Poetry Notebook Read Free Page A

possess an iambic lilt. But after the monkeys steal the boy’s burning-glass, suddenly you
get this: ‘They bit the glass and listened to the flavour.’ The moment is so good that the way it serves the poem to perfection is only part of its appeal: once we know about the
monkeys and the burning-glass, the line becomes memorable on its own. And I think we could all give examples, from our memories, of how a poetic moment can put the poem it comes from in the shade.
Without going to the bookcase, I can write down one of the first lines by Empson that ever bowled me over. ‘And now she cleans her teeth into the lake.’
    And it
was
a first line, of a poem that has always seemed dark to me after that first magnesium flash. As a diehard formalist myself, I don’t like to admit that the unity of a poem,
its binding energy, might not be the most important of its energies. But there are clearly cases where this is so. Take ‘Good Friday’, Amy Clampitt’s wonders-of-the-biosphere poem
that starts in the Serengeti and does a pretty good job of getting evolution into a nutshell. For its knowledgeable precision, Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop would both have recognized a
worthy acolyte. But the poem would hold together better if there were not an isolated burst of lyricism tearing it apart. The second stanza, the one about the cheetah, is the one you remember, and
even then only for its first three lines:
    Think how the hunting cheetah, from
    the lope that whips the petaled garden
    of her hide into a sandstorm, falters . . .
    After which, the narrative falters too. Rhythm doesn’t concern Clampitt very much. The syllabics of Marianne Moore are probably somewhere in the background, but not even
that system for manufactured unpredictability means much to her. She is just out to avoid the iambic pulse, as Pound once advised, confident as he was that it was creatively exhausted. Clampitt
writes poetry shorn of almost every formal effect. But we see the consequences when a moment stands out like the alteration of the cheetah’s coat. Not even the rest of the stanza can keep
that up, let alone the rest of the poem.
    Defenders of the formal poem could plausibly say that it has a better, not a worse, chance of joining the moments up, so that its ability to contain them, and intensify them with a symmetrical
framework and a melodic structure, becomes a satisfaction in itself. Frost did so, many times: ‘The Silken Tent’ is not only wonderful throughout, it is especially wonderful
because
it is wonderful throughout. In whatever form he chose, writing a poem, not just writing poetry, was what Frost was after. (As Frost wrote to Wallace Stevens after they dined together
in Key West, ‘our poetry comes choppy, in well-separated poems’.) And most of us would not have much trouble in compiling a list of well-separated poems that we keep complete, or almost
complete, in our heads: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, Marvell’s ‘The Definition of Love’, Keats’s ‘Ode on Melancholy’, Dowson’s ‘Vitae Summa
Brevis’, Yeats’s ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’, Cummings’s ‘You shall above all things be glad and young’, Stevens’s ‘The Emperor of
Ice-Cream’, MacNeice’s ‘The Sunlight on the Garden’, Auden’s ‘Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love’, just to name some of the poems I could at one time or other
in my life recite from memory. (In the old Australian school system, you had to get poetry by heart or they wouldn’t let you go home.) There are poets who mainly write poetry but still write
the odd poem that gets an extra dimension from being poised like a silken tent: Dylan Thomas’s ‘In my sullen craft or art’, for example. We don’t necessarily have to
remember the whole poem. (We might not
want
to learn it. Even though I can recognize and place almost any line from Larkin’s collected poems, I have never set out to learn one of his
poems by heart, because somehow, I find,