SOURCE: Labrie, Ross. “The Later Poems.” Howard Nemerov, pp. 104-42. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980.

[In the following essay, Labrie discusses Nemerov's books of poetry from New and Selected Poems to The Western Approaches, emphasizing the ways in which the poet reconciles imagination and reality.]

New & Selected Poems, published in 1960, contained fifty-eight poems, of which only fifteen were new. Included among the new poems, however, was a major work—“Runes.” The collection is a transitional one, a culmination of the themes and motifs of the 1950s and a prelude to the more intricate and reflexive poems of the 1960s. Nemerov described “Runes” as both a “summary of many years' partial preoccupation with its subjects and illustrations” and at the same time as the “beginning of something else.”¹

“Runes” was written in an intense two-week period—the way Nemerov likes to write. The memory of its composition has stayed in his mind as a time of “great delight” in which through the compressed time he felt himself able to write from the “midst of some sustaining center, whose variations and examinations” became the poem.² He has described “Runes” as a bookish poem in that it contains allusions to writers like Dante and Homer and yet he did not intend it to be esoteric. Rather, in its reflexive ruminations on the pleasures of consciousness, he meant it to sum up his principal interests as eloquently as he could and on the whole he was satisfied with what he had made of it.

The title, which derives from the enigmatic, engraved characters of the earliest German alphabet, conveys an impression of magical symbols that have been discovered and yet not adequately deciphered. “Runes” approaches phenomena in exactly this way, opening things up only to have them close in mystery again. The poem is less obsessively concerned with the dark roots of the self than was “The Scales of the Eyes” and in general possesses an orderly serenity that contrasts with the turbid restlessness of the earlier work.

The principal motifs are given in the opening sections—the stillness in moving things, the movement in still things, the world of generation versus that of thought and art. The principal metaphors are those of water and seed. The sequence, which is composed in blank verse, contains fifteen stanzas of fifteen lines each. The structure is polyphonic and involves complex variations on the central themes of mutability and permanence. The shape of the poem is centrifugal with the eighth stanza being dead center. Energy moves out from stanza eight in two complementary directions, the first part of the poem depicting the contraction of life from late summer to winter and the second part portraying the slow rising of new life, which finally quickens in the spring.

All of the stanzas except stanza eight are paired, the fifteenth with the first, the fourteenth with the second, and so on inward toward the center, stanza eight, the point of stasis. The pairing usually involves the use of similar or identical imagery or allusion—such as the Ulysses myth, which appears in stanzas two and fourteen. The effect of this close symmetry is the creation of a circular structure that parallels the cycling of the seasons. For Nemerov the circle is an ambiguous and necessary part of artistic structuring, representing both the “mind of God” and the “futility and unending repetition and the boredom of a bad eternity.”³ A fainter linear structure, dialectically complementing that of the circle, can be seen in the poem's arrival at spring. The strongest impression in “Runes” is that of the governing, cyclical rhythms of life, but the progress of the soul and of hope through the poem is faithful to the short term linear perspectives of human vision. To deny the impact of this vision would involve a denial, the poem implies, of human experience and therefore of the reason for poetry.

The structure of “Runes” is introduced in prelude fashion in the first rune, although the sense of contrary movement is already present in the epigraph from the Confessions of St. Augustine:⁴

This is about the stillness in moving things,
In running water, also in the sleep
Of winter seeds, where time to come has tensed
Itself, enciphering a script so fine
Only the hourglass can magnify it, only
The years unfold its sentence from the root.

(Collected Poems [hereafter abbreviated as CP] 211)

The motif of water, whether moving or still, is a recurrent one in Nemerov and is usually associated with what he called “from continuing in the changing material.”⁵ In addition, water imagery is usually associated with the fluidity of perception and the imagination. Still water mirrors both the external world and the completed acts of the imagination. In general the water imagery in the poem sustains the mood of reverie that is so essential to the themes connected with the passage of time. The flow of time is stilled only by death or by a fortuitous moment of illumination as the watery surface shaped by its current momentarily takes on a recognizable shape. The seed symbolizes both the inert state of death and the process of regeneration. Like the water it can represent both movement and stillness. The two motifs are brought together in the symbol of water streaming through the seed, the apex of the poem's metaphorical structuring.

Rune one is complicated by the speaker's announcement of his theme halfway through the stanza:

That is my theme, of thought and the defeat
Of thought before its object, where it turns
As from a mirror, and returns to be
The thought of something and the thought of thought,
A trade doubly burdened, commercing
Out of one stillness and into another.

(CP, 212)

This theme seems initially to be unrelated to that already offered in the first part of the stanza. What happens here is that, characteristically, Nemerov pauses in the creative process to contemplate reflexively what his mind has just been doing. This gives a further dimension to “Runes” so that the pattern of movement and stillness involves not only things but also the attentive consciousness which in perception flows through things in a metamorphosis that in lucky moments generates something new and meaningful. In a letter Nemerov has written in connection with rune one: “It may have happened to you, as it so often does with me, that when you are lucky enough to be visited with a thought, the thought that follows it will not be a logical or associative consequence, but a reflexive one: Look at me, I'm thinking! So the thought about stillness in motion quite properly … induces the thought of thought.”⁶

The “trader” metaphor at the end of the first rune becomes the dominant motif of the second rune. Nemerov's trader is Ulysses, who symbolizes movement in stillness by completing his epic journey and giving it meaning. The two arrivals attributed to Ulysses, those recorded by Homer and Tennyson, are presented as equally tenable endings. In Homer, Ulysses destroys Penelope's suitors and resumes his former life. In Tennyson, however, he “sails south / To disappear from sight behind the sun” (CP, 212). Tennyson portrays Ulysses as a Faustian seeker of new experience, who vanishes voluntarily into the abyss of the unknown. The two endings are crucially different in that the trader and Ulysses motifs symbolize venturing consciousness. Thus, the poem postulates very different limits for consciousness depending upon which ending is chosen. In line with the negative drifting of the first eight runes the speaker finds that he does “not know which ending is the right one.”

The third rune centers on a sunflower motif and is set in late summer when everything dies and goes to seed. While the summer scene is still replete with life, there are signs of change in the violence and desolation of the imagery and in the harrowing tone. There is a pronounced overlapping in rune two of the sunflower and trader motifs as the flowers are described as “traders rounding the horn of time / Into deep afternoons, sleepy with gain” (CP, 212). The imagery of gold, which unites the two motifs, is woven into a conceit that runs the length of the stanza.

In the fourth rune the gold coins issued by the sunflower—its seeds—are buried beneath the autumn soil in the “furnaces of death” (CP, 213). To emphasize the inertness of the seed in this section, it is alternately called a stone. The promise of movement in the stillness of the seed's apparent death lies in the genetic hieroglyphics of the future life that is contained within it—whether the seed be in the cycle of nature or in the depths of the psyche where it may one day generate “the living word.” “Give us our ignorance,” the speaker asks in wanting not to know the potentiality that lies within the seed—“How one shall marry while another dies” (CP, 213). The world outside the seed is so threatening that even embryonic life is portrayed as in peril in the image of the cock's egg hatched by a predatory serpent.

The fifth rune is an ironic poem to autumn. The softness of Keats's season becomes here the harsher “fat time of the year.” It is also for a Jew the time of Atonement when in contrast to the harvest outside the “dry husk of an eaten heart” has nothing to offer up. Death still covers the “undecipherable seed” (CP, 213). The mood is bleak and the tone recriminatory and although it is autumn the atmosphere is already that of winter. Winter arrives explicitly in rune six where the stillness is paralyzing: “White water now in the snowflake's prison” (CP, 214). The swirling particles of snow symbolize both chaos and a wintry view of God: “A mad king in a skullcap thinks these thoughts / In regular hexagons.” Instead of being continuous, memory in this dead season is composed of “atoms,” which have “hooks / At either end” (past and present). All is fragmentary, meaningless, and the direction is down: “White water, fall and fall” (CP, 214). Rune seven continues the downward movement, beginning with the biblical text “Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel,” Jacob's astringent prophecy for the tribe that would descend from his firstborn son, Reuben (Genesis 49:3-4). The seventh rune depicts movement without stillness in contrast to the sixth, which portrays stillness without movement. In terms of the governing symbols of the sequence both present a form of life that is disastrously incomplete. The unchecked and unintelligible movement of the seventh rune is modelled on that of contemporary technology, the bane of a “dehydrated age” whose characteristic, ignoble activity involves “Quick-freezing dreams into realities.” This is movement without purpose and without conscience whose only constancy is to vulgarity—“till sometimes even the Muse, / In her transparent raincoat, resembles a condom” (CP, 214).

Rune eight is the exact center of the sequence, the void:

To go low, to be as nothing, to die,
To sleep in the dark water threading through
The fields of ice, the soapy, frothing water
That slithers under the culvert below the road,
Water of dirt, water of death, dark water.

(CP, 214-15).

The nadir is reached when the dark, filthy water, which is usually a crystalline symbol of hope in Nemerov's poetry, falls into the “pit where zero's eye is closed” (CP, 215).

Rune nine is paired with rune seven in that both deal with the ugliness of contemporary culture, sometimes in the same metaphorical idiom (“this dehydrated time”). Although both poems offer similar condemnations of the plastic age, rune nine rises marginally at the end (as opposed to the unrelieved gloom of rune seven) in the lyrical reference to “Mary and St. Christopher, who both / With humble power in the world's floodwaters / Carried their heavy Savior and their Lord” (CP, 215). Rune ten complements rune six in using the motif of “white water,” but whereas in six the water had been imprisoned in the snow, here it runs freely, “Rainbowed and clear and cold,” and the speaker confides pleasurably that its brilliance blinds him (CP, 215). Similarly the inert seed of earlier stanzas “unclenches in the day's dazzle” and the renewal of life is at last promised if not as yet assured. As opposed to the chaos of rune six, the scene draws the mind to perceive relationships among the wakening creatures and to accept the water's rushing as an “utterance,” which although “riddled,” being a rune of nature, speaks to the reviving consciousness of the narrator (CP, 216, 215).

