William Meredith: ‘All of a Piece and Clever and at Some Level, True’
[In the following essay, Howard praises the restraint and tone of Meredith's early verse.]
“Art by its very nature asserts at least two kinds of good—order and delight.” So William Meredith, in his introduction to a selection from Shelley, a poet who interests this decorous American for his patience with established verse forms, being “otherwise impatient of everything established.” Meredith's declension of order and delight as versions of the good, a paring susceptible of a whole range of inflections, from identity to opposition, is the generating trope of his own poetry, its idiopathy or primary affection.
In his four books of poems, even in his translations of Apollinaire,1 a curious restraint, a self-congratulatory withholding that is partly evasive and sly, partly loving and solicitous, testify, like so many essays in emphasis, to the war between delight and order, and yet to the necessity of divising them in each other: if order is not found in delight, the world falls apart; if delight is not taken in order, the self withers. Success, for Meredith, is provisional—he does not ask more.
In 1944, Archibald MacLeish, inheriting the editorship of the Yale Series of Younger Poets from the late Stephen Vincent Benét, commended to his predecessor's exhibited taste his first choice of poems, Love Letter from an Impossible Land by a “William Meredith, Lieutenant (jg) U.S.N.R.”—so the poet signed himself on the title page—for its “quality of reticence and yet of communication, almost unwilling communication … after a difficult and dangerous campaign. It has an accent of its own.” Dedicated to Christian Gauss of Princeton, prefaced by MacLeish, published in the Yale series, and gravely committed to military transactions, Meredith's first book certainly stands under the sign of every kind of authority: military, educational, institutional and, as an expression of them all, the formal authority of closed verse forms: strict songs, sonnets, bookish roundels worn as so many masks. If such verse has “an accent of its own,” it is the accent of a young poet (Meredith was 25 when the book was published) for whom the very notion of an accent was concrescent: his success is in mastering the accent of others, so that only at odd moments, turning abrupt corners, do we hear a voice that will be, so indisputably, the poet's own:
This is the old, becoming grief of shepherds,
This is the way men have of letting go …
or again:
… respite from passion, real
change?
No, we shall want again later and greatly all over.
and most characteristically:
Only the delights of the body
Which I am convinced are godly,
And the brave ones, do not disappoint me now.
The brave ones with black hair and good eyes
Come round like January and are sure;
For these only I resolve, wearing tokens
And putting checks on calendars not to forget,
Not to betray, if possible.
Against the rest, the lines printed here in roman type have a resonance that will recur, one characterized by self-doubt, submission to the evidence of the senses and an eagerness to invoke the ethical generalization; here is a final sample, from a poem called “Altitude: 15,000”:
One does not shout to end the quiet here
But looks at last for a passage leading out
To domesticity again and love and doubt,
Where a long cloud makes a corridor to earth.
But for the most part, these earliest poems have other echoes, or rather echo others, often with beautiful ease, but all the more evidently borrowings. Yeats is a constant aspiration:
Only an outward-aching soul
Can hold in high disdain these ties …
The dedicated and the dead,
Themselves quite lost,
Articulate at last …
and Matthew Arnold a several-times invoked preceptor; the kind of phrasing Arnold developed in “Dover Beach” is splendidly engaged in the title poem here:
Providence occurs to me;
I will salvage these parts of a loud land
For symbols of war its simple wraths and duties,
Against when, like … sailors
Disbanded into chaos …
I shall resume my several tedious parts,
In an old land with people reaching backward
like many curtains,
Possessing a mystery beyond the mist of mountains,
Ornate beyond the ritual of snow.
Sonnets on suicide (“Empedocles came coughing through the smoke”) and war cleverly assimilate the Auden chime that we hear in the well-stopped lines:
The maps were displaced and most of the
men dispersed,
And worst perhaps of all, I have lost the wanderlust.
