CONVERSION LNTO SELF:

Sequence and Context in the Poetry

of Louise Bogan

by

Nancy Paul

A thesis submitied to the Department of English

in conforrnity with the requirements for

the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Queen's Universiiy

Kingston, Ontario, Canada

December 2000

copyright O Nancy Paul, 2000

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page i

The argument of this study is that Louise Bogan's poetic vision was large and cornplex, but one

we have not recognized as such because of its ironic, radically miniaturized presentation; 1

contend that Bogan's poetry has been overlooked because of misconceptions about literary size

and worth. Prevailuig critical standards accord only "rninor" credit to the abbreviated status of

the lyric. 1 read Bogan's serial volumes of poems as sequences, coherent collections of

integrated units. The long poem and / or the poetic sequence have been touted as the definitive

Modernist form, but inexplicably the "slim volume'' of female lyricists such as Bogan has

escaped inclusion. The work of Neil Fraistat and others on the integriw of the poetry collections

of the Romantics offers a methodology to get past the impasse. The unifying principle of the

lyric sequence as the underlying ego of the poet is useful to consider with regard to Bogan. Lrke

Yeats, she was concemed in ber work to constmct a correlative to her evolution as a person and

an artist; as a critic, she valued most those poets whose writing demonstrated the progress toward

maturity over time.

Body of This Death, published when Bogan was still in her twenties, was the work of a

young poet confident of talent and beauty, but unsure of her integrity. The dialogic miscellany of

voices demonstrate a fiindamental uncertainty of position. Bogan's assurance as to her vocation

is again demonstrated in Dark Sumer, her second volume; the poet is certain she has the

strength to undertake the underground journey traditionally required of epic heroes: to go to Hel1

and back. Bogan's persona in Dark S u m e r descends into her unconscious to face traumas fiom

childhood, turning up to the light scars incurred in the past. By the time of The Sleevin~ Fury

several desperate years later, the voices of the earlier books have resolved into an uneasy trinity:

desperate child, passionate woman, rational psychoanalyst. The poet's prediction of relative

stability is shown to have come true, but at great cost: her pride and ambition have been

destroyed with the achievement of an integrated personality.

page ii

1 gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities

Research Council and the Queen's University School of Graduate Studies. The generosity of my

boss at the National Cancer Institute of Canada Clinical Trials Group, Dr. Joseph Pater, in

allowing me to take leave and work flexible hours, is very rnuch appreciated; my CTG colleapes

have been understanding of my fiequent absences.

1 am indebted to John Lancaster ai the Amherst College Library for his assistance with my

research. I thank Ruth Lirnmer for permission to cite fiom Louise Bogan's unpublished papas,

as well as EIizabeth Frank for facilitating our communication.

Edward Lobb provided encouragement, guidance, and wry humour through the months and years

taken up by this project. 1 owe him a great deal. Pat Rae's acute cornrnents on the manuscnpt

contributed substantially to whatever coherence 1 have rnanaged to achieve. Tracy Ware directed

usefùl information my way, and Paul Stevens was consistently helpfûl and understanding.

My parents, Paul and Pauline Johnson, have been my steadfast friends throughout. 1 cannot

thank them enough.

To my husband, 1 owe everythïng.

page iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTERI: Introduction .................................................................. i

CHAPTER 2: Fom. S rie. and Reptation: Bogan and the Lynk Seqztence ........................... 20

CHAPTER 3: "A Housefil of Alien Voices: " Drarnatic Tellings and Retellings in Body o f mis Death ............................................................................. 49

CHAPTER 4: "Driven to the Verge of Sanie: " Layers of Betrayals in DarkSzrmrner .................. 137

CHAPTER 5: "Bred to Love . Gathered to Silence:" ï7ze Slee~ina Fzrrv ............................ 229

................................................................. CHAPTER6: Conclusion 314

............................................................................ REFERENCES 324

APPENDLY .............................................................................. 352

VlTA .................................................................................. 361

page iv

JRR

PA

m

OF

BD

DS

BE

NA

OED

Journey Around My Room: The Azïtobiography of Louise Bogan

Die Poet S Alphabet

M a t the Woman Lived: Selected Letters of Louise Bogan

Our 30-Year Frienckhip

Body of This Death

Dark Stïmrner

The Blue Estuaries

The Norton Antholoay of English Literature

The Ox$ord English Dictionary

She too wears the mask and the cothumus and speaks to measure.

W.M. Thackeray, n e Historv o f Henrv Esmond

Her output, however, was small.

Introduction to s'Louise Bogan, " ne Anteriean Tradition in Literatzlre

Chapter 1 : Introduction

The close examination of poetic texts, which has become a practice in what has corne to be Ecnown as the 'new' criticism, has its virtues. It fastens the attention on the poem itself, without introducing extraneous matter of one kind or another, concerning the poet. But this method of 'explication7 has certain limitations. No poem can be reduced to a set of dictionary meanings or to a series of snippets of 'fact-' Such treatment destroys the poem's atrnosphere and ambiance -one could alrnost Say its 'aura.' , . . . We must move slowly through a book of poerns, as we move slowly through a gallery of paintings or as we give tirne and attention to the hearïng of music. And the serious reader will not depend upon anthologies but will go directly to a poet's work as a whole and read it chronologically. Any collected or selected volume will present poerns in the order in which the poet has decided they should be read; and this is the order to foflow-

Louise Bogan, "Reading Contemporary Poetry"

Louise Bogan was both a literary critic and a poet- As poetry reviewer for The New

Yorker from 193 1 to 1968, she read and wrote critically on most of her contemporaries, Her

opinions were instrumental in the evolution of the American canon. As a Wter of slim volumes

of IyiLcs, she was admired as one of the finest poets of her time. We rernember her now, thirty

years afier her death, in both capacities, but spottily,-almost whimsically: a handful of her critical

pronouncements are cited in isolated footnotes in 1iteraq-y histories or cultural studies; a few of

her poems appear in every third or fourth anthology published, Neither of the defmitive volumes

of her career - A Poet's AI~habet, a compilation of her critical essays, and The Blue Estuaries,

her last book of poetry - are readily avaiIab1e.l Earlier volumes of poems have disappeared afler

their first editions, cited by critics but never again readily available in their entïrety, assurned to

be summrized or subsumed in the final collection.

Bogan's position with The New Yorker was both visiible and influential, and thus to

some she was and is better h o w n as a critic than as a poet (Nelson, AnthoIoa 378). My

concern in this study, however, is with Bogan's poetry. Her output was srnall; she wrote few

' The Blue Estuaries has been reprinted, but A Poet's Alohabet as well as Achievement in Arnencan Poetw, Sogan's monograph on verse of the first fifty years of the hventieth century and, arguably, of comparable critical significance, are out of print.

Chapter 1, Page 2

new poems afier she reached the age of forîy. Body of This Death was her first volume,

published in 1923 when she was twenty-six- Dark Surnrner followed in 1929, The Sleepinn F w

in 1937, After these three, Bogan did not publish fiirther books of new poems, instead reprinting

the frst volumes within updated collections: Poems and New Poems (1941), Collected Poems

(1 954), and The Blue Estuaries (1 968). Frorn the beginnkg her work was highly praised for its

exquisite beauty, concentration, intensity, and perfection of language, though the qualification of

her gender was often noted. Allen Tate welcomed Bodv of This Death as announcing "the most

accomplished woman poet of the tirne" ("American" 84). She was featured in a 1923 issue of

Vanitv Fair as one of the youngest 'Distinguished Arnerican Women Poets Who Have Made the

Lyric Verse Written by Women in Amenca More hteresting Than That of Men." Said Eda Lou

Walton after reading Dark Surnrner, "NO other poet in Amenca has a more inevitable sense of the

exact word to be employed than has Miss Bogan" (37). "Louise Bogan has achieved a mastery

of fom rare in the realm of modem poetry," enthused Ruth Lechlitner, in her review of

Sleepinn Furv (43). After Bogan's death in 1970, admirers of her work continued to pay tribute

to her talent- "Louise Bogan is a great lyric poet," Paul Ramsey begins directly, then admits that

"Greatness in poetry is hard to discuss, especially in the lyric. It is comparatively easy to show

that Bogan is a very good poet: powerful in feeling, surprising and chaste in diction, strong in

structure, masterly in imagery and rhythm, important in themes; but greatness in the lyric is

impact and profùndity and so simple as almost to de@ scrutiny" (1 19).

Recently arguing the importance of poetry in our own era, one so effectively dominated

by prose, Mary Kïnzie echoes Ramsey's assessrnent of Bogan as one of the greatest of American

lyrïc poets (35, 276). Harold Bloom, insisting that a true canon can be defined and obligingly

proceeding to that definition, includes Bogan in his short Iist (Western 562). And yet her work is

little known, less understood. Jeanne Larsen claims that Bogan has fiequently been passed over

Chaprer 1. Page 3

or short-changed or praised in terxm that distort her poetic achievement (204).2 In her

introduction to a 1984 collection of cntical essays on Bogan, Mary Collins regrets that, despite

its critical acclaim, Bogan7s work has not stimulated the kind of cntical discussion and

controversy that keep a poet alive and weli in college classrooms (l).' Citing W.H. Auden's

comment that Bogan was one of the four "important" American poets of her tirne4 and Robert

Frost's pronouncement afier reading her e s t volume that "'That woman will be able to do

anythïng," Bruce Bawer states that Bogan was "more or less ignored by the litex-ary world in

which she lived for half a century - seems to have been destined to remain, in the eyes of the

multitudes, a minor figure on the landscape of modern literature" (25). Hayden Carruth concurs

that, in the last tweniy years of her life, Bogan's books sold poorly, her reviews were rnixed, and

she had "little sense of a real audience" (130). Douglas Peterson states the case bIuntly: "In the

years following the publication of Blue Estuaïes: Poerns. 1923-68 Louise Bogan has been al1 but

forgotten" (73).

Collins' editorial effort in fact marked the beginning of what can be seen in retrospect as

a smaIZ surge of interest in Bogan, no doubt fueled by Ruth Lirnmer's "mosaic" of journal

excerpts, short stories, and unpublished poems, jour ne^ Around mv Room: The A u t o b i o ~ a ~ h v

'An example of distorting praise is Patrick Moore's article on Bogan's use of symbol, mask, and meire. Moore claims that Bogan "values symbolic expression because it allows her to blur her meaning so she cannot be pinned down" (69). She feared men and disliked form, he says. Feminisrn has brought women security so they no longer have to wrïte in such a restricted manner. Moore's qualification by way of conclusion is patronizing: "Yet Louise Bogan was one of the eariier women poets who pointed to a way out of the strangling forms and mentaiities of traditional verse. if for no other reason than that, her life and her poetry deserve our interest and attention" (79).

' Collins admits to being mystified at the paucity of critical discussion generated by the poetry: "It is tempting to think that this is the result of recent neglect: during her lifetirne, Bogan's books were consistently, prominentiy, and often inteiiigently reviewed, and she won most of the major awards for poetry" (1). Bruce Bawer disagees, saying that Bogan's books were respectfully but not prominently reviewed (27).

The other three were T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and Laura Riding.

Chapter I . Page 4

of Louise Born . The "autobiography" appeared in 1980, building on interest in Bogan's life

sparked by Limmer's previously published (1973) edition of the poet's letters following her

death in 1970. In 1984, the sarne year Collins's book appeared, Jacqueline Ridgeway contributed

volume 461 to the Twayne United States Author Series. Elizabeth Frank won the Pulitzer Pnze

months later for her elegantly written and comprehensive biography, whiIe Gloria Bowles

published her analysis of Bogan's "aesthetic of limitation" in 1987, a study which argues that

Bogan "is a major modeniist poet" while it articuiates summarily the curent feminist assessment

of the poet's (perceived as circumscnied) achievernent. In the 1980s, Bogan's work was a focus

of attention from scholars eager to reclaim women writers lost to the canon because of a value

system inherently patriarchal. Because she resisted feminist classifications, however, Bogan won

favour only temporarily. The following decade saw a retum to more sporadic cntical writing on

her work with a single monograph-length study, Lee Upton's Obsession and Release, published

in 1996,

Morton Zabel noted philosophically that lyrk poetry "often falls from grace," but said

that Bogan's work "should be a mode1 for poets in any decade or of any ambition" (49). Why is

Bogan not better laiown, celebrated as the "great lyric poet7' Kinzie and ottiers admire? 1 am not

the first to ask this question, nor to attempt an answer. Her range was lirnited, some have

complained; admittedly, the obscurity and difficulty of her style inhibit a larger readership.

Bawer points out that Bogan "refused to play the Iiterary garne" of "intellectual one-upmanship,

reptation-brokerage, and logrolling" (27). According to R. Phyllis Goldfein, Bogan's courage

and the demands she made on her readers hampered her popdarity (73). It is not my intention to

address the issue directly, since matters of literary reputation span broad areas of cultural

considerations beyond my expertise and interest. However, to the extent that this study

challenges assumptions about genre and value, size and gender, it also explains the systematic

Chapfer 1, Page 5

underestimation of a poet designated - and thereby dismissed - as a minor lyricist. Despite T.S.

Eliot's attempt to dispel any derogatory association connected with the t e m "minor poetry" in

his 1944 essay,'What is Minor Poetry" (39), we continue to offer definitions and make lists of

those who are "major" and who "minor," with the result that sotalled major poets are read and

studied while muior ones are overlooked,

My purpose here is to reconsider a writer relegated to the ranks of the rninor in the light

of criteria typically used to distinguïsh the work of major poets, i.e. large size and complex

vision. In the following chapters, 1 read Bogan's senal volumes of poems as poetic sequences,

coherent collections of integrated units which, read on their own, deliver limited impact. As

Rarnsey acknowledges, greatness in lyric poetry is inherently diffkult to discuss. An isolated

shoa lyric is prohibited by its small size alone from the assessrnent of major, and, thus, "great."

The writer of such lyrics might be admired for her "exquisite" touch, but she does not inspire

awe. She is a miniaturist; she attempts too Iittle. Eher rneaning can be discemed, it is by

definition small in scope; if she gestures beyond the confines of the lyric boundary, she

hstrates, is regarded as obstinately obscure. But perhaps the limitation begins with established

reading practices which encourage a scattergun approach to lyric poetry. More often than not,

we are content to evaluate a poet on the basis of anthologized selections without consideration of

the entire oeuvre. Bogan's three volumes of new poems - Bodv of This Death. Dark Sumer ,

and The Sleeping Fury - al1 incorporate features of drama and narrative. Their component lyrics

are linked, interactive, and thus invite a reading which respects the Iarger meaning arising not

only fkom thematic co~ec t ions but also ftom sequential and structural ones. In her capacity as

Iiterary critic, Bogan told us how to read the work of poets like herself- The close examination

of poetic texts is valuable, she explained, especially since it shifis emphasis fkom eFtraneous

information about the poet to the work itself, but we are to be carefbl to retain a sense of context,

Chapter I . Page 6

not to destroy the poem's "aura." 'We must move slowly through a book of poerns, as we move

slowly through a gallery of paintings or as we give time and attention to the hearing of music,"

she said. "And the serious reader will not depend upon anthologies, but will go directly to a

poet's work as a whole and read it chronologically."

Because the chronology of the work is tied to the chronology of the life, a few

biographical words are relevant by way of introduction, Louise Bogan was born in 1897 in

Livermore Falls, Maine. Her childhood was marked by bitter quarrels between her parents and

long absences of her mother. When Bogan was four years old, the farnily moved to Milton, New

Hampshire. Aithough she felt that she "must have experienced violence fFom b'kth," it was in

- Milton that ''violence first came through? in her mernories (JAR 24). She recalls cutting her

thurnb on a piece of bottle: the blood "would not stop, so I put my hand against the fiont of my

coat, and soon that was bloodstained al1 down the fiont. I was a h i d to gc home, but the blood

fnghtened me more" (26). There were "secret family angers and secret disruptions" that went on

for a year or so.' By 1907, the Bogans had relocated to Ballardville, Massachusetts, but already

the child Louise had becorne "the semblance ofa girl, in which some desires and illusions had

been early assassinated: shot dead" (27). Ironicaliy, the house in Ballardvale was the "happiest

in Fer] life" because it was there she began to read, "wholeheartedly and with pleasure" (30).

The fust book she owned was Grimrns' Fairy Tales. It was "a thick volume illustrated by

Rackham, with a procession of figures printed on its cloth cover, which went around it, from the

* One tirne, she went blind for two days. What had she seen, she wondered? She would never know: "But one (and final) scene of violence cornes through. It is in lamplight, with strong shadows, and an open trunk is the center of it, The curved lid of the trunk is thrown back, and my mother is bending over the truxdc, and packing things into it. She is crying and she screams. My father, somewhere in the shadows, groans as though he has been hurt. It is a scene of the utrnost terror." 26)

Chapfer I , Page 7

fiont cover, over the spine, to the back cover." Every story was enchanting - "half-dream, half-

fact." They were al1 true, and yet they couid not be. "1 had the double vision of the born reader,

f?om the beginning," Bogan remembers (3 1-3).

In 1932, Bogan wouid write a short essay entitled "Journey Around My Room"

contrasting the tranquillity and stability of her bedroom with the destructive, drowning roar of

the mil1 strearn experienced in a dream. As Gaston Bachelard explains in The Poetics of S~ace ,

the "bosom of the house" is our first protection as human beings, a "large cradle" which contains

us, keeps us f?om beïng "dispersed" (7). Bogan fiequently used the image of the house or room

as a representation of stilled essence, a harbour for rest and reflection or sanctuary to preserve

the self against dissolution. But sometimes the walIs present barriers to understanding, while the

many roorns provide hiding places for terrile secrets. And they do not always protect.

Marriage, for example, is a house which the poet7s rebellious spirit perversely comes to regard as

a cage.

It is a house to which 1 return, in a recurrent dream. The dream is always the same- 1 go back to the house as 1 now am. I put into it my chairs, my pictures, but most of al1 my books. . . 1 rearrange the house fkom top to bottom: new curtains at the windows, new pictures on the walls. But somehow the old roorns are still there - like shadows, seeping through. Iridestmctiile. Fixed. (JAR 30)

Bogan's feelings about enclosure and protection, offered by rooms within houses or the mutual

obligations of relationships, were fhdamentally conflicted because of her childhood. She

remembered seeing through the crack in a hotel room door in Milton her mother's ringed hand on

a pillow, signature to her sexual infidelity as well as betrayal of the child who waited for her

outside. Childhood was a space in time where what was most safe was also most dangerous; the

intimate circle of the farnily and the parental bedroom were sites of treachery.

The farnily eventually rnoved to Boston, where Louise received a "thorough classical

Chaprer 1. Page 8

education, £7om the age of twelve through the age of seventeen, in the public schools of Boston"

(JAR 52). The courses she took in English literature in hi& school and her one year of college

' k r e not very nutritious," she said, but her "classical education was severe, and [she] read Latin

prose and poetry and Xenophon and the IZiad dirring Fer] adolescencey' (5 1). She left university

to marry Curt Alexander, an army corporal, who took her to Panama with hirn. '"AU we had in

comrnon was sex," Bogan said later. "Nothing to talk about. We played cards," (JAR xxii).

She le& him to return to New England with their newborn, Mathilde (Maidie), who would Iater

be dropped off to live with her matemal grandparents so that Bogan could apply herself to her

literary career in New York City. Alexander died soon afterward of pneumonia, With her smali

widow's pension, Bogan went abroad in 1922 to study piano for six months in Viema. Before

she left, she knew that Harriet Monroe had accepted five of her poerns for Poe- magazine; soon

after her return, Body of This Death was published.

Bogan made many literary fnends in New York, including Rolfe Humphries and Edmund

Wilson, and in concert wîth her debut as a poet she began to write crïticism, begiming with a

review in 1924 of D.H. Lawrence's Birds, Beast and Flowers for The New Rewblic. In 1925

she married for the second time to Raymond Holden, and Maidie came to live with them. For a

time Bogan felt happy both domestically and professionally. One of her drearns was to live in

the country; the family of three moved into an old farmhouse near a town called Hillsdale in

upstate New York in 1929- But Bogan's brief interval of happiness was destined to end with the

year: the house burned down. AIthough she tried to be philosophical about the loss of books,

pictures, and manuscripts, "things gathered over years" and "work put into walls and rooms," as

Frank explains, the fire triggered the return of emotional difficulties the poet had succeeded over

the years in "withstanding, subduing, and, except in her poems, concealing to a large extent fiom

Chaprer 2. Page 9

herseIf;" she "suffered an overwhelming loss of power and uncertainty of direction" (133-34):

In April 193 1, Bogan voluntarily became a patient at The Neurological hstitute in New

York and later moved to Cromwell Hall, a sanitarium on a large estate in Cromwell,

Connecticut, where she was gratefùl for the pnvate bath, night nurse, hydrotherapy, and a

beautifil big blond doctor by the name of McKinney. Afier her discharge, she began a "strange

new penod" in which she felt "at once renewed and disùlherited" (cited by Frank, 142). She was

awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for a year's travel in Europe in 1933, but the long absence

f?om Holden exacerbated Bogan's jealousy, which tumed out to be well founded: on her return,

she found another woman had moved into their apartrnent. Bogan moved out, but was

hospitalized again soon afierward, The couple eventually divorced in 1936. Bogan's third

volume of poetry, The S l e a i n ~ Fuw, was published in 1937, after an affair with the younger

poet Theodore Roethke had replenished h a diminished energy reserves.

In the introduction to her ccmosaic" of Bogan's life, Jouniev Around MY Room, Ruth

Limrner explains that she used as her h e and took her title fiom the New Yorker story, a

meditation inspired by Voyage autour de ma chambre by the eighteenth-century Frenchman

Xavier de Maistre (xx). The remainder of the "autobiographyy' is composed of journals,

notebook entries, poems, recorded conversations, and excerpts fkom her critical writings, letters,

and short stories, arranged by an editor trying to "bridge the Iacunae . . . in such a way as to

suggest the flow of experience" (xxii). In the 1930s, Bogan reflected on her childhood, but about

other periods in her life she wrote little. "The fact of the matter is that Bogan was far more

absorbed by the texture and meaning of experience than with the events giving rise to them,"

Lirnmer explains (xxiv). Bogan claimed proudly to have "written down Fer] experience in the

closest detail. But the rough and vulgar facts are not there" (JAR 72).

6 Unless otherwise indicated, references to Frank are to Louise B o r n : A Portrait.

Chapter I . Page IO

Before the publication of L imer ' s Journev, information about the iïnsistently private

Bogan was difficult to come by. Goldfein, calling in 1977 for a reconsideration of the poet after

the reissue of The Blue Estuaries, Bogan's final volume of collected poems, cornrnented that the

details of her life had to be pieced together mainly fkom posthumously published Ietters (also

cornpiled by Lirnrner), "insufficient feeding of one's voyeuristic appetites" ( '73). Goldfein

professed to be looking for some particular in Bogan's life which would have shocked her

reading public because of a comment the poet made in a letter. Bogan told Morton Zabel that

W.H. Auden "couldn't get over my obscurity; and 1 told him that it was becatuse 1 wasn't

respectable. 'But that wouldn't count among members of the academic world,' SAID HE,

INNOCENTLY' (UrWL îSl).' Bogan's reticence was at least in part o w k g to a sense of

. infenority and alienation she felt - not only around acadernics, because she had dropped out of

Boston University to get married and after that was entirety self-educated: bu t in society in

general. A victim of snobbery as a child, Bogan refùsed to forgive a world vwhich had looked

down on her working-class, Irish-Catholic background, Ir, a 1935 letter to h e r publisher, John

Hall Wheelock, Bogan adrnitted to being a "recalcitrant author," refusing to +te openly about

her early life and development, and thus "passing up O so many sales, among the Washington

University ladies, by not so doing"; she imagines, for example, the "portfolio of

' To John Muller, Bogan's reasons for saying so were obvious, and he sumss them up succinctly: "Bogan, an Irish-Catholic of Iower middle-class ongins, had dropped out of college, was divorced, drank a lot, and had been a mental patient" (77).

m e n Bogan completed her application for a Guggenheim Feliowship in L932, she admitted to being f e d of "That awfüi blank afier academic honours" on the f o m She urged Zabel, one of her referees, to "bear down on native quality of mùid":

Bear, bear on the mind, on the capacity of the brain, on the long scholar's head, on the h o w - without-having-learned intuition, on the bred-in-the-bone aptitude, on the up-f3om-Livemore- Falls-Maine coming-through, on the seeking-out-as-her-own-nicety of choice, on the made-a-life- for-herself-through-choice-in-spite-of-e-cc starnina. O Morton, 1 hare this like poison, but since 1 have committed myself (and through your urging), be he who burns &th intense loyalties, and bear. (WWL 67)

Chapter 1, Page I I

information" fellow poet Genevieve Taggard would surely send thern- Bogan's sarcasm betrays

a deep bittemess: "1 suppose 1 shoufd expand on one or two things, just to let the cornfortable

creatures lcnow that it is out of poverty, fear and disaster that poetry grows, and the worse the

soil, the better the poetry is liable to be, given a good tense temperament in the poet, to begin

with. . . " (vimx 118).

The argument of this study is that Louise Bogan's poetic vision was a large and complex

one, but one we have not recognized as such because of its ironic, radically miniaturized

presentation. Susan Stanford Friedman has said that women writers have had to engage in

strategies to feminize the epic form to make it their own, r e k i n g the victim status which such

large, masculine namatives have traditionally supplied to the? gender. One way to feminize the

epic is to invert its content by telling the story fiom the perspective of, for example, Dido rather

than Aeneas. The founding of Rome as dominant focus is thus effectively replaced by an

emphasis on sexual betrayal and abandonment. The flip side of war is love; both are equally

enduring human concerns? Another is to re-invent the epic form in fernale tenns. While femaIe

writers have typicaIIy been associated with the "minory' literary genre of the lyric, an

identification Bogan embraced as appropriate (to the chagrin of many ferninist critics), their

efforts to build . coherent dramatic narratives nom Fagments of Song has not always been

appreciated. Lady Mary Wroth used the sonnet cycle to tell the story of a courtly love romance

fiom the "otherY7 side, the idealized woman pursued rather than the idealizing, wounded man in

For an interesthg perspective on female poets and the subject of war, see Margaret Dickie's essay, "Emily Dickinson in History and Literary History." Dickie argues that the Amherst recluse was deeply concerned with (obliquely) representing the sorrow and violence of the Civil War in her poetry, but critics other than Shira Wolosky (Emilv Dickinson: A Voice of War) have claùned she had no interest in the subject- Because Amencan literary history is bound up with its nationai history, the poet has been denied her rightfùl, central place, "banished . . . fiom history and fiom the literary history that depends on it'' (186).

Chapter I . Page 12

pursuit, and women poets such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Edna St. Vincent Millay have

furthered and complicated that inve~tigation,'~ Ifwe take the (reverse) epic theme of sexual love

expressed in the (miniaturized, rebuilt fkom fragments) epic form, and graft it to the Romantic

vision of the heroic artist figure stmggling at once to reconcile and divide (hm) life and art, we

have the output of a poet such as Bogan, who produced serial slim volumes of sequenced poerns

nominally about love and betrayal but essentially about the struggle to contain large within small.

Bogan was conçumed throughout her life with a fever of ambition. She satincally compared

herself to Goethe and Dante, and consciously attempted to emulate the prodigious outpowings of

Keats. But she knew herself to be a lyricist, one with a talent for the "short cryY7' as well as a

self-conscious modemist aesthetically disinclined to fleshy excess even as she professed the

desire to produce "Fat words in fat poems," "fat works ranged on shelves" (cited by Frank, 77).

This study attempts to do justice to Bogan's breadth of vision, which 1 suggest has been

underestimated according to prevailing critical standards which accord only "rninor7' credit to the

abbreviated status of the lyric. Recent readings of classical writers such as Horace and Catullus

have acknowledged the importance of sequence and context of individual lyrics within larger

poetic structures, and the English Rornantic poets have also benefitted fiom an appreciation of

the poetic collection as a complex, integral entity. While the poetic sequence has been heralded

since the 2980s as the quintessential modem form, fùll coverage to the central American tradition

of long poerns and poem sequences has ironically only just been accorded in Cary Nelson's

newly published anthology of modern poetry. In any case, the slim volume as poetic sequence is

an identification only rarely made. Those volumes, which make up the career output of rnany a

modem poet, are often lost to posterity, mined sporadically for gems fit for anthologization until

'O Wroth's Sonnet 77, "In this strange labyrinth how shall I turn?," expresses the kind of indecision about accepting the temptation of sexual love which Shakespeare's Ophelia rnight have felt. To love or not to love: that is the question that rew-rites Hamlet's speculations.

Cltapter 1. Page /3

forgotten entirely once a final collection is published. Despite work by Debra Fried and others

on the significance of Edna St. Vincent Millay, the notion that a slim volume of poems by a

twentieth-century poetess writing about love should comrnand serious attention in the academic

world is still considered by many to be slightly preposterous, and - since Bogan herself

recognized the mediocris. of much of the female lyrk tradition - the response should not be

dismissed out of hand as rnisogynist. Unfortunately, predeterminations about packaging blind us

to the exceptional and unusual. 1 contend that Bogan's poetry has been overlooked because of

misconceptions about size and worth.

In the following chapters 1 attempt to discuss her work in terms of narrative and drama as

well as lyric as way of getting outside the boxes of genre and gender, considering Bogan's three

successive volumes of new poems - Body of This Death. Dark Surnmer, and The Slemine: Fuw -

as autonornous collections which also mark distinctive penods in the span of the author's career.

On the face of it, the road of my method would appear to be relatively well-travelled already, for

Bogan scholars attempting monograph-length studies have relied (as 1 rely) on the volume titles

as chapter headings, implying an organization which respects both the integrity of each collection

and its context. However, a typical strategy in Bogan criticism is to discuss selected poerns as

representative of certain themes, patterns of images, or attitudes the writer argues are

characteristic of the poet's work. The generalizations tend to precede the readings, or - at least -

readings of al2 the poems (only enough poems are analyzed to "make the case"). Neither a

sustained concentration on the particdars of individual poerns, nor a detennined resistance to

pre-ordination of the volunie's design as a whole, are priorities in the chapter-by-chapter

discussions of Jacqueline Ridgeway, Gloria Bowles, or Lee Upton, for example. Ridgeway's

study employs the chronology of the poems to support a thin biographical fiamework, a method

suitable for the Twayne series but which the author manages with a heavy hand, inserting sub-

Cltapter 1. Page 14

titles such as "Growth and Maturity" and "A Working Through" to promote a forced, but sadly

unrealized, coherence. Bowles makes clear that her purpose is to demonstrate that Bogan

consciously developed an "aesthetic of limitation" in order to cope with the strictures of being a

fernale poet caught in a male modeniist paradigrn (1). Poems which support her polemical

argument are featured, but many others are ignored entirely or Iisted only summarily. Upton,

whose study is the more disappointing for being the most recent, fieety resorts to mixing and

matching, bringing into her analysis of one volume discussion of lyrics fiom another, Her

analysis is diffùse and scattered, a random patchwork with no respect for the author's ordering,

either of lyrics within sequences or across them. "Cassandra" @S), "The Crossed Apple" m, 'Man Alone" 0, and "1 Saw Eternity" (SF) are discussed fÛIly in the chapter supposedly on

Body of This Death. Only ten of the thirty-six poems of Dark Surnmer are mentioned in the

chapter devoted to Bogan's second volume, Upton's approach to The S I e e ~ i n ~ Fury is

particularly convoluted, taking seventeen pages of background - which includes detailed

analyses of "Medusa" TB-, "Betrothed" m, "Memory" m, "March Twilight7' (BE), and

"The Changed Woman" - before getting to the poems of that sequence. Eleven out of the

twenty-five poems of The Slee~inn Fury are cursonly covered in the remaining fourteen pages

of the chapter. Even Elizabeth Frank is deceptively selective in her critical discussions, omitting

the occasional lyric without explanation if it doesn't support her biographical intent. Much more

sustained and subtle than Ridgeway, her analysis of the poems is sirnilarly, and understandably,

secondary to the elucidation of the life. And while her observation that Body of This Death can

be understood as a "sequence of moods" (56) is rare in its appreciation of the role of sequence, it

suggests erroneously that the book can be read impressionistically and the poems understood as

indices of emotion.

My analysis is founded on the principle that, since Bogan seemed to exercise particuIar

Chupfer 1. Page 15

care and judgement about the few poems she included in her volume, it wouId be wise for her

readers to follow her example and value each on its own, in its place. What is unique about my

approach is its scrupulous attention to the placement, tone, and voice of each Iyric wlthin each

sequence. 1 begin with carefiil reading and no (overt) assumptions, allowing the poems and their

relations with one another to dictate the direction of the analysis, gradually building until an

outline is discernible. Each poem read in its place contributes to a developing picture, like lines

to a drawing. As Tilottama Rajan has argued, within the poetic collection the individuaI Iy rk

must be read as part of a larger "network of differences" - in NeiI Fraistat's tenninology, its

"contexture." In his essay on rninor poetry, T.S. Eliot States that anthologies are of limited use,

for it is to the complete works a lover of poetry will go to read poets he or she admires (41). Yet

it is in anthologies that we are compelled now to seek Louise Bogan in print. For this reason, I

quote every poem in its entirety and discuss the poems in their order of presentation in rhe three

volumes, including as additional reference for the reader the tables of contents in an appendix.

1 have chosen to Iirnit the scope of this shidy to Bogan's three volumes of new poems

with some reluctance, but a considered examination of the subsequent collec!ions warrants more

attention than 1 can grant at this time and would require a slightly different focus than analysis of

the sequences. My intention is to foIlow Bogan's instructions on the reading of poeh-y, that is,

the caveat of fastening "attention on the poem itself, wiwitht introducing extraneous matter of

one kind of another, conceming the poety' while at the same tirne taking care to preserve its

"atmosphere and ambiance" by moving slowly through the volume as through a gallery of

paintings. Within and between the volumes, individual poems look fonvard and back,

reverberating with meaning when read in context. Close readîngs illuminate those connections

and are therefore well justified. Susan Wolfson has argued that close reading is the most

appropriate method for studying the interrogative activity in Romantic poetry because it allows

Chapter I , Page 16

for appreciation of the inherent complexity, irony, and paradox; the rhetoric of the interrogative

mode is not always explicit in the syntax (28). The argument holds for Bogan's work Christine

Colosurdo's insightful close readings of a few of Bogan's poems effectively demonstrate their

dramatic quality which, she argues, arises from an unchecked tension between Bogan's "early

twentieth-century ferninine ambivaIence and modemist expertise" (340)- As Carruth rernarked in

his review of Frank's biography, "no one can deal with the most important aspect of Bogan's life

- that is, with the quality of her mind - who does not pay attention to the grammar of her style"

(129). Further, the "gaps and Geists in the syntax" identified by Daneen Wardrop as demon-

strative of the gothic in poetry are especially important to examine in poetic sequences (1 8).

In Chapter 2,1 explore several issues to provide background and support my approach:

the situation of Amencan women poets writing in the 1920s and 1930s; associations of the lyric

with fernaIe writers; implications of genre and gender; evaluations of major and minor iiterary

achievement as they relate to size; and critical responses, particularly feminist, to Bogan's career.

The long poem and / or the poetic sequence have been touted as the de finitive Modernist form,

but inexplicably the "slim volume" of female Iyricists such as Bogan bas escaped inclusion in the

otherwise generous definitions put forward. The work of Fraistat and others on the integrity of

the poetry collections of the Romantics offers a methodology to get past the impasse. Miller

argues that the u n i m g principle of the lyric sequence is the underlying ego of the poet, a

suggestion usehl to the consideration of Bogan's several volumes. Like Yeats, she was

concerned in her work to construct a correlative to her evolution as a person and an artist; as a

critic, she valued most those poets whose writing demonstrated the progress toward maturity

over time.

Bogan's initial sequence is the subject of Chapter 3. Body of This Death is fascinating

to examine for contextural integrity because of its pronounced dramatic qualities: the poet shifts

Chapter 1. Page 17

perspective and voice fkom lyric to lyric, The gender of the speaker alternates, and often is not

dÏscernibIe, There are narrative elements in Body of This Death as well. The poet / narrator tells

us of a two-sided quest involving, on the one hand, consuming and painfùl heterosexual love and

the alternative of stonelike chastity, and, on the other, an ambitious young poet 's dream of

writing deathless lyrïcs. True to Romantic form, the journey is circular, never-ending. By the

volume's conclusion we realize that the personae of artist and lover have been merged al1 along,

and that the woman's immersion in passion is rnixed up with the man's impulse to &d serenity

and a means to artistic expression: the poet is of course both, o r rather all. My approach to Body

of This Death follows Douglas .Wilson's lead in his chapter o n dream and the uncanny in

Wordsworth's poetry (24-50). Wilson applies the mode1 of the psychoanalytic dialogue between

analyst and analysand, as described by Roy Schafer, to illuminate Wordsworth's modes of

recollection in which the story of the poet's self is told from multiple perspectives.

Chapter 4 examines Dark Surnmer, an ambitious book stmctured in five parts and

containing two long poems. Bogan's reptation was already established with the publication of

Body of This Death, and with the appearance of a second volurne she was sure of her vocation

and talent- The poet's split self is revealed in even darker terms here, furthering the implication

in the previous book of a division along Jungian lines. Despite the architecture of a tragic drama,

the rnovement of the sequence is once again circular rather than climactic or progressive, but

more obsessively in this book than in the previous. The pitch o f psychological tunnoiI has

increased; some of the poems evoke a state of nightmare. The poet 's repressed memories of her

traumatized childhood are translated into fairy tales which lend a surreal quality to the violence

they descnbe and mark the experience as uniquely female. Nofhing is at it seems to the disturbed

poet-speaker of Dark Sumrner. She is terrified of lies and betrayal. In Dark Summer, the full

scope and depth of Bogan's artistic vision is revealed, as she here accomplishes a ferninine

Chapter 1. Page 18

rewriting of the standard epic episode. of the visit to the underworld.

In Chapter 5, in the context of my examination of Bogan's third and last book of new

poems, 1 consider the poet's redehed attitude to her achievement and abilities. The several

years between the publications of Dark Summer and The Sleeping Furv were especially difficult

ones for Bogan, when she questioned her gift and circumscribed her goals. Cramped into

"minor" status in the literary world, she was haunted by the image of the poetess as songbird,

She wanted desperately to feel expansive, large, weighty. The Sleeping Fury tells of Bogan's

deterrnined effort, through psychoanalysis and sheer will, to reconcile the competing voices of

her youth and put to bed their destructive urgings; of her hard-won creative renewal; and of the

bittersweet vision of her future as a solitary woman poet with a small oeuvre.

With The Sleeping Fuw, Bogan reached an emotional plateau comparable to Eliot's afier

his conversion to Anglicanism. A long-awaited peace is gained, obtained after great effort,

bought at much cost. In both cases, the poet's reward was the critic's target. Admuers of both

Eliot and Bogan castigated the poets, who - once emotionally vulnerable and artistically open -

deliberately, carefully, closed the door on nervous upheaval. For example, in an article critical of

Bogan's adherence to form and what he sees to be her resistance to experimental Modernist

techniques, Douglas Peterson clinically assesses the writer's "effort to win serenity through

withdrawal and indifference" as "really suicidal. It leads to the systernatic narrowing of the

range of one's concerns, and when the end is attained, one is lefi with neither the desire to write

nor subjects about which to write" (87). Eliot, perhaps because his transition to Christianity

carried with it social duty as well as personal spiritual renewal, was remarkably able to create

poetry in his new space, albeit a different kind of verse: the multiple voices were gone, replaced

with a singularity of vision apparent even in the plays. Bogan's achievement of wholeness after

fragmentation was her own individual adventure, carrying with it no Iarger social dictum. She

Chaprer 1, Page 19

comected the pieces of hm own being together, not to a universal; her conversion was a

"conversion into self," a concept she explains in a critical review of Millay's work as an artist's

adjustrnent to a lirniting world ("Conversion7' 67). mer the publication of The Sleeping Furv,

Bogan chose to concentrate her energies on her critical writing as well as on teaching and

lechuing. While, Iike Eliot, she became a kind of elder statesman of the craft of poetry, l e c t d g

on the importance of fonn and discipline, she was less cornfortable in the role than he, perhaps

because as an aging woman she felt herself open to ridicule. Certainly she resisted what must

have been a temptation for her, as it obviously was for Eliot (and another Eliot, the tough-minded

George), a sexual partnership in hm last years with a young supporter. Bogan's austerity was

aesthetic more than moral, a proud rejection of the pathetic.

Chapter 2: Forni, Size, and Reputation: Bogan and the Lyric Sequence

In March 1924, a brief articIe entitled "Minor Poetry" was published in The Freeman.

The author, John Gould Fletcher, opened his general comments about the state of American

literature by stating contemptuously that "the minor poet, like the poor, is always with us";

unfortunately, he opines, in the years following the "hubbub and excitement" of the first two

decades of the century, "in default of first-class work of original quality, it is again necessary to

speak of rninor poetry." In this context Fletcher goes on to darnn with faint praise the

crafisrnanship of Louise Bogan, a young poet whose first volume Body of This Death had been

recently published, to some acclairn. Bogan distinguishes herself, says Fletcher, by avoiding the

typical error of including "much infenor and weakly sentimenta1 matter. On the other hand her

style . . . conceals an emptiness of thought that is positively painful." Lines fkom one of Bogan's

fmest poems, "Medusa," are then quoted.

Fletcher was also a poet, one who started as an Irnagist, became an aggressively

experimental Modernist poet, and ended as a regional one. It perhaps would not have occurred to

him that he himself might be designated as "minor"- he who dared to write symphonies (his

"Color Symphonies"), and emulated Whitman. In the 1930s he came to be associated with John

Crowe Ransom, the infamous author of "The Poet as Woman," who conceded caustically that

while Edna St. Vincent Millay is an artist, she is aIso a woman and therefore "indifferent to

intellectuality." His attitude would be echoed by the author of the Literarv Historv of the United

States, who wrote in 1948 that Marianne Moore "is ferninine in a very rewarding sense, in that

she makes no effort to be major" (Spiller et al 1353).

Elaine Showalter dedicates a chapter of her book on tradition and change in Amencan

women 's writing to the literary women who came of age in the 1920s. She begins by quoting

Bogan, writing to her fnend Morton Zabel: "1 never was a member of a 'lost generation"' (104),

Chapter 2. Page 2 f

referring of course to the famous group of disillusioned Amencan writers who fled the to Europe

afier the f i s t World War. Showalter insists that Bogan and her female contemporaries were in

fact members of a lost generation, "in another, and more important sense," for they were "lost to

literary history and to each other." The post-war literary movement we have corne to cal1 the

Lost Generation was in fact a community of men.

For the literary women who came of age in the 1920s, the post-war hostility to women's aspirations, the shifk fkom the feminist to the flapper as the wornanly ideal, and especially the reaction against the ferninine voice in American literature in the colleges and the professional associations made this decade extraordinarily and perhaps uniquely difficult. Arnerican society's expectations of modem womanhood were strikingly at odds with its image of artistic achievement (1 05)

In the years following the war, women writers were gradually eliminated fiom the canon of

was criticized, and taught,

who suggests M e r that women poets were the worst "casualties" of the inter-war perïod. The

emphasis in twentieth-century literary history was and still is on women novelists (Ezell 32); the

term "women writers" is assurned to be synonymous with those who work in prose fiction (Miles

2 ) Attitudes toward the stereotypical female poetess were condescending in the eariy years of

the century: she was felt to be a sweet, young singer who wrote about love and renunciation in

spontaneous, artless lyrics (Showalter 107). After World War 1, therefore, American women

poets needed to redefine for themselves the shape of a serious career. Bogan was arnong those

' "For reasons only recentiy being addressed by feminist criticism, women have yet to rnake any substantial impact in large numbers on any otheq literary fo-" Margaret Ezeli noted in 1 993 (32). In their introduction to Gendered Modernisms, a 1996 coliection of essays on Amencan women poets and their readers, Margaret Dickie and Thomas Travisano daim that the eight women poets considered in the book "have yet to fmd a settled place in critical and historical accounts of modemism or post rnodemism, despite their considerable and varied achievements and their achowledged significance" and "despite their favor, they have been dismissed Born literary history, fiequentiy in so many words, as eccentric, as inessential, or as a special case" (viii). See also Josephine Donovan's essay, "Women's Masterpieces," in which she argues against traditional canon formation as chauvinistic, examines the ''wual defrnition" of a masterpiece, and concludes that twenty neglected novels and short stories by women writers of the nineteenth century qualify by these criteria. Fernale poets are not considered in her discussion.

Chapter 2, Page 22

who chose to disassociate themselves firom the sentimental tradition of the "female songbirds" by

writing an impersonal poetry which conformed with the aesthetic of (male) Modeniism, Because

early twentieth-century modem poems and modem women's bodies were valued for theü

Ieanness and "hardness of edge," it can be argued that Bogan's rninimalist verses demonstrated

the "anorexie Iogic" which underlines the Modemist rejection of excess - of flesh as of emotion

- implicated in the female.2

The critical neglect of poetry by women is tied up with the expectations of genre. David

Perkins, author of the two-volume Historv of Modem Poetrv, maintains that the "short utterance

in verse," the lyric, has been synonymous with "poetry" at least since the early nineteenth

century, 'But the idea of a major poem continues to presuppose Iength" @, 271). The lyric forrn

has traditionally been associated with female poets because of its personal, subjective tone as

well as its bounded nature (Dickie, Lwic 18). "The short, passionate lyric has conventionally

been thought appropriate for women poets if they insist on writing, while the longer, more

philosophical epic belongs to the real (male) poet," remarks Susan Friedman (cited by Ostriker,

222). But lyric poetry was a neglected genre in American literary history, according to Margaret

Dickie (Lvric 7). L i t e r q nationalism was fostered in eighteenth-century anthologies, which

were felt to be a means of consolidating the newly achieved political independence (Golding 5).

Poetry was considered valuable and preserved to the extent that it was instructive, inspiring, and

affirmative of the culture (6). In the nineteenth century, the lyric fonn was felt to be insufficient,

not irnpressive enough, to express the literary aspirations of a new, large country, "the grandness

of America and the Arnencan individual" @ickie 7, 18). "American literary history is always

linked to American history and its narratives drawn fiom the writings of men interested in

historical C ~ S ~ S , chiefly wax-," Dickie fùrther comment5 ("Ernilyy7 186). In the United States,

See Lesley Heywood, Dedication to Hunger; also Frances Kerr, "Nearer the Bone."

Chapter 2, Page 23

then, by the tm of the century, the major / rninor distinction was clear. First of all, size

mattered: the epic, the heroic narrative, the long poem - these were major; the short poem,

typically the lyric, was minor. Major meant big and full-bodied, in the overriding tradition of

Walt Whitman. Whitman identified poetry with self and self with country; al1 were large, Young,

male. His Song of Mvself and later William Carlos Williams' Paterson take as their starting

point the identification of the body of the poet with the country, or city, which is also their grand

theme and sprawling subject. Wallace Stevens envisaged a gimt Nietzschean poet-figure as the

new creator after the death of God; in "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," he describes the

- "major man" MacCullough as a "pensive giant prone in violet space," "the giant, / A thinker of

the frrst idea." Dickie argues that the brevity of form promoted by the hagist movement was an

important stage in the development of Modernist poets, who needed to throw off the

"accumulated crudities" of the past, but was ultirnately limiting to ambitious poets discoverhg

that poetry is "didactic after all" and interested in making public staternents (Lonp 7). While the

long poems of Eliot and Pound were leaner in comparîson, involving the supposed extinction of

personality and elimination of corporeality, it is clear that both the British and Arnerïcan

traditions excluded women as artists and effectively endorsed what Carolyn Burke describes as

the "masculinization of creativiv" (cited by Kinnahan, 4): the female is that which had to be

rejected, the grotesque corporality of the body, so that the purified text (male) could be attained

(British); the nature of the body / country was by definition male - a woman could not write a

poem identiSing herself with the nation as it would be conceived as absurd (sort of like

suggesting God is a woman, despite the fact that the allegorical figure of the United States is

femaIe), yet that was the only poetry which could lay claim to major territory (American)? "We

' Since both Eliot and Pound were expatriate Americans, the dichotomy outlined above is a bit confiising. Pound for instance endorsed Henry James based on "the momentum of his art, the sheer bulk of its processes" which rendered him the "great true recorder." The lyric voice was, in any case, a rninor

Chapter 2. Page 24

seldom encounter, in praise of wornen poets, tenns like great, powerjkl, forcefi I, rnasterly,

violent, large, or true," Alicia Ostriker states.

The Ianguage used to express literary admiration in general presumes the masculiniS of the author, the work, and the act of creation - but not if the author is a woman. Complirnentary adjectives of choice then shift toward the diminutives: graceful, szrbtle, elegant, delicate, cryptic, and, above all, rnodest; for the most contuiuous term of approbation for a wornan poet fiom the early nineteenth century to the day before yesterday has been modesîy (3)-

Susan Stewart argues that aesthetic size - the relation between genre and significance - cannot

be divorced fiom social h c t i o n and social values. Stewart is interested in adjectives, how we

describe things; she asks, what relation do our descriptions bear to ideology and the very

'invention' of the something we descri'be, and finds that we "cannot speak of the small, or

miniature, work independent of the ways the domestic and the interior imply the social formation

of an interior subject. And we cannot speak of the grand and the gigantic independent of social

values expressed toward nature and the public and exterior life of the city" (95). In the

introduction to his guide to Romantic and Victonan long poems, Adam Roberts asks the question

"why so big?" and finds his answer in the prevailing imperialism of Britons in the nineteenth

century: "putting together an empire upon which the sun never sets can so easily become

entangled in a belief in size as a value in and of itself," an aesthetic he claims we see manifested

in our own time in popular films such as the Titanic and Godzilla. "The urge to build big poems,

and the urge to build big empires, are various manifestations of the same ideological root

patterns," he concludes (15).

Friedman takes issue with the deceptively simple name, "long poem." It appears to be a

neutral term, innocent, inclusive of everything that is "long," a "great umbrella for everything

voice, considered too personal and thus Iimited by the Modernists on one side of the Atlantic; and too s d and ineffectuaf in i t . disassociation fiom public concerns by those on the other-

Chapter 2, Page 25

that is not 'short7 "(13). In fact, she argues, we must recognize that a long poem is by

implication a "big ~ O ~ I I I , " one that asks very big questions - historical, metaphysical, religious,

and aesthetic questions - in a very long way. The phallic codes are evident.

As a 'big' poem, a 'long7 poem fias volume - it is a many-sided figure that swells up to take space. As a long sequence, it also takes up tirne - Iiterally, lots of tirne to read, In his horizontal-vertical discourse, vast space and cosmic time are the narrative coordinates within which Iyric moments occur, the coordinates as well of reality, of history, Big long poems go far, tunnel deep, and fly high. They have scope. They are 'potent, important-' (15)

The epic as the typical big-long poem has been the preeminent poetic genre of the public sphere

fkom which women have been excluded, Friedman insists. "The epic has consequently been a

quintessentially male tenitory whose boundaries enforce women's status as outsiders on the

landscape of poetry" (16). Even as modern long poems are anti-epics, they re-insc-ribe epic

conventions because they depend for their effects on our awareness of the epic norms they undo

and redo.

To William Carlos Williams, the epic represented a way to equal the achievements of

Pound and Eliot, regarded as the most important practitioners of a high modernist aesthetic

(Kinnahan 237). In a discussion of Anais Nin's "Winter of Artifice," Williams considers the

special dificulties women are forced to overcome in the arts because of a male tradition's

"failure to recognize that there is an authentic female approach . . . [that] has been submerged by

the belief that 'the greatest masterpieces are the work of males as well as of the male viewpoint'

" (cited by Kinnahan, 432). Friedman argues that women writers have had to engage in strategies

to feminize the epic form, thereby "refùsing the victim status of women's objectification in

men's texts and making themselves agents in the forrn's evolution, subjects in its creation" (1 8).

Her presentation to the annual meeting of the Modem Language Association in 1987 was

perhaps not unrelated to the appearance of Margaret Dickie's influential volume published the

Chaprer 2, Page 6

year before, On the Modernist Long Poem. Dickie, who states categorically that the history of

Amencan Modernism is the history of the long public poem, included only forir, white male

poets and thus by implication rejected wornen writers of lyric f?om the movement. In 1983, M.L.

Rosenthal and SalIy M. Gall were similarly unsubtle in their declaration that the form they called

the modern poetic sequence "is actually the modem poetic fonn within which al1 the tendencies

of more than a century of experirnent define themselves and find their aesthetic purpose. A study

of its growth and flourishing provides an inner history of modem poetry written in English . . .

and perforce clears away some of the cntical murk obscuring our major poets' individual

achievements" (vii).

The achievement of modem American women lyric poets has been erased, according to

Cary Nelson, who argues that ' k e no longer h o w the history of the poetry of the f i s t half of the

twentieth century," and that "most of us, moreover, do not know that the howledge is gone"

rn ress ion 4). We have done "considerable damage" by adopting without qualification the

pronouncements of critics such as Dickie and Rosenthal and Gall, Le. that the development of the

long poem / poetic sequence was the defînitive expression of American Modernism. "While it is

true that a number of modem American poets turned to the long poem after the f i s t phase of

their careers, there are many others who never worked in this form," Nelson explains, lamenting

that the "immensely biased and repressive" process which has elevated some poets and

marginalized others has blinded us to the fact that the penod of 19 10-1945 was an enormously

productive and diverse one in Amencan poetry (8). In his preface to a new (published in 2000)

anthology of modern Amencan poehy, Nelson declares that it "urges a major reassessment" of

several writers ( x ~ i x ) . ~

Edna St. Vincent Millay is one writer who has received serious critical attention only recentiy. In an essay on Miliay's use of the sonnet form, Debra Fned confronts the assumption that femde writers in the twentieth century have demonstrated their inability to tackle epic. "Only by aclaiowledging the woman

Chapter 2. Page 2 7

Ford Madox Ford exhibited a curious sense of caution in 193 7 when, after remarking that

Bogan probably ranked with poets of the stature of John Donne and George Herbert, he qualified

his statement: "This is not to be taken as appraisement. It is neither the time nor the place to Say

that Miss Bogan ranks with Marvell" (47). William Kerrigan picks up Ford's appraisement

(which was not one) but throws aside his caution some 60 years later in an article entitled

"Louise Bogan, Marvell of Her Day." Bogan wrote classic lyrics which made a permanent place

for thernselves in the tradition, he contends. Even so, her career "seems destined to be regretted

or disrnissed" because of ideas that have corne to dominate the study of women's poetry in our

day (63).' Kemgan argues that ferninist critics have failed to value Bogan's "rare talent,"

wishing her to have been more prolific, less reticent and controlled. The standard view of Bogan

is that she was silenced by her inability to deal with the ideological contradictions of being a

female poet in a masculine culture. In extending this barbed sympathy to one of their own,

women readers have managed to erase Bogan fiom the canon, according to Kerrigan: "The

ironic truth is that an impatient academic movement has, for the time being, denied Bogan her

f o r a her poetics, and her subject matter, cancelling her achievement far more effectively than

patriarchy ever did" (65).

writer's exclusion fiom this hîerarchy of verse genres can we begin to understand what a woman poet may signiQ when she chooses to write sonnets," she insists (234). For male writers such a s Milton and Wordsworth, the sonnet form provided a respite from the demands of epic, but a woman is not in the same position, for "no one seriously expects her to undertake the epic, national or personal; her sonnets are no t taken to be preparatory gestures for or lyric retreats korn the longer, loftier genres" (233). Citing Millay's use of enjambment, Fried argues that the poet reclaimed the sonnet form for herself. For Wordsworth, the --on iine represented plenitude, a satisfLing fullness which overflows its limits; Millay's verse, however, communicates a sexual struggle for dominance, iirrplying the control and compression required of the woman poet who works in traditional, male-dominated forms.

Carla Kaplan regrets that "Feminist recuperations of women7s subversive 'voice ' have no t always acknowledged the myriad ways - even between women - that communication may fail and that failure rnay be symbolized. Feminist criticism has often looked to women's writing to mirror feminist criticism itself, wanting to see its own project of discovering lost female voices affirmed by the texts it recuperates" (1 3).

Chapter 2. Page 28

Feminist critics have been rnotivated to minimize Bogan's accornplishments for reasons

not elaborated on by Kemgan. Theodore Roethke's oft-cited distinction of Bogan as an

exception to the run of female poets inclined to "catenvauling, writing the same poem about f i e

tirnes, and so on" has prejudiced feminist critics against her; in the eyes of many she must have

been a traitor to her gender to have eamed such praise ftom a representative of the patriarchal

literary establishment. Showalter is one of several feminist critics who contend that Bogan

demonstrated a hatred of herself and her gender in a Ietter she wrote to her editor in 1935 in

which she explains her rejection-of a proposa1 that she edit an anthology of women's verse. "As

you might have expected," Bogan confided to Wheelock, "1 tunied this pretty job down; the

thought of corresponding with a lot of female songbîrds made me acutely ilI." In their

introduction to Shakespeare's Sisters, a collection of essays of feminist criticism, Sandra Gilbert

and Susan Gubar agree with Gloria Bowles that Bogan had "Obviously . . . internalized just those

patriarchal interdictions that have histoncally caused women poets fiom Finch to PIath anxiety

and guilt about attempting the pen. In a sense, then, using Bogan's problern as a paradigm, we

rnight Say that at its most painhl the history of women's poetry is a story of struggle against the

sort of self-loathing her letter represents" (xxiii). "Until quite recently," the authors Iarnent,

"most criticism of poetry by wornen has failed to transcend the misogyny irnplicit both in

Bogan's letter and in the sexist definitions her letter incorporates." Further evidence of Bogan's

lack of solidarity has been cited fkom her literary criticism. Even her good fiïend, May Sarton,

wrote vindictively to H.D. of Bogan' s reviews of female writersm6 As early as 1 930, Bogan

remarked that she had "found fiom bitter experience that one woman poet is at a disadvantage in

''Louise Bogan, who was once a fine poet, has not survived menopause, 1 take it, and has become a rabid anti-feminist and self-hater in consequence - her review is sirnply pathological. 1 hear that she drinks a great deal. But nothing excuses this sort of thing to rny mind. - . . There is not a spark of generosity in Bogan apparently. She is unable any longer to rejoice, poor wornan!" (cited by Sherman, 238).

Chapter 2, Page 29

reviewing another, if the review be not laudatory" (WWL 55). Wornen and men, Bogan had the

audacity to argue, have different abilities and talents which are manifested in different m e s of

literary output. Bogan challenged Virginia Woolfs assurnption that the composition of a great

poetic tragedy in five acts is the final test of a woman poet's powers.

Why shodd women, past, present, or fûture, rernain fixed in the determination to out- Shakespeare Shakespeare? Can it be that there is no basic reason for women to excel in the art of poetry by producing the same sort of poetic structures as men? Men, as a matter of fact, stayed with the five-act poetic tragedy far too long. Perhaps women have more sense than to linger over an obsessing form of this kind. 426)

As we have seen, feminist critics such as Friedman take Woolf s position that women have been

excluded fkom the larger literary f o m , not Bogan's that they are unsuited to them.

The unfair and uninforrned assessment of Bogan as a rnisogynist has reached the level of

. literary hearsay. In the introduction to a 1999 volume of essays about American wornen writers

and the masculine tradition, Karen Kilcup refers incoxrectly to a "famous essay" by Bogan

(actually her book, Achievement in American Poetrv) as being about how women in the

nineteenth century diluted the verse tradition, then recites a facile misassessment of her poetry

with the confidence of one repeating a nimour: "Femafe writers like Louise Bogan and Marianne

Moore would be adrnitted to an increasingly masculinized and aestheticized literary field only on

the condition that they wrote unemotional, detached, and intellectual poetry: that they wrote 'like

men' and contributed to masculine literary tradition" (4). No reader of Bogan's work could ever

accuse her of writing like a man, or suggest that her lyrics are unemotional. There is no doubt

that much of the overt content of the poetry refers to passionate, heterosexual relationships. We

might then conclude that Kilcup is not direct'iy familiar with the poems. Or, perhaps she is one

of many who have found conksing Bogan's occasional, unambiguous use of a male persona and

drawn the conclusion that such a practice is inappropriate and out of context in an otherwise

Chapter 2. Page 30

female production.' But, as Jeanne Larsen notes, Edna St. Vincent Millay also used male

personae on occasion and, at least once, wrote of love for a fernale figure fkom the viewpoint o f

an "I" not gender-marked, so Bogan's practice was not without contemporary ~recedent? Ernily

Dickinson chose a mate double for the "I/ Tim" p ~ e m ; ~ according to Daneen Wardrop, "one of

the major impulses of the tortured gothic identity is the desire to work out gender complications"

(1 1 1)- It is also possible that KîIcup was introduced to Bogan through the often anthologized

poem "Women" and, reading it out of context, mistook its irony for self-directed anger.

