[In the following essay, Baughman examines the principal poems of Buckdancer's Choice, illuminating significant themes and mentioning Dickey's sustained evocation of human ambivalence and equivocation.]

In Buckdancer's Choice Dickey achieves full maturity as a poet. These are exciting poems, many of them discernibly longer, less constricted in form, more “open” than his previous works. In his essay “The Poet Turns on Himself,” Dickey defines his concept of the “un-well-made” or “open” poem: “It would have none of the neatness of most of those poems we call ‘works of art’ but would have the capacity to involve the reader in it, in all its imperfections and impurities, rather than offering him a (supposedly) perfected and perfect work for contemplation, judgment, and evaluation.”¹ The “open,” or more conclusionless, poem not only creates the visual excitement of unexpected spatial arrangement upon the page but also invites psychological complexity, narrative power.

The poet in Buckdancer's Choice strips away the protecting and concealing masks employed in Helmets and openly addresses the questions haunting him throughout his work. In “The Firebombing,” the war poem which begins the volume, he asks whether he should seek absolution or sentence for his Air Force bombing activities. The speaker can find no easy answer; but that he is asking the question reveals his desire to move from self-laceration toward potential renewal. This question of absolution or sentence also underlies the writer's exploration of his other key subjects. In the family poems Dickey focuses on the mother-child relationship that has given him life but also produced a guilt about being alive. “Slave Quarters,” an important social poem, probes the moral quandary generated by the master and slave love-hate relationship so much a part of Southern history. “The Fiend,” one of his unique love poems, dramatizes another form of socially disapproved and yet curiously elevating passion. In nature, too, the writer illustrates, through “The Shark's Parlor,” how a boy's victory over a shark creates both a moment of youthful glory and a lifelong haunting memory. Dickey directly treats, in the major works of this collection, the ambiguities caught in survivor's guilt.

The volume's first poem, “The Firebombing,”² dramatically reveals the difficulties the speaker has in bringing himself back to life after combat. Looking back on his actions during World War II, he realizes that he has had no choice about what he has done—firebombing was, after all, his duty; yet he also concedes that through his bombing missions he has caused horrifying deaths to innocent populations. Dickey has declared that the poem treats “a very complex state of mind, guilt at the inability to feel guilt.”³ His statement suggests at least some of the ambiguities that permeate the poem and its speaker's mind.

As Dickey says of the protagonist in “The Jewel,” the central figure in “The Firebombing” is a man “doubled strangely in time.” Riding in the streetcars, sitting in bars, checking his well-stocked pantry, or shining flashlights on his palm trees in present-day America, he envisions his enemies' world which in the past he has helped to destroy. That the ordinary details of his present life persistently recall that other locale suggests the extent to which he is haunted by his past experiences, by questions about his own guilt or innocence in causing the deaths of Japanese civilians. To come to some answer he engages in a series of imaginative re-creations of his experience.

First he examines his own role during the war. As a pilot he became, like his plane, a kind of machine. He learned not to feel concern for his victims or to apply moral judgments to his actions; instead, he measured only how well he performed his task. He became “some technical-minded stranger with my hands” who flew artistically accomplished missions. As a pilot he had the power of life and death over others, but

                                                                                                                        … when those on earth
Die, there is not even sound;
One is cool and enthralled in the cockpit,
Turned blue by the power of beauty, …

Such detachment has allowed him to be a successful pilot and to perform his duty without remorse.

Yet because his actions now haunt him, he also feels compelled to envision the scenes of destruction that he has caused. As a pilot he had been “unable / To get down there or see / What really happened.” Since he could not witness, could not be there, he uses his imagination to portray what he could not see in actuality:

All leashes of dogs
Break under the first bomb, around those
In bed, or late in the public baths: around those
Who inch forward on their hands
Into medicinal waters.
Their heads come up with a roar
Of Chicago fire:
As I sail artistically over
The resort town followed by farms,
Singing and twisting
All the handles in heaven          kicking
The small cattle off their feet
In a red costly blast
Flinging jelly over the walls
With fire of mine like a cat
Holding onto another man's walls. …

Through these horrifying images which have held him for twenty years, he shows that “With this in the dark of the mind, / Death will not be what it should.”

Finally, to get to the truth of his experience, the speaker tries to put himself in the place of his victims. He commands himself to

Think of this          think of this
I did not think of my house
But think of my house now. …

As a homeowner seemingly in league with other homeowners, both American and Japanese, he wants to feel a sense of unity with his victims:

All families lie together, though some are burned alive.
The others try to feel
For them. Some can, it is often said.

Yet the protagonist is not among those who can—simply and automatically—“feel” for these victims. Rather, his response is more complex.

