War retains much of the density and bardic resonance of Intellectual Things, but the range of subject matter is broader: The self must now take its transformations into account against the background of recent history, for which regeneration is entirely problematic: “One generation past, two days by plane away,/ My house is dispossessed, my friends dispersed,/ My teeth and pride knocked in, my people game/ For the hunters of manskins in the warrens of Europe.” To the question “How shall we uncreate that lawless energy?” the poet can only defer to the determinisms of time: “I think of Pavlov and his dogs/ And the motto carved on the broad lintel of his brain:/ ”Sequence, consequence, and again consequence.” If the shadow of history casts the representative self in a darker hue, the poet, like Matthew Arnold before him, clings to what is most central to the life of the individual: “Lie down with me, dear girl, before/ My butcher-boys begin to rave./ ’No hope for persons any more,’/ They cry, ’on either side of the grave.’/ Tell them I say the heart forgives/ The World.” The strange weapons of intimacy and charity would seem ill-suited as protection in a brutal world, but the sacramental element, the desire to raise the supposed commonplace, remains one of the bolts of a civilization unravaged by history. If history is the inevitable backdrop of our mortality, so do a representative mortal’s most private strivings and sufferings themselves constitute a part of its fabric: “What the deep heart means,/ Its message of the big, round, childish hand,/ Its wonder, its simple lonely cry,/ The bloodied envelope addressed to you,/ Is history, that wide and mortal pang.”

The visionary “Father and Son,” perhaps Kunitz’s best-known poem, establishes, in surrealistic images full of longing and regret, the poet’s existential fate in the context of history. “Whirling between two wars,” he follows “with skimming feet,/ The secret master of my blood . . . whose indomitable love/ Kept me in chains.” Addressing his father “At the water’s edge, where the smothering ferns lifted/ Their arms. . . .” The poet asks for his father’s instruction: “For I would be a child to those who mourn/ And brother to the foundlings of the field . . ./ O teach me how to work and keep me kind.” Yet the summons brings only a shocking specter of discontinuity: “Among the turtles and the lilies he turned to me/ The white ignorant hollow of his face.” One senses that what the poet asks is already, in some way, self-provided, though minus the love so deeply rooted in biology that it has the status of a cultural given. As war and upheaval expose these roots, one senses the poet’s implication that, in a metaphorical sense, all are orphans.

“Open the Gates,” another well-known visionary lyric, delivered in a grave voice that eerily suggests posthumous utterance, finds the poet “Within the city of the burning cloud,” standing “at the monumental door/ Carved with the curious legend of my youth.” Striking the door with “the great bone of my death,” the poet stands “on the terrible threshold,” where he sees “the end and the beginning in each other’s arms.” The seamless and incestuous image suggests the allegorical figures of Sin and Death in John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674), and the allusion holds to the extent that both figures are determinants of human fate. At the same time, the emphasis is less on moral conditioning than on the endlessly reforming fate of the human, as felt from the inside, in contrast with the wholeness of a life, glimpsed, so to speak, from a vantage somehow apart from it. Our lives, as William Shakespeare said, are “rounded with a sleep,” and it is a matter of indifference whether one attempts an artificial distinction between the two sleeps, except that one’s only knowledge takes place as human and forever from the vantage of one looking outward (even when looking inward). As for the question of inside versus outside, no other consciousness has yet much to contribute to the subject.

Selected Poems, 1928-1958

In 1958, after another long hiatus, Kunitz published his Selected Poems, 1928-1958, more than a third of which are new poems. The new poems take up the modern subject of otherness, as in “The Science of the Night,” in which the speaker contemplates his sleeping beloved: “Down the imploring roads I cannot take/ Into the arms of ghosts I never knew.” Even if he could track her to her birth, he admits, “You would escape me.” He concludes, “As through a glass that magnifies my loss/ I see the lines of your spectrum shifting red,/ The universe expanding, thinning out,/ Our worlds flying, oh flying, fast apart.” Always a time-bewitched poet, Kunitz brings to this and other new poems in the volume an added sense of urgency, for they are imbued with a love and desire that is unintentionally but nevertheless increasingly rearranged by the shifting weight of years.