According to Bowles, the "conscious neg1ect"of Bogan can be explained by the many

anthologies of women writers which fernulists welcomed in the 1970s. The poems selected for

such anthologies were those which included "female" or "wornan" in the title, hence the choice

which has caused Bogan to be best lcnown arnong ferninists for "Women" - which, Bowles says

we should not be surprised to leam, "has been read as a self-hating, and thus a woman-hating,

poem7' (4). Gilbert and Gubar feature the first lines of cWomen7' in their introduction to Bogan

in The Norton Antholow of Literature bv Women as a demonstration of the poet's ccbitterness7'

' Oddly, male writers are treated more generously when they explore a gendered division of self. Douglas Wilson discovers a "sunultaneous repression and exaltation of the female" in Wordsworth's writings which coincides with his submerged creative energy (42). Galya Dirnent is approving of Joyce's BIoom giving birth in Ulysses and Samuel Richardson in Pamela representing Pamela and Mr. B. as "two reconciled halves of their androgynous creator" (150).

Larsen comments that Anne Cheney7s 1975 biography of Millay discusses the poet's transition in her twenties from a lesbian (or bisexual) orientation to a heterosexual one (223). There is no evidence to suggest that Bogan experienced lesbian attractions as a young woman, although she certainly admired her mother's beauty and vitality, even as she deeply resented her phdandering absences, and was close to one of her early fernale teachers. Bogan's heterosexuality was, however, weil h o w n to her fiieads; she had several affairs with men over the course of her life, and was married twice. May Sarton, who met Bogan in 1953 and became her close fiend, propositioned the older woman but the offer was f d y rejected. Sarton desmies how Bogan defined the terrns of their relationship in her collection of portraits, A WorId of Linfit : "An amitié amoureuse? Here Louise treated me with the utmust tact, generosity, and respect. She did so by warning me alrnost at once of what she called 'a psychic flaw' which had to do with her relation to her mother. . . . Any relationship with a woman, not purely fiïendship, risked bringing back trauma. She was deeply and no doubt rightly a h i d " (2 19).

9 Psychological studies of the experience of the double indicate that, when women see their own doubles, they tend to see it in masculine form (Coates 4).

Chapter 2, Page 3 1

dislike of other womm poets (1 6 10). Deborah Pope speaks for many when she describes its

"unrelieved bittemess toward gender" which "epitornizes the worst h d of isolation" (1 58). Few

critics have followed Christine Colosurdo's advice and been willing to experience the act of

reading as a "discovery of subversive drama," ready to piece together his or her own "ploty' of

women7s destiny fiom the contradictory actions presented (342).

Ironically, then, we return to the issue of anthologization and how reading practices

which encourage the isolation of lyrics fiom their contexts can result in misunderstanding and

uninformed evaluations. Bogan's reputation has tended to rest on a fiagmented, patched-together

picture of her as the writer of poems as different as "Medusa" and "Women," both of which were

written before she had reached the age of 25. But, as Bowles has suggested, a poem such as

"Wornen" sureIy "deserves to be read, not as an isolated poem in an anthology, but in the context

of a lifelong quest for expression" (5). Xt is evidence of emotional development over time which

Bogan herself looked for in her reviews of other poets. Of Ernily Dickinson, she said "the poet's

progress is Iike a mystic's"; "the poems show a clear line of development" 96,90). Wallace

Stevens demonstrates his c'continuing meative energy plus constancy of aim" in his 1954

Collected Poems; Stephen Spender's Collected Poems (1955) make it "clear that he has

developed over tirne" and "persevered in becoming emotionally centred and artistically

respons&le." Bogan was not ïnterested in confession or exposure, however. The "later carping"

in Robert Frost's Collected Poems "should never have appeared" (160). Rainer Maria Rilke's

belief that "egoism and childish revolt must be silenced" was one Bogan also espoused 354).

In 1940, she remarked of W.H. Auden that "this poet is not yet al1 of a piece; the development,

naturally, is still going on" a 24 Feb 1940,70); five years tater, she applauds his achievement

in his Collected Poetrv, for he "%as managed, in this collection, by skillful arrangement and

deletion, to present himself to the reader as he exists at this moment. He does not draw attention

Chapter 2. Page 32

to his growing pains or take us step by step through stage after stage of his development"

40)- Bogan's praise of Auden's "skillfiil arrangement and deletion" demonstrates her

appreciation of the poet's effort to create what Fraistat calls a "contexture," the larger whole

which is more than the s m of the parts of the individual lyrics which are its composite units.

She called A.E. Housman's Collected Poems a '%beautifid and fmely planned volume" 16

Mar 1940,96) and congratulated William Carlos Williams on the organization of his Comvlete

Collected Poems: "The delightful early poerns, long out of print, and the later sharp, clean vers

libre go together very well. The clinical candour of Williams' work cornes through remarkably

and adds up to a solid whole" (NY 19 Nov 1939,92).

Bogan believed that the challenge of achieving a body of work which is both emotionally

authentic - demonstrative of a maturing personality - and appropriately minimalist and defuied

was particulady daunting for a woman poet. The Collected Poems of Genevieve Taggard did not

impress her, despite the inclusion of many fme poems. 'Wiss Taggard's poetic personality is

mercurial," Bogan comrnents, "and her language floats upon it so that the total effect of this

collection is a blur" 5 Nov 1938'72). Laura Riding's self-importance brought out Bogan's

impatience and with it her devastating, understated wit: "She has been called by Auden, she

says, 'the only living philosophical poet.' Of Miss Riding as philosopher, the present reviewer is

ill-equipped to judge. Of Miss Riding as poet, 1 should Say that although intelligent and

purposefùl, she seldom if ever exists" (NY 24 Dec 1938,52). The book "is an imposing one"

which incorporates admirable surrealist illustrations, Bogan ingenuously concludes. While

sympathetic with Edna Millay's "dangerous lot" as "charming, romantic public poet," Bogan

chastizes her for continuing to write the same kinds of poems she wrote in her youth into the

middle of her career. She pauses to reflect on the special difficulties faced by an aging woman

poet, then - evidently fiustrated - to direct herself and al1 women to follow the challenge of

Chapter 2, Page 33

Dickinson, who held fast and descriied her fi-îght even as she advanced into the terror and

anguish of her destiny:

It is difIlcuIt to Say what a woman poet should concern herself with as she grows older, because woman poets who have produced an impressively b u l b body of work are few. But is there a ~ y reason to believe that a woman's spiritual fibre is less sturdy than a man's? 1s it not possible for a woman to corne to terrns with herself; to withdraw herself more and more, as time goes on, her own personality from the productions; to stop childish fears of death and eschew channing rebellions against facts? 299)

Bogan has been criticized for differentiating between the natural talents of women and

men; as she herself said, "to separate the work of wornen writers fiom the work of men is,

naturally, a highly unfeminist action" a 43 1-32). But hm important purpose as a female artist

struggling to achieve and maintain her integrity was to better understand herself and her fellow

writers, in relation to the past as well as the future tradition in literature, In her 1947 essay, "The

Heart and the Lyre," she undertook to examine "the rise and development of female poetic

talent" in order to bnng to light "various tniths concerning the worth and scope of wornen's

poetic gi%" (PA 424). "The earlier histow of women poets in America should stand as a

waxning to modem young women of talent," she said, critical of what she saw to be a

predorninance of affectation and stale conventionaliîy. In the earIy twentieth century, however,

wrïters such as Gertrude Stein, H.D., and Marianne Moore have dernonstrated a bold

experimentation with fonn and language. What, then, now? "Young women writing poeiry at

present are likely to consider the figure of the woman poet as romantic rebel rather ridiculous

and outmoded" and are thus "moving toward an imitation of certain masculine 'trends' in

conternporary poetry," "imitating . . . the work of male verbalizers and poetic logicians, rather

than the work of men who have carried through, out of a profound urgency, majorpuetic

investigations" 427, ernphasis mine). Bogan laments that they seem to fear a regression into

typical romantic attitudes, an 'hhealthy impulse" because it negates the intensiw of women's

Chapter 2. Page 34

emotions which is the key to their character. Auden, Bogan had once remarked, "is weakest in a

statement of direct personal intensity" 24 Feb 1940,70), but poets such as Millay, Elinor

Wylie, Sara Teasdale, and Léonie Adams have helped to ensure that the emotional chamels of

literature remain open (- 428). Bogan points out that Moore's writing "becornes progressively

warmer" in its later phases, allowing the poet's sympathies to come more directly into view. In

Moore's Collected Poems (1951) we fmd distilled "not only a picture of human Iife bu t an

interpretation of human expenence" ("Reading" 62).

While Cary Nelson may have resisted the reductive cntical tendency to equate important

modem poetry with the long poern, he daims that the new anthology is the f ist to provide fiil1

coverage of "the central American tradition of long poems and poem sequences" (xxx).

Interestingly, however, his treatment of Emily Dickinson does not achowledge the importance

of sequencing in her work Rosenthal and Ga1 argue that our understanding of the poet has

drarnatically increased after the publication of R.W. Franklin's edition of her collected poems

because it preserves the ordering of the lyrics Dickinson herself intended, as demonstrated by the

fascicles, booklets of four to seven folded sheets sewn together. "That Emily Dickinscm had

something like sequences in mind is the rnost natural of conjectures," they claim. "After all, we

do have the evidence of her own groupings" (47). Reading a lyric in sequence is fundamentaliy

different fkom reading the Iyric as independent, explains Sharon Cameron in her study lof the

fascicles, pointing out that suppression of the context in Dickinson criticism over the ysars has

resulted in an understanding of her poems "as enigmatic, isolated, culturally incomprehensible

phenomena" (19). "To see a poem contextualized by a fascicle is sometimes to see that it has an

altogether different, rather than only a relationally more complex, rneaning when it is read in

sequence rather than as an isolated lyric" (32).

Chapter 2, Page 35

The idea that some poerns which function perfectly weI1 as distinct lyrics are not

completely understood until read in "contexty' is not a new one, nor is its application confuied to

modern literature. Matthew Santirocco begins his study of unity and design in Horace's odes by

justifyïng the methodology of "consideration of poems in their published order" for it

"reproduces their effect on the ancient audience, for whom the physical format of the papyrus

roll necessitated such a sequential reading" and as well "respects the intention of their author,

who is reasonably assumed . . . to have put them in this order in the first place" (12)." Modemist

writers such as Bogan and Pound admired their classical predecessors for the economy, elegance,

and craftsmanship of their verse, fiirther appreciating the psychological depths and obscure

tensions evident, for exarnple, in the love lyrics of Catullus (Lind xxvi-xxvii), Greek and Latin

poets often wrote poems in sequence with an underlying, implied narrative, though according to

Paul Allen Miller a qualitative break took place with the writings of Catullus, which marked the

birth of the lyric collection. Miller argues that the lyric collection spawned lyric consciousness

as we know it, that the highly self-reflexive subjective consciousness we associate with Iyric is

only possible in a culture of w-riting because .the nature of the relation between speaker and

auditor has changed to that between writer and reader. The claim of Rosenthal and Gall that the

poetic sequence is a distinctive genre of the modern period is unfounded, Miller concludes; "the

modem poetic sequence does not represent a new genre, but the lyric genre per se, though as it

exists under modem conditions of subjectivity" (6).

The lyric collection as poetic sequence has proven a particularly useful critical constnict

for readers of Romantic poetry. Discussion of the Romantic lyric has typically treated the short

poem as an autonomous entity, in traditions as different as Victorian criticism and the New

Criticism, but emphasis has shifted in recent years, according to Tilottama Rajan, who argues

'O See also the discussions of Horace's Iyric sequencing by David H. Porter and Michéle Lowrie.

Chopter 2, Page 36

that "lyric is increasingly absorbed into larger structures which place it within a world of

differences."

The interdiscursive nature of the Romantic lyric problematizes the mode by revealing the traces of another voice. within the seerningly autonomous lyric voice. For instance, Blake's Songs and Wordsworth's Lvrical BalIads are collections of short poems spoken by different personae . . . . The collection inevitably forces us to read the individual poem as part of a network of differences, and to consider it in terms of its paradigmatic and syntagmatic relationships with other poerns in the collection. (195)

Rajan descnïes "pure lyric'' as a "monological forrn," whereas narrative and drama "are set in

the space of difference" (196). She ciairns that the Romantic poets came to find the pure lyric

too lirniting in its private subjectivity and thus contextualized it, fiaming it in narrative stnictures

(as in Wordsworth's Prelude) or yoking it with drarna (as in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound).

Neil Fraistat prefaces The Poem and the Book, his authoritative work on the subject of the poetic

volume as an integral unit, by citing Coleridge's description of the individual poerns of Lvrical

Ballads "as stanzas" of an ode and his admiration for Shakespeare's "extraordinary sonnets"

which "form, in fact, a poem of so rnany stanzas of fourteen Iines each" (ix). Like Rajan, Fraistat

offers evidence that the Romantic poets self-consciously ordered - and often re-ordered - their

volumes to create complex effects, Both cite the exampIe of William Blake, who experirnented

with a variety of meanings produced by differing patterns of organization in his Son~rs of

Innocence and Songs of Experience.

Fraistat considers as precursors to the mode Dante's La Vita Nuova and Petrarch's

sonnet sequence. The Petrarchan paradigm had implications for succeeding poetic collections

whether or not they were designed as sonnet cycles, he suggests, because it had shown

defmitiveIy how a collection of diverse poems might aspire toward the compIexity and variety of

a long poem (10). Fraistat quotes Edgar Allan Poe's farnous contention about Paradise Lost that

Chapter 2. Page 3 7

"what we te- a long poem is in effect, merely a succession of brief ones,"" and goes on to

suggest that the identification by Rosenthal and Gall of the poetic sequence as the "major modem

genre" in English poetry has blurred M e r the distinction of the long poem kom the Iinked

series. By grouping together such diverse works as Dickinson's fascicles and Eliot's Waste

Land, these critics have made it more it difficult to differentiate between a long poem and a well-

integrated aggregate (10). Fraistat coins the t e m "contexture" to denote the larger whole

fabricated which formed whenever organizes discrete poetic texts .

into a collection, then quotes FIoyd Allport's theory of dynamic structuring to explain that the

relatively stable "inside" meaning of the individual units in the aggregate must be read against

the shifbg, less permanent "outside" meaning of the structure (4, 1 1). The "outside" meaning of

the poems increases in rough proportion to the poet's efforts to unifi his or her coIIection.

[The poet] may accomplish this, as we have seen, by carefulIy arranging poems - compatible in subject, theme, image, or voice - or through any number of additional rneans, including the choice of an appropriate title or epigraph; the composition of poems or prose specifically to preface, open, or close the book; and the use of poetic or prose Iinks between the poems- Perhaps the strongest forma1 unity is achieved when the poems of a contexture are organized so that each 'follows' logically or temporally from the

" In his essay "The Poetic Principle," Poe claims that his "principal purpose" is to cite several "minor English or American poems" which suit his own taste.

By "minor poems" 1 mean, of course, poerns of little length. And here, in the begïnning, permit me to say a few words in regard to a somewhat peculiar principle, which, whether rightfklly or wrongfully, has always had its hiluence in my own critical estimate of the poem. 1 hold that a long poem does not exist 1 maintain that the phrase, "a long poem," is simply a flat contradiction in tenns" (568).

The reason, says Poe, has to do with the necessary "degree of excitement" one expects of a poem: "The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement. But al1 excitements are, through a psychal necessity, transient That degree of excitement which would entitle a poem to be so called at all, cannot be sustained throughout a composition of any great 1engi.h." "Paradise Losf" therefore, should be regarded as "a series of minor poems," Poe decnes "epic mania," the literary judgement promoted by the Quarterly Reviews, which rneasure poets by the "cubic foot" and misguidedly value above al1 "sustained effort:" "Surely there can be nothing in mere sue, abstractly considered - there can be nothing in mere bulk, so far as a volume is concerne& which has so continuously elicited admiration fiom these satuniine pamphlets!" (570).

Chapcer 2. Page 38

other: presenting a plot, advancing an argument, or appearing in some pattern of serial arrangement (e.g, calendrical, liturgical, nurnerological). In such arrangements, the 'inner' energy of each poem is displaced 'outward,' and an identifiably unified, progressive structure is generated throughout the collection. (12)

Fraistat warns, however, of the danger to the reader of imposing neat, arbitrary patterns of unity

on the mass of complex data which is a poetic contexture. Not only must we take care not to be

diverted from the primary experience of the poetry, but we shodd be aware that the articulation

of any pattern in a book will inevitably be at the expense of other, perhaps equally conceivable,

schemes (14). We must be open to the ultimate indeterminacy of sequences, for one of their

most prominent features is the opening up of spaces between poems. Cameron suggests that, in

the case of Emily Dickinson, the sequences illustrate the uncontainability of what is being

represented. Since the appearance of the Franklin edition of the poerns there has been a .

hstrating lack of "usehl cornmentary," says Cameron, explaining that "one of the reasons the

few existing theones about the fascicles have been so unsatis@ing is that they variously attempt

to account for the fascicles as if they had a single discemible principle or order - for example, a

love story."" In fact, to place Dickinson's poems in the context of other lyric sequences "does

not impIy that we should read her poerns only in sequence, or even rnainly in sequence, rather

than as isolated lyrics" (39).13 Close study of Dickinson's methods leads us instead to conclude

'" Cameron cites Ruth Miller (The Poetry of Emilv Dickinson), William H, Schurr (The Marriarre of Emilv Dickinson: A Studv of the Fascicles), and Rosenthal and Gd. A more recent example is Dorothy Haus Oberhaus' Ernilv Dickinson's Fascicles: Method and Meaning, which takes the fortieth and final booklet and discovers "deep stnictural and thematic unity" beneath the surface. "The key to discovering this unity is in the poems" allusions to the Bible, their allusions to one another and to preceding fascicles, and their echoes of the Christian meditative tradition," Oberhaus argues. "This intertextuality forms a network of signds leading the reader to discover that the fortieth fascicle is a carefully constructed poetic sequence and the triumphant conclusion of a long single work, the account of a spiritual and poetic pilgrimage that begins with the first fascicle's h t poem" (3).

13 Interestingly, Dickie sees no indication at al1 of narrative in Dickinson's work, but she does see the ego of the poet as the iuiifting factor of ali the poems. lyric speakers have no narrative continuity, no social viability, no steadfast identity. Ln their squandering, melodrama, and excesses, dey express an individuality that resists fînal representation and the control that signif~es. Yet Dickinson's lyric

Chaprer 2, Page 39

that the poet herself was uncertain how they were to be read, says Cameron, that ultimately she

"re fùsed to make up her rnind." Santirocco agrees that the reader 's task of discerning the

relations of lyrics in sequence and the reasons for their ordering is far fiom straightfolward-

.Horace, for example, was farniliar "with many methods of arrangement and relied on no one of

them exclusively,"

Thus, the reader must be constantly alert to a wide variety of possiïbilities - to relationships based on contrast as well as similarity, to dynamic movements as well as static patterns, to groupings of contiguous poems and linkages among poems widely separated in the collection. Most importantly, the reader must be attuned to the vanous and ever-shifting criteria on which these larger designs are founded - not just meter,

- theme, and addressee, but interna1 structure, imagery, and that vague but crucial quality, tone- (12)

Miller's chapter on Catullus compares competing readings of two poems which interpret the

rneaning of the sequence such that two different narratives emerge. There is no need, he

suggests, to decide between them, for "Each poem can fit into a variety of narratives, no one of

which is necessarily the single correct one, but al1 of which have as their centre the projection of

an ego which exists in and between the individual poems themselves, and which is the true

ground of al1 these potential narratives" (74).

The reader can react to Miller's contention that the projection of the poet's ego

constitutes the reconciling tenitory of apparent conflicting interpretative readings of sequences

with either relief or despair. In the spaces between the poems which Carneron points to in

Dickinson's sequences we can discern the poet's absence as well as her presence, an uncanny

doubling which exploits expectations as it disorients. There is white space, hesitation,

discontinuity, hence mystery. Anne Ferry has demonstrated, for example, the complex effects

presentation of a self that obstmcts narrative reading because it is discontinuous, profligate, and excessive may be the nineteenth century's rnost revolutionary expression of individuality" (Lwic 29).

Chapter 2, Page 40

generated by the play between a poem's title and its text. Separated fkom the text but associated

with it, the title irnplies the presence of someone (the titler) "privy to information the poem itself

omits, or to secrets it hides or merely hints at" (2). In her study of Dickinson as a gothic writer,

Daneen Wardrop anticipates criticism of the "seeming unorthodoxy" of applying to poetry a

theory usually reserved for fiction, arguing that "genre confusion" prevalent in the twentieth

century has prevented consideration of the "gothic Dickinson."

Fiction for the most part concentrates on gothic content; lyric poetry concentrates on gothic content and gothic form. It is not that lyric poetry cannot create haunting texts; it is that poetry already has so many gaps and Geists of form (syntax, grarnmar, etc.) that we sometirnes fail to recognize the haunted content when we find it there. . . . It is when spectres happen on both Ievels of poetry, the syntax fiactured and the images haunted, the form inspiritkg the content, that we need to take especial notice. (18)

The linking of poerns into sequences and resulting multiplication of "gaps and Geists of fonn"

has M e r promoted the "genre confiision" of twentieth-century criticism. Commenting on D.H.

Lawrence's lack of respect for the formal boundaries of lyric, composing his "bits" (his term for

his poems) in groups rather than singly, Holly Laird notes that "the poetry presents a problem of

specification or taxonomy: What is the proper unit of analysis?" (vii) How do we talk about

poetry and narrative together? Clare Regan Kinney maintains that poetic narrative has largely

been ignored in studies of "narrative fiction"; even the terminology has evolved to deal with

prose constructions. Kinney sees a "two-way dialogue" taking place between the matter and the

manner of poetic content, noting that we should not underestimate the role of the distriiution of a

poem across a page in directing our experience (9, 11). Ferry's suggestion that the titling of

poems provides an implicit temporal as well as spatial fiame, "because the title is placed in an

introductory position, to be read before the text" (3)' leads naturally to consideration of the larger

temporal context created by titled poems in sequence. Michèle Lowrie, who argues that "lyric

ways of malcing sense are essentially antithetical to narrative ways of rnaking sense" (13),

Chapler 2, Page 41

prefaces her discussion of the sequencing of Horace's odes by explaining the necessity of

engaging "in a lyrïc manner of reading: by fitting together units of sense at al1 levels, from the

srnallest, the word, through the lxger sentences and stanzas to individual odes, to books and

collections" (4).

Contrary to a narrative whose aim is to get the story told - a transparent ideal existing only in theory (if there) - l w c narrative throws up obstacles to sense-making. Pre- eminent among the obstacles is lyric form: the stanza, the metre, the very texture of the language directs attention toward the signifier. The repetition of basic units such as the stanza within poerns and the recurrence of metres as we read fiom poem to poem keeps the linear rime of narrative from moving forward, In contrast to such circularity, the fïnality of the ends of stanzas, poems, books, and collections, creates multiple breaks that set provisional closure on sense again and again. Lyric keeps fkagmenting any monolithic namative sense. Our task is to address the problem of discontinuity at al1 levels in the attempt to see to a whole, which, 1 believe, does have a consistency beyond the interna1 contradictions of its constituent parts. (4)

In a recent study of the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Daniel Schwarz insists that immanent in the

telling of a lyric is a necessary and probable plot, that '%e respond to even the most lyrical and

abstract poem as a narrative which organizes at least the gerrn of a story" (3). The issue of

narrative brings with it the implication of distance from the lyric first-person speaker, and .thus

the suggestion of other personalities or characters. Stevens, argues Schwarz, "imagined the act

of creation as a dialogue between various personae, including those that he had created in prior

poems" (6). "We might think of groups of Stevens's poerns as a dialogue in which discrete

poems speak to one another7' (10). Timothy Austin wonders why linguistic anaiysis should be

applied only to novels and not poetxy, for despite the latter's "genre-specific intensity" the reader

responds to the words as if to speech, even as the poet has imbued the irnplied conversation with

"vivid significance" in the compression necessitated by the form (29, 166). Rajan's suggestion

that we be attuned to the dialogism of Romantic lyrics because o f their contextualization in

narrative and dramatic structures opens up the possibility that volumes of lyrics contain "traces

Chapter 2, Page 42

of another voice," possibly several others, while simultaneously functioning as expected as an

extension and voice of the poet.

M.H. Abrams defined the Romantic lyric as a "sustained colloquy, sometirnes with [the

speaker] himself or with the outer scene, but more fkequently with a silent human auditor, present

or absent" (527); the distinctively rornantic lyric is like "one side of a dialogue," agreed Robert

Langbaum, '%th the other side understood by its effect" (53). Langbaum's study of the

development of the clramatic monologue fùelled critical interest in the relation of the self-

conscious, questioning rornantic lyric. to the popular nineteenth-century forrn as well as to the

experiments of the Modernists. M.M. Bakhtin's writings and reader-response criticism have

- further changed our understanding of the.dynamics of poetic texts.I4 Bakhtin concemed hirnself

primarily with novels, which he saw to be the true "dialogic" Iiterary forrn, but his theories have

been applied to poetry by cntics resistmt to genenc distinctions.15 The extent to which the

"silent auditor" is a manifestation of the speaker's own divided consciousness versus a true

social "other," that is, how "distinct" the implicated voices of the lyric are, is a matter of critical

debate.I6 Further, again with the focus primarily on narrative and thus prose fiction, the notion of

the split self in literature of the nineteenth- and twentieth- centuries has been discussed in

psychoanalytic terrns, beginning with Freud himself who comrnented on ''the tendency of modem

writers to split up their ego by self-observation into many component egos, and in this way to

personify the conflicting trends in their own mental life in many heros" (cited by Diment, 6).

14 Carla Kaplan comments that the project of literary criticism today seerns to have "become synonymous with a search for the 'dialogic': identimg multivocality or 'heteroglossia,' documenting a text's multiple discourses and the 'cacophony and disorder' between hem, discovering conflicting discourses"; some critics argue that aU reading strives for a conversation (1 1).

'* See, for example, Kinney (192-93).

l6 See Michael Macovski's discussion (13).

Chaprer 2. Page 43

Freud descriibed the motif of the double in literature - marked by "a doubling, dividing and

interchmging of the self' - as one of the most cornrnon themes of the uncanny, that which is at

once heimlich (homely, familiar) and unheimlich (un-hornely, that which should remain secret

but which comes to light). Interestingly, Freud associates the double with childhood and youth:

"The figure of the double excites an "extraordinarily strong feeling of something uncanny"

whîch arises fiom our identification of it to a very early mental stage, "a stage, incidentally, at

which it wore a more f i endy aspect" ('cUncanny" 236)-

In her discussion of what she calls the autobiographical novel of CO-consciousness, Galya

Diment describes the experïmentation of Virginia WooLfand James Joyce with the fictional split

self: their two protagonists are surrogates for older or younger selves. To the Linhthouse and

Ulvsses thus "circumvent the long but selective chronological van of a bildungsroman in order

to compress the action into a much shorter yet, in many ways, rnuch more complete 'moment of

being"' (5). As a result, there is an uncanny sense of simultaneity and circularity in the kirid of

story which is typically Iinear and progressive. It has been said that modern poetry is read

spatially rather than temporally,17 yet the perception of the uncanny between the pages implies

an underlying narrative. As well, the encornter of the speaker of the Romantic lyric with an

"other" is an encounter with uncertainS, with "contradiction, conflict, and problematic

alternatives," an aporia; it is inconclusive, leading to dissociation and estrangement rather than

accord and reconciliation (McGann as cited by Macovski, 16). Individual lyrics tend to be static,

bounded, but lyrics in sequence invite connections, leaps across the white spaces, which promote

a sense of story. Voices engaged in an irnplied exchange promote continuity. OAen, however,

we do not have the sense of going anywhere, or - if we do - the insistence of the narrative and

dramatic movement is on repetition rather than progression. The philosophical process of

" See Joseph Frank, The Idea of Spatial Form.

Chapter 2, Page 44

'%ecomingy' does not end, but is continual regeneration; the rhetorical form of dialogue, which

perpetuates itself through continual repulsions and attractions, is open-ended (Macovski 16-1 7).

Schwarz argues that the story we piece together kom an embedded narrative within the late lyrics

of Wallace Stevens '5s the radical centre" of a "narrative of contiming agon arnong three

elements; the poet's loneliness, his response to phenornena, and his reshaping imagination"

(21 9). Exarnining the poetic narrative strategies of T.S. Eliot, Kinney finds that, "even as

Waste Land offers the reader fhgmentary, half-buried glimpses of a goal-directed plot, it unfolds

- in a manner that partakes less of lineariw than of restatement and complication. One does not so

much pass on fiom a given action or situation as repeat it." There is a sense of "endless

. recapituIation, of travelling over the same territory but exarnining it iiom different perspectives"

(169).18 Miller's argument that the ego of the.poet forms the centre of al1 potential narratives

arising fkom the interpretation of the poems in series leads us to the speculation that lyric

. sequences can be read as disguised, or displaced, autobiographïcal statements. The story whkh

emerges is bound up with what Freud caIIs the "egodisturbance" of the author, in the fonn of a

Bildungsroman, a tracing of the artist's development associated by definition with prose fiction.

Laird demonstrates in her study of Lawrence how "If the novelist could be something of

a poet, the poet could also be a novelist, creating a narrative fiamework for his Collected Poems,

which could have carried the subtitle 'The Life of a Poet"'(174). Lawrence's verse arguments

possess only an implied beginning and end, and are instead circular, "a perpetually repeated

series of contests, setting a pattern that evades patterning" (viii). The poet tells a "series of

Stones . . . about hirnself' in his successive volumes of verse which repeat the familiar motif in

l 8 See aiso John T. Mayer, T. S. Eliot's Silent Voices. Mayer argues that Eliot's early poetry is "about the dialectics of self-consciousness," the indirect depiction of an "interior quest." "In Eliot," he says, "the drama is in the uncertainty and the ambiguity of the task"; "the confliciing forces are the silent voices through which the mind hears the possibilities and obstacles confionting it" (ix, 15, 14).

Chapter 2. Page 45

Lawrence's work of a new self emerging fiom the old: "Old and new selves are antagonistic to

each other, but there is conflict as well between the new self s halves" (viii). Lawrence's poems

are largely ignored by scholars of modemism, Laird says, because they are embarrassingly

autobiographical. Yet we could also descriie the poetry of W.B. Yeats in those terrns. Yeats's

sequential volumes of poerns recorded the stages of his life, detailing, for example, his enduring

passion for Maud Gonne- But the egotism of Yeats's writing is less jarring. As Frank Kermode

explains, Yeats worked through his Romantic understanding of the artist's relation to the

circumstances of his own life. Our conception of the Romantic poet is that he (certainly not she)

stands outside of the joys and sorrows of daily living in order to achieve the necessary distance --

for contemplation, and yet whose work is insubstantial if he remains isolated in a dream world:

. he is a hero whose existence is both special and inconsequential. In Yeats' work, we h d the .

perpetual struggle of a poet necessarily divided against himself attempting to reconcile vision

with being (28). Richard Ellman says that Yeats "spent much of his life attempting to understand

the deep contradictions within his mind . . . . to fuse or to separate the several characters by

whom he felt himself to be peopled." He felt a sense of responsibility which "drove him to seek

always for patterns and pictures, and to hack and hew at his life until it reached the parabolical

meaningfiilness he found necessary" (2). We c m trace Yeats' development through the several

volumes of his poems, fkom The Wanderinns of Oisin through The Wind amona the Reeds, The

Green Helrnet. Resuonsihilities, and The Wild Swans at Coole. Kermode notes an increasingly

autobiographical content in the later poems, justified by the need to examine the reIation of

process to product, of dying generations to bronze and marble (90).

The iife circumstances of the writer working in the Romantic tradition, including

Modemists like Lawrence and Yeats, can acquire a symbolic content which render them

admissible to the work of art. Even T.S. Eliot, who insisted that the suffering behind the work is

Chapter 2. Page 46

a private ziffair and no business of the reader's, allowed his own spiritual movement from despair

to conversion a narrative to underlie his oeuvre. Certainly Bogan read such a movement in

Eliot's work Reviewing Eliot's Collected Poems in 1936, she remarked that "at last" the Iater

poems have been joined to the early ones:

So the record, up to now, of the poet who has changed the accent of poetry ~vritten in our period is at last completely available to us. We can trace Eliot's "horror of a Iife without faith" £kom its first complete statement in "Gerontion," through its elaboration in "The Waste Land," to its logical conclusion in "Sweeney Agonistes." "Sweeney Agonistes," still a fragment and Iikely to remain one, twitching to music-hall rhythms, reduced men and women to gargoyles who gibbered in a world where even the comparative nobility of despair was not possible. Faith began to starnmer in "The HoIlow Men," and from that point on, Eliot's belief mounts beyond his irony and pessirnism, not in an unbroken line, .

but in a line renewed when broken. It is now possible to read the beautifil poems of the transition period ("Journey of the Magi" through "Difficulties of a Statesman") in their proper order, as well as the latest brief lyrics, the nonsense rhymes, and the Fine "Choruses h m 'The Rock' " The last poem in the coiIection, "Bunit Norton," rather long and, cornpared to the crisp early poems, rather vaporous, brings the later phase to conclusion that resolves on a note of balanced calm and even a mild sort of joy. @A 2 07)

Read on its own, "Sweeney Agonistes" is a hgment; understood in context, it expresses the

"logical conclusion" of Eliot's spintual descent. Three years later, Bogan said of The Family

Reunion that it "presents an integrated Eliot . . . . It is no srnaII feat to surround and examine an

early phase of the self by means of a Iater one" (108).

Like Eliot, Bogan was concerned that the artist's personality should not intrude, yet also

like him she allowed the implication of its development to inform the body of her work.

Following Yeats, she chose to make poetry out of her "quarrel" with herself. In Yeats, said

Bogan, we can trace "the continually enriched and undeviating course of an inspired man, fiom

earliest youth to age" 447). Yeats attained and held to "That difficult balance, almost

impossi'ble to strike, between the artist's austerity and 'the reveries of the cornrnon heart' -

between the proud passions, the proud intellect, and consuming action" (456). Bogan's career

Chap fer 2, Page 47

also is told in her poems, the successive volumes of lyrics demonstrating her lifelong struggle as

- a.fernale poet to achieve both iiterary success and integrity of self. The story is not one of

progression; rather, it circles and backtracks in the telling, its changing voices shrill or oracular,

proud or asharned. Maturity is won at great cost, is both the goal achieved and profound loss:

the ear1y phase of the self is repeatedly examined by means of a later one- In a commentary

about her poem "Zone," Bogan explained that it 'kas written in the late 30's in a transitional

period both of my outer circumstances and my central beliefs" and expresses "some reflection of

those relentless universal laws under which we live - which we must not only accept, but in

- some manner, forgive - as well as the fact of the human courage and faith necessary to that

acceptame" ("Zone" 3 3 -34).

Bogan was against the introduction into literary criticism of "extraneous matter of one

kind or another, concerning the poet," and yet we have seen that in her own reviews she reserved

her highest praise for those writers who demonstrated in their work an evolving rnahirity. A

determined Modemist, she yet recognized herself to be cblood-sistery7 to the Romantics (LBP)).I9

.This study is not an attempt to understand the poems in relation to the life, a strategy regrettably

undertaken by many of Bogan's admirers. The territory of Bogan's childhood, uneasy

relationship with her mother, and difficult marriages has been astonishingly weli traveled in the

last twenty years considering the general geography of critical neglect. Rather, 1 try to take into

account the psychic processes of the maturing artist engaged in a "major poetic investigation,"

considering the successive volumes within the overall context of the "story" that is the Iife, the

Bildungsrornan. The difference in focus is perhaps subtle, but important. Again within the

context of a review of Edna Millay's work, and thus with the circumstances and difficulties faced

I9 Box 21, Foider 1, Notebook (April 11, 1933 - June 8, 1935). The cited entry faiis within a sequence that must be 1934.

Chapter 2. Page 48

by a female poet uppermost in her mind, Bogan probes the connection of an artist's being with

the artist's work in the twentieth century:

The phenornenon of conversion in the artist has increased in frequency and desperate intention within our time. In any period, at maturity, the break between the artist's early instinctive adjustment or lack of adjustment to a limiting world, and his later and more conscious and rational choices, bred out of experience, must be accomplished- The poet, particularly, as he matures, is faced with the anîagonîsms of cornplexity and loss: if he is capable of any growth he has more intimations to synthesize and more disorganization to bear, while comforting delusion sofiens the brutality of each new crisis, as it arïses, with lessened power. ("Conversion" 67)

For Bogan, the achievement of "conversion into self' was the ultimate accomplishment for the

woman-poet, the evocation in her work of emotional distance traveled her greatest contribution

as a poet-woman.

Chapter 3: "A Housefiil of Mien Voices:" Dramatic Tellings and Retellings in Bodv of This Death

If it were permissiïble to personify the unconscious, we might cal1 it a collective human being combining the characteristics of both sexes, transcending youth and age, birth and death . . . . Unfortunately - or mther let us Say, fortunately - this being dreams . . . . The collective unconscious, moreover, seems not to be a person, but something like an unceasing Stream or perhaps an ocean of images and figures which drift into consciousness in our drearns or in abnormal states of mind.

C.G. Jung, "The Basic Postulates of Analytic Psychology"

The modem poet rarely appears before us in person; the 'TT or frrst-person-singular standpoint is now the exception rather than the nile. Browning, in his dramatic monologues, began this tendency of the poet to adopt a disguise or assume a mask, in order to project what was at tirnes a purely persona1 emotion. Modem poets avoid the fiontal attack; they prefer the oblique maneuver . . . . With a varïety of technical means at their cornrnand, poets can now describe not o d y the physical world about them but the psychic world within them and interpret in the most subtle manner the events of thcse worlds.

Louise Bogan, "Reading Contemporary Poetry"

The publication of Bodv of This Death in 1923, when Louise Bogan was just twenty-six,

instantly rnarked her as a talent - if, indeed, a female one. Allen Tate's assessrnent summanzed

the critical response: Bodv of This Death, "a slight but almost perfect exhibit, announced the

most accomplished wornan poet of the time" ("Amencan" 84). As Martha Collins notes in her

cornments about the book's reception, reviewers knew of Bogan's work already fiom its

appearance in magazines such as Others; Bodv of This Death marked the culmination of a

"considerable period of productivity" begun when the poet was only fourteen (1). Yet while the

book was celebrated for its eloquence and stark beauty, its crafted power, it was also regarded as

obscure, difficult, compressed to the point of implosion. In his review in Poetr~ (Chicago),

Robert L. Wolf remarks on Bogan's "extraordinary econorny": "each word is pregnant with such

extreme intensity that she has not woven language that will bear the burden," he contends (337).

Mark Van Doren praises the book's "pure poetry," but adrnits "it is impossible to say what it is

she has said" - one mut , he finds, resort to the image (30). Llewelyn Jones concurs, concluding

Chapter 3, Page 50

his admiring review with some advice for the reader who "may fmd that some of Miss Bogan's

poems are recondite, This is because she has written some of her poems of b e r experience in a

natural syrnbolism instead of directly; in a sort of dream imagery" (29).

Several early reviewers judged the book to be small (fewer than 30 short lyrics) and the

subject matter limited, assuming its definitive scope to be a woman's experience with sexual

love.' Most readers found and continue to h d the poems obscure, some more recent ones being

"less certain what Bogan's poems were actually about," according to Collins, who States

regretfully that "even the most astute critics" failed to notice "the gradua1 shift of emphasis in the

book fiom the difficulties of love to the triumph of poetry" (2,3). Collins's remark is insightfbl,

but implies a sirnplicity of purpose and movement defied by the compIex structure, variety of

speaking voices, and contradictory pronouncements of Body of This Death. I suggest that the

effect of this lyric sequence is of an "ocean of images and figures," a dream experienced by

Jung's "collective human being" who transcends gender, age, and mortality.' Within such

"natural symbolism" Bogan sets the stniggle of the female poetic personality seeking to

fomulate itself. Edrnund Wilson argues in Axel's Castle that modem democratic society and

the ascendancy of scientific ideas imposed a combination of obscurity and determined self-

definition on a serious lyricist writing in the eady twentieth centwy.3 "It was easy for the lyric

poet, fiorn Wyatt's age to Waller's, to express himselfboth directly and elegantly, because he

was a courtier. . . whose speech combined the candor and naturalness of conversation among

' Wolf, for example, summed up the "material of the book" as "in syrnbol or simple fact, the love experience of a modem woman" (335).

Sharon Cameron contends that "Lyric speech might be descriied as the way we would talk in dreams if we could convert the phantasmagona there into words" ("Lyric" 207).

3 Unfortunately, Wilson did not go one step M e r and consider the peculiar alienation of the female poet in the modem era- His failure of imagination is ail the more disappointhg when one considers that it was sometime between 1920 and 1923 that he and Bogan developed their fiiendship (Frank 46), a relationship that by the following decade would becorne a very important one for both of them.

Cfiapter 3. Page 51

equals with the grace of a courtly society," Wilson says. 'But the modem poet . - . must create

for himself a speciaI personality, must maintain a state of mind, which shall shut out or remain

indifferent to many aspects of the contemporary world" (39). Wilson points to Yeats's

preoccupation in his prose writings with the mask or anti-self as a h d of imaginary personaIily,

antagonistic to the other elements in one's nature, which the poet imposes on himself (39). In

'Ter Arnica Silentia Lunae" (1917), Yeats announced rnagnificently: "We make out of the

quarrel with others rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry." Lionel Johnson and

Ernest Dowson may have been dissipated, but "they had the gravity of men who had found Me

out and were awakening fkom the dream . . . .The other self, the anti-self or the antithetical self,

as one may choose to narne it, cornes but to those who are no longer deceived, whose passion is

reality" (cited by Wilson, 44-45).

Phyllis Goldfein, reflecting onthe "compIexity of speakers" in Bodv of This Death,

draws a thoughtful cornparison with the work of Yeats (79, a view seconded by Diane

Middlebrook in her analysis of Bogan's magisterial lyric, "The Alchernist" (176): Bogan read

Rewonsibilities in 1917 and The Wild Swans at Coole in 1921; she was rereading

Responsibilities in the fa11 of 1922 when she wrote several of the poems which would be

included in her first collection (Frank, 48 and 53). In an essay entitled "The Springs of Poetry"

which appeared in The New Republic in December of 1923, Bogan wrote admiringly of the

power of Yeats' reticence, the remarkable achievement of "his later work: poems tembly

beautiful, in which the hazy adverbial quality has no place, built of sentences reduced to the

bones of noun, verb, and preposition" (9). But Yeats is not the only masculine Iiterary presence

easily discemed. The opening epigraph of Body of This Death is a quotation fkom Paul's letters,

According to Steven Matthews, "the adoption of personae" by women writers "owes much to the clramatic poetry coming down through Yeats" (1 82).

Chapter 3. Page 52

Romans, 7:24. "Who shall deliver me fiom the body of this death?" The line immediately

before this is "O wretched man that 1 am!" Bogan would have come across the phrase %ody of

this death" not only in the Bible but also in her reading of Arthur Symons' The Svmbolist

Movement in Literature:

It is the distinction of Mallarmé to have aspired after an impossible Iïberation of the sou1 of literature fiom what is fietting and constraining in "the body of that death," which is the mere literature of words. Words, he has realized, are of value only as a notation of the fiee breath of the spirit; words, therefore, must be employed with an extreme care, in their choice and adjustment, in setting them to reflect and chime upon one another; yet least of al1 for their own sake, for what they can never, except by suggestion, express. (70)

Bogan7s choice of title reflects the book's twinned concerns of person and poet, wornan and

artist. Paul, man and simer, and Mallarmé, male writer, are shadows looming over her shoulder.

Western culture is a palpable presence, an animus which - as Jung intuits - "is rather like an

assembly of fathers or dignitaries who lay down incontestable, 'rational,' ex cathedra

judgements" (178). Elizabeth Frank contends that the poems in Body of This Death echo Paul's

cry, "presenting existence as a constant struggle between flesh and spirit, desire and will, passion

and reason, and time and art" (54). Tt is curious that she doesn't uiclude gender in the list of

dichotomies. Frank, who shares with many readers of Body of This Death a puzzled resistance to

Bogan's occasional use of a male persona, aclcnowIedges that the "voice changes from poem to

poem." However, her quaIification that it rernains "richly itself7 begs the question, how so?

According to Frank, consistency is maintained by the poet's detennined distancing: "The voice,

whether attached to the poet or to an observation on meditation, speaks at a remove fiom

concrete circurnstance and context" (56).

The comment is an odd one to make about a collection of lyrics, traditionally the most

persona1 and direct of genres. Jones suggests that the reader must make the accommodation of

Chapter 3. Page 53

approaching Bogan's work in a special way, allowing for the combination of lyric and dramatic

qualities. The poem "A Tale," for example, "must be read rather for the emotional drama which

the imagery symbolizes than for any explicit story with a physical locale" ( 29). The poet shifts

perspective fiom poem to poern but the voices are al1 her own, as if différent aspects of her being

take turns interacting. The Freudian method of psychoanalysis provides a usef'l mode1 for

understanding Bogan's poetic method in this volume, incorporating as it does narrative elements

into a dialogic structure while retaining the persona1 immediacy of sequential lyrics. Bogan

would have been familiar with the relation.developed between the analyst and the analysand

(therapist and patient)' and the interactive process of constructing and reconstructing reality

which Roy Shafer compares to the working out of narrative by joint authorship, for in 1922 she

had undergone several months of psychoanalysis with Samual Tannenbaum, a Freudian known

for his treatment of other wrïters in BoganYs.sphere of acquaintance (Frank 49). Freud's clinical

dialogue alters in crucial ways the analysand's consciously narrated presentation of the self and

its history among people by destabilizing, deconstructing, and defamiliarizing it ("Reading" 1 I),

he explains, for

. . . during the analysis, the analysand's self is retold as constituted by a large, fiagmented, and fluid cast of characters: not only are aspects of the self seen to incorporate aspects of others, they are also unconsciously imaghed as having retained some or al1 of the essence of these others; that is, the self-constituents are experienced as introjects or incomplete identifications, indeed sometimes as shadowy presences of indeterminate location and origin. The problematic and incoherent self that is .

consciously told at the beginning of the analysis is sorted out, so far as possible, into that which has retained otherness to a high degree and that which has not. . . . The upshot is that what the analysand initially tells as self and others undergoes considerable revision once the initial conscious account has been worked over analytically. ("Namation" 33)

Although there is no "explicit story" in Body of This Death, there is yet the narrative suggestion

* Shafer rejects the tenninology of patient and therapist, in part because the nature of the "analytic situation" he descnibes ideally involves the analyst changing through the course of the "telhg and retelling" as weii as the analysand (33).

Chapter 3. Page 54

of a quest involving the destructive experience of passionate heterosexual love. The movement

is circular rather than linear, undergohg "considerable revision" in its repeated tellings by a

"large, fragmented, and fluid cast of characters." The several lyrics in sequence are like the

fiequent, hour-long sessions which allow for space and time between development and doubling

back. Bogan's geography is symbolic, highiy persona1 yet having the quality of the dream of the

collective unconscious. She believed that the poet should have "a stem countryside that could

claim him completely" and, as well as a "clenched teeth" reticence, "a spirit as loud as a househl

of alien voices, ever tortured and divided with itself' ("Springs" 9). Because the gender of the

speaker is not consistently female or male, the reader cornes to confiise the woman's

disilhsioned search for love with the man's fear of entrapment and deterrnined autonomy. Both

eventually rnerge in the female poet figure who struggles to fmd and maintain her distinct voice,

for Body of This Death is about art in conflict with life as well as the intemal antithesis between

wiI1 and desire, body and soul. In this volume Bogan presents a series of fragments which cohere

and combine into an androgynous wholeness of vision, uncertainly attained and easily lost again.

The achievement is charactenstically modernist, but nonetheless remarkable.

The twenty-seven poerns which make up Body of This Death are discussed singly below,

grouped into units but treated individually to emphasize the relation of each to the whole, and in

deference to the straightforward listing Bogan chose to adopt in her table of contents (see

Appendix).

Poems I throzrgh 5: "A Tule, " "'Decorution, " "Medusa, " "Sub Contra, " "A Letter"

As Jones implies, "A Tale" serves as an appropriate introduction to the themes and method of the

book as a whole, for it takes as its setting an eery landscape reminiscent of drearns and symboIic

of inner experience. But its treatment in the critical literature has been disappointing. Van

Chaprer 3, Page 55

Doren's statement that "'A Tale' . . - says al1 that c m be said on the subject of mutability, and

says it in strains of music at once ancient and weirdly new" (30), is provocative but essentially

unhelpful. Recent discussions of the poem are no more sat iswg, as the search for a feminist

sub-text has yielded müted results in the elucidation of Bogan's work. For example, Maria

AIdrichYs belief that "A Tale" "expresses a longing for love as a means of control, as well as

transcendence in the of the ferninine unsupported by the text, as is her

inexplicable conclusion that "the allegiance to passion under conditions of inequality, what

amounts to women's objectification in male desire, can be debilitating and cruel" (108).

This youth too long has heard the break Of waters in a land of change. He goes to see what suns can make From soi1 more indurate and strange.

He cuts what holds his days together And shuts hirn in, as lock on lock: The arrowed vane announcing weather, The tripping racket of a clock;

Seeking, 1 think, a light that waits Still as a lamp upon a shelf, - A land with hills like rocky gates Where no sea leaps upon itself.

"A Tale" b e w s with deceptive modesty, announcing itself quietly with the diminutive

indefinite article, but the poet's commanding presence is evident f7om the first two words, "This

youth" does not lack specificity even though he functions in a symbolic role; the narrator is

literally painting, with a long bony finger, at a particular youth (hirnself). Feminist critics react

with distaste to the male persona. Gloria Bowles is dismissive of "A Tale," mentioning it onIy in

passing and describing the youth as an "unconvincing persona" (85), while Deborah Pope regrets

the use of the masculine figure because it obscures the poet's "persona1 stake in the poem" (152).

Elizabeth Dodd remarks that " 'A Tale' . . . differs fkom most of the poems to follow because it

Chapter 3, Page 56

focuses on a male figure, whereas the rest of the book predominantly observes women facing the

pain and chaos of their emotional lives" (76j. Why, these writers wonder, did Bogan choose to

present the quest for inreducible truth as undertaken by a young male when Body of This Death

as a whole is "about" female sexual love? The problem lies in the hming of the question at the

outset, for it is premised on a preference for poems which are assumed erroneously to have a

clear fernale "voice."

But he will find that nothing dares To be enduring, Save where, south Of hidden deserts, tom fire glares On beauty with a nisted mouth, -

Where something dreadfd and another Look quietly upon each other.

Elizabeth Frank comments on the "riddling tone" of the poem which "belongs to

someone who sounds somehow returned fkom a sight too temble for ordinary human eyes," and

suggests m e r that the poet and the youth are synonymous (57). The speaker announces to her

readers that she is presenting a moral tale arising fiom an experïence she feels compelled to

share, even as she herseIf is trying to rnake sense of it (evident from the hesitant "1 think'' of the

middle stanza). Like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, the narrator pulls the reader aside with this

poem, fixes her with a "glittering eye" to render her "spellbound, l1 and proceeds to the narration

of a journey which culminates in an encounter with Death and Death-in-Life. The Mariner / poet

thus "hath his will" with the Wedding-Guest, the surrogate reader.

It is evidently to Boganls purpose to keep the reader off-balance and vaguely hstrated.

The reader of "A Tale" rnight be excused for feeling muddled at the autobiographical tone, for

the male persona is at odds with the introductory factual matter of the book: Bodv of This Death

is by a female poet named Louise. But neither do the images of the poem cohere in the expected

Chapter 3, Page 57

fashion. We rnight be inclined to assume a pattern where none exists, as Sandra Cookson does

when she desmies "A Tale" as Boganls "protoSpica1 voyage poern" (196). There is no voyage

in "A Tale," despite the Mariner-Ille tone of the riddling narrator, the reference to the "break /

Of waters," and the imagined place "Where no sea leaps upon itself." Water is associated with

constant movement, and thus paradoxically with the "land of change," weather, and the quotidian

life of clocks; it is al1 of a piece with the landscape and routine the youth seeks to leave behind.

But Bogan is fully aware of the symbolic association of the sea with passion and eternity and

thus with the youth's desire for a life unbounded by mundane constraints. The "break / Of

waters" recalls a breakwater, "anything that breaks the force of waves at a particular place"

(OED);6 the image is confïrmed in the phrase "lock on lock;" for a Iock is a barrier used to

control the flow of a river or canal. Both structures are manmade devices which confine water

and harness or restrain its power for the good of civilized society (commerce, for example). To

break something is to destroy its completeness, to rend or tear if to part it by violence fkom

something else. The sound the youth has heard "too long" is the splitting cacophony of

separation and rough division. Or does such rough division necessarily imply noise? For by

implication the youth strives to leave behind the silence of the enclosed room, as the channelling

of desire into neat compartments is accomplished with such stealth that the noise of a clock

ticking can seem an unbearable racket which trips his flight. He feels twice shut in, "as lock on

lock" - in his physical body, in the routine of daily existence - with no suggestion of a key to

release him fkom either, although the very mention of a lock implies such. As in Eliot's

Waste Land, the spectre of the absent key "confirms the prison." The youth reacts with suicida1

vioIence; he "cuts what holds his days together," by implication the thread of life.

And what does he seek? The simple answer is an existence outside change and time, but,

AU definitions of words or phrases referenced are fiom the OED, unless otherwise indicated.

Chaprer 3, Page 58

as we have seen, "A Tale" is not a simple stoq, of either heroic endeavour or self-annihilation.

The youth "goes to see what suns can make 1 From soil more indurate and strange." A "strange"

soil implies a foreign land - strange referring to customs of another country; to a geography

outside of one's own; belonging to another, or of another place; a land abnormal, exceptional,

unfamiliar. The word "indurate" means "hard" but also "made hard," and can descriie not only

things but persons: "induratum est cor Pharaonis" (Pharoah's heart was hardened).' The

suggestion is that the youth seeks to harden himself, to coarsen and make callous his own

feelings, to render his own nature alien?

The poetls intrusion of "1 think" - the Mariner pulling at our sleeve - followed by her

' As cited in the OED: Exodus, vii, 13'22.

' The OED cites another usage of "indurate," in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Auron Lei*. Aurora, the heroic female poet who narrates the verse novel, expresses ciisgust with patrïarchal "fonns and systems" which channel men's energy'"brick by brick" into walls, walls which in tum block women's freedom. She tums from the arrogant Romney to the gentle Marian:

The man had baffled, chafed me, till 1 flung For refuge to the woman, - as, sometirnes, Impatient of some crowded room's close srneII, You throw a window open and lean out To breathe a long breath in the dewy night And cool your angry forehead. She, at least, Was not built up as walls are, brick by brick, Each fancy squared, each feeling ranged by line, The very heat of buming youth applied To indurate forms and systems! excellent bricks, A weii-bufit wall, - which stops you on the road, And, into which, you cannot see an inch Although you beat your head against it - pshaw! (IV, 347-59)

Introducing her edition of Aurora Lei& Margaret Reynolds remarks that Barrett Browning's "professional (and personal) expenence was distulctively marked by a sense of doubleness: as a poet she could be a prophet, as a woman she was always subservient; as a poet she could 'see' objective truths, as a woman poet she could only speak fiorn the sidelines of the subjective" (1 1). Barrett Browning's long, autobiographical poem was little admired by modernists such as Virginia Woolf, who castigated the author's lack of self control and literary discipline (as cited by Reynolds, 8). Bogan's own sense of doubieness repeated Barrett Browning's but added division to division, the critical aesthetic of minimalism which rejects female excess - a masculine stance ironic in light of Aurora's frustration with "each feeling ranged by line."

Cliaprer 3, Page 59

tentative suggestion that the youth seeks "a light that waits / Still as a lamp upon a shelf' is less

than illuminating: Bogan continues to dislodge the reader from his expectations. The domestic

image of a lamp on a shelf recalls the Romantic imagination but ironically returns us to the

enclosed r ~ o r n . ~ The "roclq gates" c o n f i the prison - or is this place a sanctuary, a refuge for

the spirit? The youth has corne füll circle; the split consciousness demonstrated by the intrusion

of the narrating voice implies the inevitability of retum. The "break / Of waters" which so long

was the condition of his being has resulted in a hopeless division of self and codùsion of

purpose. The longing now-is fûndamentally one of the mind seeking a means to escape the self-

destructive passions of the body, syrnbolized by the sea leaping upon itself.

The "But" of the closing lines is thus expected. The reader intuits that the quest is

doomed to failure, although the narrator seems unaware and announces the conclusion with

oracular superiority. We are told that, with one exception, "nothing dares / To be enduring."

To endure is to indurate, harden; and also to last, to suffer continuously, thus to alter one's

relation to both space and time. The exception exists "south / Of hidden deserts" and, since the

quest is now unambiguously defined as an interna1 one, the geography suggests the lower body,

even to the genital area so explicitly female ("rusted mouth"). The narrator is now revealed in

what Lesley Heywood would cal1 her "anorexic thinking," assuming the physical identity of a

young male in an attempt to overcome the grotesque stagnation implicated in the forrn of the

female body so fnghtening to a modem artist. In Dedication to Hunger, Heywood defrnes the

modernist aesthetic as a rejection of the material in favour of the imrnaterial- a choice that

tended to translate into a repudiation of the female, for since Plato women have been associated

See M.H. Abrams, The Mimor and the L a m ~ , for a fiil1 delineation of the differing metaphors of mind which distinguisti the aesthetics of the Romantics fiom that of their predecessors. Wordsworth and Coleridge regarded the muid in perception a s active (a Iamp) rather than inertly perceptive (a mirror).

Chapter 3, Page 60

with the material that it is the project of men to transcend (19)." Like Mallarmé, the protagonist

fkets over the Ii?ieration of the soul of fiterature fkom the "body of this deattr" (mere words),

seeking in "his" confiicted quest to Ieave behind the entrapped, ephemeral female identity

(water) for the enduring male world of adventure and meaning (land of "suris"), but fmding that

his physical nature follows him like a double and indeed defines him. "He" must acknowledge

"she." Linkages of violence ("tom") and heat ("fie") to sexuality announce that the body and its

rough passions are what endure, not the mind and its idealism - the explicit lesson of a poem we

encounter later in this collection, "The Alchernist." The ironic theme of Body of This Death is

that the ultimate site and expression of mutability, the human body, is where we must look to

find permanence.

The poem closes with a facing down, the Iooking upon each other of the two creatures of

the self: body and soul, female and male. Traditionally associated with the mind or soul, the

male looks upon the female, identified with the body, who looks back; and the moment of

realization of mutuality in difference is dramatized. The looking is all. The hapless couple is

bound together for al1 time, it seems, like Milton's lovers in an unhappy marriage, "two carkasses

chained unnaturaIly together, or, as it may happen, a living sou1 bound to a dead corpse" (214).lL

The looking is also silent, eerily so. Bogan's visual sense is key to her aesthetic, as is the

physicai occupation of space. The body here is stilled for examination, as if by staring the

observer might understand. But words are the medium of the poet, essential to her mode of

'O The modemis t woman artist found herself psyc hologically split, Heywood rnaintains, She accepted white male philosophical ideas yet resisted îraditional gender roles; "she [was] left with a empty shell for an identity, a shell she struggle[d] continuaily to fill with her attainment of masculine achievernents, wMe affrmiing daily that she [is] not good enough . . . . This is anorexic thinking. . . " (29).