While somewhat ambivalent in its themes, rune eleven exhibits an expansion in consciousness that is equivalent to the strengthened sun and water which have melted the winter ice. In this section the speaker is able to dream, a Nemerovian metaphor for the imagination, and the dream encompasses the whole mythic cycle of Judaic / Christian history. While this history is seen to culminate in the Crucifixion, it is at least coherent, reflecting the new power of the mind to discover and create relationships. This poem thus overcomes the desolate religious imagery of its opposite number, rune five.

Rune twelve, like its counterpart rune four, focuses on the seed under the earth. Here, though, the seed bursts into life like the miraculous “stone” in Exodus, (17:6) and seed and water stream joyously toward their gathering shapes and destinies. The promise of the seed is foreshadowed in the image of the tree, whose leafy branches symbolize the maturation of the motif of stillness in motion as well as providing an existential answer to the paradox contained therein. Reciprocally curving toward its origins, the tree conceals its “hidden grain” under its protective bark and thus resembles the undecipherable seed from which it grew (CP, 216).

Rune thirteen begins with an allusion to the bloody period of imperialism portrayed in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a reminder that Marlow was Nemerov's favorite fictional character as well as an echo of the trading motif of rune three.⁷ The stanza suspends the joyous mood of the immediately preceding runes, rather like the contrariness of spring itself, in a review of the savagery of human history:

To the ends of the earth
One many-veined bloodstream swayed the hulls
Of darkness gone, of darkness still to come,
And sent its tendrils steeping through the roots
Of wasted continents.

(CP, 217)

Saline imagery mixes with that of blood and the sea recalling the salt in rune twelve and the general use of this motif in The Salt Garden.

The fourteenth rune is the most artfully embroidered of all of the poems in the sequence. The link with its counterpart, rune two, is made in the allusions to the lord of Ithaca and the “damask” woven by Penelope. The damask is described as “either-sided,” relating it to the governing motif of this section, the meniscus, the two-sided lens of the eye. Because the meniscus is concave on one side and convex on the other, it allows the undulating waves of light to pass through as the eye focuses on some external object. The stimuli of the external world are symbolized by the water beetle, which in traveling over the meniscus “walks on drowning waters,” a foreshadowing of the later dark imagery of the shroud and of death. Death is here, though, associated with “unfathomable mercies” (CP, 217). The ubiquitous water imagery of the sequence is included in the “reveling stream,” which is associated with Penelope's tapestry and the motif of the design discovered in moving things.

The stanza is one of the most optimistic accounts of perception in Nemerov's writings. Apart from reflecting the renewed power of the speaker to draw significant relationships, the fourteenth rune depicts perception as a beautiful interchange between the mind and the external world across the fine membrane of the eye, which delicately balances the liquid sea of consciousness against the hard objects of the external world. In terms of its poise and complex interlacing of intricate metaphors, all of which interrelate effectively with the central poetic ideas of the sequence, the fourteenth rune is a stylistic tour de force.

The fifteenth and final rune is a blissful poem that describes the flowing of a spring stream. The scene has a sensuousness and natural vigor that contrast with the metaphysical stillness of rune one:

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 titled 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.

(CP, 218)

The stanza contains a diaphanous purity and mood of suppleness and reconciliation that temporarily outweigh though do not overcome the darkness of death, whose voice repeatedly enters the lines. The spell works and death is held at bay as long as the “secret” is kept. The secret is associated with the soft image of “herringbones of light / Ebbing on beaches,” the shifting signatures of the tide's movement. These hieroglyphic marks relate to a number of such marks in the poem, particularly those encased within the seed. The secret is identified as the self—“it is not knowing, it is not keeping, / But being the secret hidden from yourself” (CP, 218). Thus, the final lines symmetrically reemphasize that reflexive dimension of the sequence that had been introduced so conspicuously in rune one. The mind, though, is asked to harbor the secret without insisting on knowing it, for to do so is to invite death—not of the body since this is inevitable anyway but of the mind, which can burn itself out in turning its analytical powers relentlessly and obsessively upon itself.

“Runes” offers an absorbing exploration of the dilations of consciousness in concert with the movement and stillness of the external world. The sequence avoids the making of statements that have anything other than a structural and dramatic value as parts of the whole and it preserves throughout a sense of the hallowed mysteriousness of experience amidst the deft probing of the venturing mind, which seeks to lay open that mystery. Poetically, the sequence is filled with fine modulations in phrasing and prosody while the structure, admittedly ambitious, exhibits a sophisticated and rich network of thematic and formal crosscurrents. “Runes” reveals Nemerov at the height of his powers.

Other poems in New & Selected Poems are also of high quality. “Moment” is especially incisive, as can be seen in this extract:

In the saddle of space, where argosies of dust
Sail outward blazing, and the mind of God,
The flash across the gap of being, thinks
In the instant absence of forever: now.

(CP, 211)

Nemerov's cosmic projection of the moment is marked by the complex precision that is characteristic of his later poetry. “Mrs. Mandrill” is one of the most successful of the new poems. The poem shows the tension between the proud, civilized bearing of Mrs. Mandrill and the impending humiliation of death: “‘I had not thought of this,’ that lady said. / ‘Involved with crowsfeet, husbands, lawsuits, I / paid it no heed’” (CP, 224). Detached from the consolation of religion, she describes herself as ready for her final ordeal were it not for the prospect of pain. Nonetheless, she enters nature in death and thereby undergoes an ironic “conversion” as her “wet heart spills and goes to seed” (CP, 225). Her conversion is paradoxical since it is associated both with the “love of God” and with the literal metamorphosis of her body into compost. The two poles of her vision are finally united in an acquiescent sense of the unity of all life, something which she had lost sight of in her matronly years. Overall, “Mrs. Mandrill” exhibits the thematic depth and technical finesse that are characteristic of the new poems in this volume.

II THE NEXT ROOM OF THE DREAM

The Next Room of the Dream, published in 1962, contains a wealth of new poetry along with the biblical verse dramas Endor and Cain. The melancholy mood of the collection is echoed in these lines from “The Poet at Forty:” “Ah, Socrates, behold him here at last / Wingless and heavy, still enthusiast” (CP, 272). The “enthusiast” is present in Nemerov's thirst for knowledge, but this search is offset by an entrenched, metaphysical pessimism. The 1960s were not an especially happy period for Nemerov. There were marital difficulties in addition to other emotional setbacks, some of which are documented in the Journal of the Fictive Life. Many of the poems in The Next Room of the Dream are gloomy and anguished. The natural landscape is no longer the source of consolation it had been in preceding volumes. In “The First Point of Aries,” for example, nature impassively watches man “loiter on the road to death” (CP, 255). The poems are usually given autumnal settings. “A Spell before Winter,” “At a Country Hotel,” “Burning the Leaves,” “Elegy for a Nature Poet,” and “The Fall Again” are examples. The images in “The Fall Again” are uniformly somber, from the falling water that leaps in “shatterings” of light to the “drunken dark” of the heavy season in which the “rainbow shines no more” (CP, 262).

The joyful running water of Mirrors & Windows and of “Runes” has vanished. While the speaker observes nature with his usual attentiveness, it no longer speaks to him of hidden relationships and meanings. In “A Spell before Winter” a “knowledge glimmers in the sleep of things” and the speaker announces that he can “see certain simplicities / In the darkening rust and tarnish of the time.” The poem also contains the familiar, elemental motifs of water and stone, but here these motifs are submerged in the prevailing atmosphere of apprehension: “The old hills hunch before the north wind blows” (CP, 246).

A mood of dejection is felt as well in the antiheroic characters who are the protagonists of historical and religious poems like “Lot Later,” “The View from Pisgah,” and “A Predecessor of Perseus.” In a discontented review of contemporary culture Nemerov portrays Santa Claus as an “overstuffed confidence man” who “teaches the innocent to want” and thus keeps the “fat world rolling” (CP, 238). Santa Claus is part of the statue motif in Nemerov's writings and as such he symbolizes the power of the past, of the dead.⁸

The dominant motif of The Next Room of the Dream is the dreamscape. The title of the book is based on an experience Nemerov had in which he interpreted one of his dreams only to discover that he was still asleep and that the interpretation was a further stage of the dream.⁹ The experience is analogous to that described in “Winter Exercise” in which the speaker deliberately goes to sleep inside his dream in order to force himself to awaken. The title was drawn from the poem “To Clio, Muse of History.” The poem concerns a large statue of an Etruscan warrior that was discovered to have been a forgery and was consequently moved from its place of honor in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The statue had had a powerful imaginative impact on the speaker in his youth:

He, great male beauty
That stood for the sexual thrust of power,
His target eyes inviting the universal victim
To fatal seduction, the crested and greaved
Survivor long after shield and sword are dust,
Has now become another lie about our life.

(CP, 237)

Through the mysterious depth of art the warrior also taught the speaker “Unspeakable things about war that weren't in the books” (CP, 238).

The announcement of the forgery has the effect of invalidating both the statue's worth and part of the speaker's past. The poem thus symbolizes the arrogant destructiveness that can attend empirical knowledge, all in the “interest of truth.” In becoming a nonperson, historically, the warrior enters the “next room of the dream,” an ironic indication that factual history, unknown to itself, is also part of the dream of existence (CP, 237).

