The Momentum of Word-Magic in James Dickey's The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy.
[In the following essay, Kirschten expresses the magical, mythopoeic mode of Dickey's verse.]
In the late sixties, when he collected his first five books of poetry into one volume, James Dickey had reached such a considerable level of literary success that Louis Untermeyer claimed that Poems 1957-1967 “is the poetry book of the year, and I have little doubt that it will prove to be the outstanding collection of one man's poems to appear in this decade.” While Peter Davison and James Tulip ranked Dickey and Robert Lowell as the two major poets in the country, John Simon was even more enthusiastic when he declared, “I place Dickey squarely above Lowell.” However, in 1968, with the appearance of Dickey's very next book, The Eye-Beaters, Bloos, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy, critics seemed annoyed, even dismayed, at the new direction of his highly experimental collection of verse. Herbert Leibowitz noted that the “balance of pure abandon and meticulous observation breaks apart in Dickey's latest volume,” and further, that a “stagy, unpleasant hysteria enters the poems.” Benjamin DeMott charged that the “poet runs on unrestrainedly,” giving “no shapely object to delight in, little refinement of feeling or subtlety of judgment, no intellectual distinction, no hint of wisdom.” Even as staunch an early supporter as Richard Howard lamented that “The look of these poems on the page is disconcerting: forms are sundered, wrenched apart rather than wrought together.” Howard then concludes with a statement of considerable strength: “The cost to [Dickey's] poetry is tremendous, for it has cost him poems themselves—there are not poems here … only—only!—poetry.”
Despite the severity of these appraisals, Eye-Beaters contains at least seven of Dickey's major poems and constitutes one of the central transitional texts in Dickey's poetic canon.1 During this period, Dickey's experiments in two basic areas, form and diction, opened a number of technical, poetic doors that propelled him through his remarkable and controversial book-length poem The Zodiac in 1976 to major achievements in the eighties in Puella and The Eagle's Mile, two of his best volumes of verse. In The Eye-Beaters, Dickey still kept his eye at times on a classical sense of narrative—the story-based poem on which he built such a wide following of readers; however, he also began to highlight word groups that radically altered his techniques of telling and gained him especially dramatic entrance to the world of darkness and terror that strongly unsettled Leibowitz, DeMott, and Howard. These word groups reveal fundamental methods in Dickey's word-magic and the subsequent momentum of his poetic thought, which, to my mind, has been misrepresented by many of his negative critics. These critics look for intellectual or discursive thinking in a poet who is not understandable only to the rational mind, and, as a result, they find Dickey's poems lacking in elements that are completely irrelevant to his poetic program.2 Dickey's best poems in this book are not hysterical, unrestrained, unshaped, unsubtle, or wrenched apart but are intricately constructed forms generated by a mode of thinking that is rooted in anthropological and mythopoeic criticism, namely, contagious magic.
Presupposing an ancient, universal law of contact between animate and inanimate objects, even those which are geographically distant such as the moon and stars, contagious magic seems, at first, primitive, simple, or scientifically mistaken. However, when developed through the complex combinations within his extraordinary diction, Dickey's version of this practical causal principle allows him to reinvent a world in which magic not only seems plausible but natural and even necessary. For out of his animated series of “natural” connections, Dickey constructs a diverse range of rituals, ranging from sacrificial rites to linguistic acts of creation, which, reflexively, depend on his magical ontology for their effectiveness. When properly constructed, these rites reveal special, therapeutic powers designed to bring some measure of human control to the catastrophic, real worlds of “blood” and “madness.” The plausibility of Dickey's word-magic takes its authority from its appeal to deeper reaches of the human mind that are closed to more discursive modes of lyric action. Not “deep-image poetry” exactly, his poetry operates through archetypal images within a deeply appealing and personal mode that also engages and alters the social self, especially the self traumatized by war. While his verbal and formal magic has distinguished precedents in the work of Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas, Theodore Roethke, and even Samuel Taylor Coleridge, critics often fail to judge Dickey by those principles that have been used to canonize these writers. To establish critical criteria—especially those in a mythopoeic mode—more accurately attuned to Dickey's true poetic vision in The Eye-Beaters, we need to focus on a number of issues that preoccupied the poet at this point in his career: his construction of poetic form in relation to word-magic, the subsequent shift of formal momentum in his poetry from action to image, and the shaping elements in at least one of the historical genres in which he was writing.
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To initiate his keynote speech to the South Atlantic Modern Language Association in November 1982, Dickey borrowed a distinction from the Notebooks of poet Winfield Townley Scott.3 Centering on two kinds of poetry, or, rather, two kinds of poetic diction, this distinction is simple enough yet reveals much about Dickey's own poetic practice. The first type of poetry is, according to Scott, literalistic and marked by its capacity for moving, external reference. It is “a commentary on human life so concentrated as to give off considerable pressure.” Two of its central practitioners are Wordsworth and Hardy, and it “is represented by [Edwin Arlington] Robinson's [line]: ‘And he was all alone there when he died.’” The second and opposite type, less literal and more evocative in character, “is a magic gesture of language” (Night Hurdling 125), among whose proponents are Poe and Rimbaud; this second type is illustrated by lines from Hart Crane's poem “Voyages”:
O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,
Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seal's wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.
(Poems 36)
For Dickey, the key word in these lines is “spindrift,” whose peculiar qualities place Crane among what Dickey calls, following Scott, the “Magic-Language exemplars” of poetry. Instead of a literal or essential component of the seal's manner of seeing, “spindrift” belongs less to the “reality-world” of animal vision than to the “word-world” (126) of verbal association (or what Crane calls, in his well-known phrase, the “logic of metaphor” [221]). Dickey explains that “‘Spindrift’ is sea-foam, wave-foam, usually wind-blown along beaches, and, though the seal's eyes may be wide, and his gaze toward Paradise, ‘spindrift’ is really not, cannot be, part of his vision: the word is word only, associational word, and in its way beautiful, but word” (126).4
Instead of inventing poems characterized by statements that have an empirical or external referential direction, the poets of word-magic work from inside a reverberating, self-generating world of linguistic interplay. According to Dickey, these writers are less interested in realistic narratives or personal anecdotes which convey maxims about the world of human action and ideas than in the evocative powers and suggestions of words themselves. This wordplay may be further understood by considering its opposite, namely, that kind of diction that belongs to poets whom Dickey calls “the literalists.” Unlike the “magic-language practitioners,” “literal-minded poets” believe “in words as agents which illuminate events and situations that are part of an already given continuum” (Night Hurdling 131). For example,
The Robinson line … is simply factual. There are only plain words in it: a statement. Plain words in ordinary order; nothing unusual, much less exotic. The line puts the reader into contemplation of something that happened to someone, and the condition of the happening: it is the clear pane of glass that does not call attention to itself, but gives clearly and cleanly on a circumstance.
(126)
On the other hand, word-magicians do not give primacy to plot or to the discursive revelations of character, but to a dream mode or some kind of surrealistic space in which the powers of reason have little importance. Although Dickey's remarks were made with Puella (1982) in mind, the book with his fullest use of word-magic and to which this article is a preliminary study, these observations reveal much about his own magical approach throughout his poetry. This approach is evident as far back in Dickey's work as the opening poem, the magical chant “Sleeping Out at Easter,” in his first collection of poems, Into the Stone (1960). Of word-magicians, Dickey said in 1982:
For the Magicians, language itself must be paramount: language and the connotative aura it gives off. … The words are seen as illuminations mainly of one another; their light of meaning plays back and forth between them, and, though it must by nature refer beyond, outside itself, shimmers back off the external world in a way whereby the world—or objective reality, or just Reality—serves as a kind of secondary necessity, a non-verbal backdrop to highlight the dance of words and their bemused interplay.