" Perhaps Coleridge had MiIton7s metaphor in mind when composing his Rime. The Mariner finds his ship stilIed at the equator and himseif isolated fiom aii living creatures because of his guilt over killing the albatross, at which time he is contÏonted by the spectres of Death and Death-in-Life, both female characters. It is Death-in-Life who claims him. The Mariner repents of his previous rejection of iife as symbolized by the ungainly bird and the dead carcase is tied around his neck,

Chaprer 3. Page 61

communication, hence the reference to the ''rusted rnouth." The act of speaking is implicated not

only in sexuality; " it is the route past immobility. Malcing sound, forming words - these are

essentiaI, but the requirement is ironic. Description in language of the moment of silence is the

ultimate purpose of poetry, the (unexpected) goal of the recurring quest.

Bogan would later use "A Tale" to introduce her three volumes of collected poems, a

decision noticed but not interrogated by her critics. Frank, suggesting that the "source" of the

poem was Bogan's decision to marry and go to Panama with her husband, tells us that "Bogan

was extremely proud of it" and quotes Robert Frost's remark afier reading it: ''That woman will

be able to do anything" (57). ui contrast to Frost's pronouncement, Dodd's recent comment is

curiously condescending: "Since Bogan demonstrates her satisfaction with the poem by placing

it in the opening position in three subsequent collections of her work, we may assume that she

had fulfilled in her own mind the criterion of beginning with emotion but then 'breaking away in

some oblique fashion' " (77).13 Jacqueline Ridgeway agrees that the "somewhat obscure

symbolism" of "A Tale" effectively rnasks the poet's own persona1 pain and fear; she believes

the poem's placement "expresses her poetic impetus, her aspiration toward significance and

beaus in the face of mutability and human limitation" (7). Lee Upton contends that Bogan saw

"A Tale" as "ber calling car& announcing her obsession with a psychic demon who was also her

ruling divine" ("Coming" 9 1). Cookson and Pope regard the poem's establishment of the quest

motif to be adequate explanation of its placement, while Aldrich declares it suitable for the

opening of Bodv of This Death because it "initiates the pattern of sexual quest and failed release"

" See Peter Stallybrass' discussion of traditional associations between the open and closed mouth (and body generally) of women md sexuality. The wagging tongue of a talkative woman was regarded as emblematic of a Ioose morality; silence signalled chastity.

l3 Emphasis mine. Dodd refers to Bogan's statement in "The Springs of Poetry" that, while art h d s its source in emotion, it yet "must break away in some oblique fashion kom the body of sorrow or joy, - be the mask, not the incrediile face."

Chapter 3. Page 62

manifested in that volme, John Muller, arguing that light and its associated objects h c t i o n

distùictively in Boganys poetry, sees "A Tale" to be appropriate in the lead-off position because

of the syrnbolic fùnction of the lamp, centrally featured in the poem's third stanza (77).

1 suggest that "A Tale" effectively introduces Bodv of This Death, and later collections

which reproduce the poerns of that volume in sequence at theïr outset, for a number of reasons

and on several levels. The echo of Coleridge's haunted "Rime" establishes the presence of a

teller, a Iistener, and a story of profound moral significance. The self-conscious yet unreliable

narrator / moralist / compulsive poet figure (of the "1 write because 1 must" ethic) £ïrmly

confhns the young poet in her vocation. Certainly the theme of the quest is important, but -

oddly enough - even with the bony finger of this poem pointing the way, readers tend to forget

that there is a narrative contùiuity in the tellings and retellings which follow, leading back to

where we started Iike Theseus' thread. We are to follow the fates of the characters introduced in

this poem as they meet with supernatural danger; in;a landscape which symbolically features the

opposition of outer and inner, fiee and contained, transitory and permanent; in a time without

progression which seeks the still moment while embracing the circularity of eternal retum.

Voices shift; perspectives change. Genders are rnixed and merged, yet male and female maintain

their etemal dialectic. Bogan, like John Donne, adopts a conversational tone in her poetry,

taking as her ostensible subject the love between man and woman while contemplating the split

between body and soul. l 4 Woman is flesh and plowed field, but she is - ironically - what

endures: the female in the artist struggles literally to "incorporate" that physical fact. As the

anorexic, cerebral aesthetic of literary modemism resists, the conflict is ever unresolved.

"A Tale" is the first of a grouping of five poerns (including 'cDecoration," "Medusa,"

l4 Robert Wiltenburg argues that Dome "presents a fimdamentally interna1 and non-progressive dialogue between two distinct concepts of the inner Me, the self and the soul - a dialogue that is exploratory, inconclusive, and thereby faithfùI to its subject, Donne in love" (414).

Cltapter 3, Page 63

"Sub Contra," and "A Letter") which together make up the first movement of the volume,

"Decoration," the second poem in Bodv of This Death and one excised fkom subsequent

collections, has been almost entirely ignored. Frank mentions it only in passing as an illustration

both of the exotic landscape of Panama where Bogan moved with her first husband and of her

feelings of hstration living there with someone she had little in cornmon with except sex (40).

A macaw preens upon a branch outspread With jewelry of seed. He's deaf and mute. The sky behind him splits like gorgeous h i t And claw-like leaves clutch light till it has bled. The raw diagonal bounty of his wings Scrapes on the eye color too chafed. He beats A flattered tail out against gauzy heats; He has the fnistrate look of cheated kings. And al1 the simple evening passes by: A gillyflower spans its little height And lovers with their mouths press out their grief. The bird fans wide his striped regality Prismatic, while against a sky breath-white A crystal tree lets fa11 a crystal leaf,

Those critics who do take account of "Decoration" are uncomplimentary- Bowles dislikes

"Decoration" even more than "A Tale"; in a section of her book dedicated to Bogan's

unpublished and "suppressed" poems, she dismisses it as "an ornate pseudo-symbolist poem that

deserves to be forgotîen" (76). Wolf regarded it as one of the few instances of "waste motion" in

Bodv of This Death; he applauded its "beautifil eleventh line" even as he castigated the "less

authentic other thirteen" (336). Ridgeway and Theodore Roethke are more generous and

considered in their appraisals, but neither is enthusiastic. "Obscurity is a fault in 'Decoration,"'

Ridgeway concludes regretfilly; the poem's "mixture of moods of violence and peace" mars its

unity. Perhaps the title is ironic, she suggests, and if so we can see it as a statement of one of the

book's themes, the fûtility of expectation. Roethke cites "Decoration" in his discussion of

Bogan's poetry as early evidence of what will become her central theme, the search "for a

Chapter 3. Page 64

moment when things are caught, fixed, fiozen, seen, for an instant, under the eye of eternity."

Oddly, then, he rejects the poem as "too statict' even while praising it for describing a scene

"looked at steadily and closely" (88-9).

Unfortunately, while both Ridgeway and Roethke attempt to connect "Decoration" with

Bogan's other work, they neglect the significance of its placement in the volume, sandwiched

between the more forcefid, rnesmerizing poerns, "A Tale" and "Medusa." "A Tale" ends on a

note of horri%g stasis: the reader is Iefkon the brïnk of a dreadful howledge left undescriied,

a situation Pope fmds so distastefid she criticizes that poem for failing to provide "strong,

dramatic closure" (152). Yet presumably closure is precisely what Bogan would have wanted to

avoid at the opening of the book. h "A Tale," she leads the reader to an intuition, followed by

the respite O ffered by "Decoration" - a plateau to encourage psychological preparation for the

ho r r iwg vision of "Medusa."

"Decoration" keeps before the reader the interconnecting themes of vanity and beauty /

sexuality and violence / disillusionment and death, distilled in an alien, super-heated atmosphere

of hstrated and despairhg silence. The reader can take a "crystalline" breath, pause in the act

of looking precipitated by "A Tale." In a rnagical series of transformations, the desert landscape

of the first poem is changed momentarily to lush tropics before being flash-Eozen as dead white

crystal. The visual and tactile senses predominate in this glittering sonnet: the macaw is deaf

and mute, communicating with the viewer only by rneans of a sharp, chafing beauty which

scrapes the eye and leaves the light bleeding. This scene might be the background for the

encounter of the "something dreadfid and another." Pressing out their grief in a doomed

embrace, the disembodied mouths of the lovers at the very least complement the surreal reference

to the "rusted mouth" of "A Tale." The physical body - implicated through the metonymy of the

mouth and mature, menstruating (rusted) female genitalia - is inextricably bound up with the

Chapter 3. Page 65

experience of sexual love which demands a terriwng openness and interconnectedness with the

"other." Fear of betrayal and fear of decay and death are one,

"Decoration" is an artifact w h i ~ h the poet offers up quietly for contemplation, calling

attention to art as art, emphasizing the coutrageous contradiction inherent in the translation of

chaotic emotion into an elegant Iinguisrtic shape- Words are selected which "reflect and chime

upon one another." The archaic usage *of the adjective "frustrate" (fiom the Latin frustra, in

vain) draws attention to the language o f the poem in a self-conscious, scholarly way, echoing the

peculiar resonance of "indurate." Vivid, violent life is stifled, stilled and preserved in the precise

container of the sonnet fonn. The voice is third-person-distant, the tone cold and removed. The

"1" of "Medusa" forces an abrupt change of scenes as the narrator moves to centre stage.

"Medusa" and "A Tale" effectively work together to draw the reader into the worId of

Body of This Death, Harold Bloom maintains that "Medusa" provides an effective introduction

to the landscape of Bogan's poetry: " M a t is conveyed here is a sense of unreality pervading a

desolation . . . , What is offered is an image of the memory itself tunied to Stone, a hint of the

theme of the rejection of nostalgia to b e developed in the later poems" ("Louise" 85j. Mary

DeShazer suggests that the "eye to eye encounter between speaker and shadow, that other self

both fnghtening and recognizable" dramatized in the poem, is central to an understanding both of

Bogan's imagery and her perception of the poet-muse relationship (63). Jones finds "A Tale"

recondite, but "Medusa" in contrast a siirnple, beautifilly described record of the nightmare state

which marks the conclusion of the ques-t (29). 'Medusa" is thus a kind of explicative sequel to

"A Tale." As Frank says, "Medusa" "rmoves beyond 'A Tale' in drarnatizing the meeting of

'something cireadfiif and another"'; she contends however that it reverses the prediction of the

first poem, since the meeting leads "not to endurance but to its horrible inversion,

immobilization" (57). Christine Colasurdo discusses in some detail the distinct "1" which opens

Cliapter 3. Page 66

"'Medusa," positioning itself fmt in contrat to the surroundings, then in relation to the second

identity which appears (346). Both the 1 and the second identity are lost in the dead scene, and

although the 1 re-emerges at the conclusion of the poem, it does so as part of the fiozen

landscape; "the speaker, unlike the trïurnphant male Perseus, does not slay the Gorgon. She is

absorbed into the landscape, a mute stone" (347). Regrettably, Colasurdo does not consider

na me du sa,^' as we have seen some others have, in relation to "A Tale," for the role of the first-

person narrator of the two poems is worth exploring. The gender of the narrator is typically

regarded as female, but as the scene in the poem can be seen to drarnatize the concluding

encounter of "A Tale," that assumption is problematic. E w e accept the two poem as linked, we

must also allow that the speaker's gender is projected as male: the youth (or, we might fürther

hypothesize, his ancient Mariner counterpart) is the Iikely narrator of '"Medusa-" But DeShazer -

argues that 'Medusa" is about the fernale poet's confrontation with her demonic muse, her

terriQing other or goddess self. Colasurdo concurs that, in "Medusa," the wornan poet is

answering back by means of the poem itself to the silencing inflicted upon her. Critics such as

Roethke, Peterson, Ridgeway, and Frank maintain that the poem is implicitly if not explicitly

autobiographical. But who is the "1" of "Medusa?" And is the "1" of the first line necessarily the

"Y of the last stanza?

As it turns out, the answer to the second question is 'yes," but not because of any

inherent consistency of the poem's perspective. In "A Tale," the youth and the "1" who describes

his adventure share an identity. The wornan poet may be an implied presence in the poem, but

her gender is not fixed, nor is it easily located. The split self assumes various poses and voices in

Bodv of This Death: they f i c t i on as characters in its psychic drarna of a disintegrated

personality. One of the roles the self adopts is the role of narrator, making sense of the life by

shaping it into a story with a beginning, a course, and an end, and attempting to recount with

Clzapter 3, Page 67

detachment a quest for spintual wholeness which ends in the encounter with his own dreadfil

completion - change and death, as embodied in a vision of grotesque, aging female physicality,

This is the scene descriied in "Medusa." The extrernity of the situation is rnisrepresented if we

ignore the dualism of the gender and age / youth confkontations, that is, if we fail to aclcnowledge

that the persona of the initial "1" is both young and male, and that the other he encounters is

female and somewhat older - descriptions we h o w to be true Eom "A Tale." The poet's

identification with such a persona implies an- emotional rejection of the female. The matter of

the poern confirms the implication.

1 had corne to the house, in a cave of trees, Facing a sheer sky. Everything moved, - a bel1 hung ready to strike, Sun and reflection wheeled by.

"1 had come" - this is the tense of telling. We rnight picture the youth, arriving like Perseus on

his mission to kill the Gorgon and cut off her head, recomting the adventure following his safe

return.15 The sky before him is "sheer," suggesting at once a sharp drop-off, and a veil which

" Medusa was, according to Iegend, a beautifid girl who committed lzubn's by comparing herself to Athena. In punishment her lovely àair was turned into snakes, and the sight of her thereafter could turn humam into stone. Another version of the story has her punished in this way because the god Poseidon had violated her in a temple of Athena. A third version brings in the triad of pre-Olympian goddesses, the Graeae (Old Women), sisters to the three Gorgons: they had large grotesque heads, snakes in their hair, and large protruding teeth and tongues. The Gorgons (Fearfiil Ones) symbolized man's fear of the terrors of nature, particularly of wild animais; they were Medusa (Cunning One), S t h e ~ 0 (Mighty), and Ruyale (Wide Leaping). The sight of them was thought to transforxn humans into stone. Of the three Gorgons only Medusa was mortal, but even her severed head had the transforming power.

Perseus was the son of Danae and Zeus. It was foretold that Danae's son wodd kill her father, so both Danae and Perseus are exiled; a king wants to 1~liih-r Danae so, to get Perseus out of the way, he sen& Perseus on a mission to kill the Gorgon Medusa and bring back her head. Perseus h d s Medusa through the treachery of Graeae (Perseus seizes their one eye and one tooth, thereby compelling them to reveal where their sisters, the Gorgons, Iive). Assisted by Athena and Hemes, Perseus approaches the dangerous Medusa with an menai of ai&: a hat with wings, winged sandals, a special wallet to store the head, the helmet of Hades to make him invisible, and a sickle-shaped harp from Hephaestus- He fin& the sisters asleep. As the mirror is held up for him, he does not have to gaze directly upon the Gorgon and thus is able to cut off Medusa's head to store it in the wallet Perseus fies away, invisible, though pursued by two Gorgon sisters, Medusa dies, but fiom her body spring twin creatures fathered by Poseidon, the winged horse Pegasus (symbol of poetic genius) and the giant Chrysaor. The head of Medusa is eventually given as

Cfzapcer 3. Page 68

inhiiits cIear vision. Although the speaker recalls that "Everything rnoved," he immediately

contradicts himself: the bel1 did not; it hung ready to strike, like a snake, or a ba~ilisk.'~ And

here in the narrative a strange thing happens, "Sun and reflection wheeled by," it is said. Where

does the "reflection" corne fkom? The line makes sense only if we switch, mid-line, perspectives.

- The speaker is now in the house - looking, like the Lady of Shalott, into a mi r r~r . '~ She sees the

landscape outside reflected; it is she who - startled by the amval of the youth - suddenly moves,

so that sun and sky, reflected in the glass, appear to her to career wildly. Astonished, she look

directly out the window, violating the prohibition of her confinement and incurrïng the curse,

seeing Lan~elot.'~ And so, we have the moment of looking - one at another, and the other back -

a gift to the goddess Athena, who places it on her aegis.

l6 in Shakespeare's Richard III, Anne spums Richard's wooing, "Out of my sight, thou dost infect mine eyes." He continues his appeal: "Thine eyes, sweet lady, have infected rnine." She is caustic: "Wodd they were BasiIisks, to strike thee dead," (I, ii, 148-50). The Latin basikscus was a kind of bird, a

. golden wren or kingiet, a fabulous creature reminiscent of the macaw of "Decoration." Its look was fatal. (OED)

" K e ~ e t h Gross draws attention to Jean-Pierre Vernant's "La mort dans les yeau." For Vernant, the Gorgon is the face the Greeks gave to everything alien or other, especiaily the chaotic or disruptive. She is the face of dread, but also a mirror reflecting our own terrified gaze at what we c m o t bear to look at: "the Gorgon's mythic power to astonish us, or turn us into statues, is thus something we ourselves lend to the Gorgon" (24).

'* Tennyson's poem, "The Lady of Shalott," descnies a mysterious fairy lady who "weaves by day and night" in a tower on an ide, She is Eaiown to al1 in Camelot, but "who hath seen her wave her hand? Or at the casernent seen her stand?" She is aware that she incurs a curse if she Iooks directly down on the city below, but "hows not what the curse may be." In the mirror over her work "she sees the highway near 1 Winding down to Camelot." One day, when the "sun came dazzling through the leaves," a knight appears on the road, his shield sparklîng on the yellow field. His image flashes into the crystal mirror of the Lady, and her fate is sealed:

She left the web, she left the loom, She made three paces tfirough the room, She saw the water lily bloom, She saw the helmet and the plum,

She Iooked down to Camelot. Out flew the web and floated wide; The mirror cracked from side to side; "The curse is corne upon me," cried

The Lady of Shalott. (109-1 17)

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which is the conclusion of "A Tale." But the speaker gives no clue that he / she is at once

standing on the grass looking in, and h m e d by the window inside gazhg out:

When the bare eyes were before me And the hissing hair, Held up at a window, seen through a door. The stiff bald eyes, the serpents on the forehead Formed in the air.

Bogan effectively doubles the intensity of the uncamy moment described by Freud, the

encounter with one's own double, to a level of disturbance almost int~lerable.'~

The vision of Medusa Bogan provides is a spectre of male sexuality as well as of female.

As Roethke points out, the stiff bald eyes are in erectis. Further, the hissing is of the serpent

Satan in the garden, seducing Eve to precipitate the downfall of the garden of Eden and death's

introduction into the world. Because the Lady looks upon Lancelot directly, without the

mediation of the mirror, she fiilfills her doomed fate. Bogan shows us the unlikely intersection

of the two myths: the male taking advantage of the mirror's protection (ironically provided by a

female, Athena, who holds up the mirror. for Perseus so he can slay Medusa) and thus achieving

violent victory over the female; the woman disregarding that protection, abandoning her art and

isolation for a glimpse of the man, a choice fatal to her. Milton's Eve preferred her own

reflection in the pool to her first sight of Adam, but God exercised His omnipotent patemal

influence, leading her away from her solitude by the hand: her fate would be pain in childbirth

As a storm nses, the "pale yellow woods" wane, and the Lady steps into a boat. For a second, and Iast, time sne looks on Camelot, "Like some bold seer in a trame, / Seeing al1 his own mischance - / With a dassy countenance." Her blood freezes slowly; her eyes darken wholly. At the close of the poem, Lancelot muses, "She has a lovely face."

l9 "The Uncanny" (234). Freud speculates that the quaLity of uncanniness arising fiorn the confrontation with one's own image "cm only corne fiom the fact of the 'double' being a creation dating back to a very early mental stage, long since surmounted. - - . a regression to a tirne when the ego had not yet marked itself off sharply fiom the external world and fiom other people" (236).

Chaprer 3, Page 70

and eternal ignominy as the bane of humankind,

The Medusa figured prorninently in the imaginations of the Romantic poets, as Mario

Praz has shown in his influential study of the period: the "glassy-eyed, severed female head, this

homble, fascinating Medusa, was to be the object of the dark loves of the Romantics and the

Decadents throughout the whole of the centwy" (26-27). Bogan was certainly an inheritor of this

tradition, but of another as well. Susan Gubar and Sandra GiIbert in The Madwoman in Attic

argue that a distinctively female literary tradition emerged in the nineteenth century,

characterized by "Images of enclosure and escape, fantasies in which maddened doubles

functioned as asocial surrogates for docile selves, metaphors of physical discornfort manifested

in fiozen Iandscapes and fiery interiors" (xi). In their fust chapter, Gilbert and Gubar explore

how men have effectively controlled the literary images of women which have incarnated men's

ambivalence toward female sexuality and theu own physicality: men have claimed, afier

Aristotle, that they are simply holding the mirror up to nature. According to Freud, man has an

inherent dread of woman because he sees her as a castrated version of himself, hence the power

of the Medusa image." The woman writer begins her self-contemplation by looking first into the

"mirror" of the male-inscrïbed literary text, where she sees two images: an angel and a monster.

She is obliged metaphorically to kill both if she is to joumey through the looking glass to literary

autonomy. Unfortunately, Say Gilbert and Gubar, women have had difflculty carrying out this

"murder"; "Rather, the female imagination has perceived itself, as it were, through a g las

darkly" (1 7). Women writers have typically incorporated into their self-definitions polarized

'O "Medusa's Head" (273). Freud begins this brief essay rnodestly by saying that, while interpretations of individud mythological themes are not often attempted: "an interpretation suggests itself easily in the case of the h o m g decapitated head of Medusa. To decapitate = to castrate. The terror of Medusa is thus a terror of castration that is linked to the sight of something. Numerous analyses have made us familiar with the occasion for this: it occurs when a boy, who has hitherto been mwilling to believe the threat of castration, catches sight of the female genitals" (273).

Chaprer 3. Page 71

projections both angelic and monstrous. Bogan's Medusa figure can be understood as

constituting a dark self, filled with rage and hstration, which the poet feels compelled to

The last three stanzas shift the perspective unambiguously back outdoors, to the youth in

his fiozen contemplation,

This is a dead scene forever now, Nothing will ever stir. The end will never brighten it more than this, Nor the min blur.

The water will always fall, and will not fall, And the tipped bel1 make no sound, The grass will always be growing for hay Deep on the ground.

And 1 shall stand here like a shadow Under the great balanced day, My eyes on the yellow dust, that was lifting in the wind, And does not drift away.

The narrator anticipates without hope an end to the story, dreading that it will bring no M e r

illumination; nothing more will stir after the description of this "dead scene." There wiIl be no

resolution - only the circularity of the wheeling sun and sky, and the stillness at the centre of

movement.

Placed as it is on the left side of the two-page layout, "Sub Contra7' invites cornparison

with "Decoration," for this poem also is about conscious artifice, the capturing of vehernent life

in the bonds of artistic form. Here, the concern is that music will be too much contained, hushed,

in the effort to achieve art. In both instances the poem on the opposite (right) page is more

" Bogan's "Medusa" iends itself admirably to the analytic mode1 constructed by Gilbert and Gubar, so much so that it has become weii known to feminist cntics and teachers of fiterature in isolation fiom the work of the poet as a whole,

Chapter 3. Page 72

discursive and easily accessi%le, in large part because of the kt-person speaker who invites

identification with the reader, The first three poerns draw the reader, arrested and feârful, ïnto a

stifiing claustrophobia where there is an almost desperate need for sound, to break out into noise

after intense silent pressure. "&]ock on lock," the haïr of the Gorgon's head encloses, muffles.

Both ccDecoration" and "Sub Contra" seem abrasively resistant compared to 'Medusa" and "A

Letter." Bogan pulsed a rhythm into the sequence to enhance suspense (an element, of course, of

narration), manipdating the reader's response to the text of Body of This Death by alternately

holding off, inviting closer, and so on.

The importance of music is comparable to that of visual art in Bogan's work In

"Decoration" and "Sub Contra" we glimpse her struggle to craft poems which at once contain

and release passion, still the moment without killing it, honour the harmony of the chord without

entombing it.

Notes on the tuned fiame of strings Plucked or silenced under the hand Whimper lightly to the ear, Delicate and involute, Like the mockery in a shell. Lest the brain forget the thunder The roused heart once made it hear, - Rising as that clamor fell, - Let there sound fiom music's root One note rage can understand, A fine noise of riven thhgs. Build there some thick chord of wonder; Then, for every passion's sake, Beat upon it till it break.

The conclusion of "Sub Contra" is the command first to build the chord, then to break it: the

quest for permanence recounted in "A Tale" is reversed. In that poem the youth, after too long

hearing the cacophony of violent division, seeks instead silence and stasis.

The title of the poem, Frank tells us, refers to "the resonating, very lowest notes of the

Chaprer 3, Page 73

'tuned h m e of strings' (whether piano, cello, or bass violin)"; "the poem begins quietly," she

suggests, "as ifit were actually sounding these notes, only to rise and reverberate 'like the

mockery in a shell' " (58-59). We might also read the title literally: considering that "sub"

means under, beneath, and "contra" signifies opposition, we might be inclüied to take the poet's

instruction that the matter of the poem is a subversive contradiction of what has been presented

in the three previous poems in Body of This Death. The insidious entraprnent into

speechlessness, the modernist aesthetic that less - and less - is more, is countered by the

Romantic impulse to resist, to sound the great chord. We have a kind of sub-plot in clramatic or

narrative terms, the poet suggesting that both the silence plot and the "full-address"" plot are to

be developed in this volume. A quest leads inadvertently to the state of silence, but a resistant

anti-story insists on speech, supported by the shape and fact of the narration itself. References to

the mouth, seen but not heard in the previous lyrics, are brought to sound in this poem - which

is effectively an invocation, corning fiom the muse (ironically Medusa), We have had mouth

and eyes: this poem brïngs in the ear, the brain, the heart, culminating in a resounding fullness of

response, a totality of physical reaction and intention.

"1 came here," the speaker announces in the f is t stanza of "A Letter," recalling the "1

had come" opening of 'Medusa." Their physical placement aligns the two phrases exactly; page

laid on page, the words could be traced if the paper were transparent.

1 came here, being sûicken, sturnbling out At last fiom streets; the sun, decreasing, took me For days, the time being the last of auturnn, The thickets not yet stark, but quiverhg

1 borrow here Cheryl Walker's phrase. Walker, whose chapter on Bogan and the "stoic persona" apologizes for the poet's "limitations" and sums up her achievement as "some superb lyrics," an opus ".mail, but durable7' (190)' insists with regret on her "retreat" and faiIed effort. However, Walker does acknowledge that - in a handfui of poems - Bogan chooses ''full address" rather than "retrenchment" (18 1).

Chapter 3. Page 74

With tiny colors, like some b m h strokes in The manner of the pointillists; srnall yel1ows Dart shaped, little reds in different pattern, Clicks and notches of color on threaded bushes, A cracked and fluent heaven, and a brown earth. 1 had these, and my food and sleep - enough.

The speaker bas been enchanted, "stricken." Now, "stumbling out \ At last," he or she is finally

released f?om the paralysis of the dead scene of "Medusa." The bell, once only ready to strike,

rang out in "Sub Contra," and the wheelïng s u . - which "took" the speaker "[flor days" -no

longer is omnipotent. Time has passed; the narrative continues; the story is retoid fiorn a farther

peak. The landscape softens as if by the rain blurring the scene in "Medusa," now perceived as a

spray of tiny points of colour in the manner of an impressionist painting: again we have the

static, the visual, the decorative, the unreality of physical surroundings. By the end of the stanza

the speaker has corne out of the haze, recovered from the dream, and faces sky and earth with the

irnrnediacy of one reborn. Reflecting the quester's damaged sensibility, the heaven is both

cracked and fluent. It is cracked like the parched landscape of "A Tale" and the broken chord of

"Sub Contra," a split and hoarse bell of a voice which yet flows readily like water or words after

a drought.

"A Letter" was probably written in the winter of 1922, a time when Bogan was

undergoing psychiatrie treatment and was, by her own account, "in a dazed state of mind,"

perceiving everyone as coming through to her "rather foggily" (cited by Frank, 49). Bogan was

aware of her illness and aclmowledged a related fear of growth, time, and nature, but knew also

that retreat and paralysis spelled worse trouble (Frank 50). Jomeys to the New England

countryside were a repeated means of escape fkom the terror and grief that assailed her.

This is a country of roofless houses, - Tavems to rain, - doorsteps of millstones, lintels Leaning and delicate, foundations spning to lilacs,

Chapter 3. Page 75

Orchards. where boughs Iike roots strike into the sky. Here 1 codd well devise the journey to nothing, At night getting down fkom the wagon by the black barns, The zenith a point of darkness, breaking to bits, Showering rnotionless stars over the houses. Scenes relentless - the black and white grooves of a woodcut.

The houses, like the speaker, are unprotected -open to min, gone to min. 1s a house without a

roof still a house? Bogan offen used adjectives not to describe, but to undermine, negate, or

interrogate the meaning of the modified noun. The rambling momentum of the poem recaIls

Whitman's verse, but its nanator - unlike the expansive and voluble protagonists of the poet of

"Song of Myself" - questions at every step the point and purpose of the journey, and sees in the

landscape evidence of contradiction rather than confirmation. Lilacs are blooming in the

dooryard in "A Letter," but their presence is evidence of a rotting and broken fouidation and the

season is autumn, not Whitman's joyous ~ p r i n g ; ~ ~ they are ironically "spmg" like old

bedsprings, out of doorsteps which are millstones. In such a landscape, in such a season, the

speaker "could well devise the joumey to nothing," for there is movernent here but na progress,

action forever caught in the act. The zenith is a point of darkness, breaking to bits, showering

motionless stars. Scenes are relentless, cut grooves implying the motion of a train running

through inertia without impetus, but running. A simultaneity of movernent and stasis is caught in

the circularity of endless repetition, al1 seen as if fiom above, carved like a scene in a woodcut.

See the opening o f Whitman's elegy in mernory of President Abraham Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd:"

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloorn'd, And the great star eariy droop'd in the western sky in the night, 1 mourn'd, and yet shall m o u . with ever-returning spring.

....-...-.*.*..*.*.....***.*... In the dooryard fionting an old farmhouse near the white-wash'd palings, Stands the lilac-bush tau-growing with heart-shaped leaves of green, * . . - . . * . - . . . . . . . * - S . . - - . . - . . . . - .

A sprig with its flower I break.

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The quivering colour of the first stanza has drained. The rïch pointillist canvas is replaced with

the stark black and white of an unforgiving graphic.

But why the joumey to nothing or any desire? Why the heart taken by even senseless adventure, The goal a coffer of dust? Give my mouth to the air, Let arrogant pain lick my flesh with a tongue Rough as a cat's; remember the smell of cold mornings, The dried beauty of women, the exquisite skîn Under the chins of young girls, young men's rough beards, - The cringing promise of this one, that one's apo1ogy For the knife sû-uck down to the bone, gladioli in sick rooms, Asters and dahlias, flowers like ruches, rosettes , . .

Life is an oxymoron: a '30urney to nothing." The adventure is senseless - not only without

meaning, but without sensuousness; the speaker longs for taste, smell, touch. But the delights of

the senses degenerate almost immediately into empty sensualie: the dried beauty of women, the

decadence implied by an appetite for various and sundry lovers, Ieading to betrayal, and sickness

unto death. These lines undermine the standard reading of this poem as narrated by a woman.

At the very least, Bogan complicates the picture, suggesting either ornnivorous lust or

transcendent gender. The speaker is the youth (he) of "A Tale" as well as the "I" (she) of that

poem conspicuously thinking, anticipating the reflections of the Lady of Shalott. As is the case

with "Medusa," the poetry does not suggest otherwise, and to read the poems in sequence is to

acknowledge their obvious connections.

Forever enough to part grass over the Stones By some brook or well, the lovely seed-shedding stalks; To hear in the single wind diverse branches Repeating their sounds to the sky - that s lq like scaled mackerel, Fleeing the fields - to be defended fiom silence, To feel my body as arid, as safe as a twig Broken away fkom whatever growth could mare it Up to a spring, or hold it softly in surnmer Or beat it under in snow.

Chapter 3. Page 77

The cracked and fluent heaven is no longer trusted. Now, the sky is a "scaled mackerel, /

Fleeing the fields-" The retreating dream of love is seen to be a grotesque phantasm. It is

enough to part grass over the stones, or to hear the single wind. Once again (for this is where we

came in) the speaker longs for the condition of dry endurance, away fiom growth and change.

Yet he / she realizes that this cycle of love and death extinguishes the self, and resolves to

recover an identity in the world.

L must get well. Walk on strong legs, leap the hurdles of sense, Reason again, corne back to my old patchwork logic, Addition, subtraction, money, clothes, clocks, Memories (freesias, srnelling slightly of snow and of flesh In a room with blue curtains) ambition, despair, 1 must feel again who had given feeling over, Challenge laughter, take tears, play the piano, Fonn judgments, blarne a crude world for disaster.

This stanza is the poet's response to "A Tale:" there is no choice bu .t to go back to the world of

clocks and clothes, to live within the (gendered) body of this death. But she does not leave us in

this rnood of valiant resolution. Once more the speaker is overwhelmed with the certainty of

futiliw, entrapped in the relentless grooves of obsession. The speaker now addresses her / his

lover, rerninding us that this is a letter, after all, an intimate document written for one other, and

which we - in violation - have corne across as a folded paper in the bottom of a drawer.'"

To escape is nothkg. Not to escape is nothing. The fanner's wife stands with a halo of darkness Rounding her head. Water drips in the kitchen Tapping the sink. To-day the maples have split Limb fiom the tnink with the ice, a fiesh wooden wound.

24 The notion that the fyric is "overheard" rather than heard, because the poet is unconscious of the Mener, can be traced to John Stuart Mill ("Poetry" 423). The experience then of reading a poem is comparable to that of reading aaother's letter, the delicious invasion of privacy responsible in large part for the popularity of the epistolary novel. Indeed, the iinks in the literary tradition between eighteenth-century epistolary fiction and the dramatic monologue remain unexplored.

Chapter 3. Page 78

The vines are distorted with ice, ice burdens the breaking Roofs 1 have told you of.

Shall I play the pavanne For a dead child or the scene where that girl Lets fa11 her hair, and the loud chords descend As though her hair were metal, clashing along Over the tower, and a dumb chord receives it? This may be wisdom: abstinence, beauty is nothing, That you regret me, that I feign defiance And now I have w-ritten you this, it is nothing.

Ice has npped Iunb fiom trunk of the maples, leaving a £kesh wooden wound. The speaker is

fiozen, encased and weighed d o m by calcified feeling. Echoes of Lear's despair sound in the

repetition of "nothing-" What kind of conclusion c m possibIy be meaninfil? A drarnatic

ending with loud chords, then silence: the arc traced ui "Sub Contra." A "pavanne" (pavane) is

a grave and stately dance in which the participants are elaborately dressed; the possible ongin of

the word is fiom the Spanish for peacock (pavo), in allusion to the movements and ostentation of

that bird. What sort of display would accord with protocol? 1s the appropriate response a cool

aesthetic distance, an omate, forma1 containrnent of the chaos, or just a simple letter which the

speaker has here already written? The question hangs in the air.

What follows "A Letter" is not so much told as experienced, offered up as fragments of

the story, presenting themselves without the intervention of the narrator who seerns to abandon

her task with a self-deprecating sigh ("now I have written you this, it is nothing"). This poem is

a letter which adurnbrates the book. It concludes the introductory matter of Bodv of This Death,

Poems 6 through IO: " n e Frrghtened Man, " "Beh-othed, " " Words for Departure, " "Ad Castitatem, " and 'Knowledge "

In the next several poems Bogan establishes the drarnatic conflicts which the collection as a

whole moves to resolve. "The Frightened Man," "Betrothed," "Words for Departure," "Ad

Chapter 3. Page 79

Castitatem," and "Knowledge" al1 have a personal quality, h e d in the first-person and infiised

with the immediacy of direct speech. The persona of 'The Frightened Man" is arguably the sarne

as that of "A Letter," for this short poem summarizes the love action of the longer one.

In fear of the rich mouth 1 kissed the thin, - Even that was a trap To snare me in.

Even she, so long The h i l , the scentless, 1s become strong And proves relentless.

O, forget her praise, And how 1 sought her Through a hazardous maze By shafted water.

The fnghtened man fears the "snare" of sexual entrapment; the speaker of "A Letter" wants to be

a dry twig to "break away from whatever growth could mare it." The female, like the starkly

carved Iandscape of the longer poem, is described as relentless,- The fkightened man feels he has

been wanderîng in a maze, recalling the dazed sensibility at the opening of "A Letter"; he

believes hirnself to be betrayed, shafted, just as the speaker of "A Letter" has the sensation of

being stabbed to the bone. A shaft is the body of a spear, an mow, a column, a tree. Here shafts

of light seem to pierce the water, which though transparent is thus rendered treacherous. As in

"Medusa," the gender of the speaker is ground shifkg beneath the reader's feet: the phallic shaft

pierces water, traditionally a syrnbol of fernininity. Even so, the Ianguage is that of a knight on

his quest, valiantly seeking his lady in a land supernaturalIy charged with malignant deceit: the

scene of "Medusa," The maze b ~ g s to mind the Minotaur. The quester seeks at once an end

and an escape, journeying both toward the Medusa and away fkom her.

The description of the beloved in the second stanza echoes Sir Thomas Wyatt's lyric

Chapter 3. Page 80

'They Flee fiom Me."

They flee from me, that sometime did me seek, With naked foot stalking in my chamber, 1 have seen ?hem, gentle, tame, and meek, That now are wild, . . . .

--..............*..---.*..*.*.... When her loose gown fiorn her shoulders did fall, And she me caught in her arms long and small, Therewithall sweetly did me kiss And softly said, "Dear heart, how like you this?"

It was no dream, 1 Iay broad waking. But al1 is turned, thorough rny gentleness, h to a strange fashion of forsaking; . . . .

The woman in Bogan's poem is long, but h i 1 and scentless. Despite her physical insignificance,

however, and her status as quarry, she threatens the fkightened man who hunts hm. Like the

speaker in "They FIee fiom Me," he is angered at his own vulnerability in his pose of proud

lover, and - with the certainty of the conspiracy theorist (and the poised assurance of a lyricist of

an earlier age) - retrospectively interprets the rnild appearance and demeanor of the woman to

have been an elaborate trap to catch him with his guard down. He has the voice of a Renaissance

courtier dismayed by the constant changetùlness of woman, even as he engages in the determined

hunt of the philanderer. After the betrayals of stanza 3 of "A Letter," the speaker has

deliberately sought one less sensual, assuming one less scented would be preferable prey. She

was to prove, even so, "relentless." But how, one rnight ask, can the object of a quest be

relentless? The psychology of blaming is such that the one blarning imputes his own fault to the

one being blamed, thus at once redeeming himself and condemning the other. The description is

an indirect admission of his own culpability.

The reason for a male voice in this poem has been variously explained by Bogan's

readers. Frank suggests that it is a way for the poet to take a hard look at an ex-lover: "Putting

Chapter 3. Page 81

the words, '0, forget her praise,' in the mouth of the poem's speaker is a way of making him -

whoever he rnight be - commit an act of exquisite pusillanirnity" (60). Goldfein contends that

the third stanza actually expresses Bogan's generosity toward this foolish, timid man, who at

least admits in these lines his error (74). The speaker's acknowledgrnent of his participation in

the ritual of pursuit does in some way mitigate his specific cowardice, for the pattern of the male

/ female dialectic is demonstrated to be pervasive, larger (and older) than any one story of love

and betrayal, Dodd finds the fear of the fnghtened man ''very like that of Prufiock in Eliot's

famous poem of fear, uncertainty, and impotence" (77) but sets him in explicit contradistinction

to the speaker of "A Letter," even though (as Ridgeway points out) Pnrfrock's voice haunts that

poem as well(44):

Shall 1 part my hair behind? ("The Love Song of J. Alfied Prufiock")

Shall 1 play the-pavanne / . . . . ("A Letter")

Dodd continues: 'Tlaced between two sombre poerns with female speakers discussing their own

pain in love and abandonment ('A Letter' and 'Betrothed'), the poem suggests what has led the

man to his own behavior: a kind of debilitating fear due to a stereo~ping idolatry of women."

Bogan gains "a kind of detachment through the presentation of another point of view: that of the

irresponsible male" (77). 1 suggest that the speaker in "The Frightened Man" is the sarne male

speaker we have heard in the five poems which precede this one in Bodv of This Death. For the

first tirne, however, his perspective is deliberateiy disentangled fiom that of the female other, his

double and anima, who in turn narrates the next poem, c'Betrothed," in a clear, youtffil voice.

You have put your two hands upon me, and your mouth, You have said my name as a prayer. Here where trees are planted by the water 1 have watched your eyes, cleansed fiom regret, And your lips, closed over al1 that love cannot Say.

Chapter 3. Page 82

My mother remembers the agony of her womb And long years that seemed to promise more than this She says, 'You do not love me,

You do not want me, You will go away."

In the country whereto 1 go 1 shall not see the face of my fiend Nor her hair the color of sunburnt grasses; Together we shall not find The land on whose hills bends the new moon In air traversed of birds.

What have 1 thought of love? 1 have said, "It is beauty and sorrow." 1 have thought that it would bnng me lost delights, and splendor As a wind out of old time . . .

But there is only the evening here, And the sound of willows Now and again dipping their long oval leaves in the water.

Perhaps because it presents a situation of inherent codict between the worlds of men and

women, "Betrothed" has attracted critical attention fiom female critics - a curious point,

considering that it is one of Bogan's earliest efforts. it was published in 19 17 in the

expenmental "little" magazine, Others, paired with "The Young Wife," a poern Bogan never

reprinted in any of her collections. Frank regards "Betrothed" as an example of Bogan's

"'Daphne' or 'reluctant girl' poems" (40); in an article comparing Bogan's poetry to the work of

Edna St. Vincent Millay, Frank traces the girl figure of lyric tradition as a "figure of

enchantment, poised briefly by the course of nature between maidenly hope and wornanly

disillusionment." Both poets made early attempts at "that lyric set piece, the betrothal Song, so

farniliar in both classical and European lyric tradition, with its minghg of the erotic and the

elegiac" ("DoU" 190). In "Betrothed," Bogan ?urns an elegy for the romantic wishes of girlhood

into an acknowledgment and acceptance of change and uncertainty" (191). Bowles finds "most

curious" the placement at the poern's centre of the two women the speaker must leave behind -

Chaprer 3, Page 83

her mother and a wornan fiend, The two stanzas do not work artistically because they are

unconnected to the rest of the poem, she maintaîns, but they evoke an "unconscious recognition

of a basic female reality: when we choose heterosexual love, we often leave behind those fernale

attachments that had been sustaining (if conflicted) in our younger years" (71)~~' Aldrich asserts

that the ''rite of passage theme in 'Betrothed' shows how thoroughly the conventional female of

Bogan's perïod was still d e h e d by heterosexual love relationships" (1 10):

The lover's bands and mouth, placed or imposed on the female, silence rather than caress, and this imposed silence seems Iuiked to the daughter's failure to deliver herself cleanly fkom her mother's womb. The ').oum of 'Betrothed' rnakes proprietary claims upon the female, wrenching possession f7om the mother. Thus the poem emphasizes the continuity of possession from mother to husband, fiom daughter to wife, "lock upon lock." It is through relationship with the husband that Bogan discovers the crucial fact about women's sexual identity: they &e defined by their reIations with others. The fernale's identity never stands alone, cut fiee fkom the mother's claims of birth or fiom the husband's future rights. (1 1 1)

Aldrich links "Betrothed" with "A Tale" because the "continuity of possession" described in this .

poem is likened to the "lock on locK' feeling of entrapment the youth seeks to escape. Pope sees

the movement to "Betrothed" after the "depersonalization and encoding" of "A Tale" and

'Medusa" as part of the poet's "continued search for a persona1 landscape, incorporating an

exploration of persona1 relationships and conventional gender ties" (153).

1 agree with Bowles that the introduction of the mother and female fiend attracts the

reader's attention, but fmd her criticism of the separate rnood of the two stanzas irrelevant.

Bogan deliberately sets the rniddle portion of the poem apart fiom the opening and closing by

indentation. The central stanzas represent another space in the speaker's consciousness: the two

female characters are suddenly present in her thoughts, interruptïng the logic of her address with

z5 Interestingly, Bowles assumes her readers are al1 wornen; in doing so, she diminishes the substance of her own reading and underestimates Bogan.

Chaprer 3, Page 84

a Wordsworthian "spot of time," but al1 of a piece with her feelings of loss and transition. When

the speaker reflects that she will miss her fiend and "ber" golden hair, the speaker's gender is

rnomentarily in question - is she, or rather he, speaking of a heterosexual love reIationship left

behind? As in "A Letter" when the attractions of young men and women are cited in the same

line, and "The Frightened Man," when the treachery of the phallic shafi pierces the ferninine

water, Bogan disconcerts us ever so slightly. The two central stanzas also round out the "story"

of Body of This Death by b ~ g i n g in more players. The situation of the mother figure in

particular - the older woman who has expenenced not only the agony of the wornb, but romantic

love many times over - becomes central to the unfolding drama.26

"Betrothed" is reminiscent of an adolescent effort of Bogan7s, "The Betrothal of King

Cophetua," published in the Boston University Beacon in 19 15:

When they had brought her at the king's behest, The courtyard dusk felt cool to her forehead's heat, She silent stood, the sun on her bruised feet. The evening shadow lay against h a breast.

"Yom name?" he asked. "1 have not any name."

Her round voice held the sou1 of windless streams Fringed to the bank with grasses - of old dreams His youth hew. Kis words broke, and he was mute, Then asked again "You come fiom out what land?

"1 have forgo tten." Under trees of fruit

He has seen her f ~ s t as they bowed in the ripening year, Fragrant her lips with fruit, and stained her hand. He said "come nearer," and she came more near.

A casket then he gave to her like flarne

26 As I show in Chapter 4, Bogan's use of prepositions demonstrates her intense interest in the relations of things; in attitudes, gestures, and postures. Here, the lover's eyes are cleansedfiom regret, as of a "thing or person got rid of, escaped, avoided," The implication of separation and departure which informs the entire poem is reinforced subtly by this one word, "fiom," which denotes distance, absence, privation, expulsion, freedom, and deliverance (OED).

Chapter 3. Page 85

Blindly, through the dark, to his side she came, Her feet seemed shod with rain so swift they were. Lïke wings on her forehead folded lay her hair, And she was wild and sweet-

"1 am a king," He said, "but if 1 give you jewels, lands, And you spurn all, 1 have no other thing, No more to give, if it be not love you seek . . ." Leaning, he took her face between his hands; She turned her eyes to him, and did not speak

The king takes the young woman's face in his hands; it is at once a gesture of captivation and a

veiled threat. In "Betrothed," the female speaker recalls this with suffused bittemess as an act of

taking possession, of firm if loving silencing.

The brief narrative action of "The Betrothal of King Cophetua" contextualizes the

moments of emotional intensity (or delayed reflection) Bogan captures in her lyrics and reveals

the ciramatic force of her method. The speaker of "Betrothed" would appear to be female.

However, there is nothing in the poem which definitively confirms that assumption, and - as we

have seen - the poems which precede "Betrothed" either have an assumed male persona or are

ambiguous with regard to gender. In the earlier poem, Bogan defines the betrothal as being the

king's, not the maiden's; although both lovers speak, it is the king's voice which dominates, his

perspective which h m e s the action. Knowing this, the infomed reader cannot help but intuit -

as Elder Olson does when he suggests Bogan's lyrics constitute glimpses of scenes fiom "some

passionate and bitter play we have not seen" - a larger "context of events" extending above and

Seyond the parameters of the lyric "Betrothed" (74). The mind of the poet is not fxed in one

character (72).

Wisely, Bogan did not choose to include the adolescent "Cophetua" in Bodv of This

Death, even though, as Bowles notes, the "effect of immobility" rendered by the girl's silence is

Chapter 3. Page 86

one she would perfect for that volume (67). If "Cophetua" were Iess embellished it wodd pair

beautifilly with '%etrothed," since the ritualistic placement of hands on the face closes one and

opens the other, and in the white space between the two poems the perspective neatly changes

fiom male to fernale. Instead Bogan chose to match "Betrothed" with "The Frightened Man."

Both poems end with water. Situated across fiom each other on the double page, "The

Frightened Man" and 'Betrothed" constitute reflections of each other, two sides of one situation,

one "scene." Both man and woman feel trapped. The water shifts, betrays. Trees are planted by

the water: now we realize that the s h a h in the Stream the fiightened man describes are actualy

reflections of the tree- trunks. The image of the woman as planted tree, at once living and

stiffened, caught but held apart like Daphne fleeing Apollo, is here only intuited." We will find

it recurs in Bogan's poetry.

After the silence of "Betrothed," Bogan treats the reader to "Words for Departure," a

poem Frank describes as "an explicitly verbal act" ("Doll" 189). She notes: "The act of

speaking, the mouth, and the voice in Bogan s poetry are heavily erotic: words and love and

anger are al1 bound up together. As 'A Letter7 is an explicit demonstration in words, so 'Words

for Departure' becomes a ritual of speech, an address to an estranged lover who has taken

ano ther lover" (60).

Nothing was remembered, nothing forgotten. When we awoke, wagons were passing on the wann summer pavements, The window-sills were wet fkom rain in the night, Birds scattered and settled over chimneypots

" Daphne, whose nme means "laurel," was a nymph loved by Apollo. She fled his attentions but he pursued her relentlessly, and so she called on the gods for help. Just as he was catching up with her, she was transformed into a laurel tree. In antiquity the laurel was a tree sacred to Apollo- The Pythia supposedly chewed it for its intoxicating effect, which helped her speak her prophecies. Daphne is associated with chastiîy: in one version of her story, she was a dedicated foiiower of Artemis; in the Christian reinterpretation of the tale (in a long fourteenth-century poem entitled Ovid moralise), Daphne is compared to the Virgin Mary and descriied as etemaily green, like Wginity (and the evergreen laurel), bearing no fi-uit. See Reinhold (330,394).

Chapter 3, Page 8 7

As among grotesque trees.

Nothing was accepted, nothing looked beyond- Slight-voiced bells separated hour fiom hour, The afternoon sifted coolness And people drew together in streets becorning deserted- There was a moon, and Iight in a shop-front, And dusk falling Ille precipitous water-

Hand clasped hand, Forehead stilI bowed to forehead - Nothing was lost, nothing possessed, There was no gift nor denial.

2. 1 have remembered you. You were not the town visited once, Nor the road falling behind running feet.

You were as awkward as flesh And lighter than kost or ashes.

You were the rïnd, And the white-juiced apple, The Song, and the words waiting for music.

3. You have learned the beginning; Go fiom mine to the other.

Be together; eat, dance, despair, Sleep, be threatened, endure. You will know the way of that,

But at the end, be insolent; Be absurd - strike the thing short off; Be mad - onIy do not let talk Wear the bloom from silence.

And go away without fire or lantern. Let there be some uncertainty about your departure.

Frank's cornparison of "Words for Depamire" with "A Letter" is apt: not only are both poems

self-consciously about language, neither was inciuded in later collections d e r their appearance

in Bodv of This Death. Critics have offered possible reasons for Bogan's decision. Frank says

Chapfer 3. Page 88

with confidence that Bogan kept "Words" out of hm later collections Secause "its ending was too

dependent on a fashionable and utterly insincere Greenwich Village attitude of toleration toward

sexual rivals" (61). Since Frank elsewhere notes Bogan's own classification of sorne of her

poems as being in the "to-hell-my-love-with-you" mode, as well as the poet's ruefùl

acknowledgment that "Perhaps we gals are at our best on that note" (69), it is odd that she feels

this poem would be excepted. Bowles also questions its omission on these grounds; she "fmd[s]

the bravado unconvuicïng but al1 the more poignant because it is a pose" (83). Citing Bogan7s

lifelong preference for traditional metres, Frank offers, more tentatively, a second possible

reason for the exclusion of 'Words" fiom subsequent volumes : the poet may have "disliked its

form" as free verse (6 1) . The usuaIly non-committal Ridgeway is surprisingly categorical and

disappointingly hi&-handed in her dismissal of poems such as "A Letter'' and "Words" as unfit

for Bogan's oeuvre: "These . . . are the poems of a poet flailing around for a point of view or

focus of feeling rather than creating either. Bogan was right in rejecting them as not

representative of her work" (45)- A more likely explanation is that Bogan simply decided the

poems did not fit with the overall structure, length, and sequencing of the later volumes. As

Collins suggests, "Bogan knew her strengths, and had her reasons" (3).

In the same way that "A Tale" and 'Medusa" are linked, "A Letter" and "Words" work

together in Bodv of This Death, the latter. The hinging of "A Letter" and "Words" is effected by

the repetition of the word "nothing" to unite the two poems in the tragic wake of Shakespeare's

King Lear. Again, we might speculate on the gender of the narrator: is he or she the speaker of

"A Letter," or has the same scene been retained but the perspective reversed in a mirror image, a

device now familiar to readers of Bodv of This Death? A possible d u e is offered in the last two

lines. While the youth of "A Tale" seeks a lamp on a shelf but is destined to frnd "tom fie," the

lover here is commanded to leave "without fire or lantem7' as he is entitled to neither.

There are many echos in "Words" of the poems which precede it in the volume,

particularly 'Medusa." The slight-voiced bells recall the bel1 ready to strike. Dusk falls like

precipitous (fiom the Latin praecipitium, falling headlong) water - it will always f d I , and will

not fall. To enhance the sense of stiliness by implied contrast, the poet once again catls attention

to the story as story, noting its '%eginningY' and "end" in section 3 of the poem. The end will

never brighten this scene more, just as the rain of the fust section has not blurred it Zn the

memory of the speaker.

With typical compression, Bogan acknowledges both Latin and Greek forekars in the

title of the next poem of the sequence, "Ad Castitatem," for the invocation to the goddess of

chastity echoes Homer's first line of The Iliad, "Sing, goddess"; the contrast to the casually

insolent imperatives of the conc1usion of "Words for Departure" could not be more aiarked.

"Here is the modem poem as prayer, " Bowles enthuses, praising its slow-moving language of

incantation (84).

1 make the old sign- 1 invoke you, Chastity. Life moves no more A breeze of flame. Alike upon the ground Struck by the same withering Lie the fruithl and the barren branch. Alike over them Closes the rnould. 1 call upon you; I invoke you, Stranger though 1 be. Against this blackened heart 1 hold your oflerings - Water, and a stone.

In this ravaged country, In this season not yous, You having no season, 1 call upon you without echo.

Chapter 3, Page 90

Hear me, uifertile, Beautifid fitility-

The solemn language of "Ad Castitatem" is offered by the poet ironicaliy, as if in response to the

lover of "Betrothed" saying the wornan's name "as a prayer."

"Ad Castitatem" can be seen as a companion poem to "Medusa-" "Bogan retunis again

and again to the lure of a powerfiil, mythic femaIe who embodies inviolability, sanctuary, and

control," Pope rnaintains; "the personified figure of Chastity is Medusa in another guise" (156)-

. The Latin word castiîatem also calls to muid castîgatus (castigation, chastisement) and castrs (a

fall, and a euphemism for death); tbinking of "Medusa," the reader rnight experience a Freudian

slippage and read "castration" - what the face of the Gorgon represents to the terrified men who

- encounter her. In "Ad Castitatem" (as in "Sub Contra"), Bogan calls attention by means of the

title to her early education in classical literature. She shared an affiity for the Latin poets with

other modeniists; Pound and others looked to writers such as Propertius and Catullus as rnodels

for their restrained use of language, economy and bareness of image and metaphor, and skilfül

use of rhetorïc (Lind xxiv). Latin male wrïters often contrasted the life of lust and love with

celibacy; they resented the generous favours which the objects of their love granted to al1 and

sundry. The tradition, which extends fiom Catullus to Wyatt to Yeats, is one Bogan

achowledges and continues, but with a bit of a spin: as a female poet, she incorporates the point

of view of the woman, who as the beloved rather than the lover is typically the subject of lyric

sequences and not their author. Frank argues that "Ad Castitatem" reveals Bogan's a l imen t

with other female poets of the early twentieth cenhuy such as Millay, Sara Teasdale, and Eleanor

Wylie (61). The "unappeasable search for renewable chastie" constitutes a "fernale fom of the

quest myth," Frank maintains. As we have seen, Bogan was not content to maintain a consistent

female perspective. Perhaps in her attempt at a cycle of love poems in the manner of the Latin

Chapter 3. Page 9 I

elegists she found it necessary to explore a variety of voices to help in the adjustment of

perspective- The male view is represented; also in the mamer of ancient drarna, the chorus - by

turns public opinion, the voice of reason, neutral authority - on occasion comments on the nature

of women and of love. Philosophical speculation in the Latin tradition is part of the aftermath of

the experience of burning passion.

In "Ad Castitatem" Bogan introduces the motif of burial. The word ccmould" is

significant in Bodv of This Death, with al1 its attendant denotations: as a noun (loose earth or

dead growth or hollow form) and as a verb (to shape). The phrase "Closes the mould" evokes al1

these rneanings. The hollow form is like a casket; the female is malleable, her body hollow, not

filled with seed and thus infertile; her heart is blackened and dead. Yet the poem also confimis

the presence of the supematural and etemal in Body of This Death. Despite the recurring figures

of mould and decay, burial and atrophy, the resistant spirit - or rather, body - manifests itself

variously as goddess, monster, memory, art, or ghost.

'~Knowledge" is situated oppositc "Ad Castitatem" on the double page, fùnctioning as a

- coda to the longer lyric. Weary disillusionment after spent passion is the subject of both poems.

The speaker of "Knowledge" is not identified, but the mood of quiet cynicism of "Ad

Castitatem" is maintained, the images (e-g. "flesh in the mould") are renewed. 'Knowledge" is

also a kind of response to "The Frightened Man." The two share the same metre and line length,

but we suspect that the woman speaks now, not the man. In "The Frightened Man," the

adjective "long7' describes the relentless woman, the object of the quest; in "Knowledge," the

speaker refers to the "long shadow" made by the trees.

Now that I know How passion warrns little Of flesh in the mould, And treasure is brittle, -

Chaprer 3. Page 92

1711 lie here and leam How, over their ground, Trees make a long shadow And a light sound.

As in "Betrothed," a female speaker is situated in a landscape filled with trees. Because the trees

have the ability to possess the ground ("their" ground), they are personified: the trees are like the

speaker and Iike women in general. The speaker wants to be a tree; she shares the tree's

knowledge. The pursuer fmds their sexuality relentless, meaning that he cannot help his pursuit.

The trees and women long, like Daphne fleeing fkom ApoIIo, for relief fiom passion, escape into

stillness, Unmobility, and "light sound" or silence - as well as chastity, as the previous poern

indicates. Also like Daphne, they seek transformation.

Women, on their own ground, make a long shadow (there is much idealizing in the

courtly and romantic traditions of women) but a light sound (they have little true effect, are

virtually without voice). In "Sub Contra," the initial whirnpering of plucked strings is silenced

by the hand. The trees are planted in "Betrothed," and the lover's lips close over. The man at

once imputes blame on the woman he has pursued and venerates her as an object of worship,

idolizing her silent form. He is able to leave her frnally, lightly and easily, because he is able to

imagine himself the victim of her relentless strength- The irony is not lost on the woman.

Commentary on "Knowledge" is illustrative of the failure of Bogan's critics to extend

their readings to consider how her poems can be illurninated by their context. It was first

published in 1922 as one of a grouping of five called "Beginning and End."28 -mile the haunting

lyricism of "Knowledge" has attracted much attention, surprisingly little of substance has been

said, though perhaps this is to be expected when eight tetrameter lines - two short verses - are

'' The others ("Eiders," "Resolve," "Leave-Takhg," and "To a Dead Lover" ) were not included in Body o f This Death.

Chapter 3. Page 93

read in isolation, Feminist critics have found in its brevity evidence of Bogan's obsessive style

of compression and ruthless self-editing, what they see to have been a protective mechanism

which sadly diminished her effects and influence. Ouiers rnaùitain that Bogan tried to rnake

lyrics such as "Knowledge" carry more weight than their rnodest stnictures could manage. For

exarnple, Peterson contends that "the austere forrns employed exclude so much that al1 that

remains are surnrnary statements whose authority resides only in a rhetoric of flat statement and

the resonances of firmly controlled and sensitive rhythm." In "Knowledge," the long shadow

and light sound are "effective connotatively, but left undeveloped, are too slight to cary the .

burden they have been giveny' (76).