And in the flagrantly mimicked adjectives here:
He was seized with an enormous remorse:
The native stone was bright, the lines untrue.
At the end of the book, though, something happens to these brevities uttered with such a stiff upper lip, these clipped phrases which embody The Good-as-order. The experience of war, the actual displacement of the poet's person to the Aleutians, provoke a mode of discourse in which the mind's response to behavior threatens order and bids, in desperation, for delight:
We lie in khaki rows, no two alike,
Needing to be called by name
And saying women's names.
In the long title poem, in “June: Dutch Harbor” and in the astonishing “Notes for an Elegy” (where the loss of a single airman—
Who had not fought one public battle,
Met any Fascist with his skill, but died
As it were in bed, the waste conspicuous—
is by a tone of obedient resolution reconciled with the public war, when
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.)—
in these poems Meredith wrote what stand among the best poems of service in the Second World War, odes to duty that constitute a lamentable genre but a real distinction. Buttressed, as I have said, with Auden and Arnold, alienated by, say, Kodiak Island from the complacencies the word “Princeton” may be taken to represent, this Navy flyer discovered an equilibrium sufficiently endangered to be poignant, yet sufficiently realized in experience to be possessed:
But for your car, jeweled and appointed
all for no delight,
But for the strips that scar the islands that
you need,
But for your business, you could make a myth.
Though you are drawn by a thousand remarkable
horses
On fat silver wings with a factor of safety
of four,
And are sutured with steel below and behind
and before,
And can know with your fingers the slightest
unbalance of forces,
Your mission is smaller than Siegfried's,
lighter than Tristan's,
And there is about it a certain undignified
haste.
Even with flaps there is a safe minimum;
Below that the bottom is likely to drop out.
Meredith's second book, Ships and Other Figures, published promptly in 1948, is a beating to quarters after the risks of such battle pieces. Even the tactical exercises carried over—“Battlewagon,” “Transport,” “Carrier” and “Middle Flight”—from the earlier experience of war are by now tamed, as another title put it, “against excess of sea or sun or reason.” Various traditions are assayed: wedding song, dedicatory verses (one in a copy of Yeats' poems), an Ubi Sunt, an Envoi, even in “Homeric Simile” whose elaboration still affords a glimpse of the self inside:
And each man thinks of some unlikely
love,
Hitherto his; and issues drop away
Like jettisoned bombs, and all is personal fog …
But in most of its poems, this smug little book is a retreat to modes of learning and convention. Meredith even provides several pages of notes, explaining, for example, that by “Middle Flight” he “would like to convey the negative of Milton's grandiose phrase,” and synopsizing Sophocles as a (quite supererogatory) gloss on these last lines in the book:
We flourish now like Theban royalty
Before act one: right now Delphi seems far,
The oracle absurd. But in the wing
Is one who'll stammer later out of pity
—I know because I've seen these plays
before—
To name his actions to the fatal king.
If in this collection, then, the poet has occasion to juice up his tone, to rehearse the sequestering pleasures of order perceived as a submission to the old conventions by which we cope with or understand our experience, producing such anthology-pieces as “A Boon” and “Perhaps the Best Time” with their bright and barbered lines, yet the impression given by the twenty-nine brief poems taken generally is one of constraint rather than control The excess against which the poet urges himself is not in the poems, and the solutions come too pat:
Everything the years do
Can be called a kindness
And what lies behind us,
Howsoever candied
By the memory,
Has for only virtue
That it lies behind.