(Night Hurdling 126-27)
However magical Dickey's interests became at this point, he never fully divorced himself from his commitment to literal-mindedness or his belief in the necessity of basic storytelling. For in the same essay, he criticizes purely magical poetry for its considerable limitations. In magical poetry divorced from public concerns, Dickey says, “the world is lacking, and the buzz of language and hit-or-miss-metaphor-generation is everything; the poem itself is nothing; or only a collection of fragments” (Night Hurdling 138). Although he admits to being “profoundly interested” in “the absolute freedom” that the magical making of metaphors offers the poet, Dickey also wants lyrics “bound into one poetic situation, one scene, one event after the other” (139). A further problem with the magical method, especially in the surrealistic school, is that it invents without discovering, as Wallace Stevens noted. It does not reveal the contents of the unconscious but mere phantasms. Nor does it have “drama,” for it “cannot build.” Of poems in this style, Dickey observes that they have no narrative, no logic, no idea development, no transformation, no “publicly available” themes (137).
If one wonders in which camp Dickey places his own poetic language, he provides what appears to be a decisive response earlier in his address. Although he greatly admires the best of them, he claims, “I am not of the party of the magic-language practitioners” (Night Hurdling 129). At first glance, this self-classification seems true. Because so much of Dickey's early poetry depends on anecdotal narrative and extrinsic reference to topics and events from his own life (world war, family, animals, even a Southern Baptist preacher), he seems justified in placing himself among those poets whom he calls “literal-minded” (129), for example, Robert Frost, Edgar Lee Masters, and Randall Jarrell. From a stylistic or linguistic point of view, however, Dickey's poetry also suggests an extremely strong magical orientation. In the mid and late sixties in particular, Dickey began to experiment with word groups bunched together by means of techniques such as the “block format” (Central Motion v) and the “split line” (Self-Interviews 184-85). At this time, words themselves and their “connotative aura” (Night Hurdling 127) became singularly featured on the pages of his lyrics. In “May Day Sermon,” “Falling,” “The Shark's Parlor,” “The Fiend,” and to some extent in “The Firebombing,” he built “wall[s] of words” (116) out of distinctive visual and semantic combinations that were not only striking to behold but, more importantly, approximated, as Dickey says, “the real way of the mind as it associates verbally. … in bursts of words, in jumps” (Self-Interviews 184).
One major effect of the method (or “real way”) of these mental word “bursts” and “jumps” is the construction of an emotionally immediate, if not obsessive, universe in which the magical contiguity of natural forms of life and death is conveyed by Dickey's imagistic contiguities. Dickey calls the semantic aspect of this magical contact “apparently unjustifiable juxtapositions” and “shifts of meaning or consciousness” (Self-Interviews 185). These juxtapositions may be rationally “unjustifiable” but, from a poetic and emotional point of view, they enable the objects inside his visually bracketed word groups to exchange (or share) properties in an especially dramatic and vivid manner. These stylistically fused traits build scenes so rich in texture that they constitute the animating ground of the poem's action and thus possibility for Dickey's characters. “May Day Sermon” provides an especially vivid example of how the poet's word-magic “jumps” across the page with a stunning momentum that energizes the woman preacher who delivers the lines. This momentum also animates the objects of nature in Dickey's universe and reveals how he thinks magically through them:
Sisters, understand about men
and sheaths:
About nakedness: understand how butterflies, amazed, pass out
Of their natal silks how the tight snake takes a great breath bursts
Through himself and leaves himself behind how a man casts finally
Off everything that shields him from another beholds his loins
Shine with his children forever burn with the very juice
Of resurrection
(Poems 7)
In this section, Dickey's word-magic builds the poem's (and nature's) momentum by means of his striking grammatical strategies of predication, strategies that, as we will see, are also central to his magical method in “Pine.” In the arrangement of word blocks in “May Day Sermon,” nouns such as “butterflies,” “the tight snake,” “man,” and “his children” share the ejaculatory, universal motion of sheaths and nakedness which “pass out,” breathe, burst, “shield,” behold, “[s]hine,” and “burn with … resurrection.” This sharing is effected by an elaborate series of delayed predicates in parallel constructions in which the poet omits punctuation and connectives in favor of breath spaces. By keeping mechanical interrupters and conjunctions to a minimum, Dickey creates an oratorical and ontological momentum marked by “fluidity and flux” (Voiced Connections 155) that is his own specification of William James's famous stream of consciousness.5 Dickey's poetic flow—more like a tidal wave in this poem—makes objects exchange attributes by making the mind “jump” between nouns and predicates such that a verb (and its textural traits) in one clause may be plausibly predicated of two or more preceding subjects. In the lines cited above, the subject of “burn” is “loins” but may as well be “children,” for both “loins” and “children”—albeit in different modes—“burn with the very juice / Of resurrection.” Dickey does not use this technique only for single terms. Because he begins his word blocks with dynamic verbs, gerunds, and present participles, he drives these blocks forward in a stream of sexual, natural, and grammatical motion while simultaneously allowing the eye to linger upon visually separated word groups so that entire groups of words appear to serve as nouns for several series of subsequent verbals. Several lines later in “May Day Sermon,” it is a trout which flows and slides upstream, but Dickey's spatial arrangement of his word groups makes it appear that the trout's “cold / Mountain of his birth” does the same, for the trout “heads upstream, breathing mist like water, for the cold / Mountain of his birth flowing sliding in and through the ego- / maniacal sleep of gamecocks” (Poems 7). The metaphysical mechanism behind these shared predicates is a mode of connection that Sir James Frazer calls “contagious magic” in The Golden Bough, namely, “that things which have once been in contact with each other are always in contact” (13). In Dickey's poetic universe, these grammatical and ontological connections produce a magical animism, in which, to use Joseph Campbell's phrasing, “there is no such thing as absolute death, only a passing of individuals back and forth, as it were, through a veil or screen of visibility, until—for one reason or another—they dissolve into an undifferentiated ground that is not of death, but of potential life, out of which new individuals appear” (Sacrifice 9).
Not only objects and groups of objects are animated by mental word-magic in Dickey's world. Dickey's word-magic also drives the emotionally animating end of “May Day Sermon,” which is nothing less than the resurrection in springtime of nature, sexual instinct, and the vocalized anima (or soul) of the victimized daughter, all under the aegis of the oratorical triad of energized women: preacher, audience, and subject of the sermon (the daughter). The daughter of the abusive, backwoods, Bible-reading father is able to return from the dead each year precisely because, in Dickey's lyric universe, “there is,” in Campbell's words, “no such thing as absolute death.” Dickey's is a world in which life and death cyclically and magically dissolve into and out of each other and in which the animating power of the woman preacher's eternal logos—like “men” and “nakedness”—also “bursts,” “[s]hine[s],” and “burn[s] with the very juice / Of resurrection.” The daughter does not die for her sexual freedom but dies as a fertility goddess who transcends death each spring, like the earth itself, by riding the eternal continuum of decay, regeneration, and rebirth, empowered in Dickey's world-view by the words of women and the poet's magical modes of “resurrection.” The very possibility of the daughter's archetypal transcendence is thus rooted in a magically empowered and conceived setting which eternally energizes her.
If the ritualized methods and the ground of action in Dickey's lyrics take on a special primitive power in the mid sixties, the effects of his word-magic and its reverberating linguistic momentum become even more pronounced in the late sixties and the early seventies. His magical diction is primarily effected through catalogues of tactile, concrete metaphors, hypenated word combinations, and explosive, staggered groups of action-packed gerundives. When working in a distinctively surrealistic or hallucinatory dream mode, Dickey distances himself even further from his earlier formal strategies, realistic anecdotes, and the relatively sober revelations of romantic perception, in favor of an exuberant emphasis on magical imagery. For instance, in “The Eye-Beaters,” the narrator does not go inside the minds of blind children for internal revelation when he visits a home for the children in Indiana, but instead externalizes his imagined vision of what they see as he addresses himself:
Smudge-eyed, wide-eyed, gouged, horned, caved-
in, they are silent: it is for you to guess what they hold back inside
The brown and hazel inside the failed green the vacant
blue-
eyed floating of the soul.