The placement of "Knowledge" in Body of This Death is significant, allowing for a

sumrning up, a condensation of what has been suggested and hinted at - here stated simply,

quietly, totally. The poem's rnodest occupation of space invites a pause, entails a mystery. The

abundance of white surrounding page signals leisured punctuation while simultaneously instilling

in the reader a disconcerted hesitation. As Wardrop argues in her study of Dickinson, the

. element of hesitation is key to defhing the gothic: "hesitation prolongs a moment happening in

the now, and a series of such moments, nows, gives itself over to suspense, a suspended present;

hesitation entails a waiting, condensed and heightened," The rhythm of the sequence is such that

the reader's emotional awareness is prompted, then left to recover itself in stillness. Eric

Bentley, in his chapter on 'Talk" in The Life of the Drama, emphasizes the importance of the

silence between the words in any dialogue, commenting particularly on the exchange which takes

place in psychoanalysis: "Therapist and patient do nothing but talk or leave pauses between

talking" (71). Shafer might suggest that the silences and pauses allow for the necessary

transformations to be forrnulated between the analysand teHing a part of his or her life story and

the analyst constructively retelling it. Bogan is poised to retell it.

Chapter 3. Page 94

Poems I I through 15: "Portrait, " "ne Romantic, " "My Voice Nof Being Proud, " "Statue and Bir&, " and "Epitaph for a Roman tic Wornan "

The intirnacy of the previous five poems is abandoned in "Portrait" and the poem on the facing

page, "The Romantic," which - together with "My Voice Not Being Proud," "Statue and Birds,"

and "'Epitaph for a Romantic Woman" - make up a meditative exploration of what constitutes

irnmortality. An irnmediate sense of distance is effected by the use of the third person.

She has no need to fear the faIl Of harvest fiom the laddered reach Of orchards, nor the tide gone ebbing

From the steep beach.

Nor hold to pain's efiontery Her body's bulwark, stem and savage, Nor be a glass, where to foresee

Another's ravage.

Interestingly, Bowles sees a self-destructiveness in "Portrait" and assumes that the wcman

descnied here is the same "very young woman" of the previous poems (86). This rnight be so.

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? The speaker of ccKnowledge" could, in the white-space

moment of the turning of the page, become the subject of "Portrait" in an uncanny

transformation; but she rnight just as easiIy remain the speaker of both. An older woman is more

likely the subject of "Portrait," one with a long histow of loves and losses, perhaps the mother

figure introduced in "Betrothed." She has experienced already the fears faced by the one who

looks upon her, has no need to be a gIass where to "foresee / Another's ravage." The younger

woman sees herself in the ravaged visage of the older woman. She rnight be Snow White

viewing her stepmother's desperate image in the magic rnirror which pronounces on the certainty

of passing time and beauty. As in "Medusa," she encounters the Gorgon of her own fate.

What she has gathered, and what lost,

Chapfer 3, Page 95

She will not find to lose again. She is possessed by time, who once

Was loved by men.

Several of Bogan's readers have assurned that "Portrait" is about death. Pope, who regards the

poem as the concluding lyric to what she calls the "maniage tableau" grouping (begiming with

"Betrothed"), States that "the betrayed woman of 'Knowledge' has moved beyond the painfùl

reach of love and time altogether, by actual or spiritual death, to a sterile Iandscape reminiscent

of 'A Tale's' " (1 56). Ridgeway concurs, tracing an alternate sequence beginning with

"Knowledge" through to "Epitaph to a Romantic Woman" (excepting "The Romantic," which -

according to Ridgeway's analysis - unaccountably interrupts the line of five) that enunciates the

opposition of meaninglessness to human aspiration. "Aspiration or need, even denied, is

preferable to nothingness" in Bodv of This Death, Ridgeway argues. 'The inevitability of death,

seen as the only alternative to the pain of struggIe but the ultimate denial, makes the interim

struggle only worthwhile by comparison" (33-34).

The spectre of death is certainly present in Bodv of This Death, as the book's title insists,

but the young woman persona (unlike that of the youth) seems not seriously to consider it an

alternative. Rather, she sees death as a state of non-being which defines the terms of physical

existence. Contemplation of death leads to speculation on immortality as one rnight imagine it

variously manifested. Like Pope and Ridgeway, 1 connect the dots between the poems in this

section, fiorn "Portrait" through to "The Alchernist," but instead argue that the thematic link is a

conceni with what survives after a life, what "remains." The subject of "Portrait" rnight be, quite

simply, the picture - and the poem itself - as permanent testament to a woman who was once

young. The woman no longer fears growing older, as she is o1d already, beyond the pull / push

of sexual desire and fear. In this way she is possessed by time, for her image endures.

Both "Portrait" and "The Romantic" have three stanzas, and their many echoes in

Chapter 3, Page 96

language and tone demand that they be read together. Oddly, both Pope and Ridgeway ignore in

their analyses of pattern the obvious pairing. ''The Romantic" expands on some of the more

elliptical moments of cTortrait," beginning where "Portrait" leaves off: the narrator shifts her

focus only slightly fhom meditation on the tirneless image of an older woman, to castigation of a

man for objectimg a woman (the narrator herself, now?) as quarry:

Admit the ruse to fix and name her chaste With those who sIeep the spring through, one and one, Cool nights, when laure1 builds up, without haste, Its precise flower, like a pentagon-

In her obedient breast, al1 that ran fhee You thought to bind, like echoes in a shell. At the year's end, you promised, it would be The unstrung leaves, and not her heart, that fell.

So the year broke and vanished on the screen You cast about her; summer went to haws. This, by your leave, is what she .should have been, - Another man will tell you what she was.

The woman in "Portrait" has "no need to fear the fa11 / Of harvest"; the man in "The Romantic"

has promised that leaves, not the woman's heart, would fa11 in the autumn. In the first poem the

woman achieves a kuid of immortality by becoming the subject of a work of art; in the second,

the narrator chastises the man for attempting to impose that immortality by fixing and binding al1

in her that ran fiee - by arbitrarily naming her chaste and thus denying her sexuality, by silencing

her obedient voice in her breast. Woman as object - of the male lover and of the male artist - is

bound and gagged by his Romantic preconceptions of "what she should have been." The man

has the supematural power of an enchanter: under his spell, the screen he "cast about her,"" the

woman is as one sleeping through spring until "the year broke," Snow White awaiting her

29 ''The Romantic,'* like "A Letter," is haunted by Eliot's PnifTock, who fears being fmed in a formulated phrase and imagines a magic lantern throwing nerves in patterns on the screen.

Chapter 3. Page 9 7

"Admit the ruse," the poem begins. The speaker adopts the perernptory, imperative tone

of "Sub Contra," a recollection consistent with the mention of sound and shelT; the "unstrung

leaves" bring forward the image of hands plucking or silencïng the strings, and the muted sound

of willow Ieaves dipping in the water in "Betrothed," An instrument unstrung, a book with

Ieaves fallen out: did the wornan expect perhaps that her art would be silenced, but not her heart

broken? The laurel, of course, is the garland which honours the poet; its precise flower is slowly

built up, with patience, as the fernale poet builds her crafi and her strength, finding her voice out

of the pentagon of her buried (pent) contest and h e r stmggle (agon). The poem closes without

expectation of speech. Another man, not the woman herself, "will tell you what she was."

"My Voice Not Being-Proud" is one of Bogan's most mernorable lyrics. Powerfùl and

defiant, it rnagnificently rejects the suffocating strictmes of "The Romantic." Not accidentally,

a poem celebrating the poet's voice is at the centre of the collection, for Bodv of This Death is as

much about art as it is about love. Yet the poem is less lïberating for the speaker than it seems.

She defines her voice in tenns of what it is not.

My voice, not being proud Like a strong woman's, that cries hnperiously aloud That death disarm her, lu11 her - Screams for no rnourning color Laid menacingly, like f ie , Over my long desire.

Frank desmies "My Voice Not Being Proud" as "a poem in which @3ogan] takes a swipe at

what her fiiend and fellow-poet Léonie Adams used to cal1 the 'Oh god the pain girls', ingenue

poets of Bogan's and Adams' generation who plaintively descanted on the self-destructive

30 See Chapter 4 for more about the tale of Snow White in relation to Bogan's poetry.

Chopter 3. Page 98

elernents c o m o n to their erotic lives as women" (63). Bogan may have had Millay's "The

Shroud" fiom the 1917 volume Renascence in mind, Frank suggests. In that poem the speaker

"shrilly proclaims her readiness to die in punishrnent for having acted with undue premarïtal

haste" (63). Bowles, saying she "hear[s] anger - repressed, defeated" in the poem, notes that it

"is hard not to mistake this for the nineteenth-century poetess yelling for death after disappointed

love but, in fact, this is Bogan's assault on that tradition7' (86). The speaker tells us what her

voice is not, without actually getting to the point of what it is. We are told only that it will, in

fact, be silenced; more than that, it will not even be remembered.

It will end, and leave no print. As you lie, 1 shall lie: Separate, eased, and cured. Whatever is wasted or wanted . - In this country of glass and flint Some garden will use, once planted. As you lie alone, 1 shall lie, O, in singleness assured, Deafened by mire and lime. 1 remember, while there is tirne.

Once again the narrator imagines the end of the story. Death is an end which should

retrospectively reveal the shape of the life. Publication is a kind of end for the writer: an end

that does not see "print," by contrast, signals failure. AIso haunting this poem is the shadow of

truth (or consequences) and a preoccupation with deceit. The poet assumes her Iovers lie to

herm3 '

As you lie, 1 shall lie . . . ......-**..*........ As you lie alone, 1 shall lie . . .

3' After her second mam'age in 1925, Bogan would be debilitated by obsessive suspicions and sexual jealousy. See Frank (13 1-22 1).

Choper 3, Page 99

Besides the obvious connotation of burial, the lines resonate with the stubborn conviction of

reciprocal betrayal. But the irony is bitter: the poet sees that this kind of mutuality ensures

solitude and silence,

"My Voice Not Being Proud" can be interpreted as the poet's simultaneous expression

and repression of the rage symptomatic of the Freudian hysteric. Bowles, concluding that the

poem "tempts rage but finally undermines it" (86),. misses the displaced h y of irony. The

speaker rejects the hysterical voice adopted by some fernale poets of her generation, but by her

act of negative mimicry she irnplies a deeper anger.!* Jeanne Larsen insists that the voice is

"certaidy strong, and quietly proud" (228). Although words seem to have been erased at the end

of the poem, leaving only memory without print, Larsen argues that the very fact that the poem

exists bears mute testirnony to the endurance of the writer's words.

"Statue and Birds," the next poem in the volume, hearkens back to "Decoration." Botfi,

says Roethke, treat the same theme, that is, the moment when things are caught for an instant in

the eye of etemiiy (89).

Here, in the withered arbor, Iike the arrested wind, Straight sides, carven knees, Stands the statue, with hands flung out in alarm Or remonstrances.

Over the lintel sway the woven bracts of the vine In a pattern of angles. The qui11 of the fountain falters, woods rake on the s@ Their brusque tangles,

The birds walk by slowly, circling the marble girl, The golden quails,

32 A woman with a potent voice at the turn of this century was regarded as a kind of "vocal Medusa, both fascinahg and fearsorne," says Claire Kahane, The cultural repression of rage is gender- inflicted, she argues; Freudian theoq aiiows littie place for the integmtion of rage in women's libidinal development unless these women are first defmed as 'virîie,' 'castrating,' or phallic; the alternative is to turn rage inward, to convert it into 'ferninine' masochisrn or rnehncholia" (xii).

Chapter 3. Page /O0

The pheasants closed up in their arrowy wings, Dragging their sharp tails-

The inquietudes of the Sap and of the blood are spent. What is forsaken will rest. But her heel is lifted, - she would flee, - the whistle of the birds Fails on her breast.

In "Decoration" we find a deaf, mute bird with a s h q tail, whose "raw diagonal bounty of. . .

wings" the here the diagonal implied by the "pattern angles" formed the

swaying vines, and "woods rake on the sky / Their brusque tangles" while quails with "arrowy

wings" cîrcle ominously. Both poerns effectively hold their breath until the last lines:

"Decoration" completely until crystal fiom crystal tree (sure make a

clatter, though the noise isn't descriied); in "Statue and Birds," the whistle of the birds makes for

a harsh conclusion. As Pope comments, our ear hears "faIl" rather than "fail" in the last line,

lending a complexity to our response (157) - particularly so, 1 suggest, when we have read the

poems in order and ccPortrait'y and "The Romantic" still echo thus, in our minds.

"Statue and Birds" describes a frozen scene reminiscent of 'Medusa" in the third person,

distancing the reader fromthe sensibility of the speaker, but the questing male is gone. The

statue would seem once to have been a girl, fleeing fkom a p~rsuer.~' Like Daphne ("laureIV), a

nymph who fled fiom Apollo, the girl has become transfixed, rooted to the spot, tunied into a

tree. She inhabits Bogan's imagination, as we know fkom 'The Romantic" (site of the slowly

building laure1 flower), ccBetrothed" (where trees are planted beside the water), and 'Xnowledge"

(in which the speaker identifies with the trees), Bogan's allusion to the tree sacred to Apollo

and expressive of victory reminds the reader of the poet's insistence on her vocation, her

'' One of the secrets with wbich the gothic grapples, Wardrop suggests, is the unconscious, expenenced as the seif behind the veil (the "sheei' of "Medusa"), the self îrapped in the statue, the self reflected in the mirror (96).

Chapter 3. Page IO /

confidence in her own talent, and her ongoing struggle for recognition and success in the face of

considerable odds.

Dissatisfied with the flac abstract quality of the painting or photograph of "Portrait," the

poet moves toward an appreciation of stone and mass - the statue. Kenneth Gross, fascinated by

the stillness, the opacity, the ghostliness of statues, explores the idea that a ''statue is really a

once-living thing whose life has been interrupted; it is a creature stilled, emptied of life, tumed to

stone or bronze or plaster; captured, thus possibly needing to escape; dead, thus needing

resurrection or galvanization; fiozen, thus needing the warrnth of han&, or the sun . . . . the

statue represents a stopping point7' (15). Like a photograph, a statue arrests time, but it

monumentalizes and dehistorizes that arrest in a way a photograph does not." Unlike paintings,

- statues occupy the space of bodies. Gross argues that we recognize in the statue our physical

bodies idealized and made permanent:

Statues are bodies to which nothing can happen, bodies spared fiom pain or need . . . , happily resistant to our courtship, breakable but unwoundable, complete surfaces without the troubling depth or interioriS. of bodies, surfaces whose secretiveness is satismngly absolute, perfectly thoughtless; they are bodies stripped, paradoxically enough, of the body's resistant strangeness, its often disorganized animations and reflexes, its soul, (18 )

The dialogue between body and soul, manifested in Body of This Death in the encounter of the

self and other in repeated doublings, is weighted to the arguments of the body - but a body which

somehow defeats corporality and tirne. in "Ad Castitatem7' the speaker holds the offerings of

J.E. Cidot contends that the laurel "expresses the progressive identification of the hero with the motives and aùns of his victory," that "There is no achievernent without struggle and triumph." "The crowning of the poet, the artist or conqueror with laurel leaves was meant to represent not the extemal and visible consecration of an act, but the recognition that that act, by its very existence, presupposes a series of inner victories over the negative and dissipative influence of the base forces" (18 1).

" Gross cites Roland Barthes's comments on the photograph as resonant for his own account of the ontology of sculpture. An important factor is the "catastrophic" quality of the way a photograph represents both the Living and the dead (1%).

Chapter 3, Page 102

chastity: ' Water, and a stone." The quester of "A Tale" seeks what endures in a land indurate

and strange; he Iiterally hardens himself for the journey.

At this point in the book, the impulse to speech and art is present but fi-agile,

undeveloped, insubstantial, Just as Yeats would do in "Byzantium," Bogan sets up an opposition

of art and life, the golden bird and the common one representing "al1 complexities of mire or

b10od."~' The speaker predicts her own fate at the conclusion of "My Voice Not Being Proud,"

to be "Deafened by mire and lime." In "Statue and Birds," she is stuck fast as if caught in

birdlime. Words again fail: "The qui11 of the fountain falters." In both poems the speaker is

helplessly immobilized, like the murdered Agamemnon in Eliot's "Sweeney Arnong the

Nightingales," while being fouled by droppings, "liquid siftings" falling '"To stain the stiff

dishonoured shroud." The whistle of the birds failing on the girl's breast reminds us of the

bound breast of the obedient wornan in "The Romantic." Al1 that ran fkee in her has been

trapped within, "like echoes in a shell," According to Aldrich, Bogan "encodes her own self-

defeat and complicity within the tradition that objectifies women" in the marble girl's arrested

form (1 10). Perhaps, but there is also ironic potential in the failure of the whistle. The girl does

not corne when she is called. Her defiant survival as a speechless statue proclaims her resistance,

s i g n i m g that - like Sleeping Beauty or Snow White - she is only resting for a time, gathering

strength, disguised and not dead.

In "Epitaph for a Romantic Woman," Bogan surnrnanzes the threads of meaning in this

grouping about immortality. The physical and thus temporal body, represented as a statue, is

ironicaIIy a site of permanence when stilled for contemplation as art.

36 In the third stanza of "Byzantium," first published in 1930, Yeats contras& the "Miracle, bird or golden handiwork, / More miracle than bird or handiwork, / Planted on the star-lit golden bough" with the ''Common bird or petai / And ali complexities of mire or blood." Bogan's golden quail is a menacing presence, "circling the marble girl." The byzantine artifice of the statue's entrapment is reinforced by the "bracts" of the vine: a bract is a -11 leaf, from the Latin bractea meanhg thin plate as in gold leaf.

Clraprer 3. Page 103

She has attained the permanence She dreamed of, where old stones lie sunning, Untended stalks blow over her Even and swift, like young men m i n g .

Always in the heart she loved Others had lived, - she heard their laughter. She lies where none has lain before, Where certainly none will follow after,

The distanced "She" of the opening Iine echoes the beginning of "Tortrait"; the placement of the

word on the left page (1 8) is precisely the same as it is / was two leaves back (14). After "Statue

and Birds," we see that the wornan - and, by implication, the youth of "A Tale" - has indeed

"attained the permanence / She dreamed of ' by becoming a statue, now lying with other old

stones in the sun under untended stalks, perhaps by "Some brook or well" as in "A Letter." In

the casting into stone, she becomes whole, complete, somehow unified by the aesthehc

tran~rnogrification.~~ Aldrich's suggestion that the woman is implicated in her own defeat is

underwritten by the title of the poem: the controlling man of "The Romantic" casts the woman in

a stereowical role, moulding her to fit his expectations. In concurrence with Gilbert and Gubar,

the poet sees that women participate in the images men defme for them, admitting that the

woman herself is a Romantic who once acquiesced to the Procrustean exercise. Frank contends

that in the former poem Bogan's use of the tenn romantic is pejorative, an epithet for a self-

deluding fool, but in "Epitaph" the word "has a different, and tragically ironic, sense" (63).

Certainly the change in perspective, from quester to quarry, enlarges the emotional context of

each poem on its own and renders the two together three-dimensional.

37 In her book on androgyny and aesthetics, Carriona MacLeod finds the classical &le statue to be of rernarkable importance to ou. understanding of the indeterminate relationship of desire represented by the androgyne. "The marble statue, focal point of discussions on aesthetics, dso becomes central to culhual constructions of gender and difference. Theorizing the statue . . . is a way of theorking gender" (39)-

Chapter 3. Page / O 4

Bogan's decision to excise "Epitaph" tiom her subsequent colIections has mystified

some of her readers. Frank finds it c'inexplicable"(63); Bowles admires the poem, and c m only

suggest that the poet rnight have "felt the renunciation theme was evident enough in Body of This

Death or perhaps she was again excising those feelings ofjealousy f ~ s t registered in "The Young

WiW (77). Bogan may welI have come to see "Epitaph" as redundant, unnecessary to the

impact of the sequence in the compressed context of later volumes.

Poem Id: "The Alchemist"

'The Aichemist" fùnctions as a pivot in the overall structure of Bodv of This Death, continuing

the meditation on permanence - on the mystery of what "remains" - but shaking off the stone

slab of the epitaph represented by the preceding poem. The speaker of this poem counters the

water of chastity with the fire of alchemy:

1 burned rny life, that 1 might find A passion wholly of the mind, Thought divorced f?om eye and bone, Ecstasy come to breath alone. 1 broke my life, to seek relief From the flawed light of love and grief.

With mounting beat the utter fire Charred existence and desire. It died low, ceased its sudden thresh. 1 had found unmysterious flesh - Not the rnind's avid substance - still Passionate beyond the will.

The indurating process adurnbrated in the sequence of poems about stone and mass and stillness

has threatened, by this point, to stop things entirely, but "The Alchemist" picks up the Pace with

a rising rhythm ("mounting beat"), lighting the Iandscape with a "tom fire" glare reminiscent of

"A Tale." The violence of the breaking and separating further links this poem to the fxst in the

Chapter 3, Page 105

volume, to the extent that we rnight regard it as a second beginning d e r the premature ending

signified by the epitaph. The split between self and other intuited in "A Tale" is articulated

clearly in 'The Alchemist." As Thomas S i m o n s remarks, "This poem could well be the final

or ideal autobiography of the adventurer in 'A Tale'. Having sought the perfections of

Platonism, he l e m s of counterforces that cannot be quelled" (162). The question now is, what is

self, and what is other? Or, at least - following on the contemplative sequence just preceding -

we might ask with the poet, what survives, what remains?

The assurnption of a male persona is shared by several of Bogan's readers. Goldfein

argues that the speaker of "The Alchemist" "seeks . . . a purity of passion and we applaud the

quest. Ifhis choice is analogous to that of Bogan's fxst youth, the disparity in perspective is

crucial: this man requires no outsider to tell his tale" (75). William Heyen, who - after quoting -

the poem in its entirety - testily disputes its power: "This is the kind of poetry 1 can't read- Al1

this flesh, will, mind, passion, love, grief, breath, desire add up to an imagined garden without

toads. An alchernist is spealdng, of course, and his is a life of abstract speculation, but 1 can't

pay attention to what he is saying, can't focus on the issue of his p ~ e r n . " ~ ~ Other readers sidestep

the issue of speaker, probably wisely. Ruth Limrner cites "The Alchemist" as a supreme

example of Boganys disguised poetic method. " M a t event does that poem descnie? Who is the

speaker? Where? Under what specific pressure? We don? lcnow. We are not meant to bow."

(168) Goldfein suggests that "The Alchernist" demonstrates the resistant arnbiguity of meaning

and unresolved antitheses that characterize Bogan's poetry. Remarking on the "series of

speakers that well might unnerve" which appear in Bodv of This Death, she suggests that the

shifting ground we find there is inextricably linked to the unresolved matter under debate.

38 Heyen (100). Heyen's opinion is in the minority. Van Doren contends that "The Alchemist" alone would establish Bogan's excellence in her art (29). Frank calls it "one of the superb poems of Bogan's canon" (64).

Chapter 3, Page 106

"When situations, relationships, speakers are no longer simple, we must adjust to the continual

presence of ambivalence," she rernarks. Bogan's speakers remind GoIdfein of Yeats,' for "Their

confrontation is rarely with the easily assessed, more often with a temcble beauty. They revoke a

former stance, or abandon a person, and do so without belittling its great attraction. Sornething is

repudiated, to Save the self, but not without the knowledge that the ensuing pain shall itself be

The connection to Yeats is a fivitfiil one. Poetry is full of such heroes on a quasi-

scientific quest for purity, Diane Middlebrook suggests, noting that the narrator in Yeats's

- "Saifing to Byzantium" is, like the alchemist, a being "sick with desire." "The Alchemist,"

however, "rejects the idea fiirmed in 'Sailing' that a world of pure spirit exists beyond the

- sphere of physical existence" (176). Bogan's poem c m thus be interpreted as a critique of a

romantic theory of art, Middlebrook argues. We should in fact view its protagonist "not as a

symbol for the romantic poet heroically bent on d e m g nature . . . but as a woman poet

hopelessly d e m g the social significance of her femininity" (176).

From this perspective, the will to deny the body expressed in "The Alchemist" grows poignantly comprehensible. For the metaphorical gold she seeks - passion wholly of the mind, etc -are attainments essential to creativity; but in Western culture they have always been regarded as "masculine" attainments. Throughout her long career, Bogan's poetry reflects ambivalent acquiescence to the stereotype that makes aspiration to intellectual power a contradiction of the ferninine. This contradiction is rarely expressed in direct statement; rather, it infüses most of the poems that, Iike "The Alchernist," deal with a conflict between mental power and sexual passion. It is expressed in metaphors where flesh and breath form fatefiil polarities . . . (276)

Middlebrook's points are well taken; her reading m e r enhances our appreciation of the

placernent of "The Alchemisty' as pivotal to the tone, momentum, and evolving perspective of

Bodv of This Death as - past its mid-point - it looks toward the much anticipated "end." The

voice of the poet is stronger now, and clearly articulates the duality with which she has struggled.

Chap fer 3. Page 107

The gender of the speaker is, as Limmer points out, not known, and not to be known; we can

guess only that he or she is both quester and dispassionate artist, one who seeks to understand the

nature of imrnortality without preconceptions.

Poems 17 through 19: "Men Loved Wholly Beyond Wisdom. " "The Crows, " and "Memory "

The next three poerns in Bodv of This Death - "Men Loved Wholly Beyond Wisdom, "The

Crows," and "Memory" - serve as a counterpoint to the determined, idealized reserve of the

grouping which precedes "The Alchemist-" As if to prove the endurance of "'unmysterious

flesh," the speaker of "Men Loved Wholly Beyond Wisdom" picks up with a vengeance the

theme of women's foolish, all-consuming love for men, as predictable in its recurrence as the

return of the seasons and as reliably soul-destroying as "fire in a dry thicket."

Men loved wholly beyond wisdom Have the staff without the banner. Like a f r e in a dry thicket Rising within women's eyes 1s the Iove men must return.

Again, Bogan echoes the Renaissance courtIy lover, as exemplified by Wyatt, thus linking this

poem to "The Frightened Man." The first four Iines of Wyatt's sonnet, a version of Petrarch's

"Rime 140," develops the "conceit" of love as a kind of warrior who, "with bold pretense,"

flaunts his wadike presence by means ofthe "banner": 39

The long love that in rny thought doth harbor, And in mine heart doth keep his residence, h t o my face presseth with bold pretense And therein campeth, spreading his banner.

39 See note to the poem, 44On (The Norton Antholow of Endish Literature, Vol. 1).

Chapter 3. Page 1 O8

The speaker of the sonnet blushes; his beloved, who has tried to teach him discretion, is annoyed;

he is crushed and buries his feelings for her in the forest of his heart, where they hide in

cowardice. Bogan revisits this prototypical, courtly love scenario f?om the standpoint of the

woman. Eier eyes are uiflamed with desire; she knows no restraint. This creature wonders as if

fkom another world at the retreat to stone and safety sought by the romantic woman of the

preceding poerns:

Heart, so subtle now, and trembling, What a marvel to be wise, To love never in this manner! To be quiet in the fern Like a thing gone dead and still, Listening to the prisoned cricket Shake its terrible, dissembling Music in the granite hill.

Several years after she cornposed this poem, Bogan wrote a letter fkom her hospital bed at The

Neurological Institute in New York, where she was recoverîng after a nervous breakdown. Her

surprise at her own capacity to feel love, f i e r al1 the turmoil and disappointrnents of her

relationships with men, reads Iike a gloss on 'Men Loved:"

1 refused to fa11 apart, so I have been taken apart, like a watch- . - . One of rny component parts, strangely enough, tumed out to be the capaciw to love. I still can love. Isnyt that wonderfiil? 1 still can go into love humbly and take it, no matter to what end, and feel humble and ashamed [?]: "Love cornes in at the eyes" - A pretty pass for one of my stiff-necked pride, don? you think? It comes in at the eyes and subdues the body. An army with banners. My god, every poet in the world knew about it, except me. (MWL, 57)

The Petrarchan convention that "love comes in at the eyes and subdues the body," an "arrny with

40 1 owe the connection between this 1930 letter and "Men Loved" to John Muller, who notes that Bogan is quoting Yeats ("A Drinking Song," slightly misquoted - "eyes" should be "eye"). The poem was written in the fall of 1922, when Bogan was reading RemonsLbilities.

Chapter 3, Page 1 O9

banners," is revivified in the opening lines of "Men Loved-" The situation is presented matter-

of-factly, but - as Frank notes - while the poem begins as observation, it ''tuns into revelation,

as the speaker counsels herself to hoId back the very passion she disparages" (65). Bloom calls

"Men Loved" a "miniature dialectic, with the contrary statement rising fkom the sixth line

onwards" (85) and Petersen descn3es its "ironic reversal" (78). The lessons learned in the first

part of Bodv of This Death are not forgotten in this poem, even though the speaker struggles as in

"'My Voice Not Being Proud" to "rernember, whiIe there is tirne."

"The Crows" mocks the self-satisfied solemnity of "Epitaph for a Romantic Woman-"

The protagonist of this poem (herself a crow / crone) has achieved the permanence of seasonal

recurrence, has hardened herself like one of the untended staiks in a field rather than an old

stone.

The woman who has grown old And knows desire must die, Yet tunis to love again, Hears the crows' cry.

She is a stem long hardened, A weed that no scythe mows.

A haunting pair of lines fiom "Epitaph" is both elaborated on and rebuked in "The Crows:"

Always in the heart she loved Others had Iived, - she heard their laughter.

("Epitaph")

The heart's laughter will be to her The crying of the crows.

Who slide in the air with the same voice Over what yields not, and what yields, Aiike in sprïng, and when there is only bitter Winter-burning in the fields.

("'The Crows")

In both poems we hem a disturbing, alienating laughter which the poet locates as originating in

the wornan'ç heart. In "Epitaph," her heart is filled with mirthfUI personages - "Others" - who

live on and laugh while the protagonist lies still, listening. in "'The Crows," the laughing changes

into the raucous crying of crows, birds associated with longevity,4' who mock and "slide in the

air with the same voice." The reader is left with their noise at the poem's conclusion, just as in

"Statue and Birds" the whistle of the quails is the final note.42 The drama which is Bodv of This

Death is filled with the Iaughing voices of alien creatures close to - indeed of a piece with - the

poet's heart.

With "Memory," the poet again repudiates the solemn dictates of the poems about

irnrnortaliw which precede it in Bodv of This Death. The insistence on lasting reputation

("Another man will tell you what she was"), commemoration (now possessed by time, who was

once possessed by men), and the congratulatory relief of the epitapb is, in "Memory," disrnissed

as iilusory, a grand charade. We are of the earth. We will return to it. We are not planted, like

trees in poems, but scattered randomly, like "shards and straw upon coarse ground," Stones -

our hardened selves - are just so much rubble.

Do not guard this as rich stuff without mark Closed in a cedarn dark, Nor lay it down with tragic masks and greaves, Licked by the tongues of leaves.

4' McLerran and McKee (34). See aIso their discussion of "crone," a form of the Triple Goddess (Virgin / Mother / Crone), who appears as an old woman in numerous myths and tales. The word "crone" is one variation of the word "crown," originaiiy designating the power of the tribal matriarch who wrote the first laws and punished the k t transgressors. Atropos, one of the three Fates (the most powerful, as the one who cuts the thread), was calied the Crone (32-33).

"' Pope draws more parallels between "The Crows" and "Statue and Bir&." The speaker of the latter poem is trapped, like the statue, "in a recalcitrant body while inwardly she teems with life and desire; however, it is not marble, but her own physically aged body that restricts her- Both the statue and this woman would flee their barren, withered world; for the latter, tuming to love again is made to appear as fiitile as the former's lifted heel" (158).

Chaprer 3. Page I I I

Nor let it be as eggs under the wings Of helpless, startled things, Nor encompassed by song, nor any glory Perverse and transitory.

Rather, like shards and straw upon coarse ground, Of little worth when found, - Rubble in gardens, it and Stones alike, That any spade may strike.

Over time painfùl experiences are - if not completely forgotten - less acutely felt and the scars

less visible, as the speaker of "Men Loved" realizes to h a chagrin. The poet counters her

previous stoicism with the bravado of the epicure, tossing off her former fascination with

irnrnortality. Even the "irnmortal lyric" (song) is treated with contempt, as a "glory / Perverse

and transitory." The speaker counsels herself; the imperative voice is directed at her double.

In this poem, memory is synonymous with female sexuality, the speaker's physical

centre enclosed and perversely hidden as if both illicit and valuable, stoIen treasure buried and

then forgotten. It would lie down and be licked by tongues. Against the impulse Bogan asserts

the self-conscious voice of the poet, syrnbolically outfitted for battle in tragic rnask and

"greaves" (armour for shins), in the usage of the antiquated "cedarn" (of cedar). The woman

artist must control her passion and fkther resist the temptation to regard her own sexuality as

men see it: as dark uid "rich stuc" as the subject of romantic poetry ("encompassed by song"),

as defined by the functions of motherhood and child-rearing ("eggs" and "helpless, startled

things"). She can value it properly only if she lems first to treat it as rubble, common and

fundamental, for - once stripped of Iimiting preconceptions - she will be f?ee to be herself.

Poems 20 and 21: " Women " and 'Xast Hill on a Vista"

There is no more controversial poem in the Bogan canon than "Women-" It has both contriiuted

Chap f er 3, Page 1 12

to the poet's reptation and underrnined it- 'Women" has been much anthologized and discussed,

but feminist critics - angered at what they see to be its "message" - have tumed away fiom

fiirther study of Bogan in conternpt. Bowles begins her book by looking at what she cârefilly

caIls a 'cconscious neglect" of Bogan: "Those anthologies of poetry by women that we welcomed

in the seventies ïnevitably included poem with 'fernale' or 'woman' in the title; thus, among

feminists Bogan is best known for her poem 'Women.' And 'Women,' we should not be

surpnsed to leam, has been read as a self-hate, and thus a woman-hating, poem" (4).

Women have no wildemess in them, They are provident uistead, Content in the tight hot ce11 of their hearts To eat dusty bread.

They do not see cattle cropping red winter grass, They do not hear Snow water going d o m under culverts Shallow and clear.

They wait, when they should tuni to joumeys, They stiffen, when they should bend. They use against themselves that benevolence To which no man is fiend.

They cannot think of so many crops to a field Or of clean wood defi by an axe. Their love is an eager meanùiglessness Too tense, or too lax.

They hear in every whisper that speaks to them A shout and a cry. As like as not, when they take life over their door-sills They should let it go by,

The introduction to the poem in The Norton Anthologv of Modem Poetrv States that it "bitterly

pretends to speci@ the qualities women do not have, but really indicates those they possess"

(594). Jones argues that "Bogan "indicts women in general for their failure to live flamingly and

courageously" (27). The poet "is highly specific about women's shortcomings," Frank agrees.

Chapier 3, Page If 3

"Their senses are stunted, their imaginations dull, their claims upon the world meager and

modest. They put up with their lot; they miss the pleasures of planning, work, and rest. They are

limited, misplaced in their kindness, and out of step with the true nature of feeling. They

blunder, misjudge, hold back, and in every way defeat themselves" (66)- Ridgeway contends that

the "short, bitter descriptions read like an indictrnent. The imagery is of restriction and

experiential bankruptcy for women" (43). "The poem's unrelieved bittemess toward gender

epitomizes the worst kind of isolation, extending to encornpass both the outward and inward

world," Pope asserts. "Women are excoriated as stunted, constricted creatures, senselessly

paralyzed and paralyzing" (158). She considers the poem ccrepresentative" of "victimization."

Maxine Kumin condemns it outright as ''mefiil and sly" (58).

c~Women'y fias had its femuiist defenders, however. DeShazer claims that we should look

again, past our first impression of the poem as a "scathing indictment of female passivity." The

words of the first stanza, for example, are "double-edged:"

Wilderness means wildness, uncharted and uncultivated territory, but it can also refer to an area designated to preserve natural resources, a haven or refuge. Thus the implications here are paradoxical: women typically lack wilderness and the fieedom that accornpanies such a state, but neither do they have an unlimited capacity to set aside the self as, the poet suggests, has long been expected of them. (49)

DeShazer furthe notes the "obvious irony" in the juxtaposition of "Content" - as in contentment

(or not) - and "tight hot cell." 1s Bogan describing women as cornplacent, or desperately

unsatisfied? And, DeShazer wonders, "fi-om whose viewpoint is this assessment being offered?"

(49). Although we might at first assume that Bogan is condernning the female sex for unthinking

acceptance of its lot, the phrase "As like as not" in the second last line of the poem undercuts the

definitive tone and an ironic uncertainty intrudes- She concludes that, "given the shift of tone in

this last stanza, it seems likely that the ironic speaker has been describing women's weaknesses

Chaprer 3, Page 114

fiom a traditional patriarchal perspective, not-necessarily fiom the poet's own point of view"

(49). Colasurdo also highlights the fimction of irony and duplicity, along with ambivalence, in

''Women," arguing that the poem "appears straightforward in its negative and self-deprecatory

statements, but fiirther readings soon discover a complex range of possïbilities" (341). She

believes that Bogan denounces "not women but a male definition of women. The speaker's use

of 'they' - as well as the repetition of 'should' - implicitly condemns not women but women'ç

internalization of patriarchal ideology. To read the poem without irony would be to overlook an

entire tradition of irony in Amencan women's writing" (341).

Bowles pointedly singles out 'Women" for analysis in her introduction, ignoring it in her

subsequent chapter on Bodv of This Death; her assertion then that the poem "deserves to be read,

not as an isolated poem in an anthology, but in the context of a lifelong quest for expression" (4)

is the more hstrating for its acuity. Bowles treats the biographical details of the poet's Iife as

more relevant to the "context" of the poem than its carefully contrived placement in the volume.

As we shall see in the discussion of "Last Hi11 on a Vista" which follows, Pope at least considers

how the poem which follows "Women" responds to its assertions. Colasurdo gestures in the

direction of a larger "drama" and suggests Bogan's readers keep in rnind the overall "plot" of

wornen's lives:

As an expert poet Bogan is a brilliant liar: 'Women' deceives the reader into believing that a denouncement is taking place, while its Ianguage denounces the denouncement and a f f m s a more subversive reality. The act of reading becomes a discovery of subversive drama; the poem's claims are both tnie and unirue, the images seen and not seen, and the reader must piece together his / her own 'plot' - women's destiny - out of the contradictory actions presented. (342)

Consideration of voice, tone, and context are al1 relevant to the reading of "Women-"

First, we might attempt to identiQ or at least characterize the speaker. Middlebrook says Bogan,

"as author, maintains a knowing distance. These are some women, other women" (179). A s

Chapf er 3, Page 1 15

Colasurdo notes, the use of "they" distances the subject at hand, women, fiom the perspective of

that speaker. Middlebrook and Colasurdo do not go so far as to suggest a male persona, but the

leap is a small and indeed obvious one, given the dialogic nature of Body of This Death. The

question is, rather, why not assume the speaker is male? Bogan's readers repeatedly fix the

female gender to the personae of her poetry, even when al1 evidence points in the opposite

direction. They confùse Bogan the person with Bogan the poet, attempting to reconcile the

public statements of the writer with the encoded and rnasked language of lyric. Colasurdo quotes

an older Bogan desm'bing the poem as showing "al1 the bittemess of 24" (342). 1 suggest that

this does not tell uç much (she might have said the same of ' m e Frightened Man"). As we have

seen, in Body of This Death the artist effectively dramatizes her own psychic codiict through

various voices and stances. Ifit were not for a true sense of "otherness" - most clearly

manifested in its gender conflict - the dialectic would be unrealized, unconvincing.

"Wornen" echoes many of the poems which precede it, notably "The Crows," and it

functions as a kind of counter-statement to "A Tale." The youth seeks a hard and enduring

reality; the woman of "Crows" is "long hardened." Women, this poem tells us, "stiffen, when

they should bend." Are women the permanence which adventuring men unwittingly seek? Why

should women then "tum to journeys" if the quest is al1 about finding a place "with hills / Like

rocky gates" - a woman's body, cornpIete with restricted sexual passageway leading to the "tight

hot cell" of an interior "heart," idealized both into sculpture and nahiral landscape. It would take

a masculine sensibility to suggest that women are incomplete or unrealized men. Just as the

speaker of "The Frightened Man" describes the woman as relentless in her role as passive quarry,

and "The Romantic" misrepresents what his loved one "was", so the narrator of "Women" cannot

help but see his opposite nurnber except in terms of his own nature - a perspective which

translates into a catalogue of her failings, an iternized listing of lack. A disciple of Freud, he

Chapter 3. Page 116

assumes her to be crïppled by a consurning p a i s envy.

Pope regards "Wornen" as surprisingly cathartic: women must face what they are, and

change themselves. She thus fin& it fascinating that "Last Hill on a Vista," the next poem in

Bodv of This Death, "cm be interpreted as almost a point by point reversa1 of the indictments

just leveled" (1 59).

Come, let us tell the weeds in ditches How we are poor, who once had riches, And lie out in the sparse and sodden Pastures that the cows have trodden, The wMe an autumn night seals down The cornforts of the wooden town.

Corne, let us counsel some cold stranger How we sought safety, but Ioved danger, So, with stiff walls about us, we Chose this more ftagile boundary: Hills, where light poplars, the firrn oak, Loosen into a littIe smoke.

As Pope notes, the cal1 "let us" constitutes a "radical break fiom the distancing of the cumdative

'they' in 'Women'" (159). The poet returns to the irnperative voice of "Memory" ("Do not

guard"), "The Romantic" ("'Admit the ruse"), and "Sub Contra" ('Beat upon it til it break"). In

Body of This Death, Bogan repeatedly calls attention to poetry as speech (Frank 55). The

speaker is clearly addressing another in this poem, imagining a "we" who will do the telling and

M e r envisioning the audience they will seek out: in the first stanza, "the weeds in ditches"; in

the second, "some cold stranger." The various personages of the book - including the old

woman of "The Crows," described as "A weed that no scythe mows," and the wandering stranger

of "A Letter" - crowd into the margïns of "Last Hill." The landscape of "A Tale," with its "hills

1 Like r o c b gates," here merges with the nindown tavems and town of "A Letter" and "Words

for Departure." The speaker, perhaps once again addressing her double or her second self,

Chapter 3, Page 11 7

experiences a recognition of contrary desires and expectations. The two together have "sought

safety, but Ioved danger," have unaccountably chosen the "more fiagile boundary" of the open

air over the stiff walls of the wooden tom. What Colasurdo calls the mood of ambivalence of

Bodv of This Death is opedy acknowledged in this poem: the poet presents the contradictions as

psychological fact, to be accepted and spoken of rather than denied. "Last Hill" marks an

important recognition, a plateau in the movement of the book

Poems 22 through 2 7: "Song, " "Stanza, " "me Changed Wornan, " "Chanson un peu naïve, " "Ffteenth Farewell, " and "Sonnet "

The last poems of Bodv of This Death variously complicate, contradict, and complete the matter

which precedes them. "Song" pfaintively undermines the bravado of "Last Hill" as the telling

and retelling continues. Hard-won joy and wisdom cannot be rnaintained more than an instant,

but have rather slipped into the yawning gap of the white space between the two poerns.

Emotional circularity is asserted over namative progression, and a new voice from the

subconscious breaks on the surface.

Love me because 1 am lost; Love me that 1 am undone. That is brave, - no man has wished it, Not one.

Be strong, to look on my heart As others look on my face. Love me, - 1 tell you that it is a ravaged Terrible place.

Read out of context, "Song" rnight not impress, although Jones rather cryptically cites it as an

example of Bogan's "sheer power to write poetry without any resources" (29). Peterson sees it

as one of the poet's Iess successfiil attempts to imitate the anonymous writers of Elizabethan

Chaprer 3, Page 118

Song (76). Ridgeway and Bowles, speculating about Bogan's decision to excise "Song" Erom

later collections, suggest that Bogan "realized later that something was wrong with the poem"

(Ridgeway 9) in that its tone is too self-pitying and "confessional, too revealing of a weak

moment, even if it is acutely insightfid about the response to disappointed love by a wornan who

feels powerless" (Bowles 78).

Perhaps reticence was indeed Bogan's reason for excluding "Song" fiom publication

after its appearance in Body of This Death. The despaking, childish speaker punctures the

equilïbrium of the volume, scattering its multiple personalities - so briefly united in "Last Hill" -

to resume their crying singly, in isolation. The placement of "Song" rnakes vivid and horri'ble the

vicissitudes of mental imbalance.

Originally published alongside "Last Hill in a Vista" in Measure, "Stanza" both responds

to and cornpletes that poem. The poor, who once had riches, lie out in the sodden cow pastures;

the sky they waken to after sleep is overcast, not white and clear as it was once:

No longer bum the hands that seized Small wreaths Fom branches scarcely green. Wearily sleeps the hardy, l e m Hunger that could not be appeased. The eyes that opened to white day Watch cloud that men may look upon: Leda forgets the wings of the Swan; Danae has swept the gold away.

In Body of This Death we read two stories at once - or, rather, a single story with two

intersecting plots: one of sexual love and betrayal; another of poetic voice stifled yet resisting.

The role of memory is explored, the mystery of destiny interrogated. In "Stanza," the talented

young poet senses her power, yet her yearning for mythic stature is fused to women fmously

loved and lefi. As in "Memory," sexual experïence is a remembrame both illicit and compelling,

but in that poem the poet urges that it be rejected for hard reality. Here the "cloud that men may

Chapter 3. Page 1 19

look upon" seen on awakening is cornmon and uninspired compared with the wings and gold of

what was lost. Pope suggests that the attitude of Leda and Danae "Who were raped by men, and

who are now alone," is "one of self-sufficiency and specific indifference to the sexual impact of

men on their lives," of "refusing to be imprisoned in memory or trauma" (161). But there is

more to their rnemories than rape. The two women are haunted by the loss rather than the

violence of the experience. The poet feels prematurely old, believing that she was once beIoved

of the gods, trailing cIouds of glory, and that great achievement and grand passion had in the past

been bers? Like Wordsworth's child, she lives now humbled in the land of mortal men, human

afier all. Perseus, the slayer of Medusa, was the son of Danae; silence as well as poetry followed

the Gorgon's death,

In the ironically titled "The Changed Woman," the speaker describes the heroine of the

narrative becorne now like the aged woman of "The Crows." The two personae, old and Young,

are now merged. In the first stanza is described the woman's determination to repeat the

experience, to relearn the lesson of "Knowledge." The woman is changed; she is not changed at

all.

The light flower leaves its little core Begun upon the waiting bough. Again she bears what she once bore And what she knew she re-lems now.

The woman is introduced in the poem as a "Iight flower" which leaves its core, only just begun.

'' In 1939, Bogan would compose an elaborate, tongue-in-cheek response to a questionnaire sent to her by a graduate student. Her paragraph on the subject of her birtb date suggests that she at least toyed with the fantasy of having lived multiple previous lives, enacting the eternal recurrence of reincarnation:

Dates (what do you mean "Dates"?): August 1 1, 1897. Ten years before Auden, Isherwood, and L. MacNeice, and about two thousand after Sappho. This was quite a while to wait, wasn't it? It is my fïrm belief that 1 was Messalina, the Woman of Andros, a couple of nameless Aiexancirians, Boadicea, Mary Queen of Scots, Lucrezia Borgia, the ferninine side of Leonardo, Shakespeare's Sonnets, Madame Roland, Charlotte Corday, Saint Theresa (of Avila), and Felicia Hemans, before this. WWL 189)

Chaprer 3, Page 120

In 'The Romantic," the "laure1 builds up, without haste, / Its precise flower, like a pentagon,"

The echo of "Begun" and "pentagon" connects the two poerns, telling and retelling, while

drawing attention to the change which is not one, which is simply repetition: "Again she bears

what she once bore." The "little core" requires slow time and patience to build up the "precise

flower" which we might take to be the poet's mature craft. When the woman leaves as a "light

flower" the process is intermpted, presumably to begin al1 over again in a new spring.

The cracked glass fuses at a touch. The wound heals over, and is set In the whole flesh, and is not much Quite to remanber or forget.

Rocket and tree, and dome and bubble Again behind her fieshened eyes Are treacherous. She need not troubIe. Her lids will know them when she dies.

And while she lives, the unwise, heady Dream, ever denied and driven, - Will one day h d her bosom ready, - That never thought to be forgiven.

Yet while the woman lives, so does her "unwise, heady / Dream, ever denied and driven" of

artistic fiilfilment and the rewards of her talent. One day, the poem concludes, the two halves of

the split self will be reconciled. When the dream is realized, the poet will finally forgive the

woman.

"The Changed Woman" is the poet's revised statement on what "remains," The etemal

round of the seasons sets the pattern of circularity which inforrns our lives. The romantic young

woman who thought that her experience of love gone wrong would surely be fatal finds that she

c m go on, does go on, and indeed eventually is healed - quite. The whole flesh covers over the

wound so effectively that it "is not much / Quite to remember or forget."

The "cracked glass" recalls "Portrait" and the haunting of "Medusa" by the Lady of

Chapter 3, Page IL1

Shalott; its fusion anticipates the end of Bogan's poetic sequence. In 'The Changed Woman" the

poet takes another step in the reconciliation of the several voices and struggles of Bodv of This

Death. The une-xpected rhyrne of "driven" and "forgiven" brings the polarities together, and

calm follows the hysteria over betrayal which threatens the equilibrium of stanza three.

AppropriateIy - considering its f o m as song - "Chanson un peu naïve" is a kind of

recapitulation of the theme and circular narrative of Bodv of This Death. In the first stanza, the

narrator asks rhetorically: "What body c m be ploughed, / Sown, and broken yearly?"

She would not die, she vowed, But she has, nearly.

Sing, heart sing; Ca11 and car01 clearly.

The desperate loss of love, so like a close encounter with death, prompts the romantic song of

tragic love, But life goes on.

And, since she could not die, Care would be a feather, A £ïlm over the eye Of two that lie together,

Fly, Song, fly, Break your little tether.

The experience of sexual love, renewed but now without illusion -and thus without inspiration -

resuIts in the flight of song. But again, this is a stage to be passed.

So fiom strength concealed She makes her pretty boast: Pain44 is a k o w healed And she rnay love you most.

Song, cry,

" In Bodv of This Death, the h e reads: "Plain is a fiirrow healed." 1 assume this to have been a typographical error, as "Pain" appears in subsequent collections.

Chapter 3. Page I22

And hear your crying lost.

The Song renews in the "pretty boast" that the woman is over her last relationship and may in fact

love her new man more than al1 the others, but it is a suppressed sob rather than music. The lost

cry which masquerades as rnelody is a clear reference to the earlier "Song" ("Love me because 1

am lost"). "Chanson" is "Song" in another key, a different language. It undercuts the moment of

optimism which ends "The Changed Woman" just as sharply as "Song" negates the courage of

"Last Hill." The repetition of oscillating mood is at one with the recurring fa11 into sexual

enthrallment. At this point in Body of This Death, we can see cIearly that the young woman of

broken body is the poet / narrator. Again, the personae merge, and there is no longer any

question of the speaker's gender. Thus we c m assume the male voice has been subsumed: the

poet is also the woman. As if in a parting gesture to her androgynous perspective, the speaker

aclaiowledges the truth of the fkightened man's insight - that is, that a woman's vuùierability

conceaIs an unexpected strength. Bogan's elliptical syntax however renders the reading

uncertain- 1s the woman's strength concealed even fkom herself? And is the strength in question

unequivocally the wornan ' s own?

Pope is mystified by the "curious" placement of this poem after "The Changed Woman,"

"curious because the naive, childish singer seems out of context with the emerging, toughened

women of the final poems" (162). She speculates that the "altered voice of the speaker" is

important as a contrast:

There is an undertone of mockery, amplified by the affected French title, the nursery rhyme meter, and the pathetic rendering of the girl, that measures the distance between this unenlightened figure and the more complex initiated Bogan. PoçitiveIy construed, the suggestion of parody is a mile-marker of the one voice's comparative security, a flexibility and even self-wit. Yet the tone is still disturbing, for it hints at an as yet unresolved disgust of gender that will continue to appear in Bogan. (162)

Chaprer 3, Page 123

Pope's fiutration is al1 too ciear: with "Chanson un peu naïve," Bogan veers from the gradual,

spiralhg upward rnovement discernible in the closing poems of Bodv of this Death,

undermining the recovery of poetic voice and the proud rebuttal of sexual love and its inherent

destructiveness. What Pope fails to appreciate, however, is that there is indeed a strength -

perhaps too well concealed - in the poet's honest appraisal of ongoing conflicts, her recognition

that the aesthetically pleasing "end" of the volume, toward which she is workng, will in fact

"never brighten it more than this."

Pope is much happier with 'Tifteenth Farewell." "Bodv of This Deah closes out on the

new upsurge of fkeedom and self-reliance," she h d s . "The penultimate poem . . . suggests by its

title a move often atternpted but never fiilly made . . . . The poem closes in a mood and setting

sirnilar to that of 'Last Hill'. The first crucial liberating steps have been taken, but the

consequences remain untracked and darhess is closing in" (162-63). Ridgeway wonders at the

poem's title and what she sees as its "attempt at lightness of mood," suggesting it to be "a

nervous gesture to gain acceptance of a stance felt to be defiant" (10). A more generous

interpretation is that Bogan felt her lock-on-lock theme of repetition and recurrence could, at this

point in the poetic sequence, bear a little leaven.

The clear voice of the poet / beloved addresses now as "other" the lover: the "you"

challenged in "Fifteenth Farewell" is alrnost certainly the male persona of "The Frightened Man"

completeIy extemalized, dissociated f?om the drarna as it draws to a close. But Bogan does not

hand us the he / she debate served up on a platter. There are no gendered pronouns in either of

the concluding poerns, as if to remind the reader of where we came in. The poet wiII forever

harbour the personae of the questing youth and the rneditative, observing 1 / eye; she is aiso the

plurality of women. "Fifteenth Farewell" echoes al1 too well the leave-takings of "A Letter" and

"Words for Departure:"

Chapter 3. Page 124

You rnay have al1 things fiom me7 Save my breath, The slight life in m y throat will not give pause For your love, nor your loss, nor any cause. Shall 1 be made a panderer to death, Dig the green ground for darkness underneath, Let the dust serve me, covering al1 that was With all that will be? Better, fi-om the ' s claws, The hardened face under the subtle wreath.

In the fïrst stanza, the poet recollects her fascination with death and burial as a means to end the

pain of love, "Shall 1 play the pavanne / For a dead child , . .?" she had asked in "A Letter."

Shall she indeed be "made a panderer to death" by willing her own oblivion underground? In

"My Voice Not Being Roud" the anticipation was of silence underground- "Fifieenth Farewell"

- unabashedly announcing that it has repeated, and will continue to repeat, its message as often

as necessary - at once enjoins the listener that he cannot have her breath and rerninds the speaker

herself that she should Save it. The direct address to the extemal "You" of the poem's opening

thus opens up to sirnultaneous soliloquy before the end of the line, then retux-ns to 'lour" love

and loss. But the focus slips again, and by the close of the sestet which follows the poet once

again speaks to herselfi

Cooler than stones in wells, sweeter, more kind Than hot, perfidious words, my breathing moves Close to rny plunging blood. Be strong, and hang Unriven rnist over my breast and mind, My breath! We shall forget the heart that loves, Though in my body beat its blade, and its fang.

Togethex; the poet and her breath are the "we" who "shall forget the heart that loves." 'Be

strong," she tells herself, exhoting her breathing to act as a kind of rnist to separate her breast

and mind, as if self-division will nullie the debate rather than exacerbate it.

Several commentators have remarked on the change of tone between the first and second

sonnets which rnake up the two parts of "Fi fieenth Farewell." Bowles calls the first half of the

Chapter 3, Page 125

poem "a little self-dramatizing; and a littie surpnsing for one moment in its fmal lines (the

'blade' and 'fang' of love), which b ~ g portents of the sado-masochistic manifestations of love"

(87). The careful reader of Body of This Death will recognize that, in the opening sonnet, Bogan

echoes the more destructive arguments and moods of the book as a whole, as if to re-establish

that which must be refuted, No wonder Bowles is surprised if she expects to find a message in

the middle to endorse. The '"warrior" persona which Bowles identifies here is reminiscent of the

questing hero of "A Tale" and "Medusa," who may try to "forget the heart that loves" but finds

its violent twists and tunis to be integral to his being. Part II begins abruptly with "1 erred:"

1 erred, when 1 thought loneliness the wide Scent of mown grass over forsaken fields, Or any shadow isolation yields. Loneliness was the heart within your side. Your thought, beyond my touch, was tilted air Ekged with as many borders as the wind. How could 1 judge you gentle or unkind When al1 bright flying space was in your care?

The warrïor has, in the second sonnet, "given in to great sadness," says Bowles, who finds "the

image of tilted air. . .nothkg short of arnazïng" (87). The courtly presence - or absence - of

love, that "anny with banners," is sustained by the recollection of Lancelot at the volume's

beginning approaching the tower of the Lady of Shalott, his shield in hand reflecting the Sun,

perhaps idly, vainly, tilting at air. The "sheer sky" in "Medusa" tilts the unbalanced into a

chasm. Across the wide "forsaken fields," long since plowed and recently rnown, the poet

remembers the jousting bravado of the lover, the lean and hardy hunger of the beloved. In the

ensuing Ioneliness she echoes the simple rejoinder of "A Letter:" "And now 1 have written this,

it is nothing."

Now that 1 leave you, I shall be made lonely By simple empty days, - never that chi11

Chapter 3, Page 126

Resonant heart to strike between my anns Again, as though distraught for distance, - oniy Levels of evening, now, behind a hill, Or a late cock-crow fiom the darkening farms.

From "behind a Ml" the poet regains the plateau reached in "Last Hill in a Vista," The

experience of the passionate relationship had been for her like sounding a chord, striking a

cracked bel1 (the lover's "Resonant heart") - empty, hollow, consisting of only the echoes of her

own Zonging. Now she embraces a different loneliness, of "simple empty days," the solitude of

the poet. The closing of the volume articulated in "Fifieenth Farewell" represents a determined

leave-taking fkom emotional tunnoil and cornplexity.

Middlebrook argues that the "you" addressed in the poem is, in the k s t sonnet,

"unmistakably a lover" but becornes a Iarger presence by the end of the second, a signifier of

"the power of the masculine over the feminine as these two abstractions are consistently rendered

in Bogan's poems, where 'he' is nearly always either a voice or a pair of censorious and faitHess

eyes" (179). What Middlebrook fails to discern, however, is how intimately the masculine in

Bogan's poetry is bound up with the poet's own identity, and M e r that the violence in the

dichotomy is al1 on the side of the female. The heart of the man, Middlebrook contends,

"delivered blows and taught [the woman] by exampIe to be definitively alone" (179). In fact it is

the woman who has tried to hoId that chi11 heart "to strike between Ber] arrns."

More convincingly, Middlebrook states that the "theme" of "Fifieenth Farewell" (part 1)

is "explicitly a rejection of suicide." The 'breath" of Iife in the first sonnet is like the "air" of

(masculine) thought of the second, shaping active pain into forma1 art. But here again she

retreats fkom Bogan's determined multi-variance, her ambivalence and internalized androgyny.

"This is the kind of transformation which may be won by denial of the feminine, the body in

which beat 'love's blade and its fang'," Middlebrook concludes, ignoring the resigned

Chapter 3. Page 127

acceptance of the body's lasting power which closes "The Alchernist." "Fifteenth Farewell"

effectively answers the opening poem of the volume, "A Tale," by rejecting the suicida1 impulse

of the rnodernist, male ego confkonted and contained by the ineluctable fact of his mer) female

physical self,

"Sonnet," the last poem of the volume, h c t i o n s as a coda following the conclusion

inherent in "Fifteenth Farewell." It was printed in italics in Bodv of This Death, as if to indicate

an elevation of voice to a radicalIy different plane than the speakers we have been hearing to this

point." The poet seerns to address her readers fiom beyond the clouds:

Since you would daim the sources of my thought Recall the meshes whence it sprang unlimed, The reedy traps which other hands have timed To close upon it. Conjure up the hot Blaze that it cleared so clean ly, or the snow Devised tu strike it down. i t wilI be fiee- Whatever nets druw in to prison me At length your eyes must tum to watch it go.

