amandafrench.net

poet = thermometer

January 3, 2008 – 12:24 am

I’ve never read any Anne Sexton; all I know is that she’s the über-Confessional poet and that she killed herself. Someone once said I look like her; I wouldn’t know.

I should say, rather, that I had never read Anne Sexton — now, I suppose, I have. Somehow I came across her poem “Sylvia’s Death” online the other day. (And, by the way, irritatingly, there are several versions online that print “rasing potatoes” when “raising potatoes” is surely correct: the version in Chadwyck-Healey’s database Twentieth-Century American Poetry has “raising,” and it takes its text from the 1981 Houghton-Mifflin edition of Sexton’s Complete Poems, so I’m going with the sane spelling.) Basically, of “Sylvia’s Death,” I thought, “Lame.” What annoyed me was that all the poem seems to do is give prosaic details in a tone that reminds me of the mockeries of evangelists that all the comedians seem to do. I did like the last three ecphonetic lines:

O tiny mother,
you too!
O funny duchess!
O blonde thing!

That got me to thinking about Auden’s famous elegy for Yeats, which is the opposite of lame. Fleet. It’s fleet. And especially the line that I misremembered as “The instruments we have agree / The day of his death was a dark, cold day.” Turns out it’s “What instruments we have agree / The day of his death was a dark cold day.” Okay, how much totally better is that “What” than the “the”? All kinds of avoirdupois of much totally better, that’s how much totally better. And ballsy, that omission of the comma between “dark” and “cold.” I never do that.

Auden, faced with the task of writing an elegy for Yeats, knows he’s up against a mammoth task, an impossible task. A really bad poet would just go ahead and commit the seductive pathetic fallacy without being aware that that’s what he was doing; a good poet would know to avoid or temper it; Auden comes out swinging with a pathetic certainty, a whole set of pathetic data:

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

That “what” does such an economical job of suggesting that the instruments we have are maybe not the best instruments, the most expensive, bleeding-edge, accurate to a millisecond instruments. We’ve lost the best one, maybe. Maybe our best instrument just died. Yeats, Auden suggests submergedly, was our best instrument. He would have known better than to commit the freshman solecism of starting a horror story with “It was a dark and stormy night” or of being so narcissistic on behalf of the human race as to think that the death of a great man matters to the weather or vice versa. This start to the poem is lovely because it’s funny. Auden pays homage to the poet Yeats by ever-so-subtly mocking the poet Auden. Like any poor miserable bastard, Auden’s going to start grumbling at the lateness of the newspaper and the crappiness of the weather and the rudeness of the clerk and the unfairness of the death of Yeats and the inability of the city to get the streets properly plowed. They always push the snow up in huge banks on the side of the road so that everyone has to dig their car out from eight times as much snow as actually fell. It all feels like a plot, a conspiracy to outrage, some days. It’s all connected, feels the irrational man. (And isn’t “irrational man” a tautology?)

Not coincidentally, this is also the poem with the famous lines

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper,….

I usually see that sentence “poetry makes nothing happen” debated a little defensively in articles and books, as though it’s an insult. Plenty of people want to assert that poetry does TOO make things happen. But you know what? A place where executives would never want to tamper is a place I am just dying to be. And if a poet is like a thermometer, well, thermometers make nothing happen either. They just tell you what is happening, is all.