SOURCE: "Edward Hirsch: Poet at the Window," in The American Poetry Review, May-June 1981, pp. 44-7.

[In the following essay, Hirsch praises Amichai's book of poems Amen, in particular his love poems and his ability to evoke major metaphysical issues through microcosmic images.]

1

Yehuda Amichai has thus far published three books of poetry in English—Songs of Jerusalem and Myself, Poems, and Amen. These books are the work of an imaginative writer with a unique ability to render and enact the complex fate of the modern Israeli, the individual man locked in and responding to history. Amichai is a historical poet of the first order, a political writer in the deepest sense of that term. At the same time he is a writer who always speaks of his own concerns, his private love pangs and personal questions, his parents' history and his own intimate secrets. Part of the achievement of Amichai's work has been the conjoining of these two spheres, always speaking of one in terms of the other. Indeed, one of the central themes of his work has been the way the personal is implicated in the historical, the private impinged upon by the public. Always his poems register the human implications of the political event, in Lorca's phrase, the drop of blood that stands behind the statistics. He is, like Wordsworth, a passionate man trying to speak to other men and, as a modern Hebrew poet his work is appropriately steeped in the common imagery of the Prayer Book and the Psalms, the communal imagery and mythology of the Old Testament, the underground stream of Jewish mysticism.

Most often Amichai speaks without the mask of a fictive persona, as an individual witness, a quiet man who is always standing at the window. The poem "Out Of Three Or Four In A Room" (from Poems, translated by Assia Gutmann) captures and enacts precisely what it means to be a witness, a writer trying to bridge the speechless and enormous distance between the inadequate and false words (cut loose and "wandering without luggage") and the terrible event. It is a poem that, in the example of its making transcends its own pessimism, but it shows too that, as Williams said, "There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other."

      "Out Of Three Or Four In A Room"
 
      Out of three or four in a room
      One is always standing at the window.
      Forced to see the injustice amongst the thorns,
      The fires on the hill
 
      And people who left whole
      Are brought home in the evening, like small change
 
      Out of three or four in a room
      One is always standing at the window
      Hair dark above his thoughts.
      Behind him, the words.
      And in front of him the words, wandering, without luggage.
      Hearts without provision, prophecies without water
      And big stones put there
      And staying, closed, like letters
      With no address; and no one to receive them.

Amichai is a poet who may say truthfully that "I go out to all my wars." He was born in Germany in 1924 and emigrated to Israel in 1936. The poem "Like the Inner Wall Of A House" reports that

     I found myself
     Suddenly, and too early in life
     Like the inner wall of a house
     Which has becomes an outer wall after wars and devastations.

Wars and devastations are behind all of Amichai's work; sometimes they are implicit and in the background, more often they are explicit and imminent, violently impinging on his life. And the place where they impinge most is on his own love life, for Amichai is perhaps first and foremost a love poet, a writer preeminently concerned with the tenderness and ironies of sexual love. And he is continually waking to find that love engulfed by the external historical world. He writes that "In the middle of this century we turned to each other," thus specifying the personal moment in terms of the larger epoch, and he announces wryly that:

      Even my loves are measured by wars:
      I am saying this happened after the Second
      World War. We met a day before the
      Six-Day War. I'll never say
      before the peace '45-'48 or during
      the peace '56-'67.

In his perceptive introduction to Amen Ted Hughes comments on the way in which Amichai's imagery ramifies both outwards and inwards, wedding the private to the public. Hughes writes:

Writing about his most private love pangs in terms of war, politics, and religion he is inevitably writing about war, politics, and religion in terms of his most private love pangs. And the large issues are in no wise diminished in this exchange … Each poem is like a telephone switchboard—the images operate lightning confrontations between waiting realities, a comic or terrible conversation between the heavy political and spiritual matters and the lovers.

Perhaps the finest example of Amichai's conjunction of love and politics (or love and war, or love and religion), his imagistic tangle of supposedly separate but inevitably tangled realms, is the poem "A Pity. We Were Such A Good Invention" (also from Poems). This poem is remarkable for its directness and profound simplicity, its unique mixture of the erotic and the political, its subtle tone of outrage and nostalgia. As a love poem it is worthy to stand beside "The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter" or, more appropriately, "The Good-Morrow" and "Canonization." Donne was an early influence on Amichai and this poem has some of the qualities, though presented retrospectively, of "For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love …" It reads:

      "A Pity. We Were Such A Good Invention"
 
      They amputated
      Your thighs off my hips.
      A far as I'm concerned
      They are all surgeons. All of them.
 