My mortth, perhaps, may learn one thing too well, My body hear no echo Save its O wn, Yet will the desperate mind, maddened and proud, Seek out the stom, escape the bitter spell That we obey, strain to the wind, be thrown Straight to its fieedom in the thunderous cloud,

The poet's essence - the "sources of her thought" - is like a srnall bird springing fiee fiom the

reeds at water's edge, escaping the sticky lime which would catch and trap it, lime that would

also hasten its physical disintegration. It will not be planted (a tree), or immobilized (a statue).

Ironically, we l e m that her essence is in fact her physical being, that body which survived the

hot blaze of "The Alchernist." The mouth, the body, will not be defeated and cannot be escaped

fiom, despite the fiantic efforts of the "maddened and proud" mind. The body is, after all, the

45 in subsequent coiiections, the italics were removed.

Chaprer 3, Page 128

"sources of her thought;" mind and body are bound together. Yet still the "desperate rnind"

seeks out the storrn to "escape the bitter spell" that "we" (the mouth, the body) obey.

In the octave the poet seems to address an outside force, a ').ou" determùied to strike her

down, time her closing, entrôp and imprison her. The "me" which triumphantly resists "your

eyes" and "other hands" is the poet's theorized, unified self. But the point of Body of This Death

is that the ongoing battie in which the poet is engaged is only norninally or symbolically extemal.

- In the sestet she indicates the depth of her own division, as represented by a stubbom, passionate

physicality resisting the flights of a distraught mïnd bent on intellectual and artistic endeavour.

Pope remarks, rightly, that "'Sonnet' deserves special attention as the concluding poem

of Body of This Death, and the highrnark of the book's movement" (263). She compares it to "A

Tale":

The distance traveled fiom the first poem of the volume with its motive of escape and this fmal poem is remarkable. The former is vague, third-person, reactionary, motivated primarily by romantic escapisrn, while the latter is disciplined, courageous, fist-person, and charged with a strong sense of self. The direction of deliverance rnoves figuratively fiom the earth / body toward the sky / spirit- (163-64)

The "distance travelled" fi-om the first poem of Bodv of This Death to the last is indeed

substantial, but the movement of the volume is much more circular than Pope adrnits- In "A

Tale," Bogan set out an adventuring masculine persona, representative of a rninimalist,

intellectual aesthetic determined to escape the restriction of a ferninine physicality. We are still

at the sarne place in "Sonnet." The telling and retelling have brought the narrator to a more

profound understanding of the nature of her own demons, but she is no M e r ahead in dealing

with them. Rather, we see in her escalating distraction a trajectory brilliant but doomed. Her

figuration of the "thunderous cloud" as the "direction of deliverance" is uplifting only for the

reader or listener, as if we unconsciously anticipate the catharsis at the inevitable conclusion of a

tragic drama. But even the heath scene is yet to corne.

Chapter 3. Page 129

In an inspired discussion of Bogan's poetry published in the Chicago Review in 1954,

Elder Olson qualifies his analysis of Bogan's characterization and the narrative elements in her

work:

We rnust beware of reading independent lyric poems as if they made up a novel. Miss Bogan's poems, for instance, are independent lyrics, and they nearly always depict a single moment of passion or thought. But poems which deal with a moment may or may not deal with it as involved in a context of other events. . . . Miss Bogan's poems sometimes deal, similarly, with the isolated moment; more characteristically, however, they ùnply a context of events; and it is that context which 1 am attempting to suggest here. (73)

The personages of Bogan's poems, Olson continues, "appear to us as they might by a lightning-

flash, or as they might be glirnpsed fiom a swift train; they are caught in attitudes obviously

significant, which we cannot interpret, they make gestures passionate but mystenous" (74). He

acknowledges in mild frustration and evident admiration that he is ''blundering" for he finds "al1

this very difficult to say," and attempts "one last cornparison; her poems are like pictures of

scenes fiom sorne passionate and bitter play which we have not seen; the decor is brilliantly

clear; the characters are fixed in poses which betray rnuch, if only we could interpret" (74).

The dichotomies of Body of This Death are so numerous, so dynamic, that the volume

presents an impenetrable surface. The poet sees al1 the weakuesses and strengths of the

competing voices and enunciates hem, in turn- The effect is elliptical, of continual rotation.

Readers might admire the poetry but nonetheless feel left out, not engaged because too

despairing, too confused, and certainly rebuffed. Approaching Bogan's work as individual lyrics

is both easier and more difficult. Within any one poem there is a relative simplicity of vision and

voice which allows access, but without the context of allusion, structure, and narrative provided

by the volume as a whole, what Bogan articulates in a particular lyrk poem is almost random in

its fiagmented effect. The controversy over the poem Women" is an interesting case in point.

Chapter 3, Page 130

As wonderfully nch and sardonic as the poem is when read in isolation, the complexity of the

speaker's (not to mention the poet's) attitude toward women cannot be fùlly appreciated without

an understanding of what else "has been said" by the various personae of Bodv of This Death.

Critics approaching Bodv of This Death have, for the most part, appreciated uistinctively

its inherent cohesion. However, the book's complexity and interna1 tensions have confused and

misled even the most sympathetic. Frank, for example, provides analysis of the poetry which

stands alone for its insight, but she is content to underestimate the organization of Bodv of This

Death as "a sequence of moods" (56). "The poems seek meaning in the life lived passionately

and even recklessly; they attempt an understanding of it, and a reconciliation with it," she

contends. Frank's discussion of the book keeps loosely to the sequential arrangement, but she

omits several poems without comment and makes no apology for a subtle misadering to

emphasize what she calls "thematic clusters." 46

The explanation which Frank and others offer that the youth of "A Tale" is a distancing

device, a mask as easily domed as discarded, fails to disentangle how gender is fimdamentally

implicated in the intersecting debates which make up the volume, how it complicates the poet's

understanding of her own split seIf. Bowles simply ignores it. Singling out Bodv of This Death

as the poet's "most immediate voIurne," "one of the most stunning poetic records in English of a

young woman's response to the first failure of love" (83), Bowles dismisses the youth of "A

Tale" as an "unconvincing personae." Like Frank, she explains the book's logic in terrns of

"wide oscillations of mood" which arise fiom the "confusions of the woman who speaks." Her

Frank's ordering is as follows (the poems are numbered 1 through 27 as they appear in Body of This Death): 1,3,4,6,7,8,9, 10, 12, 15, 13, 16, 17,20,18,25,24,26, 19,21, 14,23,27. "Decoration" (2), "Song" (22), and "Portrait" (1 1) are not mentioned. 1 fmd Frank's treatment of the collection to be misleading because she gives no indication of either altering the sequence or leaving out poems, in fact hplying the opposite in both cases. She begins her discussion of "Medusa" by calling it "The poem which follows" the et, "A Taie" (57).

Chapler 3. Page 13 1

determined rejection of the role of the male voice in Bodv of This Death is disappointing,

particularly in light of her explanation of the charge of obscurity levelled by early readers. The

book is difficult to interpret, she says, because it has a "complicated heritage."

Bodv of This Death . . . . stands between the female tradition and modernist influence . . . . Bogan strived for the objectivity, the irony she thought of as modem. These marks of modernism, linked with her expressions of female vulnerabiliw, are responsïble for the intensity of her first book It is precisely this combination of compact form and fema1e subject matter that, paradoxically, led some of her contemporaries and many of the present generation away from a work that seems too "obscure." (89)

It is only another sîep to imagine that Bogan might have conceived of her modernist forebears as

having a masculine face, and that the face had been incorporated into her own identity as a poet.

47

In her chapter on Body of This Death, Bowles devotes much of her cntical energy to ..

readings of poerns which either were published in "little" magazines but not chosen for the book,

or appeared in the book but were excised from later voIumes. This approach is obviously

pertinent to her argument, which is that Bogan's aesthetic was one of c%mitation," that the poet

exercised a consurning pdectionism which eventually silenced her entirely. However, one

result is that Bowles7s discussion of Bodv of This Death is both disorganized and a d i s s e ~ c e to

the poet who shaped and ordered the book as it was published. Bowles separates out the excised

poems, for instance, treating them in isolation fiom those reprinted in Iater collections. Her

treatment of the latter is peremptory, with no sustained consideration for how each lyric

contri.butes to the volume as a whole, and her selection of poerns for mention so arbitrary as to

earn the distrust of the reader. "Medusa," for example, is cited only in passing, as one exarnple

" P.K. Page, a Canadian poet of the generation after Bogan's, demonstrates a male / female dichotomy along these lines in her early writing. Ln poems such as "Arras" and "Mer Rain," Page illustrates the confikt of the female artist who sees herself as a modemist in the tradition of Eliot and Pound, yet is concerned to maintain her female sensibility and subject matter. See my article on Page's early work, " 'Redressing the Balance.' "

Cliapter 3, Page 132

among several in the context of a several-page analysis of the excised "A Letter."

Perhaps Bowles felt that "Medusa" had received enough critical attention. Certaidy

Ridgeway felt the poem warranted special treatment. Ridgeway's discussion is a bit ponderous,

punctuated by self-conscious headings such as "The Goal of Objectïvity," ''The Price of

Striving," and "The Failure of Love," but in addition to linking poerns thernatically she pointedly

achowledges the relevance of the.poetYs sequencing arrangement. Citing Bogan's

pronouncement in "Reading Contemporary Poeiry" that readers should foIlow the order the poet

presmies, Ridgeway advises us to do the same, summarizing the movement of Body of This

Death as follows:

Reading the poems in order, we find that the poet has begun with "A Tale" and the fear implicit in aspiration followed by 'Medusa" with its feeling of paralyzing, defeating forces foflowed irnmediately by a cal1 to liberating rage ("Sub Contra"). Next corne the poems that examine the failure of romantic love, going fiom the confirsed feeling of persona1 rejection in "A Letter" and."Words for Departure" - separated fkom one another by "The Frightened Man" and Betrothed," both expressing disappointment - to an attempt at philosophical rejection of passion ("Ad Castitatem" and "Knowledge") to those poerns seeing the pain of loss in relation to the nothgness of death ("'Portrait," "My Voice Not Being Proud," "Statue and Birds," "Epitaph for a Romantic Woman"). The difficulties of inteilectually fieeing oneself f?om feeling are explored in "The Alchemist," "Men Loved Wholly Beyond Wisdom," and "The Crows." A bitter rebellion against one-sided emotional attachent in "Memory" and b'Women" is followed by the recognition that individuality has a price in "Last Hill in a Vista-" "Song," "Stanza," "The Changed Woman," and "Chanson un peu naïve" in quite different ways deal with disillusionment and discouragement in finding happiness in a romantic relationship. "Fi fieenth Farewell," with its recognition of the nature of loneliness as being more than the lack of another presence, is placed before "Sonnet," the concluding italicized poem which proclaims the necessity of freedom of thought at whatever pnce. (46)

Ridgeway finds that '%ve have corne fiil1 circle back to tiie urgency and danger of aspiration in

the face of societal dernands" (47). The poet camot escape £?om those demands - the "body of

this death" - if she is to maintain her integrity. The conclusion, says Ridgeway, is "a desperate

one that irnplies an underlying desire to comprehend and a hope of finding a more satisfactory

CJaapter 3. Page 133

means of living, of attaining both personal development and hurnan understanding" (47).

Ridgeway retains with exactitude Bogan's ordering of the poems in her summary, but

deletes two she expressly dislikes ("Decoration" and "The Romantic"). While she demonstrates

an intuitive appreciation for the movement, energy, and mistrated idealism of Bodv of This

Death, her discussion is ultimately superficial. Ridgeway offers the perplexed reader very little,

providing only general, unfounded statements in the style of the daily newspaper horoscope.

Much more thoughtfid and considered is Pope's carefùl treatment of the sequencing of

the poems in an essay she wrote for the volume of critical essays on Bogan edited by Martha

Collins for publication in 1984. "Bogan's poetry must be understood in terms of her unique

expenence of gender," she begins (149). A major aspect of her work is '%he need for control ... .

closely aligned with the need for a strong sense of self as a means of emotional protection and

counterbalance in intimacy." Pope takes into consideration "both individual poems and the .

arrangement of the volume as a whole" in her argument that "Body of This Death explores the

meaning of death" (150). Women are represented as %ound, trapped, prone, immobile, or dead,

figuratively or actually unable to express physical or emotional freedom."

The first reach is toward the environment, as four of the opening five poems present experiments in landscape: the desert in "A Tale," the jungle of "Decoration," the mythical realm of "Medusa," and the New England countryside in "A Letter." Escape through another person, indicative of the emotional environment, is explored in such poems as "The Frightened Man," "Betrothed," and "Words for Departue," but sirnilarly fails. At the heart of the collection, "Men Loved Wholly Beyond Wisdom" and "Women" resolve to the utterly bleak proposition that women are by gender unable to love, to move, to be fkee, that it is neither landscapes, partners, nor roles, but women's very selves that are ultimately "the body of this death." This clearly marks the nadir of Bogan's search. Yet in the remaining poems of the book a new energy and capacity for escape emerges. The impact of "women" is to bring about the final abandonment of hope for deliverance fkom the outside. . . . [Tlhe final poems evince a determination for positive action and responsibility that the earlier, static poems do not. Immobilization characterizes the speakers before "Women," while movement and spatialization characterize most of those following it. (15 1)

Chapter 3. Page 134

Pope regards " A Tale" and "'Medusa" as a kïnd of false start. "Betrothed" represents a recovery

of the poet's "continued search for a persona1 landscape" in its successfiil move away fiom the

"depersonalization and encoding" of the first few poems of the collection (153). "The

autobiographical dimension of 'Betrothed' and four of the poerns following it cannot be denied,"

Pope insists, launching into a review of Bogan's childhood, adolescence, and fkst marriage

before her surnmation:

Thus the impotence and despair of "Betrothed" are dramatically developed and cIimaxed through the marriage-tableau formed by four poerns which follow it, "Words for Departure," "Ad Castitatem," 'Xnowledge," and "'Portrait." These move eloquently fiom the ominous ambivalence of the young girl on the verge of commitment, through the breakdown of the relationship and a poignant, aggrieved sepration ("Words for Departure"), to a bitter renunciation of sexuality altogether ("Ad Castitatem"), to a more stoic but nonetheless radical resignation to celïbacy (TnowIedge"). Each step is a m e r arrnoring against the pain and betrayal of sexual commitment, concluding in the most extrerne withdrawal of al1 - death ("Portrait"), (155)

Pope argues that the poems which follow express an increasing "pain of gender," an escalating

sense of "self-disgust" which culminates in c'Women," "Last Hill in a Vista" responds to the

indictments levelled in 'Women," she contends, and marks a high point in the book which should

influence our reading of al1 which follow it.

Unlike any poem in the volume before it, "Last Hill" is the voice of rebellion and cornmunity, raised by women determined to fkee themselves mentally and physically f?om an environment which oppresses. They have simply pulled up stakes and left, preferring the challenge of a nsky liberty to the deceptive comfort and safety that dirninish their vitality and maturity. The remaining poems should be read in light of this change. (161)

Pope attempts to provide such a conditioned reading, but it fails to convince. She ignores the

pathetic cries of "Song" entirely, and struggles noticeably with the "curious" placement of "The

Changed Woman," remarking that the poem's appearance at this point in the sequence is

"disturbing" because "it hints at an as yet unresolved disgust of gender that will continue to

Chaprer 3. Page 135

appear in Bogan" (162).

Pope's analysis of Bodv of This Death is thought-provoking and sensitive to the

undercurrents of Bogan's poetry, as demonsîrated in her discussion of the effects of immobility

and futility ("poems fail to achieve any sense of completion because of the a l i m e n t of phrases

and images which act to came1 each other outy') and her insight that "there is an enormous

amount of tension in her poetry as physical self squares off against spiritual self and realiîy

attempts to face d o m illusion. The emotional tenor of the writing resembles nothing so much as

an embattIed stand-off, often internalized within the woman-speaker herself' (160, 150).

However, her approach to understanding the ordering of the poems in the volume is too rigid,

allowing into the mode1 onIy those poerns which contribute to a predetermùied hypothesis of the

book's structure and meaning. We should bë attuned to the possibility of an alternative

dynamics, alert to what CIare Kinney has called the "intrinsic formal duplicity" of poetic

narrati~e.~' "The Alchemisty" for example, is not discussed at al1 in Pope's essay, but surely its

central placement and rernarkable lyric power warrant at least passing comment- Pope's

insistence on the primacy of biographical content in Boganys writing takes the reader away from

the virtues of the poetry as poetry, a direction we should take with reluctance if at al1 when

considering the work of a forrnalist writer.

Pope is correct in noting that the emotional tenor of Bodv of This Death resembles an

embattled stand-off. The book strives with its last lyric to close on a crescendo, and its

italicization insists on an Olympian perspective, but the exhausting back-and-forth dynamic of

the sequence as a whole leaves the reader at the end fatigued rather than convinced. As Thomas

Simmons comments, "The poerns in Bodv of This Death swing through their own fragments,

Kinney argues that the "inherent doubleness" of poetic narrative "permits it to incorporate within its design the alternative dynamics - and the alternative epiphanies - of a lyric counterplot" (19 1).

Chapfer 3. Page 136

their own acceptance and renunciation of passion, their vying voices" (1 61).~' The description of

the ambitious mind as "rnaddened and proud" is vaunted and unsettling, suggesting the state of a

tragic hero at the beginning of a play rather than a knight in a romance at the successfül

concIusion of his quest. Where we should look instead for inspiration in Bodv of This Death is

in the repetition rather than an imagined progression. The telling and retelling of the pain

experïenced in a sexual love relationship - the narrative matter of Body of This Death - ailows

the poet to work through multiple versions in a therapeutic process reminiscmt of

psychoanalysis, what Shafer calls that "systematic project of constructing a psychoanalytic

reality in which one retells the past and the present, the infantile and the adult, the imagined and

the so-called real." The t e h g becomes "increasingly focused," he explains, gradually achieving

"a narrative redescription of reality . , . . adapted to the clinical context and relationship, the

purpose of which is to understand anew the life and the probIerns in question. The analysand

joins in the retelling (redescribing, reinterpreting) as the analysis progresses7' (46). in Body of

This Death Bogan does her retelling dramatically, doing the police (as Dickens, and later Eliot,

would say) in different voices.

49 Sùnmons' discussion of Body of This Dath contains other thought-provoking statements, such as his suggestion that after reading these poerns "one cornes to understand the need for suffering as a precursor to personaiiîf (164). However, his theorking about what he terms the "typology" of the volume 1 found to be opaque.

Chapter 4: 'Driven to the Verge of Sanity:" Layers of Betrayals in Dark Su-

The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego personality, for no one Gan become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is an essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge, and it therefore, as a rule, meets with considerable resistance.

C.G. Jung, "Aion: Contrhtions to the Symbolism of the Self"

We oursehes cari discover. . . that her favorite subject was not death, as was long supposed; for Me, love, and the sou1 are also recurring subjects. But the greatest interest lies in her progress as a writer, and as a person. We see the young poet moving away, Iby gradua1 degrees, fiom her early slight addiction to graveyardism . . , . S tep by step, she advances into the temor and anguish of her destiny; she is fnghtened, but she holds fast and descnies her fnght. She is driven to the verge of sanity, but manages to remain, in some fashion, the observer and recorder of her extremity, Nature is no longer a fiend, but often an inirnical presence. Nature is a haunted house. And - a tnith even more terrible - the inmost self cari be haunted.

Louise Bogan, "Ernily Dickinson"

Dark Summer, Bogan's second volume of poetry, was published in 1929. In the six years since

the appearance of Body of This'Death, Bogan experimented with and grew increasingly

confident of her poetic powers; according to Elizabeth Frank, she gradually expanded her subject

matter "to attempt more acute speculations about nature, time, and fate" (74). The beautifiilly

designed book - complete with "exquisite" leaf ornaments, and "hips and haws . . . equally

lovely" (WWL, 46) - was dedicated to Raymond Holden, whom Bogan rnarried in 1925

following the death of her f rs t husband several years earlier, In a letter to John Hall WheeIock,

her publisher, Bogan wrote of her pleasure in holding Dark Summer in her hands: "A female

lws t of no smaII ability, 1 said to myself' (as cited by Frank, 105).

The poet's ironic pose as large fish in a little pond masked her considerable ambition.

The range and format of Dark Summer mark a huge leap fiom the comparatively modest

sequencing of Bodv of This Death, which itself had been no smail undertaking. The poerns are

arranged in a five-part structure suggestive of drama, one of the two "founding" genres identified

by Aristotle in his Poetics; lyric, after all, did not really come into its own until the Romantic

Chapter 4. Page 138

age, and as a genre is usually ranked Iower on the scale of poetic achievement than its weightier

counterparts. Yet Bogan combined her minimalist aesthetic with this ambitious format. She told

Wheelock, "there should never be too many poems in a volume - 35 at most." "1 have as rnany

poems again as the manuscript contains, that have been kept back, because 1 do not wholly trust

hem, and feel that by their inclusion the effect of the others might be blmed" (WWJi 40). She

asked Wheelock to trust her judgement: "1 may not always be right, but it is, you will agree, a

. tnie instinct to wïsh to scant, rather than to fatten" (40).

Bogan may have been wary of over-promoting the book. Her satirical bent was

pronounced; she enjoyed larnpooning pretensions, those of others as well as her own. In a letter

to Rolfe Humphries, she cornrnented on the process of writing the long poem which would

occupy the second part of Dark Sumrner, "The Fiume" (which she at first called her "lightning"

poern):

The lightning's done, as 1 have before intirnated. There's only going to be one more part, making four in all. 1 have kept the parts to an even four because of the thirteenth cross- reference in the ninth book of the Upanishads - after the manner of the Spanish Lully and the Christian mystic, St. Bee. (See footnote # * %.) . . .

Yours, Louise

# * % A phenornenon I have often observed.

Bogan's abstruse, comic referencing is an almost direct quote of Eliot's footnote to the line in

The Waste Land about the "dead sound on the final stroke of nine" ("The Burial of the Dead," 1.

68): "A phenomenon which 1 have often noticed." As Ruth Lirnrner explains (in a footnote,

appropriately), The Waste Land had been published in 1922, and "Clearly LB and Humphries

were amused by the scholarly notes EIiot had appended to it" (15n).

Bogan's sardonically diminutive disguise as "fernale lyrist" (sic) of modest purpose was

Chapter 4. Page 139

too effective: her contemporaries failed to fathom her meaning or discern her large intentions. In

a surnmary of the critical reception of Dark Sumer , Mary Collins rernarks on the paradoxical

nature of the response. The book was widely reviewed and generally praised, but rnany of the

reviews "were oddly lacking in substance" (4). Critics at once regarded the work as a whole as

obscure, and particular poems as accurate and precise. Perhaps, suggests Collins, the difficulty

of the poetry "may stem from just that precision," for Bogan's concem is with what lies beneath

the tangible and visible surface.' Rather than attempt to follow her into that uncharted territory,

"many reviewers of Dark Sumrner were content to point to craftsmanship, a word which began to

appear with as much fiequency as 'obscurity' " and one which effectively reduces the writer to

one "merely skilled" (4). The review by Lvor Winters is illustrative of the mixed message Bogan

received from her admirers. Bogan's subject matter and attitude are limited, he claims, by-an

"instinctive distrust of certain ranges of experience that either might or might not involve some

kind of spiritual looseness." She produces "minute, if sometimes charming, lyrics" but the

restriction "causes each poem to be a sort of insulated unit, even pushing the quality occasionally

. . . to a certain dryness" (32).' Oddly, then, Winters concludes that Bogan "suffers no

diminution by cornparison with the best of the English lyricists," that her limited attitude "is as

central, as fiindamental, as any attitude so lirnited could be. It would take only a turn, a flicker,

to transfom her into a major poet; it is conceivable that the flicker may be taking place as f

write, that it may even have occurred in her book, a mon insu" (32)- Bogan's response was

typically self-mocking: she told WheeIock she "thought the review so serious and intelligent that

'Collins refers to Untermeyer's comment that while "Bogan's images evoke a very living reality. . . their aim is to get at 'the secret behind appearance' " (4). Frank agrees that the fiequent references to darkness in the volume indicate a fascination with conceaiment, "whatever lies at a remove fkom will and controf' (1 08).

Untermeyer also judges Bogan's work to be in need of irrigation, rellliifking that "sometimes her spare definiteness brings her close to dessication" (37).

Chapter 4. Page 140

perhaps it will make people flee in horror fiom this modern soi-disant combination of Campion,

Jonson, and Dryden!" &WU- 48).

Frank tells us that the poerns in Dark S u m e r follow a "loosely chronological

sequence," a helpfil comment which yet fails to explain the placement of poems fkom Body of

This Death in the centre. The shape of the book is as follows, she explains: Part 1, new poems

(written between 1923 and 1926); Part Il[, "The Flume" (cornposed in 1924); Part III, selected

poerns fkom Body of This Death; Part TV, new poems, "in a later mood"; and Part V, "Surnmer

Wish" (finished 1929). Finding no "strong differences" between the poems of Part 1 and those of

Part IV, Frank states that "The eartier poems ernphasize change, the later ones fulfillment, but

both groups have a l o w e ~ g inquietude" (108). Frank's discussion of the poems loosely follows

Bogan's ordenng, but she takes liberties with the sequencing in order to emphasize her thematic

points and silently skips over the third section of poems reprinted ftom the first volume.

Similarly, Jacqueline Ridgeway, who elsewhere draws our attention to Bogan's statement that

poetry should be read with respect to ch~onology,~ organizes her analysis by subject headings

(for example, "Mutability," "Religion," and "The Self ') rather than by either chronology or

sequence. She offers no comment on the effect of the poerns fiom Bodv of This Death on the

matter and structure of Dark Summer, and assigns responsibility for the seemingly illogical

inclusion to Wheelock (5 l).4 Certainly Bogan acknowledged Wheelock' s influence on the

' See page 46, where Ridgeway quotes fiom "Reading Contemporary Poetry."

John Hall Wheelock was himself a poet who, according to historian of modem poetry David Perkins, "wrote love poerns of a rather abstract khd, nature poems, and poems in which, always maintainhg euphony and dignity, he sought the meaning of the cosmos" (I,3 67). In The Human Fantasv, published in 19 1 1, Wheelock did not include even a table of contents for the numerous lyrics. Beloved Adventure (1 9 12) and Love and Liberation (19 13) organized poems simply by themes, but Dust and Light (19 19) introduced a numbered sequencing of sections which suggested an intended movement to the volume, as did The Black Panther (1922). A late collection, The Gardener and Other Poems (196 l), sets out two blocks of parts I and 2 separated by a middIe section entitled "Interlude." Wheelock's increasing attention to the stmcturing of his own books of poetry may have played a role in the publication of Bogan's work.

Chaprer 4. Page 141

"format" of the volume,5 but it is unclear what is meant by that term. We can only speculate as

to whose idea it was to reprint selected poems fkom Bodv of This Death in Dark Sumer . What

we can be certain of is that the final reason for their inclusion was not to fil1 out the volume for

lack of a sufficient number of new poems. Bogan makes clear that every poem had to contribute

to the whole, that no poem was included which would blur the overall effect.

The impulse to scant rather than to fatten was, for modernists, a masculine one, the drive

to eliminate the waste of the female gr~tesque.~ "@?na] Pound frequently used images of plump,

cornplacent, or efisive middle-class women to distinguish self-indulgent and sentimental writers

ftom serious, disciplined craftsmen," says Frances Kerr, who argues that Bogan's poetry should

be read in the context of the gendered rhetoric of dieting and thinness pervasive in the early

twentieth century (3 10, 326). Pound, as evidenced in his radical transformation of Eiiot's Waste

Land fiom "sprawling, chaotic poem'?' (originally titled "He Do the Police in Different Voices")

to spare, elliptical verse, shared Bogan's opinion of the dangers of excess. Wayne Koestenbaurn

argues that the revisions changed The Waste Land fiom a series ofpoems into a unity which

Pound tnimpeted as "the longestpoem in the English langwidge," nineteen pages "wïthout a

break" (138). Koestenbaum suggests that the disorderly linguistic condition of hysteria, by

definition a wornan's affliction, constitutes the discourse of The Waste Lands8 The poem was a

cbhysterical body" which Pound, as male modernist reader and editor, reduced into an analyzable

In the same letter in which she writes gaily of having "as many poems again as the manuscript contains, that have been kept back," the poet says to her pubiisher, "1 see no objection to the format you suggest. 1 realize that the poems you now have are realiy too few for a voiume" (WWL 40).

See Heywood, Dedication to Hunger.

' Eliot's own description, as cited by Koestenbaum (124).

"Eliot may have tried to impersonate the police, ann of male law," says Koestenbawn, "but he ended up doing woman . . . a sequence of women's voices hysterical because of their multitude and their character" (129).

Chapter 4. Page 142

other; by criticizing Eliot's portraits of women, Pound "separated The Waste Land fiom dread

female discharge" (125)P Bogan may have laughed at the pretension of the footnotes to

Waste Land, but, as a woman who committed the academically irresponsible, ferninine act of

dropping out of university to rnarry and have a child, she would have felt the chiilhg effect of the

fomally educated inteIlect. In Koestenbaum's view, "the footnotes embody the irnplied male

reader: they invite him to enter and understand the poem7' (138)-

Like The Waste Land. Dark Summer is organized into five sections. Although Dark

Summer is presented modestly as a collection of lyrics, its structure recommends a reading which

both incorporates and transcends the individual fragment, that "insulated unit" which so stymied

Winters. Bogan's experirnentation with form is remarkable, demonstrating her detennination to

explore the "large" genres even as she continued to refine her lyric poe t i~s . '~ In Body of This

Death she introduced multiple voices and engaged them in a dialogical nanative of despair and

renewal; in Dark Summer she fùrther raised the stakes by taking more risks, both emotional and

artistic. The first "act" of the five-part sequence / drama establishes an atmosphere of betrayal

Bogan was cautiously aware of the stigma of hysteria, but seemed to associare it with the self- consciously creative (or rather maniacal) urban literary personality rather than the specificaliy ferninine, In a letter to Wheelock written in late 1929 soon after the publication of Dark Surnrner, Bogan uses the tenn mockingly :

New York, and not its literary figures, can tire me with hysteria, and I hope that you did not think me too hysterical over the phone. 1 never see any literary figures - if 1 can possibly help it, and believe me, my protective mechanisms work beautifully at this period (?)- But if anyone has one word to Say, or has any ideas, or drive, or talent, in New York, he (or she) ultimately tu- out to be a maniac, or to have been a maniac, or about to be a maniac. And that is so tiresome, isn't it? By the tirne one is able to call up, or see, one's stable friends, everything fias become too hom'ble to contemplate . . , . But you will think me on the verge, if 1 go on in this vein (WWL 50, emphasis mine).

'O IronicaIiy, one of the usual criticisms of Bogan was that she attempted too little, departing not at al1 £tom traditional poetic practice. Douglas Peterson, in his otherwise admiring study of Bogan's formal versification, said that Bogan's first two volumes of poetry showed nothing "in the way of an attempt to experiment with styles or of a desire to move on either to new subjects or to new ways of dealing with old ones" (80).

Chapter 4, Page 143

and decay; we begin as at the opening of an epic, in medias res, for the disabling experience has

already happened, The reader familiar with Bodv of This Death quickly intuits the continuity of

the second volume with the fîrst: the alchemist7s rnisguided detennination to "divorce" thought

nom eye and bone is revisited in Dark Surnrner as a woman's self-destructive fears about the

integrity of her marriage. She is maddened by an abiding belief that her husband lies, suspecting

treachery everywhere as a result, forcing separation and division where she would have unity.

'The Flurne," the second part of Dark Summer, c o n f i the emotional tenor of the opening by

providing an explicit description of a young woman's obsessive, consuming suspicions. Poems

h m Bodv of This Death at the centre of the book draw the reader in M e r , back in time to the

experiences which gave rise to the poet's f is t volume, deep below consciousness now, buried in

memory. The fourth section returns to the present with insistent lyrics e v o h g a woman's

neurotic fears about her relationship, but - although the charged atmosphere of expectation and

imminent discovery is similar to the opening of the book - the intensity is heightened, and the

speaker's buried madness bursts forth in occasional exclamations to indicate the ernotional

climax suitable to Act N of a tragedy. Feeling purged and exhausted by the cathartic experience

of examining her own repressed anger, the poet resumes conscious control at the end of the

volume with the long, ambitious "Summer Wish," a tribute to Yeats and thus a deliberate

staternent of artistic purpose which calls attention to her own place in the literary tradition.

Bogan invites the reader of Dark Summer to consider what lies beneath the surface of

things, to question assumed relations and interrogate the tyranny of superficial sight. To go

down and under is to uncover memory as well as the "dark aspects of personality" Jung describes

- what is beneath, within, behind - exposing layer aRer Iayer. Some of the poerns seem to have

been written from inside the body, as if the "divorced" thought or sou1 looks out through the eyes

as through the bars of a cage. The violence of the separation of the hgments of the speaker's

Chaprer 4, Page 144

being echoes the butchev of the hermaphrodite story as well a s the brutality of fairy tales.

Through the IyRc sequencing, the poet leads the way through t h e maze of the text to its interior,

to the remembered quest of her first volume of poetry, even to the enclosed spaces of childhood

where early images and fears are unearthed. Employing the psychological context of fairy tales,

she is able to explore and animate the shadow self in her descemt below consciousness, but the

experience is t e m m g . 'Tor people like myself to look back Zs a task," Bogan once wrote, "It is

Iike re-entering a trap, or a labyrinth, from which one has only too lately, and too narrowly,

escaped" (JAR 10). As she said of Ernily Dickinson, "the young poet . . . . advances into the

terror and anguish of her destiny; she is fr-ightened, but she holds fast and describes her fiight,

She is driven to the verge of sanity, but manages to remain . . . the observer and recorder of her

extremity."

The resolution of Dark Summer by means of a formal dialogue indicates at once the

poet's emphatic return to self-conscious control and reinforces what amounts to an uneasy stasis

of effort. Dialogue, says Roy Schafer, helps the analysand sh iB toward maturity ("'Reading" 14).

There are always two sides, etemally in conflict, which neither- yield nor listen long one to

another. As at the end of Bodv of This Death, we are back at a kind of beginning. The circular

rnovement of the fkst volume was countered by the suggestion of a quest and the intimation of

progression, There is circularity in Dark Summer as well, for irts telescoping movement implies

not forward movement but rather unsettling, profound changes in focus. The lyrics are organized

spatially to represent strata of consciousness. Throughout the sequence Bogan employs

prepositional phrases - what linguists term "locative expressions" which "reflect spatial

representational structures" (Herskovits 1-2) - to force the reader to attend to relations,

perspectives, orientation.

Bogan's five-part structure follows Eliot's organizatiom of The Waste Land, and indeed

Chapter 4. Page 145

her method in Dark Summer is, like his, mythical rather than narrative. Drawing on psychology

and mythology, she maintains a "continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity" in

an attempt at control and order, just as Eliot said James Joyce does in Uly~ses.~' But while

ELiot's subject encompassed civilization as well as his own fï-agmented seIf and Joyce

compressed the world into one day of one man's life, Bogan was less expansive. Beginning, like

Eliot, with nostalgia over a lost innocence, she embarks on a quest for truth. She invokes Horner,

Milton, and Shakespeare as her implicit predecessors. There are scenes of war and devastation,

But Bogan's tone is relentlessly persona1 and solitary. Her subject is, without apology, the

failure of romantic heterosexual love and the entwined struggle of the female to achieve artistic

stature. Her symbolic landscape is inhabited by the demons and witches of fairy tales, the

"definitely girly" territory of women and children (Warner xiii), as well as by the expected

archetypes of Greek myth and Christian religion. Subjectivity is suggested through the dornestic

image of the house. The poet's journey to the underworld of her own unconscious is undertaken

for no larger reason than her own sanity, but it is nonetheless profound. In choosing depth over

breadth, Bogan uiverted the traditional, masculine subject matter of epic and drarna and

effectively ferninized it, an experiment she consolidated by slim-volume packaging which

ironically marketed the effort as both rninor and small.

" See Eiïot's response in "Ulysses, Order, and Myth" to Aldington's criticism of James Joyce as a prophet of chaos:

Psychology (such as it is, and whether our reaction to it be comic or serious), ethnology, and Golden Bou& have concurred to make possible what was impossible even a few years ago. Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythicd method. It is, 1 seriously believe, a step toward making the modem world possible for art, toward that order and foxm which Mr. Aldington so earnestly desires. And only those who have won their own discipline in secret and without aid, in a world which offers very Iittle assistance to that end, can be of any use in furthering this advance (178).

Chapter 4, Page 146

Part 1

The twelve poems which make up the first section of Dark Surnmer are "Winter Swan," "If We

Take Al1 Gold," 'The Drum," "Division," "Cassandra," "The Cupola," "Girl's Song,"

"Feuemacht," "Second Song," 'The Mark," ""Late," and "Simple Autumnal." Winter Swan"

begins suddenly, as if by way of resurnption of a conversation only recently broken off:

It is a hollow garden, under a cloud; Beneath the heel a hollow earth is tumed; Within the mind the live blood shouts aloud; Under the breast the wiiling blood is burned, Shut with the f i e passed and the fire returned.

What, we wonder, in the fust line, is the ambiguous "itY7 which the poet compares to a garden?

The reader of Body of This Death is quickly re-engaged, intuitîng that the speaker is reflecting on

the nature of her own female body, identified with the earth which contains and silences the

voice within. "Sonnet," the last poem of that fmt voolume, concludes with the violent delivery of

the "maddened and proud" rnind fiom its tonnent, "thrown I Straight to its freedom in the

thunderous cloud." The cloud of "Winter Swan" is sullen and rernote, no longer a source of

inspiration. Things are not as they seem: beneath the ground there is a hollow core; within the

nind there is vociferous blood; under the breast there is a boiling passion. Blood links the mind

and the breast, which together make up one divided being which repeatedly betrays itself and

invites treachery. The garden itself is hollow (insincere, false), and is further turned beneath the

heel of those who tread upon it. Paradise is lost. The speaker does not look forward to a friture

redemption, when the saviour with his heel shall bruise the serpent; she is obsessed with the

certainty of daily insults and Iies. In line six, she shakes herself f?ee of self-pity, invoking her

own mind as muse once more to make itself heard:

Chopter 4. Page 147

But speak, you proud! Where lies the leaf-caught world once thought abiding, Now but a dry disarray and artifice? Here, to the ripple cut by the cold, drifts this Bird, the Iong throat bent back, and the eyes in hiding.

The "leaf-caught" world of Eden is understood now to have been faithless rather than abiding,

exposed in its disarray (both unclothed and disordered) to be an invention, an artifice- In despair,

the poet assumes a necessary comection of sexual love with betrayal in her question, "Where

lies . . .?"

The swan, a "symbol of great complexity," is associated with Apollo, the god of music,

because of the mythic belief that it would sing sweetly when on the point of death (Cirlot 322).

In Greek mythology, Zeus disguised hirnself as a swan in his ravistirnent of Leda, an event

celebrated in verse by W.B. Yeats and Bogan herself in Body of This Death." According to

Gaston Bachelard, the white Swan in poetry and literature is an image of naked woman, of chaste

nudity and immaculate whiteness (as cited by Cirlot, 322). In "Winter Swan," the bird signifies

the speaker's own proud beauty as woman, which - it seerns - must be sacrificed to obtain

release fiom silence, to find the poet's voice through the swan's song in death. Bachelard fmds

another significance to the swan: "hermaphroditism, since in its movement and certainly in its

long phallic neck it is masculine yet in its rounded, silky body it is ferninine" (322). The long,

fiail, scentless woman feared in "The Fnghtened Man" is understood now in her (his) complex

identity. God / poet / lover / masculine modernist aesthetic and mortal / woman / beloved /

female as idealized subject are uniquely combined in the symbol of the swan.

In Bodv of This Death birds appeared in multiple guises, using various voices: in "The

Crows," they cry; in "Betrothed," they traverse the air; in "Statue and Birds," golden quails and

l2 In "Stanza," Leda "forgets the wings of the swan."

Cirapler 4. Page 148

pheasants circle ominously and threaten to whistle. Although there is no Swan in "Sonnet," its

sestet resonates with the sound of wings after a reading of "Winter Swan." The two poems, one

concluding Bodv of This Death and the other opening Dark Sumrner, together echo Eliot's

prologue to The Waste Land, "Gerontion," and the 'Thoughts of a dry brain / In a dry season" of

its protagonist. Gerontion is disconnected fkorn his sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch - he

has lost them, and his passion also. Like the "desperate mllid, maddened and proud" straining

against the wind in "Sonnet," the gull in the straits of Belle Isle brings "Gerontion" to a close:

"Gu11 against the wind, in the windy straits / Of Belle Isle, or ninning on the Hom, / White

feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims . . . ." At the end of "Decoration," the rnacaw "fans his

striped regaliîy / Prismatic, while against a sky breath-white / A crystal tree lets fa11 a crystal

leaf." "Winter Swan" disavows the exalted fate of the mind fiee-as-a-bird: it becornes, like the

gull, a vision of white on white, lost because invisible, blind-folded and unseeing, therefore

believïng itself unseen.

Bogan's pronouncement that Ernily Dickinson lost over time her "Emersonian belief in

the largeness and harmony of nature" 100) can be read back to h a own development.

"Winter Swan" has been desm-bed as an expression of the "disjunction and disunity"

experienced by the poet in a moment of anxiety in which she feels "estranged fiorn time" (Frank

109); the Swan in winter is "the idea of rnutability" (Ridgeway 52). Frank maintains that ""Winter

Swan" reveals Bogan's awareness that garden and earth are not, as they were formerly

understood to bey cornpliant with desire: "The rornantic imagination can no longer succeed in its

attempts to imbue the external world with its own coloring and texture" (109). While it is true

that "Winter Swan" describes a condition of lost innocence, the poem is about more than the

resulting disequilibriurn, and disturbs profoundly. The attitude of the speaker verges on the

pathological. Not only was "Nature" no longer a fkiend for Dickinson, Bogan said, it became

Cliaprer 4. Page 149

"often an inimical presence . . . . a haunted house" (100)- 'Winter Swan" is saturated with the

certainty of betrayal. Beghning without preamble and ending with a horrible vision of imminent

execution, the slightly crazed speaker challenges both herself and the reader to speak out and

uncover al1 that has been concealed.

The knowing cloud of treachery in the introductory poem to Dark Summer darkens the

landscape of the first section and c a s l its shadow over the entire volume. At the beginning of

Bodv of This Death, a quest is initiated by an idealistic youth in search of enduring meaning in a

world buffeted by daily, transitory concerns. The implied quest which opens Bogan's second

volume is that of a more jaded, disillusioned protagonist whose relative maturïty both

complicates and undermines her enthusiasm.

Corning as it does after "Winter 'Swan," the treasure of "If We Take AI1 Gold" is

rernembered as the wings forgotten by Leda in "Stanza," the gold swept away by Danae:

lfwe take al1 gold And put al1 gold by, Lay by the treasure In the shelved earth's crevice, Under, under the deepest, Store sorrow's gold: That which we thought precious And guarded even in sleep Under the miserly pillow, If it be hid away Lost under dark heaped ground, Then shall we have peace, Sorrow's gold being taken From out the clean house, From the rifled coEers put by.

Comrnenting on the "fairy-tale tropes of treasure and house" in the poem, Frank notes that "If

We Take Al1 Gold" was published in The Nation in 1925, three months after Bogan's mariage to

Holden. She contends that

Cltapter 4, Page f SU

it represents a truce with the self, enacted after a psychic battle has taken place, the tenns of which require nothing less than the dispersal o f fiercely hoarded rnisery. Frorn the "clean house" of the new beginning, Bogan equates "sorrow's gold" with both refuse and stolen treasure which must be "Lost under (the) dark heaped ground" of the unconscious. M y there, leaching înto the soi1 of lost mernories, can it serve the cause of "peace," (109-1 10)

The impulse is similar to the mghg of the earlier poem, 'Memory," that we rnust bury "this rich

stuff' - our sorrow and sexuality - as rubble in random plots, where any spade might strike.

According to Bowles, 'Tt is this Iand of understanding that is Bogan's gift, in Dark Summer: the

necessity to confront, then banish, the demons of our past" (98).

Yet "If We Take AI1 Gold" is less uplifting than Frank and Bowles would have us

believe. M e r the perernptory question (that which signals the quest) of the previous poem,

"Where lies the leaf-caught world once thought abiding / . . .?", the evasions and qualifications

begin, In the last two lines of "Winter Swan'' the poet seems ready with the answer

immediately: "Here, to the ripple cut by the cold." But the sighting of the Swan is a tangentiai

meditation, one which avoids the question while Ieading to m e r thoughts, and thus to the

poems which follow. The first eleven lines of "If We Take Al1 Gold" establish, with the

elaborate deferral of an epic sirnile, the hypothetical half of a Iogical if / then constniction. The

speaker's rehctance and distrust of the suggestion that peace will result if she would only put

aside her unhappiness - sorrow she has chenshed with the obsession of a miser - penneate the

poem, undermùiing its resolution. In the final image, the reader intuits a kind of grave-robbing

scene with overtones of rape: "coffers" suggest "coffins" disturbed by the phallic gun

("rifled")," left in the "disarrayy' regretted in "Winter Swan," a term which irnplies further the

l3 BO- rernarked in a late review on Dickinson's abiiity to "descnie with clinical precision the actuai emotional event, the supreme moment of anguish, and even her own death itseK And she finds symbols which fit the event - terrible symbols" (PA 10 1). One poem "de fies anaiysis: the poem which begins 'My life had stood - a loaded gm." Bogan goes on to recite the poem in full. "1s this an allegory, and if so of what?" she then a&. "1s it a cry fiom some psychic deep where good and evil are not to be separated? In any case, it is a poem whose reverberations are infite, as in great music; and we can only

Chapter 4, Page 151

disorganization of a retreating, demoralized arrny- The reference to a possible peace only

reinforces the curent situation of warfare.

"The Drum," next in sequence, is a kind of nonsense verse, one which Bogan's critics

have celebrated for its rhythm but otherwise left a1one.l4 Read in context, it tantalizes as another

possible answer to the question of "Winter Swan":

The dnim roars up, O blood refiised, Here's your answer. The ear is used.

The poet offers an answer, but not to the expected question. In verses two and three, we realize

that it is the solution to a riddIe such as that asked by the Sphinx."

A miss and a beat The skin and the stick Part and meet, Gather thick.

Now they part, Now they're meeting. There's not on the heart So much beating.

guess with what agony it was written down."

l4 Ridgeway notes that "the metaphor determines the imagery, &ne, and rhythm'' in "The D d (58). Calling the poem "A celebration of rhythm," Frank rernarks on Bogan's "flawless control over diction and meter" (1 10)-

'' The Sphinx - a fabulous creature with wings and the head of a wornan - is said to have asked the question: What walks on four legs in the morning, tvt-O legs at mid-day, and three legs corne evening? The answer, of course, is man. As a child, he crawls; as a man he w a k upright; in his old age he uses a cane. The Sphinx posed the question to the Thebans, killing aU those who failed to answer correctly. When Oedipus solved it, the creature threw herself fiom the rock on which she sat and died. Meyer Reinhold clairns that the Sphinx was for the Greeks an ''inteiiectual monster" because of her superior wisdorn and habit of crushg her victixns. He notes also that the riddle was thought to have a &@c quality, riddle solving being practiced among ancient peoples at critical moments to resolve crises (226 - 27).

Chapter 4. Page 152

"A miss and a beat" suggest the irregular action of a darnaged heart, while "The skin and the

stick" brïng to mind a human being, violently beaten. "Part and meet" is a phrase applied to

lovers. The third verse both complicates and reinforces the second: the connection of the heart,

lovers, and violence is not unprecedented, but the beating "on" the heart rather than "of' it has

ominous overtones- Of course, fiom the title of the poem and the "answer" provided in the first

verse, we know that the riddle must have to do with the seeming disparity of the two entities, a

human body and a drum. The hollow earth of "Winter Swan" is like the eardrum, the hollow part

of the middle ear. Beat upon it, and it rnakes a sound. But what then do we make of the last two

verses?

Use up the air To the last &op, To the last layer, Before you stop,

Whatever is toward It's the drums 1'11 have, Dying a coward Or living brave.

Again, multiple associations are juxtaposed. The "you" addressed by the poet ("Here's your

answer") is now told to "Use up the air / . . . 1 Before you stop." But air is at once defbed as a

liquid like the "blood refused" of the f is t verse and characterized as layered, as if changed into

the "dark heaped ground" of the "shelved earth's crevice" of "If We Take Al1 Gold." Why

should the air in any case be used up, and why in the fust line of the poem does the drum roar

up? The speaker seerns to be suffering fiom a suffiision of blood roaring in her head, deafening

her. Al1 she hears is the somd of the beating of her own heart. She feels overwhelmed, as if she

is suffocating, and stmggles upward toward air and light. The persona of "'My Voice Not Being

Proud" in Bodv of This Death describes the sensation of being buried, "Deafened by mire and

lime." In this poern the poet challenges that fate, seeing it as a caIl to battle to live bravely. To

Chapter 4. Page 153

this point her will and emotions have been divided - she had been speakùig to herself - but in the

last verse she is united in her deterrnination to fight with her ears ("It's the drums 1'11 have), for

listening and speaking are to one purpose,

Both "The Dnim" and the earlier "Sub Contra" CBo) are cryptic, yet their elusive

rneaning can be discerned through carefùl attention to language and by consideration of context.

Frank compares their interweaving of consonance and assonance (1 IO), and, indeed, the

placement of each of these poems about sound and fùry so close to the beginning of their

respective volumes demands our attention: they function as ernphatic invocations to the muse of

music. "The Drum" represents an extreme emotional state which defies reasonable explanation-

The disjunction of the images requires that the reader literally toss them - following the

movement of the poem - up into the air, for only al1 together do the fragments form, for a.

moment, a picture. It is helpful to look closely at the words themselves: the word ear, for

instance, means an organ for hearing but also one of the auricles of the heart.I6 As a verb, an

ancient usage of ear was "to plough, till [the ground]; also, to hirn up [the ground], to throw up

[an object] with a plough" COED). Dark Surnmer is about deception and the fear of treachery.

The speaker of "The Drum" challenges herself to be courageous and abandon the miserIy

cowardice depicted in "If We Take Al1 Gold." "The Dmm" on its own is bizarre; in context it

illustrates the powerfiil interna1 forces the speaker is literally up against.

The prepositions of the opening poems of Dark S u m e r draw attention to thernseIves.

As we know fkom our grammatical handbooks, prepositions are important structural words that

express relationships - in space, time, or other senses - between noms or pronouns and other

words in a sentence. In 'Winter Swan," al1 is buried (beneath), hidden (within), and subjugated

l6 The OED cites an early usage: T h e hea hath two eares, . . . yt serve for to let the ayre in and out (IL Copland, Guidon's Quest Chinige, 1541).

Chupter 4, Page 154

(under)." The claustrophobic atmosphere carries over to "If We Take All Gold:" "under"

appears four times in a poem of onIy 70 words; as "in" does twice. 'The Drum" responds to the

last two lines of "If We Take Al1 Gold," enunciating the change of direction indicated by "Frorn

out the clean house" in an upward thrust- The d m roars up, the air is to be used up- The

movement suggests the surge of water and thus anticipates a poem Bogan would mite several

years later, "Roman Fountain." In the fourth verse, it is as if the water has reached its highest

point, and stops for a moment before its faIl to earth. The rise-and-fa11 fountain shape desmies

- inversely - the tunnelhg movement of Dark Surnmer as a whole to the inset poems of Bodv of

This Death.

The "toward" of the closing lines isrichly ambiguous, implying, of course, a relation of

position. But "toward" can rnean aIso what is in progress, going on, being done; what is

favourable or propitious (the opposite of c7mtoward"); what is cornpliant (the opposite of

"fioward"); and finally, what is left as opposed to right (OED). In "Division," the next poem in

the sequence, prepositions dominate the syntax to the extent that the relations they defme are the

subject of the poem. As the title suggests, the fact of the separation of the parts is of

significance, for what once was whole is no longer so, and we are left with the fi-agrnents set in

contradistinction one to another.

Long days and changing weather Put the shadow upon the door: Up fkom the ground, the duplicate Tree reflected in shadow; Out fiom the whole, the single Mùrored against the single. The tree and the hour and the shadow No longer muigle,

" Upton comments that "Positional words (under, o c c ~ g twice, and beneath and within) depict the scene as covert and internalized. Within the mind, 'the Iive blood shouts aloud' and within the heart 'the wiiiing blood is bumed' " (Obsession 60).

Chapler 4, Page 155

Fly fiee, that buxned together.

The 'bpon" of the second line connotes elevation as well as contact, a situation reinforced by the

'kp" of the following line which echoes the thmst of "The Drum" and counters the burrowing

concealment of "Winter Swan" and "If We Take Al1 Gold." But when relations are brought out

into the open, concealment is replaced not with honesty and sirnplicity but by treachery and

duplicity.

Replica, t m e d to yourself Upon thinnest color and air - Woven in changeless leaves The burden of the seen 1s clasped against the eye, Though assailed and undone is the green Upon the wall and the slq: Time and the tree stand there.

The speaker of the poern, a seemingly neutral observer, demonstrates in the second stanza with

the words "Replica, turned to yourse1f7 that the scene descnied represents an interna1 division.

The act of turning takes us back to "Winter Swan," irnplying rejection and possible betrayal,

opposing the subsequent unlikely insistence on leaves as ccchangeless," Eye succeeds ear: the

passionate discord experienced in "The Dnim" is in "Division" graphically depicted; a silent

picture of tree, shadow, wall, and sky follows the roaring and pouding.

Like the alchemist of Bodv of This Death, the speaker of ccDivision" has cauterized body

fkom mind - those two that once ''burned together" - in an effort to divorce thought from

passion. The separation is successfûl, but the parts are less than their surn, and the violence of

their rough division cannot ever be forgotten. Weather changes, but the permanent image

remains. The "green" is assailed and undone; the leaf-caught world is in disarray.

A11 that is hidden beneath, behind, under the surface is denied or ignored by superficial

Chaprer 4. Page 156

sight, the sense which yet tends to predominate.18 Certainly în "Division" the poet expresses at

the least a weariness with "the burden of the seen" which is "clasped against the eye" like a

brooch sharply fastened, the relation defined as one of antagonism ("against," rather than the

more congenial, expected, "ton) as if any kind of sharp pinning to the vulnerable orb of the

eyeball is less than an act of violence. When Shakespeare's Cleopatra fastens the poisonous asp

to her breast, she compares the experience to having the Iife sucked fiom her by a nursing

infanttL9 The burden - that which is borne, like a child by its rnother, or a harvest by the soi1 - is

clasped, encircled in a kind of embrace. Again, we might wonder at the preposition "against." 1s

the clasping happening in opposition to the eye, in defense against it? Or is what is clasped held

up before the eye to block the vision, the burden becorning the shadow which blocks out light

and thus sight?

The word ''burden" is associated with music (as the under Song or bass accompaniment -

a "sub contra" or the refiain at the end of a song or verse) and, in the English Bible, means the

lifting up of the voice, an oracle or utterance (0ED)- The several meanings of the word echo into

the next poem, "Ca~sandra":~'

'' Frank comments on Bogan's "growing interest in perception" as revealed by the "intense looking" of this poem. She notes that "just as the speaker in 'Wioter Swan' had cried out to the d e n t bird in protest against the dismantled perfection of summer, so here the speaker cries out to the patterned shadow, not to question or protest, but to answer it, as it were, or recount how seeing imprints in the memory an image of the fleeting moment" (1 10). Marianne Moore has suggested that the eye troubled Bogan because "Seeing a person with the eye reduces her to a figure, a physical cipher or digit that denies the complexity of that person's mernories, beliefs, affections, expenences, and howledge" (70). As Jeremy Hawthom explains, the concept of the gaze constitutes an important elernent in the theories of Jacques Lacan concerning the formation of subjectivity (81). Feminists have pointed out that women have been denied the gaze, the prerogative of men. Women have been depicted in literature and Nm as passive, not looking thernselves but instead being looked upon, the object rather than the subject of the gaze

'' "Peace, peace! / Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, / That sucks the nurse asleep?" (Antony and CIeo~atra: V, ii, 308 - 10).

CoIosurdo says of "Cassandra" that it "summarizes Bogan's bzcrden of poetic genius" (355). Frank regards the poem as "an impassioned outburst by the woman who feels the temile burden of her gift of poetic speech" (1 13).

Cfzapter 4, Page 157

To me, one silly task is like another. 1 bare the shambling tricks of lust and pride. This flesh will never give a child its mother, - Song, like a wing, tears through my breast, my side, And madness chooses out my voice again, Again, 1 am the chosen no hand saves: The shriekïng heaven Iifted over men, Not the dumb earth, wherein they set their graves.

The speaker pronounces that she '%are[s] the shambling tricks of lust and prïde" but will never

give birth- Ifwe were listening to the poem rather than reading it, we might assume that

Cassandra ''bears" ("bares") the "shambling tricks" in Iieu of the child she cannot have, for in a

sense this is so. According to legend, the Trajan p ~ c e s s accepted from Apollo the gifi of

prophecy in exchange for sexual favours, but when she reneged on her part of the bargain -

declaring her intention to remain a wgin - he tumed the gift on its head: her predictions wouId

always be true ones, but she would never be-believed. Although Cassandra's pronouncement in

this poem that her "flesh wilf never give a child its mother" is accurate, her body is destined to be

violated- Mer being raped by the Locnan Ajax in the chaos of the fa11 of Troy, she is taken as a

concubine by Agamemnon and subsequently murdered by his jealous wife, Clyternnestra."

Bogan's description of song tearing the breast of the young woman "like a wing" suggests the

rage of Apollo, bird-god of music, and the rape of Leda by Zeus, comecting this poem with

"Winter Swan." Cassandra bares - exposes, uncovers, reveals - the cheating and deceptions

("tricks"), and pays the price with her open, honest body, a bare thing, both modest and naked.

She experiences every prophetic utterance as both a violation and a birthmu

2' See Reinhold (273-74,280-8 1). Mary Kinzie cites a version of the myth which has Apollo spit in the mouth of Cassandra, a violation she claims is aiiuded to in Bogan7s poem (277).

zz 1 mention only a few instances of Bogan's Iayered, suggestive use of language. In a recent book about the moral fùnction of poetry, Kinzie concludes an extensive consideration of the brief "Cassandra" by reiterating her point that "the poet must study words." "It was enough" for Bogan, she ctaims, "to use language sparingly, with a lethai certainty about how each word is cursed with resemblance and with the residues of other lives and earlier meanings" (279). Kinne notes that the "shriek" which is the voice of

Chapter 4. Page 158

The "shrieking heaven Iifted over men" brings uito the poem the spectre of the Furies,

attendant with them the entire narrative of the House of Atreus. Aeschylus concludes his trilogy

about this famous, cursed farnily by telling how the Furies, spirits of retribution, h a l l y bring to

justice Orestes, the son of Agamemnon, who has bloodily avenged his father and whom they

have long and relentlessly p ~ r s u e d . ~ There were three Furies, just as there were three Gorgons:

both sets of sisters were hideous female monsters, feared and castigated by men. Cassandra -

who has adopted the shrieking cry of the bird-god Apollo, patron of poetry, and thus become like

her pursuer - speaks in the voice of Medusa in this Iine, rendering the earth dumb and bringing

men to their graves. Medusa, we remember, gave birth to Pegasus; the winged horse which is the

symbol of poetic genius sprang from her blood just as the Furies sprang fi-om the blood of

U ~ U S . ' ~

Cassandra as the beloved of Apollo recalls the experience of Daphne in Body of This

Death, a recollection which in turn retrospectively alters o u . reading of "Division," the preceding

poem. Daphne became a tree to escape Apollo's unwanted attention. The "green" of the closing

lines of ccDivision" has been "assailed and undone," The separation of self into component

heaven is derived frorn a mimetic Norse word for bird-cry, and is set in opposition to the silent earth; the origin of "dumb" is the Indo-Ewopean root "dheahh," meaning fogged, dark, obscured. The words ''silly" and "shambling" are casual and glii, she suggests, and reinforce the "bitterly dismissive self-deprecation" of the prophetess. "Shambhg" as an adjective means awkwardly gaited, but another rneaning of "shamble" is a slaughterhouse; the carnage of the Trojan war, and the later bloody scene of the House of Atreus after the murder of Agamemnon and Cassandra, come to mind. "Silly," in tuni, "plays, flickeringly, over its primary idea of a foolishness close to imbecility, a state of radical reduction in the human creature owing to Apollo's visitation as well as to the carnage at Troy. For the word can denote the feeblemindedness or senselessness that corne fiom being dazed, as fiom a blow" (278).

