SOURCE: Mills, William. “Because the Mind's Eye Lit the Sun.” In The Stillness in Moving Things, pp. 1-30. Memphis: Memphis State University Press, 1975.

[In the following essay, Mills dwells on the ways in which Nemerov's poetry reflects the tenets of phenomenology as outlined by Edmund Husserl and William Luijpen.]

One element in the poetry of Howard Nemerov that urges his relevance to contemporary audiences is his awareness of the main currents of thought during his own time. He does not write as if he lived in a pre-Cartesian world or as if the Einsteinian world picture had not come along. As poet and thinker he has taken the problems of his day seriously, engaged them, and this engagement is an intrinsic part of his value.

Nowhere is this awareness of the ideas of the times more apparent in Nemerov's work than in the area of epistemology. By “awareness” I do not mean that Nemerov has any systematic epistemological position. He may have, but his poetry would not be the likely place to present it. What one does find is an intelligence that is perfectly content to doubt itself in much the way that philosophy has had to do. There is a sufficient number of poems in the collected poetry to indicate that epistemology is a major concern and, in addition, a concern that has been a source of considerable interest and even anxiety for him.

“Solipsism & Solecism” (Gnomes and Occasions [hereafter cited as G & O]) dramatizes this particular species of anxiety in a particularly witty way.

Strange about shadows, but the sun
Has never seen a single one.
Should night be mentioned by the moon
He'd be appalled at what he's done.

“Turning on the light” of human perception may create as many problems as it solves. The poem emphasizes, too, the prison of the point of view. As soon as one moves about an object, he ceases to see the other side. The prison of solipsism quite naturally leads to anxiety and despair. The very etymology of solipsism associates itself with the modern preoccupation with “aloneness.” Punning on solecism, the sun has not seen “a single one,” the solecism itself. The sun would be “appalled,” or would “pale,” if he knew.

Nemerov's well-known poem “The Blue Swallows” is an example of poetry about the mind thinking. The speaker in the poem is on a bridge looking across a millstream and below him he sees seven blue swallows flying. Invisible paths of flight stick for a moment in the mind, then dissolve. The speaker considers how often the mind creates relationships that are no more the “fact” than the non-existent “designs” that have been created by the seven blue swallows.

Thus helplessly the mind in its brain
Weaves up relation's spindrift web,
Seeing the swallows' tails as nibs
Dipped in invisible ink, writing …

The speaker then goes on to enumerate some of the various kinds of “spindrift web” that man has woven.

Poor mind, what would you have them write?
Some cabalistic history
Whose authorship you might ascribe
To God? to Nature? Ah, poor ghost
You've capitalized your Self enough.

So much then for theology, and for Nature as God's “handiwork.” He goes on to remind us that William of Occam “took care of” this problem a long time ago. This habit of the mind, of “weaving up relation's spindrift web,” or of conjuring general concepts or universals, has no substance, in one sense of the word, and thinking that it does leads one astray:

That villainous William of Occam
Cut out the feet from under that dream
Some seven centuries ago.
It's taken that long for the mind
To waken, yawn and stretch, to see
With opened eyes emptied of speech
The real world where the spelling mind
Imposes with its grammar book
Unreal relations on the blue
Swallows.

Here the speaker might with Bertrand Russell say, “Gradually Occam's razor gave me a more clean-shaven picture of reality.” What follows in the poem is very suggestive of the poet's idea of the relationship the mind might have with that which is outside itself and, further, is an example of the affirmation the poet can make.

                              Perhaps when you will have
Fully awakened, I shall show you
A new thing: even the water
Flowing away beneath those birds
Will fail to reflect their flying forms,
And the eyes that see become as stones
Whence never tears shall fall again.
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.

Just as we have learned that our general concepts and myths are constructs of our own doing and bear no relation necessarily to the “world of things,” likewise we may learn to “see,” with increasing precision, “things as they are.” I think Nemerov would care to stress in such a statement the word “increasing.” This is to say, a dynamic process that perhaps by necessity does not reach an end. Our experience would lead us to form this conclusion. Gradually we may learn to see better through the efforts of the poet, the scientist, and the philosopher.¹

Elsewhere Nemerov has written on similar matters, and it is to the point to introduce his remarks here. His essay, “The Poetry of Wallace Stevens,” is very helpful in illuminating that poet's attitude toward the relation between mind and reality and is, incidentally, useful in describing Nemerov's own poetry. While he is suggesting an explanation for Stevens' choice of metaphor and its seemingly arbitrary character, he says that he ran upon a description of “the school of existential thought known as phenomenology” in Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus, and it struck him as relevant to Stevens' way of approaching reality, or at least to his theory that the choice of metaphor for describing reality is arbitrary. There may be a common ground in Nemerov's own poetry. The passage from Camus concerns Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology:

Originally Husserl's method negates the classic procedure of the reason. … Thinking is not unifying or making the appearance familiar under the guise of a great principle. Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place. In other words, phenomenology declines to explain the world, it wants to be merely a description of actual experience. It confirms absurd thought in its initial assertion that there is no truth, but merely truths. … Consciousness does not form the object of its understanding, it merely focuses, it is the act of attention, and, to borrow a Bergsonian image, it resembles the projector that suddenly focuses on an image. The difference is that there is no scenario, but a successive and incoherent illustration.²

To begin with, the idea that “thinking is not unifying or making the appearance familiar under the guise of a great principle,” that it is “learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place,” is very similar to the theme of “The Blue Swallows.” Further, this posture has been a fairly consistent one with Nemerov.