Glimpses of the dream are found in many of the poems. goldfish, for example, cruise the “ocean of an alien dream” (CP, 252). In “The Fall Again” the rain spills its “dreaming strength” upon the trees (CP, 262). In “Winter Exercise” a man out for a walk in a blizzard enters a world of fantasy, a “walk around a dream / Whose nonsense only waking could redeem” (CP, 248). The distinction between the actual world and the dream world is blurred in the poem so that the speaker is unsure which world he inhabits at any one moment, especially as the scenery and characters in the two worlds are similarly familiar and improbable. The same sort of uncertainty haunts the speakers in “The View from Pisgah” and “Lot Later.” The dream thus becomes the metaphor in this collection for perceived reality. It registers the mind's total response to its surroundings without the need for rational interpretation. In addition, in approaching experience in this way, Nemerov avoids becoming embroiled in epistemological discussions with himself about the validity of his perceptions. In a dream world all perceptions are equally valid.

This approach has the salutary effect on occasion of permitting Nemerov to record impressionistically the look of things with a hint of the old emblematic spirit, as can be seen in “Human Things”:

When the sun gets low, in winter,
The lapstreaked side of a red barn
Can put so flat a stop to its light
You'd think everything was finished.
Each dent, fray, scratch, or splinter,
Any gray weathering where the paint
Has scaled off, is a healed scar
Grown harder with the wounds of light.

(CP, 246-47)

The bittersweet evocativeness of the poem recalls Emily Dickinson.

In a number of poems Nemerov undercuts the solidity of the phenomenal world that people conventionally take for reality. The predation of the dragonfly larva, for example, an emphatically empirical phenomenon, is paradoxically described as the “small / Remorseless craving of his dream, / His cruel delight; until in May / The dream transforms him with itself” (CP, 255). In “Realities” a man and a woman find their behavior not only reflected in but dictated by scenarios enacted in dreams. There are occasions, however, when the vulnerability of the dream dimension is pointed up. In “De Anima” a woman stands before a window unable to see out to her lover because of the reflection of herself in the glass. She tries vainly to see beyond her own image and “half become another, / Admiring and resenting, maybe dreaming / Her lover might see her so” (CP, 250). The poem is an allegory of the soul's relationship with the external world: “We look to both sides of the glass at once / And see no future in it” (CP, 250). The importance of “De Anima” lies in its flawless poetic ambiguity and economy. The analogies between the lovers' drama and the anxieties of perception sustain the pathos of both situations. If the mind cannot know the external world, then the lovers cannot know each other. The effect of the poem is to broaden the drama of perception and to imbue it with poignancy.

In “At a Country Hotel” a widow watches her children sailing paper boats amidst the falling seeds of autumn while she dreams of her dead husband. As in “Realities” the pathos of the woman's situation is perceived by a third party, the poet, and it is he who sees the spirit of the dead husband responding to her thoughts but not getting through. He “dreams / A kindly harbor, delicate with waves, / Where the tethered dories, rocking, rise and fall, / Until the high sail heightens, coming home / To landfalls of the lily and the ash” (CP, 259). The only place where the living and the dead cross over is in the falling of the seeds, which signal both the “landfall” of death and the distant prospect of renewal. The poem has a tender lyricism that answers the objections of those who claim that Nemerov's poetry is overly cerebral.

The most recondite of the dream poems is “Polonius Passing through a Stage,” which attempts to see Polonius through his own eyes instead of through the unsympathetic viewpoint of Hamlet. Nemerov has described the poem's subject as about a “certain kind of incoherency” in the idea of character. Polonius sinks despairingly into a dream in search of his identity, held precariously to sanity only by his platitudinous advice to Laertes: “To Thine Own Self Be True.” The advice comes mockingly back to him with the implicit question: what is this self that one is to be true to? The poem explores the sources of Polonius's identity through various historical and literary allusions, the complexity of which have been testified to by Nemerov himself:

there are several fathers who briefly and glancingly appear through the confused mutterings of the poem: There is God the Father with his “Ten heavenly don'ts,” which are of course the Ten Commandments; there is Hamlet's father, who speakes sternly to his son about rotting at ease on Lethe wharf; there is King Lear, who in his madness proposes to shoe a troop of horses with felt in order to steal upon his sons-in-law and kill, kill, kill; finally, there is William Shakespeare, the father of Hamlet and so many others—exactly as, in a famous figure, Jehovah is the father of mankind generally.¹⁰

The parallel between Polonius and Lear as foolish old men underscores the sympathetic view that is taken toward Polonius generally in the poem. The “fathers” are of various kinds, but all shape human identity through the transmission of culture. Polonius's problem is that he is not clever enough to make much of his cultural heritage: “Try to be yourself,” he had been told in his youth. “I tried. Accumulating all those years / The blue annuities of silence some called / Wisdom” (CP, 252). The image is one of the most brilliant in Nemerov's poetry, effectively dramatizing the helpless state of Polonius, who has been shaped by others (God and Shakespeare) whose intentions he cannot fathom. As a result he shuffles through life on a thin program of expediency. The result is catastrophe. He “brings the house down” (CP, 253) not only in eliciting the audience's scorn but in bringing about his own death. Moreover, his death portends the collapse that awaits the bulk of mankind, which is equally blank about its own identity.

Society's dream is explored in “The Daily Globe.” The title invites a comparison between the saga of the newspaper's collective dream and the actual history of the globe. The paper overlooks the natural hum of life on the globe in favor of sensationalism, concentrating on the “paper flowers of catastrophe” (CP, 242). Even those back sections of the newspaper that purport to deal with the ordinary world, the social and obituary pages, reflect editorial distortion as the matrimonial pages contain pictures only of women and the obituary pages show only men.¹¹

The relationship of the dream to art is outlined in a number of poems. The alternative to an art based upon dream is realism, which is the subject of “Vermeer.” The Dutch painter is praised for addressing himself to “What is, and seeing it as it is” (CP, 257). The relationships in Vermeer's paintings are transparent and exact, part of a “holy mathematic.” Nemerov speaks of wanting to emulate the style of this great artist and he does strive for a sort of imagistic palpability in poems like “Goldfish,” but he does not persist. His interest in consciousness is too compelling. Thus, in “Goldfish” he slips into the ambiguities of metaphor and finally into the imaginative freedom of the dreamscape. Nevertheless, although he sympathizes with the poet who attempts to peel the landscape back in order to show it is a “story,” he is struck in “Elegy for a Nature Poet” by the un-storylike bluntness of the poet's death at the hands of nature (CP, 261). Characteristically, he turns toward the prospect of imaginative freedom—of the sort exemplified in “Metamorphoses,” for example—with a sense of pleasure but also with the mitigating sense that the artist's dreaming does not compensate for the absence of a knowledge of the external world.

Nemerov arrives at his ars poetica in “Lion & Honeycomb.” The title recalls Samson's encounter with the lion's carcass in which there was a colony of bees. The poem divides into two polarized sections. The opening lines show the speaker in a disaffected mood in which he seems tired of virtuosity and yet is similarly bored with those poets who stridently emphasize the “need for values” (CP, 277). Going his own way, he describes the role of poetry as the recording of the “moment's inviolable presence:”

The moment before disaster, before the storm,
In its peculiar silence, an integer
Fixed in the middle of the fall of things,
Perfected and casual as to a child's eye
Soap bubbles are, and skipping stones.

(CP, 277)

The final images from the child's world are the honey that mysteriously issues from the discontent of the earlier part of the poem. The problem of dualism in perception is skirted by focusing holistically on the experience of the present moment. The poet's skill, honed on the villanelle and the sonnet, will be used to describe the precise balance that the moment's particular vitality upholds against the running down of time.

Nevertheless, the pressure of the mind to understand and the simultaneous intuition that it never can, persist. The insatiable hunger for meaning coexists with the awareness that the meaning sought by the mind will inevitably turn out to be the meaning imposed by the mind. The governing motif in this perceptual drama is the eye. In “The Private Eye,” for example, the eye's “lust to apprehend” is described (CP, 268). In “To David, about His Education” Nemerov tells his son that the world is full of “mostly invisible things” and that there “is no way but putting the mind's eye, / Or its nose, in a book, to find them out” (CP, 268). Similarly, in “Idea,” although pure thought, a “lonely star,” is associated with madness in its inviolable separation from the external world, the “independent mind thinks on, / Breathing and burning, abstract as the air” (CP, 248). This ingrained perversity of the mind is given pathos by the ancillary observation that all “other stars are gone” (CP, 249). The collapse of traditional epistemological and ethical value systems has left the mind with nowhere to turn for light but to itself in a narcissistic drama that is as poignant as it is futile.

Though the mind thirsts for knowledge, the impact of knowledge on behavior is problematic, a further refinement of the pessimistic mood that pervades The Next Room of the Dream. “Somewhere” is the lament of a girl who “regrets her surrender with tears.” The lament is set against a background of famous women—“Yseult, Antigone, Tarquin with Lucrece, / The Brides in the Bath”—whose “careless love” led to similar misery (CP, 249). The implication is that the knowledge of the past offers no protection in the experience of the present. In “These Words Also” consciousness itself is seen to be the primary source of pain in contrast to the “toy kingdom” of the insects where “nobody thinks” (CP, 257).

The unfruitful relationship between thought and behavior is mirrored as well in The Next Room of the Dream in the verse drama Endor. The Old Testament king Saul observes wryly that those prohibitions that a man lays down for himself and others he “will do / One day, as if to spite himself” (CP, 278). The play involves a visit by the prophetic witch of Endor to Saul on the eve of his defeat and death. Structurally, the play is interesting because it juxtaposes an implacable determinism against man's emotional need not to know what the future holds in store. Like the other biblical play, Cain, which is set next to Endor, it lacks dramatic force. Nemerov's characteristic pursuit of fine shades tends to obviate the boldness, contrast, and intensity that are found in an effective play. Basically, both plays are deficient in action, that most indispensable ingredient of the drama.

