[In the following essay, Randall analyzes the ways in which Nemerov's “double vision” enables him to objectify the invisible world through the observable world.]

Once, writes Nemerov, villainous William of Occam exploded the dream that we could confidently assign the authorship of the Great Writing. And yet science, social science, and philosophy go on confidently assigning. “Nature,” they cry; “Man,” they cry; “God,” they cry—physics in one tongue, theology in another. What Occam in fact pointed out was that what a thing is in itself in no way depends on how we think of it. But it is by thought embodied in language, and by language embodied in institution, that we construct the civilization in which we live, the human world which so often appears to be simply the Self writ large. The poet's job, strangely enough, is to ‘unwrite’ by going back to the beginning; to make such speech as we have faithful to ‘things as they are’ rather than to our arrangements of them; to make language live by confronting things with the ‘innocent’ mind of an Adam, by naming them to themselves afresh through the powers of that mind which is somehow continuous with them. Nemerov is not alone in observing how many of our languages are dead. Since the medieval synthesis

It's taken that long for the mind
To waken, yawn, and stretch, to see
With opened eyes, emptied of speech
The real world where the spelling mind
Imposes with its grammar book
Unreal relations on the blue
Swallows.

Nemerov, then, does not seek to impose a vision upon the world so much as to listen to what it says. He works in closer relationship with literal meaning than is presently fashionable; consequently his worst fault (he says so himself) is sententiousness, but his corresponding virtue is a clarity whose object is not to diminish the mystery of the world but to allow it to appear without the interposition of a peculiar individuality, or of fancy-work or arabesque. He is, as much as any modern can be, a romantic poet; he is a religious poet without religion; a prophet, especially in the polemical and ironic mode, without portfolio. When he writes about history, as Stanley Hyman has said, his theme is “history from the point of view of the losers.” Thus when he wants to write about Moses, he does so from the point of view of Pharaoh after the Red Sea debacle; and instead of writing about Perseus, he presents the nitwitted predecessors of that hero, who approached Medusa without a mirror and were turned to stone. To judge by his later poems, being turned to stone is the least agreeable and most probable fate for human beings and their institutions together.

II

Nemerov's experience of the Great Society is the common one, and his cry the same cry that has been ringing in our ears since at least Dover Beach. His poems begin in the personal pain of the 1940 war, and move through the shock of specifically modern history to the consideration of human history generally, backward to the Fall and forward again through its repetitions. “Succession” pictures history as a furnished room whose former tenant, a priest, has departed nobody knows where. The apartment does not record his stay. The present occupant has

                              no further wish to follow him
Where he has gone, for now the room awaits
The thud of your belongings and your name—
How easily it will encompass them!
Behind the door the sycophantic glass
Already will reflect you in a frame
That memorizes nothing but its place.

Indifference and rigidity characterize the room; complacency or confusion, the roomers. Any red-blooded American boy can buy a passport to the war, a subway ticket to suburbia, even an access to the Academy of Fine Ideas. He can make like Ike, Santa Claus, Don Juan, Professor Publish, or any number of free-trial examples (and if not satisfied in 20 years, double your hypocrisy back). The monuments of his aching intellect resemble the stark angularities of Steinberg, and the poet can only serve as wry guide to such ruins, which include, for instance, New York, the “frozen city”; the statues in the public gardens; the stacks of the university library; the pulpit; the motel; the segregated cemetery; the packaged meat in the supermarket; the loyalty oath; the Indian-head nickel, and so on. The dead goose-fish leers up at lovers on the beach, and the poet reviews his youth:

Accumulating all those years
The blue annuities of silence some called
Wisdom, I heard sunstorms and exploding stars,
The legions screaming in the German wood—
Old violence petrifying where it stood.

The recording artist of this happy scene is the camera, whose “incisive blade” takes “frozen sections”: “maybe a shot of Lenin tombed in glass.” For the camera “makes the constant claim that reality is visible,” whereas “language asserts it to be secret, invisible, a product of relations rather than things.” But if we look before, we see Lot's wife pillared on the plain, and if we look after we see—but like Saul at Endor we forget what we have seen, which was probably the ghost of Norbert Wiener.

Nevertheless, if there are no capital Heroes, there are, as there have always been, Hangers-On to the pain and the puzzle. “The point of faith,” reiterated in several poems, “is that you sweat it out,” you continue. In one metaphysical poem, the heart is a voracious vacuum cleaner:

“THE VACUUM”

The house is so quiet now
The vacuum cleaner sulks in the corner closet,
Its bag limp as a stopped lung, its mouth
Grinning into the floor, maybe at my
Slovenly life, my dog-dead youth.
I've lived this way long enough,
But when my old woman died her soul
Went into that vacuum cleaner, and I can't bear
To see the bag swell like a belly, eating the dust
And the woolen mice, and begin to howl
Because there is old filth everywhere
She used to crawl, in the corner and under the stair.
I know now how life is cheap as dirt,
And still the hungry, angry heart
Hangs on and howls, biting at air.

