,1 .Hemorable American Poet

THE POETRY OF LOUISE BOGAN*

By THEODORE ROETHKE

T wo of the charges most frequentlyleveled against poetry by women arelack of range-in subject matter, in

emotional tone-and lack of a sense of hu­mor. And one could, in individual instancesamong writers of real talent, add otheresthetic and moral shortcomings: the spin­ning-out; the embroidering of trivialthemes; a concern with the mere surfacesof life-that special province of the femi­nine talent in prose-hiding from the realagonies of the spirit; refusing to face up towhat existence is; lyric or religious postur­ing; running between the boudoir and thealtar, stamping a tiny foot against God; orlapsing into a sententiousness that impliesthe author has re-invented integrity; car­rying on excessively about Fate, abouttime; lamenting the lot of the woman; ca­terwauling; writing the same poem aboutfifty times, and so on.

But Louise Bogan is something else.True, a very few of her earliest poems bearthe mark of fashion, but for the most part

THEODORE ROETHKE, one of our own alumni (A.B.'29, A.M. '36) and a distinguished poet with five pub­lished \'olumes of verse to his credit, was the 1960 Hop­wood L~cturer and g:t\'e the accompanying estimate ofLouise Bogan's poetry. ~ow Professor of English at theUniversity of Washington, Mr. Ro~thke has also taughtat Lafayette College, Pennsylvania State University, andBennington College. Recognition of his standing as apoet has corne to him in the form of the Tietjens prize,the Levinson prize, the Pulitzer prize, and an awardfrom the American Academy of ;\rts and Letters. He is amember of the ;l;ational Institute of Arts and Letters,kls twice held Guggenheim fellowships, and in 1955 wasFulbright lecturer in Italy.

:'>!iss Bogan's publishecs, Xoonday Press, of ~ew York,have graciously permitted us to make copious quota­tions from her works.

"Copyright, 1960, by the Regents of The Cni"ersit¥of :'>'1 ichi;pn.

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she writes out of the severest lyrical tradi··tion in English. Her real spiritual ancestorsare Campion, Jonson, the anonymous Eliz­abethan song writers. The word order isusually direct, the plunge straight into thesubject, the music rich and subtle (she hasone of the best ears of our time), and thesubject invariably given its due and nomore. As a result, her poems, even the lessconsequential, have a finality, a comprehen­siveness, the sense of being all of a piece,that we demand from the short poem at itsbest.

T HE BODY of her complete poetic work isnot great, but the "range," both emo­

tional and geographical, is much wider thanmight be expected from a lyric poet. Thereis the brilliant (and exact) imagery of herNew England childhood; there is also thehighly formal world of Swift's Ireland; therich and baroque background of Italy calledup in the evocative «Italian Morning."And, of course, her beloved Austria. Herbest lyrics, unlike so much American work,have the sense of a civilization behind them-and this without the deliberate piling upof exotic details, or the taking over of a spe­cial, say Grecian, vocabulary.

Invariably these effects are producedwith great economy, with the exact sense ofdiction that is one of the special marks ofher style. Even out of context, their power,I believe, is evident. Thus, in "HypocriteSwift," a curious tour de force which in­corporates many actual phrases from Swift'sJournal to Stella, there suddenly occurs thest:mza:

On 'val!s at court, long gilded mirrors gaze.The parquet shines; outside the snow hIls deep.

THE QC.\!ZTERLY REVIEW

Ve nliS, the \1lIses stare a!Jo\·e the m:\Ze.Now sleep.

For one terrifying instant we are withinSwift's mind, in cighteenth-century Irc­hnd, :;haring the glitter, the horror andglory of his madness.

Again, from the poem, "1 talian l\10rn-

T IllS is only one, :lnd by no means thebest, of :\li~s Bogan's poems on time,

on change, all the cessation of timc. E\'Cll inher earliest work, ~he seems to be seeking amoment when things are caught, fixed, fro­zen, seen, for an instant, under the eye ofeternity.

