Anthony Hecht has said of this poem in blank verse paragraphs that it is “about ‘growing up’”; “about the disguises of Pride”; “about the infections of the ego”; “about . . . delusions”; “consuming paranoia”; and “universal moral corruption”. Hecht was forty-seven when he wrote it, and it “may be one of the most personal I’ve written”. “The way we disguise our deepest truths from ourselves . . .”
Before the poem appeared in Millions of Strange Shadows (1977), his third book, he delivered it – the Phi Beta Kappa poem – at Swarthmore’s graduation ceremonies. The effect of the poem on an attentive graduating senior, hearing the poem and facing the world, would be worth knowing.
Was it that extravagant language, “the embellishments,” as Hecht said, “are often desirable in and for themselves . . .”? Or was it that rage, as he also said, is “an important element in any view of my work”? Or that “corruption is intended to embrace the reader”? To me, the poem is less persuasive heard, even less in a public arena, and is better read in a solitude that compliments the “grubby” isolation his character the “Writer” requires.
Hecht opens with the first quatrain of Theodore Roethke’s “Cuttings (later)”, a small poem from The Lost Son (1948), which continues, more abjectly, “I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing”: Nature, mired in awful human dramas.
Roethke sent a draft of “The Lost Son” to his old lover Louise Bogan, who thought it was “written to be read aloud . . . for you to read aloud . . .” and praised it as music. She suggested “a musical sub-title (like Rondo . . .)”, a change Roethke did not make. Hecht might have appreciated her lyricism, though, her distillation of what he called “symbiotic family ties” into a “Suite”. His choice of the word “epistle” in the title, not “letter”, not “correspondence”, strikes a similar note.
“I write at last of the one forbidden topic” is Hecht’s first line, and though it introduces a character, a situation, a topic – not to mention a culmination “at last” in a beginning – none of these develop. They are overtaken, instead, by the “involutions and intricacies” of one allegory after another. Hecht’s “allegorical myth of Plato’s cave transformed into a modern movie theater”, his movies – simple characters and silvery projected “Certitudes” – play out “that perfect world” and block his Writer’s counter-allegory.
He needs the illusion of safety to write and protects himself with anonymity and degradation. The stanza on his arrival in a “grubby little border town” echoes ironically “clearly identified” types and scenes in film noir. The Writer not writing is vividly arresting, leaning into his chosen sad view.
It was this passage Hecht cited, when he claimed that his poem was indebted to W. H. Auden’s “Venus will now say a few words” (“Since you are going to begin to-day”). “W” tried to sound “objective and Olympian”, he said, when leaning into a view immense enough to hold the sun both coming and going.
Auden’s human drama is also encircled with evolutionary force (not to mention Venus); but his blank verse is more propulsive than Hecht’s and amplified with couplets. His tone is appropriately inexorable. Hecht’s baroque allegories are too excessive to be inexorable; his tone, more deliberately mercurial. Perhaps he read Seamus Heaney’s essay on Auden and the “Venus” poem (LRB, June 4, 1987), and it prompted, in his letter of the same date (June 4, 1987), his claim.
Not all affinities are elective. Hecht’s “Green” seems no closer to Auden’s “Venus” than it is to Marianne Moore’s “Nevertheless” (“you’ve seen a strawberry / that’s had a struggle . . .”). Here is another allegory making use of evolution: ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny again. Moore wrote to Elizabeth Bishop that her poem “contrives to include a great deal of awkwardness”; so does Hecht’s.
A perceptibly awkward element follows the Writer, as a parasite a host, into the second allegory. Critics rightly praise the beauty of Hecht’s writing: orchestrated understated slant rhymes; ingenious rhetoric; and dramatic energies released into a long-delayed vision: the survival of – not the fittest – the furious. The mutilated, for example, Hecht said (assuming rhetorically, implicitly, a commonwealth of the mutilated), “may have to rely on the energy of rage merely to remain ‘life’ at all”. Rage is more ancient than animals, a mesmerizing intelligent design: magnificent.