It hangs on and howls in stubborn contradiction to the Pleasure Principle:

There, toward the end, when the left-handed wish
Is satisfied as it is given up, when the hero
Endures his cancer and more obstinately than ever
Grins at the consolations of religion as at a child's
Frightened pretensions, and when his great courage
Becomes a wish to die, there appears, so obscurely,
Pathetically, out of the wounded torment and the play,
A something primitive and appealing, and still dangerous,
That crawls on bleeding hands and knees over the floor
Toward him, and whispers as if to confess: again, again.

What all this amounts to, I suppose, is that salt blood still beats inside the frozen skull: salt blood we inherit, the freezer we inhabit. Or to put it another way, freezing is an illusion, a trick of the temporal camera, a phase of the land which claims us but not of the sea which makes prior claims. In a clarifying poem from Mirrors and Windows, the poet stands “where the railroad bridge / Divides the river from the estuary,” deciding that he has fallen from the “symboled world” into the great silence of “reality.” A loon's cry shatters that silence:

I thought I understood what that cry meant,
That its contempt was for the form of things,
Their doctrines, which decayed—the nouns of stone
And adjectives of glass—not for the verb
Which surged in power properly eternal
Against the seawall of the solid world,
Battering and undermining what it built,
And whose respeaking was the poet's act,
Only and always, in whatever time
Stripped by uncertainty, despair, and ruin,
Time readying to die, unable to die
But damned to life again, and the loon's cry.
And now the sun was sunken in the sea,
The full moon high, and stars began to shine.

The “verb's” properly eternal urge to creation and destruction seems to be echoed in the bleeding hero's confession: again. The loon's cry recalls the poet to his job of celebrating the single force. Perhaps, after all, there is a coherence in the voices of things.

III

It is tempting to mythologize the history of Howard Nemerov somewhat as follows. Hero tramps through rocky wastes, stout Cortez in reverse, having heard tell of mermaids singing (he improvises a song for them in the manner of his grandfather the Pioneer), of a lake isle Innisfree (a song in the manner of the indomitable peasantry), and of a colony at Key West where they have ideas of order (he practices orders). And indeed his songs are the magic which carry him, undaunted but not undinted, through the perennial dangers of pilgrimage.

In place of pain why should I see
The sunlight on the bleeding wound?
Or hear the wounded man's outcry
Bless the Creation with bright sound?
I stretch myself on joy as on a rack
And bear the hunch of glory on my back.

On first looking into Nemerov's hunch, we perceive among other things the family Bible, the collected works of St. Augustine, Shakespeare, and William Blake, plus what appears to be a Prelude in brown wraps. In 1948, arrived at a port called Bennington, Hero has his first view of the sea, recognizes his mission, and attended by winged tutelaries does not start building an ark or an empire. Instead he paces the beach, one ear landward and one ear seaward, and you will find him there to this day.

This would, of course, be a poem more true than history. At about the time he went to live in Vermont, Nemerov had outgrown his immediate influences and had found his own spare and flexible tongue. And his theory of poetry, later embodied in the Poetry and Fiction essays, was developing out of his own practice and his scrupulous and open-minded attention to literature past and present.

Peter Meinke, in his helpful monograph on the poet (University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers, no. 70), sees Nemerov as, from the beginning, a deeply divided man, as evidenced in “the tensions between his romantic and realistic visions, his belief and unbelief, his heart and mind; and in his alternating production of poetry and prose.” I think this is true, and that it is as apparent in the later volumes as in the earlier—perhaps even more so, for the divisions between the serious and the funny (which Nemerov claims are one) come clearer. Two tones of voice, less distinct in the early work, become apparent. One is the ironic flourish: e. g., at the expense of Santa Claus, the “annual saviour of the economy,” who “speaks in the parables of the dollar sign: / Suffer the little children to come to Him.” The other is a quiet, insistent, but immensely versatile voice, one which can speak songs, sonnets, and sestinas, but perhaps speaks best the loose blank-verse well exemplified in two short plays, Endor and Cain (in The Next Room of the Dream), and in many quotations included in this essay.

Nemerov's fiction (with which I am not here concerned) is basically comic. The curious self-analytical volume, Journal of the Fictive Life, discusses his personal and professional tensions in Freudian terms, but the goose-chase gets nowhere (well, hardly anywhere): “The net of association, for a responsive intelligence, is endless and endlessly intricate; moreover it never will reach a fundamental or anogogical reading that might simplify and make sense of all the others.” But the upshot of the Journal is that if psychology cannot arrive at anagoge, poetry may. Poetry may somehow recognize the substance of things under the disguises of culture and personality: “the thought comes to me that the predicaments of my most characteristic and intimate imagery strangely belong to Shakespeare too, who resolved them by the magical poetry of his Last Plays. May it happen to me also one day that the statue shall move and speak, the drowned child be found, and the unearthly music sing to me.” Individuality is a form which we must suffer. But it contains a secret power to get beyond itself, to be purified (Joyce would say) out of personal existence. The mortal man continues, as in the conclusion to the Journal, in the birth of his son; the poet continues in the larger spirit of his poems.