Taken as a whole, however, The Next Room of the Dream is an impressive collection. It is impressive technically in exhibiting Nemerov's elegant mastery of a variety of forms, but it is also impressive in its intuitive acuteness. Karl Shapiro objected in 1967 that Nemerov's poems, while “shaped and sculptured to a turn,” were somewhat lacking in sympathy and tenderness.¹² As the previous discussion has suggested, if Nemerov is absorbed by the play of consciousness, the mood of these poems is anything but cerebral. Many of the poems, such as “At a Country Hotel” and “De Anima,” are deeply moving. If Nemerov's tone is fastidious and ironic, it is also compassionate. His importance as a poet derives in fact from his sophisticated application of language and rhythm to the articulation of remote and elusive emotional resonances.

III THE BLUE SWALLOWS

The Blue Swallows was published in 1967, five years after The Next Room of the Dream, a difficult five years, as can be seen in the Journal of the Fictive Life. Furthermore, Nemerov's appointments to the Library of Congress as poetry consultant and to the Department of English at Brandeis University did not provide the stimulus to his writing that Bennington had provided. In 1964 he gave some indication that he was in the process of taking stock of himself as a writer:

when the poet is older, if he has continued to write, it is at least probable that he will reach a point, either a stopping point or a turning point, at which he finds it necessary to inquire into the sense of what he has been doing, and now the question of poetic diction becomes for him extremely important, of imagination itself, of how thought ever emerged (if it did) out of a world of things.¹³

The passage indicates a pronounced tendency toward reflexiveness. For Nemerov the poetic process, especially the use of language, became a way of exploring the “question of primary perception” and of the “imagination itself.” Implicit in this exploration is his belief that the answers to these large questions will be the answer to the even larger question of what makes human life distinct from that of other organisms. Looked at in this way, his poetic preoccupations seem anything but narrow.

The high quality of the poems in The Blue Swallows was confirmed when the book received the Theodore Roethke Memorial Award for poetry. Thematically, the poems exhibit Nemerov's growing interest in science. Formally, the collection possesses a simplicity and abstractness that distinguish it from previous volumes. As opposed to the preponderance of narrative and descriptive elements in many of the poems of the 1950s, a number of the poems in The Blue Swallows come close to being statements. This is offset to some extent by a tendency toward brevity that reflects itself in the extensive use of short lines, sometimes involving a partial use of rhyme.

The atmosphere is generally pessimistic, although a few of the poems, like “Firelight in Sunlight” and “Interiors,” possess a sort of burnished warmth. In spite of the prevailing pessimism some of the poems are flooded with light, even if it is not always a saving light. The darkness in other poems comes largely from Nemerov's obsession with death, which is nowhere more present than in “Growing a Ghost,” a grim portrayal of his father's preparation for death. Against this background of death is Nemerov's bleak consciousness of the waning of his enchanted perception of nature. This can be seen in the opening lines of “The Companions”:

There used to be gods in everything, and now they've gone.
A small one I remember, in a green-gray stone,
Would watch me go by with his still eyes of a toad,
And in the branch of an elm that hung across the road
Another was; he creaked at me on windless days.

(CP, 355)

As the title of The Blue Swallows suggests, the relationship between man and nature is symbolized by birds. The relationship is generally portrayed as alien rather than hostile. In “The Distances They Keep,” for example, the sparrows and the pheasant show “no desire to become our friends” (CP, 348). The speaker speculates, however, that this reserve in nature may ironically be its protection. As pieces of a world “we're not responsible for,” natural creatures may through their shy separation from man “yet survive our love” (CP, 349). Among other things the poem reflects Nemerov's exposure to the ecological consciousness raising of the 1960s. The difference between the birds in The Blue Swallows and those in earlier volumes is that, even though they occupy the symbolic space between heaven and earth, they do not have the power to evoke emblematic versions of reality for the poet-observer. Nevertheless, they are associated with some of Nemerov's most hopeful imagery, especially that of trees. This symbolic association can be seen in poems like “The Cherry Tree” and “Learning By Doing.” In “Learning By Doing” the presence of man is felt as menacing and this again overshadows any disappointment about nature as alien.

One of the most significant poetic statements about nature occurs in the title poem “The Blue Swallows.” The poem opens with the speaker in the unusual position of looking down on some flying swallows. The darting of the swallows below reminds him of the mind's lowly location in the brain, weaving up “relation's spindrift web,” just as the swallows weave designs with their flying (CP, 397). The speed and complexity of the birds' flight, however, prevents him from seeing what these designs are. With sympathy but also with finality he rejects the “spelling” mind's tendency to delude itself into thinking it has discovered design in nature when in fact it has imposed it. Having rejected the mind's symbolizing, he invites it to consider a new role for itself:

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.

(CP, 398)

The mind is invited to enjoy the natural forms of the external world without seeing them as coauthors of treasured moments of consciousness. The mind is then urged to glory in itself as a genuine and prolific source of responsiveness and beauty.

The only emblems left to the poet are those that portray the alien and unfathomable workings of nature. Such an emblem exists in “Between the Window and the Screen,” which depicts the death of a trapped fly and the subsequent carrying off of its body by a diligent ant. “I helped not, nor oversaw the end,” writes Nemerov, “Ordained to the black ant / Bearing the thin-winged heavy death” (CP, 386-87). The martial imagery of the poem connects the incident with man's bloody history, but the detachment of the insect protagonists symbolizes a savage, inhuman innocence. A similarly neutral view of nature is taken in “The Mud Turtle.” Without any need for comment on Nemerov's part, the turtle generates metaphorical reverberations that expand outward from the center of the poem. The center of the poem is the moment when the turtle turns over and the speaker sees the swollen leech fastened “Softly between plastron and shell. / Nobody wants to go close enough / To burn it loose” (CP, 403). Left to itself, the turtle lumbers off bearing his “hard and chambered hurt / Down, down, down, beneath the water, / Beneath the earth beneath. He takes / A secret wound out of the world.”

As the incantatory, downward motion of the lines suggests, the secret lies beneath the beginnings of history and is merely recognizable though not explicable when a prehistoric creature like the dark mud turtle surfaces to remind us of what we do not otherwise remember. Like the fly and the ant, the mud turtle is an emblem of darkness, a “lordly darkness decked in filth,” a “black planet,” a “gloomy gemstone to the sun opposed” (CP, 402-03). The imagery magnifies the size of the turtle until it is adorned with a primeval magnificence. It emerges from its slimy womb for a transient moment as a mute and somber manifestation of the life process itself, a process that is mysteriously and pathetically flawed and yet that holds up its savage head for a moment before sinking back amorphously into its protoplasmic grave. The poem is as powerful and moving as anything Nemerov ever wrote.

In spite of the portrayal of nature as uncomfortably primitive, the mind in the later poems bends toward union with nature. In “Lobsters” the mind sinks obliviously into the “blind abyss” thinking there is “something underneath the world” (CP, 362). The “something” is identified as the “flame beneath the pot that boils the water.” The flame symbolizes both the predatory cycle that involves both man and lobster, and includes eventually whatever fathomless force it is that drives the world. In “Landscape with Figures” the middle-aged flirtation of a man and woman is seen in retrospect as a pleasurable falling into nature, into the “green sleep of the / Landscape, the hooded hills / That dream us up & down” (CP, 348). The conformity between man and nature is enforced artfully through the image of the hooded hills, which rise and fall like the inflamed breasts of Mrs. Persepolis. Caught by the tide of passion, the two consider entering nature's dream if they can persuade themselves to throw down the barrier of self-consciousness.

Similarly, in “The Beekeeper Speaks and Is Silent” the beekeeper imagines himself sinking into the well of being, becoming a bee first—

And then the single-minded hive itself,
And after that the blossoming apple tree
Inside the violation of the swarm—
Until I am the brute and fruitful earth,
Furred with the fury of the golden horde,
And hear from far upon the field of time
The wild relentless singing of the stars.

(CP, 402)

The mind's submersion in nature is given impetus by Nemerov's image of man as a marooned creature. In “The Human Condition,” for example, man is suspended absurdly between his mind and body. Increasingly in the poetry Nemerov wrote during the 1960s, man is depicted as a dangerous creature. The stream in “The Breaking of Rainbows,” for example, struggles to throw off the foulness that man has dumped into it and for the moment succeeds—“Leaping and dancing and singing, forgiving everything” (CP, 400). Man's abuse of nature is echoed in his abuse of himself. In “Enthusiasm for Hats” the quiet neighborhoods of the affluent are places where “people keep / Hidden in filth a broken relative” (CP, 368).

Nemerov devotes a complete section of The Blue Swallows—“The Great Society”—to a sardonic study of the grievous effects of social and political mismanagement. In “Christmas Morning” a conventional, snow-frosted village on a greeting card is juxtaposed with the news of a Buddhist priest immolating himself in protest against American involvement in the Vietnam war. The boldness of the language in the poems about society can be felt in “Money,” which scrutinizes the now defunct design of a U.S. nickel:

one side shows a hunchbacked bison
Bending his head and curling his tail to accommodate
The circular nature of money. Over him arches
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, and, squinched in
Between that and his rump, E PLURIBUS UNUM,
A Roman reminiscence that appears to mean
An indeterminately large number of things
All of which are the same.

(CP, 369-70)

The bluntness and colloquialism, which are characteristic of the later poetry, are given a sharp edge through the underlying anger. Just as the buffalo was pushed into extinction by greed, the great society is propelled narcissistically by the “circular nature” of money into a callous destructiveness that is only partially masked by a nebulous idealism.