The Testing-Tree

With amiable, if slow, regularity, Kunitz’s fourth volume, The Testing-Tree, marks a departure from the rhetorical shimmer and elevated diction displayed in the previous collections. Written in a less knotty, more transparent syntax and style, the poems confront the upheavals of the 1960’s, the guilt of failed marriage and inadequate parenthood, the ravages of time past (“the deep litter of the years”), and the inexplicable urge to carry on in the face of public and private failures: “In a murderous time/ the heart breaks and breaks/ and lives by breaking.” The consolations of this volume, though sparse, strike the reader as all the more authentic for their scrupulous lack of facade, which, however, in no way implies a lessening of charity on the part of the poet.

One of the most notable poems in The Testing-Tree is “King of the River,” a poem of the skewed hopes and unclear motives that disfigure and sometimes break a life but that are finally overtaken, with individual life itself transcended and transfigured by the relentless biological urge to perpetuate the species. The poem, whose central symbol is the chinook salmon swimming upstream to spawn, seeks to rebut the materialist’s claim that “there is no life, only living things.” By addressing the fish throughout as “you,” the poet clearly implicates the reader in an allegory of life: “If the water were clear enough,/ if the water were still,/ but the water is not clear . . . If the knowledge were given you,/ but it is not given,/ for the membrane is clouded/ with self-deceptions.” The psychological phrase helps swing the pointed finger around to the reader. “If the power were granted you/ to break out of your cells,/ but the imagination fails . . . If the heart were pure enough, but it is not pure . . . ” continues the litany of denial that underpins the allegory. The salmon (“Finned Ego”) thrashes to a place of which it has no knowledge, for “the doors of the senses close/ on the child within.” The blind, headlong rush to “the orgiastic pool” brings about dreadful change (“A dry fire eats you./ Fat drips from your bones”) into something “beyond the merely human,” where, despite the “fire on your tongue,” promising that “The only music is time/ the only dance is love,/ you would admit/ that nothing compels you/ any more . . . but nostalgia and desire,/ the two-way ladder/ between heaven and hell.” At the “brute absolute hour” when the salmon spawns only to die, when “The great clock of your life/ is slowing down,/ and the small clocks run wild,” he (“you”) stares into the face of his “creature self” and finds “he is not broken but endures,” but at a price: He is “forever inheriting his salt kingdom,/ from which he is banished/ forever.” The “forever” that rounds the conclusion, like a little sleep, suggests that the victory of life’s mission to perpetuate itself is ironically accomplished at the loss of the human’s vaunted objectivity and understanding.

In “Robin Redbreast,” Kunitz reveals a similar, but distinct, necessity. In “the room where I lived/ with an empty page” (a room identified in “River Road” from the same volume as one the poet inhabited after his second divorce), the poet hears the squawking of blue jays tormenting a robin, “the dingiest bird/ you ever saw.” Going out to pick up the bird “after they knocked him down,” in order to “toss him back into his element,” he notices the bullet hole that “had tunneled out his wits.” The hole, cut so clean it becomes a window, reveals “the cold flash of the blue/ unappeasable sky.” The sky’s indifference to the poet’s sympathy for the bird (“Poor thing! Poor foolish life!”) or to his own condition (he lives “in a house marked ’For Sale’”) provides the chilling backdrop for a revelation of the necessity for human charity toward all living things. The poem knowingly alludes to a passage in “Father and Son”: “For I would be . . . brother to the foundlings of the field/ And friend of innocence and all bright eyes.” As with that earlier poem, “Robin Redbreast” finds no consolation in received wisdom, either from a father’s love or the heavens. What charity there is exists (as do humans) in what scientists dryly refer to as “terminal structure.”

Memory is more directly the subject of “The Magic Curtain,” a cultural tour of the United States during the 1920’s. A paean to his nurse, Frieda, the poem affectionately recounts his happy childhood adventures with this blue-eyed, Bavarian maid, while his mother, “her mind already on her shop,” unrolled “gingham by the yard,/ stitching dresses for the Boston trade.” Frieda, identified as his “first love,” in secret complicity with the knowing child, bestows “the kinds of kisses mother would not dream” and serves as his guide to the melodramatic, romantic world of the motion pictures where, during reels of The Perils of Pauline (1914), Keystone Kops, and Charlie Chaplin, “School faded out at every morning reel.” The films also offer a hint of the glamorous world beyond for Frieda, who takes her cue in a cinematic cliché and runs off “with somebody’s husband, daddy to a brood.” Although the poet’s mother never forgives her this abandonment, the older poet, returning to her in the sanctuary of memory, eagerly does, for each has in a different way unknowingly conspired in fulfilling the dreams of the other.

