Analysis
In his poems, Richard Eberhart returned again and again to the theme of death: death-in-life and life-in-death. His poems are, at once, a stay against oblivion and a bid for immortality. In his essay “Poetry as a Creative Principle” (in Of Poetry and Poets), Eberhart claimed that poetry is “a spell against death.” As long as the essence of one’s life exists in one’s recorded work, there is immortality.
A Bravery of Earth, Eberhart’s first published work, is a long philosophical and autobiographical narrative that establishes the dichotomy between the push toward life, harmony, and order and the corresponding horrors that are a constant pull toward the grave.
“The Groundhog”
“The Groundhog,” perhaps Eberhart’s most anthologized and acclaimed poem, is the epitome of the duality that characterizes his verse. The poem serves as a kind of memento mori that unites all living creatures in their temporality. Focusing on a dead groundhog, it develops the paradox of life-in-death. The poem additionally expresses the poet’s belief that poetry is a gift of the gods—a mystical power that is relative, never absolute.
“The Groundhog” is one of four or five poems that Eberhart claimed were given to him. In a 1982 interview printed in Negative Capability, he described this mystical experience. These “given poems,” Eberhart stated, came from “far beyond or underneath the rational mind” and hence are unusually powerful. In such an experience, he speculated, one is “allied with world consciousness.” Commenting specifically on “The Groundhog,” he explained that the poem was composed in “twenty minutes of heightened awareness” after he saw a dead groundhog on a friend’s farm.The body was open and the belly was seething with maggots. So here was a small dead animal, as dead as could be, and yet he was full of life, an absolute paradox. . . . He seemed to have more life in him being eaten up by maggots than if he were running along in the fields with nature harmoniously in him.
The poem cites three encounters with a dead groundhog. The first takes place “in June, amid golden fields.” Here, in “vigorous summer,” the animal’s form began its “senseless change.” The sight of it without its senses makes the poet’s own “senses waver dim/ Seeing nature ferocious in him.” He pokes the animal with a stick and notes that it is alive with maggots.
In autumn, the speaker returns to the place where he saw the dead groundhog. This time, “the sap [was] gone out of the groundhog,/ But the bony sodden hulk remained.” The speaker’s previous reaction of love and loathing, the revulsion that was the first response of the senses, is no longer present. “In intellectual chains, . . . mured up in the wall of wisdom,” he brings intellect into play. He thinks about and applies reason to the experience of seeing the dead animal. In another summer, then, he takes to the fields again, “massive and burning, full of life,” and chances upon the spot where the groundhog lies. “There was only a little hair left,/ And bones bleaching in the sunlight.”
After three years, the poet returns again, but this time “there is no sign of the groundhog.” It is “whirling summer” once more, and as the speaker’s hand covers a “withered heart,” he thinks of
China and of Greece, Of Alexander in his tent; Of Montaigne in his tower, Of Saint Theresa in her wild lament.
Eberhart attributed the success of “The Groundhog” to the fact that he refused to delete these final lines. At a writer’s discussion group in the Harvard area,...
(This entire section contains 3178 words.)
Unlock this Study Guide Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
where Eberhart joined other poets and read his work aloud, he was urged to end the poem with the description of the dead creature—before the mention of China and Greece, of the soldier, the philosopher, and the saint. Eberhart pointed out that the purposeful lives of these notable people distinguish them from a dead animal, the groundhog. Perhaps it can be said that an ordinary man would never have noticed the small rotting thing lying in the field had a poet not called attention to its demise. An animal leaves only bones that in time disappear; however, the lives of great men and women endure throughout time and are recorded in their works. The final lines of Eberhart’s poem celebrate human achievement, the life-in-death that is beyond decay.