“To find again the world” is used here in a special sense. How exactly is this “finding” different from other ways already known? Nemerov has, in the first place, ruled out understanding particulars in terms of “a great principle,” or some “cabalistic history.” But what about finding the world by simply looking at “actual experience” in the way that scientists are doing every day? Surely physical science pretends to study experience without imposing “relation's spindrift web.” How is this to be understood as any different from the phenomenologist's contention that he is “really” doing it?

I have turned to a contemporary exponent of phenomenology, William Luijpen, for some definitions and distinctions that help to clarify the questions, for a description of the phenomenologist's position concerning scientism, and in turn the alternative way of looking at things advanced by Husserl. I have done this instead of looking at Husserl's basic writings in the interest of clarity and brevity.³ On the matter of scientific knowledge Luijpen writes that scientists think their science at least gives us “genuine and reliable knowledge.”

Such an attitude, however, contains a philosophy which is in principle “complete.” One who simply identifies physical science with genuine and reliable knowledge decrees that knowledge, tout court, is the kind of knowledge offered by physical science. But it is obviously beyond the competency of physical science to define what knowledge, tout court, is; that is the task of the philosopher. Moreover, one who proposes a “complete” theory of knowledge cannot avoid proposing also a “complete” theory of reality. For, no matter how he wishes to define knowledge, he cannot escape from admitting that knowledge, unlike dreaming, is a disclosure of reality. Thus, by absolutizing physical science, he proposes as a “complete” theory of reality that whatever cannot be disclosed by science is simply not real. Again, however, it is not the task of the physicist to define what reality, tout court, is; that task belongs to the philosopher.

Scientism is the name given to the absolutism of science, understood in the narrow sense of physical science, for until recently all positive sciences were defined as “still imperfect forms of physical science.” But scientism is an internal contradiction. By claiming that meaningful statements are statements of physical science, it implies that other kinds of statements are nonsense. Now, this claim itself obviously is not a statement of physical science and therefore must be classified as a nonsense statement. Those who make the claim, however, imply that it is a meaningful statement; hence the contradiction.⁴

Of course such a distinction between “scientific” knowledge and “another” kind of knowledge about particular things does not yet explain how Nemerov means “Finding again the world / … where loveliness / Adorns intelligible things,” but it is a necessary starting point.

Existential phenomenologists claim that they have overcome the divorce, apparent since Descartes, between the knowing subject and the world outside him. Luijpen notes, “Since Descartes philosophers accepted without question that knowledge was a mirroring of brute reality and that physical science was the system of objective mirror images.”⁵ Once the divorce between subject and world was introduced, there was the choice of emphasizing consciousness or the world—idealism or realism. This divorce does not exist, claims the phenomenologist. A brief summary of the phenomenological position as related by Luijpen may prove useful here.

If one wishes to speak about a blooming tree in a meadow, physical science can say something about the tree and the perception of it, e.g., physical and physiological processes. “But what sense does it make to wish to speak only in this way about the perception of a blooming tree in the meadow.”⁶ The blooming tree can be fragmented, or “atomized,” but this information is not more “objective,” when it comes to perceiving a tree. The tree is not a series of processes for us, but a blooming tree in a meadow and physics or some other science is not competent to explain it to us as it is. It is not that what a science may say about the cerebral processes is untrue, but when scientists speak of such things, “they do not speak of anything at all” unless ultimately they are trying to speak of the perception of the blooming tree in the meadow.”⁷ When Husserl says “Back to the things themselves” he means for us to go back to such an “original” experience—an integral way of knowing something as it occurs.

Knowledge is not a matter of “strong cognitive images” in the subject's interiority, but the immediate presence of the subject as a kind of “light” to a present reality. Knowledge is a mode of man's being-involved-in-the-world. The subject, then, is not “first” and in himself a kind of “psychical thing” which “subsequently” enters into relationship with physical things through cognitive images. Knowledge is not a relationship between two different realities, but is the subject himself involved in the world.⁸

Whatever violence has been done by summarizing Luijpen's analysis of this position, I think the general outlines remain intact.

