Poetry Friday: Stephen Vincent Benét and a poem that isn’t exactly from 1941

This is definitely not how I pictured Stephen Vincent Benét—I imagined a much more Whitmanesque figure, given the voice he captures in his poems. A good reminder not to judge books by their cover. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One of the ways I find poetry for a PF post is by taking advantage of the fact that I work in a reasonably well-stocked academic library—I can do a quick catalog search for anything labeled as “poetry” with a publication date of whatever-year-I’m-currently-in.  Today that backfired on me slightly, but in a really good way, so I’m going with it.  I came home with a copy of John Brown’s Body, a book-length epic poem by American poet Stephen Vincent Benét about the Civil War.  It turns out that this isn’t a poem first published in 1941, though—he wrote it in 1927/1928 while he was living in Paris, and published it then.  And the book in my hands isn’t from 1941 either—this is an edition published in 1968 with notes by two English professors from the United States Military Academy.  The only piece of it from 1941 is a short preface Benét wrote for an edition published in that year for schoolchildren.  I’ll quote briefly from that preface later, since it’s not only the one piece of 1941-era content available to me from the book, but it’s also really thoughtful and interesting.  But the more time I spent with the poem itself, the more I realized that I wanted to share it with you regardless of its designated “year of publication”.  The poem is full of reflections on America and history that fit right into what I’m interested in, and what this blog is more or less about, or tries to be.

As I said, this is a book-length epic, so I can only share a small piece of it with you.  I’ll use the first 30 lines or so, the beginning of the “invocation”—the opening to every classical epic poem in the ancient world involved invoking one of the goddesses to speak through the poet, and Benét honors the tradition.  Here, he calls to the “American muse”, the American spirit who suffuses his whole poem.  I’ll say one last thing before the poetry starts—this is all right on the page, but I liked it a lot better when I read it aloud in a calm, clear voice.  If you’re able, I encourage you to try it—not in a dramatic “acting” voice, but just the way you would talk if you were saying something important and sincere.  I think you’ll find Benét’s work with sound is really very skilled.  Anyway, without further ado, the opening lines of the Invocation from John Brown’s Body:

“American muse, whose strong and diverse heart
So many men have tried to understand
But only made it smaller with their art,
Because you are as various as your land,

As mountainous-deep, as flowered with blue rivers,
Thirsty with deserts, buried under snows,
As native as the shape of Navajo quivers,
And native, too, as the sea-voyaged rose.

Swift runner, never captured or subdued,
Seven-branched elk beside the mountain stream,
That half a hundred hunters have pursued
But never matched their bullets with the dream,

Where the great huntsmen failed, I set my sorry
And mortal snare for your immortal quarry.

You are the buffalo-ghost, the broncho-ghost
With dollar-silver in your saddle-horn,
The cowboys riding in from Painted Post,
The Indian arrow in the Indian corn,

And you are the clipped velvet of the lawns
Where Shropshire grows from Massachusetts sods,
The grey Maine rocks—and the war-painted dawns
That break above the Garden of the Gods.

The prairie-schooners crawling toward the ore
And the cheap car, parked by the station-door.

Where the skyscrapers lift their foggy plumes
Of stranded smoke out of a stony mouth
You are that high stone and its arrogant fumes,
And you are ruined gardens in the South

And bleak New England farms, so winter-white
Even their roofs look lonely, and the deep
The middle grainland where the wind of night
Is like all blind earth sighing in her sleep.

A friend, an enemy, a sacred hag
With two tied oceans in her medicine-bag.”