He has been involved in the destruction of families hauntingly like his own; that he was just doing his duty does not, he knows, expiate him. Uncertain finally about the extent of his own moral responsibility, he will not attempt to simplify it, either for himself or others. Instead, he can only pose yet another question: “Absolution? Sentence? No matter; / The thing itself is in that.” What Dickey suggests here is that the question of guilt or innocence is too complicated to be easily stated or resolved. If he wishes honestly to treat the question, he must acknowledge all the ambiguities it does, in fact, contain. Thus his speaker finally comes to no certain conclusion but instead continues to grope with the ambivalence implicit in his situation.

A similar emotional quandary is dramatized in “Buckdancer's Choice”⁴ and “Angina,” two family poems that focus on the mother-child relationship. Although the poet expresses great affection and admiration for his mother in these works, his feelings are also influenced by guilt. He realizes that he has been born only because an older child has died and that his birth has endangered the life of his mother, a heart patient. Thus their relationship contains profound emotional ambiguities.

In the title poem Dickey's mother serves as a model of courage in the face of death. To counter her agony she whistles “The thousand variations of one song; / It is called Buckdancer's Choice.” Through her music the child-speaker envisions the dying art of a black buck-and-wing dancer who flaps his elbows in a futile attempt to transform them into wings. Together these two performers merge in the child's mind as emblems of human refusal to give in to death:

Through stratum after stratum of a tone
Proclaiming what choices there are
For the last dancers of their kind,
For ill women and for all slaves
Of death, and children enchanted at walls
Not dancing but nearly risen
Through barnlike, theatrelike houses
On the wings of the buck and wing.

The personal, private arts of the two performers, which are caught in the three-beat anapestic lines, inspire the child, another slave of death, to pursue his own art years later.

Again, in “Angina,”⁵ the speaker asserts that “when I think of love” it embodies itself in “an old woman” who “takes her appalling risks.” Though doctors had warned her that to bear children would cause her death, she nonetheless has had four; to this woman “Existence is family,” although “Her children and her children's children fail / In school, marriage, abstinence, business.” Aware of her agony, the speaker stands at her bedside and hears death “saying slowly / to itself.”

I must be still and not worry,
Not worry, not worry, to hold
My peace, my poor place, my own.

Here the voice of death and that of the son fuse. Measured against the woman's courage, death does indeed hold a “poor place”; so too does the grown child who is conscious that he, like his siblings, has imperiled his mother's life, has caused her enormous disappointments. He thus feels a mixture of love and guilt in his relationship with her, an ambiguity that he cannot resolve but must explore.

Dickey's honesty in facing emotional truths about himself extends as well to the larger social context. Although he feels strong affection for the South, he acknowledges the guilt implicit in his region's history. In “Slave Quarters,”⁶ Dickey records a contemporary white Southerner's responses to his ancestors' sexual domination of black slave women. In many respects “Slave Quarters” is about a special kind of love, but one that accommodates an active indifference which is a form of hate as well. The sexual encounters between slave owner and slave are always described as “love” in the poem, yet the owner's attitude suggests his arrogance, his complete freedom to take possession whenever he chooses and then to feel no sense of obligation or concern afterward.

Like the protagonist of “The Firebombing,” Dickey's speaker is a man who bridges the present and the past, fusing the two periods in his own imagination. His dilemma, as a contemporary Southerner, involves how to acknowledge his own place within the legacy he knows was wrong:

                                                                                                    How take on the guilt
Of slavers? How shudder like one who made
Money from buying a people
To work as ghosts
In this blowing solitude?

Although he knows that the master-slave relationship was wrong, he also feels drawn to it and to the social system it implies.

While visiting the site of a former plantation, the speaker re-creates in his mind the life established in “the great house” of the South. In the daytime house of social order and decorum the plantation owner has led an aristocratic life. Like the protagonist in “The Firebombing” who surveys his well-stocked pantry and suburban home, the planter records his affluence: he is

                                                                      proud of his grounds,
His dogs, his spinet
From Savannah, his pale daughters,
His war with the sawgrass, pushed back into
The sea it crawled from.

His taming of the wilderness into a fruitful, cultivated environment sparks the contemporary Southerner's pride. But only the plantation dogs decipher what is true of both the owner and the speaker, “what I totally am”—a creature of lust and sexual power. In one sense the slave master has the same kind of power over others' lives that the pilot does in “The Firebombing.”

At night, in the moonlight—the light associated in Dickey's work with madness and a special inner vision—the plantation owner leaves his house and his “thin wife” and “seeks the other color of his body.” The speaker recognizes the very real passion in the relationship between the white man and the black woman, whether in the past or in the present:

My body has a color not yet freed:
In that ruined house let me throw
Obsessive gentility off;
Let Africa rise upon me like a man
Whose instincts are delivered from their chains. …

Such passion is good, alive; yet it grows out of power over other human beings.

