William Meredith

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In Charge of Morale in a Morbid Time

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SOURCE: “In Charge of Morale in a Morbid Time,” in Compulsory Figures: Essays on Recent American Poets, Louisiana State University Press, 1992, pp. 171-89.

[In the following essay, Taylor surveys the defining qualities of Meredith's poetry.]

The Wreck of the Thresher, published in 1964, was the book that most firmly established the nature and strength of William Meredith's poetry. It seems now to have been the culmination of a development in certain directions from which the poet has since swerved, though not unrewardingly. The poems in it reveal unobtrusive mastery of craft traditionally conceived; there are not many sonnets, villanelles, sestinas, or other insistent evidences that the poet is comfortable in formal cages; but beneath the steady, honest lines, with their sometimes unpredictable rhyme schemes, there is a sense of assurance that for Meredith, form is a method, not a barrier. In its range of subject, tone, and mode, the book consistently offers the voice of a civilized man, a man with good but not exclusive manners, engaged in encounters with matters of inexhaustible interest.

This style did not come quickly to Meredith—not that his debut was inauspicious: his first book, Love Letter from an Impossible Land, was chosen by Archibald MacLeish in his first year as editor of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Here were a number of accomplished poems, including a few that spoke in the voice that would be firmly Meredith's by the time The Wreck of the Thresher appeared twenty years later. Much of the book is apprentice work, but in the “impossible land” of the Aleutians, of the Second World War, Meredith came to grips with strangeness for which no borrowed voice could suffice. So the book falls into two parts, whose relation MacLeish describes as “the way in which the literary vehicle (for it is nothing else) of the Princeton undergraduate turns into the live idiom of a poet's speech reaching for poetry.” What is there, one wonders, to like about “the literary vehicle of the Princeton undergraduate”? A possible answer is that the earlier poems show us a young poet diligently studying his craft. In the brief lyrics that acknowledge various masters, there is little room for the voice of Meredith, but there is in them a serious and intelligent setting-forth after the tools that will give the voice, when it speaks, the distinctiveness and force of the later poems. Craft matters to the young poet: of the thirty-three poems in Love Letter, eight are traditional sonnets, and seven others are near-sonnets of twelve to fourteen lines. If some of these are predictable or flat, or if others are too insistent upon their experimentation with formal expansion (as in the packed internal rhymes and slant end-rhymes of “War Sonnet,” for instance), practice has made nearly perfect by the time we come to “In Memoriam Stratton Christensen”:

Laughing young man and fiercest against sham,
Then you have stayed at sea, at feckless sea,
With a single angry curiosity
Savoring fear and faith and speckled foam?
A salt end to what was sweet begun:
Twenty-three years and your integrity
And already a certain number touched like me
With a humor and a hardness from the sun.
Without laughter we have spent your wit
In an unwitnessed fight at sea, perhaps not won,
And whether wisely we will never know;
But like Milton's friend's, to them that hear of it
Your death is a puzzler that will tease them on
Reckless out on the thin, important floe.(1)

Here the experimentation with local sonic richness is muted, but not below the level of fruitful risk; for example, Reckless in the last line is right not only in itself, but because it echoes the second and fourth lines.

In “Notes for an Elegy,” a longer poem whose ambition and scope are larger than anything else in this book, Meredith sounds a note of modesty in the title, a note that he will sound again and again, even as his poems improve. This title, of course, means not to suggest that the poem is unfinished—it is quite brilliantly finished—but that in a time and place more distant from the war, it might have acquired more of the trappings of a formal elegy. Here, the first twenty-two lines, a meditation on flying and its relation to freedom, tyranny, and war, set the proper tone, verging toward an invocation to the muse. The death is that of an airman, but not one shot down in battle; for some mysterious reason, his plane has crashed in a wood. Having asked where the engine and the wings were at the crucial moment, the speaker concludes that

the invitation
Must have been sent to the aviator in person:
Perhaps a sly suggestion of carelessness,
A whispered invitation perhaps to death,
Death.(2)