      They dismantled us
      Each from the other.
      As far as I'm concerned
      They are all engineers. All of them.
 
      A pity. We were such a good
      And loving invention.
      An airplane made from a man and wife.
      Wings and everything.
      We hovered a little above the earth.
 
      We even flew a little.

The final memory of this poem, understated and passionate, may be effectively placed against the violent and surgical destruction of the unspecified "them." Here the lovers are not "stiff twin compasses" as in Donne's famous image, but appropriate to their century, "an airplane made from a man and wife." There is a sad, ironic, outraged, bitter, and wistful tone in the homely invention of this little hovering aircraft. And though it is true that there is an enormous burden in this act of remembering, there is also a vehement anger and determination. This is the same poet who will convincingly title another poem "To Remember Is A Kind Of Hope." Because to remember is a kind of hope, particularly as those hopes are embodied in poems.

2

Amen begins not at the window but in the street, and it starts out not with the poet but with Mr. Beringer "whose son / fell by the Canal." Mr. Beringer is the first of many in this book who has lost a son or a husband or a father or a lover. He is grief-stricken and responsible to his dead son and because of the weight of that responsibility (or rather because of the weight he is losing) the poet becomes responsible to him.

      "Seven Laments For The Fallen In The War"
 
                           1
      Mr. Beringer, whose son
      fell by the Canal, which
      was dug by strangers
      for ships to pass through the desert,
      is passing me at the Jaffa gate:
 
      He has become very thin; has lost
      his son's weight.
      Therefore he is floating lightly
      through the alleys,
      getting entangled in my heart
      like driftwood.

The poem goes on to speak of the monument to the unknown soldier which, ironically and because it is on the enemy's side, will become "a good target marker for the gunners / of future wars." It remembers Dicky who was hit "like the water tower at Yad Mordecai"; there "everything poured out of him." It speaks of "Bitter salt dressed up / as a little girl with flowers" and a dead soldier who "swims above little heads / with the swimming movements of the dead." These laments come from a country where "everything (is) in three languages: Hebrew, Arabic, and Death." And in this world even an old textbook, faulty but tenderhearted, becomes an emblem of a friend who died "in my arms and in his blood."

                         4
    I found an old textbook of animals,
    Brehm, second volume, birds:
    Description, in sweet language, of the lives
    of crows, swallows and jays. A lot of mistakes
    in Gothic printing, but a lot of love: "Our
    feathered friends," "emigrate to warmer
    countries," "nest, dotted egg, soft plumage,
    the nightingale," "prophets of spring."
    The Red-Breasted Robin.
 
    Year of printing 1913, Germany
    on the eve of the war which became
    the eve of all my wars.
 
    My good friend, who died in my arms and in his blood
    in the sands of Ashdod, 1948, in June.
 
    Oh, my friend,
    red-breasted.

One of the remarkable and metaphysical aspects of this sly and sad poem is the way the feelings for the textbook imply, without becoming sentimental, the tender feelings for the friend. The connection is made with lightning-like precision, the name of the robin transformed and infused with new meaning as it comes to represent the dead soldier, frozen in time, red-breasted. And by speaking about this outdated textbook of animals ("year of printing 1913") the poet lines the poem not only with sorrow but with warmth and affection too. Indeed, the sixth lament makes this distinction important: "Yes, all this is sorrow" … but "leave / a little love burning, always / as in a sleeping baby's room a little bulb." The lightbulb gives off a "feeling of security and silent love" that keeps us from giving ourselves wholly to grief. It is true that sometimes, as on Memorial Day in the seventh lament, the poem itself gives way, mixing grief with grief, sorrow with sorrow, until the poet (in "camouflage clothes of the living") cries out, much as one imagines Job crying out:

     Oh, sweet world soaked, like bread,
     in sweet milk for the terrible toothless God.

But against this, and with a terrible irony infusing a kind of tender hopefulness, the poem juxtaposes its final line: "Behind all this some great happiness is hiding."

Amichai's war poems are unique in that they are informed by a strong sense of personal responsibility—the self simultaneously implicated in, and victimized by the war—or as one poem puts it "the hunter and hunted in one body." No poem demonstrates this sense of personal responsibility, the individual voice assuming the weight and burden of these collective deaths (and what is that collective but a sum of individuals?) better than the fourth poem of "Poems From A Cycle Called 'Patriotic Songs.'" The poem begins, typically, with a disclaimer about itself ("I have nothing to say about the war") and it ends, also typically, with a complex and sweet voiced affirmation.