The closing lines of “The Blue Swallows,” “Finding again the world / … where loveliness / Adorns intelligible things / Because the mind's eye lit the sun” (italics mine) may help to suggest Nemerov's general concept of how man knows. It may even be necessary to find the world again because science has atomized experience. Luijpen's example of a blooming tree in a meadow demonstrates that physical science does not speak about a “blooming tree in a meadow”; likewise physical science does not speak about “loveliness.” It must be said that Nemerov does not single out physical science in his poem, but physical science is included by implication.

And how does the mind's eye light the sun? From the phenomenologist's position, knowledge is the immediate presence of the subject as a kind of “light” to a present reality. Perhaps this is the way the world can be “found” again, a world where “loveliness” is still a meaningful reality. This is so only because the mind's eye lights the sun.

In a similar vein I think the poem “Celestial Globe” (The Blue Swallows [hereafter abbreviated as BS]) reflects this human knowledge as “intentionality” (as the phenomenologist likes to name this “immediate presence of the subject as a kind of ‘light’ to a present reality”). In a characteristic Hamlet-like stance of meditating on skull-surrogates of some kind, the Nemerovian speaker holds a celestial globe in his hand and pursues the associations. At one point in the action the speaker takes the hollow sphere and wears it on his head:

As a candle wears a pumpkin
At Halloween, when children
Rise as the dead; only
It has no human features,
No access to its depths
Whatever, where it keeps
In the utter dark
The candle of the sun,
The candle of the mind,
Twin fires that together
Turn all things inside out.

One of the données of the Nemerovian world is of course a universe that “keeps / In the utter dark” the inquiring mind. The speaker in the poem, like Nemerov himself, never has to worry, though, about running out of a sense of mystery, a fear many may have had from various demythologizing efforts of man. It is a world that does not seem to have any “access to its depths / Whatever.” Yet somehow the poem does not seem to end on a note of complete negation. There remain the powers of the “candles” of the sun and the mind. These powers have the ability to “turn all things inside out.” There are many rich possibilities to this last line. The sun was described as a “great source” which “Is blazing forth his fires.” In a very literal way the sun's insides, the source, are turned from inward, outward. The sun, too, is the power that turns the inward seed outward to life. In the second section of the poem, the mind is “turning things inside out.” Homer is the “dark fire fountaining forth / The twin poems of the war / And of the journey home—.”

It is apparent that this poem was not written with a “diagram” of phenomenology by which the poet simply fleshed out the model with concrete examples for the reader's quicker retention. If there is a departure from the basic attitude, though, it is a drift inward, a drift that sometimes appears to return to psychologism. This seems to be the limit of the movement.

Another Blue Swallows poem, “The Rope's End,” also touches on the kind of knowledge that physical science arrives at because of its methods.

Unraveling a rope
You begin at an end.
Taking the finished work
You pick it to its bits,
Straightening out the crossed,
Deriving many from one,
Moving forward in time
And backward in idea …
Having attained the first
Condition, being dust,
No longer resembling rope
Or cord or thread or hair,
And following no line:
Incapable of knot or wave
Or tying things together
Or making anything secure,
Unable to bind, or whip
Or hang till dead. All this
In the last analysis
Is crazy man's work,
Admitted, who can leave
Nothing continuous
Since Adam's fall
Unraveled all.

The idea is clear enough. The basic sentiment has a romantic emphasis about it. The image works very effectively in describing a functional object that has meaning as long as it is whole (tying things together and making them secure), an object that becomes useless after its atomization (unable to serve as whip or hangman's noose).

Nemerov obviously understands that a scientist (or engineer) needs to take things apart in order to understand them or make them better. But the poem is about taking things apart, like “a blooming tree in a meadow,” things which do not have the same reality once they are disintegrated. The “last analysis” of line 27 is the very last analysis and is indeed “crazy man's work.”

The same theme can be found, if somewhat more internalized, in “Endegeeste,” a poem from Mirrors and Windows, which Nemerov published nine years earlier. The scene in this poem is a view of Endegeeste, formerly a residence of Descartes and now a state insane asylum. Reading, and reflecting on the scene outside the window, the speaker sees a resemblance between his own situation and that of Descartes':

I live in a great and terrifying time,
As Descartes did. For both of us the dream
Has turned like milk, and the straight,
          slender tree
Twisted at root and branch hysterically.
I keep my reasonable doubt as gay
As any—though on the lawn they seem to say
Those patient, nodding heads, “sum, ergo sum.”
The elms' long shadows fall cold in my room.

The notion of a disorientation or a disintegration of the psyche or mind is associated with disintegration of the subject-object relation in a fashion somewhat like the one in “The Rope's End.” Nemerov even speculates that the world exhibits enough absurdity and madness to have been created with a circular causality. The “steady state” cosmology of the chicken-and-the-egg puzzle is suggested in “Creation Myth on a Moebius Band” from his latest volume, Gnomes & Occasions:

This world's just mad enough to have been made
By the Being his beings into Being prayed.