See Richmond Laîtimore's introduction to îhe Oresteia (the titie of the trilogy) for an outhe of the action of the three tragedies. In brief, he ' es it as follows: "Amemnon takes us fiom the news of Troy's faIl to the murder of Agamemnon and the confirmation of his murderer as despots in Argos. The Libation Bearers begins with the return of Orestes and ends with his flight fÎom Argos, purçued by the Furies, after the murder of Clytaemestra and Aegisthus. The Eumenides fin& Orestes seeking sanctuary at Delphi, takes him ta Athens for his acquitta1 and absolution, and ends with the establishment of the Furies in their new home at Athens" (9).

24 See Warrington's descriptions of the Erinyes (Furies) and Pegasus.

Chapfer 4, Page 159

entities, tree and shadow, c m be understood as a response to pain and violation, the

compartmentalization associated with denial as well as survival. As Jung said, "no one can

become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort." The dumb earth is like the

moving, silent shadow, reflecting and looking back upon the other self, the shrieking sky. In

"Winter Swan," the "hollow earth" which tums is seen as treacherous; the hollow of the ear in

- "The Drun', responds to the violent beating of its surface skin with defiant courage. The

hollowing out of the wornan's body makes it a vesse1 and her a poet, for the voice is a kind of

shadow, separated fiom and opposed to solid flesh. In "Cassandra," the speaker begins defiantly

in the first person, even as she qualifies the truth by fkarning it in a relative proposition ("To

me...").

Dark Surnmer takes us past the paralysis of Daphne so frequently represented in Bodv

of This Death, but the recognition which follaws the resumption of movement is what had been

feared and expected. The speaker has become reluctant prophetess, seeing her own fate as

unavoidably tragic. In "Winter Swan" the bird's long and beautifd throat is bent back, awaiting

the sacrifice; the eyes are "in hiding" as if blindfolded, prepared for execution. Cassandra's

shriek and mad, wild presence constitute the hysterical disorder of the female which Bogan

rejected but well understood, and which was so threatening to the male modernist aesthetic she

consciously espoused. Eliot's prose poem "Hysteria" recounts with horror how the dark cave of

a woman's throat draws her male companion into its depths. He is saved by a nervous voice

f?om the surface:

As she laughed 1 was aware of becorning involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill. 1 was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading a pink and white checked cloth over the msty green iron table, saying: 'If the lady and gentIeman wish to take their tea in the garden, if the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden . . . . ' 1 decided that if the shaking of her

Chapfer 4, Page 160

breasts could be stopped, some of the Eragments of the afiernoon rnight be collected, and I concentrated my attention with careful subtlety to this end.

Bogan's Swan, throat exposed, drifts to the "rîpple cut by the coId" just as Eliot's speaker is

drawn in, "bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles" of the woman's throat, fascinated even as he

fears sexual engu&~ent .~~

Koestenbaum identifies the speaker of "Hysteria" with the poet hirn~elf; '~ similady,

many of Bogan's readers see the author's presence in the persona o f "Cassandra." Mary Kinzie

contends that Bogan "reinterpreted her own career in light of the vehement and anguished figure

of the prophetess in Greek legend" (276). According to Mary DeShazer, "Cassandra's stance as

a female prophet dissociated fiom other women and fiom other prophets parallels Bogan's view

of herself as a woman poet, alienated fiom other women and their 'silly tasks' as well as fiom

male poets , . , , Clearly Bogan perceives herself as a modem version of Cassandra" (62). Like

"Medusa," "Cassandra" illustrates "the woman poet's relationship to her male peers, her identity,

and her craft," argues Christine Colosurdo:

It should come as no surprise that Bogan found a parallel identity in a Greek prophetess

'5 Perhaps of interest (or not) in this context is William Drake's study of Arnerican wornen poets in the k t part of the century, which consists of biographical information with a twist - a freewheeling pseudo-analysis of their relationships (fnendships, mother-daughter ties, etc.) as they affect the writing. Bogan, he contends, was a repressed personality dependent on her male psychoanalyst. "The cornerstone of analysis," Drake States confidently, without any discemile attempt to substantiate his claïm,"was the attempt to fiee the patient fkom emotional identification with the mother, in the belief that individuation could occur only through separation - a view that reflected men's perception of themselves. The mother was seen, in effect, as a voracious mouth threatening to swallow her offspring." (25) Drake reveals his obvious dislike of Bogan in his treatment of her fiiendship later in life with May Sarton. When Bogan "failed" to give Sarton the support she needed, in her "stubbom refusai" to promote Sarton's poetry? she had, "in the blind way of most human beings, re-created . . . the tragedy of separation fiom her own mother rather than the ernpowering union they both required" (265).

Koestenbaum suggests that in his poem Eliot confionted the deepening nervous crisis which would eventually lead to the writing of The Waste Land: "Seeing the disturbance in a woman, Eliot fmds it in himself, for the male "I" is hardiy separate eorn the female hysteric he watches." The speaker's solution to the problem of his identification with female hysteria is extreme: "the woman must be 'stopped' - tranquilized, terminated." Only then will the fîagments cohere, the poet begin again to write (1 15).

Chapter 4, Page 1 61

whose talent, given to her by Apollo, was rendered useless to others because she refused to surrender up her body to hïm as payment for it. Cassandra epitomizes the doubly blessed and cursed roIe Bogan endured as a woman poet: she is both oppressed and insubordinate in reIation to men, gifted and obscure, as well as both articulate and incomprehensible to the general public. (355)

Bogan's "progress as a writer, and as a person" is evident fkorn her advancement "into the terror

and anguish of her destiny"; she saw herself, as she saw Dickinson, "driven to the verge of

While the wholesale identification of the poet with any of her personae is a suspect

enterprise - even Bowles, whose ferninist reading gives excessive play to the life over the art, is

carefil to cal1 Dark Sumrner Bogan's most "removed" volume (26) - there is no question that

Bogan used her own experiences and feelings as material for her poetry. In "The Cupola," the

next poern in the sequence, she seems to be desmiing her birthplace.

A mirror hangs on the wall of the draughty cupola. Within the depths of glass rnix the oak and the beech leaf, Once held to the boughs' shape, but now to the shape of the wind.

Someone has hung the rnirror here for no reason, In the shuttered room, an eye for the drified leaves, For the oak leaf, the beech, a handsbreadth of darkest reflection.

Someone has thought alike of the bough and the wind And struck their shape to the wall. Each in its season Spills negligent death throughout the abandoned chamber.

In a letter to her publisher in 1929, the year Dark Sumrner was released, Bogan describes the

house in which she was boni as having "such a cupola and eaves made of gingerbread" CWU-,

50)." The term "gingerbread" is applicable to certain types of decorative house trim, but the

" Both Bowles and Ridgeway draw the connection between Bogan's mention in the letter of her birthplace and this poem (25, 102). Oddly enough, Frank does not mention it, but instead suggests that "an old home in Hillsdale" (where Bogan moved for a time after her marriage to Holden) might have been the basis of the impression fiom which "The Cupola" was drawn (1 12).

Cliapter 4. Page 162

poet's usage suggests Mer the fairy-tale atmosphere of magic, a childhood place of fancy

inhabited by witches and darkened by deep woods- In "The Cupola," the enchanted setting of

"Medusa" is literally tumed outside in. Here, the cave of trees and sheer s l q are only a reflection

in a mirror, the circurnscriied vision granted the Lady of Shalott- The eye of the &or is al1 that

is allowed in this room otherwise shuttered. But, if this was her place, she is gone. Sorneone has

hung the mirror for no apparent reason; someone has struck the shape of the bough and the wind

to the wall. Now the chamber is abandoned to the negligent death of passive reflection (the

shadow of death), the changing images in the mirror of the seasons dying in their t ~ r n s . ~ ~

There is a suggestion in "The Cupola" that we have corne upon a still place which once

saw great violence, the result of hurnan action (done by "someone"). The shapes of the bough

and the wind have been "struck" to the wall; death spills like blood. As in "Division," time (the

wind) and the tree (the bough) still stand, despite the "assailed and undone" green- At one time,

the oak and the beech tree mixed in the "depths of glass," and the mirror returned the image of

the shape of their (green) boughs. Now what the rnirror reflects is the shape of the wind, the

image of death as manifested by their bare branches- The poet's speculations about the dual

nature of the tree - as tree of life, and tree of howledge (death) - continue fiom Bodv of This

Death. In "Knowledge," the speaker learned that trees "Make a long shadow, and a light sound."

Bogan was no doubt aware of the resonances of her use of the biblical symbol. In iconography,

the Tree of Life (or the lunar side of a double or triple tree) is depicted in bloom; the tree of

death or knowledge (or the solar side) is dry, and shows signs of fïre. Psychology, States J-E.

Cirlot, regards the syrnbolic duality in sexual terms, Jung affirrning the tree's bisexual nature;

Latin endings of the names of trees are masculine even though their gender is ferninine (349). In

The d n m g of the leaves recalls îhe movement of the winter swan to its end and the obliteration of the piling snow which closes Eliot's "Gerontion."

Chapter 4. Page 163

the domed room of the cupola, the images which are treacherous behind the fieshened eyes of the

protagonist of "The Changed Woman" in Body of This Death take on new significance: 'Rocket

and tree, and dome and bubble." Tree and dome are both in this room; rocket and bubble are

imagined correspondences, confirming in their gendered dichotomy the sexual fiagility and

passivity of the fernale while calling into question the very terrns of the division. Again, a

preponderance of prepositions forces the reader to examine the relations between; arnong, and

The next poem, "Girl's Sang," is the earliest of the volume: Bogan wrote it in Vienna in

May of 1922. Frank calls it "one of Bogan's consummate 'girl's songs,' a cross between a

traditional lyric on s p ~ g ' s return and a girl's lament for the betrayal of love and her lost

innocence," has a "more conventional lyric theme" than "Cassandra" (1 13-1 14).

Winter, that is a fireless room In a locked house, was our love's home. The days tum, and you are not here, O changing with the little year!

Now when the scent of plants half-grown 1s more the season's than their own And neither sun nor wind can stanch The gold forsythia's dripping branch, -

Another maiden, still not 1, Looks t?om some hiIl upon some sky, And, since she loves you, and she must, Puts her young cheek against the dust.

Ridgeway regards "Girl's Song" as "evidentiy a cornpanion poem to 'Juan's Song,' a poem

excluded fkom Bodv of This Death but later included with collected poem" (42). She sees it as

an exception in Dark Summer, since the other poems "place emphasis on self-understanding in

love" (57). Why then did Bogan want it here? Ridgeway implies a problem but does not address

it. Frank finds a rhythm in the paired sequencing of "Cassandra" following "Division" and

Chapter 4, Page 164

"Girl's Song"' placed afier 'The Cupola," commenting that both of the former are "dramatic and

personal, speaking of a fatality irreconcilable with any simple acceptance of natural faith," but

she pursues no explanati~n.~ The first stanza of "Girl's Song" originally read: "Winter, that is a

roofiess room, / Tavern to min, was our love's home." Bogan had already used the image in "A

Letter" ('This is a countryside of roofless houses, - Tavem to min, - ") and so she changed it. 1

suggest that the opening lines condition the circumstance and rnood of the entire poem, In its

original version, it was redundant and thus not included in Bodv of This Death, but - revised to

include a room which is "F~eless . . . / In a locked house" - ccGirl's Song" is entirely appropriate

to pair with "The Cupola." The poet implies by its placement that the mernories of violence

contained in the "abandoned chamber,? the cupola, have to do with love and betrayal. The

drippïng branch of the gold forsythia that "neither sun nor wind can stanch" extends the

association of tree boughs and spi1t bl00d.'~ Now al1 alone, the girl watches the days turn, the

year change; her field of vision might as weII be restricted to the "handsbreadth of darkest .

reflection" afforded by the mirror, for - with her cheek in the dust - she cannot see rnuch above

ground in any case.

"Feuemacht" follows?[ It opens with the "shuttered eye," shut - as in "Winter Swan" -

"with the fire passed, and the fire returned."

The leaf-veined fie, Swom to trouble the least The shuttered eye Turned fkom its feast, - Running the night

'9 Frank comments on the "reversion to grief and check upon joy" which occurs.

'O Like the golden bough of mythology, the branch extends protection to those who venture to Heil and back.

3' 111 subsequent collections, "Feuemacht" is changed to "Feuer-Nacht-"

Chapter 4, Page 165

In long fanned gush, Must bum in that sight Less than a rush.

With the phrase "leaf-veined fire," the speaker at once evokes the feeling of passionate abandon

in the "leaf-caught world" and describes precisely what she sees with her eyes closed: the pattern

of blood vessels, the bIurred red of the shut eyelid- Her sight has been turned fiom the "feast" of

shuttered sleep to a wild vision which engulfs her. As Frank tells us, Ferter means "passion" as

well as "fire" in German; "the title's 'night of fire' suggests a wild, dangerous, and forbidden

conflagration that bums at night, witnessed from a secret place, devouring everything in its path. . .

Like the 'fire in a dry thicket / rising within women's eyes' of 'Men Loved Wholly Beyond

Wisdom,' this is Iove at its most savage and violent" (1 16)- The repetition of "thicket" c o n f i l s

Frank's connection of this poem with "Men Loved" fkom Body of This Death:

The torch being laid And the land kindled, And the deepest shade Caught fire-brindled; The thicket and the bare Rock, rising bright - The eye in its lair Quivers for sight.

The uncontrollable passion of jealousy is signified by the fire veined with blood, associated with

the ephemeral leaf; coming as it does after the dripping branch of the gold forsythia of "Girl's

Song," the image confirnls the connections between blood, violence, and los^.^' The movernent

of tuming is effected. As in "The Changed Woman" m, the woman sees "treacherous"

images behind her "fieshened eyes:" "She need not trouble. / Her lids will know them when she

dies." Quivenng for sight, the eye "in its lair," like an animal on the prowl, looks for proof of the

-

'' Frank and others read this poem as being about the violent emotion of consuming sexual love.

Chapter 4, Page 166

betrayal of the lover.

In the last stanza, the speaker regrets how the f i e has "burned aI1," and we suspect that

she has participated in the destruction of the relationship, broken the "pledge" of their union.

To touch at the sedge And then run tame 1s a broken pledge. The leaf-shaped £lame Shears the bark piled for winter, The grass in the stall, Sworn to lick at a little, It has burned all.

She acknowledges the hypocrisy of touching Iightly at the sedge - as at the edge - then backing

away. It is impossible after al1 to "run tarne:" the injunction is an oxymoron. Bogan h e w the

danger of lingering on "the verge of sanity:" she joked with Wheelock that he might think her

"on the verge" of hysteria @VWL, 50). Like Pandora, the speaker pretends to herself she can

simply peek under the lid, that she will allow only a "lick at a little." But what is opened is no

longer shut, as in "Winter Swan," "Shut with the fire passed and the fire returned." The flame

shears "the bark piled for winter, 1 The grass in the staI1." Everything she and her Iover had tried

to build for a future together is destroyed by emotion raging out of control.

In the poem which follows, "Second Song," the speaker weariiy bids her passion

goodbye. With the f ie of "Feuernacht" now passed, al1 is blackened and dead:

1 said out of sleeping: Passion, farewell. Take fiom my keeping Bauble and shell,

Black salt, black provender. Tender your store To a new pensioner, To me no mcre.

Chapter 4. Page 167

She has in her advancing age been sustained on a meagre allowance of passion, ironically

granted in mal1 regular measures because of service to passion in her youth. Like the miser

hoarding misery in "If We Take All Gold," she has guarded the "Bauble and shell" of her

romantic illusions as necessary to existence, Now, they are to her black and charred, ruined, and

liable - like bumt salt - to contaminate what she has left. The title of the poem indicates that the

speaker is attempting a second try; after "Girl's Song," which brought forward the girl figure of

Bogan's youth, the impiication is clear. The impulse to make a new start, intimated in "Tf We

Take Al1 Gold" and pronounced with fervour in "The Drum," is confumed, but the speaker is

clearly exhausted with the effort of combating her own worst instincts. We recall the plaintive,

despairing voice of "Song" in Bodv of This Death describing her h a r t as a ravaged, temcble

place - a scene visited by violence and passion - and crying, "Love me that I am undone." The

title thus undermines, even as it encourages, the battle, As implied in "Fifteenth Farewell" m, mention of another Song reminds that this is not the first, and may not be the last.

With "The Mark" the next poem in sequence, Bogan steps away fi-om the tumoil - and

the fust person intimacy of "Second Song" - to what she termed a "contemplative" stance.33

The iambic tetrameter and male protagonist who "seek[s]" immediately take the reader back to

"A Tale," the quest poem which opens Body of This Death:

Where should he seek, to go away That shadow will not point him down? The spear of dark in the strong day Beyond the upright body thrown, Marking no epoch but its own.

Loosed only when, at noon and night, The body is the shadow's prison. The pivot swings into the light;

33 in a letter to Sister Angela in 1966, Bogan compared "The Mark" with two later poems, "Exhortation" and "Henceforth, From the Minci," and caiied it "much more contemplative" (WWL. 368).

Chap fer 4, Page 168

The center lefi, the shadow risen To range out into time's long treason,

As Douglas Peterson comments, "'The Mark' is similar to 'Division,' not only in theme and

method, but also in the symbolic use of shadow, Here, the tree and the shadow it cast upon the

door of the house in 'Division7 are replaced by the upright figure of a man and the shadow it

casts upon the ground" (83). "Division" and 'The Mark" address the subject of tnrne, as Peterson

says, but when read as independent lyrics - even as paired ones - they fail to yieId up their

multiple layers of meaning. Peterson does not comment on the sunilarity of "The Mark" to "A

Tale," for example, nor do other critics. But clearly the youth who seeks the des& and rocks,

who goes ''to see what suns c m make / From soi1 more indurate and strange," has. corne in this

poem to a standstill, weighted and unbalanced by the swinging pivot of his own long ~hadow?~

Stand pimed to sight, while now, unbidden, The apple loosens, not at call, Falls to the field, and lies there hidden, - Another and another fa11 And lie there hidden, in spite of al1

He has seen, in other words, what he came to see, and while now he seeks "to go away" he is yet

"pinned to sight." The "something dreadfùl and another7' imagined locked in a hmmfied stare at

the conclusion of "A Tale" have in 'The Mark" matenalized into the body and the shadow,

mortal enemies locked in combat. At noon and night, the body is the shadow's prison. At al1

other times of day, the shadow is a "spear of dark" which points the "upright body7' dom, is

thrown beyond it; the body is in its tm trapped, as is the fiightened man of Body of This Death,

in a "hazardous maze / By shafied water." Like the wild, roaming creatures of Sir Thomas

34 The reality of Eliot's Waste Land f& him with dread, as if he had seen "something different Çom either 1 [His] shadow at evening striding behind m] 1 Or [his] shadow at evening nising to meet piIn]."

Chapter 4, Page 169

Wyatt's "They Flee fkom Me" who "range, / Busily seeking with a continual change," the

shadow is "risen / To range out into time's long treason."

"The Mark" signifies the increasing intensity of the poet's obsession with treachery and

betrayal, in concert with her despair for a lost world of innocence, wholeness, and hope. The

falling appZes of stanza thee announce more than a long-vanished Eden: the mark of the poern's

title is that of Cain, forever doomed to wander in ignominy for the violence he committed against

his brother, The shadow which the- youth cannot escape is his own guilt and brutal nature. Not

only do the apples fall, they fa11 'îmbidden." KnowIedge, once thought to have been the reward

for a devil's bargain, is only so much rotten f i t , wasted and hidden. The last stanza confirms

that we are al1 now in Hell.

The diagram of whirling shade, The visible, that thuiks to spin Forever webs that time has made Though momently tirne wears them thin And al1 at length are gathered in.

The resonant biblical language of the final line of the poem - which suggests that the appIes will

not finalIy be wasted but "gathered in" to harvest and that al1 of o u . shadow selves will be

gathered (like Abraham, who "gave up the ghost . . . and was gathered to his people" [Genesis

25: 81) - is not enough to salvage the emptiness of a world of lies, lies which rely on the

deception of the "visible" for their currency, spun into transparency and finalIy non-existence.

The "diagram of whirling shade" is rerniniscent of Dante's description of the lustfbl (represented

as birds) in the second circle of Hell:

Into a place 1 came Where Iight was silent all. Bellowing there groan'd A noise as of a sea in tempest tom By warring winds. The storrny blast of hell With restless fiiry drives the spirits on

Chapter 4, Puge 170

Unlike Dante's

Whirl'd round and dash'd amain with sore annoy. . - . . - - - . - . . . - ...... - - - - . - . . . - - - - - -

1 understood that to this torrnent sad The carnal sinners are condemn'd, in whom Reason by lust is sway'd- As in large troops And multitudinous, when winter reigns, The starlings on their wuigs are borne abroad; So bears the tyrannous gust those evil souls- On this side and on that, above, below, It drives them: hope of rest to solace them 1s none, nor e'en of milder pang, As cranes, Cbanging theu dol'rous notes, traverse the sky, Stretch'd out in long array; so 1 beheld Spirits, who came loud wailing, hurried on By their dire doom. 35

verse, Bogan's is ominously silent. The whirling shade is a diagram - visible, yet

without voice; there is no sound in space, no whisper even of the spinning of webs of tune- The

fatefùl question hangs in the air:

Where should he seek, to go away

'' Inferno, Canto V, lines 28-33,3749. 1 cite Cary's translation (1814) because of its contemporary currency. Dorothy Sayers, whose trandation of Dante's was first published in 1949, notably uses the term "shadows" rather than "Spirits." The original Italian is as follows:

Io venni in loco d ' o p e luce muto, che mugghia come fa mar per tempesta, se da contrari venti è combattuto.

La bufera infernal, che mai non resta, mena li spirti con la sua rapina; voltando e percotendo li molesta- ..-.....--....-....*...-...

Intesi ch'a cosi fatto tormento enno dannati i peccator carnalî, che la ragion sornmettono al talento.

e come Ii stomei ne portan l'ali ne1 fieddo tempo, a schiera Iarga e piena, cosi quel fiato li spiriti mali

di qua, di là, di giù, di su 1. mena; nulia speranza li conforta mai, non che di posa, ma di minor pena. E come i gru van cantando lor lai,

faccendo in aere di sé lunga riga, cosi vid' io venir, traendo guai,

ombre portate da la detta briga; . . .

Chapter 4. Page 171

That shadow will not point him down? ("'The MarK' 1-2)

What will the spider do, Suspend its operations, will the weevil Delay? De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled Beyond the circuit of the shudderïng Bear In hctured atoms, ("Gerontion")

The chanting cranes of Dante's verse "traverse the s b , / Stretch'd out in long a r r a ~ . " ~ ~ Bogan

substitutes the silent Swan for the clamorous Crane. Both are Iong-necked, stately birds, but the

Swan is a solitary creature while the crane travels in flockç, flying in a military r d . Homer's

cranes can "escape the winter time," but Bogan's desolate bird drifts with tragic inevitability to

meet it. In "Winter Swan," the world is in disarray, its lines disordered. The battle is now over-

Al1 that is left is the shadow of the Lady of Shalott spinning pictures like one of the Fates in the

abandoned chamber, watching the wheeling reflections in the tilted air of the rnirror, waiting for

Lancelot and death.

The silence is broken once again in "Late." The cormorant's scream echoes Cassandra's

The cormorant still screams Over cave and promontory. Stony wings and bleak glory Battle in your dreams. Now sullen and deranged, Not simply, as a child, You look upon the earth And find it harrowed and wild. Now, only to mock At the sterile cliff laid bare, At the cold pure sky unchanged,

36 Dante borrowed the Mage from the opening h e s of Book 3 of Homer's Iliad:

Now when the men of both sides were set in order by their leaders, ùie Trojans came on with clamours and shoutûig, like wildfowl, as when the clamour of cranes goes high to the heavens, when the cranes escape the winter tirne and the rains unceasing and clamorously wing their way to the streaming Ocean . . .

Chapter 4, Page 172

You look upon the rock, You look upon the air.

"Late" b ~ g s together rnany of the images and motifs already accumulating in Dark Summer,

while its geography recollects Bodv of This Death, The cormorant, a large black bird, is Cain to

the swan's Abel. The speaker has been dreaming; the landscape of her nightmare of warfare .

combines cave and promontory, female and male, the "cave of trees" of "Medusa" and the "hills

like roc& gates" of "A Tale." The earth seems to her "harrowed and wild." Biblical overtones

of the word "harrowed" (Christ harrowed Hell) reinforce the hellishness of the scene, its distance

fiom heaven. As in "Winter Swan," the garden is scorned as hollow, the "leaf-caught world" as

dishevelled.

The speaker's pose is one of hysterical irony. Lïke Cassandra, she regards the

unchanging sky and mocks herself, "the sterile cliff laid bare," that which cannot "bear" but

which exposes and is exposed. Also like Cassandra, she lias grown mad fiom her suffering and

horrifying visions. Her perspective has become deranged; it is not simple (whole and intact) like

a child's (the child she once was, the child she cannot have), but is fragmented, chaotic. In her

divided state, the speaker - with hypnotic repetition - observes herself observing: "You look

upon the earth / . . , . . . / You look upon the rock, / You look upon the air." The act of Iooking

held at the end of "A Tale" and "Medusa" is stuck like a long-play record circling at its

conclusion, caught in the relentless grooves of the woodcut in "A Letter."

The chafed, distressed, and distrustfül tone of the first section of Dark Sumrner changes

radically with its last poem, the solernn, regular "Simple Autumnal."

The measured blood beats out the year's delay. The tearless eyes and heart forbidden grief, Watch the bmed, restless, but abiding leaf, The brighter branches arniing the bright day.

Chaprer 4. Page 173

The cone, the curving fmit should fa11 away, The vine stem crumble, ripe grain know its sheaf Bonded to time, &es should have done, be brief, But, serfs to sleep, they glitter and they stay.

Because not last nor fist, grief in its prime Wakes in the day, and hears of Iife's intent. Sorrow would break the seal stamped over time And set the baskets where the bough is bent,

Full season's corne, yet filled trees keep the sky And never scent the gromd where they must lie.

The repetitions - of beating blood, burning leaf, and falling fruit; of sleeping and listening; of

somow, trees, and sky - complete the sequence, serve as its coda. Restated in these sonorous

lines are the anxious themes of the previous poems but, because "Simple Autumnal" has the full

and even tones of a hymn, a caIm acceptance of inevitability closes this portion of the volume.

Whereas the speaker in "Late" is incapable of regarding the scene "simply, as a child," the

chorus voice here espouses - as the title tells us - a "simple" view, one modest, uncomplicated,

plain, perhaps foolish in its professed, rediscovered faith in the endurance of the "leaf-caught

world." The looking of "Late" continues, with the eyes and heart watching the burned and

restless leaf, once again believed to be "abiding." The warfare is unceasing: grief wakes to the

branches arming the day. Yet at the close of the poem there is an overwhelrning sense of

anticipation, for although the harvest is over-ready, still the "filled trees keep the sky." For sorne

reason, the apples now do not fa11 unseen and unbidden. 1s the poet taking it as an article of

almost religious faith that they "never" will, or is the poem a prayer for heIp? The language of

the spell tram fixes as it transfonns,

One of the reasons why Dark Sumrner is so "obscure," considered to be so impenetrable

and elusive by readers of Bogan's poetry, is that it fkequently retreats to the images of childhood,

whether to cal1 up scenes of half-forgotten violence or their transmutation into the narratives of

Chapter 4, Page 1 74

the f a j r tales of the brothers Grimm- In The Uses of Enchanîment, psychoanalyst Bruno

Bettelheim argues that folk fairy tales are more s a t i s w g for children tha. other children's

stories, as they help them fmd meaning in theïr lives- The reason, he says, is that they "start

where the child really is in his psychological and emotional being. They speak about his severe

inner pressures in a way that the child unconscious1y understands" (271). Further, "the form and

structure of fairy tales suggest images to the child by which he can structure his daydreams and

with them give better direction to his life" (272)- In "The Cupola" and "Girl's Song" intuitions

of blood and violence - negligent death in an abandoned charnber, a forsythia branch dripping

Iike a disrnembered limb - seem bizarre until seen as fkagments of the homile story of

Bluebeard, in which the remains of murdered women are stored in a r~orn.~ ' Bluebeard's young

wife has been toId she cannot enter the room, but one day in his absence she does so- Reflected

in a pool of clotted blood - as in a rnirror - she sees the rnangled bodies of her husband's

previous wives hanging fkom the wall.

The movement through these twelve poems simulates the emotional zigzag of the poet's

incursion into the territory of a profound despair. Whereas in Bodv of This Death Bogan sought

to disentangle the skeins of the story by descnïing and giving voice to "characters" in the drama,

in Dark Surnmer she relinquishes that distancing device, offering an astonishing vulnerability and

exposure, a rïsky intimacy. There is an intimation of continuing selfdiscovery, but the effect is

static, of simultaneity expenenced in Iayers rather than movernent, What Bogan expIores in this

series of interconnected lyrics is the alienation of self fiorn self as experience taints expectations.

Childish fears corne to the surface and threaten the hgi le , hard-won stability of the adult.

'' The story of Bluebeard made its literary debut in CharIes Perrault's seventeenth-century Tales of Mother Goose. Maria Tatar argues that two lesser known stones recorded by the brothers Grimm are closely related: "Fitcher's Bird" and "The Robber Bridgegroom," both of which have served as inspiration for the fiction writer Margaret Atwood, are also about young women caught in marriages which promise violent death (143). Photographer Cindy Sherman portrays the dismembered sisters as broken dolls in her illustrations for the Rizzoli publication of Fitcher's Bird.

Chaprer 4, Page 175

"Winter Swan" desmies a situation of disintegraiion and separation (blood from both mind and

body) and mourns the Iost integrity- The speaker addresses herseIf ("speak, you proud!"). "If

We Take Al1 Gold" hypothesizes a strategy "toward" wholeness, which "The Drurn" picks up

and courageously endorses; but neither poem convinces. In "Division" the poet responds to her

own question, What abides? "Time and the tree stand there," she concludes. But "Cassandra"

backs up fkom the answer to the explanation. A gift which brings with it extreme suffering and

entails madness is the cause. "The Cupolô" retreats M e r , to a childhood scene, and already

frorn under the floorboards the poet is retrieving the "sorrow's gold" so briefly and ineffectually

hidden, never out of the haunted house of her "inrnost self' at all. "Girl's Song" is a clear,

interpolated memory of youth, while 'Teuernacht" - revisiting the scene of the destructive

passion - merges with the current desperate fear of betrayal that corrodes the speaker's

personality. 'cFeuernacht," like "The Dnun," is a poem written £iom the inside of the body, by a

trapped creature looking out of the ce11 of self, hearing only the roar of surging b l ~ o d . ~ ~ It is thus

rhythmical yet sernantically chaotic. "Second Song" is a reprise of previous songs: s u m e r is

the second season (OED), and this one is black, dark. With 'The Mark" the poet returns to the

quester of "A Tale," describing him in his now fatally divided state. In "Late" she no longer

addresses herself as "you" but quietly, humbly observes. The speaker is M e r distanced in

"Simple Autumnal," which closes the sequence with a reverse invocation, speaking as if in

response to the demand of 'Winter Swan" in a kind of placating chant, perhaps to induce by

The scenario is that of William Blake's Book of Urizen in which Los the blacksrnith poet- creator forges a cage of self (a body, with five senses distinct fiom one another, a fallen state of division) for the reasoning tyrant, Urizen, Los tries to restrict Urizen's bad influence, but what he does to Urizen he does to himself, for they are both one. Blake's theory that human beings have been fataiiy divided nom their eternal natures, trapped as if imprisoned in physical bodies they have xnaiiciously been led to believe are inherently gros and S M , wodd likely have been attractive to Bogan at this time. In December? 1928, she wrote to her fÏïend Ruth Benedict her delirious thanks for a present of a volume of BIake's poetrys "The BIake filled me with joy as 1 wildly tore off the wrapper. Thank you for it, dear Ruth, - 1 did want it with a real gluttony, and had no idea where to find it, even if 1 could have afforded it" (WWL, 43).

Chapter 4. Page 176

insistent reassurance a more peaceful sleep than the poet has experïenced for some time.

Part Z ï

The second section of Dark Summer is given over to a four-part, eleven-page narrative called

"The Flume," one of only two long poems Bogan is hown to have composed. It was fated for

excision £iom subsequent colIections. Bogan's reasons for suppressing the poem in later

publications are not entirely clear, but in any case her inciusion of "The Flume" in Dark Surnrner

can be seen as a gesture of generosity to her readers. The first twelve poems of the book are

extraordinarily rich and dense, after which the relative expansiveness of an extended narrative is

a relief. Further, "The Flume" fiinctions as a legend, allowing one to read back, to c o n f i or

decode entirely sorne of the more obscure images of the earlier p0erns.3~

"The Flume" is the story of a young woman obsessed with finding evidence that her

husband has betrayed her. She plays a game with herself of searching desperately for "agony hid

is some corner." in the first section, we come to understand her mania:

She had a madness in her for betrayal. She looked for it in every room in the house, Sometimes she thought she must rip up the floor to h d A box, a letter, a ring, to set her grief, So long a rusty wheel, revolving in fiuy. But al1 that she ever found was the noise of water Bold in the house as over the dam's flashboard, Water as loud as a pulse pressed into the ears, Steady as blood in the veins, - often she thought The shout her own life, - that she did not listen and hear it.

39 Cheryl Waiker remarks that Dark Surnmer is Bogan's "maddest book and contains some of her most obscure poems, like 'Division,' 'Feuer-Nacht,' and 'The Mark' It is hard at £ k t to make sense of the visual imagery of light and shadow, fire and stoxm, which seems to be intended to carry so much psychological weight but which the poet refuses to gloss or even to assist the reader with understanding" (1 8 1).

Chapter 4. Page 177

Frank comments that "The Flume" was "an extremely usefil poem for [13ogan] to have wrïtten"

for it "allowed her to put away an abundance of crystalline nuggets fiom the matrix of childhood

memory" (1 17-18). Bogan grew up in mil1 towns in the northeastern United States. She recalled

the fear her mother had of the cascading fiurne: "It had voices for her: it called her and beciconed

her. So 1, too, began to fear it" (JAR 60). Like the speaker of 'The Drum," the young wornan of

"The Flume" hears a steady pounding, so loud and so regular it seems to be "The shout [ofl her

own life." The noise of the water outside merges with the roar within. But the house itself, a

metaphor for the poet of the physical being which contains the chaos of our inmost selves (as in

the "housefiil of alien voices" and Dickinson's "haunted house"), is quiet on this hot summer

The fields had gone to young grass, the syringa hung Stayed by the weight of flowers in the moving morning. The shuttered house held coolness a core against The hot steeped shnibs at its doors, and the blazing river. She in the house, when he had gone to the rnill, Tried to brush fiom hm heart the gentlest kiss New on her mouth. She leaned her broom to the wall, Ran to the stair, breathless to start the game Of finding agony hid in sorne corner, Tamed, perhaps; by months of pity, but still Alive enough to bite at her hands and throat, To bruise with a blue, unalterable mark The shoulder where she had felt his breath in sleep Warm her with its slow measure,

Like Cain, the woman is bruised, ironically through her own suspicions, with an "unalterable

mark" in a spot made vulnerable by love. The mark identifies her as a violent sou1 struggling to

live with guilt in a fallen world, just as the youth of the poem "The Mark" has to face his own

miserable humanity.

The woman comes to a room where she stops to contemplate her reflection in a mirror.

Bogan has evoked this scene in several previous poerns, but here she describes the experience

Chapfer 4, Page 178

fùlly.

In a mirror Reflecting a barrow by a neighbor's barn And a weather-vane stopped between north and West She saw her face, as she had thought to see it, Tightened between the eyes. She sat down on the bed So that a tree was thrust into the mirror Behind her head, and moved.there shadowless Turning around her the green of its distant leaves. She had her two eyes before her, giving her back The young face, sofily marred by its own derision, A hand that settled combs in the heavy hair, The willing mouth, kissed never to its own beauty Because it strained for terror through the kiss, Never quite shaped over the lover's name Because that name rnight go.

n i e tree moved over Its bounded space, and gave some s b to the glass Mixed with its leaves, although the branch rushed loud A field off, it was lost within the steady Leap of the dam to the flume, made to a silence She had heard it so long.

The intense act of looking on oneself as other is the theme of "A Tale" and "Medusa," and

anirnates the harrowed landscape of "Late." When the woman sits down on the bed, a tree is

"thnist into the mirror / Behind her head." The movement is forceful and sexual; the wornan

seerns to be watching her own violation, and watching herself watching. Miraculously, the

mirror is not broken with the energy of the thrust, but the tree's turning movement is quickly

distanced, and later it moves "over / Tts bounded space" like a body in the bed, to give "some sky

to the glass." The proud young woman meanwhile mocks her own vanity - her lovely mouth, her

hand settling combs in her hair. She anticipates the tree's departure but derides herself for that

cowardice, the fear that the "name might go." The abandoned chamber of the cupola, where the

rnirror hangs and shows the shape of the bough to be changed and empty, is her permanent

emotional home, tied to her identity.

Chapfer 4. Page 1 79

Nothing against the cold Beat of her own proud purpose was noise or power.

She had some guilt in her to be betrayed, She had the terrible hope he codd not love her.

In the second section of "The Flurne," the stonn comes. Bogan's initial impulse to

compose the poem was apparently a "mindless, idealess (sic) compulsion . . . [to] do a lyric

called 'Thunder"' 8). She spoke in her correspondence of the "lightning passage,"

remking that it is actually "more thunder than lightning" because "The lightning stades me

merely, the thunder would wring me with fright were 1 a mole underground" (UrWL 9):' The

woman of the poem Iikewise does not f e z the lightning (which looks "'A little Iike another tree")

but is terrified of the thunder which follows it:

The wind before stonn was to her the wind before thunder. She heard the break within it fiom the first. She never was a h i d to face the heavy Sprout of the lightning, for one moment branched Within the sultriness of the high pasture A little like another tree for a moment Gathering through the window not like danger. She ran about to shut the windows, slamrned The doors that gaped along the wall like ears And tried to keep herself fi-om the £irst crash To follow the stripped spasm that took root On the rocky Ml, in the field, or in the water, She needed more than a house to keep it out. She clung to the wall, and smelled the dusty papa Beside her face, and counted out the figures Into a spell, to keep her terror hushed, And clenched herself so tightly that she thought Nothing could make her hear that noise again, And again heard, spun down throughout the valley, . The spi11 fiom the long slq, over the roof, Mounting as surely as the beats in pain.

JO Frank coments that, despite Bogan's progress reports on the poem in her letters to fellow poet Roïfe Humphries, it is not clear why or at what point the poem "strayed fiom its original preoccupation with thunder to the fiume itself' (1 18).

Chapter 4, Page 180

The youth of "'A Tale" ernbarks on his quest because he, like the woman, too long has "heard the

break / Of water in a land of change." Both yearn for an asceticism to take them far away fiorn

mortal concerns - less because of a fear of sex and death ("the break / Of Water" suggests

fernale sexuality, while "the heavy / Sprout of the lightning" brings to mind both male arousal

and the planted corpse of Eliot's Waste Land: "Has it begun to sprout?"), than to avoid the

emotional aftermath.

The thunder was like agony, a smother Against her life: she thought never to stand Out in the fkee still air again, and buy A loaf of bread out of the baker's cart, Or cut the lamp-wicks in the early monring, Or cany in the biggest Iamp at night Shining and clean under the china shade To Iight the dishes of the supper table.

In "A Tale," the narrator's inirusive "1 think" provides an unexpected insight into the quester's

true goal: he seeks, she believes, ' A light that waits / Still as a lamp upon a shelf." The domestic

image cornes as a surprise in "A Tale," for its protagonist seems to be an adventurer who would

happily shun interiors of al1 kinds. But the contradiction is to the point: the youth is both poet

and woman. Ironically, she cries out against the srnothering spi11 fiorn the sky, yet yeams for the

protection and quiet of burial underground.

- Still - still - everything quieter then Than the very earth escaping under the plou&, The depth beyond seed of the still and deep-layered ground Stiller than rock, than the blackest base of rock, Than the central grain crushed tight withui the mountain. It would be still again.

The storm subsides. The woman recovers her equilibrium. She imagines the conversation she

will have with ber husband over dinner:

Chapter 4. Page 181

She could Say to-night "There has been a storm," as though he hadn't heard The hundred breaks within the murderous s b , And he would Say that thunder couIdnyt hurt her. "There's been a storm," she would Say. "Trees have been struck, "Maybe a man stunned in an open field, "The milk in the cows' udders curdled sour." One woman fkïghtened in a dusty corner Who bit her fist and wished to pluck the thunder From its swinging tree, to throw it down forever Against the pastures it could not destroy, And afler the thunder, run and stop the dam, The endIess fountainous roar of fallïng water, And scratch her heart fiee fkom the itching love So much like sound, never spending itself, Never still, in any quietest room. The thunder ended. She could hear the others: The water that wrapped the house like a shawly vine, Love like a rough wind mixing a branch's stems. The thunder had stopped. Some day she could stand Listening yet, with the others silent around her.

When the noise of her raging passion stops, the woman c m hear other sounds - other ernotions

loving and gentle, gmffly protective. But she feels she should warn her husband that she is

dangerous to him, that the s tom in its fÙry was "murderous" and trees were stnick like men.

Like Lady Macbeth, she puts off the milk of human kindness as "curdled sour." These lines

prepare for the knife-edge of violence envisioned in section three, predicted with the certainty of

the changing seasons:

At night his calm closed body lay beside ber Beyond her will established in itself. Barely a moment before he had said her name, Giving it into sleep, had set the mercifûl Bulwark of spare young body against the darlmess. Her hair sweeps over his shoulder, claiming hirn hers, This fine and narrow strength, although her hands Lie, shut untenderly by her own side. Her woman's flesh, rocking al1 echoes deep, Strains out again toward ravenous memory. He lies in sleep, slender, a broken seal, The strong wrists quick no more to the strong hmd, The intent eyes dulled, the obstinate mouth kissed out.

Chap fer 4. Page 182

Outside the dam roars. He is perhaps a child, With a child7s breath. He lies flexed like a child, The strong n i s and finn neck may count for nothing. She will think him a child, He is weak and he will fail her.

Again she remembers the girl on the edge of t o m Who took her lovers out along autumn roads, Under half-empty trees, and shouted her Iaughter To hear an echo thinner, later than summer's, Answer her fiom the fields. Again she remembers The true hard cold that caught at the wild girl's body, When night after night she felt the auturnn break And open the country she knew, when she gave her kisses Beside rough field-stones piled into a wall Cold as the wind in every particle. She had been that girl, this woman in a house, Who well might have no bed- He had given her walls She wished to burn, his body she wished to tear Ever upon the h i f e of another's body. He was the dark, he was the house and sound.

The wild young girl the woman remembers herself to be was bold, an adventurer. We have met

her before, in "Last Hill In A Vista," and laiow her as one who "sought safety, but loved danger"

out in the cow pasture, beyond the walls of the "wooden town." The mernories of making love in

an open field taunt her now; she wonders if she is constitutionaIly incapable of living inside the

contained circle of marriage. Her many lovers have broken open her body, "the country she

knew," for in the autumn the cold earth does not yield easily, not as it does to the plough of

sumrner. Auturnn is a break (brake) on surnmer, the %eak in the land of change" heard by the

youth of "A Tale." The slosing Iines of the third section of 'The Flume," set in the third season

of the year, foreshadow the certain, silent, violent emptying of the "filled tree" regarded with

such calm in "Simple Autumnal": "One morning she saw how the first autumn had changed /

The splayed repeated figures on the ground / Making them leaves, and not the shadow of

leaves." In "Knowledge" in Bodv of This Death, the protagonist describes herself lying on the

ground, Iearning that "Trees make a long shadow / And a light sound." A splayed figure is one

Chaprer 4, Page 183

stcetched out, displayed; also, it is a female from whom the ovaries have been removed (as

"spayed," OED). Again like Lady Macbeth, the woman seems to have set aside her sexuality and

distanced herself fkom the limitations of her gender. The transformation is both a fiilfilment (the

shadows becorne thmselves, leaves) and a kind of death (they are fallen).

"The Flume" closes in winter, in the dark The woman returns to the house afier an

absence, coming back earlier than expected in order to resume her game of seeking evidence of

her husband's betrayal. Her jealousy is both f i e and ice; she sees everywhere around her the

visage of Medusa, her own reflection:

She has been away. She shuts the heavy door Against the stars of the late afiernoon. The fine fire in the kitchen warms the hall And has turned the stove lids golden-red. Such buming! Oh, equal to the terror of the colé Biting itself outside, like a maddened thing, Its tooth and £Ùry matched. The lamp flarnes clearly Against its glassed-in air. Nothing has changed, Table and floor have been swept clean enough. She pulls the fiozen patch of veil fiom her mouth And stands, like a stranger, mumed fiom the cold To which she may rehirn. Where is this treachery That she has come home earlier to find Wide in her house? It has not tracked the floors Nor strewn cxumbs on the shelves. It is hid away.

In the fairy tale 'Xansel and Gretel," the children try in vain to find their way out of the forest by

following bread crumbs. Here, the woman iooks for crumbs strewn by a malicious rat. The

burning stove is a witch's oven. We are once again in the gingerbread house of "The Cupola:"

another presence is suspected, of she who hung the min-or before and lefi- The woman is

overtaken by her identification with the avenging hry, determined to exact bloody retribution.

The narrator addresses ber heart as if it is the muse's instrument:

Begin to turn, you whirring Stone in the breast;

Chapter 4, Page 184

Beat again, unsated pulse of fiiry. He will soon be here. Give her before he cornes Whet to the blade. Lie open to her eye; Rustle against her ear; give her mean glory Of treason found outside the treacherous heart. - No moon is close against the ernpty windows To fil1 the cold hand of the air.

She rnoves through the house, making her way steadily to the bedroom. Her approach is like the

advance to the house of Medusa: the "sheer" sky in that poem is both precipice and veil. The

"whistling cold" she hears and feels recalls the noise of the quai1 as they circle the fiozen girl in

"Statue and Birds." She would flee, but the sound 'Fails on her breast."

The cold stairs murmur In al1 their boards and nails, under her feet, Her breath shows white over the lamp she canies And sets by the bed. The panes shine back As though there were nothing but a precipice Beyond the wall, and the house itself a shelter Held over space. She stands within the panes As in that room, coated, the veil on her cheeks, Save that there darkness streams behind her body And through it. She almost knows the change She could not h o w until now, so recently The whistling cold outside beat down her sense. But now she is snared. She tries to take a step Toward the clumsily smoothed bed, and wait half-balanced, Even her anger checked. Now al1 is over. Her blood still beats, but everythuig else is still. She stands in an empty room, in a silent room. The ear has stopped.

The beat of stick on skin, the thudding of the blood in her eardnim, stop. The flume has fiozen

solid. Bogan has described this moment of stillness in her poetry before - in "Medusa," "Statue

and Birds," b'Decoration.'"' The woman is held fast in an enchantment, like a sleeping beauty

" At the close of "Statue and Birds," for example, "The inquietudes of the sap and of the blood are spent. / What is forsaken will rest."

Chapter 4, Page 185

waiting one hundred winters for release:

Great quietude spels the throb Expected, because here the water sounded, Because of it the bed and chairs stood here, She stands here, too, because she once heard water Night or day, go d o m in a bristling swing, - Water now like a stone over the dam, And in the flume below, that once ran black And marked its current with the earliest stalks Of sumrner broken, the water might be the ground. No longer the echo of fienzy b o n d on itseIf Answers her fkom below. She and the mirror Can play no longer together their bitter game. Here now is silence, over the earth as beneath it, The rim of the cymbal fiozen, the d m gone slack.

"Winter Swan," which opens Dark Summer, represents the resumption of movement after the

pause, the poet's voice once again speaking, words on the page appearing after white space,

sound following silence. Ironically, however, the season of that poem is autumn: winter is still

yet to corne; the bird drifts to the ripple cut by the coId. In the closing lines of "The Flurne," the

poet describes a wonderful thaw which, like the happy ending of a fairy tale, is both uplifting and

profoundly suspect:

And here at last the Iust for betrayai breaks. Her blood beats on, and her love with her blood Beats back the staring coldness that would kill her, Laying a palm over the ebb and return Of her warm throat, heard now for the first time Within this room. Soon he will find her, Still dressed for flight, quiet upon his bed, When he has humied from the weighted cold Toward the faint larnp upstairs. She will lie there Hearing at last the timbre of love and silence.

The circulating blood of "The Drurn" sufises the woman with wannth, literally beating back the

"staring coldness that would kill her." The youth - the woman - is relieved to kindle the "faint

Chapfer 4, Page 186

lamp," the light that wili be waiting on the shelf for her returning husband- Bogan suggests in

these lines that a cozy domesticity as well as true rornantic love can be recovered £tom the bmen

chi11 of the quest and its harrowing dangers.

"The Flume" tells a story of fear and magic. Invisible, vicious creatures hide in corners

of a house swept clean by Snow White or Cinderella; they leave no trail of bread crumbs- When

the woman sees herself in the glass, she is realized as both evil queen and maiden. Like the

queen, she canuot stop obsessïng, the response of a child in fear of the witch of "Hansel and

Gretel." Yet she is the witch. ui ''Hanse1 and Gretel," the parents leave the children in the forest

to die- The stepmother / queen in "Snow White" dispatches a huntsman to cut out the child's

lungs and liver.

Many years afier she wrote the poem, Bogan professed dissatisfaction with the its "false"

closure, and - while implying that it did not meet her own standards for publication -

achowledged with deprecation its rightful inclusion in the scho1arys catalogue of her life's work:

1 have never been quite sure about ''The Flume." It came f?om the right place, and 1 worked hard on it, and it has some nice moments - the hot stove and the no-sound of water - which were actually observed and lived with, at one penod of my life. Perhaps 1 have the feeling that one doesn't get out of that kind of obsession so easily - the "facts" are false, at the end- (WWL 8) 42

4' Collins cornments on the negative cntical reception Bogan's two long poems received, speculating that she rnight have been "needlessly discouraged from longer efforts by the review of the second book" (S), while Frank states confidently that "The Flume" must have been "obviously unacceptable" to a poet of Bogan's aesthetic because it was too openly autobiographical(117). "When I'm dead, someone will gather it up and insert it in the works, 1 suppose. With notes!" Bogan had sourly predicted (WWL 8). Frank points to details of house and landscape, as weiï as the similarities of the young woman to Bogan and her "be-ying mother" - a woman who had made a practice of abandonhg her husband and chiIdren for extended sexual liaisons:

The woman in the poem, like Louise's mother early in the century, is married to a man who leaves every day for work. But there the resemblance between the two ends; the women in "The FIurne" is much closer to Louise herself, who, when she was writing the poem in the sumrner of 1924, was consolidating her relationship with Raymond Holden and trying hard to overcome the distrust that reached back to Milton and her betraying mother. (1 18)

The "false" ending belied the fact that "one doesn't get out of that kind of obsession so easily." Stiii, as

Chapter 4. Page 187

Taken out of context, "The Flume" might well be judged in these harsh terms; read on its own, it

is unbalanced, animated by a strong and u m l y presence who is unaccountably tarned in the last

line. But, as the second act of a drama building to an emotional climax of fhstrated despair, a

poem which wants to fa11 forward fiom its own weight serves the larger cause of narrative

momentum. Throughout the poems of parts 1 and II is the ever-present fear of beirayal by self

and others. In context, the poem as written works entirely as it should: because "The Flume"

hc t ions as a narrative restatement and elaboration of the introductory matter of the volume, it

follows that it, too, should close on a note of hopeful expectation. "Simple Autumnal" fmds a

religious solace in the natural rhythrns of the seasons just as "The Flume" offers an abiding belief

in the power of a tnisting, romantic love. Its naïvety leads naturally to the earlier experience

alluded to by the centrally placed poerns fkom Bodv of This Death. The impulse to believe in a

happy ending is, despite Bogan's reconsideration, emotionally "true" (if not authentic) and

therefore entirely appropriate as a conclusion to "The Flume." The addictive, circular path of

trust and disillusionment becornes increasingly dizzying, however, as Dark Sumrner progresses.

The rest of the volume testifies to the truth of Bogan's statement that "one doesn't get out of that

kind of obsession so easily-"

For the central section of Dark Sumrner, Bogan seIected eleven poems fi-om the original 27

published in Bodv of This Death. She kept the essential sequence the same, as indicated by the

table below:

Frank concludes, "'the heroine's experience of love as the onnish of a bodily force, fa- fiom being false, was and remained a centrai ideal in Bogan's faith, both as an artist and a human being" (1 19).

Chapter 4. Page 188

Contents: Section III, Dark Summer 1 Contents: Bodv of This Death 1 P@

Medusa 1 33

A Tale

Decoration

1

2

SU^ Contra I 35 Sub Contra

A Letter

The Frightened Man

Betrothed

Words for Departure 1 O

4

5

8

9 -

-

Ad Castitatem

-

Portrait

The Romantic

-

-

3 6

38

39

Ad Castitatem

Epitaph for a Rornantic Woman

12

Knowledge

Portrait

The Romantic

My Voice Not Being Proud

Statue and Birds

The AIchemist

Men Loved Wholly Beyond Wisdom

13

14

15

16

17

The Alchemist

Men Loved WhoIly Beyond Wisdom

The Crows

Memory

Wornen

Last Hill on a Vista

Song

S tanza 26 I

The Changed Woman

Chanson un Peu Naive

Fifieenth Farewell

Sonnet

Chanson un Peu Naïve 43

Fifteenth Farewell 1 44

Since you would daim the sources. . . 46

Bogan achieves a serene sense of balance and proportion in her choices and placement of the

lyrics: the pattern of the selections is regular, rhythmical, suggesting that she was attempting to

Chapter 4. Page 189

retain the spirit of the first volume as a whole- "A Tale," which introduces Bodv of This Death,

is omitted, but the three poems which conclude the book are retained, perhaps to promote a re-

connection afler this telescoping to the poerns of Part W. The paging of the book effects a series

of pairs, linking the poems Tortrait" and 'The Romantic," "The Alchernist" and "Men Loved,"

and "Stanza" and "Chanson." "Ad Castitatem" and ''Fifieenth Farewell" stand alone on either

side of the-central grouping formed by the three pairs, each occupyfng its own double page.

"Medusa" and "Sub Contra" serve then. as introduction, the condition of siIence balanced by an

invocation to sound; at the end of the section, "Stanza" - renamed as "Since You Would Claim

the Sources of My Thought" - provides dramatic conclusion,

Bodv of This Death was printed in a small font, single spaced. The visual effect of the

volume is of isolated areas of concentration punctuating a landscape of white space, appropriate

to the representation of voices engaged in dialogue, now speaking and now pausing (breathing,

thinking, forgetting), speech altemating with silence. In Dark Swnmer, the font is larger, the

lines more generously spaced apart, so that the words and the white-which-surrounds more

effectively share the page. Dramatic tension is lost in these poems, but because the

intercomectedness of the lyrics is reinforced, the sense of the original sequence is retained even

in its abbreviated form.

Dark Surnrner begins with the speaker's agonized, disonented response to experiences

which have taken away her trust. "The Flume" attempts to explain her state of rnind by

providing narrative background and sketching a fond, unconvinced and unconvincing, vision of

how al1 might be resolved. By situating the sequence from Body of This Death at this point in

the volume, Bogan emphasizes the centrality of the conflict it dramatizes, arising fiom what

precedes and precipitating what comes after: the emotional crisis of Part N. At the conclusion

of his review of Body of This Death in The New Republic, A. Donald Douglas refers to Bogan's

Chapter 4, Page 1 !?O

work in dramatic tenns, descn%ing her first volume as a kind of third act in need of context:

"One hopes that in her next work and with a deepening richness Miss Bogan may turn fiom her

cornpleted third act of Tristan and Isolde and with an equal intensity and beauty mite the second

act" (22). The split in the speaker's self, for which the tragically doomed love relationship

between man and woman is both symbol and realization, is relentlessly pursued and explored.

The poet reaches a locked door at the centre of the haunted house which is her being, and tunis

the key.

Part W

The mood of disturbed enchantment which sufises the first part of Dark Summer resurnes its

hushed, anxious viiration in the fourth section. In the poem which opens this section, the title

poem "Dark Summer," the lightning waits, is "not yet found." The landscape is fi111 of meaning

but - malignantly passive - it waits for the protagonist of the poem to seek it out,

Under the thunderdark, the cicadas resound. The storm in the s e mounts, but is not yet heard. The shaft and the flash wait, but are not yet found.

The apples that hang and swell for the late corner, The simple spell, the rite not for our word, The kîsses not for our mouths, - light the dark sununer.

Who are the disenfranchised "we" of the poem? Frank assumes they are the speaker and her

lover. But there are more questions to answer. The spell, the apple, "the rite not for our word" -

what are these? How, and why, do they "light the dark surnmer?" The poem seems to Say: seek,

though what you will find is not for you.

In the rest of the poems which make up the fourth section - "For a Marriage," "Didactic

Piece," "Tears in Sleep," "Song for a Slight Voice," "The Crossed Apple," "Sonnet," "Fiend's

Chapter 4. Page 19 1

Weather," "1 Saw Eternity," "Corne, Break with Time," and "OZd Countryside," the poet

continues to peel compulsively at the layers of her being and the tissues of her relationship,

seeking at once to uncover evidence of old and new betrayals and to gain some perspective on

her own building hysterïa. In "For a Mamïage," the wornan - presurnably the same woman of

' m e Flume" - gives to her husband "dangerous sight" of her cruel and self-destructive nature:

She gives most dangerous sight To keep his life awake: A sword sharp-edged and bright That darkness must not break, Not ever for her sake.

With it he sees, deep-hidden, The sullen other blade To every eye forbidden, That half her life has made, And untiI now obeyed.

Now he will know his part: Tougher than bone or wood, To clasp on that barbed heart That once shed its own blood In its own solitude.

Frank suggests that the source of the "pretty trope of sentimental exchange" of this poem

may well have been Sidney's "My true love hath my heart and 1 have his:"

My true love hath my heart and 1 have his, By just exchange, one for the other given; 1 hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss; There never was a better bargain driven. His heart in me keeps me and him in one, My heart in him his thoughts and senses guides; He loves my heart, for once it was his own; 1 chensh his, because in me it bides. My heart was wounded with his wounded heart, For as fkom me on him his hurt did light, So still methought in me his hurt did smart; Both equal hurt, in this change sought our bliss: My true love hath my heart and 1 have his.

Chapter 4, Page 192

Although Frank argues that Bogan "constructs an elaborate (and somewhat labored) conceit of

marriage as a double-edged sword - the wife's neurotic character - which the husband (suitor-

courtier-knight) rnust 'clasp on"' (122), in fact there are two swords: one is sharp and bright,

which the woman gives to her husband like an ilIurninated rnirror - it is her "dangeroüs sight,"

her insight into her own nature. "With it he sees . . . / The sullen other blade," her barbed heart,

Like Perseus, he can look on Medusa by means of his refiective "shield-"

Bogan's husband and wife differ f7om Sidney's lovers. It is doubtful they would boast

that "never was a better bargain driven." Further, their wounds are not rnutually inflicted; the

wife7s barbed heart causes them both to bleed. Bowles insists that there is a "sense or

reciprocity" in that "she keeps hirn awake and alive and , . . in exchange he protects her fiom her

own demons" (1 10). Frank concurs: "At the very least, ' he will know his part,' have a purpose,

role, and destiny, and these in turn will shieId hirn against the recognition of his own

weaknesses" (122). If so, that seems small compensation. Like Bluebeard, the woman keeps

secret from "every eye" the bloody charnber of her heart, where "negligent death" was spilled.

