SOURCE: Prunty, Wyatt. “Permanence in Process: Poetic Limits that Delimit.” Southern Review 15 (January 1979): 265-71.

[In the following essay, Prunty examines Nemerov's Collected Poems, finding an emphasis on the interplay of movement and stasis, as well as a sense of compassion.]

Having won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his Collected Poems, Howard Nemerov has said he is going back to work to find out whether the book “is a tombstone or a milestone.”¹ think it is fair to say that such a response is characteristic not only of his humor but of a dark reserve as well. In his poetry, this tendency surfaces when limit and process are seen as mutually dependent opposites. For example, in his first volume, The Image and the Law (1947), Nemerov begins one poem with “Only the dead have an enduring city” and in conclusion says “Like melting wax we change, / Waiting the last shape of death.” That is, we endure, our process somehow continues, but only by being caught in its opposite, “the last shape of death.” In a world where “we may not pray for permanence,” “milestone” and “tombstone” become mutually constitutive. The title of the poem is “The Situation Does Not Change.”

From this early point to the title poem in The Western Approaches (1975), there is a theme that in fact “does not change,” a preoccupation with permanence in process and with the significance this has for the individual. The latter poem begins:

As long as we look forward, all seems free,
Uncertain, subject to the Laws of Chance,
Though strange the chance should lie subject to laws,
But looking back on life it is as if
Our Book of Changes never let us change.

The paradox suggested by these lines is that permanence is concomitant with change; “Chance” is “subject to laws,” and “Changes” fail to “let us change.” Looking forward, Nemerov sees possibility for the self. But looking back produces the alternate view; thus toward the end of the poem the poet says he knows “How a long life grows ghostly towards the close / As any man dissolves in Everyman.” Aware of what process details, Nemerov is self-questioning even at an apparent high point in his career. It seems basic to his nature, and, in terms of his poetry, is a source for his clear and often austere vision.

At another point, Nemerov begins one of his major poems, “Runes,” with “This is about the stillness in moving things,” a stillness found (here or in other poems) “In running water, also in the sleep / Of winter seeds,” in seasons (particularly autumn), photographs, and (most basically for the poet) in “thought and the defeat / Of thought.” But for the moment I quote the opening stanza of “Runes”:

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 before its object, where it turns
As from a mirror, and returns to be
The thought of something and the thought of thought,
A trader doubly burdened, commercing
Out of one stillness and into another.

Whether seed, thought, or running water, Nemerov regards the same predicament; that which appears static paradoxically owes its existence to something always in process. The poem concludes that “To watch water” is in a sense “to know a secret” or “to have it in your keeping.” Basically, it is neither knowing nor keeping “But being the secret hidden from yourself.” That is, we can celebrate the recurrence inherent in such process and at the same time lament the individual loss which it dictates, but finally, being part of that process, we can neither contain it nor encompass its meaning.

Another poem which focuses on “the stillness … In running water” is “Painting a Mountain Stream.” Yoking apparent contraries, the poem begins:

Running and standing still at once
is the whole truth. Raveled or combed,
wrinkled or clear, it gets its force
from losing force. Going it stays.

It is easy to think of a mountain stream as a thing somehow fixed when in fact its very nature is the opposite. Not only the process of running water but that of thought as well (as Nemerov says in the following stanza) is unfounded in the sense that, to be, it must continue moving beyond where it is at any one moment. Thus the painter painting such a process must fail before his object much as “Runes” argues “thought and the defeat / Of thought before its object.” Addressing the painter who attempts to reduce an ongoing stream to his static medium, the poem concludes, “paint this rhythm, not this thing.” Or, to return to “The Western Approaches,” the proper response to our finitude is the articulation of a larger pattern in which each of us participates and, in effect, “dissolves in Everyman.”

Similar to the preceding poem but taking its argument a step further, Nemerov says in “The Blue Swallows” (the title poem for a volume that appeared in 1967) that the objects of his art, here the swallows, are “evanescent, / Kaleidoscopic beyond the mind's / Or memory's power to keep them there.” A few lines later he continues, “Thus helplessly the mind in its brain / Weaves up relation's spindrift web.” That is, the mind through its “eye” creates a continuum on its own, first depending from then independent of the swallows themselves. Wakened yet “emptied of speech,” it sees “The real world where” by “spelling” and “grammar” it “Imposes … Unreal relations on the blue / Swallows.” The “spelling mind” imposes what is in many ways an arbitrary order (or limit), but in so doing, its “eye” delimits and occasions the sun's real light. The poem's closing lines follow:

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.

As a statement of purpose, Nemerov says in “Lion & Honeycomb” that he writes “for the sake of getting something right / Once in a while.” The poem is a thing which stands “On its own flat feet to keep out windy time,” and yet it is no more than “a moment's inviolable presence … an integer / Fixed in the middle of the fall of things.” However, even momentary order is not always possible, thus “Holding the Mirror Up to Nature” discusses the failures that exist in any mode of thought, this time in poetry. The opening lines state that “Some shapes cannot be seen in a glass, / those are the ones the heart breaks at.” Finding the world “non-representational,” Nemerov says he knows “a truth that cannot be told, although” he tries to tell it. In the attempt, he quotes his own voice to dramatize a gap in meaning:

I try to tell you, “We are alone,
we know nothing, nothing, we shall die
frightened in our freedom. …”

Comparing this with the opening line of “The Western Approaches” where looking “forward, all seems free,” “our freedom” may be seen in two ways: At its best it plays out of “Our Book of Changes,” past mere things into something like rhythm; at its worst, it suggests that we are unsponsored in a world where (to quote “Painting a Mountain Stream” again) “The visible way is always down” and where “there is no floor.”