(Eye-Beaters 50)
At first, there appears to be little here of what could be traditionally called a complicated plot which changes the fortunes of its characters. Neither the children nor the narrator can change. Try as he may, the speaker cannot alter the condition of the blind children who beat their eyes in frustration. In a sense, then, the animating end of this poem is the realistic failure of the poet's magical, elaborate techniques of animation. This failure, however, is only half the equation. After acknowledging the therapeutic limits of his poetry, the speaker frantically continues to build his fictional wall of mythic images for his own sake and for that of the real “vision” of the children. He argues rationally that in spite of their blindness, these children are still important, and that “what they see must be crucial / To the human race.” Despite his claim to reason, Dickey's magic produces nothing more than a semihysterical nightmare of his own darkness and rage as the poet tries to see what is “under their pummeled lids” (54).
His word-magic is thus closer to word-madness than magic. Yet this madness has its own peculiar visioning power. In “May Day Sermon,” while partially maddened by her belief system, by abuse to the farmer's daughter, and by Dickey's inflamed rhetoric, the woman preacher nonetheless effects an optimistic, mythopoeic reincarnation of the victimized girl. In The Eye-Beaters, Dickey's word-madness seeks a magic that at first appears ineffective. This magic is built out of nothing but the “sheer / Despair of invention” (55) in the real world where the narrator's poetic powers cannot heal. However, what comes most alive in this world—even more than plot and character—is the poet's mental cave of magical images, that is, the cave of “perversity” and “madness,” constituted by Dickey's wall of words. It is as if he has taken us inside Plato's cave of illusions or inside one of the Paleolithic caves at Montesquieu-Avantes in the Pyrenees and left us in the dark. In such a world, “Half-broken light flickers” briefly and shows us partial images of “ibex quagga … cave bear aurochs [and] mammoth” (54, 51). However, this is a mental world which is even darker and more claustrophobic, where the poet's “reason” has “gone / Like eyes” (55), and only his primal images offer him solace. We thus come closer to experiencing the dark world of these children than we ever would have without Dickey's disturbing and dazzling poem, at the heart of which is yet another of his extraordinary, primitivistic exchanges. This exchange transforms speaker and reader by linking sighted readers to blind children, even though the mode of shared “vision” is only—or, to use Richard Howard's exclamation, “only!”—poetic.
As we trace the evolution of Dickey's use of magical language, what is important to note in “The Eye-Beaters”—as well as in “Mercy,” “Victory,” and “Pine” in the same volume—is that Dickey's walls of words are so powerful that their contagious, magical energy appears to displace plot, character, and revelation as emotionally central parts of his poetic action. These traditional shaping elements are, of course, still prominent in his work of this period. However, we may well be able to claim—using Dickey's own description of poetic word-magicians—that, in these boldly experimental poems, he has gone further than ever toward giving primacy to “language and the connotative aura it gives off.” This new primacy of parts enables him to invent a new poetic “Reality [which] serves as a … backdrop to highlight the dance of words and their bemused interplay” (Night Hurdling 127). To put it another way, Dickey's radically magical walls of reality establish settings which not so much displace thought and character as they take on the functions of character, revelation, and the solution (or opposition) to the protagonist's driving needs. In “May Day Sermon,” magical word groups not only create the physical setting but also the animating ground of change and motivation for the woman preacher. Yet they also constitute a formal revolution, what would in contemporary criticism be called a “deconstruction,” in which Dickey's word-magic achieves a parity of power with the classic, Aristotelian elements of thought and action, and even becomes the central pattern of thought and action. By focusing on “[the] action of words upon each other, for whatever meaning or sensation they may throw off, evoke” (131), Dickey uses these networks of “meaning or sensation” not to remain mired in sensation but to invent what is for him a new kind of poetic form. Insofar as his new diction produces a “connotative aura” that radically alters his speaker's fundamental mode of perception while also shaping and guiding the reader's point of view, Dickey's mythical language becomes both his poetic action and his basic method of representation. This collapse—or fusion—of analytic distinctions is true for all poetry insofar as poetry's shaping causes are synthesized within its verbal materials. But for Dickey, his distinctive change in emphasis yields especially vivid insights into a new way of thinking through words which themselves revolutionize his poetry.
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If, in this middle period of his career, Dickey begins to think in a radically mytho-magical mode while quite consciously moving away from ancedote and narrative, we see yet another reason why his poetry upsets the Aristotelian causal hierarchy which privileges plot the way Dickey did in his early work. The very nature of thought manifested in Dickey's word-magic demands this formal shift. For, as Ernst Cassirer notes, “mythical consciousness … knows nothing of certain distinctions. … it lacks any fixed dividing line between mere ‘representation’ and ‘real’ perception, between wish and fulfillment, between image and thing” (Mythical Thought 36). Further, by using a mode of thought which burkes classical logical axioms and assumes instead magical principles—such as “the part not only stands for the whole but positively is the whole” (64)—Dickey confounded many critics in the late sixties and early seventies by inventing an “aura” that baffled them when they applied discursive or meditative criteria. For when Dickey's linguistic “aura” became a dominant force, it produced a dreamworld like that of the undifferentiated reality of primitive consciousness; thus many readers dismissed the poems in The Eye-Beaters as formless or poorly constructed. On the contrary, these poems are intricately constructed, and further, they are designed to convey the atmosphere of nightmares or dream consciousness, the very nature of which is cloudy or phantasmic.
One magical mode, the conversion of properties or attributes of objects into bodies, appears in the scenic imagery of “Mercy,” a nightmare poem about the narrator's lover Fay, a nurse at a hospital in “slum Atlanta,” whom he picks up at the nurses' dormitory called “Mercy Manor.” By mixing hypostatized, imagistic traits of love, mortality, blood, and banal pop culture in a dazzling scene of surrealistic transformation, Dickey converts Fay into a contemporary Persephone, macabre yet heroic. While “perfume and disinfectant battle / In her armpits” (Eye-Beaters 15), she straddles the worlds of life and death, goddess-like, when, in the poem's conclusion, the speaker imagines himself “Collapsed on the street,” having a kind of heart (or love) attack: “I nearly am dead / In love” (16). Herself a stark contrast in the colors of healing and of death, Fay leans over him as he calls for her kiss to silence the cry of mortality from his lips and to bear him safely from the world of darkness into the “mercy” of St. Joseph's hospital:
She would bend
Over me like this sink down
With me in her white dress
Changing to black we sink
Down flickering
Like television like Arthur Godfrey's face
Coming on huge happy
About us happy
About everything O bring up
My lips hold them down don't let them cry
With the cry close closer eyeball to eyeball
In my arms, O queen of death
Alive, and with me at the end.
(16)
If Fay, like Persephone, possesses a goddess-like power of healing and renewal, she does so because the poet rescues her from a convincing technical, pop cultural hell that enervates yet simultaneously animates her. As he does in “The Eye-Beaters,” Dickey builds another dynamic wall of words—this time, down the middle of the page—that makes the night world of hospitals come alive in a sensuously dark dream scene. This scene is not static. As the drama develops, the setting not only gains emotional power by means of the affective accumulation of Dickey's detail; it propels the action forward by providing an overwhelming opponent of “night” and “mortality” against which the speaker battles for “care” and “love.” In the night world of this hospital, “love,” if not life, has never felt more vulnerable. One cause of this vulnerability is the massive sense of indifference that the setting, indeed, the world, evinces toward the speaker. This anomie is reflected in Dickey's magical, imagistic hypostatization of Arthur Godfrey's smiling television face, whose mind-numbing, “happy” countenance benignly smiles over the night world of pain and death with the comic indifference of a plastic Halloween mask. Ernst Cassirer says that in magical thought, “The ‘image’ does not represent the ‘thing’; it is the thing; it does not merely stand for the object, but has the same actuality, so that it replaces the thing's immediate presence” (Mythical Thought 38). We do not confuse Arthur Godfrey with his image. Rather, Dickey so animates the banality of the image that its preposterous happiness becomes an oppressive, real, actual body. In this animated, surrealistic space, the poet turns a complex of cultural and technological relations into “a pre-existing material substance” in which, in Cassirer's words, “all mere properties or attributes … become bodies” (55). By magically making banality a substance, Dickey provides one element in the poisoned substratum of a contemporary, urban scene against which the energized passion of a goddess-woman offers temporary redemption from the speaker's hysterical “wail” and the dark, cold world of mortality and indifference.