Just as he does, she grants her spouse the key to the room, but rather than command that he never

use it, she shows him, in a dim reflected light, the horrors within; the insight is the bright sword,

sharp and hurtfùl but necessary to their relationship. "Men and women are two locked caskets,

of which each contains the key to the other," Bogan once quoted Karen Blixen as saying.J3 As in

"Divisio~," the replica turns to itself with the sword confi-onting the sword, and "The burden of

the seen / 1s clasped against the eye." This is her gift to him, for she is dangerous to hirn as weIL

as to herself, Because he loves her, he will continue to cherish and protect her, to "clasp on that

"3 Bogan caiied the remark "a tmly sibylline utterance" having a "ring of mysterious truth" (JAR 158).

Chaprer 4. Page / 93

barbed heart," even as he remains vigilant on his own behalf?

Bogan thanked Hamet Monroe for taking the next poem of the sequence, "Didactic

Piece," for original publication in Poetrv, apoIogizing that it is "obscure, but that's the way it

came (cited by Ridgeway, 54) .4'

The eye unacquitted by whatever it holds in altegiance: The trees' upcurve thought sacred, the flaked air, sacred and alterable, The hard bud seen under the Iid, not the scomed leaf and the apple - As once in a swept space, so now with speech in a house, We think to stand spelled forever, chained to the rigid knocking Of a heart whose time is its own flesh, momently swung and burning - This, in peace, as well, though we know the air a combatant And the word of the heart's wearing tinie, that it will not do without grief.

The fomzlity of the poem marks it as a kind of prayer, an incantation confîrmed by the repetition

of "sacred," the phrase "spelled forever," the "word" which hearkens back to "the rite not for our

word" of "Dark Sumer," and the suggestion of an altar in "alterablr." The speaker stands as if

in church, hearing the knocking of her own heart as she listens to the "speech in a house." The

emotional intensity of the moment rerninds her of standing in her own bedroom at the end of

'The Flume," that "swept space" which allowed her crazed sensibility to settle to itself in grace.

Like the shadow in "The Mark," a pivot swinging heavily into the light, fier heart is a censer,

44 Ridgeway, suggesting that "For a Marriage" is "especially self-concemed," remarks that the

psychological state it descn%es, one of "fearful reticence in a close relationship, was to be a factor in Bogan's later emotional iiiness" (57). She feels that "The poem suffers . . . £kom the metaphor of the sword as the sight allowed of her nature," finding it "confusing, if expressive of the danger she feels in being revealed. The poem itself is as obscure and knotted in symbol as her feelings were." Read on its own, "For a Marriage" is indeed "obscure," as are rnany of the lyrics in Dark Summer. But the "jedousy and childhood anxieties" which Ridgeway identifies in the poem c m be traced in the pattern of the sequence, through the narratives of fairy tales and myths. The sword is a symbol of purification (me fire) and we feel the poet struggling, through a maze of pain, to achieve through archetypal representation both art and purgation.

4S Frank descriies it as "an extended meditative poem," but regrets that it is "impenetrable in places, and fails as a whole, despite sorne fine passages" (1 12). Paul Ramsey, however, celebrates "Didactic Piece" as "one of /J30gan7s] best" (1 19).

Chap fer 4. Page 194

"momently swung and buming." We know the air to be "a combatant" fkom the military

discourse of "The Drum," when the heart is enjoined to 'Vse up the air / To the Iast drop." The

speaker has, in the past, disdained the passing of tirne, scomed the leaf and the apple for the hard

bud of spring. As if in a trame, she realizes her error.

The liniit already traced must be returned to and visited, Touched, spanned, proclaimed, else the heart's time be all: The small beaten disk, under the bent sheIl of stars, Beside rocks in the road, dust, and the nameless herbs, Beside rocks in the water, marked by the heeled-back current, Seeing, in al1 autumns, the felled leaf betray the wind.

She embraces the circularity of the seasons and the eternal return of the natural world. She bends

her head to listen to the prayer spelled out by her h e m "Let the allegiance go," it tells her.

If but the sign of the end is given a room By the pillared harp, sealed,to its rest by hands - (On the bright strings the hands are alrnost reflected, The strings a minor and light). The head bends to listen, So that the grief is heard; tears begin and are silenced Because of the mimic despair, under the figure of laughter. Let the allegiance go; the tree and the hard bud seed themselves. The end is set, whether it be sought or relinquished. We wait, we hear, facing the mask without eyes, Grief without grief, facing the eyeless music.

The "pillared harp, sealed to its rest by hands," recalls the "tuned h m e of strings / Plucked or

silenced under the hand" in "Sub Contra." In the earlier poern, the speaker longed for a "noise

fiom music's root," a "fine noise of riven things;" now, she seeks the c a b of harrnonic cadence,

relief fiom the breaking of chords and fits of passion. The "bright strings" are both "mirror and

light," like the mord in "For a Marriage." They remind of the devastation past. The Lady of

Shalott h o w s that she is safe if she confines her looks to the mirror, which replicates and

remembers turmoil but keeps it at bay, and serves as a light - an insight - into the irnprisoned

beast of her own dangerous beïng.

Chapter 4, Page 195

In the next poem, "Tears in Sleep," the speaker tells of the horror of nightrnare, when she

is trapped inside the "'cage of sleep," behind 'Wie bars of the dream."

Al1 night the cocks crew, under a moon like day, And 1, in the cage of sleep, on a stranger's breast, Shed tears, like a task not to be put away - In the false light, false grief in my happy bed, A labor of tears, set against joy's undoing. 1 would not wake at your word, 1 had tears to Say. I clung to the bars of the dream and they were said, And pain's derisive hand had given me rest From the night giving off flarnes, and the dark renewing.

The measured peace so c"rnomently" experienced in 'Bidactic Piece" and "Simple Auturnnai" is

countered by supernaturally long nights which pull the speaker back into the darkness of her

subconscious, that darkness which threatens to break the bright sword of her acuity and self-

awareness. She is engulfed in the Feuernacht. The darkness ever renews; it will not be

conquered, onIy singly defeated in recurring battles- The task which is not to be put away echoes

the mask which must be faced at the close of "Didactic Piece." Distressed by the "false light,

false grief' which tum her husband into a stranger by her side, the disoriented speaker

expenences a fnghtening duality: she is at once serenely happy, content with her life and her

lover, and hopelessly frightened, rniserable, and angry.

With the next two poems, "Song for a Slight Voice" and "The Crossed Apple," Bogan

again experiments with male personae - as she did in Body of This Death - to give voice to

feelings and attitudes which contest the female's presentation of self. With th% pair we enter

into the dream world alluded to in "Tears in Sleep." The poet adopts the position of the

"stranger" of the nightmare in "Song," addressing the anguished, desperate woman on the subject

of her bloody heart:

If ever 1 render back your heart

Chapter 4, Page 196

So long to me delight and plunder, It will be bound with the firm strings That men have built the viol under,

Your stubborn, piteous heart, that bent To be the place where music stood, Upon some shaken instrument Stained with the dark of resinous blood,

Will find its place, beyond denial, Will hear the dance, O be most sure, Laid on the curved wood of the viol Or on the stnick tambour.

It is clear from the first two lines that the speaker is a lover / hunter who regards the beloved as

prey.- The lover's "slight" manner is both insubstantial (without weight or worth) and

contemptuous, while the act of "plunder" recalls the effect on the harrowed landscape of "Late."

In a manner similar to the persona of "The Frightened Man," the speaker responds to the beloved

with repressed fear and loathing; like the Iover in Sidney's poem, he or she has taken possession

of the beloved7s hem. But - as we know f?om "For a Marrïage" - the romantic relationship

envisioned in Dark Sumrner is not founded on the confident mutuafity described in the

Renaissance lyric, but rather is as precariously "tilted" as the air of 'Tifteenth Farewell."

Violence penneates the speaker's language ("bound," "shaken," ccstruck"). The reference to

plunder and the echoes of courtly lyrics suggest a male speaker who taunts the wornan he once

romanced, toying with the possibility of ever 'crender[ing] back ber] heart." To render is to give

back, but also to melt down, as one renders the fat kom an animal- If ever he were to return her

heart, he would make sure it was first destroyed: he would rend, then render it He would wrap

it up like a piece of meat The image of a heart "bound with the firrn strings / That men have

built the viol under" represents a violent scene of sexual domination (viol in French is 'lape;

46 Ridgeway assumes that the "slight voice" is the poet's own (57)- In a bnef discussion of the poem's chiaroscuro effects, Frank avoids the issue of voice (123).

Chapter 4. Page 197

vi~lation").~' The heart is stubborn and piteous, bent in defiant supplication like the long

beautifiil neck of the winter swm, "To be the place where music stood." Et would have to be

beaten and shaken. Finally, he would lay it out for sacrifice, upon a blood-stained altar. The

tambour is a drum; its skin is "struck" with a stick to make music ("The DruIn"). A tambours, an

oriental musical instrument of the lute family, resembles the guitar, which has %ire strings .

strclck by a plecû-um" (OED). Like the huntsman, the speaker of "Song7' can imagine al1 that he

would do, for he has been assigned these tasks by the evil queen, the dreamer of "Tem in

Sleep," who has terrïfj4ng visions of the man behind the mask, the a-anger / lover who lies

beside hm:* Does he harbour violent feelings toward her beneath a smiling face and loving

rnanner?

The violence of "Song for a Slight Voice," depicted so chillingly in the first person,

combines the surreal butchery of fairy tales with the desperate grandeur of Greek tragedy: the

House of Atreus and the House of Bluebeard are one. The poet plays the part of the victim, even.

as she understands to her horror that she herself is the energy and ongin of the bloodiness; she

uses a masculine mask to observe herself on the verge. According to Colosurdo, the speaker of

the next poern, "The Crossed Apple," is also most likely male, the propnetor of an orchard. The

first Iines of the poem bear out this interpretation:

I've come to give you miit fkom out my orchard, Of wide report. 1 have trees there that bear me many apples Of every sort:

47 Larousses's French-English Dictionary. Bogan's choice of instrument also may have been intended as a clue to her readers that the gender of the speaker of this poem is not as they might assume. Viola in Shakespeare's Twelfth Ni& sin@ and courts Olivia in the guise of a boy.

48 Gilbert and Gubar agree with Bettelheim that the huntsman of "Snow White" is "really a surrogate for the King, a parental - or, more specifically, paîriarchal - figure 'who dominates, controls, and subdues wild ferocious beasts' and who thus 'represents the subjugation of the animal, asocid, violent tendencies in man"' (Madwoman 294).

Chapter 4, Page 198

Clear, streaked; red and russet; green and golden; Sour and sweet.

In 1928, Bogan moved with Holden to a country home in Hillsdale, New York.Jg But while the

- poern begins with matter-of-fact good nature, in the voice of a farmer neighbour describing his

crop, the tone pdua l ly becomes orninous - more specific, more personal.

This apple's fiom a tree yet unbeholden, Where two kinds rneet, -

So that this side is red without a dapple, And this side's hue 1s clear and snowy. It's a lovely apple. Tt is for you.

Within are five black pips as big as peas, As you will find, Potent to breed you five great apple trees Of varying kind:

To breed you wood for fire, leaves for shade, Apples for sauce. Oh, this is a good apple for a maid, It is a cross, . . .

The meeting of "two kinds" at a secret tree, "yet unbeholden," introduces sexuality and mystery.

The speaker's casual tone, descriptive and distanced, changes to a familiar, howing air which is

urgently personal, From the title we already know of course that the h i t he now speaks of is

"crossed," a tenn which partalces both of husbandry and tragic Iove (as in star-crossed lovers).

Because it is an apple, the implications of the Fa11 as well as the Crucifixion loom menacingly

over the poern like the "thunder-dark" of "Dark Surnmer." The dual connotations of the

Ianguage of breeding and potency, flesh and root, promote an ever-increasing disconnection

49 Harold Bloom comments on the "ffavor of New England speech" of "The Crossed Apple" ("Louise" 85), while Frank tek us that the poet's reading of Thoreau during the period may have been an iduence (123).

Cliapter 4, Page 199

between what seems to be a casual conversation about farrning and what threatens to be a

dangerous seduction, The poem's Janus face is perfectly represented by the two-sided apple:

Fine on the finer, so the flesh is tight, And grained Iike si&- Sweet Burning gave the red side, and the white 1s Meadow Milk

Eat it; and you will taste more than the h i t : The blossom, too, The Sun, the air, the darkness at the root, The min, the dew,

The earth we corne to, and the tirne we flee, The fxe and the breast. 1 claim the white part, rnaiden, that's for me- You take the rest.

Tn the last two stanzas the slowly turning face of the f m e r cornes again into view, as if

revolving on a pedestd in shadow, but the face is now Satan's. She who tastes the h i t will

savour seasons and time, enjoy earthly knowledge. She will learn mortality - birth (the breast,

Meadow Milk) and death (the fie, Sweet Burning), "the earth we come to, and the tirne we flee."

This reading of the 'The Crossed Apple" is inadequate on its own, for it ignores the

obvious allusions to the fairy tale of Snow White. Bogan herself stated that the poem was based

on the fairy story of a witch who brings a young girl an apple, one side of which is poi~oned.'~

The last two lines arise directly fiom the story as told by the brothers Grim~n.~' The prosaic

farmer of the first stanza undergoes another transformation, in parallel to his change into the

serpent in Eden: he becomes the wicked queen, stepmother to Snow White, who is actually

-rom her introduction to a recorded reaciing of the poem, as cited by Ridgeway (58).

See Maria Tatar's translation (88): "No," said Snow White, "I'm not supposed to take anything," "Are you a h i d that it's poisoned?" asked the old wornan- "Here, I'li cut the apple in two- You eat the red part, 1'11 eat the white."

Chapter 4. Page 200

disguised as an old crone selling apples, Deception is layered on deception in this poem.

Nothing is as it seems, and îhings change before ou - unseeing eyes- Snow White knows she

should not speak to the old woman, for twice before she has alrnost died fiom believing the lies

of a stranger.

Controversy in the critical literature over the gender of the speaker of "The Crossed

-Appien is both beside the point and entirely relevant. Lee Upton maintains that the speaker must

be an old woman, because 'tvomen Eequently bear apples in myth and fairy tale," but it does not

matter if we see her as 'îvizened Eve or a revisionary witch" (568-69). DeShazer agrees that

"the speaker is best envisioned as a female crone" and daims the poem depicts "the division

between woman and artist. . . . Bogan uses female imagery within a fa--tale motif to descde

the sexual ambivalence of the woman and the creative anbivalence of the poet" (58). Colosurdo

takes issue wîth this interpretation: "One could argue as well that the voice is male and the

conflict heterosexual suice many of the p0en.s in Dark Summer deal explicitly with the .

disappointrnents of heterosexual love" (343). It seems to me that both interpretations are "tnie,"

but neither entirely so. As we have seen, gender confusion is centra1 to the poet's androgynous

sensibility and dialogic method, but as well ambiguity serves her thematic puxpose in Dark

Summer. Bogan ensures with "The Crossed Apple" that the reader is radically conflicted, unable

to find under the layers of disguise and tissues of lies any final truth. Double meanings,

innuendo, deception, transformations - al1 are played out in shadow against a backdrop of master

narrative^, thernselves endlessly open to interpretation. ln context, the poem can be understood

as a second dream in the long night of "false grief' suffèred by the speaker of "Tears in Sleep."

She refiises to wake because she "had tears to say," "Song for the SIight Voice" and 'The

Crossed Apple" are what she says.

What follows the conclusion of "The Crossed Apple" is known to readers of Gnmms'

Chaprer 4, Page 201

Faiw Tales. Snow White takes a bite of the apple and falls to the ground as if dead. The

dwarves mourn for three days, but - reluctant to lower her body, which seems to live still, into

the dark ground - they make for Snow White a glass coffm, labelled in gold, that alIows her to be

seen fiom al1 sides (Tatar 88). The speaker of "Sonnet," the next poem in the sequence,

renounces that display of corporaI permanence, ernbracing instead hm own imminent dissolution:

Dark, underground, is fiiniished with the bone; The tool's lost, and the counter in the game. Eaten as though by water or by flame The elaborate craft buift up fiom wood and Stone.

Words made of breath, these also are undone, And greedy sight abolished in its claim. Light fails fiom ruin and fiom wall the same; The loud sound and pure silence fa11 as one.

Wom flesh at last is history and treasure Unto itself; its scars it still can keep, Received eorn love, fkom memory's false measure, From pain, fkom the long dreamdrawn back in sleep.

Attest, poor body, with what scars you have, That you left life, to corne down to the grave.

The "long dream drawn back Ui sleep" is wonderfully distanced in this poem. To irnaginatively

occupy the empty space of non-existence, where somd and silence are as one, is to experience

vicariously the non-feeling which defines it. The intense sensuality of "The Crossed Apple" is

only a memory; the violence and brutality of "Song for a Slight Voice" are but scars. In the final

couplet, the speaker envisions herself long hence as one of the dead in Dante's Inferno or

Virgil's Aeneid, explaining to travellers to the mderworld how she once lived and felt pain. She

will, some day, bear witness ("attest") to her suffering. This sonnet is her version of the

memorial glass box above ground: its words are made of gold, not breath.

Bogan mocked her own solemnity in the poem in a letter to her fnend Ruth Benedict: "1

am sending you a sonnet that 1 thought quite good . , , . Please be per$ectZy critical about it. 1s al1

Chapter 4. Page t 02

am sending you a sonnet that I thought quite good . . . . Please bepe$ectly critical about it. 1s al1

this bone business just h y ? " (WWL 44). According to Frank, ''The bone business was h y .

. . . Bogan needed a core of drama, comrnon life, and strong speech to give vitality to her worY

(123-24). Frank's point is well taken, but the poem's placement in Dark Summer creates a

necessary pause. The implied narrative of 'The Crossed Apple" demands (ternporary) closure, a

space of mourning and meditation, to aclmowledge the (temporary) death of the maiden.52

The quiet moment is short-lived. "Fiend's Weather" and "1 Saw Etemity" depict a

'%indstorm of disi11usionment7' (Frank 1 15):

O embittered joy. You fiend in fair weather, Fou1 winds from secret quarters Howl here together.

They yell without sleet And fieeze without snow; Through them the broken Pleiades And the Brothers show,

And Orion's steel, And the iron of the Plough. This is your night, my worthy fiend, You can triumph now.

In this wind to wrench the eye And curdle the ear, The church steeple rises purely to the heavens; The sl-q is clear.

And even to-momow Stones without disguise In true-colored fields Will glitter for your eyes.

The storm of "The Flurne" is back; it seems the dreamer of 'Tears in Sleep" has still not

'' Snow White does, of course, corne back to life. A prince claims her body, and in the course of the transport of the c o f h the bite of apple is dislodged Çom her throat so that she miraculously revives.

Cltapter 4. Page 203

awakened. "Fiend's Weather" is a kind of cornpanion poem to "Feuemacht": both depict raging,

unworthy emotions overwhelming a first-person speaker at night, as she sleeps. "Fiend's

Weather" recalls the heath scene of King Lear and Poor Tom's desperate fear of the "fou1 fiend."

There are aIso echoes of the "Mad Song" by William Blake?

Like a fiend in a cloud With howling woe,

After night 1 do croud, And with night will goe;

1 turn my back to the east, From whence cornforts have increas ' d; For light doth seize my brain With fiantic pain.

"Fiend's Weather" can be seen to depict "the mental ariguish of neurotic compulsion," the

uncontrollable h i e s of childhood revisited in adult life (Bowles 98). Certainly the "Fou1 winds

from out secret quarters" suggest fetid odours let loose, as fiom rotten things long hidden under

the floorboards. The "embittered joy" is happiness turned over, revealing a rank bottom. The

speaker addresses her own happiness with disdain. She is angy with herself for not tmst ing in

joy, for she knows it is her own jealous füry and fiantic fear of betrayal which distort her

perception - wrenching the eye, curdling the ear. But she also revels in her wild isolation. At

least she is not so foolish to believe that the false sky is clear, the fields me. As Poor Tom

predicts, "This cold night will turn us al1 to fools and madmen" (King Lear, Iü, iv, 79), but in

that transformation he and the king turn their backs on hypocrisy and false &ends.

"1 Saw Eternity," on the facing page, both continues from "Fiend's Weather" and reflects

it in a mirror image. Instead of addressing "O embittered joy," the speaker of "1 Saw Eternity"

invokes with disgust the despised religious pap of immortal tmth - "O beautifùl Forever" -

- -

" It is conceivable that Bogan was reaàing Blake at the time of writirig the poem. See note 38.

Clrapter 4, Page 204

which glitters at the close of its opposite:

O beautifbl Forever! O grandiose Everlasting! Now, now, now, 1 break you into pieces, 1 feed you to the ground.

O brilliant, O languishîng Cycle of weeping Iight! The mice and birds d l eat you, And you will spoil their stornachs As you have spoiled my mind.

Here, mice, rats, Porcupines and toads, Moles, shrews, squirrels, Weasels, turtles, lizards, - Here's bright Everlasting! Here's a crumb of Forever! Here's a c m b of Forever!

As the speaker has just demonstrated, her mind has been spoiled (made rotten) by make-believe

stories of etemal faith and happiness. She rejects the Everlasting and elects to spoil her stomach

rather than her rnind, following the example of Poor Tom, who "eats the swimming fiog, the

toad, the todpole, the wall-newt, and the water; that in the fusr of his heart, when the fou1 fiend

rages, eats cow-dung for sallets; swallows the old rat and the ditch-dog; drïnks the green m a d e

of the standing pool . . ." (III, iv, 129 - 133). The mice and birds d l in turn spoil their

stomachs, eating the broken pieces of the '"anguishing / cycle of weeping light" like so many

moldy bread crumbs. Bettelheim's analysis of the singular oraIity of the story of Hanse1 and

Gretel is fascinating to consider here. The two children, abandoned in the depths of the forest by

their parents because there is not enough food for the family, are able to find their way home

because Hanse1 drops white pebbles as they are canied off- When the parents try again,

however, Hansel is able to leave only a trail of bread cnunbs, which are eaten by the birds. The

Chaprer 4, Page 205

food for safety (bread crumbs to mark the p t h ) fails them, Hanse1 and Gretel now give full rein to their oral regsession. The gingerbread house represents an existence based on the most primitive satisfactions. Carried away by their uncontrolled craving, the children think nothing of destroying what should give shelter and safety, even though the birds' having eaten the c m b s should have warned them about eating up things- (275)

The house, of course, belongs to a wicked witch who, as "a personification of the destructive

aspects of orality, is as bent on eating up the children as they are on demolishing her gingerbread

houe." The children Iearn their lesson: the evil designs of the witch purge them of their oral

fixations (278).

Bogan was very proud of "1 Saw Eterniîy." She wrote it, she thought, in a "mood of

katharsis" 39). The conscious acknowledgment of childish anxieties must have given her

a great sense of relief. The revenge on the "witch" of the Everlasting is subversively satisS.ing:

the speaker insists on the right to childish greed, and in doing so relinquishes the gnawing

spiritual hunger that has misled her for so long.54 The blessed creatures who inhabit folk tales

are endowed with speech and magical power~.~* In ''1 Saw Eternity," the mice, rats, porcupines,

toads, moles, and turtles reassert with appetite their rights in the realrns of childhood and

femininity, taking back ftom the hypocritical adult, masculine world the pirated tenitory of

spirituaiity and wonder, of potent creativity.

In "Corne, Break with Time," the next poem in sequence, the speaker addresses herself:

" Upton introduces her discussion of "1 Saw Eternity" by drawing a connection with the poem "Women," in which Bogan "made her sex the mice of culture, 'Content in the tight hot cells of their hearts / To eat dusty bread' ("Coming to God" 88).

" For example, a duck helps Hansel and Gretel children escape fiom the forest The tailcing horse Falada continues to speak with the Goosegirl even after his head has been cut off ("The Goosegiri"). Frogs, nvens, and fish Save the life of a Servant because he has been kind to them; he was able to understand their speech after eating a piece of a white snake ("The White Snake").

Chaprer 4, Page 206

she is split into two voices, "one that exhorts and another that retorts," representing - according

to Frank - the "nature-hating will" and the "defiant heart" (124)?

Come, break with tirne. You who were lorded By a clock's chime So il1 afforded. If time is allayed Be not afiaid.

1 shaZZ break, zyl wiZZ. Break, since you must. Tirne has its fill, Sated with dust. Long the clock's hand Bumed like a brand.

The exhorting voice challenges the heart to carry on the quest of the youth of "A Tale," to leave

behind the "break / Of waters in a land of change" and the "tripping racket of a clock." It mocks

the heart as one who was "lorded / By a clock's chime." Coming as it does after "1 Saw

Etemity," the combined allusion to mastery and domination by a lord - at once feudal ruler,

husband, and God, in al1 cases unavoidably male - summarizes richly the heart's subrnissive

position, "So il1 afforded." As the wife or daughter of a king in a story, she has split her own

nature into two to accommodate the overriding sense of decor~m.~' She has subjected herself to

the brutalis of male lovers threatened by her intellectual and artistic gifts. The masculine

hierarchy and myths of the Christian religion implicitly support her subjugation. These lords are

associated with time, the "clock's chirne," because they have no place in the eternal tmth

ss Calling Bogan "a contender, an opponent, an adversary," Roethke remarks that she "cm quarrel with her daemon, her other self, as in 'Corne, Break With Time"' (90).

The expression of the rnacaw in "Decoration" (BD) is, it would seem, one of the masks of the poet herself: "He has the mistrate look of cheated kings." In a similar way, in her early work the Canadian poet P.K. Page presented a dual perspective which at once honoured and rejected, identified with and repudiated, her masculine, modemist forbears, depicting them in "Arras" as the royal figures of a set of playing cards. See my '"Redressing the Balance."'

Chapter 4, Page 20 7

envisioned by the speaker. In society as it is constructed in the Western hernisphere in the e s t

half of the twentieth century' the "cIock's hand" has long "Burned like a brandy" marking wornen

with energy and purpose as shadowed, dangerous. The lording of clocks is the imposition by

arbitrary decree of a patriarchal society on nature. Natural tirne, dternatively, can be understood

kom the changing of the seasons, the rotation of the planets:

Take the rocks' speed And the earth7s heavy measure. Let buried seed Drain out time's pleasure, Take time's decrees. Come, cruel ease.

Frank notes the ambiguity of the heart's weak utterance, "1 shall break, if 1 wiI1," and the counter-

attack of "Break, since you must" - "an oracle preempting al1 choice and counseling only

cornpliance with necessity" demonstrative of an "executioner's sop-histry" (124). The exhorting

voice adopts the self-justifig arguments of the murderous, implacable lover of "Song for a

Slight Voice." The sacrifice prophesied in "Winter Swan" is IogicalIy unavoidable, for only in

death can the heart escape the cruel reach of the "clock's hand." What the princess can hope for

is that the words on her coffm are golden and thus explain her unjust treatment to those who

corne after.

The "remarkable shift in rhythm in the Iast stanza" rerninds Roethke and othersSS of

Wordsworth's "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal:"

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

Rolled round in earth's d ima l course, With rocks, and Stones, and trees.

58 See Roethke (90)' also Ridgeway (54) and Walker (184).

Chapter 4, Page 208

The Lucy poems of Lvrical Ballads celebrate a figure - like Bogan's persona - at once child,

wornan, and spirit, In "Lucy Gray," the child is sent out by her father into a wild winter storrn to

light her mother's way back f?om town. She never returns. Yet, like Snow White, she lives on,

for some Say they have seen her tripping along the moor. Bogan's exhorting voice advises that

the heart must "Let buried seed / Drain out tirne's pleasure." In "Tbree Years She Grew," we

learn f?om Nature that "A lovelier flower / On earth was never sown" than Lucy, and for this

reason she must return to Nature early:

The floating clouds their state shall Iend To her; for her the willow bend; Nor shall she fail to see Even in the motions of the storm Grace that shall mould the maiden's form By silent sympathy. (1 9-24)

Lucy is insensate ("She neither sees nor hears") and yet her spirit endures to "attest" like the

"poor body" of "Sonnet" that she "left life." She is lost in a winter storm at night - a fiend's

weather - yet she lives eternally with Nature in a "happy dell,"

With "Old Countryside," the poem which follows, Bogan gathers up the various threads

which run through Dark Sum~ner.~~ The opening Iines recall the centre of the maze which is the

volume, "Medusa," and spin outward fkom there:

Beyond the hour we counted rain that fell

s9 "Old Countryside7' is one of Bogan's most admired poems. Ramsey descnies it as "one of the most etched yet suggestive lyrics in the language. Its sensuous description is fïrm as eye can hold . . ." (125). Roethke declares that "The details are no mere accretion, but are developed with a cumulative surprise and the power of great art" (91). Olsen cites "Old Countxyside" as a "perfect example" of Bogan's method of vivid reticence: "her poems are like pictures of scenes fkom some passionate and bitter play which we have not seen; the decor is bf ian t ly clear, the characters are fixed in poses which betray much, if only we couid interpret" (74). The images of "Old Countryside" - cock, axe, vine, rose, snow - are both "sharply etched"and obscure; "The poem's irnagery, which on one level is as public and precise as an illustration to some book of trés riches heures, is on another level a hieroglyphics of fate" (Frank 124- 25)-

Chapter 4. Page 209

On the slant shutter, al1 has corne to proof- The summer thunder, like a wooden bell, Rang in the storm above the mansard roof,

And mirrors cast the cloudy day along The attic floor; wind made the clapboards creak. You braced against the wall to make it strong, A shell against your cheek.

"Old Countryside" goes beyond the hour of blurring raïn anticipated vaguely in "Medusa" and

predicted as imminent in "Dark Sumer." Now, "On the slant shutter, al1 has corne to proof."

Like Dickinson's truth told cbslant," the "proof' is not arrived at dire~tly.~' The quester has

travelled a circuitous route in her quest, fooled by false scents and mocked by illusions. In the

abandoned room, high in the attic overlooking the countryside, a mirror has been hung so that it

reflects the sky outside and casts it carelessly on the floor, The speaker and her lover are now

together in the room. Their memories crowd upon them; they feel as old as the countryside

surrounding. They recall, "Far back," seeing what they now realize was a portent-

Long since, we pulled brown oak-leaves to the ground In a winter of dry trees; we heard the cock Shout its unplaceable cry, the axe's sound Delay 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 show Red to the thorns, and, sharp as sight c m bear, The thin hound's body arched against the snow.

An obsolete meaning of "scrawl" is '90 spread the limbs abroad in a sprawling manner" (OED).

The vine is thus sprawled and shuddering, like a body in pain trellised against a wall; it is also

the scribbled (scrawled) notation of that pain, the handwriting on that wall inscnibed by the four

fingers at the feast of Belshazzar, predicting the king's death and the division of bis kingdom

"Tell al1 the Truth but tell it slant - / Success in Circuit lies" (# 1263, 1-2).

Chapter 4, Page 2 1 O

@miel 5). The rose-branch shows red against the snow and is sharp to the si& suggesting the

opening of "Snow White" where the firçt queen, after pricking her fmger with a needle, predicts

the birth of her child, white as snow and red as bloodPL Like Cassandra, the queen foretells tmly

and dies; as Snow White's mother, however, she both "bares" the truth and 'bears" it.

Bogan would later descrîbe "OId Countryside" as being "a memory of childhood" (cited

by Ridgeway, 132). The speaker of the poem experiences a Wordsworthian "spot of tirne" in

which she is transported back to her green years. What she sees and hears fiom iuside the room

- the cock's shout, the delayed sound of the axe after the striking blow, the vine against the wall,

the rose bush, the arched back of the hound - take her back. She relives the moment as a

prophecy of the violence of the outside worId and adulthood, knowing at once the anticipation of

pain, the experience, and its me-? Because the speaker has given her lover "most dangerous

sight" ("For a Mariage") of her bitter and sullen nature, he too partakes and is part of the vision,

rolled into it like the rocks and Stones and trees.

In "Fiend's Weather," the speaker mentions various constellations. Orion and the

Plough are well hown. Bogan associated the Pleiades with Sappho's lines: "The moon has set,

and the Pleiades; rnidnight has passed, and still 1 lie alone" (cited in JAR-, 157)- But who, or

what, are "the Brothers"? Perhaps Bogan meant to refer to the Twins, Castor and Pollux

(offspring of Leda after the tape by Zeus). After mention of the Pleiades, also h o w n as the

Seven Sisters, she rnight have felt the allusion to be more clear than it is. Or perhaps she wished

'' See Tatar (93): "Once upon a the, in the middle of winter, when snow flakes were f a b g Corn the sky like feathers, a queen was sitting and sewing by a window . . . . While she was sewing and looking out at the snow, she pncked her finger with a needle, and three drops of blood feil onto the snow. The red look so beautifid against the white snow that she thought to herself: 'If only 1 had a child as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood of the window h e ; soon thereafter she gave birth to a Little girl. . . . The queen died afier the child was boni."

62 AS Ridgeway comments, "the fears of childhood seem to have materialized in maturiSr, making the summer of life dark and the inevitable winter fearfiil" (62).

Chapter 4. Page 2 1 /

to cal1 her reader's attention to the brothers Grimm, functioning as Fates in their rnapping of

cryptic patterns. What "the Brothers show" in the poems of Dark Summer is a prediction of an

innocent life blighted by brutal circurnstance and malignant intent, a maiden who struggles to

become whole and tnisting after being cut to pieces, lefi tortuously divided. What the poet leams

is that one agent of the brutality is the "other" residing within, the monster on the other side of

the glass. Faïry tales warn children that the world is a dangerous place, that adults will let them

down, that those who should protect them will abandon them. They also empower children with

the wil! and wit to survive and become autonornous beïngs. Only a nurtured balance of wisdom

- and trust allows for love. Bogan drew the images of fairy tales £iom deep in her subconsciuus~

making poetry of her exploration of the conflict of the immature and mature selves, between fie

shadow and the conscious presence.

Part V

Ln "Summer Wish," Bogan overtIy acknowledges the drarnatic conflict and representation of

inner division in her work by constmcting a dialogue between "This One" and "The Other." She

had it planned in December of 1928, and was still working on it the following May when sbe

received the sample pages of Dark Summer fkom her publisher. In the same letter to ~ h e e l o c k

in which she thanked him for the leaf ornarnents, font type, and squarish look of the pages, she

gave him an update on the progress of her "fairly long drarnatic dialogue," "Summer Wish":

The longer poem is really corning to life. For a time 1 despaired of it; now it has its shape and sound, a climax or two and an ending that really excites me, al1 in the rni~d; one or two good intensive spurts will finish it, 1 trust. You have been good to believe in it, and clever to goad [?] me. It will be about five typewritten pages, 1 should think, in the form of a colloquy between This One and The Other. CWIIC: 46)-

Although it is shorter than "The Fiume," Bloom calls ''Summer Wish" Bogan's "rnost arnbitious

Chaprer 4. Page 212

poem," believing that it marked "the crisis and rnid- oint of her career." Frank agrees that the

poem "does sum up a period of persona1 and poetic fulfillment, standing alongside Yeats's 'The

Tower' and Stevens's 'Sunday Moming' as a testament of renewal and acceptance" (125). She

notes that Bogan's reference to "This One" (Hic) and "The Other" (me) echoes Yeats's "Ego

Dorninus Tuus," wherein the voices "act out the Yeatsian division between the hown self and its

mknown other" (125 - 26).63

As the poem opens, the First Voice adopts the portentous tone of the epic poet, invokïng

the sumrner as muse:

That cryk from thefirst cuckoo of the year. 1 wished before il ceaed.

FIRST VOICE We call up the green to hide us This hardened month, by no means the beginning Of the natural year, but of the shortened span Of leaves upon the earth. We call upon The weed as well as the flower: groundsel, stellaria, It is the month to make the summer wish; It is time to ask The wish f?om summer as always: It wiZ2 be, It wilZ be.

That tool we have used So that its haft is smooth; it h o w s the hand- Again we lifi the wish to its expert uses, Tired of tbe bird that calls one long note downward, And the forest in cast-iron. No longer, no longer, The season of the Iying equinox Wherein false cock-crow sounds!

With the repetitive insistency of the hysterical ('Tt will be, / It will bey'; "No longer, no longer7'),

the First Voice casts off as false and deceitful the "season of the lying equinox" - the time at

which the sun crosses the equator and day and night are equal, around March 20 in the spring.

63 Bloom comments M e r on the influence of Yeats, polnting out that the epigraph is the opening o f the pastorai Iament for Robert Gregory, "Shepherd and Goatherd." ("Louise" 85)

Chapter 4, Page 21 3

The wish is that which is not one: 'Tt wlll be" is a statement, a prediction, but the speaker's

tension laces it with uncertainty. The practice of repeated wishing has worn smooth the "haEl of

the wishing tool - the handle of an axe- Sex, violence, and desperate longing al1 combine in

Bogan's apt phallic image. The First Voice is the voice of 'The Frightened Man," angdy self-

sufficient. He is ashamed, calling on the green to hide hïm in "This hardened month" which does

not constitute a "natural" beginning. The youth of "A Tale" sought to harden himself in his

quest for a land "more indurate and strange," Older now, he looks back on the sterility of the

course he chose. Over and over with weary predictability he has "lift[ed] the wish to its expert

uses." A hunter, he has used the axe to kill the singing bird and chop d o m fiozen trees- The

bird which "calls one long note downward" is the winter swan of the first poern of the volume.

Its swan song is of course the prelude to its violent death, which was foretold and expected. In

"Winter Swan" the eyes are "in hiding;" the hunter calls up the green to hide the deed - or

perhaps his failure to carry it out, as in "Snow White."

The Second Voice responds calmly, with naturalistic description of the changing light

and release of snow to green:

In March the shadow Already falfs with a look of summer, fiiller Upon the snow, because the sun at last 1s almost centered, Later, the sprung moss 1s the tree's shadow; under the black spruces It lies where lately snow lay, bred green f?om the cold Cast down fiom melting branches.

The Second Voice does not argue with the First Voice. Its affirmation of the spring is based on a

sensuous appreciation for the earth's beauty, ân appreciation attuned to the violent sexual

impIications of the moss lying under the trees, bred (and bled) green, but undaunted by fear of

lies and abandonment ("cold / Cast down"). It acknowledges death - the shadow falling, the

Chapter 4, Page 2 14

overhanging black trees - but is accepting. The First Voice is sardonic, not responding but

contiming its monologue:

A wish like a hundred others. You cannot, as once, yeam forward. The blood now never Stirs hot to memory, or to the fantasy Of love, with which, both early and late, one lies As with a lover. Now do you suddenly envy Poor praise you told long since to keep its tongue, Or pride's acquired accent, - pomposiw, arrogance, That trip in their latinity? With these at heart You could rnake a wish, crammed with the nobility Of error. It would be no use. You cannot Take yourself in.

The FiTst Voice speaks as the ambition of the poet. The laure1 is twinned with the rose.

Summer was Bogan's creative season, her ''tirne for poe rn~" .~ No longer is love, whether as

rnemory or fantasy, the object of the yearning; now, the blood stirs at praise once magnanimously

scorned, and cultivates the accents associated with pnde - "pomposity, arrogance, / That trip in

their latinity." As a youth, the speaker was susceptible to envy; although he determined to leave

behùid the "tripping racket" of the clock, the impulse to harden himself like Pharoah (induratu~n

est cor Pharaonis) against physical diversion and division was a proud gesture, "crammed with

the nobility I Of error." Now al1 too conscious of his own fallibility and the flaw at the heart of

even idealistic acts, the speaker despairs: "It would be no use. You cannot / Take yourself in."

The Second Voice resumes its methodical chant, picking up the images of the First Voice

and himing them over like rocks, to show their dark sides to the light. The green we cal1 upon to

hide us is the more wondefil for being "unencouraged." We are indeed tired of the "forest in

cast-iron" but soon Mies will heave open fiom below the "metal earth," unready though it might

In March, 1927, Bogan wrote to Ruth Benedict of her cyclical inspiration: "1 haven't a poem in me or about me - and feel useless and incompetent, but then summer is my time for poems, mostly, or perhaps there aren't any more" 36).

Chapter 4, Page 215

be to give birth to the many shapes of the young.

Count over what these days have: Mies Returned in little to an earth unready, To the sun not accountable; The hillside mazed and leafless, but through the ground The leaf fiom the bulb, the unencouraged green Heaving the metal earth, presage of thousand Shapes of young leaves - lanceolate, trefoil, Peach, willow, plurn, the lilac Iike a heart.

Under the hollow hillside the world, once "leaf-caught" and lifeless, is a garden ready to bloom

as soon as the "earth is turned" ("Winter Swan"). It appears as a %azardous maze" to the mind

of the fÎightened man, because he rejects the harmony of the seasons. Eternity is revealed in the

pattern of the stars, the constellations of "Fiend's Weather," but he stands against rather than

with them, electîng vainly to wish upon a star ("stellaria") rather than read the meaning it offers.

The Second Voice, aware that the spring rerninds of past hurt, advises that pain and love and

youth are al1 of a piece. The new leaves will always be gendered and ready: the young males are

gallant knights complete with phallic instruments ("lanceolate" and "trefoil" suggesting the

"lance" and the fencer's "foil"), while the maidens have hearts like ripe fruit waiting to be

punctured. Unheeding and feverish, the First Voice belies its own clairn that "The blood now

never / Stirs hot to memory, or to the fmtasy of love."

Memory long since put by, - to what end the drearn That drags back lived-out life with the wrong words, The substitute meaning? Those that you once knew there play out false tirne, Elaborate yesterday's words, that they were deaf to, Being dead ten years. - Cal1 back in anguish The anger in cbildhood that defiled the house In walls and timber with its violence? Now must you listen again To your own tears, shed as a child, hold the bruise With your hand, and weep, fallen against the wall, And beg, don't, don't, while the pitifid rage goes on

Chap ter 4. Page 2 1 6

That cannot stem itself?

The First Voice is haunted by dreams which replay endlessly temile scenes £kom its childhood,

but with a twist: the pictures are the same (she is "fallen against the wall," sprawled helplessly

like the scrawling vine in "Old Countryside"), but the script changes, the actors try out different

words as if in a futile attempt to work out a belated meaning. They were deaf to yesterday's

words, and now they are long dead. The speaker has another wish, to cal1 back the childish anger

"that defiled the house / . . . with its violence." But he, merging to she, cannot escape the

repeating record of her own tears, shed as a child, which she must listen to over and over, the

painful monotony of "Don't, don't, while the pitiful rage goes on." Her rage, a torrent or flume,

"cannot stem itself."

Or, having corne into woman's fùll estate, Enter the rich field, walk between the bitter Bowed grain, being compelled to serve, To heed unchecked in the heart the reckless fiiry That tears fYesh day from day, destroys its traces, - Now bear the blow too young?

Like Ruth amid the a k n corn in Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," the speaker - now

unambiguously female - stands in the field, ready for the season of plowing, "compelled to

serve." The body of the young woman of "Chanson un Peu Naive" is "Som, and broken

yearly;" her pain, she boasts, is "a furrow healed." But her tears are continually renewed as she

hears her "crying lost." She is Prometheus. Each day is tom like the fire of "A Tale" from fiesh

day, preventing the wound fiom closing. And so, inside her mangled body - in her heart - a

"reckless fury" rages unchecked- Like u d y horses overturning a chariot, it "destroys its

traces." Plato compares man to a chariot-driver struggling to control the two horses of his soul,

Chap ter 4, Page 2 1 7

one obedient and the other di~obedient.~' But the firs- ais0 destroys a11 traces, al1 evidence of

existence, as a fire burns houses to the ground. The "long desire" of the strong woman of 'My

Voice Not Being Proud" "will end, and leave no print." While the endurance of rnemory is

agony, its erasure is a disaster. The speaker is homfied that she has only the wornan's choice of

fate of Leda or Cassandra: she can either bear the blow of the violent Swan and bear his children;

or she can put on the swan's knowledge and take his identity, to bare the "shambling tricks" but

die unheard, "too young."

The Second Voice continues, unmoved:

In early April At six o'clock the sun has not set; on the walls It shines with scant light, pale, dilute, misplaced, Light there's no use for. At overcast noon The s u i cornes out in a flash, and is taken Slowly back to the cIoud.

The scene is melancholic, but quiet, soothing in its humility, The youth had set out to see "what

suns c m make" and it seerns they manage but little. Most of us are not particularly usefûl in our

lives as light. We are weak, and arrive too late. Only occasionally do we see the flash of

greatness in hurriankind, but even then it cannot help but be short-lived, rnagnificently brief in its

display like a falling star or a bolt of lightning. But the b a h offered by the Second Voice is

unnoticed by the relentless First Voice, which has escalated its anguish to full hysterics:

Not memory, and not the renewed conjecture Of passion that opens the breast, the unguarded look Flaying clean the raped defense of the body, Breast, bowels, throat, now pulled to the use of the eyes That see and are taken, The body that works and sleeps,

See Phaedrus 493. According to Wiiiiarn Kemgan, "Anger, and the sorts of conflict boni of anger, bear somehow on the rnanic fïights of the poet" ("Life's Iamb" 170). Kemgan, quoting Plato's myth of the chariot and horses, argues that "there is something at once visionary and egocentric about wrath: it would impose the self s command on the world or on d y elements within the psyche" (171).

Chapter 4, Page 2 18

Made vulnerable, night and day, to delight that changes Upon the lips that taste it, to the lash of jealousy Stmck on the face, so the betraying bed 1s gashed clear, cold on the mind, together with Every embrace that agony dreads but sees Open as the love of dogs.

Spring signals betrayal for the First Voice, as it does for Gerontion, who sees "flowering judas"

in "depraved May." The Second Voice intuits the spiritual crisis attendant on these fears, the

terror of the devouring tiger, and thus resumes its reflection in pantomime on human mortaliw:

The cloud shadow flies up the banlc, but does not Blow off like smoke. It stops at the bank's edge. In the field by trees two shadows come together. The trees and the cloud throw down their shadow upon The man who walks there. Dark flows up fiom his feet To his shoulders and throat, then has his face in its mask, Then l i fk

The figure which is lifted into the mask of darhess is identified as male. The failed significance

of the "sun" in the previous h e s is underlined here; the Second Voice appears to be reassuring

the First Voice that men are but shadows, insubstantial, not to be feared or envied, We are al1

such. The cloud, which takes the sun back within its folds after the brief flash, is feminine in its

orninous, materna1 gesture of protection. The shadows of the cloud and the tree come together,

joining silently; their united shadow is thrown down by the trees and the cloud on the man,

causing the darkness to flow upward through him like blood in a fountain. The Second Voice

presents a rnirned morality play about the hollow garden - of sexy death, and hope.

It is not clear at this point if the First Voice finally listens, or simply reaches a pitch of

such heightened fury that there is nowhere to go but d0wn.6~ The mood it recovers in its descent

66 Frank contends that "at uiis point at last . . . the First Voice hem what the Second has said. Questioning itseü; it sees its own madness, its own unintelligi'bility, and its own brooding narcissism" (1 29).

Chapter 4, Page 219

is the self-regarding defiance of "Winter Swan:"

Will you turn to yourself, proud breast, Sink to yourself, to an ingrained, pitiless Rejection of voice and touch not your own, press sight Into a myth no eye can take the gist of; CIot up the bone of phrase with the black conflict That claws it back from sense?

Go into the breast . . .

You have traced that lie, before this, out to its end, Heard bright wit headstrong in the beautifül voice Changed to a word mumbled across the shoulder To one not there; the gentle self split up h to a yelling fiend and a soft child. You have seen the ingrown look . Corne at last upon a vision too strong Ever to turn away.

The breast's six rnadnesses repeat their dumb-show.

What are the "six madnesses"? Frank, Bloom, and others avoid the question begged at the end of

this speech. The First Voice catalogues the madnesses, but because they rnerge and overlap it is

difficult to entangle them in their separate roles, endlessly enacting the dumb show which - in its

relentless repetition - lashes the breast into occasional hysteria. Fust, the 'Xejection of voice

and touch not your own." At the opening of the poem, the speaker admits to repeated, barren

wishing in Ianguage suggestive of sexual isolation and masturbation. Second, the pressing of

"sight / h to a myth no eye c m take the gist of." Like the unreadable sequence of a fneze

fkagmented and misaligned, the unforgettable scenes which haunt the speaker illustrate pieces of

a story but fail to tell it. Thirdly, the breast "Clot[s] up the bone of phrase with the black conflict

/ That claws it back fiom sense." Emotion tangles the meaning of her words. In three ways

therefore does the First Voice retreat into solipsisrn; the poet has been left without external

support and sunk within herself into paranoia. Her rnaniacal jealousy - the fourth madness of the

breast - can and does transform her fiom %eautifÙl voice" to a "word mumbled," splitting her

Chapter 4. Page 220

"gentle self' into two personaIities: "a yelling fiend and a soi? child," the fifth and sixth

madnesses. It is the vision of intemal chaos which is h a l l y "too strong" for the poet.

Confkonted by the spectre of Medusa, she is mesmerized by the horriile image in the glass.

A '73lakea.n vision of evening" is offered now by the Second Voice, as if it senses "that

the Fust Voice has now reached a point of maximum openness" @rank 129):

In the bright twilight children cal1 out in the fields. The evening takes their cry. How late it is! Around old weeds worn thin and bleached to their pith The field has leaped to stalk and strawbeny blossom. The orchard by the road Has the pear-tree fidl at once of flowers and Ieaves, The cherry with flowers only.

The evening takes the cry of the children as the cloud takes back the Sun, a Wordsworthian

repossession wildly perverted by the First Voice into the seeing and taking of breast, bowels, and

throat for the use of the eyes. Now, it is late, and the huit trees are filled with flowers, the

promise of the harvest to corne. It must already be May; the weeds are old, worn thin. The First

Voice is stifl agitated but sornewhat more rneditative:

The mind for refuge, the grain of reason, the will, Pulied by a wind it thinks to point and name? Malicious symbol, key for nisw wards, The crafi knight in the game, with its rnixed move, Prey to an end not evident to craft . . . .

In December of 1928, when Bogan reported having made a start on "Summer Wish," she called

the game of chess "quite terr img. That closing in on the king is Iike time and fate sitting in

opposite quarters, and chuckling quietly, because their designs are not immediately apparent. It's

no game for a person afflicted with claustrophobia. Somewhere at this moment, behind these

pleasant hills, there is a great fat Bishop and a round ponderous Rook . . . O Dear, O dear"

Chapter 4. Page 22 /

(WWL, 43). The mind is not a reliable refuge, in part because of its inherent conflict of interest

(it is pulled by the sarne wind it "thinks to point and name"). Further, while the breast has its

obsessive urges to hide and distort, the mind plays games with words, deli%erately muring up

meaning frorn its safe haven "behind these pleasant hills." The symbol is malicious in its

multiple evocations. It is a "key for rusty wards," the wards being the notches and projections in

key and lock designed to prevent opening by the wrong key, or perhaps the neglected back rooms

of mental hospitals. A ward is also a minor, a youth; "rusty ward" is, in this sense, an oxyrnoron.

Or is the ward just a word? CertainIy the knight (night) is c r a w in the game, meaning not only

that he is accomplished in the vocation of quester (or sonneteet) but also deceitful; in chess, his

is a "mixed move" - he tums first one way, then another. Yet, he is "Prey to an end not evident

to craft, " the intended victim of a hunter - his counterpart in the childish realm of fairy tales -.

unconcerned with intellectual argument or ingenuity. The reader ! listener rnight be inched to

"pray" to such an end beyond hurnan invention, for is not "the Ieaf-caught world, once thought

abiding / Now but a dry disarray and artifice?" ("Winter Swan").

The Second Voice cuts off the dry thoughts of the First Voice's dry brain, describing the

spring's planting '%th a new note of purposefulness" (Bloom, "Louise" 86):

Fields are ploughed inward From edge to center; k o w s squaring off Make dark lines far out in irregular fields, On hiIIs that are builded like great clouds that over them Rise, to depart. Furrow within fùrrow, square within a square, Draw to the center where the team tums last- Horses in half-ploughed fields Make earth they walk upon a changing color.

The inward movement of the ploughing tearn and the circling, squared pattern it makes on the

field are both to the purpose here. The "ingrown Iook" which paralyzed the First Voice is

Chapter 4, Page 222

necessary before the natural world of turning seasons can be understood and appreciated- The

act of looking - whether inward or outward, to the natural world - is not passive, but is a

cultivation which informs the object sighted, just as the horses change the colour of the earth

they walk upon, Now at least the preoccupation with death has gone with the clouds, risen and

departed- The poem concludes with the First Voice acknowledging that the year begins with the

share "again in the earth." FinalIy, we have the response to the opening challenge of "Winter

Swan" - "But speak, you proud!" - and the answer to the riddle posed in that poem: "Where lies

the leaf-caught world once thought abiding?"

FlRST VOICE

The year's begun; the share's again in the earth,

Speak out the wish like music, that has within it The horn, the string, the drum pitched deep as grief. Speak it like laughter, outward. O brave, O generous Laughter that pours fiom the well of the body and draws The bane that cheats the heart: aconite, nightshade, HelIebore, hyssop, rue, - symbols and poisons We drink, in fervor, thinking to gain thereby Some difference, some distinction. Speak it, as îhat man said, as though the earth spoke, By the body of rock, s h a h of heaved strata, separate, Together.

Though it be but for sleep at night, Speak out the wish. The vine we pitied is in leaf; the wild Honeysuckle blows by the granite.

Poetry is that which "Speak[s] out the wish like music." In lyrics such as "The Dnim," we hear

the timbre of both laughter and deep grief. Laughter draws fiom our being the poison we drink

"thinking to gain thereby / Some difference, some distinction." It speaks "outward," away from

the interna1 swell of self pity. Bogan, who prided herself on her sense of humour, described in a

letter many years Iater to May Sarton how it saved her during the emotional turrnoil of her

Chapter 4. Page 223

maniage to Holden:

. . . what has never been explained thoroughly, by me to you, is the really dreadfid emotional state 1 was trapped in for many years - a state which Raymond struggled manfülly against, I will Say, for a long time, In those days, my devotion came out al1 counter-clockwise, as it were. 1 was a demon of jealousy, for example; and a sort of demon of fidelity, too: "morbid fidelity," Dr. Wall came to cal1 it, P. slave-rnaker, really, while rernaining a sort of slave. Dreadful! . . . . Except for a certain saving hzrrnor, 1 should have indeed been a full rnonster- (WWL 282).

''Sumner Wish" is Bogan's statement of the need to flow with life!' The proclamation that we

must, Iike "that man" (Thoreau),6' speak the wish, "as though the earth spoke, 1 By the body of

rock, shafls of heaved strata, separate, 1 Togethery' summarizes both the symbolism and structure

of Dark Sumrner. From beneath the "hollow garden" of "Winter Swan" cornes the response to

the perplexing problem of human faithlessness, the "leaf-caught world once thought abiding."

From nature and tirne we Ieam that Iayers of meaning, parallel seams of understanding, need not

necessarily dissolve one into another but can lie side by side like a man and woman in bed,

"separate, / Together."

SECOND VOICE

See now

'' As Frank poinîs out, a description of the h d of the working relationship existing between Bogan and her psychotherapis t James Wail in the early 1930s can be found in a book by a Ranician analyst named Jessie Taft, The Dvnarnics of Thera~v in a ControlIed Relationship (194). Bogan's description of her condition at the time of her mariage echoes a passage in Taft's text:

The neurotic is caught in life as in a trap. Fear will not permit him to recognize his own creative power or to admit the destnictiveness which he shares with the rest of iife. He mut be everything or nothing, al1 powerfid or consumed with fear of a reality which is stronger than he, perfect or condemned to an intolerable imperfection. What he needs is to learn to flow with life, not against it; to submit wilhgly, to let himself be carried by its strength without giving up responsïbility for being that particular part of the current which is uniquely himself, yet like enough to the rest to take the same direction, to be moved by similar force. (as cited by Frank, 195)

68 Frank identifies the reference. She cites lines written by Thoreau in March,1841: "1 hear a rnan blowing a hom this still evening, and it sounds like the plaint of nature in these thes. In this, which 1 refer to some man, there is something greater than any rnan. It is as if the earth spoke," (130)

Chapter 4. Page 224

Open above the field, stilled in wing-stiffened flight, The stretched hawk fly.

The Second Voice leaves us with an image of the "stretched hawk" in flight, a syrnbol of the sou1

and its clear, long sight. In this bird the poet cornes to terms with her predatory, violent nature

while resolving to maintain a removed perspective, resist the tunrioil of illusory inner visions.

In Dark Surnmer, Bogan presents a dornesticized descent into Hell; the volume is her

Inferno, She takes the epic convention of the visit to the underworld and feminizes it, inverting

its perspective to that of the abandoned Dido in The Aeneid, a woman hysterically certain of

sexual betrayal. The shape of the volume suggests a journey inward to recollection of a central,

shaping experience - as represented by the poems fkom Bodv of This Death - and back out again.

The speakers of the sequence of poerns seek special knowledge, the truth, which cari only be

. obtained by going beneath the layers of deception which are a part of the everyday world and

bringing that which is buried up, as in "The Drurn," to light and air. Bogan's use of prepositions

emphasizes that direction and relation are of primary significance, as the quest for what is

beneath or under, what can be found within or beyond, is the subject of the volume.

The five-part structure of Dark S u m e r suggests also the genre of tragedy; the imagery

of storms, planetary influence, and madness echo specifically Shakespeare's King Lear. The

recognition which Lear achieves afier his crisis on the heath is twofold, for he realizes both the

malignant deception of those around him and his own foolish insignificance. The division of

inside and outside is dramatized in Lear by the exposure of the poor, bare, forked creature which

is man to the elements. Unprotected, he is nothing. In several poems in Dark Surnmer the house

as a protective space is contrasted with exterior forces of nature, such as the weather, and fate, as

represented by the planets and stars. The speaker of "If We Take Al1 Gold" imagines expunging

Ciiapter 4. Page 225

sorrow fiom the "clean house" and burying it in the earth. "As once in a swept space, so now

with speech in a houe," intones the voice of "Didactic Piece." But sometimes the walls present

barriers to understanding, while the many roorns provide hiding places for tem'ble secrets- And

they do not always protect, The lovers in "Old Countryside" listen fiom an attic room to the min

falling on the mansard roof of the house which protects them fkom the weather, but in "Girl's

Song," the poet calls "our love's home" the "Winter, that is a fireless room / In a locked house" -

or, in an earlier version of the poem, "a roofiess room, / Tavem to min." The Gorgon of

-"Medusa" dwelk in a house away fiom the throng, deep in a "cave of trees," just as the witch of

Hanse1 and Gretel threatens fiom her gingerbread residence in the dark forest. Marriage is a

house which the poet's rebellious spirit perversely regards as a cage, just as the "desperate mind,

maddened and proud" in "Since You Would Claim the Sources of My Thought" (the last lyric in

the central j3lJ section of the book) seeks fi-eedom fkom the body which impnsons it, In "The

Flume," the young wife remembers being a "girl on the edge of town / Who took her lovers out

- along autumn roads ."

She had been that girl, this woman in a house, Who well might have no bed. He had given her walls She wished to burn, his body she wished to tear Ever upon the knife of another7s body. He was the dark, he was the house and sound.

The speaker in "the cage sleep," a wild creature '30 the

bars of the drearn" when her lover tnes to wake her. "The Cupola" describes a shuttered.yet

draughty room which has seen violence, "negligent death" spilled like blood. Fire, the

Faternacht which destroys wooden structures, is a destructive yet exhilarating, liberating

fantasy. As a small child Bogan was fond of her toy stove and matches: "it was fïre which really

attracted me" (JAR 25).

Chapter 4. Page 226

The fairy tale of "Bluebeard," about a bloodthirsty man who cautions his young wife

against investigating a particular room in their house, is atypical of the genre in its "depiction of

marriage as an institution haunted by the threat of murder," contends Maria Tatar (139).