The artists who become socially aware are no help, as can be seen in the satirical poem “A Relation of Art and Life.” The socially committed poets are depicted derisively as “savage sages” who seek to bring catastrophe under a “copyright, and doom to its publication” (CP, 376). The poets are flanked by similarly ineffectual academics, “master ham and doctor clown,” whose pedestrian prose equivocates about the “Word that was no word” (CP, 378).

Nemerov's approach to social injustice is sometimes oblique and muted. In “The Sweeper of Ways,” for example, the sweeping of leaves from public paths by the old Negro is both a reflection of his servile social status and of his dignity as part of the grace of autumn. In an article about the poem Nemerov compared the futility of the man's sweeping to the labors of Hercules.¹⁴ Nonetheless, the effective work of the sweeper in performing his seemingly hopeless task moves the speaker to an admiring recognition of the man's conscious adjustment to his lot. Burdened with a history of social inequality that he cannot avoid, the man expresses the only pride he is permitted to reveal in a skillful performing of his limited task. This is the meaning of the last line, which declares that he “can do nothing, and is doing that” (CP, 406). The poem succeeds by being an aesthetic study and a sensitive delineation of human dignity rather than by means of condemnation.

In spite of the somber shading given The Blue Swallows by the poems about nature and society, many of the lyrics are suffused with light. Nemerov focused on the capacity of light to act across distance in an invisible manner.¹⁵ Thus, light imagery is used to signify the mind as in “Interiors” and “Celestial Globe:” “The candle of the sun, / The candle of the mind, / Twin fires that together / Turn all things inside out” (CP, 395). Ironically, however, the mind's ability to illuminate by turning things inside out is contiguous with its mortality, as can be seen in “The Flame of a Candle:”

Miracle! the soul's splatter and flap
Aloft, enlightened lamb
That spurting through the beastly trap
Is able to say I am
That I am—
Our fathers lived on these
Desperate certainties;
Ate manna in the desert, it is said,
And are dead.

(CP, 386)

The soul's triumphant freeing of itself from the body like the flame arising from the wax is polarized against the certainty of death, which ironically reunites soul and body. The light of life is thus as frail as it is hallowed. In “Small Moment,” for example, it is described as a “light that shudders in the leaves” (CP, 407).

The intertwining of mind and sun is present throughout The Blue Swallows. In “Thought” the play of light through the foliage and among the “minnow waves” on the shore is likened to the mind passing across the world making its “differences / At last unselfishly / The casualties of cause” (CP, 393). Similarly, in “One Way” the mind, through its instrument language, is wedded to the phenomena of the external world like “sunlight / On marble, on burnished wood, / That seems to be coming from / Within the surface and / To be one substance with it” (CP, 395). At the end of the poem thought is described as the fire in the diamond, which itself stands small and alone against the encroaching gloom of death and meaninglessness.

Increasingly the poems picture the world in scientific terms. “The First Day” involves a witty juggling of the questing mind and the intractable external world:

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.

(CP, 345)

What makes the external world appear intelligible is the lens of the eye, which like a movie 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.” The lines contain strong echoes of the creation story in Genesis. The eye's movie creates a pseudoreality that gives the illusion of progressing through real time and space. Primitive culture, which is dominated by the imaginative simplicity of religion, is symbolized by the black and white silent film. Modern culture is more subtle, and is represented by the color, sound film.

The wit of the poem lies in the playing off of scientific truths against poetically imaginative ones. The initial impression of the mind's clumsiness in arriving at an exact knowledge of the cosmos gives way to a qualified affirmation of its own powers: “For ‘nothing in the universe can travel at the speed / Of light,’ they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed.” With its own projector, the imagination, which traditionally lives in the shadows, records its version of reality. Nemerov sets limits on the mind, however, by noting dryly that the “Fall already is recorded on the film,” an ironic comment on the retarding effect of cultural tradition on the progress of knowledge.

A simpler use of science occurs in “Firelight in Sunlight.” The winter scene combines brilliant exterior sunlight with the fire of apple logs inside. The scene evokes a sense of the whole cycle of nature since the logs in generating heat are merely releasing the original energy of the sun that had been transferred to them in the past. Therefore, there is what the speaker regards as a noteworthy meeting in the poem between the old sun, supposedly spent, and the new, which falls in “silvered gold / Through the fern-ice forest” on the window (CP, 407). The recovery of the old sun provides the speaker with hope that the mysteries of man's past and of his nature may be similarly released through the “logs” of language that have been used in constructing literary masterpieces. The meditation offers the speaker hope that his own poetic language will cross time and matter releasing its light in the minds of future generations.

“This, That & the Other” involves a debate between a scientific realist (This) and a Romantic (That). In order to break the stalemate between their respective viewpoints, each yields a bit and attempts to look out at the world from the other's point of view. Eventually each is able to correct the bias in his vision without depending on the other for help. That, for example, pulls up at one point recognizing that he is about to revert to subjectivism by straying from physics into theology. Their reconciliation is sealed in the mutual recognition that a mysterious “Other” is involved in reality in a way that makes both their viewpoints simultaneously inconclusive and promising: “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” (CP, 360).

If Nemerov found science stimulating within its range, so too were myth and religion. In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” man turns passionately and repeatedly toward myth in order to satisfy some long forgotten need in himself. Although mythic vision is viewed as childlike, it is also a paradigm of all knowledge. This can be seen in the seriocomic poem “Projection” in which sophisticated adults desperately try to attain the child's clarity of vision:

                                        To stand here, on these ladders,
Dizzy with fear, not daring to look down,
Glue on our fingers, in our hair and eyes,
Piecing together the crackling, sticky sheets
We hope may paper yet the walls of space
With pictures any child can understand.

(CP, 389)

Similarly, in “To a Scholar in the Stacks” a professor enters the world of myth through the ostensibly arid route of the library only to find his imagination enlivened so that the bookstacks become the labyrinth of Crete and he himself is transformed into the legendary Theseus. As the scholar slips into the desiccated rituals of his profession, he loses his earlier potent sense of imaginative contact with myth. The conclusion of the poem suggests, however, that this sense will return in periods of “darkness and deep despair.” At such a time the scholar will become Theseus again and will become 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” (CP, 361). The “ingener” is Daedalus, who symbolizes the artist and who is therefore the sublime apex of the scholar's metamorphosis.

Myth excites the imagination into perceiving history as a “dream within a dream” as the speaker puts it in “Departure of the Ships” (CP, 364). For the imagination the external world is an unfolding and yet cyclical story which speaks to the child within even the most cultivated observer. For science there is no story, only painstaking descriptions based upon minute observation of the hard shell of the external world. For the mind that has been floating in the reveries of myth and the thin air of abstractions, the sharply visualized descriptions of science are refreshingly concrete. The limitation of science as opposed to myth is that it tends to atomize knowledge as can be seen in “In the Black Museum” where it shears off the diversity of relationships between things until at last there is “only one of everything” (CP, 389).

In combining the data of scientific observation with his usual skeptical exploration of perception, Nemerov addresses himself in The Blue Swallows to issues that are at the forefront of contemporary thought. The risk with this sort of poetry is that it can become esoteric and sententious. On the whole he evades this problem by creating tensions within the poems between belief and skepticism, empiricism and Romanticism, and mind and feeling that turn the poems into absorbing dramas of the subjective life. In addition, by making the poems the subjective adventures of his observers, he hopes to generate a picture of the subjective life that can become a basis, perhaps the only basis possible, for unity between himself and the reader.

Technically, The Blue Swallows exhibits an ambitious range of poetic forms. In addition to the usual blank verse, for example, there are a number of short-lined poems, including both trimeter and dimeter. The rhythm of all of the poems is more subtly flexible and colloquial than ever. Nemerov shows himself as much a master of baroque art as ever, but he shows a keener interest than in earlier volumes in matching his complex forms to the exigencies of his themes. In “Sarajevo,” for example, he uses the intricate form of the sestina. In this form the same last words are used in different order to end the lines in each of the six stanzas. The fastidious elegance of the form gives the poem the appearance of a minuet and this skillfully mirrors the mood of pre-1914 aristocratic Europe which is the portentous subject of the poem. The poem is one of a number of remarkable technical achievements in The Blue Swallows. With justified assurance Nemerov shows himself equally at home with the formalities of past poetic styles and the more relaxed prosody of the present.

IV GNOMES & OCCASIONS

Gnomes & Occasions, published in 1973, is a slim volume though not a meager one. At the same time, considering that six years had passed since the publication of The Blue Swallows, the fifty-nine short lyrics in Gnomes & Occasions do not strike one as prodigious. Nemerov was not troubled by personal problems in this period. Moreover, he had settled happily into the Department of English at Washington University in St. Louis. In addition his work was finally beginning to receive the sort of critical attention it deserved. He did, though, experience the sort of block that had earlier overtaken him as a writer of fiction and that he discussed in Journal of the Fictive Life.

The poems are varied and uneven. About half of them are epigrammatic “gnomes.” Some, like “Lines & Circularities” and “The Painter Dreaming in the Scholar's House,” are substantial and among Nemerov's best works. The subjects vary a great deal—riddles, science, art, the war in Vietnam, his sister's suicide, autumn. The diction and syntax continue to move toward informality and simplicity and yet the verse is somewhat austere. The mood, however, is mellow in comparison with The Blue Swallows and The Next Room of the Dream. This is especially apparent in the geniality of poems like “Extract from Memoirs”:

Surely one of my finest days, I'd just
Invented the wheel, and in the afternoon
I stuck a bit of charcoal under the bark
And running it along a wall described
The cycloid curve. When darkness came, I sang
My hymn to the great original wheels of heaven,
And sank into a sleep peopled with gods.