Even so, there is a saving discontent here too, and in the “Envoi” to the book, with its Chaucerian echo, Meredith accounts for his activity as a poet by a covering confession of inadequacy:
… the comeliness I can't
take in
Of ships and other figures of content
Compels me still until I give them names …
Awareness, then, that figures of content compel by their comeliness must disqualify mere decorum, though it is always easier for this poet to “give names” to what he discards than to specify what it is he keeps. At least by his third book, The Open Sea, which was published in 1958, Meredith insisted on play, on a response to selfhood as pleasure, on the morality of virtuosity. By this time, he is sure enough of his vocation to invoke it as an ethical force. Back in his first book, he had characterized a Beethoven quartet as “not tune nor harmony nor a wild sighing, but strings only … taught this wisdom that returns on itself with such insistence.” In the second book, there had been another poem about the string quartet, dedicated to the composer Randall Thompson, in which Meredith observed that when we attribute intentions to the instruments, “these novel troubles are our own we hear.” Still more determinedly, this third book insists on the autonomy of art, and with it of form. Music, for example, means only itself (the bird “holds a constant song; / He calls to what he calls”) and yet is “at some level, true.” Tautology is here declared a significant fiction. Everything, conversely, which does not mean only itself is, at some other level, untrue. For Meredith, all art, poetic or otherwise, is an act of self-defense against the world changing its meaning from moment to moment, against the difference, against things becoming other, against their loss of identity. For him, poetry is a way of asserting that things are what they are—the insight of self-reference—and that when they mean something else, order as well as delight is endangered. Hence The Open Sea contains many poems about works of art, amounting almost to a poetics—poems about Chartres, about the Brooklyn Bridge, about a Persian miniature, about Robert Frost's poems read aloud by him, as well as “Thoughts on One's Head (in Plaster, with a Bronze Wash)” and, in this context most important, “To a Western Bard Still a Whoop and a Holler away from English Poetry.” Here as in a number of poems he would write subsequently, Meredith defends the very decorum that endows as well as endangers him—defends it desperately:
It is common enough to grieve
And praise is all around;
If any cry means to live
It must be an uncommon sound.
Cupped with the hands of skill,
How loud their voices ring,
Containing passion still,
Who cared enough to sing.
His meters and sentences, as Robert Lowell remarked of Meredith, “accomplish hard labors,” and he will not see them jeopardized by mere exuberance, mere rebellion. Moreover, he has arrived with great certainty at his own destination now, his own tone of voice—playful, even chatty sometimes, indulgent or willful, but the movement of the lines, for all the prose syntax, is the movement of music:
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.
The things that go on there! Erotic movies are
shown
To anyone not accompanied by an adult.
The marquee out front maintains a superior tone:
Documentaries on Sharks and The Japanese Tea
Cult …
This particular head, to my certain knowledge
Has been taught to read and write, make love
and money,
Operate cars and airplanes, teach in college,
And tell involved jokes, some few extremely
funny …
The achievement of this tone, and it is a very inclusive one, brings Meredith to his final stance, which I mean to compliment when I say it is of a rueful maturity. Decorum is questioned but must be, he acknowledges, abided, and in the best-known poem of this third book, “The Chinese Banyan,” the heroism and “dark capacity of quiet” are celebrated with a wisdom which gives every evidence of a deepening investment in life. Meredith's adherence to reality is more powerful and complete than his—or our—acquiescence in pain and despair, though he knows, and allows, that they always win “in the end.” He is not, then, an eschatological poet, for he is concerned with what is going to happen between now and the end:
I speak of the unremarked
Forces that split the heart
And make the pavement toss—
Forces concealed in quiet
People and plants …
he observes in “The Chinese Banyan,” and this heroism of modesty is the gravamen, too, of his latest and best book, The Wreck of the Thresher, which was published in 1964. Here the academic notes (which had persisted in The Open Sea) are dropped, nor is the book dedicated (as that volume was to Professor Stauffer) to a celebrated educator “who could write / Commonplace books”; indeed the entire collection has a freshness and an amplitude of assurance which shows the poet to be in possession not only of his own voice now, but of his own vision as well. There are still the poems “about Poetry,” the ritual tributes to Frost and the redeeming one to Apollinaire; there are also more charms or spells cast against chaos and change, for by opposing mutability Meredith would say that words are not a medium in which to copy or record life; their work is to restore life to order, and in doing so to enable delight. This enterprise succeeds best, I think, in the book's longest poem, “Roots,” which continues the impulse of “The Chinese Banyan” and develops the dialectic of identity and alteration, selfhood and extinction in the form of a conversation between the poet and his elderly neighbor, Mrs. Leamington, a widow wrestling with a mysterious tree-root in her garden in May, “when things tend to look allegorical.” Here all of Meredith's gifts converge: the lucid, easy phrasing—easy, I mean, to read; Meredith makes no secret of the fact that “poems are hard”—the ingratiating self-deprecation, the ready sense of character:
Her face took on the aspect of quotation.