“For a Lamb”
In juxtaposition to “The Groundhog,” “For a Lamb,” an earlier poem about a dead animal, anticipates and highlights the import of the later work. In a field near Cambridge, England, in 1928, the speaker sees a dead lamb among daisies. “But the guts were out for crows to eat.” The speaker asks, “Where’s the lamb?” and then answers, “Say he’s in the wind somewhere,/ Say, there’s a lamb in the daisies.” Although there is the sense of death as a fusion with life, there is no person in the poem to give meaning to existence. The lamb lives only because someone, a poet with creative imagination, has marked its being in the world. When there is human significance, death-in-life is transformed into life-in-death.
Eberhart believed that poetry comes out of suffering, and it was his mother’s death that brought this awareness. Before she died, he had stayed out of college a year to help take care of her. According to a 1983 essay published in Negative Capability, this was for Eberhart “the most profound experience of my life, one that begot my poetry, an experience of depth that was inexpressible.” Fifty-five years later, in an essay entitled “The Real and the Unreal,” the adult Eberhart ponders the meaning of this early suffering. From memory, he says, “as part of the mystery of creation, flow poetry and music, manifold works of the imagination.” One of his poems asserts that it is “the willowy Day-Bed of past time/ that taught death in the substratum.” These lines exemplify Eberhart’s thoughts in “The Theory of Poetry” that the first experience of the death of a loved one teaches “the bitterness but the holy clarity of truth.”
Life-in-death and death-in-life
The final stanza of the poem “1934,” reprinted in Collected Poems 1930-1986, defines Eberhart’s premise about poetry and “life-in-death.”
And I have eased reality and fiction Into a kind of intellectual fruition Strength in solitude, life in death, Compassion by suffering, love in strife, And ever and still the weight of mystery Arrows a way between my words and me.
As a philosophical poet, Eberhart explores life’s dualities. In “How I Write Poetry,” he states that “everything about poetry is relative rather than absolute.” Commenting on “The Cancer Cells,” a poem that brings to mind his mother’s terminal illness, the poet writes that the cancer cells photographed in Life magazine aroused in him an awareness of the simultaneity of the lethal and the beautiful, another poignant reminder of death-in-life.
In “Meditation Two,” Eberhart notes that since “the Garden of Eden/ When Eve offered man the fruit of the womb and of life,” human beings have been locked in dualism, “so that from the opposites of good and evil, flesh and spirit,/ Damnation and redemption, he is never absent/ But truly is fixed in a vise of these opposites.” Art is a “triumph of nature/ Before the worm takes over,” and it is the poet’s job to “sing the harmony of the instant of knowing/ When all things dual become a unity.”
The duality of the person as human and as a kind of creator and god is evident in “New Hampshire, February.” Eberhart said the poem was written in the late 1930’s, before he was married. One cold winter evening, he was staying in Kensington, in a cabin heated only by a kitchen stove. Two wasps fell through the roof onto the stove. At first the insects were numb, but as they moved to the center of the stove, they became lively. The poet described how he played God and shoved the creatures toward the heat, where they would become lively and buzz their wings; he would then push them away and watch them become gelid once more. The philosophical implications of this act in relation of persons to God led to the poem that concludes,
The moral of this is plain. But I will shirk it. You will not like it. And God does not live to explain.
Humans’ purposeful nature sets them apart from insects and animals, from wasps, spiders, gnats, seals, terns, cats, tree swallows, owls, field mice, groundhogs, and squirrels. Creatures obey “the orders of nature/ Without knowing them,” but the poet who observes their blessed ignorance comments that “it is what man does not know of God/ Composes the visible poem of the world” (“On a Squirrel Crossing the Road in Autumn, in New England”).