In this stage of Dickey's poetic career—which may be labeled a magical period in which he makes a radical move from action to image—voice, points of view (reader's and speaker's), and plot seem less like specific, separable literary devices than undifferentiated aspects of the dreamy aura of his word selection. These strategically constructed word groups reveal the movement of his mind from linguistic block to block in modes of nondiscursive, non-analytical thought that Cassirer discusses in his chapter “Word Magic” in Language and Myth:
mythic ideation and primitive verbal conception. … [involve] a process of almost violent separation and individuation. Only when this intense individuation has been consummated, when the immediate intuition has been focused and … reduced to a single point, does the mythic or linguistic form emerge, and the word or the momentary god is created. … the process of apprehension aims not at an expansion, extension, universalizing of the content, but rather at its highest intensification. … The conscious experience is not merely wedded to the word, but is consumed by it. Whatever has been fixed by a name, henceforth is not only real, but is Reality.
(57-58)
In the momentum of Dickey's thought in the best poems from The Eye-Beaters, objects and events are individuated through narratives that antagonize and separate agents. Things and acts are also individuated through strategic spatial separations (different from the split line but an off-shoot of it) and through emphases of the arrangement of words on the page. Dickey's word blocks isolate images in focused impressions that, when grouped in his distinctive series of sequences, give the sense that a name and its referent are magically connected—indeed, that reality is built out of momentary bursts of tangible, tactile names. These names not only share the properties of what they signify but feel as if they are some essential part (or the whole) of their referents while simultaneously amplifying the emotional impact of those parts. At times, Dickey's focused images give us an animal's surrealistic, enlarged perspective of heads and eyes in word groups that themselves enlarge the objects represented. For example, in “Madness,” a family hound is bitten by a rabid female fox, and the experience of sound and pain is conveyed and enlarged in a poetic form marked by the isolation of intensified moments from the story:
she bit down
Hard on a great yell
To the house being eaten alive
By April's leaves. Bawled; they came and found.
The children cried
Helping tote to the full moon
Of the kitchen “I carried the head” O full of eyes
Heads kept coming across, and friends and family
Hurt hurt
The spirit of the household, on the kitchen
Table being thick-sewed
(Eye-Beaters 48)
To no small degree, the basic representational device in this poem progressively becomes the form of the poem. That is, the strategic isolation of the names of fragments of events results in a magic pointillism that fixes as its primary patterned reality the surrealistic aspects of the core event that pattern depicts. Summarized under the title of “Madness,” the basic narrative is simple: a family dog is bitten, becomes rapid, is hunted down, then beheaded. However, the stylized, magical story is considerably more complex, primarily because of the way it is told: the conversion of a family hound into an energized, manic god of the hunt and kill, who, through a narrative of hallucinatory frenzy marked by the contagious, explosive escalation of sexuality and violence, dies a divine death as a nonretaliatory scapegoat; the humans in the poem project their own mimetic desire for violence upon this sacrificial monster who is expelled from the circle of domestic safety and then closes the poem's process of overflowing violence with his own execution. Dickey's verbal methods of separation, individuation, and amplification are essential to the monster-making process because they amplify the dog's bizarre and dangerous traits into monstrous proportions, so that his sacrificial death, dramatically mandated, purges the stable world that he himself has infected and threatened. One instance of this amplification process occurs after the dog is bitten. It is carried into the family kitchen, and the phrase “O full of eyes” floods the moment with what Dickey construes to be the animal's vision, yet also isolates that moment with an image in which eyes seem disembodied and bizarre, as would befit a being which is in the process of transgressing normal social boundaries. That the poem is so effectively disturbing and dark reveals that Dickey's vibrant word-magic makes fully tangible the traits of surrealistic monstrosity which the poem requires for its sacred drama.6
Although there is none of the archetypal pairing of the intensely dramatic mythopoeic opposites of sex and violence in the three-page lyric “Pine,” this poem reveals several other aspects of Dickey's remarkable—and difficult—mode of magical meditation.7 Cast in a sequence of “successive apprehensions” (or “four ways / Of being”), with a fifth, concluding, single-word section (“Glory”), “Pine” examines a pine tree by means of four senses: hearing, smell, taste, and touch. At first glance, the poem's process of thought appears to be built out of compounds—or, to use Dickey's own term, “a dark / Flood”—of traits which the speaker is “Opening one by one.” Each section features, though not exclusively, one sense which Dickey examines by means of a series of percepts, analogies, intuitions, and visceral experiences of the body. This flood of synesthetic experience combines to form a whole of some kind, when, at the end, Dickey claims:
A final form
And color at last comes out
Of you alone putting it all
Together like nothing
Here like almighty
V
Glory.
(Eye-Beaters 46)
To some extent, Dickey's mode of perception resembles the kind of accumulation that, according to Denis Donoghue, constitutes “the self” in Walt Whitman's lengthy catalogues:
he begins by saying, Let x equal the self. Then x equals A plus B plus C plus D plus E … where each letter stands for a new experience contained and possessed, and the self is the sum of its possessions. This is the law of Whitman's lists. If you say that the self—x—is the sum of its possessions … then the more you add to the right-hand side of the equation, the more you enrich the left, and you do this without bothering about the “nature” of the x. You assume, as most Romantic poets did, that the self is not at any moment fixed, complete, or predetermined, and then you are free to develop or enlarge it at any time by adding to its experience.
(964)
The Romantic aspect of Dickey's poetic identity certainly coincides with the latter part of Donoghue's observation about flow and indeterminacy. However, Dickey's mental method of accumulation—and, consequently, his conception of his poetic “self”—does not depend on a mere unity that is the “sum of its possessions.” Dickey does not build his perceptual objects out of discrete properties only, but, instead, conceives a different kind of whole constituted by an empathic mode of consubstantiality. One may best see the method in his word-magic in the Melanesian concept of “mana,” which is a general, undifferentiated power that appears in different forms and different objects in a sacred, rather than a profane, world. In such a realm, not every animate thing possesses “mana,” only certain objects that evoke a sense of wonder and delight. Sacred wonder and delight in the world of physical sensation and magical things (especially animals and natural objects in motion) are constants in Dickey's lyric universe, the various elements of which are bound together by a principle of shared power that Cassirer calls the “law” of “concrescence or coincidence” (Mythical Thought 64):
Mythical thinking … knows such a unity neither of combination nor of separation. Even where it seems to divide an action into a number of stages, it considers the action in an entirely substantial form. It explains any attribute of the action by a specific material quality which passes from one thing in which it is inherent to other things. Even what in empirical and scientific thought appears to be a mere dependent attribute or momentary property here obtains a character of complete substantiality and hence of transferability.
(55)
Even though the major parts of “Pine” are divided by individual sense, Dickey builds the poem's progression out of a fluid “merging of properties” (Mythical Thought 77) which is effected by collections of hyphenated compounds and jammed fragments of thoughts and feelings. These compounds—especially Dickey's phrase “sift-softening”—and his fragmented, syntactic shorthand recall the opening lines from the fourth stanza of Gerard Manley Hopkins's “The Wreck of the Deutschland”:
I am soft sift
In an hourglass—at the wall
Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift,
And it crowds and it combs to the fall[.]