The quietness of this passage, while it emphasizes the distance of the crash from any battle, is at odds with the noisy violence of any plane's untimely coming down; it is as if the plane and its pilot had drifted silently to rest, like so many other things that fall in the forest when no one is there to hear them. This impression is confronted in the poem's remarkable conclusion, where the phrase “as it were in bed” lifts the tone out of solemnity toward something large enough to enclose great mystery:

Note that he had not fought one public battle,
Met any fascist with his skill, but died
As it were in bed, the waste conspicuous …
.....The morning came up foolish with pink clouds
To say that God counts ours a cunning time,
Our losses part of an old secret, somehow no loss.

(EW, 34-35)

This ability to complicate tone by the subtle use of something close to humor has been important in much of Meredith's work, though it has been only recently that many of his serious poems have contained very wide streaks of humor. But fairly early, Meredith came to an inclusive control of tone that makes for greater strength than the owlish cultivation of high seriousness.

These qualities of strength and inclusiveness, however, are not much in evidence in Meredith's second book, Ships and Other Figures, which appeared in 1948, only four years after Love Letter. A note of acknowledgement states that “most of these poems were written and all of them collected while the writer was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow of Princeton University,” and one feels keenly the absence of peril in these poems, the safety of academe. Under the pressure of his credentials as a promising young poet, Meredith seems not to be the aviator inspired to struggle with his craft and its relation to puzzles of much magnitude; he seems instead to be a Wilson Fellow who would like to have enough poems for a book. Under such circumstances, he turns his hand to various exercises in tradition and occasion, and is sometimes successful with slight poems where, the pressure being momentarily off, he can indulge his excellent sense of play without fear of momentous failure. Here, for example, is the first of “Two Figures from the Movies”:

The papers that clear him tucked in his inside pocket
And the grip of the plucky blonde light on his bicep,
He holds the gang covered now, and backs for the door
That gives on the daylit street and the yare police.
But the regular customers know that before the end
With its kissing and money and adequate explanation,
He has still to back into the arms of the baldheaded man
With the huge signet-ring and the favorable odds of surprise,
Somehow to outface the impossible arrogant stare,
And will his luck hold, they wonder, and has he the skill?(3)

Meredith continues to be puzzled by my affection for this little poem; some years ago, when I sought to include “Two Figures” in an anthology, he granted his permission on the condition that my text not make fun of it or ask embarrassing study questions about it. True, its matter is more trivial than the matters that usually engage Meredith; but in its satirical arrangement of well-chosen cinematic clichés, and in its deft echo of classical heroic meters, it is a small but thorough success. The second of the “Two Figures” is less successful, as it lacks the particularity of the first, and is somewhat outweighed by its epigraph from Shakespeare. Even so, these two poems have intrinsic interest, and reveal an impulse that is important in much of Meredith's later work.

This is not to suggest that, in his New and Selected Poems of 1970, Meredith saved from Ships and Other Figures all the wrong things; he saved the best six poems, but would not have tarnished his reputation by carrying forward a few more. The same could be said of his selection from The Open Sea (1958), a collection of nearly fifty poems of considerable range and effectiveness. Here Meredith continues his exploration of difficult fixed forms, not merely in order to submit himself to complex rules, but also to see how some of these rules may be pushed around. Aside from the half-dozen or so sonnets that one might expect to find, there are also two sestinas and a dedicatory villanelle. The usefulness of these explorations is perhaps most apparent in the title poem, which fits the definition of none of the fixed forms mentioned above, but which clearly takes advantage of their existence:

We say the sea is lonely; better say
Our selves are lonesome creatures whom the sea
Gives neither yes nor no for company.
Oh, there are people, all right, settled in the sea—
It is as populous as Maine today—
But no one who will give you the time of day.
A man who asks there of his family
Or a friend or teacher gets a cold reply
Or finds him dead against that vast majority.
Nor does it signify, that people who stay
Very long, bereaved or not, at the edge of the sea
Hear the drowned folk call: that is mere fancy,
They are speechless. And the famous noise of sea,
Which a poet has beautifully told us in our day,
Is hardly a sound to speak comfort to the lonely.
Although not yet a man given to prayer, I pray
For each creature lost since the start at sea,
And give thanks it was not I, nor yet one close to me.