“Idea” (The Next Room of the Dream [hereafter cited as NRD]) reflects the tension with which the poet considers the mind's abstract capabilities. The tension seems to result from an admiration of abstraction and a sense of its destructiveness:

Idea blazes in darkness, a lonely star.
The witching hour is not twelve, but one.
Pure thought, in principle, some say, is near
Madness, but the independent mind thinks on
Breathing and burning, abstract as the air.
Supposing all this were a game of chess.
One learned to do without the pieces first,
And then the board; and finally, I guess,
Without the game. The lightship gone adrift,
Endangering others with its own distress.
O holy light! All other stars are gone,
The shapeless constellations sag and fall
Till navigation fails, though ships go on
This merry, mad adventure as before
Their single-minded masters meant to drown.

In the first stanza there is again the association of madness with unbalanced modes of knowledge as in “Endegeeste” and “The Rope's End.” In the second stanza one line of consequence is compared to a chess game, whose rules and values are arbitrary to begin with. Finally these are “abstracted” out of existence, even the game itself. The “lightship” of idea which “blazes in darkness” goes adrift, endangering others. The third stanza examines another line of consequence of abstraction. With idea as “polestar,” and that only, the light of the other stars is not apparent. The old constellations in the form of mythological figures derived from imaginary lines are no longer to the point; modern astronomy considers them abstractly. Abstraction of the heavens is rendered through the symbolic language of mathematics. With only the “polestar” of idea to guide the navigators, these “single-minded masters” are meant to drown.

The poem “Thought” (BS) is about the mind as it turns to itself. It begins, “thought is seldom itself / And never itself alone. It is the mind turning / To images.” This says that thought is only thought when it is thinking about something. (This is precisely the assertion of phenomenological “intentionality.”) Much of the time this “something” takes the form of images. The second section of this poem offers a little drama of process and reveals an attitude about the mind's conclusion concerning reality.

Leaves shaken in the wind
Rattle the light till shadows
Elide, and yet the grass
Bends to the weight of the wind
And not the shadows' weight.
The minnow-waves can mingle
In shallows at the shore
As if they were no matter,
Until they peak and break,
Taking the sunlight up
In a shatter of spray.

Matter is therefore real. The last section, however, proves somewhat difficult.

And mind in some such way
Passing across the world
May make its differences
At last unselfishly
The casualties of cause:
          Its likeness changes.

The mind may make the differences, the “apparent” differences and discrepancies, the “casualties” of the process of cause and effect. After this, the mental event, “The likeness changes,” the image of the world for now is focused in the way Camus describes it in The Myth of Sisyphus.

No matter how often Nemerov may disparage a useless fragmentation of the analytical process, he is emphatic about not preferring “cabalistic histories” or an unjustified explanation of particular experience in terms of some General Principle. “The Loon's Cry” (Mirrors & Windows [hereafter abbreviated as MW]) is a case in point. As the speaker takes a walk in the cold evening, he is intensely aware of the natural world around him. But he is not permitted to be “Nature's priest” in the way Wordsworth or someone like him would be. As the setting sun's ball of fire is imaged in the sea, the moon is somehow balanced in the river on the other side of him. The balance is striking. However there is a significant difference in this poet's response to the moment.

But I could think only, Red sun, white moon,
This is a natural beauty, it is not
Theology. For I had fallen from
The symboled world, where I in earlier days
Found mysteries of meaning, form, and fate
Signed on the sky, and now stood but between
A swamp of fire and a reflecting rock.

What is left of interest when the “symboled world” has fallen? As the speaker continues to reflect (midway in the walk) he concludes that “We'd traded all those mysteries in for things, / For essences in things, not understood—.” But as the poet “listens to nature speak,” even this possibility is not permitted.

As answering my thought a loon cried out
Laughter of desolation on the river,
A savage cry, now that the moon went up
And the sun down—yet when I heard him cry
Again, his voice seemed emptied of that sense
Or any other, and Adam I became,
Hearing the first loon cry in paradise.

Not even the substantiality of a reality in things is allowed. The man thinks now he understands what that cry meant. The loon's laughter does not seem to ridicule the idea that there is a fundamental force behind a constantly changing reality, although it does seem to deride any notion of a static idea or a static reality. The poet is driven to celebrate this force. As he celebrates it, he considers the moon, which may have been a living and changing world like the one he lives on, and then he considers the stars:

                                                                      Chaos of beauty, void,
O burning cold, against which we define
Both wretchedness and love. For signatures
In all things are, which leave us not alone
Even in the thought of death, and may by arts
Contemplative be found and named again.

These signatures are not derived from any immanence that rests in fixed things, no “symboled world,” but truths of a changing reality that are what they are because of their relationship with man, the poet. Finding and naming these signatures in things is like the theme in “The Blue Swallows” of “Finding again the world … where loveliness / Adorns intelligible things.” It is interesting to note Stephen Daedalus' thoughts about “signatures” in the beginning of the third chapter of Ulysses.

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs.

Joyce's conception of “signatures” may not be the same as Nemerov's, but the resemblance is striking.