(13)
Hopkins's “soft sift / In an hourglass” serves to remind him that his body decays with time and that he can achieve redemption only by “Christ's gift” of eternal salvation, “proffer[ed]” in the gospel (13). In “Pine,” Dickey's “sift-softening” does not stand for the “motion” and “drift” of a heightened sense of personal mortality. Rather, “sift-softening” is one stage in his poetic process of rendering both sensible and transferable the motion of the wind through pine needles. If yet another mark of magical thinking is that substance and force are not sharply distinguished, then Dickey's fusion of force and thing demonstrates even more fully his mythopoeic mode of transforming relations between objects into tactile, living presences which he offers to perception. For instance, here is Dickey's flow of compounded properties that he unifies—or, in his own word, “assign[s]”—as he makes the force of the sound of pine sensuous and, therefore, substantial:
Low-cloudly it whistles, changing heads
On you. How hard to hold and shape head-round.
So any hard hold
Now loses; form breathes near. Close to forest-form
By ear. …
..... Overhead assign the bright and dark
Heels distance-running from all overdrawing the only sound
Of this sound sound of a life-mass
Drawn in long lines in the air unbroken brother-saving
Sound merely soft
And loudly soft just in time then nothing and then
Soft soft and a little caring-for sift-softening
And soared-to.
(Eye-Beaters 44)
Because the form of the sound of pine is difficult to grasp—as Dickey says, “any hard hold / Now loses”—he hypostatizes the pine's “sound of a life-mass” by inventing a sequence of modes of motion, each of which is assigned a distinctive trait such as sifting, soaring, and whistling. By giving even the softest sound a tangibility, Dickey makes his own poetic process of perception—and thus his poetic form—substantial. What was “hard to hold” now has elements that can be held, and can be held in a discernible sequence or form. Further, by making sound a mode of motion shared among the fragments of his “apprehension,” Dickey also makes these substantial traits transferable from one part of the apprehension to another, and thus to the whole percept. The form of the stanza is the flow of the traits of felt motion commingling and building toward a whole. This process of substantiation and consubstantiation begins to culminate in the phrase “O ankle-wings lightening and fleeing” (44), which represents the magical fusion of the substantiated properties of the “sound” of pine; these properties include speed, lightness, evanescence, alternation, and texture. A few lines later, in its conclusion, the stanza reveals one whole, unified aspect of pine in terms of hearing. Pine's basic properties merge in the figure of “footless flight,” which the reader understands can be heard yet is difficult to hear—like the sound of pine—for it is “coming and fleeing / From ear-you and pine, and all pine” (44).
Another way to examine the poem's formal momentum is to think of Dickey's cataloguing and combining of properties as a mythopoeic mode of predication, that is, as a preliminary process of naming—and thus dividing—an undifferentiated subject into specific predicates from which he builds a differentiated reality. As an analogue of this preliminary, linguistic stage of cognition, Dickey's poem makes pine feel like “mana,” in that it emerges through his word groups with what feels like its own mysterious energy and power. Like the Sioux conception of Wakanda (“Great Spirit,” or world creator, or mystery, or grandeur, or sacredness—the term is nearly untranslatable in English), the spirit-force of pine grows magically through animated substances and, in Dickey's case, toward an ultimate, imaginatively conceived unity that differentiates it from its ground of perception. In his primitive predication of properties and in his conception of an animated whole, Dickey's poetic method is radically perspectival. As Cassirer notes, “for mythical thinking[,] the attribute is not one defining the aspect of the thing; rather, it expresses and contains within it the whole of the thing, seen from a different angle” (Mythical Thought 65). Not only is each perceptual sense in each major part of “Pine” “a different angle”; each tangible attribute of each sense is also “a different angle.” Further, as we saw, each “angle” reveals and incorporates the whole by means of Dickey's complex movement of concrete imagery. These new angles are themselves new views, new names of aspects of pine rendered plausible, determinate, and separable from the preconscious welter of sensation out of which pine reveals itself to consciousness.
In his verbal act of distinguishing perspectives, Dickey calls pine into being through the magical power of naming. With regard to this constitutive, predicative dimension, Dickey's perspectival form is a linguistic act of creation. Like the narrative thrust in many primitive creation myths, the direction of Dickey's mythic speech moves a differentiating human preconsciousness away from the chaotic condition of heaven and earth before things had names and thus could be verbally distinguished. What is magical and sacred about this naming is that, in Dickey's poem, names do not merely signify but convey the potential powers of the things named and thus symbolically created. In “Pine,” Dickey's series of imagistic potencies—for example, “Your skull like clover lung-swimming in rosin” (Eye-Beaters 45)—literally become the poetic essence of the identity of pine as the speaker's whole being, not just the rational component of the human mind, engages the world of nature and its emerging objects through his nascent language. No better description of the epistemological implications of Dickey's unity-effecting word-magic can be found than in an analogy between the primitive process of object formation and its relation to language, taken from the biblical narrative of creation. Cassirer recalls that after the word of God separated darkness from light to produce heaven and earth, the distinctively human element then entered the linguistic process of genesis:
the names of earthly creatures are no longer directly given by the Creator, but have to wait their assignment by Man. … In this act of appellation, man takes possession of the world both physically and intellectually—subjects it to his knowledge and his rule. … This unity, however, cannot be discovered except as it reveals itself in outward form by virtue of the concrete structures of language and myth, in which it is embodied, and from which it is afterward regained by the process of logical reflection.
(83)
Dickey's one-word conclusion to “Pine” thus signals his sacred finale to the linguistic process of inventing a “momentary god.” In this kind of “holy” and “mythico-religious” atmosphere, the unity-effecting name and the god's nature (or power) are thus felt, however evanescently, to be one: “Glory.”
.....
Another formal achievement derived from the momentum of word-magic and magical thinking in The Eye-Beaters is the most dramatic aspect of Dickey's neo-Romanticism, namely, his reinvention of the ode of terror. To be sure, Dickey has explored the world of nightmares and dream consciousness from the very beginning of his work in poems such as “The Vegetable King” (1960) and “The Firebombing” (1964). However, in “Mercy” and “Madness,” his word-magic in this volume signals his fullest and most frightening contribution to a genre of poetry that was extremely popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Represented on Coleridge's dark side by “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Dejection: An Ode,” this genre took its criteria for excellence from Longinus's classic treatise “On the Sublime,” especially that aspect of the sublime that focuses on “the most striking and vehement circumstances of passion” (16). Because, in Edmund Burke's opinion, the sublime produces “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” (cited in Ronald Crane 446), and because terror was felt to be an emotional corollary of the feeling of religious dread occasioned by nothing less in importance than “the supreme evil” (447), the ode of terror was held by many to be the highest form of lyric. Although there is no explicit theodicean component in “Victory,” this historic genre—“so wildly awful, so gloomily terrific” (447), as the eighteenth-century critic Nathan Drake enthusiastically put it—combined a number of traits that bear directly on Dickey:
To excel in this species of Ode demands a felicity and strength of genius that has seldom been attained; all the higher beauties of poetry, vastness of conception, brilliancy of colouring, grandeur of sentiment, the terrible and the appalling, must combine, and with mysterious energy alarm and elevate the imagination. A lightning of phrase should pervade the more empassioned parts, and an awful and even dreadful obscurity, from prophetic, or superhuman agency, diffuse its influence over the whole.