(CP, 415)

The mellowness of the mood proceeds from an underlying tone of acceptance that had replaced the pessimism of the 1960s. Also noteworthy is the soft intermingling of scientific and religious perspectives.

The changed mood is reflected in the relaxed approach to spirituality in “A Memory of My Friend” and in the serene acknowledgment of the mind's isolation from the senses and the external world in “Analogue”:

You read the clicking keys as gibberish
Although they strike out sentences to sense.
So in the fluttering leaves, the shoaling fish,
The continuum nondenumerable and dense,
Dame Kind keeps rattling off her evidence.

(CP, 442)

The mind's isolation is balanced by the speaker's confidence that nature is eloquently writing some sort of story and that this is imprinted hierographically on his own senses. His connection with nature is thus absolute even if it is incomplete.

In his fifties Nemerov felt grateful to be writing any poetry at all, and this underlying feeling of gratitude seeps into most of the poems in Gnomes & Occasions. He told an interviewer in 1973 that the writing of poetry was a “great privilege.”¹⁶ The joy of composing comes across warmly in jeweled miniatures like “The Crossing,” “Late Butterflies,” and “Above”:

Orange translucent butterflies are cruising
Over a smoke of gnats above the trees
And over them the stiff-winged chimney swifts
Scythe at the air in alternating arcs
Among the roofs where flights of pigeons go
(slate as the roofs above and white below)

(CP, 443)

The collection abounds with aphorisms and riddles. The aphorisms found in poems like “Philosophy” and “The Death of God” are set against the riddles in poems like “Power to the People” and especially “Quaerendo Invenietis.” Nemerov's fascination with riddles stems from his sense that they represent the “very basis of poetry.”¹⁷ What he meant is that, like memorable poetry, good riddles remain mysterious even when the answer to them is known. This can be felt in the poem “Mystery Story,” where the answer to the riddle is provided at the outset. Riddles also resemble poems in that the answers precede the questions. The answer to the riddle is like the title of a poem, which often becomes meaningful (without losing its mysteriousness) only when one has worked carefully through the poem. Nemerov likes the surprise of riddles, which he sees as paralleling poetry in revitalizing experience by altering its mundane appearance.

“Quaerendo Invenietis” (Seek and ye shall find), contains three riddles. The answer to the first riddle is the alphabet (“I am the combination to a door / That fools and wise with equal ease undo”). The answer to the second is the tone arm of a record player (“It is a spiral way that trues my arc”). The answer to the third riddle is a sentence (“Without my meaning nothing, nothing means” CP, 413). Significantly, two of the answers have to do with language, which for Nemerov is the supreme riddle in its mysterious reconciliation of the mind and the external world. Considering the prosaic nature of the answers, the riddles in “Quaerendo Invenietis” contain oddly mystical language. Even the tone arm shares in this heightening as it is visualized moving toward “central silence.” The image suggests religious depths that seem curiously out of place. They can be explained by the attitude of the observer in the poem, an attitude that can be described as a Taoist concentration on the flowering of even the most ostensibly mediocre manifestation of being. In some respects this is reminiscent of the contemplative serenity in the poems of the 1950s, but the mood is more hallowed and austere than in these earlier volumes.

In harmony with this shift in mood the poems in Gnomes & Occasions show a relaxed acceptance of the suggestiveness the mind perceives as latent in the ordinary workings of the external world. In “Lines & Circularities,” for example, the speaker listens to the music of Bach on the record player in a way that recalls the riddle in “Quaerendo Invenietis”:

I watch the circling stillness of the disc,
The tracking inward of the tone-arm, enact
A mystery wherein the music shares:
How time, that comes and goes and vanishes
Never to come again, can come again.

(CP, 416)

The rebirth of Bach on the record involves a blending of sublimity (the music) and the mundane (the record player). For this reason the occurrence is called a “silly” miracle, which, although it will not “save” the world, is nonetheless “miraculous” (CP, 416-17).

Nemerov retained his sense of the ruined world, as can be seen in “The Puzzle,” but he responds gratefully to life in these poems not only in spite of but because of its flaws. “Snowflakes” is an example:

Not slowly wrought, nor treasured for their form
In heaven, but by the blind self of the storm
Spun off, each driven individual
Perfected in the moment of his fall.

(CP, 440)

The return to nature as emblematic is as striking as Nemerov's renewed loyalty to the only life he knows—even if that life is thought to be illusive. There is as well an attitude of undisturbed indifference to the epistemological doubts that scarred the poems of the 1960s. The doubts persist, as can be seen in “Knowledge,” but they are absolved in a benedictory calm that is diffused throughout the collection. The mind's relationship with nature is informed by a feeling of comfort as in “Beginner's Guide” and “The Poet as Eagle Scout”:

I said to the stone, “Am I standing all right?”
“How's this for running?” I said to the stream.
“Is it bright enough for you?” I asked the light.
And I told my dream, “You're a damn fine dream.”

(CP, 441)

The imagination's revived pleasure in its surroundings encompasses art as well. In “Breughel: The Triumph of Time” the world is depicted as a “ramshackle traveling show” that cyclically and arbitrarily “does whatever's done and then undoes it” (CP, 417-18). “The World as Breughel Imagined It” presents a similarly bizarre portrait of reality in which whatever is “proverbial becomes pictorial” (CP, 429). Thus, if people proverbially go “crawling up a rich man's ass, they must be seen to do so.” After the proverbial lore that underlay the paintings has been forgotten by subsequent generations, Breughel becomes difficult to decipher. Nonetheless, through the durable clarity of art a modern observer can intuit the meanings so that, struck with the aptness of some of Breughel's pictorial allegories, he will take Breughel's word in “many matters wherein we have no further warrant / Than that his drawings draw enciphered thoughts from things” (CP, 429). The mind gravitates toward art because unlike the opaque phenomenal world it possesses a meaning whose value is axiomatic and which does not depend upon being completely understood.

“The Painter Dreaming in the Scholar's House” was written in memory of the modernist painters Paul Klee and Paul Terence Feeley and was read at the inauguration of the president of Boston College in 1968. The poem thus has the amplitude of a formal public statement. The meditation arises principally from Nemerov's reflections of Klee's paintings, but he obviously feels a strong sense of identification with Klee's breadth as both artist and scholar. Moreover, both poet and painter depend upon the mediation of language, whether language take the form of brushstroke or word. Similarly, the mind of the painter, like that of the poet, goes out into the forms of the surrounding world—into a tree, perhaps—where it become “incarnate” (CP, 435). At that point the painter paints the tree, which is then indistinguishable from his charged idea of it. The poem ends with the “light” of the external world going forth in search of the eye, a paradoxical reversal of the earlier part of the poem, which focused on the eye and the mind in pursuit of the external world. The eye of the artist plays so important a role that the world is vacant without it. Instinctively realizing this, as it were, the world seeks out the eye in an attempt to confirm its own being.

Nemerov continues to rely on science in Gnomes & Occasions to provide him with metaphor. In “Solipsism and Solecism” the light cast by the sun is seen to be solipsistic and therefore a model of the mind. The sun sees only what it illuminates and therefore unlike the moon has no knowledge of shadow or night. Elaborating whimsically on the motifs of solitariness and light, the poem contains a glaring solecism in the last line: “He'd be appalled at what he's done” (CP, 414). The grammatical error echoes the note of dislocation that issues from the ironical fact of the sun's blindness with respect to the world of shadows. The awkwardness of this defect in vision is wittily symbolized in the solecism. The notion of two-sided realities is also found in “The Tapestry,” “Hide & Seek,” and “Creation Myth on a Moebius Band.” “Creation Myth on a Moebius Band” shows Nemerov using a scientific metaphor for his longstanding inside/outside motif, a variation of which appears in the top/bottom motif of “Solipsism & Solecism.” A. F. Moebius (also spelled Möbius) was a nineteenth-century German mathematician who developed a mathematical demonstration to form a continuous one-sided surface in which the inside literally becomes the outside. The Moebius strip thus resembles language in allowing the outside world to pass to the inside and vice-versa. The poem illustrates Nemerov's sense of the continuity between being and consciousness as opposed to the biblical notion of a single act of creation by an isolated divine consciousness.

The inside/outside motif is also elaborated in “Questions” where the “radar of the mind” receives back what it sends, “but modified. / The breath of language goes out on the wind, / The drumming on the eardrum comes inside” (CP, 442). The motif is given ironic treatment in “Druidic Runes.” The poem recounts the history of astronomy from the simple observations of the Druids, made with the naked eye, to the sophisticated technology of the radio astronomers of today. In radio astronomy the mind goes forth “without the eye” into the “realm of number pure” and significantly its purely mathematical idiom surpasses the range and precision of the eye and the telescope. Thus, the outside can only become the inside when the external data are of limited complexity: “It was as if the lip / Of silence learned to intimate / In integers that it might mate / Its dark selfhood to any mind / Consenting to go blind” (CP, 419). The aesthetically satisfying vividness of the eye's patterning is offset by its simplicity, a state of affairs that Nemerov appears finally willing to accept with equanimity.

Gnomes & Occasions contains a number of topical poems on American society including “Power to the People,” “The Poverty Programs,” and “On Getting Out of Vietnam.” Nemerov's skepticism about the value of such poems is balanced by his reluctance to suppress poetic ideas which come to him—for fear that he would thereby shut off the flow of inspiration. The best of the social satires is “One Moment in Eternity.” The poem focuses on the exclamations of two altar boys, who are more impressed with the luxurious Cadillac hearse outside of their church than by the grandeur of immortality that is symbolized by the funeral Mass within. The overpowering of religion is dryly signified by the chrome insignia on the tip of the car's gleaming hood, “sighting between the up/spreading wings of a silver angel taking off” (CP, 414).