The uneasy subject and situation of parents (and parent figures) weighs heavily, if somewhat obliquely, in the poems of The Testing-Tree. In fact, the volume opens with “Journal for My Daughter,” a poem in which the poet, in nine free-verse sections, confronts his own hesitations and guilt in the upbringing of his only child. He imagines himself through her eyes as beckoning “down corridors,/ secret, elusive, saturnine.” Now that, he hopes, the smoke of these misgivings has cleared, he declares, “I propose/ that we gather our affections.” Looking back over his role in her life, he recounts his absence (“his name was absence”) but claims, “I think I’d rather sleep forever/ than wake up cold/ in a country without women.” He recounts, too, drunken nights of bonhomie with his friend, the poet Theodore Roethke, “slapping each other on the back,/ sweaty with genius,” while she “crawled under the sofa.” While he confesses that he is now “haggard with his thousand years,” he declares his solidarity with her 1960’s protests: “His heart is at home/ in your own generation,” and to prove it, he equates her misspelled slogan “Don’t tred on me” with the “Noli me tangere!” he used “to cry in Latin once.” Though it seems implausible that one would cry out in Latin anyplace outside the Vatican or a course in Tudor poets, the point is well made. Recalling “the summer I went away,” he carries her outside “in a blitz of fireflies” to observe her first eclipse. To this image he adds Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s carrying his crying son outside and catching the reflection of stars in each of his suspended tears. The heavens and the natural world are captured, comfortably diminished, and naturalized as a way of sanctioning human folly and love. The reverse of this coin is that it is an illusion, a pint-sized reflection of a placid cosmos that will momentarily evaporate.

The book’s title poem, composed in four sections of unrhymed tercets, concerns a ritualistic childhood game of stone-throwing (“for keeps”) at a specific oak tree able to confer magic gifts: one hit for love, two for poetry, three for eternal life. In the summers of his youth, searching for “perfect stones,” he is master “over that stretch of road . . . the world’s fastest human.” Leaving the road that begins at school at one end and that at the other tries “to loop me home,” he enters a field “riddled with rabbit-life/ where the bees sank sugar-wells/ in the trunks of the maples.” There, in the shadow of the “inexhaustible oak,/ tyrant and target,” he calls to his father, “wherever you are/ I have only three throws/ bless my good right arm.” In the final section, he recalls a recurring dream of his mother “wearing an owl’s face/ and making barking noises.” As “her minatory finger points,” he steps through a cardboard door and wonders if he should be blamed for the dirt sifting into a well where a gentle-eyed “albino walrus huffs.” Suddenly the scene shifts, and the highway up which a Model A chugs becomes the road “where tanks maneuver,/ revolving their turrets.” He concludes, “It is necessary to go/ through dark and deeper dark/ and not to turn.” With the clear implication that the poet is mindful of his approaching mortal hour, with or without his father’s blessing, he cries, “Where is my testing-tree?/ Give me back my stones!”

The Testing-Tree differs from the first three volumes in being composed of nearly a quarter translations, all from postrevolutionary Russian poetry. It was during the 1960’s that Kunitz met and befriended two of the Soviet Union’s best-known poets, Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrei Voznesensky, and, in collaboration with Max Hayward, translated a selection of poems by a third, Anna Akhmatova. Clearly, the poems enabled Kunitz, with the aid of this fortuitous ventriloquism, to take aim at the brutality and inhumanity of the modern political bureaucracy, whether Soviet or American. In Yevtushenko’s “Hand-Rolled Cigarettes,” for example, the common man’s practice of rolling cigarettes in papers torn from Pravda and Izvestia, the two chief organs of state propaganda, gives rise to a dandy send-up of the bureaucrat’s contempt for the common man: “Returning late, the tired fisherman/ enjoys his ladled kvass’s tang,/ and sifts tobacco at his ease/ onto some bureaucrat’s harangue.”