(447)
“Terrible” and “appalling,” with a “mysterious energy” that appears to issue from a “superhuman agency,” “Victory” is Dickey's striking nightmare poem about one of the most “supreme evil[s]” of human experience: world war. The poem recounts the story of a GI in the Pacific theater who anticipates the surrender of the Japanese on V-J Day (September 2, 1945) two years before the actual fact. “[T]wo birthdays // Back, in the jungle, before [he] sailed high on the rainbow / Waters of victory” (38), the soldier drinks whiskey sent by his mother as a present, then explains to her—apparently, in a letter—how he later found himself drunk in a tattoo parlor in Yokahama, with “four / Men … bent over me,” who tattoo his entire torso with a brightly colored snake that follows the contours of his body:
it was at my throat
Beginning with its tail, …
moving under
My armpit like a sailor's, scale
By scale. …
..... I retched but choked
It back, for he had crossed my breast. …
..... Oh yes and now he lay low
On my belly, and gathered together the rainbow
Ships of Buckner Bay. I slumbered deep and he crossed the small
Of my back increased
His patchwork hold on my hip passed through the V between
My legs, and came
Around once more all but the head then I was turning the snake
Coiled round my right thigh and crossed
Me with light hands
(Eye-Beaters 40-41)
The soldier's experience with this all-devouring, demonic snake warrants immediate comparison with two turbulent moments from Coleridge's odes of terror. Dickey's snake-filled, nightmare world in “Victory”—especially “the dark side / Of the mind” (Eye-Beaters 40)—recalls Coleridge's “viper thoughts, that coil around my mind, / Reality's dark dream!” from “Dejection: An Ode” (419). When Coleridge turns from these viperous thoughts to “listen to the wind,” he hears, with greater terror, the “groans, of trampled men, with smarting wounds—/ At once they groan with pain, and shudder with the cold!” Likewise, Dickey's world of war is filled with the pain of men, that of his living “buddies,” “ready,” as he is, “to sail … toward life / After death,” along with the memories of “others long buried / At sea” (38). Even more important, the retching and choking of Dickey's soldier in a time of war suggest the sixth stanza from “Ode to the Departing Year,” which records Coleridge's rage and shock at human slaughter carried out in the name of liberty during the French Revolution and at the massacre of Ismail in 1770. After experiencing, “on no earthly shore,” a nightmare vision of the Departing Year, whose past events and “robe [are] inscrib'd with gore” (388), this Romantic poet awakes to find that his predatory dream continues to flood traumatically through his soul, to the same degree that World War II traumatically pervades Dickey's and fiction (even half a century later in Dickey's best and most recent novel, To the White Sea). One has only to place sections from “Victory” and “Ode to the Departing Year” side by side to note the emotional frenzy and and pain shared by the two writers.8 Here are Coleridge's words, still striking after two hundred years:
Yet still I gasp'd and reel'd with dread.
And ever, when the dream of night
Renews the phantom to my sight,
Cold sweat-drops gather on my limbs;
My ears throb hot; my eye-balls start;
My brain with horrid tumult swims;
Wild is the tempest of my heart;
And my thick and struggling breath
Imitates the toil of death!
No stranger agony confounds
The Soldier on the war-field spread,
When all foredone with toil and wounds,
Death-like he dozes among heaps of dead!
(389)
While terror signals the presence of an emotionally animating form in both poems and indicates the genre to which they belong, the method of closure in each differs considerably, and this difference sheds further light on the momentum of Dickey's word-magic. To be sure, both poems close with a suffocating terror that demands release. Each poet has worked his way through considerable psychological pain; however, to remain in a state of such dread is emotional, moral, and political paralysis. In short, the pervasive terror in the body of each ode demands the poet's return to action in his conclusion, lest the momentum in each piece remain mired in pathetic tragedy.9 This two-step process—stasis and renewal—occurs in Coleridge's ending when he warns England that it has been protected from the political terrors of the Departing Year primarily because of the military value of its geographic isolation. Threatened even as he closes, Coleridge hears “the Birds of warning sing,” then personally resolves to be “unpartaking of the evil thing” (389) and to remain alert, “Cleans'd from the vaporous passions that bedim / God's Image” (390).
Dickey, also acutely aware of catastrophic evil in human nature, needs to be “Cleans'd” from his exposure to the atrocities of war, which, like Coleridge, he personifies in animal form.10 Although both poets subscribe to a harmonious pantheism that incorporates historical calamity as fully realistic material for the poetic imagination, Dickey postulates nothing like a divine providence—as does Coleridge when he “recentre[s]” his “immortal mind” (390)—as a subsumptive or unifying principle to which he can appeal for relief. Instead, on a personal level, Dickey dramatizes an inferred, magical animism in which life and death are not exclusive opposites but shared moments in a cycle of perpetual motion. In a world in which life and death constantly emerge into and out of each other, Dickey's snake—unlike Coleridge's birds, “the famish'd brood of prey”—has a double nature. First, the boa constrictor-like coiling and physical mutilation of the snake constitute a “confrontation” or “death encounter” for the speaker, a poetic event that has an emotional analogy with his vast experience of death from war and simultaneously stands for his desire for the symbolic death of his mutilated war self. With what appears at first to be an “appalling” movement, the snake then enters its subject from behind, and an opposite movement begins, namely, the renewal of the soldier that is initiated in the poem's final line. Strangely enough, the motion of the snake alters—indeed, redeems—both serpent and host, for the snake acquires, in Drake's terms, a “mysterious energy” that transforms the soldier, Christ-like, into “the new prince of peace”:
I felt myself opened
Just enough, where the serpent staggered on his last
Colors needles gasping for air jack-hammering
My right haunch burned by the hundreds
Of holes, as the snake shone on me complete escaping
Forever surviving crushing going home
To the bowels of the living,
His master, and the new prince of peace.
(Eye-Beaters 41)
As is the case with Dickey's animals in many of his poems, such as “Approaching Prayer,” “Eagles,” “Reincarnation I and II,” and “The Sheep Child,” the snake now functions redemptively by assuming the role of what is a shamanic commonplace in anthropological literature, namely, a power animal. In keeping with the classical, mythological character of a power animal, Dickey's snake acquires a “mysterious power” that is both malign and benign. On the one hand, as a cross-cultural symbol of the range of human evil (including war), the snake is a traditional object of terror. Joseph Campbell says, “in its threatening character, as a traveling aesophagus, the serpent is … an image of the consuming power of the … will [in nature], foreboding death to all that lives” (Mythologies 378). On the other hand, Campbell notes, “The ability of the serpent to shed its skin and thus to renew itself, as the moon is renewed by sloughing its shadow, has recommended it, throughout the world, as an obvious image of the mystery of the [same] will in nature, which is ever self-renewing in its generation of living beings” (378). This ancient mythological connection between snake and moon thus enables the serpent to play its double role by providing it with the “self-renewing” power that is passed on to the soldier. In “Victory,” as in “May Day Sermon” and “The Eye-Beaters,” Dickey establishes yet another magical setting in which his poetic agent is energized as he tries to overcome overwhelming odds. On the road of this momentous psychic journey, Dickey's soldier struggles forward to rid himself of war by acquiring traits of natural objects which are really rhetorical, self-animating aspects of his own mind.11 That nature should seem beneficent and helpful, rather than another debilitating oppressor, adds considerably to the momentum of the healing process.
Consequently, in Dickey's ritual scene, the moon is not static but carries with it a renewing, ancient, magical light. For example, in “Victory,” “two birthdays / Ago,” when the soldier got drunk—drunkenness being another variation of the hallucinatory state of shamanic transition—he did so at night when “the moon burned with the light it had when it split // From the earth” (Eye-Beaters 39). Dickey's soldier, like this moon, has been “split” by war from the human and emotional ground that he desperately requires. However, this moon retains the “light” or energizing possibility to split, then become something different and uniquely powerful, a possibility and process that bear direct analogy to the soldier's ritual journey of healing and self-empowerment. While expressing a dynamic relation between life and death, metaphors throughout the poem further bind the motions of snake and moon, suggesting once more that, in Dickey's world, there operates something analogous to Frazer's principle of a power-exchanging, contagious magic. When the soldier says, “I reached for the bottle. It was dying and the moon / Writhed closer to be free,” the dying energy of whiskey's liberating hallucination gives rise to the snakelike motion of the moon, which sheds its animating light on the soldier's “smile of foreknowledge” that he will survive the war. Similarly, just before the visionary snake emerges from the bottle, the speaker indicates another, closer connection between snake and moon that images the archetypal movement of life out of death: “Had the Form in the moon come from the dead soldier / Of your bottle, Mother?” (39). Finally, even during the tattooing process, the passive host gives himself over to the animating, magical motion of the snake. Earlier, he described the snake by saying, “the angel / Of peace is limbless” (39-40). Yet as the snake covers his body, the soldier identifies with the shape and motion of this “dreadful … superhuman agency” (Drake's terms) and so takes on its sustaining and renewing moon-energy as he notes, “limbless I fell and moved like moonlight / On the needles” (40).