The poem is not flashy, but Benét is running a marathon, not a sprint, and he’s pacing himself consciously, I think.  Certainly I think there’s real brilliance in the cadence he develops from almost the very first.  He opens with a meditation on the elusive America, the idea that can only be made smaller by art because it is too varied—I get the image of America as Walt Whitman, who, in his “Song of Myself” admits “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself / (I am large, I contain multitudes)“.  That notion of the America to various to describe is lovely, and he pairs it immediately with a few quick brushstrokes that outline the vast environments of the American continent.  Then, at the turn (the turn, you ask? Yes, the turn from the first eight lines—the octet—to the next six lines—the sestet—because Benét opens his invocation with a traditional English sonnet.  I pause to acknowledge the man’s attention to detail, and his skill), America because uncaptureable not because various, but because too swift—America is the elk that outruns the hunter.  So, in the sonnet’s closing couplet, how does Benét resolve this problem?  He will not chase the fleet-footed America.  He will lay a snare, and wait for it to pass.  He acknowledges the low odds of his success, the frailty of his “mortal snare” as set against the “immortal quarry” of America.  But he doesn’t let it dissuade him.

And the sounds of the poem are so fluid and appealing—if you didn’t read it aloud, you missed some of the real deftness of the lines.  In that stanza about the elk, he gives us “half a hundred hunters have pursued“—listen to all those h’s.  The hah-hah-hah of the hunter out of breath, gasping a bit as he sprints after game he will not likely catch.  Even when the sounds are less pregnant with meaning than that, they’re still almost perfect on the ear—hear the way the s’s and r’s murmur together so perfectly in “set my sorry / and mortal snare for your immortal quarry“.  He wants this poem to speak America by speaking American in a beautiful (but not delicate or frivolous) way.  I think he more or less succeeds.

He moves on to the great catalog of American sights and sounds, of which I only share 15 lines or so—line after line that strike my eye (and ear) just right.  The “dollar-silver in your saddle-horn“, the “prairie-schooners crawling toward the ore“, etc.  Then, two gems so excellent I thought it the perfect place to break off.  First, the startling loveliness (and strangely alien feeling) of his description of the Midwest: “the deep / the middle grainland where the wind of night / is like all blind earth sighing in her sleep“.  Coming as it does on the heels of a lot of short clipped phrases, the sudden stretch into a longer phrase is attention-grabbing, and I love how much ambiguity and suggestiveness he can work out of remarkably simple words (only three two-syllable words, and one of them is just a compound noun made up of two monosyllables—grain and land).  Then, the real punch he lands (for me).  “A friend, an enemy, a sacred hag / with two tied oceans in her medicine-bag.”  I can think of few better two-line descriptions of America than that—the pairing of America’s openness and welcome with the sense that America will work against you and defeat you if it can, and then the ominous but not entirely threatening figure of America as the cunning-woman, the keeper of mysteries, whose power commands the forces of nature.  It’s like some of Melville’s more poetic passages about Americans—he’d have used a phrase like “two tied oceans” to describe the people of Nantucket if he’d thought of it.  I’m struck by the power Benét can marshal up out of lines that, at first glance, seem a bit prosaic and not necessarily heart-stirring.  He knows how to snare America—it takes patience and a willingness to stay with America’s swirling and often contradictory images until they begin to weave together.

The rest of the invocation is gorgeous, and what I’ve skimmed and sampled of the whole epic so far suggests to me that Benét shouldn’t be neglected.  He’s a skilled poet, and one I’m sorry not to have spent time with earlier—certainly he captures some things about America that are worth hearing.  I hope to share another bit of his work again in a PF post—keep watching this space.  I promised at the outset to share a little of Benét’s preface to the 1941 edition for schoolchildren, and I’ll close with it here: advice for how to think about poetry and how to read it that I think is useful in almost every context, and which I hope is observed here in how I approach the musings and mutterings I put forward about poems every week.