THEODORE ROETHKE

jng," the lines:The big magnolia, like a hand,Repeats our flesh. (0 bred to love,Gathered to silence I) In a hndThus garnished, there is time enough

To pace the rooms where painted swagso t fruit and flower in pride depend,Stayed as we are not.

The "garnishcd" and the "paintcds\\'ags" are triumphs of exactitude in lan­guage-suggest the elabor:1.te backgroundwithout recoursc to merely D2roque dicion.

A vcry early piecc, "Decoration," printedin her first book, BoLly of This Death, butnot in the Collected, is, 1 believe, a begin­ning, a groping toward this central theme:

.-\ macaw preens upon :I branch outspread\\'ith j;:wtlry ot seed. He's ,leat :ind mute.The sky behind him splits like gorgeous fruit.\nd claw-like Ie-a \·cs clutch li~ht till it has bled.The r:\\v dia~oJ1:d bounty at his wingsScrapes ull the e,·c color too chafed. He he~lts

.\ flattered tail out against gauzy heats;He has the frustrate l,'ok of chcated kin([s.:\nJ :tIl the simple c\<cning pa:'5es by: -

POETR Y OF LOLTISE DOG..\N IS

:\ gillyflo\Ver spans its litt1t: heightAnd lo\'ers with their mouths press out their grief.The binl bns wide his striped regalityPrismatic, while ag:linst a sky hrcath-white..\ crystal tree lets f:lll a crystal Ic:!f.

This is a vulnerable poem, in spite ofcertain felicities (the fine "and all the sim-

site «Decoration" in the first book, is abreakthrough to great poetry, the wholepiece welling up from the unconscious, dic­tated as it were:

I h:ld come to the h'Juse, in :! cave of trees,Facing a sheer sky.

LOUISE BOGAN

pIe evening passes by," for instance). Butthe uncharitable might say hardly beyondmagazine verse. ;\nd even though 1\1 iss Bo­gan disanns us with her title, the poem re­mains 100 static, not very interesting syntac­tically, and the tlnalline plays upon one ofthe cliches of the twenties: "A crystal treelets fall a crystal leaf." Still, the scene islooked at ste::dil},' and closely; the poem iswhat it is.

X,'OTHER carly piece, «Statue and theRrds," is already a much betteJ' poem

on essentially the same theme. However,the «:\'lcdusa," printed on the page oppo-

Everything moved,-a hell hung ready to strike,Sun and reflection wheeled by.

\Vhen the bare eyes were before me"'\nd the hissing hair,Held up at it window, scen through a door.The stiff hald eyes, the serpents on the foreheadFormed in the air.

This is a dead scene forever now.?\othing will ever stir.The end will never brighten it more than this,~or the Din hlur.

The w:Her will always bll, and will not bll,A.nd the tipped bell make no sound,

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The grJSS will always be growing for hayDeep on the ground.

And I shall stand here like a shadowUnder the great balanced day,My eyes on the yellow dust, that was lifting in

the wind,And does not drift away.

Now, what does this poem mean?-infinal terms? It could be regarded, simply,as a poem of hallucination-a rare enoughthing-that maintains its hold on thereader from the very opening lines to theend. But we are told some other things,with the repetitiousness of obsession: "Ihad come to the house, in a cave of trees":the house itself is in a cave, a womb withina womb, as it were. But notice: ((facing asheer sky"-obviously the "scene" is beingplayed against a backdrop of heaven, ofeternity, with everything moving yet notmoving-"the bell hung ready to strike."

Then the terrifying moment: "the bareeyes," "the hissing hair," of the anima, thel'v1edusa, the man-in-the-woman, mother­her mother, possibly-again "held up at aVJindaw," ((seen through a door": certainlyfeminine symbols. And notice, "the stiffbald eyes, the serpents on the foreheadformed in the air"-in erectus, in otherwords.

The last three stanzas bring us the self­revelation, the terrible finality of the ulti­mately traumatic experience. I shan't laborthe interpretation further, except-why"yellow dust"? To me, it suggests the sul­phurous fires of hell, here under the sheersky of eternity.

