Shadow Box

Fred Chappell's volume entitled Shadow Box contains poems reminiscent of the cleverness of John Donne's Songs and Sonnets because of the way he both incorporates and reinvents form.  Each part of the volume (there are five) has a prefatory note explaining what kinds of experiments with form the reader will find therein.

Part One contains "poems-within-poems (enclosed, inlaid, embedded, double, nested)" including "curtal sonnets in which sestets are embedded in octaves."  This is the best part of the volume, and the longest section.  My favorites from it are "Neverland," "A Face in the Crowd," and "Narcissus and Echo," in addition to this one, a curtal sonnet:

Stopping by the Old Homestead

The Interstate is audible from here.
Five miles east, its low, autonomous hum
disturbs the stillness that then stood, the calm
you found when you came here last time, eight years
ago, climbing the same hard road you toiled
in youth that slants a steeper grade today,
this path by the twisted apple tree whose shadow
tensely holds a darker tone. You breathe
harder than when you stopped to see this farm
back then, where claims your life had made against
the future and never paid to own decayed.
Old times shriveled and largely gone, you think,
and trudge all down the hill to find your Chevy
rust-eaten, blind, jacked up on cinder blocks.

You see how the octave (the first eight lines) has a sestet (six lines) within it, consisting of the italicized words?  And then the last six lines, the traditional sestet, has a quatrain consisting of italicized words within it, like half an octave.  And isn't it lovely how the back and forth within the logical progression of the sonnet moves us in time as the speaker pictures "you" moving down the hill?

Part Two contains poems which "center upon visual images," of which I think the one entitled "Fireflies" is the loveliest.  The poet gets a little too cute alluding to Stevens' "Anecdote of the Jar" with "Anecdote of the Ironweed," at least for my taste.

Part Three contains "reliquary" poems.  This one, I think, is the most finely-turned, the best-sculpted:

Pearl

Her hands were gentle about the ills of children,
Her speech was measured amid the quarrels of kinfolk.
She held the sorrow that had grown unspoken
Till it was perfect as a sphere, a token
Of her secret, with a light that shone within
And stood, in an undropped tear, a sign
Of what enwrapped itself upon the wound
Again, layer on nacreous layer, around
The hurt till it transformed to stone, mild jewel
Priceless, modest, calm, and pure and cool.

Here lies the lucent Pearl on black sateen
That shall not often enrobe her like again.

Don't you like the eulogy of the woman in her coffin, and the image of the pearl within?

Part Four is "counterpoint," and this is the section in which you'll find the title poem, a debate between body and soul with a tribute to Hopkins' poem "Spring and Fall" embedded in it ("Poor Ghost, you are no more than guess").  Flesh and spirit take turns surrounding meaning, culminating with a memorable resonance for the words "sheltering" and "grave."

Part Five is a section "in which ancient Christian Latin hymns provide context and subject matter."  This is my least favorite section, and it is the shortest.  One poem, elaborating on "noctium phantasmata," can't resist the reference to A Midsummer Night's Dream:

"A strumpet image appears in guise
Of Love once lost to compromise;
A taloned Fury in sharp silhouette
Advances, by moonlight ill met."

These four lines are particularly disappointing after my interest has been roused by the wording in previous lines, where "spectral accusers demand/ empathies he cannot profess."

Overall, although there are some moments in the volume that strike me as clunky--mostly to do with literary allusion--there are many lovely moments in these finely-crafted and clever little poems.  This is a book I will pick up and occasionally reread with pleasure, finding another turn of phrase to admire, another hidden shadow within these nested boxes.

A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day, Being the Shortest Day

I'm a believer in long winter's naps. I think if I lived by myself, I would pretty much hibernate for the winter. So I didn't get up--or worse yet, stay up--to see the lunar eclipse last night. I did see that the moon on the crest of the old-fallen snow gave the luster of sunset to objects below. That would have been around 4 am U.S. eastern time.

I share John Donne's fear of the dark in his poem about the winter solstice, "A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day, Being the Shortest Day"--a poem written after the death of his beloved wife:

'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks,
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
The world's whole sap is sunk;
The general balm the hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed's feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interred; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring:
For I am every dead thing,
In whom love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness;
He ruined me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that's good,
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have;
I, by love's limbeck, am the grave
Of all that's nothing. Oft a flood
Have we two wept, and so
Drowned the whole world, us two; oft did we grow
To be two chaoses, when we did show
Care to aught else; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death (which word wrongs her)
Of the first nothing the elixir grown;
Were I a man, that I were one
I needs must know; I should prefer
If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means, yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love all, all some properties invest;
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light and body must be here.

But I am none; nor will my Sun renew.
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
At this time to the Goat is run
To fetch new lust, and give it you,
Enjoy your summer all;
Since she enjoys her long night's festival,
Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her Vigil, and her Eve, since this
Both the year's, and the day's deep midnight is.

When I think of the line about "absence, darkness, death," I also try to think of the ending of this poem, in which the speaker resolves to "prepare towards" summer and to "call/This hour her Vigil." I like the way it implies that a person will be nobler after suffering through these long nights.

How about you--do you curse the darkness or light a candle?

Morning has broken

We're in the second week of our adjustment to daylight savings time, so you think I'd be getting used to waking up and going out in the dark again (just when it was starting to get light about the time I wake up). But it's raining this morning, so it's even more dark than usual.

As I was driving home in the dark from driving my kids to school, I found myself thinking about Jonathan Swift's poem "Description of the Morning" and Philip Larkin's "Aubade," with their sneering references to the traditional feeling of waking up in the morning to a new, fresh start (like Oliver in the musical, at the window of his luxurious bedroom in the morning after he has been rescued from Fagin). Any reluctance to face the day in traditional aubades is a reluctance to leave the warm bed with your lover still in it, like in Romeo and Juliet's "lark or nightingale" scene or John Donne's poem "The Sun Rising." But in "Description of the Morning," the servant-girl "Betty from her master's bed had flown,/ And softly stole to discompose her own," and Larkin's speaker is rising to regret "the love not given."

This kind of feeling seems to me to be appropriate on the day that the Disney movie Enchanted comes out on DVD. Instead of Cinderella singing to the mice and the birds, the princess in Enchanted has to sing to the animals available to her--rats, pigeons, and cockroaches.

Well, today you have to get up and put on whatever clothes you can stand to wear again (unless you can whip up something made from curtains), because already

telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.