Goethe’s “The Holy Longing” advances easily.
The painting scene in 19th century France, like the life of drama in ancient Athens, was heavily competitive, judged and awarded, and Criticism, even in democratic America, wears boots and medals and smells of wealth and pedigree and power.
Sports events are decided by a bad bounce, by the accident of bent bodies, by the ephemera of repeating movements dressed in various garb, enshrined and canonized naively and enthusiastically by provincials shining in their expert-ism; art is just as prone to chance as sport: sparks which happen to shoot a certain way in the mistiness of a pedant’s brain; the hired life of temple, monument and textbook, as one wields brush or pen, the same in hope and renown as wielding moving ball in moving hand over moving feet: for sweet triumph’s sake.
“In Bertram’s Garden,” the lowly 16th seeded poem by Donald Justice, swimming in the great Romantic Sea, is a sharp, image-profound celebration of seduction, a New Critical orgy of painted circumstance and symbol, removed from the usual yammer of Romantic and Victorian Anthology-ism. Justice, one of the first poet-knights of Workshop, wins over with dirty detail, showing not telling. His poem appeals to the senses:
Jane looks down at her organdy skirt
As if it somehow were the thing disgraced,
For being there, on the floor, in the dirt,
And she catches it up about her waist,
Smooths it out along one hip,
And pulls it over the crumpled slip.
On the porch, green-shuttered, cool,
Asleep is Bertram that bronze boy,
Who, having wound her around a spool,
Sends her spinning like a toy
Out to the garden, all alone,
To sit and weep on a bench of stone.
Soon the purple dark must bruise
Lily and bleeding-heart and rose,
And the little cupid lose
Eyes and ears and chin and nose,
And Jane lie down with others soon,
Naked to the naked moon.
Hearken to the lovely sounds in the Justice poem! The inventive way in which Justice has the night make “the little cupid” disappear! The psychological cunning of “as if it somehow were the thing disgraced…!” The hard-hitting closing couplet: “And Jane lie down with others soon,/Naked to the naked moon.”!
Marla Muse joins me now. Marla, Justice was looking for an upset with his neo-Romantic poem, composed somewhere in Iowa in the 1950s, probably.
Marla: Yet Goethe took him apart. Justice did so well in the paint. The sublime imagery: “porch, green-shuttered, cool” “the purple dark must bruise/Lily and bleeding-heart and rose” But Goethe never let Justice establish any kind of game-plan. Justice had the pieces, but they never fell together into what could be called consequence.
Exactly, Marla. Bertram, Jane, the garden, the rose, the “little cupid,” the “naked moon.” They finally feel like the ephemera of a poet’s paint-by-numbers contrivance. And there’s something missing in the music and the cadences of the poem, as well. It all rises, only to fall. It isn’t just that the Justice is an artificial copy of a type—what we hear is the inability of the poet to talk to the reader. As we read the Goethe, see how we have in this poem by the German genius a consequential arc, in which the reader’s emotional and mental life is illuminated by the poet:
THE HOLY LONGING
Tell old wisdom what you feel
Or else shut up, because it won’t seem real
To your friends. They’ll just make fun of you—
Quietly dreaming of burning to death will have to do.
In the calm sighings of the love-nights,
Where you were made, where you, too, kissed in the shade,
You now feel a powerful yearning
When you glimpse the silent candle burning.
Come on! Older and wiser today,
Your childish obsession with the dark has faded away;
You love serene lights in the sky,
And aren’t afraid to look in an old man’s eye.
You don’t care how long you burn
Or the journey lasts, or how long you yearn;
You want the light madly, that’s blinking on—
You are the moth, and now you are gone.
Your thoughts are empty, you want to rest,
You don’t understand your own worth—
You are only a troubled guest
On the dark earth.
The Goethe poem is self-reflexive in a way that the Justice poem is not—it obeying a certain New Critical distance and inarticulateness. Goethe’s”Holy Longing” impregnates the reader. “In Bertram’s Garden” skillfully amuses.
J. Goethe advances to the next round.
Donald Justice is going home.
