1. the two rivers: the Styx and the Spoon

From the beginning I was drawn equally to those two primary streams of early modern poetry, which I tend to think of as the Styx and the Spoon.  I cannot remember quite when or where I was when I encountered either of them for the first time.  The earliest memory of the Styx, river of death, dream and forgetfulness, was in some old book of faery lore, with illustrations by Rackham or Crane, the realm of interiority, of the unconscious, of shadows and passing beauty.

Of my memories of the Spoon, they were present from the beginning.  My father and grandfather had both grown up on its banks, and I grew up close to it, lying beneath its trees and playing in its shallows from my earliest days.  I have a memory of first reading Masters’ Spoon River Anthology in someone’s farm house in the general vicinity of the river, and I was young enough that I did not grasp the strangeness of encountering my familiar and utterly ordinary stream as the central image in a book of haunted and disturbing old poems, for the book was no more disturbing than what I had encountered at first hand.  The Spoon River country of my childhood was as haunted as the poems, populated with shameful, rotting ruins and solitary old farmers, grown peculiar from living alone in decrepit houses surrounded by miles of empty fields.  The poems only took me deeper into what was already familiar.  No one could tell me anything about the book, or the man who had written it.  It was just there, in someone’s house, as simple and unremarkable as an old clock on the mantel or a piece or crockery in the cupboard.  As it happened, Masters had lived near the mouth of Spoon River, while we lived near its source, in another county, so that the scandel it caused did not reach our vicinity except as somewhat distant news, and long before my time, so that it was no longer a living memory.   When the Anthology burst upon the nation in 1915, my grandparents were still in their teens.  Masters died at the midpoint of the century.  I was born near Spoon River not five days after he was placed in the earth. 

From each of these two streams, then, the Styx and the Spoon, as I wrote over a period of forty years, two distinct bodies of poems grew up.  From the Styx – from the poems of Blake and Coleridge,  Keats, Tennyson and Rossetti, from Baudelaire and Verlaine, Swinburne and Yeats — a body of symbolist poems in the language of dreams.   And from the Spoon, from the stories of my parents and grandparents, and the poems of Wordsworth and Hardy, of Robinson, Masters and Frost — a body of naturalistic narrative poems in the language of everyday life. 

They mingle of course, these opposing streams, each tainted with traits of the other, so that every poem is a hybrid of the two.  Yet there is no mistaking into which group any one poem belongs.   As illustration I include one sonnet from each stream here:

 

THE MARINER

The vibration singing through all my veins
is the beating of endless tropical rains,
a pulsation of far-off breakers breaking,
with every tendril of hair on my head
the cry of a gull.

                              I am eighty years dead,
having perished at sea in a howling squall
off the African cape when a monstrous swell
overtowered the deck and crushed me choking
into the brine.

                              Now I drift without end
through a strange latitude, a slackened soul
drawn by a distant memory of wind,
past feeling but hardly at peace, possessed
of a thirst that will admit no slaking,
of a restlessness that will not rest.

 

 ~~~~~~~~~~~

 

THE PRODIGAL

In the end the thing that disturbed him most,
the thing he remembered most through the years,
was when he returned to the family place,
to the hard unforgiving acres where
his father still farmed, and recalled again
the inherent knowledge he once possessed
simply by being his father’s son–
a knowledge foregone, consigned to the past,
till he saw it rise up in his father’s face
as a look of reproach: that nothing gained
by talking has worth, that cattle and land
are the only wealth befitting a man,
that a landless man is like Adam cast
from the Garden, shamed, and forever lost.