Furthermore, when in his ancestor's time this passion creates “A child who belongs in no world,” the slave master responds with indifference. For the present-day speaker this uncaring attitude is his region's greatest sin. He cannot imagine heartlessly confining a child to a life as a doorman, waiter, parking lot attendant, or member of a road gang simply because the father will not acknowledge his son. In Self-Interviews, Dickey states that “the main thing I characterize as the emotion of love is the wish to protect the other person.”⁷ Since the slave owner ignores the requirement to protect the black woman and their child, his guilt is profound.

In “Slave Quarters” Dickey evaluates the extremely ambivalent feelings he has about his region's history. As he states in his essay “Notes on the Decline of Outrage,” every white Southerner must appraise the attitudes that he retains from his past: “Not for a moment does he entertain the notion that these prejudices are just, fitting, or reasonable. But neither can he deny that they belong to him by inheritance, as they belong to other Southerners. Yet this does not mean that they cannot be seen for what they are, that they cannot be appraised and understood.”⁸ However, as in “The Firebombing,” the appraisal in order to be honest must convey all the ambiguities that remain.

“Them, Crying”⁹ clearly embodies the wound motif that operates throughout Dickey's poetry, and, like “Slave Quarters,” it emphasizes the writer's unconditional compassion for children who suffer. About this subject he feels no ambivalence. In his portrait of a truck driver who spends his nights in hospitals comforting sick and dying children, he therefore describes a man who does not scrutinize his motives—a desire for absolution or sentence—but instead simply acts.

Dickey writes, “I've always had the most complete horror of hospitals. … I view hospitals as charnel houses. … I hold it against doctors that they're not miracle workers; they're helpless in so many ways. … To me, the voice of a child who is alone, frightened, and in pain is an appeal so powerful that it can go through any barrier and be heard anywhere.”¹⁰ His own feelings about children in pain become those of his protagonist, an outsider who is “Unmarried, unchildlike, / Half-bearded and foul-mouthed” but who at night is “called to by something beyond / His life,” the appeal of hospitalized children. The trucker's personal characteristics make him seem one unlikely to feel concern for others; in fact, Dickey purposely has selected a figure who is ordinarily thought of as insensitive and boorish. Acutely aware that he does not belong within the medical and family groups in the hospital, the truck driver nonetheless consoles children in ways doctors cannot;

For our children lie there beyond us
In the still, foreign city of pain
Singing backward into the world
To those never seen before,
Old cool-handed doctors and young ones,
Capped girls bearing vessels of glucose,
Ginger ward boys, pan handlers, technicians,
Thieves, nightwalkers, truckers, and drunkards
Who must hear, not listening, them:
Them, crying: for they rise only unto
Those few who transcend themselves,
The superhuman tenderness of strangers.

Unlike most of those who gather in the hospital, the trucker “transcends” himself in agonizing for a small child's return to life. And his unselfish, unambivalent response provides the miracle that helps the child “rise,” either to health and life or to heaven as an angel.

Returning to a more ambiguous figure in “The Fiend,”¹¹ Dickey reasserts the tone dominating much of Buckdancer's Choice. Here his protagonist is both evil and good: the conventional view of the voyeur is mirrored by the poem's title; yet in its course the fiend also becomes a source for love. Fusing the potential for violent death with the possibility for transforming love, the beholder bestows a rare gift—both threatening and promising—upon those he watches:

                                                                                                                                            Not one of these beheld would
                    ever give
Him a second look                    but he gives them all a first look that goes
On and on                    conferring immortality while it lasts

As he watches people through their apartment windows, he sees and participates in the familiar dramas of their lives:

In some guise or other he is near them when they are weeping without sound
When the teen-age son has quit school                    when the girl has broken up
With the basketball star                    when the banker walks out on his wife.
He sees mothers counsel desperately with pulsing girls face down
On beds full of overstuffed beasts                    sees men dress as women
In ante-bellum costumes with bonnets                    sees doctors come, looking oddly
Like himself. …

He learns to read their lives as he reads their lips, “like reading the lips of the dead.” And as he crouches in tree limbs, calming dogs and connecting with birds and other creatures of nature's night, he observes people who involve themselves only with the artificial, lifeless images reflected by their television screens. His is a passionate connection; theirs is passive and empty.

Yet his greatest gift and greatest threat goes to those lonely, too often unnoticed women whose husbands and lovers do not provide the intensity of emotion the fiend offers. When he watches “a sullen shopgirl” undress to shower, for example,

                              She touches one button at her throat, and rigor mortis
Slithers into his pockets, making everything there—keys, pen
and secret love—stand up.