(PA, 23)

The poem's debt to the formal repetitions of villanelle or sestina is clear enough; what is less clear is how the poet, in suggesting a form that already exists, walks the elusive line between failure to fulfill the contract and success in making something that is complete on its own terms. Here, the success is gained through a profound awareness of the subtle tensions that arise between hypothetical form and human utterance. The first stanza, with its second line reaching just above the sound of conversation, establishes a tone that is greatly broadened, but not obliterated, by the second stanza, which stays within the metrical bounds of the poem while it introduces a much looser diction. This thoughtful changing of voices is held in suspension through the final stanza, so that the speaker earns our belief in his prayer.

Another fine example of what comes of serious play is “The Illiterate,” a poem whose structure is that of a Petrarchan sonnet, but repeated words appear at the ends of the lines, instead of rhymes. The octave begins by saying, “Touching your goodness, I am like a man / Who turns a letter over in his hand,” and goes on to say that the man has never received a letter before, and is unable to read it, or to overcome his shame and ask someone to read it to him. The poem ends:

His uncle could have left the farm to him,
Or his parents died before he sent them word,
Or the dark girl changed and want him for beloved.
Afraid and letter-proud, he keeps it with him.
What would you call his feeling for the words
That keep him rich and orphaned and beloved?

(PA, 27)

The wit that chose recurring words instead of rhymes for a poem like this, and the craft that makes them work, have greatly matured since the early sonneteering experiments; this poem transcends its quite noticeable peculiarity, partly by drawing us away from the ends of the lines toward consideration of the subtle use of your and you, in the first and thirteenth lines, respectively: these words and lines are just enough to keep the simile and the form from being self-conscious studies of themselves.

Of course such forms are, in some unself-conscious way, studies of themselves. By this time Meredith has wedded technique to meditation, so that they are harder to separate, even for convenience in discussion, than they were in his earlier work. Meredith finds several occasions in The Open Sea to be explicit about the value of art; there are several poems about music, painting, sculpture, architecture, the ballet, and so on, and in all of these one finds an admiration for formal restraint, especially when it is evident that there is something beneath the form that is worth restraining, whose power is worth conserving.

To this end, Meredith joins the urge to self-consciousness and a very light touch with meter, to strike a precise balance of tones in the pleasant but complicated “Thoughts on One's Head (In Plaster, With A Bronze Wash).” In a delicate alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes, and in a meter of musical elasticity, these stanzas, like good heads, hold simultaneously a number of attitudes:

A person is very self-conscious about his head.
It makes one nervous just to know it is cast
In enduring materials, and that when the real one is dead
The cast one, if nobody drops it or melts it down, will last.
We pay more attention to the front end, where the face is,
Than to the interesting and involute interior:
The Fissure of Rolando and such queer places
Are parks for the passions and fears and mild hysteria.

(PA, 37)

The slight confusion between the cast head and the real head, introduced by the unobtrusively vague it in the second line, modulates into clarity: the head under discussion becomes the real head, with its Fissure of Rolando, its judgment, and so on; but at the end, the poem seems to shift partly back to the cast head for a moment, in the last line below:

This particular head, to my certain knowledge
Has been taught to read and write, make love and money,
Operate cars and airplanes, teach in a college,
And tell involved jokes, some few extremely funny.
It was further taught to know and to eschew
Error and sin, which it does erratically.
This is the place the soul calls home just now.
One dislikes it of course: it is the seat of Me.