As the allegory continues, taking in tainted plant life and “fossil fuels and gems”, the Writer turns more pointedly to “you”, the “Reader”, the epistle recipient. For it is “you” he accuses of fomenting “[r]esentment, malice, hatred . . .”. And it is down among the pronouns the awkward element recurs.
Hecht intended “you” to refer variously to the “Reader”, the “Writer”, the author, and we the readers as well; and yet, the effect is more turbulent and ambivalent than capacious. The accusations flung at “you” are often too difficult to write, and the pronoun is then engorged: “We” replaces “I” or “most of us”; “all of us” (a bolstering phantom chorus), shored against “you”.
A late Sylvia Plath poem, like “The Rabbit-Catcher” (“It was a place of force –”) uses this poetic device to similar effect. Mockery, fear, accusations ignite a battered space her characters share. Readers may reduce the poem to history (he said, she said) but it endures by means of its difficulty. Hecht also often reduced his poem to “science” (“a psychological type”). Science may be easier to summarize in public than poetry.
Hecht knew Yeats’ categories of quarrels: “We make out of the quarrel with others rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” In this context, in order to be more than rhetoric, the poem must not, in moving from allegory back to narrative, recall the characters as simple, separate types, as they were in his movie theater. If so, the poem would end with a rhetorical whimper, as twee in its way as Moore’s bang (“What sap / went through that little thread / to make the cherry red!”).
But if the poem carries out of the allegory “the quarrel with ourselves”, then the burden of that recognition could account for the depleted energy in the narrative. The effect would be contemplative, still, yet unresolved.
GREEN: AN EPISTLE
By Anthony Hecht
This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks,
Cut stems struggling to put down feet,
What saint strained so much,
Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?
– Theodore Roethke
I write at last of the one forbidden topic
We, by a truce, have never touched upon:
Resentment, malice, hatred so inwrought
With moral inhibitions, so at odds with
The home-movie of yourself as patience, kindness,
And Charlton Heston playing Socrates,
That almost all of us were taken in,
Yourself not least, as to a giant Roxy,
Where the lights dimmed and the famous allegory
Of Good and Evil, clearly identified
By the unshaven surliness of the Bad Guys,
The virginal meekness of the ingénue,
Seduced us straight into that perfect world
Of Justice under God. Art for the sake
Of money, glamour, ego, self-deceit.
When we emerged into the assaulting sunlight,
We had a yen, like bad philosophers,
To go back to stay forever, there in the dark
With the trumpets, horses, and ancient Certitudes
On which, as we know, this great nation was founded,
Washington crossed the Delaware, and so forth.
And all of us, for an hour or so after,
Were Humphrey Bogart dating Ingrid Bergman,
Walking together but incommunicado
Till subway and homework knocked us out of it.
Yet even then, whatever we returned to
Was not, although we thought it was, the world.
I write at last on this topic because I am safe
Here in this grubby little border town
With its one cheap hotel. No one has my address.
The food is bad, the wine is too expensive,
And the local cathedral marred by restorations.
But from my balcony I view the east
For miles and, if I lean, the local sunsets
That bathe a marble duke with what must be
Surely the saddest light I have ever seen.
The air is thin and cool at this elevation,
And my desk wobbles unless propped with matchbooks.
It began, I suppose, as a color, yellow-green,
The tincture of spring willows, not so much color
As the sensation of color, haze that took shape
As a light scum, a doily of minutiae
On the smooth pool and surface of your mind.
A founding colony, Pilgrim amoebas
Descended from the gaseous flux when Zeus
Tossed down his great original thunderbolt
That flashed in darkness like an electric tree
Or the lit-up veins in an old arthritic hand.
Here is the microscope one had as a child,
The Christmas gift of some forgotten uncle.
Here is the slide with a drop of cider vinegar
As clear as gin, clear as your early mind.
