell remarks, “Behind the old poems there was a poet trying to write poetry; behind these new ones there is a man with interests and experiences of his own, that is, a poet who has learned to write poetry.”²⁸

Without consciously seeking his voice, Nemerov has found it. There is no doubt that the aural quality of his imagination responded to the beauty and simplicity of life in the natural environment in which he has lived for most of the past twenty-three years. Nevertheless, he is not a “nature poet” in the limited sense of that term; nor is he, like Frost, a philosopher of nature, although he is often philosophical in the parables he draws from there. What he searches for is the reality that binds us to the natural world in spite of our dusty myopic lenses, lost instincts, and pretty thoughts about it. Frequently he perceives nature with a scientific eye, looking for answers in the branching relation of trees in a snowfall, in a dried-up pond from which a dragonfly emerges, or in a maimed turtle that “takes a secret wound out of the world.”²⁹ Often the correspondence between internal and external situation is conveyed through powerfully descriptive elemental imagery as, for example, in “Runes,” “Brainstorm,” “A Day on the Big Branch,” and “The Quarry.” Sometimes the poet's response is fanciful, as in “Holding the Mirror up to Nature” and “Celestial Globe.” At other times nature is transfigured through the poet's private lens to express a particular mood, as in “The Sunglasses,” “The Icehouse in Summer,” and “The Sanctuary.”³⁰ Always he respects nature's forms and substance and its mutability. What he seeks, as do all poets, is to find again that world of nature which Shakespeare imagined—a world that is at once sublime and terrible but is also a reality which no poet afterwards has regained.

The problem of imagination today is that of the post-Shakespearian world, or the modern age of poetry, and is a matter to which Nemerov has given considerable thought. To understand his imagery one must know the context of this problem. Currently, the imagination (once thought to be too real to argue about) is subject to a great deal of research in an attempt to “locate” and define “mind” in its spatial and temporal dimensions—another extension of man's search for identity. The relationship between mind and world (or even the possibility that such exists) is continually questioned, while man's self-image daily becomes more fragmented and absurd.

The mind's relation with the world is discussed by Nemerov in one of his most penetrating essays, “Two Ways of the Imagination.” His premise is that, during the modern age, poetry “has had increasingly to define itself in relation to the conventional worldly view” concerning the relationship between soul and body, mind and world—the traditional subject of poetry.³¹ The conventional view is what Alfred North Whitehead has termed “scientific materialism,”: a “fixed cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread throughout space in a flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless.”³² What has resulted, Nemerov says, is the “so-called alienation of poetry from society,” as a “function of this self-definition,” and also “an observable tendency for poetry to become the subject of itself.”

Scientific abstractions, as Whitehead stated, have yielded matter on the one hand, “with its simple location in space and time,” and “on the other hand ‘mind,’ perceiving, suffering, reasoning, but not interfering.” Philosophy has been compelled to accept such abstractions as “the most concrete rendering of fact,” which has produced three theories about the mind: dualism (mind and matter accepted on an equal basis) and two types of monism, one placing mind inside matter and the other, matter inside mind.

In view of this historical development in science and philosophy, the growing tendency of poetry to become its own subject and alienated from society is an attempt to solve the problem of mind/world by means of the imagination—an attempt which proceeds from doubt. Nemerov's thesis is that poems, through analogy upon analogy, seek to imagine their own imagining, or coming into being. Wordsworth, in “The Prelude,” and Blake, in “Jerusalem,” were the first great poets to write self-reflective poems, and these illustrate two ways of the imagination. Both poets introduced something new into poetry, which is “doubt.” This “doubt” was what “led them to view their own vocations as problematic and subject to investigation.” Nemerov believes that the element of doubt in no way diminishes the claims of the imagination but rather that the reverse is true. “Imagination now becomes central to the universe and the most important thing to understand about the universe; but becomes this precisely because it has become problematic and doubtful.”³³