At this point in “The Loon's Cry” the speaker thinks he may hear the bird mocking this notion that truths may be found in the changing reality.

The loon again? Or else a whistling train,
Whose far thunders began to shake the bridge.
And it came on, a loud bulk under smoke,
Changing the signals on the bridge, the bright
Rubies and emeralds, rubies and emeralds
Signing the cold night as I turned for home,
Hearing the train cry once more, like a loon.

How is the tension of ideas resolved in this last stanza? Or is it even resolved? The train shakes the very bridge that the speaker views and which acts as the dividing fulcrum of the initial experience of balance: red sun, white moon. The bridge is not only not static and certain, but the train changes the signals on the bridge. As Nemerov presents the signals, the effect is not to suggest a change from red to green, but rather changing, alternating stop and go, “signing the cold night.” And now that the signatures have been “found and named again,” what is the relation to man? Perhaps the signature is not ambivalent, but about ambivalence, and about the ambiguity and mystery that constitute the world. The last “cry” of the train, “like a loon,” is only a double entendre to an already haunting ambiguity.

“The Sanctuary,” in the 1950 volume The Salt Garden, is an early analog of the mind and its habits. This is, incidentally, the first volume to reflect the writer's move from the city to the countryside of Vermont. It seems that as he “listens” to Nature, he discovers appropriate correlatives for his mental events with much more frequency. In “The Sanctuary” trout suspended in the water of a clear mountain stream suggest thinking.

… like thoughts emerging
Into a clear place in the mind, then going back,
Exchanging shape for shade.

At such moments his past and his own body seem to dissolve; as he becomes mind, all motion and change seem to stop.

                                                            Even at such times
The mind goes on transposing and revising
The elements of its long allegory
In which the anagoge is always death;
And while this vision blurs with empty tears,
I visit, in the cold pool of the skull,
A sanctuary where the slender trout
Feed on my drowned eyes … Until this trout
Pokes through the fabric of the surface to
Snap up a fly. As if a man's own eyes
Raised welts upon the mirror whence they stared,
I find this world again in focus, and
This fish, a shadow dammed in artifice,
Swims to the furthest shadows out of sight
Though not, in time's ruining stream, out of mind.

The mind that participates in this “transcendental” experience does not fall away in thoughtlessness, but continues as if by reflex to consider itself. The trout seem to feed on his eyes. The speaker has achieved some kind of terrifying oneness with the world outside his mind, until, literally, the trout breaks through the water to catch a fly and fractures the smooth film of the surface of the water. Figuratively the world outside his mind, the quiddity of things, seems to invade his mind violently. Or, the persona reflects, did his mind raise “the welts upon the mirror”; did he create what reality there was to this moment? Then the “picture” or image is once again in “focus.” The perspective is righted. But the speaker does not forget what an awesome and mysterious sequence took place during this time when the mirror was distorted. In this surreal drama, this fish, “like thought,” swims back to the subterranean places in the mind, out of sight of consciousness; but the mind knows it was there and it is not out of mind. A poem like “The Sanctuary” is a good example of the modern sensibility in action. Nature poetry can never be quite the same because of this sensibility.

“This, That & the Other” (BS) is a dialogue between two attitudes concerning knowledge and reality, those of physics and theology. The subtitle is much to the point: “a dialogue in disregard.” The scene of the poem (or dialogue) is a pond. Two figures (THIS and THAT) watch the snowflakes fall on the water and as they watch them they comment on the meaning of the phenomenon. THIS apparently is speaking from the point of view of the physicist, although he could be any realist. Like the symboled world of “The Loon's Cry,” this world has fallen, or else never existed for this character. He comments in a commonsensical fashion. His quasi-courteous companion considers the same phenomenon, but “interprets” it in terms of hermetic doctrine.

THIS:
Though I get cold, and though it tells me nothing
Or maybe just because it tells me nothing,
I have to stand and watch the infinite white
Particulate chaos of the falling snow.
THAT:
The things below are as the things above.
A parable of universal love,
To see the water taking in the snow.

THIS says that his companion can thus interpret if he cares to, but in fact he thinks, “There's no more reason in it than in dreams.” The answer does not deter THAT for a moment:

THAT:
Then I'll interpret you this dream of yours
And make some sense of it; rather, of course,
Some mind of it, for sense is what you make,
And your provision is for me to take.
First, I observe a pretty polarity
Of black and white, and I ask, could this be
A legend of the mingling of the races?

THAT continues as hermetic theologian throughout the little drama. THIS observes in the middle of the dialogue that “One of the things [the surface of the water] does / Is mirror, and there's a model for all thought.” This seems to describe the view of the “naive realist” that Luijpen attacked. Luijpen maintained that one really could not speak about the problem of knowledge from this position, but must become philosophical, something which THIS is avoiding. THAT “philosophizes” but THIS murmurs “sleeveless speculation” to such thinking.