Even though Dickey's poem suggests that the “Form in the moon” (which I read to be an incipient image of the “snakehead”) comes from a masculine source (albeit from his mother: “the dead soldier / Of your bottle”), and though the form's shape suggests a phallocentric image, the serpent is, by no means, a universal sign of masculine power. As an instrument of self-revelation and transformation, the serpent is conceived in many cultures as a feminine totem that symbolizes modes of coming to consciousness that bear directly on central religious components in Dickey's poem. For example, Campbell notes that in “India's Kundalini Yoga … the energy of life—all life—is symbolized as … a female serpent.” In this sect,
The aim of the yoga is to wake this Serpent Maiden, coiled in upon herself, and bring her up the spine to full consciousness, both of herself and of the spiritual nature of all things. She is awakened by the sound of the energy of the light of consciousness (the sound of the syllable “om”), which is brought to her first on the rhythm of the breath, but fully heard only when she has uncoiled and ascended to the center of the heart.
(Mythologies 291)
As it does in this Indian ritual initiated through feminine power, the snake in “Victory” covers the soldier's body with a motion that constitutes a hypnotic, somatic meditation, a meditation that, like Dickey's poem, involves the total transformation and awareness of its participant. Examples of the movement of Dickey's snake warrant repeating here to confirm this striking analogy: “the snake … was at my throat / Beginning with its tail … moving under / My armpit. … He coiled around me … I turned with him side / To side … he grew. … I lay and it lay / Now over my heart. … and I knew that many- / colored snakeskin was living with my heart our hearts / Beat as one” (40-41).
In Campbell's citation, the symbolic purpose of the Indian snake is to unify all human emotional and psychic centers, whether at the lowest point in the genitals or at the higher reaches of the heart. This somatic concordance then leads each center along the “One Way Trail” to full consciousness at “the crown of the head” (Mythologies 291). To carry the whole man—sensory and cognitive, conscious and unconscious—through a comprehensive healing process, Dickey's serpent enters the soldier's bowels with the ritual motion of the mythical ouraboros, the serpent eating its own tail in the eternally circular process of separation and return to an energizing source. When Dickey's serpent passes the navel (that part of the body that Campbell interprets as a mythological symbol of “[the] will to power, aggression” [291]) and enters the soldier, we may read this event as the poem's climactic moment, a culmination of the fully conscious, circular transformation of the aggressive, wartorn, and exhausted phallus into an instrument of peace and renewal. Thinking through the physical imagery of the male body, Dickey transcends the merely physical by concluding in the mystical tradition of T. S. Eliot in “East Coker.” While we may see a pun equal to Kenneth Burke's wordplay in his essay on the bodily tropes, we also see a standard, religious oxymoron in Eliot's words that locates Dickey's poetic attitude in a well-documented series of theological traditions, namely, that “In my end is my beginning” (129).12
If one thinks that this kind of closural magic (or, indeed, the formal, snakelike movement of Dickey's poem down the page) is trivial or may be reduced to static, sensory experience, one needs only to examine similar forms of “religious” meditation in other cultures, ranging from that of the Hopi Indians to certain Oriental religions.13 Consistent with the world-views in many of these beliefs, Dickey's magical method in “Victory” is not a form of escapism but rather a nondualistic way of clearing the ego of earthly pain in order to stand outside dominating sensation and emotion, and thus to free oneself from their tyranny. In many ways, the animating emotional form of “Victory” is analogous to the utterance of the mythic syllable om, which carries its practitioner through levels of consciousness, beyond myriad mental opposites, to the infernal and celestial vision deep within one's own soul. Dickey's magical, religious method of closure is thus both ancient and cross-cultural; it is directed to an external narrative of traumatic historical events, yet also inner-directed to the most sensitive reaction to these events by the human body. That this method should involve a sexual component becomes even more intelligible when related to certain basic religious principles, shared by Buddhist and Hindu sects. As Campbell notes of the Sahajiya cult in the Pala dynasty from Bengal, between A.D. 700 and 1200:
it was held that the only true experience of the pure rapture of the void was the rapture of sexual union, wherein “each is both.” This was the natural path … to the innate nature (sahaja) of oneself, and therewith of the universe: the path along which nature itself leads the way.
So we read … “This sahaja is to be intuited within.” “It is free from all sounds, colors, and qualities; can be neither spoken of nor known.” “Where the mind dies out and the vital breath is gone, there is the Great Delight supreme: it neither stands steady nor fluctuates; nor is it expressible in words.” “In that state the individual mind joins sahaja as water water.” “There is no duality in sahaja. It is perfect, like the sky.”
… One knows then: “I am the universe: I am the Buddha: I am perfect purity: I am non-cognition: I the annihilator of the cycle of existence.”
(Masks of God: Oriental Mythology 351)
“Victory” originally appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1968. Twenty-five years later, in fall 1993, Dickey dramatized yet again his paramount interest in mystical momentum by using word-magic to conclude his novel To the White Sea. Here, his hero-predator, the American tail gunner Muldrow, shot down over war-torn Japan, is killed by Japanese soldiers. As their bullets go through him, he does not exactly die but rather enters a desireless, objectless, bodiless world, like the Sahajiyaian realm of supreme rapture, in which “the mind dies out and the vital breath is gone,” which “neither stands steady nor fluctuates,” and in which there is “no duality,” for “the individual mind joins [nature] as water water.” This absolute, circular flow—the union of life and death, waking and dreaming, pain and the absence of sensation—then hypnotically transports him to a kind of waking trance beyond even these harmonious opposites. In the novel's final lines, Muldrow's predatory quest ends when he closes his eyes and the individuality of his speaking voice dissolves into a darkened silence, which Campbell calls the “fourth element” of om, “the sphere of bliss,” described in the Mandukya Upanishad as “neither inward- nor outward-turned consciousness, nor the two together … neither knowing nor unknowing … the coming to peaceful rest of all differentiated, relative existence: utterly quiet: peaceful-blissful” (Masks of God: Creative Mythology 666). In the purity of his motionless motion, this soldier, like the soldier in “Victory,” is propelled by the momentum of Dickey's extraordinary word-magic into the ecstatic silence that is his and its own final form:
When I tell you this, just say that it came from a voice in the wind: a voice without a voice, which doesn't make a sound. You can pick it up any time it snows, where you are, or even just when the wind is from the north, from anywhere north of east or west. I was in the place I tried to get to. I had made it in exactly the shape I wanted to be in, though maybe just a little beat up. But the main thing was that I had got to the landscape and the weather, and you can remember me standing there with the bullets going through, and me not feeling a thing. There it was. A red wall blazed. For a second there was a terrific heat, like somebody had opened a furnace door, the most terrible heat, something that could have burned up the world, and I was sure I was gone. But the cold and the snow came back. The wind mixed the flakes, and I knew I had it. I was in it, and part of it. I matched it all. And I will be everywhere in it from now on. You will be able to hear me, just like you're hearing me now. Everywhere in it, for the first time and the last, as soon as I close my eyes.
(274-75)
Notes
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Poems that I should like to nominate as major in this collection are “Under Buzzards” (part 2 of “Diabetes”), “Mercy,” “Victory,” “Pine,” “Madness,” “The Eye-Beaters,” and “Turning Away.”
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For example, “the stagy, unpleasant hysteria” with which Leibowitz faults Dickey may, in fact, be an emotional sign that Dickey has formally achieved exactly the kind of poem he intended to produce, with “hysterical” effects totally appropriate to its genre. See my discussion of “Madness,” “Mercy,” and “Victory” below. Ernest Suarez deals perceptively with the considerable critical misperception of Dickey, especially in chapter 4. See also Romy Heylen's valuable distinction between “reflection poetry” and “a participation poem or performance poem that quite simply must be experienced,” with Dickey falling under the latter heading.