These lines echo the inverse logic and paradoxical perspective of many modern philosophers and theologians who, likewise, see the impossibility of man ever perceiving the One except in terms of the Other. Here, also, is echoed the problem of language itself, particularly the language of poetry. Cleanth Brooks consistently makes the point that paradoxes spring from the nature of the poet's language: “it is a language in which the connotations play as great a part as the denotations.”³⁴ Brooks adds that if “the poet is to be true to his poetry he must call it neither two nor one: the paradox is his only solution. The difficulty has intensified since Shakespeare's day: the timid poet, when confronted with the problem of ‘Single Nature's double name,’ has too often funked it.”³⁵

Far from being timid, Nemerov continually strives to solve the riddle of the Phoenix in his poems and in his reflections on the nature of language and the imaginative process. In the tradition of Richards, Empson, and Burke, he has even added a third dimension to the paradox in his poem “Phoenix,” namely, the idea that words, besides being denotative and connotative, are also reflexive, being about themselves:

The Phoenix comes of flame and dust
He bundles up his sire in myrrh
A solar and unholy lust
Makes a cradle of his bier
In the City of the Sun
He dies and rises all divine
There is never more than one
Genuine
By incest, murder, suicide
Survives the sacred purple bird
Himself his father, son and bride
And his own Word.

(NSP, 116)

Comparison of the poem with Shakespeare's “The Phoenix and the Turtle” shows the direction of the poetic imagination since the Renaissance. From his vantage point in space and time, Nemerov's lens is necessarily more divided than Shakespeare's, yet, in many ways, their vision is the same. With a little serendipity the reader discovers that what Nemerov writes about Shakespeare's world correlates with something in his own world of imagination:

Shakespeare's tragedies seem to work on the belief, deep enough to require no justification, that there exist several distinct realms of being, which for all their apparent distinctiveness respond immediately and decisively to one another. … All these mutually reflect one another. You cannot disturb the balance of one mind, or of one king's court, without the seismic registration of that disturbance in the near and remotest regions of the cosmos: an error of judgment will strike flat the thick rotundity of the world; a wicked thought will tumble together the treasure of nature's germens even till destruction sicken. The result is a world of dreadful splendors, but every piece of it is rhythmically articulated with every piece; and the realms which have priority in initiating the great releases of energy are ambiguously psychological and supernatural at once, but unequivocally the realms of spirit, will, mind. All life, and all the scene of life, the not-living around and beneath and above, poise in a trembling balance which is complete, self-moving, extensive in detail through the four elements, from “Let Rome in Tiber melt” and “kingdoms are clay” to “I am fire and air” and “O eastern star!” This, then, is the sublime and terrible treasure which afterwards was lost. …³⁶

Compare this vision of Shakespeare's with what Nemerov says in regard to the universe:

The painter Delacroix expressed it by saying that Nature is a dictionary. Everything is there, but not in the order one needs. The universe itself, so far as we relate ourselves to it by the mind, may be not so much a meaning as a rhythm, a continuous articulation of question and answer, a musical dialectic precipitating out moments of meaning which become distinct only as one wave does in a sea of waves.

(“The Swaying Form,” in PF, 11)

The two visions of the universe are able to correspond, despite the difference in the poets' lenses, because of the bifocal nature of imagination. Mind appropriates and concretizes human experience within a historical context, yet the substance of all imagery, in any age, is elemental and, therefore, atemporal—even aspatial—however we may describe or interpret it. As Nemerov reminds us, all poets at some time come into relation with the “initiatory ascent from earth through water and air to fire”³⁷—an ascent which may be gradual or cyclical. Similarly, poetry continues to ritualize the natural pattern of birth, death, and regeneration, in both the poem and the poetic process. Because nature is the raw material of imagery in poetry, as in all art, and since the source of poetry is the primary human drama, the vision articulated through a particular work (or works) can transcend historical limitations as well as those of the art form itself. This happens in spite of, though also because of, the fact that imagination is dual. Through the substance of vision the unitive possibility exists for poets of widely different eras (and for artists working in different media)—a possibility which, paradoxically, can only exist because of the particular nature and function of imagination moving within and through the limits of the art form. This dual function of imagination is implied in Nemerov's description of the painter as one who “sees / How things must be continuous with themselves / As with whole worlds that they themselves are not, / In order that they may be so transformed.” The same implication can be found in the poet's statement about the poetic process being “a matter of feedback between oneself and ‘it,’ an ‘it’ which can gain identity only in the course of being brought into being, come into being only in the course of finding its identity.”