It seems to me that Nemerov's ‘progress’ consists in a solution to the predicament of his imagery. Bugs, birds, trees, and running water have been there from the start; death, war, and the city are there still, but they are less disturbing for being more acutely seen, distanced, separated out. Movement and light permeate The Blue Swallows, as the title indicates. And it is far and away the most significant and least recognized volume of poems of the 60's. Via deep doubts, deep self-questionings, painful recognitions, and sere embracings, Nemerov emerges on the shore between two worlds whose relation is the subject of his most serious and most moving poetry. He joins there a ghost whose composite face reminds us now of Shelley, now of Coleridge, now of Jeremiah, now of Arnold or Roethke. It is a handsome face that literature fathers-forth. But literature is only the formal cause, as the well-to-do Jewish parents were the efficient one. The final cause is neither man's invention nor his own power:

The aim of the poet is to write poems. Poems are arrangements of language which illuminate a connection between the inside and outside of things. 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. Because of the oddly intimate relations obtaining between the inside and the outside of things, the poetic art is always with us, and does not decay with the decay of systems of philosophy and religion, or fall out of fashion with the sets of names habitually given, over more or less long periods of time, to the relations between the inside of things and the outside. With all the reverence poets have for tradition, poetry is always capable of reaching its beginning again. Its tradition, ideally, has to do with reaching the beginning, so that, of many young poets who begin with literature, a few old ones may end up with nature.

IV

“Wo ist zu diesem Innen / ein Aussen?” cries Rilke like a blind man. And Coleridge:

In looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dim-glimmering through the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking for a symbolical language for something within me that already and forever exists.

And Nemerov:

I look not so much at nature as I listen to what it says. This is a mystery, at least in the sense that I cannot explain it—why should a phrase come to you out of the ground and seem to be exactly right? But the mystery appears to me as the poet's proper relation with things, a relation in which language, that accumulated wisdom and folly in which the living and the dead speak simultaneously, is a full partner and not merely a stenographer.

It is odd that we have to learn a language in which to talk to our central selves, and that the artist should be our naive tutor; that the eyes turned into the skull are blind until thought illuminates the objects inside as the sun illuminates those outside. But it is by its likeness to natural or objective form that we recognize psychic or subjective form, through the medium of the living art-form.

The way a word does when
It senses on one side
A thing and on the other
A thought; like sunlight
On marble, or burnished wood,
That seems to be coming from
Within the surface and
To be one substance with it—
That is 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.

In Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, Jacques Maritain writes:

The poet does not know himself in the light of his own essence. Since man perceives himself only through a repercussion of his knowledge of the world of things, and remains empty to himself if he does not fill himself with the universe, the poet knows himself only on condition that things resound in him, and that in him, at a single wakening, they and he come forth together out of sleep. In other words, the primary requirement of poetry, which is the obscure knowing, by the poet, of his own subjectivity, is inseparable from, is one with another requirement—the grasping, by the poet, of the objective reality of the outer and inner world; not by means of concepts and conceptual knowledge, but by means of an obscure knowledge … through affective union.

That art is an objectification of invisible life in terms of the visible and sensible world, that it is the essential means to self-awareness not of individual life (I am Jane Doe of 1842 Williamson Road) but of common human life (I am Adam, I am Hamlet), and that such awareness of life “in widest commonalty spread” is the best agent of sympathy and hence of disinterested action—all this Romanticism made apparent. Nemerov, conscious of the potentiality of romantic or pseudoromantic attitudes for self-delusion, and wondering if he is not sometimes their dupe, is shy of claiming a moral role for poetry. Only occasionally, as in his lines to Lu Chi, does he glance openly at the effect of a purified dialect on the tribe:

                                                            Neither action nor thought,
Only the concentration of our speech
In fineness and in strength (your axe again),
Till it can carry, in those other minds,
A nobler action and a purer thought.

He does claim, however, poetry's power to bear new parts of a world up to consciousness out of an unmindful “sleep of causes.” One of his figures is the chess-board or tennis-court: the room of our dream defined by the traditional rules, the “nouns of stone and adjectives of glass.” “The existence of tennis courts is also a guarantee of the existence of undefined spaces that are not tennis courts, and where tennis playing is unthinkable. The object of exploration is to find what is unthinkable in those immensities.” The object of exploration, Eliot claims, is to arrive where we started. Nemerov too implies that the out-of-court immensities may be our being's heart and home; that the poet, if we attend him, may guide us there. But he is often in doubt. If we started in the neat Commercial Gardens, then

                                        it is right that we return
To exit where we started, nothing in our hands.