Look down, being most careful not to see
Your own eye in the mirror underneath,
Which will appear, unless your view is right,
As a darkness on the face of the first waters.
When all is silvery and brilliant, look:
The long, thin, darting shapes, the flagellates,
Rat-tailed, ambitious, lash themselves along –
Those humble, floating ones, those simple cells
Content to be borne on whatever tide,
Trustful, the very image of consent –
These are the frail, unlikely origins,
Scarcely perceived, of all you shall become.
Scarcely perceived? But at this early age
(What are you, one or two?) you have no knowledge,
Nor do your folks, nor could the gravest doctors
Suspect that anything was really wrong.
Nor see the pale beginnings, lace endeavors
That with advancing ages shall mature
Into sea lettuce, beard the rocky shore
With a light green of soft and tidal hair.
Whole eras, seemingly without event,
Now scud the glassy pool processionally
Until one day, misty, uncalendared,
As mild and unemphatic as a schwa,
Vascular tissue, conduit filaments
Learn how to feed the outposts of that small
Emerald principate. Now there are roots,
The filmy gills of toadstools, crested fern,
Quillworts, and foxtail mosses, and at last
Snapweed, loment, trillium, grass, herb Robert.
How soundlessly, shyly this came about,
One thinks today. But that is not the truth.
It was, from the first, an everlasting war
Conducted, as always, at gigantic cost.
Think of the droughts, the shifts of wind and weather,
The many seeds washed to some salt conclusion
Or brought to rest at last on barren ground.
Think of some inching tendrils worming down
In hope of water, blind and white as death.
Think of the strange mutations life requires.
Only the toughest endured, themselves much altered,
Trained in the cripple’s careful sciences
Of mute accommodation. The survivors
Were all, one way or another, amputees
Who learned to live with their stumps, like Brueghel’s beggars.
Yet, for all that, it clearly was a triumph,
Considering, as one must, what was to come.
And, even by themselves, those fields of clover,
Cattails, marsh bracken, water-lily pads
Stirred by the lightest airs, pliant, submissive –
Who could have called their slow creation rage?
Consider, as one must, what was to come.
Great towering conifers, deciduous,
Rib-vaulted elms, the banyan, oak, and palm,
Sequoia forests of vindictiveness
That also would go down on the death list
And, buried deep beneath alluvial shifts,
Would slowly darken into lakes of coal
And then under exquisite pressure turn
Into tiny diamonds of pure hate.
The delicate fingers of the clematis
Feeling their way along a face of shale
With all the ingenuity of spite.
The indigestible thistle of revenge.
And your most late accomplishment, the rose.
Until at last, what we might designate
As your Third Day, behold a world of green:
Color of hope, of the Church’s springtide vestments,
The primal wash, heraldic hue of envy.
But in what pre-lapsarian disguise!
Strangers and those who do not know you well
(Yourself not least) are quickly taken in
By a summery prospect, shades of innocence.
Like that young girl, a sort of chance acquaintance,
Seven or eight she was, on the New York Central,
Who, with a blue-eyed, beatific smile,
Shouted with joy, “Look, Mommy, quick. Look. Daisies!”
These days, with most of us at a safe distance,
You scarcely know yourself. Whole weeks go by
Without your remembering that enormous effort,
Ages of disappointment, the long ache
Of motives twisted out of recognition,
The doubt and hesitation all submerged
In those first clear waters, that untroubled pool.
Who could have hoped for this eventual peace?
Moreover, there are moments almost of bliss,
A sort of recompense, in which your mood
Sorts with the peach endowments of late sunlight
On a snowfield or on the breaker’s froth
Or the white steeple of the local church.
Or, like a sunbather, whose lids retain
A greenish, gemmed impression of the sun
In lively, fluctuant geometries,
You sometimes contemplate a single image,
Utterly silent, utterly at rest.
It is of someone, a stranger, quite unknown,
Sitting alone in a foreign-looking room,
Gravely intent at a table propped with matchbooks,
Writing this very poem – about me.
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