Specifically, the dual function of the poetic imagination is to listen attentively, then, to transform what is heard into a vision that is as organically sound and just as elusive to the rational understanding as Antony's crocodile. The means of transformation is art, which is not the least part of the lyric difficulty, as Nemerov asserts. A poem must illumine a connection between the visible and invisible. “The durability of poems, as objects made out of language which will be around for some time because people experience this illumination and therefore like reading them, results from the clarity, force, and coherence with which this connection is made, and not from anything else however laudable, like the holding of strong opinions, or the feeling of strong emotions, or the naming of beautiful objects.”³⁸ As a means of transformation, art need not be true to life or love (though both are involved); art must be true only to the voice of imagination and to the rigid demands of the art form itself. This point is illustrated by an aphorism in the Journal: “It is according to the nature of life that Papageno should be helped on his way by a hideous old crone on condition that he will marry her. And it is according to the nature of love that when he agrees she will turn into a beautiful young girl. But it is according to the nature of art that both the hideous crone and the beautiful girl are played and sung by the same moderately pretty woman of a certain age, who has spent her youth learning music” (11).

Yet, the voice of imagination is not always clearly distinguishable from echo, which is a problem that Nemerov and all true poets have had to contend with since it was first exposed by Plato (Republic, X) and Aristotle (Poetics, I.2-XVIII) in their widely different theories of mimesis. In another chapter of the Journal, Nemerov seeks out his own method of delineating the creative and imitative aspects of imagination. His reflexions turn, dialectially, on the metaphorical notion that “seeing” is the mediator between “the pond” (the mysterious source of imagination) and the art work. This relationship, and the dichotomy it presents, are summarized by the poet:

1. The pond as birthplace and deathplace, the liquid mother and mirror whence beautiful and terrible forms arise, and whereto they return.
2. Artefacts and representations, for example, the portrait of my sister and myself, the Rodin statue and others, the poems I have written about.
3. “Seeing,” as mediator between the pond and the art work. Seeing as forbidden and punishable, seeing as protested to be innocent. Photography as the antithesis (guilty) of writing (innocent), and the subsequent revelation that all I said about photography had to be applied word for word to writing as well.

4. (Journal, 146-47)

Nemerov continues by viewing his basic antithesis (photography/writing) in other terms: science/art (“knowing”/“making”), and imagination/memory—an opposition made also by Stendhal and other writers, as Nemerov acknowledges. He, then, recalls his delight in finding the harmony of science and poetry in the writing of Sir Charles Sherrington, the eminent neurophysiologist (1857-1952). What particularly attracted Nemerov, because of its brilliance of thought and expression, was a passage from Sherrington's book Man on His Nature, which had been reprinted, in essay form, as a memorial in Scientific American. In this essay, the making of the eye is described by means of the eye-camera analogy. Aware that Sherrington's metaphors were intrinsic to the imagery of his own poetry, Nemerov records that he copied the following statements from the essay, adding a few thoughts of his own. Taken together, these notations suggest a symbolic equation of mimesis—an equation which brings into focus the poet's basic antithesis and its variants:

“The likeness (of the eye) to an optical camera is plain beyond seeking.” If a craftsman making a camera were “told to relinquish wood and metal and glass and to use instead some albumen, salt and water, he certainly would not proceed even to begin.” “Water is the great menstruum of ‘life.’ It makes life possible.” “The eye-ball is a little camera.” The adjustment of the lens to more or less light in a camera “is made by the observer working the instrument. In the eye this adjustment is automatic, worked by the image itself!”

Particularly striking to me: “all this making of the eye which will see in the light is carried out in the dark. It is a preparing in darkness for use in light.”