(PA, 38)

“One dislikes it of course:” the cast head, occasion for an aesthetic judgment (however biased), has become the occasion for a meditation on its original, “the seat of Me”; and the cast head stays between the real head and the observing consciousness, a barrier against self-indulgence, a reminder that either head could be dropped or melted down.

The Wreck of the Thresher is both larger and smaller than The Open Sea. It contains fewer poems, and there is less variety of form and subject; but several of these poems are considerably more ambitious than anything preceding them. In somewhat narrowing the range of his attention, Meredith deepens his focus, producing a few poems that can stand with the best poems of his generation. (Often people write such phrases in their sleep; I am awake, and aware that I speak of the generation of Berryman, Bishop, Lowell, Nemerov, and Wilbur, among others.)

The title poem is a bold achievement, one of Meredith's rare “public” poems; its occasion was the destruction at sea of the nuclear submarine Thresher on April 10, 1963. Much has happened since that date to make that disaster recede from the public consciousness; one of this poem's strengths is that it has not been diminished by a fifteen-year torrent of public catastrophes. The poem deserves closer attention than it has received. Some reviewers have accused it of staginess; Richard Howard, to whose essay on Meredith I am in some ways indebted, does not mention it.4

The opening stanza, it is true, makes a few moves that seem suspicious; the first line arouses the fear that this may be just one more “I-am-standing” poem, a subgenre often exploited by poets who have nothing to say. And the description of the sea, with its zoömorphic similes, seems melodramatic:

I stand on the ledge where rock runs into the river
As the night turns brackish with morning, and mourn the drowned.
Here the sea is diluted with river; I watch it slaver
Like a dog curing of rabies. Its ravening over,
Lickspittle ocean nuzzles the dry ground.
(But the dream that woke me was worse than the sea's grey
Slip-slap; there are no such sounds by day.)

(PA, 46)

But it is the dream that has imposed this animistic vision on the speaker; it is, as “The Open Sea” has it, “mere fancy,” to which the speaker will return as the poem shifts from the present to the dream, then to meditation derived from both:

This crushing of people is something we live with.
Daily, by unaccountable whim
Or caught up in some harebrained scheme of death,
Tangled in cars, dropped from the sky, in flame,
Men and women break the pledge of breath:
And now under water, gone all jetsam and small
In the pressure of oceans collected, a squad of brave men in a hull.

(PA, 46)

The only full rhyme in this stanza is one of the most predictable in our language, but the lines thus rhymed give the words freshness of context, and the rhyme's very obtrusiveness yokes “harebrained scheme” to “break the pledge,” one of the many subtle juxtapositions that parallel the larger tensions between actuality and dream, land and sea, life and death. In dream, the speaker has met

a monstrous self trapped in the black deep:
All these years, he smiled, I've drilled at sea
For this crush of water. Then he
saved only me.

(PA, 46)

The phrase “a monstrous self” suggests, at the same time, an other and a version of the speaker's own self; we are reminded, more subtly here than in some other poems, of Meredith's own war experience, the losses of friends, the perils survived. The poem moves again to the question of investing the inanimate with life, as in the tradition of naming ships “for ladies and queens,”

Although by a wise superstition these are called
After fish, the finned boats, silent and submarine.

(PA, 47)

The complicated idea of a “wise superstition” carries one through the next stanza, where the sea is divested of emotion while the dead sailors, it seems, are given the capacity for it:

I think of how sailors laugh, as if cold and wet
And dark and lost were their private, funny derision
And I can judge then what dark compression
Astonishes them now, their sunken faces set
Unsmiling, where the currents sluice to and fro
And without humor, somewhere northeast of here and below.