The poem possesses the conciseness and urbanity that are characteristic of Gnomes & Occasions. With the exception of “The Painter Dreaming in the Scholar's House,” which was composed for a public occasion, the poems show Nemerov striving for brevity in an effort to sum up. This affects both the small, exquisite nature poems and the more abstract meditations on the mind, art, and society. The unfolding explorations of earlier collections are supplanted by the compactness of retrospective vision as Nemerov screens out all but what is essential. This results in a powerful intensity and singleness of effect.

V THE WESTERN APPROACHES

The Western Approaches, which appeared in 1975, came as a joyful surprise to Nemerov, who feared that he might have been drying up: “I was fully convinced that I was ‘past it’ through with writing and that nothing would ever happen to me again. And then suddenly in my fifty-fifth year last summer, I produced a book of poems.”¹⁸ Although the book was almost completely written in the one summer of 1974, it is a full one in comparison with Gnomes & Occasions. Nemerov commented a few years later on the unpredictable ebb and flow of the creative impetus in his case: “Writing is either easy or impossible. I can't turn a poetry crank and make it happen. I have my bad spells. But when it happens, it happens fast.”¹⁹ The mood of The Western Approaches reflects his consciousness of being “happier” and “much less introspective” than he had been in the mid-1960s, when he wrote the Journal of the Fictive Life.²⁰ Most of the poems are short lyrics. He had come to dislike the amplifying of some of his fellow poets, as he indicates in “Strange Metamorphosis of Poets:” “From epigram to epic is the course / For riders of the American winged horse” (CP, 451).

The title of The Western Approaches was derived from the British name for the World War II convoy route from Iceland to Liverpool. In RAF Coastal Command Nemerov flew the half of this route closest to England in a Wellington bomber. The flights took him past the Skerries, rocky islands off the Hebrides. The Skerries are mentioned in the title poem in connection with an old Icelandic myth that depicted Hamlet as a sea god. In a letter Nemerov has explained the obscure lines about the nine maidens and the Skerries in this way: “The bit about the nine maidens grinding Hamlet's meal suggests one of those stories about how the sea turned salt after some fall from paradise in which it ground the meal for bread (and for free); in my poem I assume a second fall after which the sea ground only stone (it is reported that the rote off the Skerries can toss ninety ton boulders over (or through) the lighthouse tower.”²¹

The title poem sets the mood for the collection in its preoccupation with death and entropy. The fatigue and determinism that overshadow the poem are offset, however, by the equally strong and valid perception that life is forever beginning anew:

How a long life grows ghostly towards the close
As any man dissolves in Everyman
Of whom the story, as it always did, begins
In a far country, once upon a time,
There lived a certain man and he had three sons …

(CP, 464)

The underlying balance of the poem is upheld by the acuity of vision that enables a middle-aged man to finally understand the experience of his youth, just as Nemerov finally came to understand the meaning of the war he had fought in many years before.

The poems in The Western Approaches are grouped under three headings. “The Way” is the broadest of these headings and deals with the way man lives in society—as opposed to the way he ought to live. “The Ground” contains poems about nature for the most part and “The Mind” deals with the familiar themes of perception and culture. The entropic theme of the running down of the world circulates through all three sections, most conspicuously perhaps in the autumnal emphasis and in the allusions to the second law of thermodynamics.

The mood of enervation is mitigated by the underlying tone of resistance that is implicit in the opening anecdote about the dying man who refuses to listen to the revelations of the angel of death: “Among all the hosts of the dead,” Nemerov notes, “he is the only one who does not know the secret of life and the meaning of the universe; whence he is held in superstitious veneration by the rest” (CP, 449). For Nemerov the man is an archetype of the artist, who also refuses to succumb to knowledgeable clarifications of the world by either science or religion in the face of a lingering mystery that clings to experience that has supposedly been explained.

A similar attitude of resistance surfaces caustically in poems like “He” and “Capitals,” which polarize doctrinaire abstractions with the subtler, indefinite intimations that arise from experience. Thus, in attaching himself to institutionalized religion, the hero of “He” is paradoxically described as having “lost his faith” (CP, 457). As Nemerov felt himself aging and coming closer to death, he became irritable about the demands of religion, as can be seen in the biting conclusion of “Einstein & Freud & Jack”: “What God wants, don't you forget it, Jack, / Is your contrite spirit, Jack, your broken heart” (CP, 459). The poem is a good example of Nemerov's use of the colloquial, low style.

The heavy presence of death and dying is felt in “Flower Arrangements” in which hospital patients are compared to the cut flowers that have been set next to them. The speaker ignores the conventional symbolism of the flowers in order to focus on their severed and therefore doomed state. Like the patients they are in “death already though they know it not” (CP, 474). The theme of death is taken up as well in the poems about autumn. “Again” is probably the most striking of the autumnal lyrics:

And through the muted land, the nevergreen
Needles and mull and duff of the forest floor,
The wind go ashen, till one afternoon
The cold snow cloud comes down the intervale
Above the river on whose slow black flood
The few first flakes come hurrying in to drown.

(CP, 476)

With its impeccable imagery and finely modulated rhythm the poem recalls both the evocative settings and fluidity of the poems of the 1950s. The use of sound is particularly impressive, the muffled sounds of the “u” and short “o”, which capture the apprehensiveness and stillness, skillfully set against the long “o” of the concluding lines, which signal the approach of winter and the terrifying finality of death.

Reflecting Nemerov's instinct for balance, the hand of death is usually held in check by opposing forces. In “Near the Old People's Home,” for example, the “turned-off fountain with its basin drained” is compensated for by the sparrows and the winter sun (CP, 478). In “Equations of a Villanelle” death, “the candle guttering to naught,” is portrayed as forgiving the “breath within us for the wind without,” a hopeful recognition of the beneficent continuity of being: “What if the same be true of world and thought?” (CP, 477). The balanced structure of the poems is nowhere better exemplified than in “A Cabinet of Seeds Displayed.” The seed is one of Nemerov's emblematic symbols for the poised state between life and death that is epitomized in the moment. Trees fulfill a similar function in “The Consent.” The trees are the ancient Chinese ginkgo trees whose fan-shaped leaves adorn the dust jacket and title page of The Western Approaches. The exoticism of the trees is balanced by their foul odor as is made clear in “Ginkgoes in Fall.” The leaves of the trees, which flank the main walkway of the quadrangle at Washington University in St. Louis, enact the death of the year with a mysterious unanimity that is unrelated to temperature, wind, rain or any other visible cause: “What use,” Nemerov asks, “to learn the lessons taught by time, / If a star at any time may tell us: Now” (CP, 476). The event is a humbling one in terms of human knowledge, but it does cast its own compensatory spell.

Like the seed, the tree is suspended delicately between life and death, stillness and motion, and the one and the many with the solid strength of the bole played off symbolically against the tremulous shivering of the foliage. Trees are everywhere in The Western Approaches, their ubiquity being a reflection of their status as one of the “shapes of our Protean nature” as Nemerov puts it in “The Thought of Trees.” Since the mind itself evolved from “Protean nature,” he concludes that the “trees are within us, having their quiet irrefutable / say about what we are and may become” (CP, 496). Similarly, in “A Common Saw” man is portrayed as bound to nature in the way King Lear was bound to the wheel of fire. Man is described as twined “round the pinkie and pinned under the thumb / Of Dame Kind dear and beautiful and dumb” (CP, 478).

Nature's unconscious fecundity and dominance are distinguished in The Western Approaches from the rigid cosmology and ossified ethics imposed by formal religion. Moreover, man is perceived as dependent upon nature, whereas, although he may in nature be a religious creature, he is viewed as having a tentative relationship to particular religious systems. His essential relationship to nature is expressed in “The Dependencies” where the speaker passively observes the nighthawks migrating south, unable to do much more about the world than attend to its beauty and violence and prepare himself for those outer and inner alterations which the seasons will inevitably bring about. Thus, seasonal fluctuations become the “private rites / And secret celebrations of the soul” as the speaker puts it in “Walking Down Westgate in the Fall” (CP, 474).

In spite of the thorough pessimism of poems like “Waiting Rooms” most of the poems hold to a dialectical format. Thus, the theme of erosion is characteristically offset by a depiction of life's resilience. This can be seen in the use of the motif of the second law of thermodynamics, which focuses on the irreversible loss of heat through the expenditure of energy—the running down of the world; “We're going to our doom in supreme comfort, compared to any other world you could name.”²² The second law is pictured as at least temporarily halted, however, in poems like “Drawing Lessons” where water, as opposed to land, has the “wondrous property / And power of assembling itself again / When shattered” so that the second law “seems to reverse itself, (CP, 498). The land with its “decay, and dust that blows away” becomes a symbol of the empirical world. The sea, on the other hand, a symbol of the imagination and of the recesses of being that lie beyond knowledge, is portrayed as a “little more mysterious than that.” The poem thus affirms the spirit and its freedom from the attrition implicit in the second law of thermodynamics.

Nemerov sees the entropic process of the second law as balanced to a limited extent by the conclusions of Darwin.²³ Darwin's scenario of the spiraling evolution of being means that if the universe is running down in most fundamental respects it is also simultaneously throwing up higher forms of life. The pull of the second law is dominant, however, as can be seen in “Route Two” with its absurd billboard message—“Save While You Spend”—which Nemerov passed while driving along a secondary highway: “As if one saw / A way to beat the Second Law / By pouring money down the drain / As long as it was one's own drain” (CP, 456). “Playing Skittles” and “Gyroscope” describe a delicate navigational instrument, which becomes another Nemerovian symbol of stillness in motion. The gyroscope's “unshivering integrity” makes it appear to be in an apparent state of perpetual motion, but it eventually wobbles and “drops dead into its own skeleton” (CP, 501).