And: “This living glass-clear sheet is covered with a layer of tear-water constantly renewed. This tear-water has the special chemical power of killing germs which might inflame the eye. This glass-clear bit of skin has only one of the four-fold set of the skin-senses; its touch is always ‘pain,’ for it should not be touched. … And the whole structure, with its prescience and all its efficiency, is produced by and out of specks of granular slime arranging themselves as of their own accord in sheets and layers, and acting seemingly on an agreed plan.”

(149-50)

Between these lines, with their juxtaposition of metaphors, the reader can discern a symbolic equation which effects a unity between Nemerov's pairs of opposites: eye/camera = imagination/memory = innocence/guilt = poetry/science (“making”/“knowing”) = art/photography. Imagination is analogous to the eye: that which will see in the light is prepared in darkness out of specks of granular slime (out of “the pond,” or the unconscious), arranging themselves as if acting on an agreed plan. Imagination is spontaneous. (In the eye, the adjustment of the lens to more or less light is worked by the image itself.)³⁹ On the other hand, memory is likened to the camera; memory proceeds from the conscious mind. (In the camera, the adjustment of the lens to more or less light is made by the observer working the instrument.) Art, as the creative aspect of vision, is innocent, finding its model (again) in the natural mystery of creation. Photography, as an extension of vision, is imitative and, like memory, records the knowledge of guilt; the camera is “a voyeur,” which sees without becoming transformed by the experience.

Nemerov concludes his deliberations by stating that “this scientifically accurate and imaginatively convincing story” affected him so powerfully that he “had to relate it at once to the pond, to seeing, to photography, and to art” (Journal, 150). He adds that this relation was expressed in the first six lines of “Runes,” XIV, which were written before his second reading of Sherrington, “though not certainly before the first.” All of “Runes,” XIV (which will be analyzed more thoroughly in Chapter 4), is included here as one of Nemerov's most profound poetic illustrations of the creative and imitative aspects of imagination:

There is a threshold, that meniscus where
The strider walks on drowning waters, or
That tensed, curved membrane of the camera's lens
Which darkness holds against the battering light
And the distracted drumming of the world's
Importunate plenty.—Now that threshold,
The water of the eye where the world walks
Delicately, is as a needle threaded
From the reel of a raveling stream, to stitch
Dissolving figures in a watered cloth,
A damask either-sided as the shroud
Of the lord of Ithaca, labored at in light,
Destroyed in darkness, while the spidery oars
Carry his keel across deep mysteries
To harbor in unfathomable mercies.

(NSP, 10)

“Runes,” XIV, is also interesting because it is constructed on a type of imagery, used frequently by Nemerov, which, for want of a more precise term, I have called “reflexive.” The first six lines above contain two parallel, but antithetical, images—i.e., the two thresholds—which bear an inverse, reflexive relationship to each other. In the last nine lines, the two preceding images have become a single, but paradoxical, image of mind imagining the world. This final image is also an inversion of the first two but succeeds in unifying them. In this poem, as in the entire sequence, a fusion occurs between thought and thing, between figure and meaning, which is accomplished largely through the “reflexive image.”

The adjective “reflexive” is used, intentionally, because it has a broader connotative value than its synonym “reflective.” Both words convey the “mirror” idea implicit in all imagery. But “reflexive” infers that something not only mirrors an object, or itself, but is also acted upon, or acts upon itself, thereby emitting a response which differs in kind from the stimulus (whether external or internal) and which generates a still different third response but one that retains continuity with all previous responses. The image so conceived is not a duplicate, or negative, or an inversion of an original thing, but is complex, serving connotatively as metaphor and symbol and, equally well, in its own right as the denotation of something. The initial seed and water images in “Runes” have a reflexive continuity through all of their configurations in the poem sequence. Such imagery is powerful because it is organic, multivalent, and capable of reaching human experience on many levels of being.

Reflexive imagery is born from the poet's prismatic lens and is particularly appropriate to the paradoxical complexity of contemporary life. However this type of image is not necessarily new. Certainly John Donne used it often, though it cannot be confined to a metaphysical mode of expression. More modern examples can be found in Yeats' “Among School Children” and “Sailing to Byzantium” and in Wallace Stevens' “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” But reflexive imagery is an intrinsic part of Nemerov's poetry and imaginative process, a means through which the vision and its articulation are one.