What is ironic is the last speech of the dialogue which is uttered by “Both.”

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.

It seems clear that the naive realist and the hermetic theologian can make the same statement about “The Other” and not mean the same thing, and in fact “disregard” each other's approach to reality altogether. This is possible because “The Other is deeply meddled in this world.”

The difficulty or even impossibility of grasping the whole of life Nemerov dramatizes in “Angel and Stone” (New & Selected Poems [hereafter cited as NSP]). One of the habitual scenes for the reflecting “I” in Nemerov's brooding lyrics appears in this poem: a pool of water whose surface serves as a mirror of reality. In this instance, the figure who looks into the pool thinks that so much of the difficulty of understanding the nature of things results from the perceiver's inevitably self-centered position.

In the world are millions and millions of men,
          and each man,
With a few exceptions, believes himself to be
          at the center,
A small number of his more or less necessary
          planets careering
Around him in an orderly manner, some
          morning stars singing together,
More distant galaxies shining like dust in any
          stray sunbeam
Of his attention. Since this is true not of one
          man or of two,
But of ever so many, it is hard to imagine
          what life must be like.

One might derive an orderly system of some sort that could account for the whole of things and the order of such a system appears beautiful. The poet uses the example of a stone cast into the middle of a pool. The concentric circles that move out from it and that touch the limits of the pool only to return to the center of the order-creating stone are beautiful. This same situation obtains if two stones are cast, because the angularities of the intersecting lines are interesting and beautiful: this phenomenon is not yet too complex to be understood and rewarding.

But if you throw a handful of sand into the
          water, it is confusion,
Not because the same laws have ceased to
          obtain, but only because
The limits of your vision in time and number
          forbid you to discriminate
Such fine, quick, myriad events as the angels
          and archangels, thrones
And dominations, principalities and powers,
          are delegated to witness
And declare the glory of before the Lord of
          everything that is.
Of these great beings and mirrors of being,
          little at present is known.

The “limits of your vision in time and number forbid you to discriminate. …”

The speaker then enumerates various ways of accounting for “these great beings and mirrors of being,” but the voice persists that little is known about “the manner of their perceiving.” They may not be as we imagine them at all. Physics concentrates on the particulars of grains of sand and the eccentricities of snowflakes. The historical point of view “reckons and records the tides of time.” Biology “Reads in the chromatin its cryptic scripture as the cell divides,” and mathematics considers such matters as probability and chance in the order of things. All of this “counting without confusion” is going on while what else is occurring?

                                        … while the pyramids stand still
In the desert and the deermouse huddles in
          his hold and the rain falls
Piercing the skin of the pool with water in
          water and making a million
And a million designs to be pleasingly latticed
          and laced and interfused
And mirrored to the Lord of everything that
          is by one and one and one.

In a way this expression of man's perception of reality is similar to the Zen parable of the reflection of the moonlight on the waves of the water. Depending on one's perspective, the picture appears differently, but after all, it is the same moon. But with this Nemerovian parable, there is perhaps not the same confidence. Somehow the pyramid seems quite impervious, the deermouse huddles in his hole quite undetected, and the very stuff of reality continues to feed “into itself” (or maybe from a source outside itself) and changes the very “transactions / Of all the particles.”

What is the final effect of the poem? Certainly the “partialness” of vision is there, but perhaps the effect is not altogether one of despair. The poet began by saying “it is hard to imagine what life must be like,” but when the poem is finished the vision of the world has become more inclusive because it images the sense of change and process with humility, and this sense of humility permits the flow of the mind to mingle with the flow of being.

The short poem “Knowledge,” in Gnomes & Occasions, contains similar thematic ideas.

Not living for each other's sake,
Mind and the world will rarely rime;
The raindrops aiming at the lake
Are right on target every time.

The first two lines echo the idea in “Angel and Stone,” that there are great limits to knowing. The last two lines are close in idea and feeling to the last two of “Angel and Stone”: “And mirrored to the Lord of everything that is by one and one and one.” Somehow, too, the intuition contained in both endings goes beyond paraphrase to a stillness, and a stillness where the reader resides.

Humility is further apparent in the first poem of that admirable sequence, “Runes” (NSP). It is a significant example of one side of Nemerov's art and evidence of his relevance to modern readers.

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.
I have considered such things often, but
I cannot say I have thought deeply of them:
That is my theme, of thought and the defeat
Of thought of something and the thought of thought,
A trader doubly burdened, commercing
Out of one stillness and into another.

With the many references to mirrors and reflected images, it might be expected that the camera should figure in the poetry. In the “Sightseers” (BS) tourists walk about photographing “Where history was.” One of the many “sights” recorded is the “Fathers” in the Badlands, and the speaker declares that “Sometimes they dream / Of looking alive,” of entering the world of the living. But the camera, does not permit this:

… reflexion
Has intervened, and
The dark will won
Again, in the box
That knows no now,
In the mind bowed down
Among the shadows
Of shadowy things,
Itself a shadow
Less sure than they.