The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928-1978

The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928-1978, like Selected Poems, 1928-1958, contains a section of new poems, titled “The Layers.” Here, the poet returns to the garden of his obsessions—father, family, time, the wounds of guilt, and memory—in poems of reconciliation and commemoration. In the opening poem, “The Knot,” the poet imagines that the knot “scored in the lintel of my door” keeps “bleeding through/ into the world we share.” Like a repressed thought, the knot wants more than anything to grow out again, to become a limb: “I hear it come/ with a rush of resin/ out of the trauma/ of its lopping-off.” Characteristically, the poet associates the wound with a door, a threshold. It is as though something in nature has had to be tamed to effect the domestic tranquillity so delicately limned here, but its desire to return to its true nature is such that it “racks itself with shoots/ that crackle overhead.” Identifying a part of his own nature with that of the knot, the poet completes the metaphor: “I shake my wings/ and fly into its boughs.”

Kunitz returns to the theme of the lost father in “What of the Night?” and “Quinnapoxet.” In the former, the poet wakes in the middle of the night “like a country doctor,” having imagined, “with racing heart,” the doorbell ringing. It is a messenger (Death) whose “gentle, insistent ring” finds the poet “not ready yet” and realizing “nobody stands on the stoop.” Suddenly the poem switches focus from the grown son to the father: “When the messenger comes again/ I shall pretend/ in a childish voice/ my father is not home.” His father has, in actuality, never been home, but in a deeper, metaphorical sense, he has never left home. In this light, just as the grown man must receive the messenger at the end of his life, so the son must protect the father in memory from the “second death,” the oblivion of forgetting. The poet’s task of remembering is obligatory, as his question earlier in the poem recognizes: “How could I afford/ to disobey that call?” “Quinnapoxet” takes place on a mysterious fishing trip where, on a dusty road similar to the one described in “Father and Son,” the poet describes a hallucinatory vision of his mother and father “commingling with the dust/ they raised.” His mother admonishes him for not writing, and the poet’s response is simple: “I had nothing to say to her.” Yet for his father who walks behind, “his face averted . . . deep in his other life,” the poet, too awestruck to attempt speech, touches his forehead with his thumb, “in deaf-mute country/ the sign for father.”

One of the most original of the new poems in this volume is “A Blessing of Women,” a prose poem inspired by an exhibit of early American women painters and artisans mounted by the Whitney Museum. In the form of a litany, the poem briefly describes, in dignified understatement, the works and lives of five of the representative women: an embroiderer, a quilter, and three painters, “a rainbow-cloud of witnesses in a rising hubbub.” He blesses them and greets them “as they pass from their long obscurity, through the gate that separates us from our history.”

“Our history” is again the subject of “The Lincoln Relics,” a meditation on Lincoln’s passage from the “rawboned, warty” mortal “into his legend and his fame.” Written not long after the Watergate trauma during Kunitz’s tenure at the Library of Congress, the poem alludes to that episode by invoking the ancient struggle between idealism and materialism, no less fierce in Lincoln’s day than in ours: “I saw the piranhas darting/ between the roseveined columns,/ avid to strip the flesh/ from the Republic’s bones.” The source of Lincoln’s, the sacrificial redeemer’s, strength is identified as his “secret wound”—that is to say, “trusting the better angels of our nature.” It is this trust, evoked by the humble but talismanic relics—a pocketknife, a handkerchief, a button—found on his person after the assassination, that makes “a noble, dissolving music/ out of homely fife and drum.”

The title poem of the new section, “The Layers,” looks forward to the possibilities of new art. The poet has “walked through many lives” and from the present vantage sees “milestones dwindling/ toward the horizon/ and the slow fires trailing/ from the abandoned camp-sites.” To the question, “How shall the heart be reconciled/ to its feast of losses?” the answer comes “In my darkest night” from a “nimbus-cloud voice” that thunders, “Live in the layers,/ not on the litter.” Though the poet admits, “I lack the art/ to decipher it,” he concludes, “I am not done with my changes.”