Horrors of war
“The poetry of tragedy is never dead,” Eberhart states in “Am I My Neighbor’s Keeper?” “If it were not so,” he says, “I would not dream/ On principles so deep they have no ending,/ Nor on the ambiguity of what things ever seem./ The truth is hid and shaped in veils of error.” The question of death in war, of humankind’s capacity for destruction and God’s tolerance of evil, is addressed in a series of poems Eberhart wrote during World War II. “The Fury of Aerial Bombardment” seems to be the best known and most anthologized of the lot. This poem’s speaker says, “You would think the fury of aerial bombardment/ Would rouse God to relent.” Since the time of Cain, humans have killed other humans. “Is God by definition indifferent, beyond us all?” the poet asks. The ruthlessness and senselessness of war are exposed in a lament over the death of two young men, Van Wettering and Averill, “Names on a list, whose faces I do not recall.”
In “At the End of War,” “God, awful and powerful beyond the sky’s acre/ . . . looks down upon fighting men” and sees their bloody folly and their wickedness. The poet asks God to “forgive them, that all they do is fight/ In blindness and fury.” The poem concludes with a further prayer: “And may he learn not to fight/ And never to kill, but love.”
“Brotherhood of Men,” an account of the death march of Bataan, similarly bewails the horrors of war. Its speaker tells what it was like to be a prisoner of war, “caught . . . on the Rock. At Corregidor/ Caged with the enemy.” Here Eberhart is unsparing in graphic detail, telling of “bones softened by black malnutrition,” of ulcerous legs and “heads swelled like cabbages before the soft death-rattle.” He speaks of “days unendurable,” when “madness was manifest, infernal the struggle.”
Urine was drunk by many, rampant was chaos, Came wild men at each other, held off attackers, Some slit the throats of the dead, Drank the blood outright, howled wailing, Slit the wrists of the living, others with knives, or with fangs ravenous, I saw them drinking the blood of victims.
Horrible as war is, however, the narrator finds redemption in the brotherhood of man. He has a profound conviction “that we were at our peak when in the depths.” The tortured group of men who “lived close to life when cuffed by death,/ had visions of brotherhood when [they] were broken,/ learned compassion beyond the curse of passion.”
Life’s blessings
Though Eberhart railed against the evil in human nature that leads to violence and war, he was able to transcend death and destruction to acknowledge simply that to be human is to be imperfect. The poem called “A Meditation” concludes with an exhortation to let one’s awareness of evil and death purify and heighten one’s enjoyment of life’s blessings, “easing a little the burden of our suffering/ Before we blow like the wind away.”
Eberhart stated in “Learning from Nature” that he was taught “acceptance of irrationality.” He recognized “the supreme authority of the imagination” because “life longs to a perfection it never achieves.” In a poem whose title is an exit, “A Way Out,” Eberhart noted the mocking nature of time: “but I would mock it,/ Throw hurricane force against its devil,/ Commanding it to stop.” The poet acknowledged the Buddha and Jesus Christ, for they “give mankind examples of the way to go/ The ineffable, and the active means to know.” The speaker wrestles with doubt and belief. His warfare is that of rationality, he says, and he “could not abrogate [his] reason East or West.” In the end, however, “We can sense/ That old death will give way to new life/ As new mornings grow, Spring comes over the land.”
“Love is the mystery in which to rejoice,” Eberhart states in “Sphinx,” and readers must not mistake his intense interest in and focus on death as indicating somberness or a lack of joy. “The Groundhog Revisiting” is a poem that celebrates life. The occasion is the wedding of the poet’s daughter. A groundhog has come along and deflowered the garden; Eberhart wants to dissuade the groundhog from such destruction, not kill it, so he pours gasoline down its hole. “It’s on with marriage, down with the groundhogs,” he says, as he reflects on Gretchen as a child, when she could “turn six cartwheels/ Outwitting my power to put on paper/ Pure agility and grace in action.” The poet offers a kind of prayer. “Grace this company in some retrospect,” he says. “We are here to celebrate love and belief,/ May time bless these believers, love give them grace.”
It is because of humanity’s impermanence that life is precious, and Eberhart recognizes this in “Three Kids,” another poem inspired by his daughter, Gretchen. He fumbles for words to describe his feelings at seeing three frisky little goats frolicking around her in a bright meadow.
