The Meaning of Recognition Read Free Page A

still a lot more comfortable to arrive voluntarily at that conclusion after you’ve had them than to be forced to it before.
    Goethe was dying of old age, which is another way of saying to die of life. What he wanted was more of what he’d spent three quarters of a century enjoying and describing. He just
didn’t want to leave. He could scarcely complain of never having arrived. Hodgins could. Hodgins was dying with most of his life unlived. Hodgins was dying of death. As it happened, the
prognosis he had received when he was twenty-four, that he would live only three more years, was short by almost a decade. But when the end finally came he had still seen far too little of the
light that left Goethe shouting for more after having bathed in it for a long lifetime. So behind the light that Hodgins makes so terrible in its truthful clarity there is the ordinary light of
life that he had seen too little of. Most of the poems in the last section of
Things Happen
– the section is called ‘Urban’, and we can safely take it that every poem in
it was written when he already knew he was a goner for sure – are, like ‘More Light, More Light’, terrible with the presence of the hospital’s fluorescent illumination and
the hum of the sad machines. I could quote details for an hour. I could quote them until you prayed for release. That was exactly what he was doing, and the words prove it.
    I watch the needle hovering over me.
    It’s big. It goes in slowly and it hurts.
    That’s from ‘Blood Connexions’. Even without reading the whole poem, you can see that the sexual connotations might be fully meant, thus to complete the work of turning the
world upside down. Or try this, from ‘Cytotoxic Rigor’.
    You vomit through surges of nausea and pain.
    And when there’s nothing left to vomit you vomit again.
    But here the critic, for once,
ought
to be an anthologist, because quoting fragments is unfair on both poet and audience. To quote fragments makes for a clumsily edited show-reel of
horror, when in fact every poem is a complete film, and even when possessed by death is still full of life. The needle in ‘Blood Connexions’, for example, is wielded by a female nurse,
with whom the narrator really does have a kind of blood connection, because both she and he had their origins in the same country, Ireland.
    The nurse unpacks a needle and a line.
    ‘We’re probably related,’ she almost jokes,
    but wary of which side I’m on she looks
    me in the eye, just momentarily,
    a look that asks, ‘Are your folks killing mine?’
    One need hardly note that the poem’s conventions of a romantic meeting are gruesomely transformed by the tools of intimacy. That’s where the poem started: the dislocation was the
inspiration. The nurse
    Undoes my catheter, makes a new connexion
    And pushes in the calming drug
    But it is still a romance. It is still a determination to see the multiplicity of life, a refusal to withdraw into what would have been a very excusable solipsism, into a world
bounded by the walls of a pillow when our head sinks into it. One or two of the poems in the last section don’t mention his situation at all. There are postcard memories of his last trip
abroad, to Venice. He is remembering, but if we assume that he is remembering with bitter regret, it can only be an assumption. There is no bitterness on the page. The poems read as if he were
remembering his first delighted response. Browning arrived in Florence with no more joy than this.
    A vaporetto ducked across in front,
    taking the same date and same short route
    that Doges took for centuries
    on their way to hear the multi-choral choirs,
     
    while a pair of gondolas, as dark as submarines,
    headed down the Grand Canal,
    their prows curved up like the toes of slippers
    in a Hollywood oriental musical.
    Eugenio Montale’s gondolas slid in a dazzle of tar and poppies. Hodgins’ gondolas are less carefree, but they still dance. I can tell you