(PA, 47)

Astonishes, of course, turns out to be completely appropriate, as it means “renders insensate”; we are forced by the syntax, and by the word's placement at the head of the line, following a breathless enjambment, to examine it before passing on to the pun in “sunken faces.” This vision of the sailors leads back to the dream again, in a stanza where impossible schemes of escape and heroism give way to the voices of the drowned: “Study something deeper than yourselves, / As, how the heart, when it turns diver, delves and saves.” Earlier in the poem, the speaker asks, “Why can't our dreams be content with the terrible facts?” In the light of day, no one truly hears “the drowned folk call.” The poem passes from the dream to a final stanza of great stateliness; in its treatment of the terrible facts, it shifts from the nearly conversational to the nearly prophetic, its movement genuinely suggestive of a musical coda:

Whether we give assent to this or rage
Is a question of temperament and does not matter.
Some will has been done past our understanding,
Past our guilt surely, equal to our fears.
Dullards, we are set again to the cryptic blank page
Where the sea schools us with terrible water.
The noise of a boat breaking up and its men is in our ears.
The bottom here is too far down for our sounding;
The ocean was salt before we crawled to tears.

(PA, 48)

In this poem, and in others in the collection, a quality of modesty asserts itself strongly; Meredith himself described it a few years later, in a foreword to Earth Walk: New and Selected Poems; he selected from earlier books, he says, “poems that try to say things I am still trying to find ways to say, poems that engage mysteries I still pluck at the hems of, poems that are devious in ways I still like better than plainspokenness.” “The Wreck of the Thresher” only seems to be plainspoken; it engages and contains deep mystery, and makes it memorable.

Plucking at the hems of old mysteries sometimes compels a poet to go over ground he has visited before. “On Falling Asleep to Birdsong,” the third poem in The Wreck of the Thresher, recalls the title of “On Falling Asleep by Firelight,” from The Open Sea. The earlier poem is perhaps too tidy to be convincing; the later poem is much better made, and goes beyond tidiness, drifting with the consciousness of a man falling asleep, who hears a whippoorwill and thinks of his parents' and his own death. Trying to dream of nightingales, he is led on to Philomela, whose story appears gracefully in the poem, not as paraded learning, but as the unwilled reverie of a man who has read some books:

But I am in bed in the fall
And cannot arrest the dream
That unwinds a chase and a rape
And ends in Thracian pain.

(PA, 52)

The whippoorwill calls, and is not answered; his song becomes no more than itself, and no less: “When time has gone away / He calls to what he calls.” And the speaker, thinking that “life is one,” accepts both the written fable and the one the whippoorwill has helped him to invent:

I will grow old, as a man
Will read of a transformation:
Knowing it is a fable
Contrived to answer a question
Answered, if ever, in fables,
Yet all of a piece and clever
And at some level, true.

(PA, 53)

This idea, that unwilled or semiconscious rumination leads on to meditation and sometimes to fable, is taken up several times in The Wreck of the Thresher, often in sequences or in poems separated into nearly self-contained sections. “Fables About Error,” “Five Accounts of a Monogamous Man,” and “Consequences” are all acts of a mind responding with attentive love to surfaces, but never being content with superficiality. The first of the “Fables About Error” develops the amusing notion that “The mouse in the cupboard repeats himself,” being found dead every morning in the trap. On one level, then, the idea that the mouse should know better after a while is preposterous, but Meredith's conclusion is nonetheless apt:

Surely there is always that in experience
Which could warn us; and the worst
That can be said of any of us is:
He did not pay attention.

(EW, 82)

Meredith pays close attention, and finds even in our troubled age some vindication of his tendency to praise, as he says in “of choice,” the first section of “Consequences”:

More than I hoped to do, I do
And more than I deserve I get;
What little I attend, I know
And it argues order more than not.

(PA, 64)

This attitude of hopefulness comes through these poems tentatively, free of the hectoring tone that often afflicts poems with something valuable to say. They are “all of a piece,” and let themselves come gradually to those levels where they ring truest. At such levels, they are beyond cleverness.