Generally, Nemerov's imagery works within a spatial-temporal context which is both circular and linear. As an aspect of vision, this dual dimension of space-time should not be thought of in fixed Euclidian terms but as an artistic extension of Einstein's theory of relativity. More importantly, this double focus on space-time, like the two attitudes voiced in the poems, extends the poet's dual concept of imagination. Human experience is perceived in two ways: ontologically, or substantively, in the circular context, and objectively, or formally, in the linear context. From this duality certain primary paradoxes emerge: darkness/light, eternity/time, the one/the many, substance/form, and actual/ideal, all of which evolve from the poet's fascination with creation and its reverse process, metamorphosis, and the relation, or identity, of the evanescent with the enduring. These basic antitheses are redefined in more immediate paradoxes: mirrors and windows/reality, and statues and effigies/life, both of which paradoxes are contingent upon the divisiveness, fragmentation, complexity, and absurdity of modern existence. Most often the basic antitheses underlie the philosophical, religious poems, whereas the secondary paradoxes find expression in satirical or tragicomic poems which, owing to the poet's sense of dramatic irony, are no less profound.

Paradox is not only the language of poetry but also its province. In his essay “Younger Poets: The Lyric Difficulty” Nemerov writes:

This difficulty is usually presented to us as a series of pairs of opposites—e.g., form and having something to say, grace and passion, control and urgency, etc. Thus equipped, any man may make his own battlefield, not to mention that his may also, and probably will, make his own side win. What such warriors of the abstract fail to take into account is that any poet, any at all, is aware that these opposites exist. He is further aware that writing poetry does not mean choosing one side against the other, but achieving the maximum intensity and the greatest harmony of both sides. And he is painfully aware, from the experience of writing, that his own temperament (which irremedially belongs to him, and cannot be subordinated to any ideal however fine) is constantly pushing him toward one side or the other. But poetry is one of those human activities in which it is not the object to identify oneself exclusively with the right or the left, though it is hoped that the result will look more like tightrope-walking than fence-sitting

(PF, 225).

Here again is the problem of the swaying form in its shifting and variable relation to nature and the nature of things and to the source of great primary human drama, life and death. That drama begins in the garden where relations grow; outside the garden is the vast abyss—the eternal mystery beyond the reach of prophecy or parable. In contemplating this situation in the mirror of language, Nemerov proceeds from the hypothesis that God exists, however doubtful man's relationship and communication with Him has become. The problem of relating and communicating is that of imagination itself—imagination which becomes central to the universe and the most important thing to understand about the universe precisely because it has become problematic and doubtful. In this respect, poetry is for Nemerov not only a way of being but an act of faith, a leap into the unknown.

The complexity of Nemerov's position, as a man and as a poet, is best articulated in an off-the-cuff statement he made in a letter to Robert D. Harvey, a statement which provides also a fitting summary of the poet's concept of poetry and its purpose. “Poetry is a kind of spiritual exercise, a (generally doomed but stoical) attempt to pray one's humanity back into the universe; and conversely an attempt to read, to derive anew, one's humanity from nature, nature considered as a book, a dictionary and bible at once. Poetry is a doctrine of signatures, or presupposes that the universe is such a doctrine whether well written or ill. … Poetry is an art of combination, or discovering the secret valencies which the most widely differing things have for one another. In the darkness of this search, patience and good humour are useful qualities. Also: the serious and funny are one. The purpose of poetry is to persuade, fool or compel God into speaking.”⁴⁰

Reading Nemerov, one is reminded that the sublime and terrible treasure that was lost may yet exist in unfathomed seas where a poet of another time and place will find it transformed “into something rich and strange.” If Nemerov has not claimed it, he has at least sounded in those waters.

Notes

1. The Painter Dreaming in the Scholar's House, p. 3.

2. “The Swaying Form,” in PF, p. 9. Nemerov quotes Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, 3.3.109-11. (Although “married,” not “mirror'd,” is now accepted by most modern editors; see Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, New Variorum Edition, p. 177.)