The reflected and static image of the “Fathers” has “intervened” in the dark of the box camera, which only knows the “past” and registers this in the blacks and whites of shadows and is in a sense a shadow of the “real.” By analogy, the dream of looking alive was created by the power of the imagination, but reflection intervened and “The dark will won / Again.” There is a fruitful association, in addition, with the dark of the coffin in this box that knows no now. The mind that reflects on the past and death and on the death of the past has bowed its head among the shadows of shadowy things; as a consequence this mind is less sure of its own reality than the reality of things.

“In the Black Museum” (The Blue Swallows) is a dark poem thematically and structurally. The darkness comes from a locked-in system or structure when two mirrors face each other:

Or as two mirrors vacuum-locked together
Exclude, along with all the world,
A light to see it by. Reflect on that.

In the earlier Mirrors and Windows, the arrangement of the poems resembles in a larger way the structure of “In the Black Museum.” But the resemblance is only apparent. Mirrors and Windows opens with the poem “The Mirror” in which the persona asks “how should I understand / What happens here as in the other world … ?” What intervenes or stands between this question and the first mirror of the book's beginning and the last mirror of the book's end is the imagination and reflecting light of the poet, who is himself using the mirror of language. The closing poem, and another mirror, is one of the Nemerovian answers.

“HOLDING THE MIRROR UP TO NATURE”

Some shapes cannot be seen in a glass
those are the ones the heart breaks at.
They will never become valentines
or crucifixes, never. Night clouds
go on insanely as themselves
though metaphors would be prettier;
and when I see them massed at the edge
of the globe, neither weasel nor whale,
as though this world were, after all,
non-representational, I know
a truth that cannot be told, although
I try to tell you, “We are alone,
we know nothing, nothing, we shall die
frightened in our freedom, the one
who survives will change his name
to evade the vengeance for love. …”
Meanwhile the clouds go on clowning
over our heads in the floodlight of
a moon who is known to be Artemis
and Cynthia but sails away anyhow
beyond the serious poets with their
crazy ladies and cloudy histories,
their heroes in whose idiot dreams
the buzzard circles like a clock.

There are some “hard sayings” in this poem. In the world the night clouds do not resemble weasels and whales, do not “symbolize” or represent any underlying reality but “go on insanely as themselves.” This is a “non-representational world.” The moon once was Artemis or Cynthia, but as in “The Loon's Cry,” it has fallen from the “symboled world.” The “shapes” that are part of the human reality cannot be seen in a mirror, but these are the ones that break our hearts. In mid-poem Nemerov sadly concludes that man is solitary and that he knows nothing, and all the while, time, death's instrument, runs on. Such a poem has no doubt led to Meinke's description of Nemerov as a poet of “minimal affirmation.” The poem also signifies that the important knowledge for the poet is human knowledge.

Two other poems allude to seminal myths in western thought and convey a poignant attitude toward the human problem of trying to see. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (BS) opens with a description of the beginnings of human thought in terms of the Beowulf story: just as Grendel and Grendel's mother may well mythicize or project man's early search for ways to handle fears of the unknown, or at least of terrifying forces, so does thought in general spring from such sources.

The second stanza continues this idea, alluding to various myth fragments, and especially to that one relating to the minotaur and the labyrinth.

Our human thought arose at first in myth,
And going far enough became a myth once more;
Its pretty productions in between, those splendid
Tarnhelms and winged sandals, mirroring shields
And swords unbreakable, of guaranteed
Fatality, those endlessly winding labyrinths
In which all minotaurs might find themselves at home,
Deceived us with false views of the end, leaving
Invisible the obstinate residuum, so cloudly, cold,
Archaic, that waits beyond both purpose and fulfillment.

Truly between theology and metaphysics alone, there are enough endless labyrinths for any and all minotaurs. But Nemerov observes that just as human thought was born in myth, so it returns, creating “pretty productions” that deceive us about the end.

But the sophisticated speaker admits something that yet remains a mystery for him, too. That even with the courage to ignore these “pretty productions” there remains “A something primitive and appealing, and still dangerous, / That crawls on bleeding hands and knees over the floor / Toward him, and whispers as if to confess: again, again.”

A different kind of mystery is intrinsic to the opening poem of Gnomes & Occasions. The very title, “Quaerendo Invenietis,” conveys the state of chance that surrounds the attempt to learn about the world and the way out of our various labyrinths: in seeking to learn, you discover by chance.

I

I am the combination to a door
That fools and wise with equal ease undo.
Your unthought thoughts are changes still unread
In me, without whom nothing's to be said.

II

It is a spiral way that trues my arc
Toward central silence and my unreached mark.
Singing and saying till his time be done,
The traveler does nothing. But the road goes on.