In 1970, Meredith published Earth Walk: New and Selected Poems. I have already suggested that he was too stingy in making his selections from the four previous books, though he makes a handsome apology for this in a foreword: “In making this selection from twenty-five years of work I have represented my early books scantily, as I have come to feel they represented me. Juvenile gifts apart, it takes time to find out our real natures and purposes. But finally we have done so many things, good and bad, in character, that it is permissible to disown some of our other acts, at any rate the bad ones, as impersonations.” He makes it clear in the next sentence, part of which is quoted earlier, that he is talking primarily about his first two books, and it is hard to quarrel much with his selection from those. But the slimness of the selection as a whole should have the effect, intended or not, of sending the reader back to the early work, especially to The Open Sea, where among the thirty-three “disowned” poems there are several that reward continued attention.

But one turns with greatest interest, of course, to the fourteen new poems in Earth Walk, and one is struck first by the variety of points of view. Poems spoken by fictional characters are not plentiful in Meredith's work, though on some occasions, as in “Five Accounts of a Monogamous Man,” he has adopted, as Yeats often did, the device of applying third-person titles to first-person poems. Earth Walk opens with such a poem, “Winter Verse for His Sister,” the speaker of which is not readily distinguishable from Meredith himself. Then in “Walter Jenks' Bath” the speaker is a young black boy thinking over what his teacher has said about the way everything is composed of atoms. The tension between the poet's level of sophistication and that of the speaker is first of all useful in setting the tone of the poem, the touching simplicity of the observations; but in the last six lines, what Walter Jenks says becomes larger in its grasp of things, so that in the final line, he seems to speak for the poet as well as for himself:

And when I stop the atoms go on knocking,
Even if I died the parts would go on spinning,
Alone, like the far stars, now knowing it,
Not knowing they are far apart, or running,
Or minding the black distances between.
This is me knowing, this is what I know.

(PA, 75)

That a child in the bathtub comes plausibly to thoughts like these is a tribute to the delicacy with which the tone is handled; the same delicacy sustains a tougher poem, “Effort at Speech,” in which the speaker relates an encounter with a mugger. The speaker and the mugger wrestle briefly, the wallet parts “like a wishbone,” the mugger flees with his ill-gotten half, and the speaker comes close to guilt at having retained the other half:

Next time don't wrangle, give the
boy the money,
Call across chasms what the world you know is.
Luckless and lied to, how can a child master
human decorum?
Next time a switch-blade, somewhere
he is thinking,
I should have killed him and took the lousy
wallet.
Reading my cards he feels a surge of anger
blind as my shame.

(PA, 78)

The strength of the poet's control over these lines is felt in the prosody; this narrative of violence and guilt is cast in stanzas that come as close to Sapphics as idiomatic English can come. The classical echo puts a distance between the poet and the events described, but it also recalls the actual effort that real speech requires.

Colloquial language, contractions, and exclamations fall into regular stanzas in “Poem About Morning,” a funny little lecture on waking up and facing the day. The suggestion of lecturing is made by casting the poem in the second person, though the “you” partakes of the speaker's experience, almost as if the speaker were addressing himself. And “Earth Walk” provides a final illustration of the experimentation with point of view that runs like a thread through these new poems. The title poem begins in the third person, as a man pulls off the highway and touches his seat belt. After the phrase “He thinks” the first stanza continues in the first-person plural, as it describes our habit of traveling in straps and helmets. The second stanza is in the first-person singular, but despite the stanza break, it all still follows from “He thinks.” The man steps out of his car, parodying the careful steps of the men on the moon:

I pick out small white stones. This is a safe walk.
This turnpike is uninhabited. When I come back
I'll meet a trooper with a soft, wide hat
who will take away my Earth-rocks and debrief me.

(EW, 20)

The shift from third to first person, while it is perfectly within the bounds of narrative logic, still gives the poem a scope of observation that a single point of view might lack.