The thematic fusion of love and death is dramatically suggested through the rigor mortis image. However, when he “gets / A hold on himself” sexually, the shopgirl senses a connection with her unseen admirer, and she is transformed:

                                                                                          With that clasp she changes                    senses                    something
Some breath through the fragile walls                    some all-seeing eye
Of God                    some touch that enfolds her body                    some hand come up
                    out of roots

Once she is “beheld” she becomes “a saint” and “moves in a cloud.” She sings, “As if singing to him, come up from river-fog,” and is changed into an ideal of womanhood, into a goddess. For this girl as well as for all the other people he observes, “It is his beholding that saves them.”

On the other hand, to those who close their shades and refuse disclosure to him, he harbors an implicit threat of danger, of possible death. Such harm will, he knows, finally emerge when he moves from his hidden existence into an open declaration of who and what he is. He will follow a closed-shade shopgirl home and into her apartment to behold her directly. And once he abandons his secret life for an open disclosure, the fusion of love and death will probably culminate in his raping and killing the one he beholds.

With the figure of the voyeur as his protagonist the poet ventures far from the conventional bounds of morality. “The Fiend,” like “Slave Quarters,” formulates a complex vision of human passions and their potential, a vision far removed from traditional concepts of love. And because this vision is complex, it underlines the ambiguities Dickey perceives in his world.

“The Shark's Parlor”¹² portrays one of nature's fiends, the shark—a creature who, like the snake, represents for the poet the power of indifferent, inexorable destruction. Yet like its human counterpoint in “The Fiend,” the shark in this work also has transforming powers for the human being who confronts it. Dickey says the poem recounts a coming-of-age experience.¹³ Clearly, however, what the protagonist learns through his struggle with the shark is that victories over the powers of death are bound to be transitory.

As the poem begins, the adult speaker invokes “Memory” to recall the time in his youth when he and his friend, Payton Ford, had fished for a shark from the porch of a beach house. Fortified by their “first brassy taste of / beer” and their nightly dreams of “the great fin circling / Under the bedroom floor,” the two spread blood upon the sea to lure the creature to their hook. The struggle between the caught shark and the boys, helped by other “men and boys,” is a monumental one. Although they finally drag him onto the porch and into the house, he nearly destroys their “vacation paradise”:

                                                                                          cutting all four legs from under the dinner table
With one deep-water move                    he unwove the rugs in a moment throwing pints
Of blood over everything we owned                    knocked the buck teeth out of my picture
His odd head full of crushed jelly-glass splinters and radio tubes thrashing
Among the pages of fan magazines                    all the movie stars drenched in sea-blood.

And as the protagonist says:

Each time we thought he was dead                    he struggled back and smashed
One more thing                    in all coming back to die                    three or four more times after death.

By triumphing over this creature of the deep, the speaker seems to have attained manhood, seems to have defeated the mindless powers of death and destruction. Yet, as he reveals at the end of the poem, he has felt compelled to buy the beach house under which the shark still symbolically swims and which he can still symbolically wreck. The narrator thus concedes that his youthful struggle with death has been—and will continue to be—forced upon him: he feels “with age / … in all worlds the growing / encounters.” His triumph therefore remains equivocal; the initiation experience contains real ambivalence for him.

Throughout Buckdancer's Choice Dickey raises difficult questions about his own and his speakers' roles in relationship to the events and people in their lives. That he comes up with no clear answers—no clear verdicts of absolution or sentence—may at first suggest that he is avoiding his responsibility as an artist. However, his stance in fact reveals his honesty, his integrity, his refusal to reduce complex issues through simple answers. By probing and finally accepting the ambiguities of his situation, Dickey opens the way to renewal, for which he continues to strive in the succeeding collections.

Notes

1. Babel to Byzantium 291.

2. Buckdancer's Choice (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1965) 11-20; Poems 1957-1967 181-88.

3. Self-Interviews 137.

4. Buckdancer's Choice 21-22; Poems 1957-1967 189-90.

5. Buckdancer's Choice 63-65; Poems 1957-1967 226-27.

6. Buckdancer's Choice 73-79; Poems 1957-1967 234-39.

7. Self-Interviews 148.

8. Babel to Byzantium 274-75.

9. Buckdancer's Choice 31-33; Poems 1957-1967 198-200.

10. Self-Interviews 141-42.

11. Buckdancer's Choice 68-72; Poems 1957-1967 230-33.

12. Buckdancer's Choice 39-42; Poems 1957-1967 205-08.

13. Self-Interviews 146.