Next-to-Last Things

Kunitz’s Next-to-Last Things makes at least three important additions to his poetic canon. A dream poem, “The Abduction,” begins with the image of the beloved stumbling out of a wood, her blouse torn, her skirt bloodstained; she addresses the poet with the mysterious question, “Do you believe?” Through the years, he says, “from bits/ from broken clues/ we pieced enough together/ to make the story real.” Led into the presence of “a royal stag,/ flaming in his chestnut coat,” she was “borne/ aloft in triumph through the green,/ stretched on his rack of budding horn.” In the next verse paragraph, the poet discloses that the episode was “a long time ago,/ almost another age” and muses on his sleeping wife (recalling, with the same image, the theme of otherness in “The Science of the Night”): “You lie in elegant repose,/ a hint of transport hovering on your lips.” His attention shifts “to the harsh green flares,” to which she is indifferent, that “swivel through the room/ controlled by unseen hands.” The night world outside is “childhood country,/ bleached faces peering in/ with coals for eyes.” His meditation leads him to realize that “the shapes of things/ are shifting in the wind,” and concludes, “What do we know/ beyond the rapture and the dread?” echoing William Butler Yeats’s famous question, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” As a poem of transformation, “The Abduction” does not lend itself easily to interpretation—partly by design—for, at a very basic level, the preternatural images of transformation are rooted in undisclosed biographical events. As a poet of knowledge, however, Kunitz is poignant in his recognition that when people sleep, when they are most themselves, they are also most withdrawn and indifferent to their surroundings, even, or especially, from those they love. Yet by acknowledging, even honoring, the terms of this indifference, one most surely understands the unselfish nature of love.

“Days of Foreboding” begins with the announcement, “Great events are about to happen.” The poet has seen migratory birds “in unprecedented numbers” picking the coastal margin clean. Turning to himself, he observes, “My bones are a family in their tent/ huddled over a small fire/ waiting for the uncertain signal/ to resume the long march.” He too is migratory, warmed by the small fire of his heart. Presumably, the “uncertain signal” is in some way keyed to the signal by which the migratory birds decide to move on—that is, it is keyed to nature. Moreover, while the signal is uncertain in terms of time and origin, it is nevertheless inevitable. The ultimate phrase, “the long march,” sings with historical resonance and the promise of an irreversible transformation at the end. In this poem and in others, Kunitz accepts the awful fact of mortality, not by making an abstraction of it but by naturalizing both it and the patch of history that is the bolt of time and circumstance given for its completion. Avoiding the need for consolation, it is a brave and existential view.

Certainly the centerpiece of Next-to-Last Things is the five-part meditative elegy, “The Wellfleet Whale,” composed, like “The Testing-Tree,” in tercets. Kunitz has noted that much of contemporary meditative poetry suffers from “the poverty of what it is meditating on,” but this poem, occasioned by the beaching of a finback whale near the poet’s home on Cape Cod, is rich in its suggestion that life’s secret origins can be, if not revealed, then somehow embodied by the evocativeness of language, which is itself, as the poet notes elsewhere, “anciently deep in mysteries.” The poem begins by ascribing to the whale, both Leviathan and deliverer of Jonah, Christ’s precursor, the gift of language: “You have your language too,/ an eerie medley of clicks/ and hoots and trills. . . .” That language, to which humans are denied access (just as historical man, exiled from Eden, can no longer hear the music of the spheres), becomes only “sounds that all melt/ . . . with endless variations,/ as if to compensate/ for the vast loneliness of the sea.” In the second section of the poem, the whale’s arrival in the harbor is greeted with cheers “at the sign of your greatness.” Unlike man, the whale in its element seems “like something poured,/ not driven,” his presence asking “not sympathy, or love,/ or understanding,/ but awe and wonder,” responses appropriate to deity. Yet by dawn, the whale is stranded on the rocks, and the curious gather in: “school-girls in yellow halters/ and a housewife bedecked/ with curlers, and whole families in beach/ buggies. . . .” As the great body is slowly crushed by its own weight, the Curator of Mammals arrives to draw the requisite vial of blood, someone carves his initials on the blistered flanks, and seagulls peck at the skin. The poet asks, “What drew us, like a magnet, to your dying?” and answers, “You made a bond between us.” This unlikely company, “boozing in the bonfire night,” stands watch during the night as the whale enters its final agony and swings its head around to open “a blood-shot, glistening eye/ in which we swam with terror and recognition.” The terror is that of witnessing “an exiled god” and the recognition that the creature, bringing with it “the myth/ of another country, dimly remembered” is “like us,/ disgraced and mortal,” like all beings, and “delivered to the mercy of time.” Despite the desecrations visited upon the creature, it remains an emissary from that other “country,” the country of myth and inspired origin that stands at the beginning of human memory—and thus of identity—and so supervenes upon the noble disenchantment of the poem.