An analogous decline is visualized in “First Snow” with the world eventually becoming enshrouded in a final snow that seals the “sleepy cities up, / Filling their deep and canyoned avenues / Forever” (CP, 480). Here, though, the speaker resiliently shrugs off the feeling of portent as an example of nineteenth-century hysteria and focuses instead on the present moment with its softly falling snow that “hisses through the whitening grass, / And rattles among the few remaining leaves.” In “Two Pair” the first and second laws of thermodynamics are interlaced with the Mosaic first and Christian second laws of religion in ironic symmetry. Playing on the theme of conservation that is implicit in the first law of thermodynamics, Nemerov writes: “The first pair tells us we may be redeemed, / But in a world, the other says, that's doomed” (CP, 457). The poem implies that the hopeful vision of the Jews, the old law, was somehow lost amidst the mortifications of its Christian sequel.

A number of the poems employ elaborate scientific conceits. The laws of relativity are applied with great metaphorical freedom in “Fugue,” which attempts to illuminate the human perception of time. Because of the close relationship between music and mathematics the title of the poem has the effect of reconciling discrete kinds of perception and experience. The poems are studded with occasional metaphors that reflect a scientific perspective. In “Figures of Thought,” for example, the mind's capacity to discover analogies is pictured as the laying of a “logarithmic spiral on / Sea-shell and leaf alike, and see it fit” (CP, 472).

In general Nemerov's view of science is fairly tough minded in spite of his reliance on it in the later poems. In “Seeing Things” the narrator has a view of a marsh on a summer evening that strikes him as the closest he has ever come to “seeing things / The way the physicists say things really are” (CP, 479). What he sees is a ring of smoke around a tree that gives it the appearance of being on fire but which when looked at through binoculars turns out to be a cloud of gnats:

Their millions doing such a steady dance
As by the motion of the many made the one
Shape constant and kept it so in both the forms
I'd thought to see, the fire and the tree.
Strike through the mask? you find another mask,
Mirroring mirrors by analogy
Make visible. I watched till the greater smoke
Of night engulfed the other, standing out
On the marsh amid a hundred hidden streams
Meandering down from Concord to the sea.

(CP, 479-80)

The binoculars appear to dramatize the corrective vision of science. In the conclusion, however, science is seen as just another “mask.” Furthermore, the enlarged perspective of the final lines places both the ordinary vision of the eye and the mechanical vision of the binoculars against a background whose cosmic mysteriousness outweighs the differences between the eye and the telescope.

In “Einstein & Freud & Jack” science is described as beginning and ending “in myth” (CP, 459). Nemerov's irreverence toward science reaches its nadir in “Cosmic Comics”: “Where Moses saw the seat of God / Science has seen what's just as odd, / The asshole of the universe” (CP, 451). If formal religion fails because of its rigidity, science fails in the gross application of its methods to reality. Nevertheless, Nemerov appreciates the freshness of the perspectives provided by science. In “The Weather of the World,” for example, satellite cameras literally capture the face of the planet giving it an unexpected affective dimension:

Containing contradictions, tempers, moods,
Able to be serene, gloomy or mad,
Liable to huge explosions, brooding in
Depressions over several thousand miles
In length and trailing tears in floods of sorrow
That drown the counties and the towns.

(CP, 483)

Reflecting a similar originality in perspective, in “The Backward Look” satellite man looks back longingly to earth, a “small blue agate in the big black bag” and hopes for a safe return from the precariousness of space in the “hand / Of mathematics” (CP, 470).

When liberated from scientism, science becomes simply another pathway for the mind, whose powers are celebrated in the final section of The Western Approaches. In “There” and “The Spy” the immense mysteries of space and the earth are compared paradoxically with the comparatively minuscule arena of the skull:

Behind the brow, a scant deep inch away,
The little nutshell mystery meditates
The spiral fire of the soul;
Through eyes as innocent and wide as day
It spies upon the true appearances of
Our sensible old world.

(CP, 502-03)

By expanding the size of the eye to be as “wide as day” in the final lines, Nemerov manages metaphorically to dramatize the awesome power of the “nutshell” eye and cerebrum.

Nemerov not only abandons his pessimism about the mind's limitations in The Western Approaches, but he suggests in poems like “TV,” which deals playfully with idealistic metaphysics, that all life depends on someone's looking at it, just as the world on television implies a cameraman. Similarly, the fictional universe in “Reflexion of a Novelist” depends upon a sustaining ultimate consciousness. Such an ultimate consciousness could never be understood by the characters in a novel, nor by living men, for that matter, because of the very nature of creation—their creator “hovering there / A dimension past the space in which they speak” (CP, 483). The mind's creativity is honored in a number of poems, notably in “The Makers,” “Plane,” “Conversing with Paradise,” “The Four Ages,” and “Playing the Inventions.” In “Playing the Inventions” Nemerov marvels at the sublime fugues of Bach. The music reflects the adventurousness of a mind that “cannot know / Except by modeling what it would know” (CP, 489). Having thus struck out into new territory, the mind of Bach curves back upon its new theme and upon itself in a pattern in which the melody's “sides and the roof and floor are mirrors / With some device that will reflect in time / As mirrors do in space.”

The mirror motif lacks the pessimism that characterized Nemerov's earlier epistemological excursions. One reason for this is that the mind's reflexive curving upon itself, which underlies art, is perceived as analogous to the shape of external reality. In “The Metaphysical Automobile” the shortest way between two points on the earth, the speaker explains, happens to be a curve:

                                        And so do song
And story, winding crank and widdershins,
Still get there first, and poetry remains
Eccentric and odd and riddling and right,
Eternal return of the excluded middle.

(CP, 453)

In these late poems Nemerov simply recognizes that it is mind that had chiefly captured his interest all along and that the vast brow of the external world pales in comparison with the mind that illuminates it. Therefore, the moments of reflexiveness that had interrupted earlier poetic meditations here become the principal subject. In a sense Nemerov's life finally becomes his art, an art which holds out the prospect of paradisal vision and a refuge from the sterile neutralities of the empirical world. Even the poems about society seem to be as much about the mind of the narrator as about external behavior, as is evident in the anthropological ruminations of “Watching Football on TV” and the garrulous pronouncements of “The Metaphysical Automobile.”

In its preoccupation with various kinds of laws, The Western Approaches brings Nemerov's poetry full circle. Like The Image and the Law and indeed like most of the subsequent collections The Western Approaches revolves around the central philosophical question of the one and the many. The function of the law is somehow to reconcile the concrete particulars of experience with the generalizing and abstracting habits of the mind without losing sight of the sensuous individuality of things. By the time Nemerov gets to The Western Approaches, the phenomenal world has become as much a part of an enveloping cosmic dream as the laws drawn from it. While taking care to preserve the concreteness and individuality of phenomena, Nemerov is no longer haunted by the question of their epistemological validity.

Stylistically as well there are resemblances between The Western Approaches and The Image and the Law. The use of formal metaphors and conceits is a noticeable link between the two volumes. Poems like “Late Summer” and “A Cabinet of Seeds Displayed” in The Western Approaches are obvious examples. The acorns in “Late Summer” are portrayed as wearing “neat berets,” while the horse chestnuts are “shiny as shoes inside their spiny husks, / Prickly planets among the sweetgum's starry leaves” (CP, 473). In “A Cabinet of Seeds Displayed” the seeds are fancifully depicted as the “original monies of the earth, / In which invested, as the spark in fire, / They will produce a green wealth toppling tall” (CP, 473). Similarly, in “An Ending” the mind is pictured as subdued by the later summer rain going forth a “penitent in a shroud of grey / To walk the sidewalks that reflect the sky” (CP, 506). The stylistic hyperbole mirrors Nemerov's confident attitude toward the play of the mind. Freed from the need to conceal itself in the shapes of the external world, the imagination in the later poems rejoices in a frank display of its powers.

Notes

1. Poet's Choice, ed. Paul Engle and Joseph Lang (New York, 1962), p. 186.

2. Ibid.

3. Reflexions, p. 87.

4. Loosely translated, the epigraph reads, “While in good health, I was overcome by madness, and while filled with life, I was dying.”

5. Reflexions, p. 172.

6. Letter to the author, July 29, 1978.

7. Journal of the Fictive Life, p. 152.

8. Ibid., p. 170.

9. Author's conversation with Nemerov, May 1977.

10. Reflexions, pp. 154 - 55.

11. Nemerov comments on this phenomenon in “Attentiveness & Obedience,” Reflexions, p. 171.

12. “Showdown at City of Poetry,” “Book Week,” Chicago Sun-Times, December 3, 1967, p. 5.

13. Introduction to Owen Barfield's Poetic Diction (New York, 1964), p. 3.

14. Reflexions, p. 162.

15. Ibid., p. 40.

16. Paul Wagman, “Profound Master of ‘Plain’ Poetry,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 11, 1973, Sec. H, p. 3.

17. Quoted in Julia Bartholomay, The Shield of Perseus: The Vision and Imagination of Howard Nemerov (Gainesville, Fla., 1972), p. 154.

18. Crinklaw, p. 52.

19. W. U. Record (Washington University, St. Louis), May 19, 1977, p. 2.

20. Crinklaw, pp. 66 - 68.

21. Letter to the author, July 29, 1978. Nemerov came upon the reference to Hamlet as a sea god in Israel Gollancz's The Sources of Hamlet.

22. Crinklaw, p. 69.

23. Author's conversation with Nemerov, May, 1977.