“Poetry is meant to be read, it is meant to be heard.  It is meant for everybody, not only for the scholars.  It is not a highly complicated puzzle box which you can open only with a special set of keys.  It tells the story in a way different from prose—it uses rhyme and meter and the words go to a beat.  You cannot read it precisely as you read prose, any more than you can sing the words of a song without knowing the tune.  With poetry, the tune is in the words themselves—and once you begin to hear it, it will stay with you.  Nor is it so difficult to hear.  Most of the basic rhythms of poetry are very old ones—rhythms hammered out by men who wanted to tell a story or convey an idea more intensely, more swiftly and memorably than they could in prose.  Sometimes they succeeded in this, sometimes they did not.  You will be able to judge for yourself whether an individual poem succeeds in making you see more clearly or feel more deeply—whether it enters your stock of memories and remains there.  But poetry itself is not restricted to any special class, to any special section of life.  It is open to any reader who likes the sound and swing of rhythm, the color and fire of words.“

“The people in flight from the terror behind—strange things happen to them, some bitterly cruel and some so beautiful their faith is refired forever.”

Stop whatever else you are doing.  Or, if you are about to leave the house, set aside the next free half-hour you can build a wall around.  Get out your copy of The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.  If you do not own one, admit this to no one—go quickly to the nearest library or bookstore and remedy this most grievous situation.  You will want a quiet place where you feel sure no one will overhear you (or else someone you love and trust).  Pour yourself a small glass of water, and take one tantalizing sip.  Let the rest lie untouched at a table by your side until the chapter is over.

Turn to Chapter 12, the chapter than begins “Highway 66 is the main migrant road…” and read it out loud.  Don’t rush it—read it gently, read it with confidence, read it with care.  Read it the way Garrison Keillor reads aloud, even though you sometimes think he overdoes it with his Midwestern vowels—he is right about this, and you are wrong.  Tell yourself that you are reading one of the great American poems that found itself unexpectedly in the middle of a novel, the song of a people, the bare bones of a nation’s hope and fear and wrestling match with the frontier and the promise of Opportunity and the idea of the West.  As the chapter progresses, there will be characters—try to give them voices.  The poem is also a play, full of scenes and soliloquies but without stage directions, and your mind will have to be the stage.  See them as you speak for them.  When you get to the very end, give yourself a moment or two of absolute quiet, and then take a good long drink of the water Danny asks for.  This is a chapter to savor, not only because it is beautifully written, but because it is so raw and honestly American.  I have no idea what Joseph Pulitzer wanted out of his Pulitzer Prize, but this is what he should have wanted, and if Steinbeck’s novel from here on out is a shattering disappointment (an outcome I do not expect) the book is still a masterpiece for what it’s done so far.

I know I should write more, but I don’t want to impose my meaning on Chapter 12 just yet….I want to mull it over and live with it a while, and let some of you do the same (if you’re willing).  I finished it and I knew I just had to set the book down and breathe for a bit.  I got the notion to read it out loud about three sentences in, and the experience was something truly numinous.  If Whitman and Frost had tried to collaborate, I think the prose poem they fashioned would have borne a close likeness to this chapter about the road west.  Stunning.  I do apologize, by the way, for a long absence—a trip home to the Northwest took me away from the blog (and I set the novel aside too, figuring I wanted to be able to blog reactions, rather than save them up throughout the trip….I came back to Steinbeck tonight for the first time in a couple of weeks, and he dropped me with one perfect punch).  For the last time, folks, if you haven’t read Grapes, get it on your nightstand, and if you have read it, keep talking to me in the comments—this is a reading experience I want to share with as many people as possible.

P.S. Who are these people who criticize the non-Joad chapters as being “dull” or “boring” or “a waste of time”?  If you’re lurking, speak up and make your case, because I don’t get it.  It’s like saying that Beethoven’s Ninth is a pretty good symphony “except for all that singing toward the end”.

The Way I Read: Out Loud

This is the third in a very occasional ongoing series on this blog I call “The Way I Read” (all three installments are available here, for the curious).  This is my attempt to step back a little from my immediate reactions to novels—though have no fear, there will be more on George Apley this weekend at some point—to offer a little more insight into me as a reader.  This insight is offered to me as much as to anybody else, since often I find I haven’t ever considered the idiosyncrasies that make me the reader I am.  For today, I’m pondering how I am affected by my long commitment to reading aloud.