These new poems, with their restless personal pronouns, may now be seen as forerunners of Meredith's next book, Hazard, the Painter (1975). This collection of sixteen poems seems to have been designed to provoke a number of reactions, not all of them charitable, and not all of them familiar to readers of Meredith's previous books. One notices pure surface, a meticulous and beautiful job of book production in which the cover and typography seem to assert that the book amounts to more than its small bulk might suggest. Inside, there are poems composing a “characterization,” as Meredith calls it in a cagey note; he adds, “Resemblances between the life and character of Hazard and those of the author are not disclaimed but are much fewer than the author would like.”

It comes to mind that in the work of William Meredith and John Berryman there are several references to their friendship; furthermore, as Meredith has acknowledged in public readings, a line in the first of the Hazard poems is taken from Berryman's conversation. The uncharitable speculation arises that Hazard is too closely akin to Berryman's Henry, in strategy if not in size and style. Clearly, though, Meredith cannot have conceived this book in any competitive way, as Lowell seems to have conceived his Notebooks; the very brevity of Hazard indicates that it is not useful to compare it with The Dream Songs, even though that book continues to loom as a distant forebear.

Hazard is a middle-aged painter with a wife and two children. For two years his subject has been a parachutist, but he is at the moment stalled in his work; various pressures—family, uneasy friendships with other painters, daydreams—take up more of his time than painting does. He has a fine eye for detail, and a wry sense of the absurd; lying at the beach, where “they use the clouds over & over / again, like the rented animals in Aïda,” Hazard nearly dozes as things impinge at random on his consciousness, making equal claims on his curiosity:

The sand knocks like glass, struck by bare heels.
He tries to remember snow noise.
Would powder snow ping like that?
But you don't lie with your ear to powder snow.
Why doesn't the girl who takes care
of the children, a Yale girl without flaw,
know the difference between lay and lie?

(PA, 111)

The style of Hazard appears to be more casual, less concentrated, than anything Meredith has written before. One notices, for instance, that there is not a semicolon anywhere in these poems; instead, the independent clauses tumble along over their commas, contributing to the feeling of interior life, as in the second half of this stanza from “Politics,” a poem about liberals gathering to hear jazz for McGovern:

Hazard desires his wife, the way people
on the trains to the death-camps were seized
by irrational lust. She is the youngest woman
in the room, he would like to be in bed
with her now, he would like to be president.

(PA, 100)

Gradually, as one rereads these poems, the accumulation of anecdote and detail provides the density that is missing from the style, and there arises the illusion of a life, a way of life, made difficult by a difficult time, but still enjoyable and cherished. “The culture is in late imperial decline,” Hazard thinks in the line taken from Berryman; and in “Hazard's Optimism,” considering his vision of the parachutist as he himself tries a parachute jump, Hazard concludes thus:

They must have caught and spanked him
like this when he first fell.
He passes it along now, Hazard's vision.
He is in charge of morale in a morbid time.
He calls out to the sky, his voice
the voice of an animal that makes not words
but a happy incorrigible noise, not
of this time.

(PA, 96)

The mask of Hazard gives Meredith, at least for the duration of this deceptively brief book, the freedom to work out of ways in which he might think he was becoming set. In the chattiness that contains more than it at first seems to, beneath the detailed surfaces, there is room for satire as well as for a serious, loving exploration of a peculiar world.