He is certain that wherever we started, it will not be knowledge we carry off in the end. The art-form which imitates not our appearance (the camera does that) but our living relations, is not a means to conceptual knowledge; it is a light which illuminates wider and wider areas of our obscure experience, the next and next room of the single dream.

To watch water, to watch running water
Is to know a secret, seeing the twisted rope
Of runnels on the hillside, the small freshets
Leaping and limping down the tilted field
In April's light, the green, grave and opaque
Swirl in the millpond where the current slides
To be combed and carded silver at the fall;
It is a secret. Or it is not to know
The secret, but to have it in your keeping,
A locked box, Bluebeard's room, the deathless thing
Which it is death to open. Knowing the secret,
Keeping the secret—herringbones of light
Ebbing on beaches, the huge artillery
Of tides—it is not knowing, it is not keeping,
But being the secret hidden from yourself.

The secret which we are is the same as the secret in the seed, in the sea, in the word. Nothing belongs to the self alone, although thought belongs to the human mind alone. And thought, like its parent nature, is fiercely generative, both of what it sees as good and of what it sees as evil.

Great pain was in the world before we came.
The shriek had learned to answer to the claw
Before we came; the gasp, the sigh, the groan,
Did not need our invention. But all these
Immediacies refused to signify
Till in the morning of the mental sun
One moment shuddered under stress and broke
Irreparably into before and after,
Inventing patience, panic, doubt, despair,
And with a single thrust producing thought
Beyond the possible, building the vaults
Of debt and the high citadels of guilt,
The segregating walls of obligation,
All that imposing masonry of time
Secretly rooted at the earth's cracked hearth,
In the Vishnu schist and the Bright Angel shale,
But up aspiring past the visible sky.

Great pain was (and is) in the world; great loveliness, too. Happiness is “helpless” before the fall of the white waters (of time) which bear away “this filth” (of personal and communal history). Nemerov can watch the spring freshets and speak of the literal rising of the dead. He can break a stick and find “nothing that was not wood, nothing / That was not God.” The stick can figure equally well the tree of Eden or of Calvary, the forest tree brought down by the vine, the family tree or its sexual organ, Aaron's rod, Daphne's wrist, and so on in an endless string of ambiguities which keeps fraying out and away “since Adam's fall / Unraveled all.” The poet makes his knot and holds it up to our attention. But he can't knot water. He can only tell us

A new thing: even the water
Flowing away beneath those birds
Will fail to reflect their flying forms,
And the eyes that see become as stones
Whence never tears shall fall again.

V

Meanwhile, at least, the poet “by arts contemplative” finds and names reality again. Like Conrad's Marlow (“my favorite person in fiction”), he is enamoured of simple facts but finds the world unavoidably symbolic. Writing of Nabokov, Nemerov says

His subject is always the inner insanity and how it may oddly match or fail to match the outer absurdity, and this problem he sees as susceptible only of artistic solutions. He may well be the accountant of the universe … but he is not its moral accountant, and his double entries seek only the exact balance between inside and outside, self and world, in a realm to which morality stands but as a dubious, Euclidean convenience; that balance is what in the arts is conventionally called truth.

In his excellent book, The Lyrical Novel, Ralph Freedman writes: “Equating the subject and object of awareness with the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’, Virginia Woolf suggests that both are included in a single whole.” And Woolf herself writes of Conrad: “one must be possessed of the double vision; one must be at once inside and out. To praise … silence, one must possess a voice.” So, according to Nemerov,

the work of art is religious in nature, not because it beautifies an ugly world or pretends that a naughty world is a nice one—for these things especially art does not do—but because it shows of its own nature that things drawn within the sacred circle of its forms are transfigured, illuminated by an inward radiance which amounts to goodness because it amounts to Being itself. In the life conferred by art, Iago and Desdemona, Edmund and Cordelia, the damned and the blessed, equally achieve immortality by their relation with the creating intelligence which sustains them. The art work is not responsible for saying that things in reality are so, but rather for revealing what this world says to candid vision. It is thus that we delight in tragedies whose actions in life would merely appall us. And it is thus that art, by its illusions, achieves a human analogy to the resolution of that famous question of theodicy—the relation of an Omnipotent Benevolence to evil—which the theologians, bound to the fixed forms of things, have for centuries struggled with, intemperately and in vain. And it is thus that art, by vision and not by dogma, patiently and repeatedly offers the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.

These are high claims, and easily misread. But we cannot misread two necessary qualities of the poet: openness and the double vision, qualities which Howard Nemerov possesses to a high degree. Look inward, look outward, and speak of what you have seen. But finally, perhaps,

                                                  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.