In a more public vein, “A Cabinet of Seeds Displayed” was written after Nemerov's wife presented him a cabinet of dried seeds with space enough left for a short poem. It begins, “These are the original monies of the earth … They will produce a green wealth toppling tall, / A trick they do by dying.” The conclusion follows:

May they remind us while we live on earth
That all economies are primitive;
And by their reservations may they teach
Our governors, who speak of husbandry
And think the hurricane, where power lies.

Using a recurrent image, the seed, and a characteristic and traditional paradox, “They will produce … by dying,” Nemerov has turned from self and is making a statement suitable to be taken abroad. Also, in terms of the process of writing, it is interesting to note that out of the limitations which pre-given theme and allotted length dictate, out of closure, the poem achieves its disclosure. Limits are posited to which the poem's thought must have reference (and therefore meaning) much as the significance of a game depends upon arbitrary spatial boundaries and the clock, within both of which the game's meaning, its imaginative free play, is carried out.

One page to the next, Nemerov takes the reader from high rhetoric to aphorism, from meditation upon political topics to contemplation of a passing season. In particular, he writes poems confronting fall or the coming of winter, poems that deal with the limits which a season imposes. One such, “Again,” is worth quoting in large part because of its tumbling effect. Unrolling in one long sentence for fourteen lines, it describes the fall's first snow. It begins:

Again, great season, sing it through again
Before we fall asleep, sing the slow change
That makes October burn out red and gold
And color bleed into the world and die …

and concludes:

                                                                      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.

Here, limitation inspires because it reveals by delimiting what is otherwise concealed. As he says in “A Spell before Winter,” “Now I can see certain simplicities / In the darkening rust and tarnish of the time.” What he sees enables him to “speak … with the land's voice” of “A knowledge” (a measure of permanence) found “in the sleep of things.” For Nemerov, limitation (or closure) is more than simply an aesthetic principle arguing form; it is a modality taken from and analogous to the external world which makes knowing possible.

What the external world can lead to when limits are absent may be seen by looking at a poem such as “Kicks,” in which fishermen on Lake Michigan fix two baited hooks to the ends of a fishing line and throw the trap aloft into circling gulls “Who go for it so fast that often two of them / Make the connection before it hits the water.” Describing the gulls as “Hooked and hung up,” doing “a dance / That lasts only so long,” the poem ends with ironical flatness. As a title, “Kicks” suggests not only the brutality of the act but its meaninglessness as well.

Related but more muted, one poem describes an isolated traveler left waiting in a motel, not knowing why or for what he is there. The title is a familiar one, “The Human Condition.” The opening stanza follows:

In this motel where I was told to wait,
The television screen is stood before
The picture window. Nothing could be more
Use to a man than knowing where he's at,
And I don't know, but pace the day in doubt
Between my looking in and looking out.

As “in a picture by Magritte,” the “television screen” and “picture window” make “a perfect fit, / Silent and mad,” and yet this is the “only” way “world and thought exactly meet.” The poem is dramatically concerned with intelligibility; but the mind's room is “always an empty room,” and that peculiar meaning which does occur is imperfectly constituted by art, in this case, “A picture of a picture.” As in the last line of “The Blue Swallows,” the “mind's eye” generates its meaning, it lights what platonic “sun” there is. But to do so, to get beyond its initially dark confines, it must raise its own parameters so that by its synthetic activity it can travel beyond them. While the speaker waits, “The day falls into darkness,” though the TV is still going. What he is left with is “legendary traffic, love and hate,” screened (that is, shut off from view as much as revealed or shown) in a room that cannot be located.

For Nemerov, this predicament allows only minimal affirmation, for example that which we find in his “The View from an Attic Window.” He says he cries “because life is hopeless and beautiful,” because “we live in two kinds of thing,” and “because” he knows he has “to die.” The “two kinds of thing” follow:

The powerful trees, thrusting into the sky
Their black patience, are one, and that branching
Relation teaches how we endure and grow;
                    The other is the snow,
Falling in a white chaos from the sky. …

Endurance such as that of “powerful trees” is set against the apparent meaninglessness for the individual that results from the world's multiplicity. The self that would be permanent is eroded by process. Identity is made possible by the delimiting functions of thought, art, season, and death, yet each of these covers as much as it uncovers. As in “The Human Condition,” our cognition screens our surroundings, obscures what it reveals. The list goes on. However, in an attic that gathers his past and dramatizes his passing, Nemerov finds that “the promise” given Abraham was “kept” and says of himself, “a child I slept.” Perhaps the most important aspect of the “two kinds of thing,” therefore, is not their irresolution but our response to them.

With Nemerov as with few contemporary poets there is a powerful sense of compassion grounded in and resultant from his austere vision of the world. Similar to the “trees … branching / Relation,” his poetry serves as a momentary stay, a delimiting in which words are able to mean what they say, vitally so when by naming they approach what is otherwise unintelligible. The Collected Poems makes a valuable “stillness” of “moving things.”

Note

1. Howard Nemerov, “My Summer,” New York Times Book Review, June 4, 1978, p. 37.