This in part is what is traditionally meant by “reading aloud”—that is, I read aloud to people who listen to me, most usually one person (my wife).  Together we’ve read aloud through books I was sharing with her for the first time (The Lord of the Rings and C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold, most memorably), and books that neither of us were familiar with going in (Connie Willis‘s two-part novel Blackout / All Clear and Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) are the first titles that occur to me). 

Connie Willis, the most award-winning American novelist you may never have heard of: if you haven’t read her stuff, make it a priority. She deserves her own post here, sooner or later. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Obviously my reading in these circumstances is profoundly affected by the aspect of performance—at least some of my neurons are devoted to keeping track of which character has what voice, paying attention to my volume so that she can hear me clearly, etc.  Especially for the books that I read this way for the first time, like Connie Willis’s time-travel epic, I wonder how much that multi-level engagement with the text affects my read.  I think in some ways it becomes more emotionally effective—I don’t think I ever felt the impact of the death on the Bridge of Khazad-dum as deeply on my own as when I was experiencing it as my wife’s narrator, for instance.  In other ways, I think it does mean I’m less attentive to little turns of phrase or allusions that I might otherwise catch, since I’m not stopping to re-read (usually), and I generally don’t put the book down to think until we’re done reading for the day.  All of this impacts me as a reader (and as a husband, of course—take it from me, folks, reading aloud together is a wonderful thing for a marriage, or at least for the kind of marriage I have), but it’s not really what I’m thinking of.

What I mean to ponder is the tendency I have had since I was a very small child to read aloud to myself when I am alone.  I did this so often as a kid, usually while reading English novels with Cockney characters, that at one point I had a somewhat pronounced English accent—my mother had trouble explaining her small British child to grocery store clerks, I think.  I eventually figured out how to separate the real world from my wonderful fictional worlds.  But the reading aloud persists: I read the narrator’s part, often, although sometimes in dialogue-heavy books I pick a single character and voice only their dialogue.  Sometimes I read all the parts, but I find that a bit exhausting.  And I should say that this reading approach is intermittent—sometimes I only do it for a chapter or two, or even only a single scene, while sometimes it lasts much of the book.  And many books never get the “read-aloud approach” at all.

I was thinking about this over the last few weeks, and I’m wondering if it affects the books I like and dislike.  I’d imagine that this makes me favor lively narration, or dialogue with a bit of energy to it.  I think it’s possible that I’m always devoting some of my brain’s audio centers to the book—that is, even when I’m reading silently, I think I may be passing the words through a sort of audio filter in my head—and for that reason may favor turns of phrase that sound particularly nice as sounds, independent of their semantic meaning.  Might this make it harder for me to appreciate certain kinds of authors?  I’ve been trying to work that out—you’d think, for example, that this would diminish my appreciation for works in translation (given that the author’s original sound patterns are lost), but I’m a big fan of a wide range of translated fare, from Homer’s Iliad to Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose to the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges.  This may, of course, merely go to the credit of skilled translators, but I’m not sure—I’ve appreciated Homer in the hands of multiple translators.  There’s a larger question here I don’t know how to address, which is this: why do I read out loud to myself?  I’m honestly not sure.  I’m sure there’s a reason, but it’s buried deep in my past: I learned to read at an unusually young age, but I can’t work out why that would have an effect like this.  It may suggest something deeper in how my brain tackles the act of reading (since, I have to say, the reading aloud happens almost unbidden: it feels like a very natural and almost unconscious act), but I leave that to the neurobiologists in the crowd.

So, my question to you is, is this reading-aloud-to-myself stuff weird?  (I almost asked “Am I weird?” but too many of you know me in real life.)  Is this something that a lot of us readers do and just don’t talk about, or am I part of a small minority?  If anybody out there does this with books, do you have any thoughts to add to my musings above?  And in general, does anybody have thoughts for me about how my approach to reading may affect my reading preferences?  I recognize I’m in uncharted territory here, but I figure a blog about reading has to delve into this kind of very specific personal reflection, at least now and then.  Here’s hoping this little window into my reading practice is at least interesting, if not illuminating.