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Dickey's speech, titled “The G.I. Can of Beets, The Fox in the Wave, and The Hammers Over Open Ground,” is collected in Night Hurdling (124-40).
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Whether or not we agree that “spindrift” cannot be part of this seal's vision—one recalls Crane's own, vigorous defense of his language in a famous letter to Harriet Monroe (Poems 234-40)—Dickey's comments on Crane's word selection lead to further considerations about magical wordplay in poetry which are relevant for the beginning of our inquiry.
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For Dickey's view of William James, see Baughman, Voiced Connections 155.
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Dickey calls this mode of lyric “country surrealism” (Sorties 100).
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My own reading of “Pine” differs from yet is indebted to Ernest Suarez's analysis (134-36).
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If we apply Drake's criteria as well as conventional standards of the ode to “Victory” and “Ode to the Departing Year,” we find that both poems qualify as singular representatives in the genre of terror. First, both poems are long—Dickey's at 131 lines, Coleridge's at 161—which enables each to develop a considerable vastness of conception regarding war and the toll it takes on human emotion. Further, both possess an occasional reference of considerable, if not ceremonial, importance, Dickey's to V-J Day, Coleridge's to the year 1796 and a preceding, tragic history; each occasional reference produces the feeling of an elevated status of public utterance, even though each poem is represented in a profoundly personal mode of address. Both poems entail elaborate stanzaic organization, exquisite detail and coloring, and a somewhat similar style of indentation, although Dickey's is more pronounced and much less regular than Coleridge's. While Dickey uses no rhyme and his tone is less heightened, both lyrics convey a considerable seriousness that slowly alters and transports the reader into a state of impassioned dread. Rhetorically, this dread aids the political position of each poet by giving him a vulnerable sincerity that makes him sympathetic and morally convincing.
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Arguing for the value of “poetic” rather than merely “semantic” meaning, Kenneth Burke puts the issue in a poignant statement that could well represent Dickey's poetic stand against certain self-indulgent aspects of confessional poetry: “I wonder how long it has been since a poet has asked himself … Suppose I did not simply wish to load upon the broad shoulders of the public medium my own ungainly appetities and ambitions? Suppose that, gnarled as I am, I did not consider it enough simply to seek payment for my gnarledness, the establishment of communion through evils held in common? Suppose I would also erect a structure of encouragement, for all of us? How should I go about it, in the sequence of imagery, not merely to bring us most poignantly into hell, but also out again? … Must there not, for every flight, be also a return, before my work can be called complete as a moral act?” (Philosophy 138-39).
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As critic Ronald Baughman poignantly points out in “James Dickey's War Poetry: A ‘Saved, Shaken Life,’” it is not just the snake that terrorizes Dickey, but also a veteran's residual terror of surviving the war. It is a well known biographical fact that Dickey spent the formative years of his young adulthood (1942-46) serving in the Army Air Force in the South Pacific. After Dickey flew nearly one hundred missions with the 418th Night Fighters, after he saw his American colleagues killed and mutilated by the enemy, and after he was an integral part of the killing mechanism of war, it is little wonder that so much of Dickey's poetry is driven by his internal need to deal emotionally with the shock of combat.
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This self-enabling rhetoric is extremely important, especially on a personal and emotional level. The reader has only to ask how many times he or she has had to fight back from psychological or physical attack, whether in a major social arena such as world war or in the wars conducted on the battlegrounds of one's profession, family, or love life, where the threat of failure is the constant enemy. For a similar rhetoric, though presented in a more explicit mode of direct address, see Whitman's “A Noiseless Patient Spider” (Whitman 450). See also “Rhetoric and Primitive Magic” and the “Realistic Function of Rhetoric” in Kenneth Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives (40-46).
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See Kenneth Burke, “The Thinking of the Body” and “Somnia ad Urinandnum,” Language as Symbolic Action 308-58. See also William James's famous chapter “Mysticism” in The Varieties of Religious Experience 299-336.
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See Joseph Campbell's description of the Hopi Indian Snake Dance, which occurs in late August in the lunar month called “the Big Feast Moon,” in Mythologies 290.
Works Cited
Baughman, Ronald. “James Dickey's War Poetry: A ‘Saved, Shaken Life.’” South Carolina Review 10 (Apr. 1983): 38-48.
———, ed. The Voiced Connections of James Dickey: Interviews and Conversations. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1989.
Burke, Kenneth. Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method. Berkeley: U of California P, 1966.
———. The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. New York: Vintage, 1957.
———. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969.
Campbell, Joseph. The Masks of God: Creative Mythology. New York: Viking, 1968.
———. The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology. New York: Viking, 1962.
———. Mythologies of the Primitive Planters: The Middle and Southern Americas. Part 3 of The Way of the Seeded Earth. Vol. 2 of Historical Atlas of World Mythology. New York: Harper, 1989.
———. The Sacrifice. Part 1 of The Way of the Seeded Earth. Vol. 2 of Historical Atlas of World Mythology. New York: Harper, 1988.
Cassirer, Ernst. Language and Myth. Trans. Susanne K. Langer. New York: Dover, 1946.
———. Mythical Thought. Vol. 2 of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New Haven: Yale UP, 1955.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Poems and prose. English Romantic Poetry and Prose. Ed. Russell Noyes. New York: Oxford UP, 1956. 373-447.
Crane, Hart. The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane. Ed. Brom Weber. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1966.
Crane, Ronald, ed. Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1952.
Davison, Peter. “The Difficulties of Being Major: The Poetry of Robert Lowell and James Dickey.” Atlantic Monthly Oct. 1967: 223-30.
DeMott, Benjamin. “The ‘More’ Life School and James Dickey.” Saturday Review 28 Mar. 1970: 38.
Dickey, James. The Central Motion: Poems, 1968-1979. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1983.
———. The Eagle's Mile. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1990.
———. The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970.
———. Night Hurdling: Poems, Essays, Conversations, Commencements, and Afterwords. Columbia, SC, and Bloomfield Hills, MI: Bruccoli Clark, 1983.
———. Poems 1957-1967. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1967.
———. Puella. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1982.
———. Self-Interviews. New York: Dell, 1970.
———. Sorties. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1984.
———. To the White Sea. New York: Houghton, 1993.
Donoghue, Denis. “Walt Whitman.” Leaves of Grass. Ed. Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett. New York: Norton, 1973. 962-72.
Eliot, T. S. “East Coker.” The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909-1950. New York: Harcourt, 1952. 123-29.
Frazer, Sir James George. The Golden Bough. New York: Macmillan, 1963.
Heylen, Romy. “James Dickey's The Zodiac: A Self-Translation?” James Dickey Newsletter 6.2 (1990): 2-17.
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ed. W. H. Gardner. Baltimore: Penguin, 1953.
Howard, Richard. “Resurrection for a Little While.” Nation 23 Mar. 1970: 341-42.
James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. London: Collier, 1961.
Leibowitz, Herbert. “The Moiling of Secret Forces: The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy.” The Imagination as Glory: The Poetry of James Dickey. Ed. Bruce Weigl and T. R. Hummer. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1984. 130.
Longinus. “On the Sublime.” Ed. Mark Schorer, Josephine Miles, and Gordon McKenzie. Criticism: The Foundations of Modern Literary Judgment. New York: Harcourt, 1948. 10-24.
Simon, John. Rev. of Poems 1957-1967, by James Dickey. Commonweal 1 Dec. 1967: 315.
Suarez, Ernest. James Dickey and the Politics of Canon: Assessing the Savage Ideal. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1993.
Tulip, James. “Robert Lowell and James Dickey.” Poetry Australia 24 (Oct. 1968): 39-47.
Untermeyer, Louis. “A Way of Seeing and Saying.” Saturday Review 6 May 1967: 55.
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