                            4
     I have nothing to say about the war,
     nothing to add. I'm ashamed.
 
     All the knowledge I have absorbed in my life
     I give up, like a desert
     which has given up all water.
     Names I never thought I would forget
     I'm forgetting.
 
     And because of the war I saw again,
     for the sake of a last and simple sweetness:
     The sun is circling round the earth. Yes.
     The earth is flat, like a lost, floating board. Yes.
     God is in heaven. Yes.

This final affirmation, in a language that is itself a kind of last and simple sweetness, is particularly poignant in that it is an affirmation of a world that has long been lost, a world that has been initiated into another kind of knowledge. That extraordinary sense of a world which has a flat wooden surface and a calm God can only predate 1913, that dark eve of all our wars, when the west put on its helmet of fire and, like the Hebrew poet, "crossed the borders of being an orphan." It is now a blood-stained, red-breasted world for adults and, as an early poem of Amichai makes clear, "God takes pity on kindergarten children … but adults he pities not at all."

     He abandons them,
     And sometimes they have to crawl on all fours
     In the roasting sand
     To reach the dressing station,
     And they are streaming with blood.

It is with this knowledge and through these eyes that one must consider Amichai's final affirmation. Somehow and all at once that affirmation is simultaneously sincere and ironic, terribly honest and tender, deceptively simple and impossible. Perhaps most of all it is impossible. And yet, like Rilke in his self-portrait, the poem does make its affirmation, "it says its yes."

Reading Amichai's poems is a harrowing experience. The sheer accumulated weight of these losses is enormous. I find it nearly impossible to read these poems, however successful, as a merely literary performance. Their human presence is too close. Even the weakest poems, and some of the little love poems towards the end of the book seem tossed off and merely cute, bear a particular human stamp. Ultimately these poems may not have the stature of, say, Whitman's poems but, as in Whitman, one cannot read them without simultaneously touching the man who stands behind him. And at times, in their deepest moments, in their naked splendor, the simple recital of losses may take on the quality of a sacred litany. Here is Amichai's eleventh "Patriotic Song."

      The town I was born in was destroyed by shells.
      The ship in which I sailed to the land of Israel was drowned later in the war.
      The born at Hammadia where I had loved was burned out,
      The sweet shop at Ein-Gedi was blown up by the enemy.
      The bridge at Ismailia, which I crossed to and fro on
      the eve of my loves,
      has been torn to pieces.
 
      Thus my life is wiped out behind me according to an exact map:
 
      How much longer can my memories hold out?
 
      The girl from my childhood was killed and my father is dead.
 
      That's why you should never choose me
      to be a lover or a son, or a bridge-crosser
      or a citizen or a tenant.

It is no wonder, given the accumulated burden of these losses that the thirty-fourth poem goes on to move in three ascending sentences from "Let the memorial hill remember, instead of me/that's his job" to

      let dust remember, let dung remember
      at the gate, let afterbirth remember.
 
      Let the wild beasts and the sky's birds eat and remember.
      Let all of them remember, so that I can rest.

Amen is a book of faith and doubt, sorrow and sweetness, astonishment and recognition. But mostly it is a book of memory, a book that continues to remember even as it refuses that very act, even as it longs to rest. But there is no rest. Out of three or four in a room, one is always standing at the window.

3

With the aid of Ted Hughes, Yehuda Amichai has translated his poems from Hebrew into English with surprising immediacy and effect. Many of the poems are written in a style that is disarmingly playful and direct, deceptively simple; they are so artful that at times they appear artless and naked, utterly spontaneous. What a long apprenticeship must precede such simplicity! Much of Amichai's strength rests in the tone and temper of that style, the way in which he strikes the exact registers of feeling, the sympathy that is always flowing outwards in his work. Almost always his poems move on the wings of a rich and nearly surreal imagery, somehow both personal and anonymous, absolutely contemporary and yet very ancient. In a way the poems seem like one of the women they describe: "With a very short dress, in fashion, / But weeping and laughter from ancient times."

Unlike most books of contemporary poems Amen is filled with other people. These poems speak with a natural and real tenderness of a village Jew ("God fearing and heavy eyed"), a tired gym teacher ("I never realized gym teachers could be sad"), a Czech refugee in London ("She behaves here as in a schoolbook for foreign languages"), and a bride without dowry ("What a terrible blood bath is she preparing for herself"). In a country filled with "all this false tourism" he speaks, comically but also with a certain amount of warmth of "a Jewish girl / Who has American hope / In her eyes and whose nostrils are still / Very sensitive to anti-semitism." And there is a heart-rending poem about a school teacher who travelled all the way to New York to commit suicide.