I suggest that this is a great lyric and inan area of experience where most writersare afraid to go--or are incapable of going.

M ISS BOGAN is a contender, an opponent,an adversary, whether it be the de­

vouring or overpo\vering mother, or timeitself. And she can quarrel with her dae­mon, her other self, as in "Come, Break\Vith Time." Here she manages with great

skill the hortatory tone, the command­from which so much bogus poetry often re­sults.

Come, break with time,You who were lordedBy a clock's chimeSo ill afforded.If time is allayedBe not afraid.

I shall break, if I will.Break, since you must.Time has its fill,Sated with dust.Long the clock's handBurned like a brand.

Take the rocks' speedAnd Earth's heavy measure.Let buried seedDrain out time's pleasure,Take time's decrees.Come, cruel ease.

Notice the remarkable shift in rhythm inthe last stanza, with the run-on lines thatpick up the momentum of the poem. \Veare caught up in the earth's whole move­ment; I am reminded, perhaps eccentri­cally, of \Vordsworth's

No motion has she now, no force;She neither hears nor sees;

Rolled round in earth's diurnal course'Vith rocks, and stones, and trees.

In this instance, I feel one poem supports,gives additional credence, to 'the other.

Yet Miss Bogan does not rest with thateffect. There is a terrible irony in "Letburied seed/drain out time's pleasure."Then the acceptance that all humans mustmake: "Take time's decrees." The last lineremains for me a powerful ambiguity. Isshe like Cleopatra, or Keats, asking foreaseful death, or the cruel ease of unaware­ness, of insentience, of the relief from timethat old age provides? There is, of course,no final answer, and none is necessary.

O NE DEFINITION of a serious lyric-itmay come from Stanley Kunitz-

POETRY OF LOUISE BOGAN

would C11l it a rcnlarion of a tragic per­~onality, Behind the Bogan poems is a,,'oman intem:e, proud, strong-willed, neverhysterical or silly; who scorns the open un­abashed caterwaul so usual with the lovepoet, male or female; who never writes aserious poem until there is a genuine "up­welling" from the unconscious; who shapesemotion into an inevitable-seeming, an en­durable, form.

For love, passion, its complexities, itstensions, its betrayals, is one of Louise Bo­gan's chief themes. And this love, alongwith marriage itself, is a virtual battle­ground. But the enemy is respected, theother is there, given his due; the experi­ence, whatever its difficulties, shared.

Thus, in "Old Countryside":

Beyond the hour we counted rain that fellOn the slant shutter, all has come to proof.The summer thunder, like a wooden bell,Rang in the storm above the mansard roof,

And mirrors cast the cloudy day alongThe attic floor; wind made the clapboards creak,You braced ag:Jinst the wal1 to make it strong,A shell against your cheek.

Long since, we pulled brown oak-leaves to theground

In :J winter of dry trees; we heard the cockShout its un placeable cry, the axe's soundDelay a moment after the axe's stroke.

Far back, we saw, in the stillest of the year,The scrawled vine shudder, and the rose-branch~ow .

Red to the thorns, and, sharp as sight can bear,The thin hound's body arched against the snow.

This, it need hardly be said, is typicalBogan: the concern with time, the settingput dO\vn with great exactitude, the eventre-created and then looked back upon-the'.vhole thing vivid in the mind's eye, in thememory. The details are no mere accretion,but are developed with a cumulative sur­prise and the power of great art.

::\otice the oracuhr, almost Shakespear­ean finality of "all h:ls come to proof"-

and this, at the start of a poem. She an­nounces boldly but not portentously, and\ve believe. Notice, too, the mastery of theepithet-the cock's "unphceable cry,," the"scrawled vine," the rose-branch "red tothe thorns." And then the final triumphof the last image, upon which everythinghinges: "The thin hound's body archedagainst the snow."

But what has come to proof? We are nottold, explicitly, nor should we be. Inval;­ably, the final experience, however vivid andexact the imagery, comes to us obliquely. Itstays with us, can be brooded upon, andbrought, finally, into our own lives.

