[In the following essay, Maio explicates Nemerov's “The Amateurs of Heaven,” finding in its blank verse a suggestion of an ordered universe.]

“The Amateurs of Heaven,” one of the new poems collected in Howard Nemerov's posthumous Trying Conclusions: New and Selected Poems 1961-1991, ranks among the very best of the Nemerov oeuvre. This poem, written within the final years of his life, also exemplifies Nemerov's particular and characteristic use of blank verse. Much as Wordsworth and Frost made special use of this centuries-old rhythmic measure, each shaping it to suit his unique personal voice, Nemerov developed a blank verse style distinctively his own.

Combining the gentle, steady ascension of the stresses of conversational diction with the tension of the dramatic situation being described, Nemerov's carefully syncopated blank verse disarms readers (or, more appropriately, listeners), lulling them into the comfortable and the familiar before highlighting a musical device or detonating a surprising trope. Thus he achieves the “great consistency” (or “absolute law”) coupled with both “a great freakishness” and even an “absolute rage,” that he wrote about in his poem “The Measure of Poetry” which appeared in an earlier collection, The Western Approaches (1975). Thus the poet's meter creates an overall order which, when skillfully disrupted, can unleash the power of the disorder or “rage” which lurks below the surface.

Given this perspective, the sound of any exacting blank verse is at once calm and angry. The consistency of the rhythmic ebb and flow both soothes and disturbs, its regularity just able to keep the rage measured, thereby precluding its shouting uncontrollably. When good blank verse finds the right subject matter—as it does in “The Amateurs of Heaven”—the result is moving and memorable art. Here Nemerov—to paraphrase a poetic theory of Frost—breaks the irregularities of speech across the regulating structure imposed by meter. The poem follows in its entirety:

Two lovers to a midnight meadow came
High in the hills, to lie there hand in hand
Like effigies and look up at the stars,
The never-setting ones set in the North
To circle the Pole in idiot majesty,
And wonder what was given them to wonder.
Being amateurs, they knew some of the names
By rote, and could attach the names to stars
And draw the lines invisible between
That humbled all the heavenly things to farm
And forest things and even kitchen things,
A bear, a wagon, a long-handled ladle;
Could wonder at the shadow of the world
That brought those lights to light, could wonder too
At the ancestral eyes and the dark mind
Behind them that had reached the length of light
To name the stars and draw the animals
And other stuff that dangled in the height,
Or was it in the deep? Did they look in
Or out, the lovers? till they grew bored
As even lovers will, and got up to go,
But drunken now, with staggering and dizziness
Because the spell of earth had moved them so,
Hallucinating that the heavens moved.

A brief look at the poem's first two lines will illustrate several of Nemerov's typical blank verse devices. Both lines employ common words, conversational clichés, and a regular iambic baseline; nevertheless, the effect is anything but ordinary. In the first line, by stressing a generally unaccented syllable, the preposition “to,” the poet carefully enhances the accents on the following alliterative stresses “mid” and “mead”—which then, in turn, put an even greater weight on the line's final stress, “came,” which is already at the heaviest position in the line. This extra heavy stress on the word “came” serves to highlight the poet's peculiar syntax (inversion of subject and verb). Thus the meter skillfully lifts the line far beyond the ordinary by emphasizing both the musically incantatory alliteration as well as the unusual syntax.

In the second line, the poet begins with the trochee, “High in.” This simple substitution enforces the amazing alliteration of the line's four stressed “h” words, and it also lifts the common clichés (“High in the hills” and “hand in hand”) to a carefully crafted usage that reinforces the poem's hallucinatory effect—which is also a theme in the poem's narrative.

As for the poem's larger elements, it's vaguely narrative, depicting a couple in love who quite literally star gaze. They are amateurs of heaven, lovers of one another, the midnight sky, the illuminated constellations and the wonder of existence itself. The couple is overwhelmed by the beauty of the majestic night. Their self-effacing thoughts focus on the heavenly bodies above them; their own, humanly bodies seem like mere effigies in light of celestial magnificence. Conversely, the “never-setting” stars are consummately self-concerned, circling “the Pole in idiot majesty.” Growing bored when reflecting on themselves—“Did they look in / Or out, the lovers?”—and their specific relationship to the heavens, the couple leaves without having resolved the poem's questions. Their imperfect understanding, in turn, preserves the mystery of the stars and the nighttime sky, indicating the couple's return and their continuing love as only amateurs can love. In sharp contrast to indifferent professionals sullied by astronomical certainty, the amateurs of heaven are blissfully ignorant, always to remain in wondrous awe of that which they cannot explain. “Being amateurs, they knew some of the names / By rote” and could regard the heavens as having moved, when in fact the earth had moved, not the stars. And yet the couple has been moved: emotionally by viewing the natural phenomena and physically by the earth's rotation.

There is an understated tension in this poem, tension between amateurish speculation and scientific objectivity, between perception and reality, between the lovers' adoring regard of the heavens and the heavens' disregard of the lovers, and, perhaps, between the lovers themselves, who may someday grow disillusioned with each other even though this particular night obscures any such thoughts. And this is the kind of subtle tension embodied in iambic rhythm, the soft followed by the loud immediately tempered by the soft again.

But in an even larger way, the poet's careful blank verse meter subtly reinforces the poem's theme of an underlying order in the universe that is so intoxicating that the lovers are left “staggering” and “Hallucinating.” Thus the regular iambic meter carefully reinforces the poem's sense of an ordered universe, but its many modulations and surprises allow for the “wonder” within it. At the same time, the meter also skillfully creates a gently lulling and incantatory feeling that highlights the lovers' peculiar sense of hallucination.

Only a poet with a masterful ear and marvelous talent could use the common language to such amazing effects. As Mary Kinzie once wrote of Howard Nemerov in Poetry Magazine (Sept. 1981), “No one since Frost has done as much to move blank verse forward from where Wordsworth and Coleridge had left it.” And this exceptional poem, “The Amateurs of Heaven,” exemplifies this achievement and serves as testimony to a rare artistry—one in which such a simple and tradition-worn poetic subject like star gazing lovers could contain such profound truths and conflicts just beneath its surface. The poem both openly displays and yet carefully covers over its art; it's both as clear and mysterious as the heavens of the poem, drawing loving readers to its wonder, to wonder continuously.