“‘The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,”
—That's Shelley, the Spirit of Earth
in Shelley—
“Met his own image walking in the garden
That apparition, sole of men, he saw …”
—Prometheus Unbound, a long dull poem.
Please use the ashtray, not my luster saucer.’
and the recovery of the terror which resides in the usual. The poem has the rich, seemingly random detail of a novel, yet never loses its intensity as a poem: a clear presentment of life, its preoccupation with death is made normative by wit and the self-stroking charm this poet elsewhere employs a little too consciously. The other great successes in the book are the meditation on his “Hands, on a Trip to Wisconsin” (from “Five Accounts of a Monogamous Man”), the most intimate of Meredith's poems, and the Phi Beta Kappa poem read at Columbia in 1959, “Fables about Error.” A poem in four parts, this work is a masterpiece of phrasing, image and, again, reticence, in which the poet has turned all of what had been his conventional accomplishments in the earlier volumes to his striking advantage. Consider first the management of the verse mechanics, as in this report of a dead mouse found in a trap:
His beady expressionless eyes do not
speak
Of the terrible moment we sleep through.
Sometimes a little blood runs from his mouth,
Small and dry like his person.
I throw him into the laurel bush as being too
small
To give the offenses that occasion burial.
The music of that concluding couplet, with its significant retard on the last word as it takes the rhyme, preceded by the rightness of “occasion” as a verb here, and the prose sensibility of that description of the mouse's mouth, could not be equalled by any poet younger than Marianne Moore except, perhaps, Richard Wilbur. Then the felicities of image as carried by phrasing, in this figure of grackles:
Like a rift of acrid smoke
A flock of grackles fling in from the river
And fight for the winter sun
Or for seed, is it, in the flailed grass.
Their speech is a mean and endless quarrel
And even in their rising
They keep a sense of strife, flat across the
orchard;
Viciousness and greed
Sharpen the spaces of sky between them.
Next the control of learning—for in his intellect-despising way, Meredith is learned—the mastery of reference appropriate in this context is here conjugated with a stunning awareness of what it is like to be alive now:
Many people in Massachusetts are moved
by lust,
Their hearts yearn for unseemly fittings-together
Which their minds disown. Man is aflutter
for the beautiful, Diotima told Socrates,
But the flesh is no more than an instance for
the mind to consider.
And finally, the old reverence for order, the mistrust of pleasure, the withdrawal into convention is given a new moralizing pitch, where art is seen as the mode of bringing delight and discipline needfully together:
The mind should be, like art, a gathering
Where the red heart that fumes in the chest
Saying kill, kill, kill, or love, love, love,
Gentled of the need to be possessed,
Can study a little the things that it dreams
of.
The persistent modesty of this disarming poet makes an assessment of his achievement—its value, and in the old sense its virtue—something of a violation of his very temper. The arms of which he would strip us are self-importance and heedlessness, those devices we employ to get through life more cheaply. Meredith's voice now, submissive to his experience and the representation of a discipline at a higher frequency than itself, recalls us to a more expensive texture:
What little I attend, I know
And it argues order more than not.
Notes
-
“Readers may feel that the inaccuracy that remains in these translations stems from deliberate and humorless conviction rather than from good-natured ignorance.”
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.