Passing Through

Passing Through, published when Kunitz was ninety years old, is a slim volume that adds nine new poems to the body of Kunitz’s work. Some of the poems in this collection are drawn from The Testing-Tree, Next-to-Last Things, and “The Layers.” The title of the collection comes from a poem, “Passing Through,” that Kunitz wrote on his seventy-ninth birthday and published in Next-to-Last Things. In this poem, he looks back on his childhood and amplifies his quest for identity. Saying that his family never observed anniversaries, he matter-of-factly states, “my birthday went up in smoke/ in a fire at City Hall that gutted/ the Department of Vital Statistics.” He goes on to say that only because a census report noted that “a five-year-old White Male/ [was] sharing my mother’s address/ at the Green Street tenement in Worchester” did he have any identity at all. However, he concludes that “Maybe I enjoy not-being as much/ as being who I am,” and continues whimsically, saying that—at seventy-nine, mind you—“I’m passing through a phase.”

Similar in its quest for identity is “The Sea, That Has No Ending,” which begins with the questions “Who are we? Why are we here,/ huddled on this desolate shore,/ so curiously chopped and joined?” The eternal sea, the forever sea, the sea that has always been and will always be, “The sea that has no ending,/ is lapping at our feet.” Kunitz recounts, “How we long for the cleansing waters/ to rise and cover us forever!” Here he juxtaposes immortality and mortality, human time and eternity, reiterating forcefully his persistent concerns with time and space.

In his selection of poems for this volume, the author included a range of works that detail ancient and modern events, broadly global and intensely personal occurrences, and events both real and mythical. On one hand, he celebrates the flight of Apollo 11 (the first to transport humans to the Moon); on the other, he tells of the struggles of Roman gladiators.

“Around Pastor Bonhoeffer,” his homage to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who stood foursquare against Adolf Hitler and his reign of terror in Nazi Germany, is stylistically among his most successful poems. Short, clipped lines capture the tension of the situation:

Kyrie eleison: Nightlike no other night, plottedand palmed,omega of terror,packed like a bulletin the triggered chamber.

The Collected Poems

Coincident with his being appointed the poet laureate of the United States in 2000, when he was ninety-five years old, The Collected Poems is the first collection of Kunitz’s poems since the publication in 1979 of The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928-1978 by W. W. Norton. This volume, drawing on all the earlier volumes, provides readers with the full range of Kunitz’s remarkably varied work. Reading through the entire volume, which is arranged chronologically, one becomes fully aware of the themes that most affected the poet and his work: innocence and love, including the loss of each; parental relationships, particularly the father-son relationship of which he was deprived by his father’s suicide shortly before his birth; a tragic element connected with personal disappointments; and an overwhelming optimism, articulated well in “The Long Boat,” where Kunitz writes, “He loved the earth so much/ he wanted to stay forever.” Kunitz was always aware of the tenuous relationship of time in human terms to eternity, which is a global concept. The poet urged young writers always to be explorers. In his ninth decade of life, Kunitz continued to be an explorer, seeking out new experiences and writing about them in new and uniquely wonderful ways.

The tension that is everywhere apparent between noble disenchantment and hard-won acceptance demonstrates the ruling dialectic in Kunitz’s poems. At the very least, it reveals the long trail of a poetic career (poetic careers have been built on much less); at its most resplendent, this dialectic embodies, through its variously charted interests, experiences, and investigations, a reason for the mind’s commitment to the things of this world. Standing simultaneously in their singular and typical natures, they suggest the duality that is both a curse and triumph and lead to an appreciation and understanding, as individuals rebound endlessly between the two, of the transformations that must be endured to ensure survival.