3. Ibid.

4. Personal letter, October 30, 1968.

5. Nemerov, “Younger Poets: The Lyric Difficulty,” in PF, p. 224.

6. Nemerov, “The Marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta,” in PF, p. 22 (Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, 5.1.23).

7. Nemerov, “The Muse's Interest,” in PF, p. 47.

8. Nemerov, “The Swaying Form,” in PF, p. 13.

9. Ibid., p. 14.

10. Ibid., p. 6. (The phrase about “the art” is not included in all editions, according to Nemerov's footnote on page 6.)

11. “The Muse's Interest,” in PF, p. 45.

12. Nemerov, “The Swaying Form,” in PF, p. 13.

13. Nemerov, “The Muse's Interest,” in PF, p. 46.

14. Ibid.

15. Nemerov, “The Marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta,” in PF, p. 23.

16. “The Swaying Form,” in PF, p. 12.

17. “Attentiveness and Obedience,” p. 242.

18. Nemerov, “Younger Poets: The Lyric Difficulty,” in PF, p. 224.

19. Nemerov, “The Muse's Interest,” in PF, p. 46.

20. “Attentiveness and Obedience,” p. 241.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid.

23. “Blue Suburban” is from NRD, p. 35; “Mrs. Mandrill” and “Boom!” are from NSP, pp. 20-21 and 18-19; and “Keeping Informed in D.C.” is from BS, p. 62.

24. “Attentiveness and Obedience,” p. 241.

25. The first three poems mentioned are in IL; “The Scales of the Eyes” is in SG.

26. “Attentiveness and Obedience,” p. 240.

27. Babel to Byzantium, p. 40.

28. “Recent Poetry,” p. 126.

29. “The View from an Attic Window” and “The Pond,” in NSP, pp. 22-23 and 42-46; and “The Mud Turtle,” in BS, pp. 97-98.

30. “The Quarry,” “A Day on the Big Branch,” “Brainstorm,” “The Sanctuary” (all from earlier volumes), “Runes,” and “The Icehouse in Summer” can be found in NSP; “The Sunglasses” and “Holding the Mirror up to Nature” are in MW; “Celestial Globe” is in BS.

31. “The Mind's Relation with the World,” p. 375.

32. Ibid. Nemerov quotes Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, New York: Macmillan Co., 1925, p. 25. “Matter,” as Whitehead conceived of it, has been reduced, of course, so it can no longer be considered as “irreducible” in scientific terms. According to Whitehead, Einstein's theory that mass (or matter) and energy are equivalent to each other (E = mc²) made it possible to show the conversion of matter into energy, and vice versa; nevertheless, the problem of where to locate mind remains, as a result of “scientific materialism.”

33. Ibid., p. 378.

34. Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn, p. 8.

35. Ibid., p. 20.

36. “The Mind's Relation with the World,” pp. 376-77.

37. Ibid., p. 384.

38. Nemerov, “Younger Poets: The Lyric Difficulty,” in PF, p. 224.

39. Described here (and indirectly referred to, earlier, by Sherrington) is “accommodation,” the eye's ability to focus on objects at varying distances—an ability peculiar to reptiles (except snakes), birds, and mammals. The eye is focused by an adjustment of the shape of the lens, brought about by contraction of the ciliary muscle—an involuntary reflex initiated by the light itself. Changes in the curvature of the lens—and, therefore, the extent to which the lens focuses light—are determined by the degree of contraction of the ciliary muscle. The lens flattens to focus on distant objects and becomes spherical for close objects. The undulating movement of the lens, as accommodation occurs, can rightly be compared to that of the tide—a comparison Nemerov makes in “Runes,” XIV. In all respects, the poet's extension of Sherrington's analogy remains a good one.

    Although in the light of current scientific research on both the eye and the camera, the eye-camera model is crude, it is still widely used in reputable sources to illustrate the likenesses and differences between the mechanism of the eye and that of the camera. This analogy, as presented by Sherrington and appropriated by Nemerov, remains a valid one, metaphorically speaking, although a scientist, today, might describe the physiology of the eye in more sophisticated terms.

40. Robert D. Harvey, “A Prophet Armed pp. 125-26.