      People travel far away to say:
      this reminds me of some other place.
      That's like it was, it's similar. But
      I knew a man who travelled to New York
      to commit suicide. He argued that the houses
      in Jerusalem are not high enough and that everyone knows him.
 
      I remember him with love, because once
      he called me out of class in the middle of a lesson:
      "There's a beautiful woman waiting for you outside in the garden,"
      and he quieted the noisy children.
 
      When I think about the woman and about the garden
      I remember him on that high rooftop,
      the loneliness of his death and the death of his loneliness.

Amichai's poems, as in this elegy for his school teacher, always try to keep "the route to childhood open." Often they speak with warmth, nostalgia, and reverence for his dead father. There are so many lovely lines about Amichai's father here (and "All those buried with him in one row / His life's graduation class") that it is hard to resist quoting them all. One poem begins "My father's cheeks when he was my age were soft / Like the velvet bag which held his praying shawl." And in "Letter of Recommendation" the son inside the lover breaks loose and he cries out

      Oh, touch me, touch me, you good woman!
      This is not a scar you feel under my shirt.
      It's a letter of recommendation, folded,
      from my father:
      "He is still a good boy and full of love."
 
      I remember my father waking me up
      for early prayers. He did it caressing
      my forehead, not tearing the blanket away.
 
      Since then I love him even more.
      And because of this
      let him be woken up
      gently and with love
      on the Day of Resurrection.

When Amichai speaks of childhood he does so with a sly and wistful sadness, a tender hopefulness, a longing to cross the barriers of that other. Cocteau tells us, rightly I think that "there are poets and grownups." But at times Amichai almost takes Cocteau one step further as if to say "there is no such thing as a grownup" and, simultaneously, "we are all in exile from childhood." Lit up by a dry interior weeping, we are always recalling our lives, lugging around worn out letters of recommendation from the past, our futile hearts, our endless queries for affection.

In Amichai's poems those queries are most often sent out as a lover. Sometimes his love songs ("Love Song," "Menthol Sweets," "Sometimes I Am Very Happy and Desperate") seem to be too short and unrealized, too imagistically interchangeable. But his finest love poems are filled with a bittersweet tenderness, an ancient mine of wisdom. He tells us that "He who put / masculine and feminine into the language put / into it also departing." Amichai is best however, not when he laments a lost love but when he praises: simply, wildly, without restraint "A Majestic Love Song," for example, begins majestically

      You are beautiful, like prophecies.
      And sad, like those which come true,
      Calm, with the calmness afterward.
      Black in the white loneliness of jasmine,
      With sharpened fangs: she-wolf and queen.

He is a poet able to speak of the royal scar and the blind golden scepter; he names a woman's rings as "the sacred leprosy of your fingers." It is only when the erotic poems move at the speed of such marvelous images that they earn their delicate vulnerability, their deep heart-breaking voices. And from "You are beautiful, like the interpretation of ancient books" they move successfully into

     To live is to build a ship and a harbor
     at the same time. And to complete the harbor
     long after the ship was drowned.
 
     And to finish: I remember only
     that there was mist. And whoever
     remembers only mist—
     what does he remember?

Robert Lowell once called Randall Jarrell "the most heartbreaking poet of his generation." Amichai, too is a heartbreaking and heart-rending poet and, in an odd way, in a different incarnation, speaking in a different language of a different people moving through a different landscape, his poems sometimes remind me of Jarrell's finest and most luminous poems. Artfully simple, direct, and absolutely honest, simultaneously sweet and sorrowful, tender and unsentimental, both poets continually remember the enormous burden and mystery of ordinary adults shouldering their memories, carrying around the secret of their childhoods, the weight of their losses, the endless rituals of their daily lives which are so utterly original, so utterly "commonplace and solitary." I would not push the connection, but I cannot shake the feeling that, however different they are, Jarell's housewives, secretaries, and ball turret gunners are part of the same human band as Amichai's gym teachers, tourists, refugees, and Jewish soldiers. Both poets speak naturally of orphans, warriors, parents, children, and citizens.

Yehuda Amichai is a poet with a genuine talent for rendering the complex interior lives of other people. Human sympathy flows generously out of his work like a great river. He is, in his own small way, part of a tradition that dates at least as far back as the ancient Hebrew prophets. Amen is the book of a representative man with unusual gifts telling the tale of his tribe.