If I lived a hundred years No ink of mine from a passionate hand Could communicate to you, dear reader, Essence of ecstasy, this ecstatic sight Of joy of life, limitless freedom, As the girl and the young kids leaped and played.
Eberhart’s delight in such youthful exuberance is informed by his awareness of death. “Flux” serves up a litany of tragedy: “the gods of this world/ Have taken the daughter of my neighbor,/ Who died this day of encephalitis,” a boy, “in his first hour on his motorbike,/ Met death in a head-on collision,” and a sea farmer “was tripped in the wake of a cruiser./ He went down in the cold waters of the summer.” Death is sudden and inexorable. “Life is stranger than any of us expected,” the poet concludes; “there is a somber, imponderable fate” that will annihilate all.
Death as preeminent theme
For Eberhart, is was necessary to acknowledge the horror of death to move beyond it. Poems that embrace the theme of death represent a sizable part of his canon.
“Orchard” pictures a family, the poet’s own, sitting in an automobile among fruit trees, grieving in deep silence. They have learned of the mother’s impending death. In the middle time of her life, when she is “most glorious” and most beautiful, she is “stalked/ By the stark shape of malignant disease,/ And her face was holy white like all desire.” “All of life and all of death were there” among the fruit trees in the evening, but the final line says that “the strong right of human love was there” as well.
In “Grave Piece,” the speaker, presumably the poet himself, says, “Death, I try to get into you,” and later repeats, “I must discover inexorable Death.” He feels compelled to attempt the impossible, to make “poetry to break the marble word.”
Although Eberhart believed that poetry is a gift of the gods, he recognized that it requires a certain sacrifice: “Every poet is a sacrificial spirit.” The poet bears this burden gladly, “gay as a boy tossing his cap up,” for even when he is called to write “of tragic things and heavy/ He lives in the senses’ gaiety.”
Eberhart believed that the ideal life would be lived “near the pitch that is madness.” He explained that the crucial word is “near.” To be mad or insane would be to fail to capitalize on one’s potential, but to live near madness, without being mad, would afford heightened awareness that makes poetry. For Eberhart, poetry is the bid for immortality that ultimately defeats death. It is the only way to deal with the immutable fact of mortality.
Critical commentary
Eberhart’s poems seldom display a light touch; they are serious and philosophical, and critics sometimes claim that they are uneven. Two advocates offer strong counters to this claim. In Negative Capability’s special issue on Eberhart, Arthur Gregor asserts that “poetry is significant only if it articulates the great and timeless matters of human life, anything less than that falls short of its ancient obligation.” He says that Eberhart’s work reminds him “of the invisible realities” at a time when “trivia has replaced the great matters of poetry.” In the same issue, Sydnea Lea says that “Dick’s poems, like the man himself, are engaged with matters that matter.”
Certainly an examination of Eberhart’s work will show that death-in-life is a consistent and predominant theme. To celebrate life, according to Eberhart, it is necessary to probe its opposite—death. “It is not necessary to live long to sense the abysmal depths of despair,” he wrote as he cataloged some of the horrors: prolonged and problematical illnesses such as his mother’s cancer, the pain of wrecked bodies in war, the deep eyes of those justly accused of crime, and the awesome spectacle of mental imbalance. “It is impossible,” Eberhart added “to conceive of great poetry being written without a knowledge of suffering.”
Eberhart stressed the fact that he was a meliorist who adjudicated between opposite ideas. “I don’t accept anyone’s idea as absolute, or I try not to,” he says, and when one met the poet, this aspect of his personality became immediately clear. “So what can one make of all of this?” was a typical Eberhart statement, and his poems set out to respond to that question—to determine what one is to make of the grand and knotty complexity that is life. Eberhart was a poet whose creativity is a spell against death. Words from “Hardening into Print” sum up his work: “This glimpse is of an immaculate joy/ Heart suffers for, and wishes to keep.”