This obliquity, at once both Puritan andfeminine, brings Louise Bogan close, de­spite differences in temperament, to EmilyDickinson and to l'vlarianne :'VIoore. Nonequails before the eye of eternity; theirworld is their own, sharply defined. If oth­ers enter it, the arrival, the meeting, is ontheir terms.

M ANY of the best Bogan poems in thisvein are of such complexity and

depth that the excerpt is virtually impossi­ble, particularly since lvliss Bogan oftenemploys the single developed image withusually at least two levels of meaning. Andoften, within a very short space, she effectsan almost intolerable tension, a crescendo inrhythm, as in "Men Loved \Vholly Be­yond \Visdom"; or builds up the themepowerfully, as in the remarbble "Feuer­Nacht," and then takes a chance with a gen­eralization without losing the momentumof the poem: ~

To touch at the sedgeAnd then run tameIs a broken pledge.The leaf-shaped fhmeShears the bark piled for winter,The grass in the stall.Sworn to lick at a little,It has burned all.

Some of her best pieces begin with theobject perceived, as it were, for an instant,

13 THE QUARTERLY REVIEW

and the image remembered, fixed in themind unforgettably.

However, she is not, as I have said, apoet of the immediate moment, as say,Lawrence, but of the time after, whenthings come into their true focus, into theresolution, the ti nal perspective. Listen to((Roman Fauntain":

Up from the bronze, I saw"Vater without a flawRush to its rest in air,Reach to its rest, and fall.

Bronze of the hlackest shade,An element nun-made,Shaping upright the bareClear gouts of water in air.

0, as with arm and hammer,Still it is good to striveTo beat out the image whole,To echo the shout and stammer"Vhen full-gushed waters, alive,Strike on th~ fountain's bowlAfter the air of summer.

For me, the opening lines are one of thegreat felicities of our time: the thing putdown \';:ith an ultimate exactness, absolutelyas it is. Perhaps the two appositives((Bronze of the blackest shadel An elementman-made" in the next stanza' are a bit((written"; but ((gouts of water" saveseverything. Nor do I care much for theevocative outcry-and the arm and ham­mer image. Y~t the poem resolves itselfwith characteristic candor. \Ve have come along way in a short space.

I believe this poem will stay in the lan­guage: its opening alone demands immor­tality. Yet it exists, too, as a superb piece ofobservation; as a phallic poem; as a poemabout the nature of the creative act in theno-longer young artist.

I N THE last lines of this piece, we hear theaccent of the hter \vork: a tone of resig­

nation, an accept;1nce of middle age, a com­ment, often, on the ironies of circumstance.Of these, I believe "Henceforth, From the

:YIind" to be a masterpiece, a poem thatcould be set beside the best work of theElizabethans:

Henceforth, from the mind,For your whole joy, just springSuch joy :lS you m:lY findIn any earthly thing,And every time and pbce\-Vill take your thought for grace.

Henceforth, from the tongue,From shallow speech alone,Comes joy you thought, when young,\-Vould wring you to the bone,\-Vould pierce you to the heartAnd spoil its stop and st:lrt.

Henceforward, from the shell,\Vherein you heard, and wonderedAt oceans like a bellSo far from ocean sundered­A smothered· sound th:tt sleepsLong lost within lost deeps,

"Vill chime you change and hours,The shadow of increase,Will sound you flowersBorn under troubled peace­Henceforth, henceforthWill echo sea and earth.

And certainly, "Song," "Homunculus,"and "Kept," at the very least, are amongour best short lyrics. We are told:

Time for the pretty clay,Time for the straw, the wood.The playthings of the youngGet broken in the pby,Get hroken, as they should.

And, in terms of personal revelation,((The Dream" might be regarded as a latercompanion piece to "~'ledusa.)) In some ofthese last poems, as "After the Persian,"('Song for the Last Act," the rhythms, themusic, are richly modulated, highly styl­ized, grave and slow. ~liss Bogan is notrepe3.ting herself, but moving into ~mothcr

world. There is no lessening of her powers.