III

Without my meaning nothing, nothing means.
I am the wave for which the worlds make way.
A term of time, and sometimes too of death,
I am the silence in the things you say.(9)

What one learns by chance is the crucial and pervasive nature of silence and nothing. That silence and nothing may be the mother of meaning, a twist to the well-known paradox that death is the mother of beauty: “Without my meaning nothing, nothing means.” And the poet urges the reader to listen to the silences. Truly Nemerov is a poet of the silences, in all their terrifying aspects.

The closing poem of Gnomes & Occasions is yet another comment about the human adventure of seeking and learning. It is called “Beginner's Guide” and reveals the bewilderment one encounters in trying to learn about the physical world—the flowers, the birds, and the stars. The character in the poem buys field books to flowers and “Every spring he'd tear / From their hiding-places, press and memorize / A dozen pale beginners of the year.” Summer comes, however, and inundates him with species. His study of birds is even more troubled, because flowers stand still at least. He concentrates on “sedentary birds” but they too are just as likely to leave.

The world would not, nor he could not, stand still.
The longest life might be too short a one
To get by heart, in all its fine detail,
Earth's billion changes swinging on the sun.

His study of the stars was overwhelming. Hoping he would get some help, he buys a telescope, but this only serves to increase the number of stars to learn. The poem does not stop on this note, however. It ends affirming the value of learning as a continuing adventure.

The world was always being wider
And deeper and wiser than his little wit,
But it felt good to know the hundred names
And say them, in the warm room, in the winter,
Drowsing and dozing over his trying times,
Still to this world its wondering beginner.

“To a Scholar in the Stacks” (BS) takes up again the labyrinth and the minotaur that was evident in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” and is more distinctly affirmative about the pursuit of knowledge. It, incidentally, evidences a man of letters in his late forties who has spent his adult life with belles lettres. The poem opens by describing how the scholar began his long journey in search of wisdom, the past, and beauty. The “maze” of all the learning, its complexity, seemed not even to offer an entrance. “A heart less bold would have refused to start, / A mind less ignorant would have stayed home.” All the action had been completed: Pasiphaë had borne the Minotaur, Daedalus had designed the labyrinth, and Theseus had found his way in and out of it many times. “What was there that had not been always done?” But because the scholar began, the way to the maze did open, and the story did become known.

And now? You have gone down, you have gone in,
You have become incredibly rich and wise
From wandering underground. And yet you weary
And disbelieve, daring the Minotaur
Who answers in the echoes of your voice,
Holding the thread that has no other end,
Speaking her name whom you abandoned long ago.
Then out of this what revelation comes?
Sometimes in darkness and in deep despair
You will remember, Theseus, that you were
The Minotaur, the Labyrinth and the thread
Yourself; even you were that ingener
That fled the maze and flew—so long ago—
Over the sunlit sea to Sicily.

This is a moving testimony and statement of belief by a scholar and man of letters in a time not especially noted for either moving testimonies or belief. It may well be that man himself has created the mazes and minotaurs, the devils and most intricate guilts. But just as surely, Nemerov says, he has found his way out and flown “Over the sunlit sea to Sicily.”

The poems examined in this chapter demonstrate over and over that it is “human knowledge” that Nemerov engages. It is not his desire, or his error, to seek the “dehumanized” knowledge of naive realism or scientism. But Nemerov goes beyond merely letting the “things” speak for themselves (“To the things themselves”) as “pure” phenomenology might demand. “Interpreting” bare things is alien to “pure” phenomenology, but not to the way of the poet. Like students and philosophical descendants of Husserl, Nemerov does not dwell on the method of knowing (as Husserl did), but rather what the way of knowing might reveal. Nemerov as poet has done what someone like Heidegger, Husserl's student, has done as philosopher—to be primarily interested in revealing “the stillness in moving things.” It is to Heidegger that I shall often turn to put Nemerov's world in a context.

Notes

1. A variant reading of lines 29-35 might be, of course, that in death these false conjurings or errors do not continue; thus tears do not fall where, assuredly, they do not. Such a vision might come only with the loss of what makes us human.

2. Nemerov quotes Camus in Poetry and Fiction: Essays (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1963), 79-80.

3. For an introduction to Husserl, see his Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. with an introduction by Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper & Row, 1965). For a deeper investigation Cartesian Meditations, tr. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960), and Ideas, tr. W. R. Boyce-Gibson (New York: Macmillan, 1941). Quentin Lauer has also written a fine commentary on Husserl and phenomenology entitled Phenomenology: Its Genesis and Prospect (Harper & Row, New York, 1965).

4. William A. Luijpen and Henry J. Koren, A First Introduction to Existential Phenomenology (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 9-10.

5. Ibid., 55-56.

6. Ibid., 59.

7. Ibid., 60.

8. Ibid., 61.

9. Julia Bartholomay (in The Shield of Perseus: The Vision and Imagination of Howard Nemerov) remarks that Nemerov has divulged the answers to these riddles in public lectures: I, the alphabet; II, the tone-arm moving across the record; III, a sentence.