But Hazard was not destined to take over Meredith's voice and life. He is an interesting character met along the way, and, having met him, Meredith was usefully diverted. In more recent work, the deceptively casual tone and form in Hazard's voice have been especially useful. The title poem of The Cheer (1980) says to the reader, “Frankly, I'd like to make you smile” (PA, 123), and speaks up for the cheer and courage in which words are born; but “Recollection of Bellagio” shows how far from humor such an optimistic aim can go. The first of the poem's two strophes describes the dance of pine needles against a night sky like a ballroom floor; here is the second:

How long has this been going on, this allemande,
before a man's thoughts climbed up to sit
on the limestone knob and watch (briefly,
as man's thoughts' eyes watch) the needles
keeping time to the bells which the same wind rocks
on the water below, marking the fishermen's nets—
thoughts he would haul in later from the lake
of time, feeling himself drawn clumsy
back into time's figure, hand over hand,
by the grace of pine boughs? And who
is saying these words, now that that man
is a shade, has become his own shade?
I see the shade rise slow and ghostly from its seat
on the soft, grainy stone, I watch it descend
by the gravelled paths of the promontory,
under a net of steady stars, in April,
from the boughs' rite and the bells'—quiet,
my shade, and long ago, and still going on.

(PA, 129-30)

A number of the poems in this book elicit the deep and often unseen smile of pleasure at difficulty being negotiated with good cheer. Even in poems addressing a president guilty of “criminal folly,” or friends—Lowell, Berryman—who have died, love of the world often matters at least as much as the world's unwitting insistence on harboring wickedness, folly, and death.

Among the best poems in The Cheer are four unusually “literary” ones; three are responses to epigraphs at least as long as the poems, and one requires a prose preface of more than 150 words. This last is “Trelawny's Dream,” in which Edward John Trelawny recalls—and, in dream, revises—the boating accident that took the life of his friend Shelley. A splendid poem taken alone, it also speaks to “The Wreck of the Thresher”; both poems are moving portrayals of our need to dream away our helplessness, and to wake to it.

Meredith's most recent book of poems, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, is Partial Accounts: New and Selected Poems (1987). Here, as in Earth Walk, he has represented his early work sparingly. I miss “Fables About Error,” and like to think it took its small revenge at being dropped: its former neighbor “The Ballet,” first collected in The Wreck of the Thresher, appears here among the poems selected from The Open Sea.

Partial Accounts adds a translation and ten new poems to the selections from earlier books; they meditate upon violence and love about equally, and often on the human ability to separate ourselves from the rest of nature. “The Jain Bird Hospital in Delhi” applies to its form the nonviolent attitudes of the Jains, who see all living things as brothers and sisters; the form is based on that of a sestina, but only one end-word is varied by so slight a device as shifting between singular and plural; others are replaced with homophones, synonyms, or associates; one appears as pigeons, bird(s), creatures, pheasants, and flock; another as beings, men, women, laymen, poultrymen, women, and ourselves. Few readers will ponder the adherence to traditional word-order long enough to discover that birds are creatures and people are beings; the poem wittily exemplifies nonviolent achievement of order.

In “Partial Accounts” a surprising juxtaposition makes a defense of optimism; the first part, titled “surgery,” humorously remarks on the appropriateness of replacing a faulty valve with a pig's valve; the second part recalls the sympathy the speaker felt as he watched, or tried not to watch, an Arab woman in Morocco having a tooth pulled in the open-air market:

The chirurgien dentiste was
a small man,
authoritative, Berber I think.
His left foot was set gently on the woman's
shoulder, and when I last looked,
difficult, silent progress was being made.

(PA, 182-83)

Meredith continues to find fresh ways of reminding us that there is joy in plucking at the hems of even the darkest mysteries; as he says in “Among Ourselves,” “Accountability / weighs on me, but so does happiness” (PA, 181).

Notes

  1. Archibald MacLeish, Foreword to Love Letter from an Impossible Land, by William Meredith (New Haven, 1944); William Meredith, Partial Accounts: New and Selected Poems (New York, 1987), 6. Hereafter cited in the text as PA, followed by a page number.

  2. William Meredith, Earth Walk: New and Selected Poems (New York, 1970), 34. Hereafter cited in the text as EW, followed by a page number.

  3. William Meredith, Ships and Other Figures (Princeton, 1948), 26.

  4. Richard Howard, Alone with America (New York, 1969), 318-26.

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