I FI;-<O my rather simple method of"pointing out"-at which :\Iiss :\lari-

POETRY OF LOUISE BOGAN

anne ~loore is such a master-has omittedor underemphasized certain qualities inLouise Bogan's work, and of necessitypassed by remarkable poems.

For example, the great variety and suretyof her rhythms-that clue to the energy ofthe psyche. Usually the movement of thepoem is established in the very first lines, asit should be:

If ever I render back your heart,So long to me delight and plunder

orTo me, one silly task is like anotherI bare the shambling tricks of lust and pride

And she is a master of texture, yet al-ways the line is kept firm: she does notlapse into "sound" for the sake of sound,lest the poem thin out into loose "incanta­tory" effects. Thus:Under the thunder-dark, the cicadas resound

or the grave rhythm of

The measured blood beats out the year's delay

or in «Winter Swan":

I t is a hollow garden, under the cloud;Beneath the heel a hollow earth is turned;Within the mind, the live blood shouts aloud,U ncler the breast the willing blood is burned,Shut with the fire passed and the fire returned.

Louise Bogan rarely, if ever, repeats acadence, and this in an age when some poetsachieve a considerable reputation with twoor three or even one rhythm. The reasonfor this is, I believe, her absolute loyalty tothe particular emotion, which can rangefrom the wry tenderness and humor of "ACrossed Apple" to the vehemence of "Sev­eral Voices Out of a Cloud":Come, drunks and drug-takers; come, perverts

unnerved!Receive the laurel, given though late, on merit;

to whom and wherever deserved.Parochial punks, trimmers, nice people, joiners

true-blue,Get the hell nut of the way of the laurel. It is

deathless:\nd it isn't for you

This, for me, incorporates the truly sav­age indignation of Swift-and still man­ages to be really funny. And even in apoem on a "high" theme) "I saw Eternity)"she can say:

Here, mice, rats,Porcupines and toads,Moles, shrews, squirrels,vVeasels, turtles, lizards,­Here's bright Everlasting!Here's a crumb of Forever!Here's a crumb of Forever!

I HAVE said that Miss Bogan has a sharpsense of objects) the eye that can pluck

out from the welter of experience the in­evitable image. And she loves the words,the nouns particularly) rich in human asso­ciation. "Baroque Comment" ends:

Crown and vesture; palm and laurel chosen asnoble and enduring;

Speech proud in sound; death considered sacn­fice;

l'vlask, weapon, urn; the ordered strings;Fountains; foreheads under weather-bleached

hair;The wreath, the oar, the tool,The prow;The turned eyes and the opened mouth of love.

But let us see how this side of her talentoperates when she is absolutely open, asin the deeply moving elegy "To MyBrother":

o you so long dead,You masked and obscure,r can tell you, all things endure:The wine and the bread;

The marble quarried for the arch;The iron become steel;The spoke broken from the wheel;The sweat of the long march;

The by-stacks cut through like loavesAnd the hundred flowers from the seed;All things indeedThough struck hy the hoo\"es

Of disaster, of time due,Of fell loss and gain,

20 THE QUARTERLY REVIEW

All things remain,I can tell you, this is true.

Though burned down to stoneThough lost from the eye,I can tell you, and not lie,­Save of peace alone.

The imagery in some of the last poemsis less specific, yet still strongly elemental;we have, I think, what Johnson called thegrandeur of generality. They are timeless,impersonal in a curious way and objective-not highly idiosyncratic as so much of the

best American work is. Her poems can beread and reread: they keep yielding newmeanings, as all good poetry should. Theground beat of the great tradition can beheard, with the necessary subtle variations.Bogan is one of the true inheritors. Herpoems create their own reality, and demandnot just attention, but the emotional andspiritual response of the whole man. Sucha poet will never be popular, but can andshould be a true model for the young. Andthe best work will stay in the language aslong as the language survives.

Reprinted from MICHIGAN ALUMNUS QUARTERLY REVIEW

December 3, 1960, VoL LXVII, No. 10