Canonical fairy tales like "CinderellaT' and "Beauty and the Beasty' begin with unhappiness a t

home but end with marital bliss. According to Bettelheim, naive repugnance toward UbeastIike"

sex is worked through in "Beauty and the Beast," but in "Bluebeard" a child's worst fears about

sex are confiirmed (306). The concatenation of violence, rnaniage, deception, and a locked mom

emerge in the lyrics of Dark Sumrner, bringing the poet's deeply hidden fears to the surface and

articulating her anger toward those who betrayed, or threaten to betray, her trust. In "The

Flume," the woman returns after an absence to the house, expecting to fmd evidence of her

husband's infidelity. She sees "The lamp flames clearly / Against its glassed-in air." The

narrator mocks the woman's irrational rage, addressing it as an instigator of obscene images

which dance in the rnind's eye, maddening she who thinks she sees.

Begin to turn, you whining Stone in the breast; Beat again, unsated pulse of fury. He will soon be here. Give her before he cornes Whet to the blade. Lie open to her eye; Rustle against her ear; give her mean glory Of treason found outside the treacherous hem,

The woman mounts the stairs to the bedroom to find - nothing. "She stands in an empv room, in

a silent room. / The ear has stopped." Silence serves to counteract the homble visions. The

"echo of fkenzy" is gone, so that "She and the &or / Can play no longer together their bitter

ga~me."~~

69 The significance of the mirror in Snow White has been dïscussed by femlliist psycfiologists

interested in applying the narratives of folk tales to our understanding of human developrnent. Janet Strayer argues that the mirror is a ''central character" in a story which explores the dichotomy of youngerl older women, representing the judgment of (male) society which values (female) beauty. The Queen, a wornan who cannot face maturity, is trapped in the image of her reflected self, "Having lost herself as

Chaprer 4. Page 22 7

Tatar notes that "Bluebeard" was read for many years as an injunction against female

curiosiw, citing an illustration by Walter Crane which connects the story with Eve's temptation

(141). Dark Summer supports, on one level, a similar interpretation. The poet advises that the

reward of the quest to discover, at al1 costs, an irnagined reality beneath what can be seen, is

madness. Don't go there, she implies. And yet, the poetry also reveals a concurrent sense of

self-justification and satisfaction with the woman's urgent honesty. Ironically, what the woman

"saw" in 'The Flume" was illusory- Tatar argues that while Bluebeard's wife "may suffer fiom

an excess of transgressive curiosity, . . . that cunosity is clearly intellectual rather than sexual.

- Her curiosity turns her into an energetic investigator . . ."(141). The proud poet celebrates her

cornmitment to uncovering what is secret or buried in memory because she feels the unconscious

is a source of tnith. The knowledge that she is herself Bluebeard c m be used to strengthen her

marriage. "She gives most dangerous sight" to her husband "To keep his life awake-" Sogan

was deliberate and self-consciously courageous in her determination to examine her own past,

plumb her own depths. She believed that she, Ille Dickinson, was advancing step by step "into

the terror and anguish of her destiny," fiightened, but holding fast while describing her fight. In

the dramatically compelling Bodv of This Death, the haunted house of the poet's being was filled

subject" (162); she "is victim to the mirror and must suffer its verdict," a condition of rigidity and Iimitation Strayer desmies as being "without a context" (159, 163). Citing Lacan's thory of the "mirror stage," she explains that a child fomis an erroneous idea of wholeness based on the imaginary self constituted by his or her reflection. This "necessary deception" initiates, according to Lacan, a series of "alienating identifications," "misrecognitions," and "defensive distortions" by which the ego is constituted: "It is the image that c d e s [one] about like a slave" (W. J. Richardson as cited by Strayer, 164). The ego as constructed fiom the mirror stage is more object than subject and thus "identification with one's mirror image is alienating and divisive." When the xnirror "distorts" the aging Queen's image of being the fairest, she has the opportunity to disassociate herself f?om its limiting frame. Arguing from Jung's perspective, Strayer contends that the individual must make the effort to consciously individuate by integrating the shadow (repressed, unacceptable) aspects of personaiîty (1 64), concluding that wornen at mid-life are chailenged to revise their mirror images by becoming conscious of their dialectical natures and integrating their ferninine-masculine, creative-destructive tendencies. The Queen becomes a da& aggressive character, in sharp contrast with the innocent Snow White. "Keflection on these contrasts involving the three main characters (including the mirror) conveys the need to uitegrate, by means of dialectical contextualist thinking, apparent opposites in one's personality and actions in the world," Stayer concludes. See also Labourvie-Vief s "Commentary," a response to Strayer's article.

Chapter 4. Page 228

with alien voices. By articulating in Dark Summer the fears of the immature, repressed self

through the language and tenor of fairy tales, Bogan faced obstacles and emerged victorious fkom

the "verge of sanity," or so the rationally constructed "Summer Wish" would seem to

dem~nstrate.'~ in tirne, however, Bogan would corne to regret her brave enterprise as

ernotional1y profligate, and counsel herself to a fiiture of cautious restraint.

'O According to Bettelheim, we want our children to believe that a l l people are inherently good, but because children know that they are not always good they cDme to see themselves as monsters. Bettelheim argues that f a j . tales help chikiren work through the knowledge that people tend to be aggressive, asocial, and selfish, and thus understand that "the source of much that goes wrong in life is due to o u . very own natures" (7). Further, fajr tales help a child deal with his own feelings of loneliness and isolation, empowering him by assuring that he too can succeed in life (10).

Chapter 5: "Bred to Love, Gathered to Silence:" The Sleminp Fuq and M e r

The continuous turrnoil in a disastrous childhood makes one so tired that 'Rest' becomes the word forever said by the self to the self. The incidents are so vivid and so terriile that to remember them is inadequate: they must be forgotten.

(Journal, August 193 2)

. - - when one lets go, and recognîzes the stream on which we move as the same stream which moves us within - that it is tirne and the earth floating our blood and flesh, floating its own child - and stops fightuig against the kinship, the light flows in; peace arrives.

(Letter to Morton Zabel, 1936)

Forgive me for not being a female Dante- (Letter to Morton Zabel, 1934)

The years after the publication of Dark Summer were troubled and full of stress for Bogan.

When she voluntarily became a patient at The Neurological Institute in 193 1, she reasoned that,

because she had been unwilling to fa11 apart, she had "been taken apart, like a watch" (WWL 57).

She wrote to Edrnund Wilson that a letter from him made her "laugh and cry:" ". . . you can

easily see that I have been separated into my component parts. Rather queer parts they tumed

out to be, too. They lie al1 about me as 1 write" (as cited by Frank, 139). She did not

immediately get better. Her analysis of her own situation reads like a gloss on the obsessive

search for buried answers underlying Dark Surnrner: "Well, there 1 was, and 1 got worse and

worse, rather than better and better, because 1 hadn't corne into myself as a person, and was still

a puling child, hanging on to people, and trying to make them tell me the truth" @AVL 122).

One of Bogan's "component parts" was her capacity to love, which she realized had suMved the

dismantling. "Whatever happens after this," she told John Hall Wheelock, "I shall no longer

sneer and fleer. One of my component parts, strangely enough, tumed out to be the capacity to

love. 1 still can love. Isn't that wonderfûl?" (WWL, 57). "My doctor insists that I love," she

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toId Harriet Monroe, while ''Robert Frost . . . recommends fear and hatred." She reiterates the

allusion of the broken watch: "1 am much better, although by no rneans completely well. Several

mechanisms have broken down and a strange new penod has set in, in rny heart and mind. 1 feel

at once renewed and disinherited" (59).

She was certainly "by no means completely well" and suffered a second breakdown two

years Iater, followed by her sepration ftom Raymond Holden. Living on hm own, Bogan was at

times desperately short of rnoney, at one point tumed into the street with her firniture.

Strangely, she reported feeling peacefiil and rested; the eviction seemed to be a h d of

watershed. The achievement of such serenity is "always a miracle," she said, pleased that the

therapists of her rnaturity and saints of her chiIdhood agreed on that score. The problem, as

Bogan saw it, was the necessary effort to maintain the happiness: "I'm just going to try to keep

that way, that is all. 1 know it takes work. 1 workecl and fought for thirty-seven years, to gain

serenity at thüty-eight, Now 1 have it. And it's not dependent upon the whim of any fallïble

hurnan creature, or upon economic security or upon the weathery' (WWL, 109).

Bogan felt that she had experienced the equivalent of a great loss and needed literally to

work through her grief.' She told Monroe that "work is the one thing in which I reaIly believe"

(59). Her doctor, she said, thought she should refkain fiom returning to New York for good until

she had "creative work under weigh" (77). She argued with Morton Zabel that "the courage to

' A passage transcnied in Bogan's notebook fiom Otto Fenichel's Outline of Clinical Psvchoanal~sis is revealing of her thinking at the tirne:

A grief-stricken person who has lost an object must Ioosen the libidinal attachment that binds him to it. This tie is not a matter of a single situation; the libido is attached to thousands of individual memories; and on each of the memories the dissolution of the tie must be carried through, which takes time. This process Freud designated the "grief-work" (Trauwarbeit). It is comparable to the "working through" (Durcharbeiten) that takes place in a therapeutic analysis, wherein a certain interpretation is brought to bear successively on ail the individual manifestations of a given idea. The czrrying out of the grief work is a difficuit and unpleasant task, which many persons try to evade for a time by employing repression, so that the apparent lack of emotion may be due in part to an identification with the dead person. (as cited by Frank, 239)

Chap f er 5, Page 23 1

take responsibility must be trained into most of us - into people of our type. For responsibiliq is

the mark of adulthood, and adulthood is based on 'the conquest of fear'. . ." (136). Bogan felt

that her therapy had helped her achieve maturity, and that work - her "grief-work" - was the

discharge prescription necessary to maintain it.

The particular work of writing poetry was not always possilble, however. In the early

1930s Bogan composed several short stories for publication in The New Yorker along with her

regular critical reviews. The idea of a fictionalized autobiography, to be caIled L a m Dailev's

Storv, allowed her the avenue of childhood recollections and the opportunity to put down

"chance words on paper" for an hour a day (WWL, 77). But writer's block was a recurring

problem for Bogan, one which becarne more acute as the years passed, She predicted to Zabel in

1934 that, after completing two more poems as a promise to Poetrv and to him, "thereafter the

fountain will be sealed for good." "Having definitely given up alcohol and romantic dreams,

having excised my own neurosis with my own hand, having feft the knife of the perfectionist

attitude in art and life at my throat," Bogan declared the writing of poetry as a potential threat to

her mental health, pronouncing it (along with Eliot, she said), a "mug's game."' "1 can no longer

put on the "lofly dissolute air" necessary for poetry's production," she announced

melodramatically, but with her usual irony. "1 cannot and 1 will not suffer for it any longer.

With detaclment and sanity 1 shall, in the future, observe; if to fa11 to the ground with my

material makes me a madwoman, 1 abjure the trade" (WWL 79): But Bogan needed to write in

Despite his admiration for art, Freud viewed the artist as a neurotic, and works of art as atternpts to impose order on a messy reality

' This was not the fmt time Bogan cIaimed to "abjure the tmde." In a letter to Monroe in 1930, thanking her for the John Reed Mernoriai Prize, she wrote that she had dehierately "suppressed any impulse toward creative work" in the previous year because of the persistence of tired nrmours about her which "colored, in the minds of many people who migbt be expected to be without bias, opinion of [tier] work." Because she had continued to meet with "a kind of subtle and refined cruelty," she "abjured poetry." "1 no longer wished to Say myself," she said. 56)

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order to live: her jokes to Katharine White (thanking her for The New Yorker cheque, which

saved ber "fiom experiencing one of the most humiliating moments possible: that moment when

one's Iast mossy vestment falls in rags at one's feet") and Zabel (notifjk~g him that she had sold

her Iast two poenis "for bread and shoes") have a desperate undertone (WWL 7 1,79).

Fortunately, by May, 1935 Bogan was beginning to feel creatively renewed, and that

sunimer the thirty-eight-year-old established poet and critic had an affair with a twenty-six-year-

old fledghg academic and poet, Theodore Roethke. Like S ylvia Plath, who in the early days of

her love for Ted Hughes spoke of him repeatedly in her letters and journal in terms of his hulking

health and strength, calling him "the only one .. , huge enough for fher 1" (1 12),4 Bogan was

attracted to Roethke because of his gagantuan size, as if the sheer massive presence of the male

poet conferred a mgnificent energy to the environment, infirsed a vitality into the atmosphere.

The relationship was intense and exuberant for several weeks before its dynamic eased into

fkiendship. Usually reticent about her private life, Bogan uncharacteristically revealed the new

intimacy to her male correspondents. She told Wilson that she "been made to bloom like a

Persian rose-bush, by the enorrnous love-making of a cross between a Brandenburger and a

Pomeranian, one Theodore Roethke by name" (WWL 84). To Wheelock she admitted, "1 had

the peculiar experience of falling rnildly in love . . . with an enonnous young man fiom Ann

Arbor, Mich."(86). She described herself as "deliriously happy, most of the time, over nothing,

over the fact of being able to breathe the daylight, of getting up in the moming, of eating, of

sleeping" (88). By August Bogan was asking Zabel not to be shocked, assuring him that she had

"1 am so hungry for a big smashing creative burgeoning burdened love," wrote Plath in 1956, three months before her marriage to Hughes. Janet Malcolm quotes Plath's letters home to her mother in which Hughes is desmied as "rnagnificent," "about twice as ta11 as aU the little, stumpy people," "a strong, fascinating person" (38). Malcolm suggests that, while Plath's "representation o f Hughes as an overgrown Adonis / Aryan superman is the same" in her joumals, the voice o f the journal writer is "often sharper and darker" than that of the letter writer.

Chapter 5, Page 233

the disruptive influences of the past weeks under control, but only just: "People fell out of the

s b ; and such people! Very large people . - - Young, strong people. Young strong adniiring

people, who, when 1, in my stroong-minded way, tried to stem their tide, would turn to me with

some disanning remark as 'Louise, you're a great minor poet and I'm a bastard, but kîss me"'

(95). Zabel as her prospective biographer rnight do well to pass over this penod of her life in

silence, she suggested, "Although there is no real reason why you should. 1 wrote poetry during

it." Not only did she compose seven poems in the few short weeks between June and

September, but she also re-discovered poems set aside, sent away, put in the bottom of drawers.

Bogan's affair with Roethke was about creative force, unselfconscious abandonment,

about strength and vinlity and the will to live life and make poetry on a grand scale (or, at least,

the making of "one or two immortal lyrics," which she hoped could "corne out of al1 this

tumbling about"). Her letters demonstrate that she was enamoured with Roethke's huge physical

presence, which she appeared to associate with the German culture? They indulged in "St.

Bernardish antics"; their lovemaking was "bearish"; they "poured rivers of Iiquor down [their]

throats" (WWL 84). Bogan admits to drinlcing too much, but cornforts herself "with the thought

that it's merely beer . . . . Al1 that beer does to me is swell me up to hideous proportions; I1m

rapidly getting a large corporation, and soon won't be able to see my feet. But to hell with it. 1

am so delhiously happy . . ." (88). Roethke brought out the Catherine the Great in her, Bogan

pronounced (86); she professed admiration of the "big womanl' George Sand, who "went through

a life that would have killed ten men" (101). It is intriguing that Bogan in her letters described

Roethke as large in size, but small in poetical stature: "He is very, very large (6 fi. 2 and

weighing 218 lbs) and he writes very very small lyrics" (84); his talent is definite, she told

Years later, in a letter to Mildred Weston, Bogan described Roethke as "a v. real person, undemeath a Iot of rather Germanic largeness . . . " a 40).

Chapter 5, Page 234

Wheelock, "Slight, but unmistakable" (1 14).

In the years preceding the publication of The Sleeping Fun/, Bogan was coming to terms

with a life and career she was forced to circurnscribe. Her experience with Roethke was like a

precious gift, allowing her a breakthrough of creativity and reminding her that she was capable of

grand conception, but it was a short respite which she consciously recognized as such. She was

not done with love affairs - she began another at age thirty-nine which lasted eight years and

brought her "perfect fieedom, perfect detachment . . . an emphasis on joy" (283) -but she was

done with the highs and lows of risk, longing, and ambition. Bogan would continue until the

- time of her death to place emphasis on the value of work for the disciplined routine it demanded

and the emotional maturity it required, Her mental breakdowns marked a pivota1 point in her

life, dividing it in two in a manner comparable to Eliot's conversion to the high Anglican faith.

On the fax- side of the chasm, after a pedous crossing, Bogan could look back on her former self

as on the child she once was. She concerned herself with distinguishing childish fkom mature

behaviour. For example, she adrnonished Rolfe Humphries that it was "undialectical and

childish" of him to be affected by min, 'Vndialectical, because if we have one sort of weather, it

stands to reason that we have to have another kind, and a good thing, too. Childish, because the

mature sou1 rather enjoys the rain: clouded skies let you alone, and you don't have al1 that play

and inter-play of nerve-wracking light and shadow to cope with" (100). Apologizing a few

sentences later for her "meteorological treatise," she explained that she had decided that, after

her "sojom in the mad-house," she should never again let the weather get her down. "1 used to

be at the mercy of clouds no bigger than a man's hand, and in that hour of twilight, when animals

howl, 1 used to feel that al1 hell was rising up to oppress me, and fkequently, 1 would weep," she

told him. 'Wo more. 1 am serene fiom dawn to dark, and even the homd watches of the night

afford me no qualms. Grown-up. Mature."

Chaper 5, Page 235

For Bogan, the uncertainty of the weather was symbolic- The speaker of "A Letter"

IBD), a voice of the poet's early self, seem to be "at the rnercy of cIouds" while lamenting the

dreary countryside hl1 of ccroofless houses, - / Tavems to rain." A roofless houe is a body

unprotected, subject to the "whirn of any fallible human creature, or economic security or the

weather." In 'Winter Swan" w, the hollow garden is "under a cloud." Unaware of its

vulnerability, ignorant of the depth of the darlmess in its shadow, a child craves the Sun. Bogan,

like Eliot, found that ''In our rhythm of earthly light we tire of light" ("Choruses fiom 'The

Rock"'). A mature person achieves s e r e n i ~ by embracing the dialectic implicit in the

uncontrollable, day-to-day occurrence of one or the other of two types of weather: rain and clear

skies,

We are constantly buffeted by life, said the Roman poet Lucretius. The natural process

of aging is a kind of violent wearing away. Lucretius, who has been called the first psychiatrist,

argued that we must dispel fear - of nature, God, death - before we can attain the goal of

Epicurean tranquillity. Bogan was interested in the writings of Lucretius in this period, reading

and discussing bis De R e m Natura with Humphries6 Perhaps returning to the Latin studies of

her youth was a means of reminding herself of classical principles - discipline, inner strength,

maturity. She mentions working on some ccrenderuigs" of Lucretius in an o u t h e sent to

Wheelock of her proposed new volume of poetry:

1 am working on a center, or nucleus for the book. This should consist of: 1) A poern called 'Goodbye at Sea,' already on the stocks, wfiich will sum up the

Holden suffering, endured so long, but now, at Iast, completely over. (- eventually called "Putting to Sea." 1 h o w what it's about, with my upper reason, just a little; it came fiom pretty far down, thank God.)

2) A longish poem calkd "The Sleeping Fury" . . . . 3) Some renderings, of Lucretius and, perhaps, Rilke. 4) One or two short sharp epigrarnmatic things.

Humphries wodd later publish his own translation of De R e m Natura,

Chupfer 5. Page 236

and that, uniess the dernon starts really flowing, will be all. - 1 was so comforted, this winter, when 1 came upon MalIrné 's Poesies, in one volume, containkg about fi@ poems. If that was his lifetime work, 1 haven't done so badly, at 38 . . . . (WVL 132)

A spirited criticism of writers she said had plagiarized Dark Surnmer (because the book had

fallen into a "dark well," it was easy for them to get away with it) was included with Bogan's

description of her work in progress.

The "renderings" never materialized in printS7 By December, however, Bogan had

rnapped The Sleeping Fury into four sections. She playfully described the volume's shape and

movernent to Zabel as a rising and falling, "fiom despair, to exaltation, and back again: Bogan in

cothurnus and Bogan in flat heels." The cothurnus, the thick-soled boot of the Athenian tragic

actor, literally eIevates its wearer and figuratively the wearer's speech; the moods of the volume, .

she suggests, are a mix:

Seriously, the poerns shape up pretty well. The 1930-33 period - despair, neurosis and alcoholism - is set off by itself . . . ..Then there is the period of further despair, edged in upon by the period of Beautifùl Males , . . . Then the spiritual side begins, with a few nunbles fiom the sensual bassoons and the mystic fiddles. Al1 ends on a note of cairn: me and the landscape ciasped in each other's arrns. (WWL 145)

As Frank notes, despite a roughly chronological sequencing of the poems, the book - published

in 1937 - "as usual, conceals its direct biographical sources," A "narrative of sorts" is achieved,

however, "although it was only after she had settled on the final disposition of the book's

sections that Bogan herself recognized this pattern. But there it stood, the story of her spirit's

trial, death, and rebirth, the 'dark night of the soul' which she had traversed like any seeker for

' Ridgeway, who assumes Bogan intended to produce translations, cites a manuscript worksheet which lists Baudelaire and Lucretius (8 1). In a 1935 ietter to Wheelock, Bogan mentions that the "Lucretiw stuff' she is working has been promised to Poetry (JhWL, 86)- In Bogan's papers there are several unpublished poems which have a Lucretian tone to them but for which 1 could fmd no direct source.

Chapter 5. Page 23 7

sabation" (244).

Altogether, there are twenty-five poems in The Sleeriing: Fuw: seven in Part 1, five in

Part II, seven in Part III, and six in Part IV. How seriously are we to take Bogan's outline of a

"narrative"? Frank's acceptance is perhaps too ready, though certainly The Slee~inpr Furv is a

much easier sequence to navigate than either Bodv of This Death or Dark Summer. Bogan's self-

conscious struggle with mental illness and subsequent detennined reconciliation of the warring

elernents in her own nature are clearly the subject matter of the volume, dictating its movement

and relatively restrained tone. The following analysis attempts to follow the pattern, but also not

- to follow it, for perhaps the thread is too neatly laid, the message too pat, especially the closure.

In Dark Summer, increasing fears of betrayal take the poet down into a maze of bad mernories,

%the continuous turmoil in a disastrous childhood." She was a "puling child" trying to make

people "tell Fer] the tmth." The artist made poetry out of the experience of reliving childisli

anxleties, drawing upon images associated with that time, fiom fairy taIes. in The Slee~ing

Furv, Bogan Ieaves behind the voices and characters of those dramas, though - as she herself

tells us - they occasionally surface unbidden fkom her unconscious. While she deliberately opted

for rnaîurity, Bogan couldnyt help but regret the loss of the bounding energy of youth and

corresponding hope of a large body of work. She admitted to Wilson, writing fkom her hospital

bed in 193 1: "1 wish 1 were a continuation of a kid and Virginia Woolf. Flying around

producing round solid novels and ferninine intuition, and thoughts on great writers" (cited by

Frank, 139). The new sequence reveals more about the complexity of the poetys struggles than

she gives out, for example, a rising concem for her literary reptation and posterity.

Part 1: "The 1930-33 period - despair, neurosis and alcoholisrn - is set off by itself: . . "

As she does with the first poerns of Bodv of This Death and Dark Surnmer, the poet introduces a

Chapter 5, Page 238

riddle which the subsequent lyrics address, setting in motion the implied narrative of the

sequence. In "A Tale" m, the speaker describes a mysterious quester who will corne to a

horri@îng howledge and a strange end. "Winter Swan" (DS) asks the question, "Where lies this

leaf-caught world?" and seems to begin to answer, but deliberately misleads. Like "Winter

Swan," "Song" begins with the unidentified "It:"

It is not now 1 Iearn To tum the heart away From the rain of a wet May Good for the grass and leaves.

If "It is not now," then when? The poet tells us:

Years back 1 paid rny tithe And eamed my salt in kind, And watched the long slow scythe Move where the grain is iined, And saw the stubble burn Under the darker sheaves.

But she gives us another question, expressed indirectly this time:

Whatever now must go Tt is not the heart that grieves. It is not the heart - the stock, The Stone, - the deaf, the blind - That sees the birds in flock Stem narrowed to the wind.

It is "not now" that the speaker l e m s to tum the heart away - that was before, "Years back"

Whatever "now must go / It is not the heart . . . ." Then what is it which "now must go?" Where

and why must it go?

The opening poem of The Slee~ing Fury, first published in 1930, recalls "Second Song"

in its references to "salt" and the paying of tithes. Sandra Cookson claims that the speaker

Chapter 5. Page 239

in "Song" repeats the attempt of "Second Song" to renounce an impulse to sexual passion (197),

but it is in fact clear - now - that the goodbyes have already been said. "Song," and the volume

it introduces, are not about passion, or even the act of bidding it goodbye, the turning away of the

heart. The poems here are al1 new; the poet is not inclined to include sequences from her

previous two books because the purpose now is to articulate the new plateau reached, to

concentrate on the present - the work of achieving emotional stability. They are expressions and

manifestations of the extensive "grief-worK' which must be carried out, pairhlly and over a long

period, methodically to dissolve the innumerable ties to memones. Gloria Bowles, calling

attention to the echoes in "Song" of language frorn Bodv of This Death (the charred fields, the

plowing), argues that Bogan is here "again fully in the female mode, resigned to the limited life."

Bowles implies that this kind of narrowing strategy, 1i.e that of the birds in flight, signals a

failure of the artist. 1 suggest that it is instead a re-affirmation, arising fiom the poet's

determination to make a mark in the worId despite the odds. It is not the heart that accomplishes

the "seeing" necessary to this task, but the unnarned, undefined self addressed in the next poern -

one of Bogan's most admired works - ''Henceforth, fiom the Mind":

' In hiç review of The Sleepin~ Furv, Alien Tate says that Bogan "reaches the height of her talent" in this poem, "surely one of the finest Iyrics of our time" (42). Léonie Adams echoes the sentiment, proclairning "Henceforth" to be "sureiy one of the perfect lyrics of the period" (70). Theodore Roethke believed it "to be a masterpiece, a poem that could be set beside the best work of the Elizabethans" (93). Ford Madox Ford opens his review with a paragraph-Iong discussion of the meaning of the word "authentic," simply in order to provide the reader with the precise sense he felt when he opened Bogan's book and read the f i t three or four words of LcHenceforth." William Jay Smith closed his mernorial lecture on Bogan, foliowing her death in 1970, by reciting "Henceforth," introducing it as "one of the greatest of her poems" and one which all poets who h o w her work wouid agree "will unquestionably endurey' (20).

Tate, Adams, and Roethke were all poets. Ford, a self-proclaimed "prosateur" but also a poet, affected not to understand "the cIaims that verse poets make to be . . . beings set apart and mysticalfy revered" but without hesitation celebrated the authenticity of Bogan's lines. It is impossible to define what poetry is, he says:

But the moment 1 read those words 1 felt perfectly sure that what would follow would be something stable, restrained, never harrowing, never what the French cal1 chargé - those being attriiutes of what one most avoids reading. And that was what foIlowed - a series of words, of

Chapter 5, Page 240

Henceforth, fiom the mind, For your whole joy, must spring Such joy as you may find In any earthly thing, And every tirne and place Will take your thought for grace.

Hence forth, f?om the tongue, Frorn shallow speech alone, Cornes joy you thought, when young, Would wring you to the bone, Would pierce you to the heart And spoil its stop and start.

Hence forward, fkom the shell, Wherein you heard, and wondered At oceans like a bel1 -

So far fkom ocean sundered - A smothered sound that sleeps Long lost within lost deeps,

WilI chime you change and hours, The shadow of increase, Will sound you flowers Born under troubled peace - Henceforth, henceforth Will echo sea and earth.

'TIenceforth" directly answers the implicit question of "Song." The poet makes clear that she

will no longer look to the heart for the piercing, disabling joy of youth, but will cultivate the

cadences, thought and disciplined expression that brought to the m a t a l eye and ear, in a kind of television, the image of Miss Bogan writing at the other end of d l those processes dI the words that go to make up this book. . . . When we think of poetry, we rnust think of Miss Bogan as occupyimg a definite niche in the great stony facade of the temple to our Muse. (46-47)

Perhaps a lack of artistic credentials might explain why Ridgeway - one of oniy four critics who have to date published a book-length study of Bogan - does not bother to quote fiom "Henceforth" and alludes to it ody in passing as a "stronger statement of the fear of intensity" than "Song" (82). Certainly a Iack of humility, which she might have learned fiom Ford, is an obvious explanatiom for Cora Kaplan's arrogant and uninfomed introduction to a selection of Bogan's poetry in her collectiom Salt and Bitter and Good- She makes mention of "Henceforth" ody to castigate it: "Whom is this poem addressed to?" The exasperated Kaplan approves only of those lyrks "where the speaker is identifiable and the event precisely Iocated" (274).

Chapter 5. Page 24 1

pleasures of thought (the mind) and its expression in speech (the tongue), in the early 1930s,

Bogan kept a series of jomals and notebooks in which she tord herself how to live, to write.

She envisioned the will and imagination given voice, expressing their differing views, offering

stem and advice:

It is necessary to rernernber and to choose, You must Say out to the end what you have long managed to suggest. You must give up syrnbols. You must be able to see well, to feel clearly and to place every phrase in proportion to the rest- The hardness of a rich will must serve you completely; subtle as a diagram, proven and complex, ordered, rearmed, detailed - that is work, the imagination said. The will and 1 have slept, and we awaken now only to catch you in the symbols of ourselves . .. . You are made in the fashion, and it is too late to change it now, The appearance is your reality, and a set of appearances shadows your Fate. Be gainsaid, said the d l - It is time to be tried. You will write out of ambition or out of fear . . . . Far enough, the will said- Not strong, not fresh, not unbroken, not whole, not easily swayed, not wise, not blessed in effects, not politic- (LBP)

The determination expressed in the opening tines of "Henceforth" is al1 about survival - as a

person, as an artist. Bogan might have been thinking of the observations of Lucretius on the

movement of mind and matter:

Now 1 will tell you how it is that we walk And can stride forward when we wish, and how We are able to move Our limbs in various ways, And what it is that is wont to push along Our body's heavy weight. Please mark my words. 1 Say that in the first place images Of walking come in contact with the mùid And strike the rnind, as 1 have said before. Hence follows will: for no one ever begins Anything unless the mind has first foreseen What it wills to do and what the rnind foresees 1s the image of the thing. (IV, 877-885)

"Henceforth" announces a new beginning, the first page in a new book. William Jay Smith sees

Box 20, Folder 2, Notebook (dated October 1930).

Chapter 5. Page 242

the poem as "about poetry, about the poet who puts al1 of life, al1 her experience of the earth into

poetry, and in the end becomes the earth itself' (20). The sense of loss is profound, however. As

Frank describes it, the poem is "Filled with affirmations" but "nevertheless shot through with

elegy" (245). Bowles finds its tone of resignation deeply disturbing: "The poem builds to a

crescendo of defeat (and the change in the opening iamb 6om 'henceforth' to henceforward'

extends the agony). We are left with a terrible sense of emptiness, as the woman poet asserts the

split between rnind and body and renounces passion yet again" (108). In Bodv of This Death,

says Bowles, "we believed the resignation momentary . . .. here, it is more profound . . . the

- voice of experience" (108). Thomas Simmons also finds a "crucial difference" between the

method of this poem and that of an earlier poem such as "The Alchemist," but he does not regard

the change as tragic. "In this poem," he remarks, "though mind and matter are clearly opposites,

they are complementary; they are not enernies" (176-77). Mind is held up as primary, necessary

for the poet's emotional well-being and fùture stability, but its ultimate allegiance to "sea and

earth" is affmed, The passing of time allows for the desired but heretofore unattainable

tranquillity (Peterson 80). Bogan's closing echoes Wordsworth's "Intimations of hor ta l i ty ,"

reminding that the passing years are not just the accumulation of the heavy crust of custom, but

foster the developrnent of the "philosophic mind." "Henceforth" is about aging and loss, but also

about wisdom and compen~ation.'~ As Bloom says, "the Wordsworthian image of the sea-shell

betokens a darker music of mature imagination, simiiar to the 'sober-coloring' of the close of the

'Intimations' ode" ("Louise" 86).

The image of the shell also implies protection. According to Lucretius, "al1 things that

live and grow" have an outer covering - a skin, shell, or rind - which protects them from the

'O Frank compares it to other poems of that mode: Wordsworth's ''Tinten Abbey," Yeats' "The Tower," and Stevens' "Sunday Morning" (245).

Chapter 5, Page 243

constant buffeting which is the condition of existence and the cause of aging and death:

. . . since the body is touched By the motions of the air surroundkg it Its outer part by fkequent blows of air 1s thumped and buffeted; and that is why Nearly al1 things that live and grow are covered By skin or even shells or rind or bark. The body's inside also when we breathe This same air strikes, drawn in and out. And so Since the body is beaten outside and in, and since The blows through tiny channels penetrate The primas. parts and prima1 elements, Slowly, collapse (as it were) occurs in the Iirnbs. The atoms of mind and body are dislodged From their positions. (IV, 928 - 44)

In her journal in 1933, Bogan wrote of what she called her "dual nature," the unconscious and

the conscious, and of the necessity of separating "as far as possible these two sides of the mind,

even by considering thern not merely as aspects of the sarne rnind but as separate personalities"

(LBP)." The conscious mind - stolid but essential - attends to the prosaic, practical aspects of

daily life: "it must learn to be intelligently critical, detached, tolerant while at the same time

remembering that its f i s t function is to provide suitable conditions for the artist-self." As Bogan

continues to lecture herself, she ceases to distinguish "two sides of the mind" and instead

identifies the conscious with the mind, and the unconscious as something other. "Erect a

transparent barrier between you and the mind," she enjoins herself, for "the other half of your

duaI nature may then be as sensitive, enthusiastic and partisan as you like." Bogan fears that,

without the careful protection of the practical and intekgent, conscious part of herself, the

exposed atistic side will "m the risk of being made unsuitable by trying to cope continually

with situations which cal1 only for reason, or of loneliness ludicrous to the unindulgent

'' Box 20, Folder 2, Notebook ( 1 933).

Clraprer 5. Page 244

observer." She w m s herself sternly: "Ifyou leave it to the more sensitive side . - . to set the

conditions of work and living for you, you may fïnd yourself at the end of your days with very

Iittle to show for the gifi you were bom with."

The shell described in the third stanza of 'Tknceforth" is a safe place fiom which the

emotionally exhausted and exquisitely Milnerable speaker hears distant, srnothered sounds, the

chiming of change and hours and approaching death. The poet's "sensitive side" nestles and

sleeps, drearning of flowers. Like f au1 Valery's mollusk, she exudes her own shell; it is a part of

herself and not an extemal ~overing. '~ The echoing close of the poem is sonorously lovely, but

the mention of "troubled peace" and the designation of sound as "smothered" signal a warning.

The conscious side could perform its task too well, insulating the artistic side with such success

that it dwells permanently in "dreamful ease," Iike Tennyson's sailors in "The Lotus-Eaters."

Bogan was heavily influenced as a young woman by the Pre-Raphaelite poets; she easily

mastered the rich and mellifluous tones of Swinburne, but came to regard this kind of writing as

self-indulgent, to be left behind (Frank 28). The safety and reassurance of her natural poetic

ability, unchallenged and isolated in its shell, could be to her a kind of deathly "slurnber . . . more

sweet than toil."

Three decades later, Bogan would remark that "Henceforth" was written "in the midst of

a state which bordered on despair" (WWL 368). "You cannot think what life with a shell

resolves into," she told Zabel in 1932 (61). She joked that the first grouping of poems in The

Slee~ing Furv was "set off by itself" (the period of "despair, neurosis, and alcoholism") but

" See Bachelard's discussion of Valery's Les merveilles de la mer. Les coquillages (106). Bachelard devotes a chapter to the shell and its potency as a symbol for the imagination. He notes that "whenever life seeks to shelter, protect, cover or hideitself, the imagination sympathizes with the being that inhabits the protected space. The imagination expenences protection in al1 its nuances of security, fiom life in the most material of shells, to more subtle concealment through imitation of surfaces" (1 32). Bogan told herself to be carefüi not to "drag" her artistic side "out into the unshady mien-" Bachelard cornrnents that "Shade, too, can be inhabited" (132).

Chapter 5, Page 245

neglected to mention that their subject - the modest but persistent work of the self-circumsmied

poet - infonns the sequence with purpose. "Hornunculus" and "Single Sonnety' are both about

the thing made, the poem which is crafted to contain so much which cannot otherwise be borne.

As Frank points out, "Homunculus" is a hîgfily allusive poem, drawn Erom Goethe's Faust, and is

surely one of Bogan's "oddest" efforts:

O see what L have made! A delicate precious ruse By which death is betrayed And ail time given use-

See this fine body, joined More cleanly than a thom. What man, though lusty-loined, What woman fiom woman born, Shaped a slight thing, so strong, Or a wise thing, so young? This mouth will yet know Song And words move on this tongue.

ft lacks but life: some scent, Some kernel of hot endeavor, Some dust of dead content Will rnake it live forever.

In the laboratory scene of the second act of part II of Faust, a homunculus - a miniature man - is

created by Wagner fiorn a test-tube. Mephistopheles asks how this was achieved: "So you have

locked an arnorous pair / Up in your chirnney-stack somehow?" Wagner replies, "Why, God

forbid!"

That method's out of fashion now: Procreation's sheer nonsense, we declare! *....................*........-.. By animals, no doubt, it's stili enjoyed,

.

But man henceforth, being so highly gifted,

Cflaprer S. Page 246

Must have an ongin rnuch more uplifted. @, 11. 683847)13

Bogan no sooner announces that, henceforth, a new beginning is come, proceeding fiom the

mind, then skie mocks her own arrogance and punctures the platitude. "Hornunculus" is about the

incredible achievement of "birth" by crystallization rather than insemination. As the tiny

creature tells Wagner, its "father," artificial life has to be contained for its own protection:

Corne now, embrace me tenderly - but do Be carefid, please, my glass must not be cracked. That is the way things are, in fact: For natural growth the world's too small a place, But art must be enclosed in its own space. (II, 11. 6880-84)L4

Bogan's attitude toward Goethe was bound up with her feelings about the distinctions of

"major" and "rnin~r'~ in the evaluation of literary worth, and the assignrnent of those distinctions

by gender.15 In 1924, several years before the publication of "Hornunculus," Bogan at the age of

twenty-six wrote jokuigly to fellow lyric poet Humphries that they would both surely receive the

Pulitzer Prize by the time they reached middle age. In another letter, however, she reported

feeling "very minor" after learning that Keats reportedly sat down every moming and wrote 200

13 Behüte Gott! wie sonst das Zeugen Mode war Erkliren wir für eitel Possen. .....-......*......*.*.. Wenn sich das Tier noch weiter dran ergota, So muB der Mensch mit seinen groBen Gaben Doch künftig hohern, hohern Ursprung haben.

Komm, drücke mich recht zartlich an dein Herz, Doch nicht zu fesî, damit das GIas nicht springe. Das kt die Eigenschaft der Dinge: Natürlichem genügt das Weltall kawn, Was künstlich ist, verlangt geschloBen Raum,

l5 B o p was learning German dong with Edmund Wilson in 1934. The two ven t evenings together reading and translating. One of their more ambitious plans was to read Faust in the onginal awL 79)-

Chapcer 5, Page 24 7

lines; upon reading Goethe's biography - "on the advice, supposedly, that lives of great men a11

rernind us we can make our lives sublime" - Bogan was rnoved to consider the disparity between

a man's life and a woman's, to compare the expectation of everlasting vinlity and potency of the

male with the usually limited destiny of a wornan. Goethe, she told Humphries in the satiric

manner characteristic of her letters,

had five love-affairs before he was twenty; at the age of 70 he fell in love again (when he should have been drawing up plans for a pIeasant little stearn-heated grave) and wrote the Westoslicher Diwa . . .O you great male poets! Think of the life ahead of you, Rolfe! No rest! No hope! 1 should think you'd shudder at the thought of being 83, with no relief in sight. You'll fa11 for a girl of 19, at 83 (vide Goethe) whom you'll see one moming chasing the ducks, you wiIl leap out of bed, write an immortal sonnet, clutch the g i n l e d throat, and breathe your last. Cicero, with al1 his talk of escaping from the tiger, didn't count on the capacities of octogenarian male poets. . . . O God, why were women born with ambition! 1 wish 1 could sit and tat, instead of wanting to go and mite THE poem, or lie and kiss the ground. (WWL 9)

- Bogan anticipated her upcoming birthday with dismay, as her biographer Elizabeth Frank puts it,

"haunted by the spectre of scanty production and entrenchment in the minor" (77). "I'll be 27,

Rolfe. O God, 1 thought I'd be a great poet by 27 with fat works ranged on shelves. O well"

(WWL. 9). She craved "a lot of fat words. Fat words in fat poerns. Latinities like immoderate

and cornmewual and ceremonious and arrogance" (cited by Frank, 77). A literary lightweight

she did not want to be.

Size matters. The tiny homunculus is an apt representation, in her own eyes, of the lyric

poet's typical work as well as her overall output. Bogan's speaker exclaims, "O see what 1 have

made!" at the opening of "Homunculus." What she has created is what she describes at the

conclusion of "Henceforth:" the smothered imagination forever "lost within Iost deeps" of the

female artist7s birth-canaI. When the two poems are read together, the imagery is hauntingly

suggestive of an aborted fetus moumed by its demented, regrethl mother. "It lacks but life," she

wonders, with the calm of one unhinged ffom the reality of consuming despair. This reading is

Chaprer 5, Page 248

re-enforced by the speaker's unexpected cornparison of the creature's "fine body" to a thom.

Wordsworth's poem "The Thorn" is about a woman who, in despair at being jilted by her lover,

is suspected of having caused the death of her newborn child. What seems to be an infant's

gravesite is situated high on a mountain, and beside it are a pool and a thorn (a thorn tree). The

woman haunts the place, continually crying to herself "Oh rnisery! oh rnisery!"

At al1 times of the day and night This wretched Woman thither goes; And she is known to every star, And every wind that blows; And there, beside the Thom, she sits When the blue daylight's in the skies, And when the whirlwind7s on the hill, Or fiosty air is keen and still, And to herself she cries, "Oh rnisery! oh rnisery! Oh woe is me! oh rnisery!" (11.67-77)

The thom tree, the unlikely subject of the poem, is itself "old and grey" but stands "Not higher

than a two years' child"; a "rnass of lmotted joints," it ironically symbolizes the woman's

- memory of her dead infant, at once enduring and broken, tortuous and tortured. One meaning of

the word "thom" is "a constant affliction, a continual source of grief' (OED). The speaker of

'LHornunculus" asserts that her creation is '3oined / More cleanly," but the suggestion is that time

will tell, as the "srnothered sound" chimes change and hours. The flowers of the "troubled

peace" adom the child's grave.

Another meaning of "thorn" is the Old English letter '3" - the unvoiced "th" sound.

The homunculus is, or course, a poem; Bogan reminds us of this through wordplay. And just as

Martha Ray, the lamenting mother of Wordsworth's poern, walks arnong the voices of the dead

as well as of the living, so too does the poet feel the pressure of an unseen crowd of overbearing

literary forebears. Goethe is here, without apology, and Wordsworth, but so also is Chaucer.

Chaprer 5. Page 249

The creator's description of her homunculus as "A delicate precious ruse" increases in

significance in light of lines fiom one of Chaucer's earliest poems, 'The Deth of Blaunche the

Duchesse" (cited in OED): "So at be last / This hert rused & stale away / Fro al De houndis a

prive way." The "hert" (hart, also heart) carries out a "nise" - that is, it doubles or tunis back -

detours - to throw the hounds, which hunt it d o m , off its scent. In "Song," the poet has already

toId us that "Tt is not now" she has learned "to turn the heart away." In poems such as "The

Frightened Man" (BD) and 'Tor a Marriage" @S), Bogan has before drawn on the language and

tradition of courtly love lyrics to enforce the analogy of lover as hunter, beloved as hunted. The

heart (hart) as the object of violent and bloody pursuit is an old subject for her, not one she

means to renew now.

Wagner, believing the homunculus to have supenor laiowledge, cannot resist asking it

the buming question, "How body and sou1 seem to have been planned / To fit so perfectly and

cling so tight, / Yet each toments the other day and night." Mephistopheles reacts with

impatience: "Stop, stop! One should ask him rather / Why man and woman can't endure each

other. / My &end, you'll never get such matters straight" (11. 6894-99).16 The alchemist of Bodv

of This Death also sought this answer. Bogan is perhaps suggesting that her inclination to

destroy one half of her being to salvage the other, whether the dual self is defined as mind and

body or conscious and unconscious, is flawed in its inception. The homunculus is an incomplete,

inanimate creature because it represents the impulse to divide rather than unite, denying the

natural dynamic of masculine and ferninine which informs al1 life. But while we might agree

16 Wagner: "Wie Seel' und Leib so schon zusammenpassen, So fest sich halten als um nie ni scheiden, Und doch den Tag sich immerfort verlaiden. Sodann - "

Mep histopheles: "Halt eh! ich woilte lieber mgen: Warurn sich Mann und Frau so schlecht vertragen?

Du kommst, mein Freund, hierüber nie ins Reine."

Chapter 5. Page 250

with Frank that the poet thus implies genuine art "must be bom fkom a copulative impulse," it

would be a rnistake to disrniss the insistence on permanence which the poem expresses. The

speaker is slightly ridiculous in her self-congratulatory glee ("O see what 1 have made!") and her

creation is both delicate and precious, a ruse to trick death. Bogan despised deceit. And yet -

the voice could be Cassandra's, in a mood to take pnde in the "shambling tricks" which she

"bears" and "bares" as iier fate. The alchernist is proud of his endurance. This slight thing, this

homunculus, is strong, wise, and 'WlI yet know song." It gives "al1 time . . - use." Ironically, it

will live forever with the small addition of either a spark of life (scent or kernel), or the "dust of

dead content." With a naive turn, the speaker considers how it is that some lyrics are irnmortal,

whiIe others Iack force; sometimes, she feels, canonici@ might be questioned - the dusty dead

are not necessarily to be admired. The poet is confident her work will endure on its own ments,

as she assures us in "Single Sonnet," written in May of 193 1 when Bogan was convalescing

after her breakdown at the Cromwell Hall sanitarium in onn nec tic ut.^'

Now, you great stanza, you heroic mould, Bend to my will, for 1 must give you love: The weight in the heart that breathes, but cannot move Which to endure flesh only makes so bold.

Take up, take up, as it were lead or gold The burden; test the dreadfûl mass thereof. No Stone, date, metal under or above Earth, is so ponderous, so dull, so cold.

Too long as ocean bed bears up the ocean, As earth's core bears the earth, have I borne this; Too long have lovers, bending for their kiss Felt bitter force cohering without motion.

Staunch meter, great song, it is yours, at length, To prove how stronger you are than my strength.

" The îypescript for the poem includes a note indicating where and when the poem was written CBP, Box 1 1, Folder 61).

Chaprer 5, Page 251

Frank regards the contrast of "Single Sonnet" with "Homunculus" as "almost providential"

(247): the second poem is optimistic and benevolent, while the first is satiric, deflating."

Certady the pairing of the two on the open pages must have been deliberate, but 1 suggest that

the second actually follows on the first, in sequence. The creator of the homunculus turns her

attention from the reader to the thing she has made, and addresses it, telling it to "Bend to ber]

will." The poet is the source of life; she gives her verse love, breathing into it the weight of her

own heart. By this act of artificial respiration she literally inspires the poem to bear the earth, to

prove the strength she knows it to have ("slight thing, so strong7')- Now the mouth h o w s the

Song: "it is yours," she tells it, "at length." The sonnet, like the homunculus, is "single," not a

product of coupling but a finely formed crystal produced with great effort, over a long penod, by

the solitary poet. It is a transformation of carbon into diarnond by pressure and time, and

sornething more. By the end of the sonnet the "Staunch meter7' has absorbed the very lifeblood

of the poet, taken her strength into its permanent form, leaving her gratefully weakened but the

poem irnrnortal.

Bogan suggests that the creative energy which initiates the struggle behveen poet and

verse is masculine, but the endurance - the long wait / weight - is feminine, the passive

Cassandra waiting for the tear in her side, the wound which will release the burden which is

borne and blood which only the meter can staunch.lg The promise to "give . . . love" confirms

18 There is critical disagreement (by the few who have discussed the poem in print) on the tone of

"Homuncdus." DeShazer claims that "Bogan celebrates here the power of language to transform silence into oracular speech, art Uito Me; she invokes from within an inspirational force, the 'kernel of hot endeavor,' which gives birth to the work of art" (52). Larsen agrees with Frank that the artificial "Homunculus" is a lackluster thing: "The homunculus-poem, not engendered in ardent procreation but constmcted in a leamed alchemist's fleshless flask, 'lacks . . , some kernel of hot endeavor,' a hazardous but essential source of bodily - perhaps specifically female - energy-" (230).

19 DeShazer says that "the poet personifies her sonnet as a Iover, a potent erotic force" (54) and Colosurdo agrees that "the poet rnakes the poem 'bend' to her 'wili' - a kind of literary seduction, if not rape" (353).

Chaprer 5. Page 252

the persona of the poet, in the first Iines at least, to be male- As CoIosurdo argues, the conflict

between the poet and the verse fonn which contains the emotional chaos is a kind of "struggle

between self and self' (354). The poem which follows "Single Sonnet7' continues the dramatic

engagement, In "Exhortation," as in "Henceforth," the poet addresses herself in the lecturing

tone of wise mentor to stubborn, wilful apprentice:

Give over seeking bastard joy Nor cast for fortune's side-long Iook. Indifference can be your toy; The bitter heart can be your book. (Its lesson torrnent never shook.)

In the cold heart, as on a page, Spell out the gentle syllable That puts short lirnit to your rage And curdles the straight f i e of hell, Compassing all, so al1 is weIl,

Read how, though passion sets in stonn And griefs a cornfort, and the young Touch at the flint when it is warm, It is the dead we live among, The dead given motion, and a tongue.

In the faIl of 1932 Bogan reported in a letter to Zabel that she had written and sold to Scribner's

"A fine, fkight-liy angry, temfically compressed poem" (WWL 69); she sent it to Wheelock

with the comment: "Bitter though it be, do try to like it. 1 think it good, because, on a second

reading, it sounded like something 1 had never seen before, and 1 always take that as a sign that

the vulgar upper consciousness had nothing to do with it" (as cited by Frank, 247). Her

reflection thirty-four years later that both this poem and "Henceforth" were composed "in the

midst of a state which bordered on despair" is followed by a comment on the deep bitterness of

"Exhortation," that it '%as written on the verge of a psychic and physical breakdown (which had

roots in realiiy, and partook v. little of fantasy)" (WWL 368)- The "bitter heart" - the heart

Chapter 5, Page 253

which turned away long before now f?om the wet May recalled in "Song" - is represented as a

book, or a page, which can be both read fiom and written on to define and limit passion, grief,

rage. In "Single Sonnet" the poet demonstrates the importance of the strict forrn of art as a

means of containing within its "heroic mould" the "dreadfbl mass," the 'keight in the heart that

breathes, but cannot move," The act of spelling out the "gentle syllable / . - . puts short limit to . .

. rage." Bogan's admission that the poem came fkom her unconscious helps explain the unusual

effect of the lines "And curdles the straight fie of hell / Compassing ail, so al1 is well." Milk

and blood can be curdled, but not fie; nor can we easily imagine fire as "straight," not crooked,

undeviating in direction, honest and fiank, direct- She suggests that the fire of heil is at least

open, forthright and commendable - unlike duplicitous fortune with its "side-long look." More

than anything else, she hated pretension and deceit: "1 hate a lie, O Christ, how I hate a lie," she

tord Humphries in 1935 QVWL 88). The discipline of work and art compasses and girdles the

fire of honest em~tion.'~ Raging biood is curdled and thus staunched with the limitation of the

meter, the page; the stoic poet is distanced, indifferent, in control.

The "dead we live among, / . . . given motion, and a tongue" emerge in the third stanza as

a source of the speaker's fear. They are both malicious and powerfùl:

The dead, long trained to cruel sport And the crude gossip of the grave; The dead, who pass in motley sort, Whom sun nor sufferance can Save. Face thern, They sneer. Do not be brave,

Know once for all: their mare is set Even now; be sure their trap is laid; And you will see your lifetime yet

'O The line "Compassing dl, so al1 is well" echoes the calming sentiment of Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach": "The Sea of Faith / was once, too, at the f ' , and round earth's shore / Lay like the folds of a bright girdie fiirled . . . " 01. 21-2 1). Bogan's curdling unexpectedly recalls Arnold's girdling, I suggest,

Chapter 5, Page 254

Corne to their te-, your plans unmade, - And be belied, and be betrayed.

"Who 'the dead' mentioned in the poem are, 1 do not bow," Ridgeway admits, but theorizes that

they are not meant to be actual personalities (such as Bogan's brother, who died in WorId War 1,

or her first husband) but rather ''the force of those who went before, traditional ways of thinking

and doing that shape the present" (83).*' William Kemgan, acknowledging that the "homfic

vision of 'the dead"' is indeed puzzling, disagrees:

The dead do not represent tradition or the past, as Jacqueline Ridgeway has suggested. They stand for the social world of gossip and ill-wishing, spite and snubbing, the world the nineteenth-centmy Arnerican poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox had in mind in her superb 'No Classes,' which refùtes the idea of America as a classless society by cataloguing the envies, resentments, and countless acts of ahnost unthinking superiority to be observed in small-town life, Bogan, living among the literati of New York, found herself in the nidst of a supercharged expansion of such malice; she particularly loathed the 1930s because the fashion for political cornmitment led in her mind to a temble intensification of backbiting and shunning, the clique's disdain for the outsider and the outsider's disdain for the clique. Her terror of gossip ran deep. (74)

Kemgan quotes one of Bogan's mernoirs of childhood in which she recalls the malice directed at

her mother, the "sneers and rebuffs fiom the less endowed beings about her. Early 1 saw them jib

and sneer. Early, early , from the beginning, 1 abjured the ordinary world" (74). In

"Exhortation," he says, the poet cultivates indifference, for to sneer back would be "to put on the

motley of the dead and join their ranks." But in the end, the exhortation fails; we live in society

and thus cannot escape its ubiquitous games of betrayal."

21 Ridgeway conîradicts her own analysis in her subsequent discussion of "To Wine," the poem which introduces Part iI of The SIecming F q . She argues that "Bogan's other poetry indicates that she writes from her own feelings," thus the "lipless dead" in "To Wine" "is very likeIy her husband or brother" (85). It would have to be both, considering the term is used in the plurai, but Ridgeway does not seem to notice Bogan's usage.

" Frank's contention that the dead are "both those who belong to the past, and those who are dead in life" (248) is an attractive compromise position which inchdes within its scope the "actual personalities" Ridgeway abjures. in the same letter Bogan wrote to Zabel desmbing "Exhortation," she told him about

Chapter 5. Page 255

The burden of tradition and the exarnple of her literary forebears is suggested in the

poem by the poet's insistent advice to "Read." Just as "the dead" can be understood to allude to

the short story of the same name by James Joyce, Bogan's mention of "motley" rnay be

interpreted is a gesture to ber Insh heritage - she made a pilgrhage to Ireland in 1937,

immediately afier the publication of The Sfeminn Fun - and the poetry of William Butler Yeats.

In "Easter 1916," the speaker recounts having "met them at close of day / Coming with vivid

faces:"

1 have passed with a nod of the head Or polite meaningless words, Or have lingered awhile. and said Polite meaningless words, And thought before 1 had done Of a mocking tale or a gibe To please a cornpanion Around the fire at the club, Being certain that they and I But lived where motley is worn: Al1 changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.

Bogan, in her less charitable moments, saw only the motley and not the potential for terrible

beauty. She wrote to Humphries a few years later, in 1936, that "what we need is a new race:" "1

think there is no doubt that this generation should be swabbed off the board. For they are sick in

their souls, to a woman and to a man. In miles of streets I did not see one clear, feasible face.

Dead souls, one and all, and 1 remembered the wonderfiil passage in The Waste Land, where

Eliot describes the crowd going over the bridge in the twilight" (WWL 127) Bogan's line, "The

dead, who pass in motley sort," echoes Eliot's "A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, /

1 had not thought death had undone so many."

her daughter Maidie's near death because the woman in the apartment below her room had committed suicide by turning on the gas, and &O about the sudden death of Margaret Wilson, Edmund's wife, of whom she "was very fond" (WWL 68).

Chapter 5. Page 256

Bogan shared the elitism of Yeats and Eliot, the singular distrust of humanity a s a mass

which often translated into a nostalgia for Iess democratic times- Yeats's persona meets the

"vivid faces" of Dublin on their way home fiom worlc, at the end of the day, "among grey /

Eighteenth-century houses." Bogan places "Hypocrite Swift," a poem based on her reading of

Jonathan Swift's Journal to Stella, after "Exhortation," even though its composition was a year

and a half earlier. The successful completion of the poem was a tremendous achievement for

Bogan, written only two weeks afier her admission to The Neurological Institute; she attriiuted

her "rapid recovery, fiom then on" to her renewed sense of self-worth as an artist (WWL 60).

Hypocrite Swift now takes an eldest daughter. He lifts Vanessa's hand. Cudsho, my dove! Drink Wexford ale and quaff down Wexford water But never love.

He buys new caps; he and Lord Stanley ban Hedge-fellows who have neither wit nor swords. He t m s his coat; Tories are in; Queen Anne Makes twelve new lords.

The town mows hay in hell; he swims in the river; His giddiness returns; his head is hot- Berries are clean, while peaches damn the giver (Though grapes do not).

Mrs. Vanhornrigh keeps hirn safe fiom the weather. Referment pulls his periwig askew. Pox takes belittlers; do the willows feather? God keep you-

S tella spells ill; Lords Peterborough and Fountain Talk politics; the Florence wine went sou. Midnight: two dieerent clocks, here and in Dublin Give out the hou. /

On waIls at court, long gilded mirrors gaze- The parquet shines; outside the snow falls deep. Venus, the Muses stare above the maze. Now sleep.

Dream the mixed, fearsome dream. The satiric word

Chapter 5, Page 257

Dies in its horror. Wake, and live by stealth. The bitter quatrain forrns, is here, is heard, 1s wealth.

What care 1; what cares saucy Presto? Stir The bed-clothes; hearten up the penshing fire. Hypocrite Swift sent Stella a green apron And dead desire.

Like "Homunculus," a poem which owed its specific subject matter to Goethe, "Hypocrite Swift"

is highIy allusive and literary, an homage of sorts to a giant in the tradition. Literary a1Iusion is a

means of giving the homunculus "sorne dust of dead content" to "make it live forever." The

"dead" of The Sleeping Fuw include those whom Bogan admired but felt compelled to criticize

and come to tenns with as part of the process of her own deveIopment as a writer. The dialogue

in which she engaged, of self to self, involves a rnirror recognition of those predecessors for

whom she felt an affinity. Swift's Journal 'inung my heart," Bogan told Wilson: "The passion

is so real, so imperfectly dissembled, and the wit is such a strange mixture of roughness and

elegance" (WWL 58). As Frank says, "The blighted ability to love which formed the c m of

Bogan's 193 1 collapse found an echo of its withered voice in the Journal, and, by merging her

own pain with Swift's, or rather detaching it and seeing it as Swift's, she was able to achieve

forgiveness of herself, and understanding" (250). Bogan's repudiation of "the dead" included the

casting off of her old self which was as ready to entrap and betray her as any extemal adversaries

on either side of the grave. After she had become a patient, but before the composition of

"Hypocrite Swift," Bogan wrote apologetically to Wilson about her erratic behaviour in the past:

I have always vaguely suspected that you were the fiend 1 liked best in the world, and that suspicion is now a certainty. And 1 did think that 1 had done something to make you dislike me. In my high sneering and fleering days (now gone forever), 1 did things to many people with that subconscious end in view. . . . You understand now that you have been a great solace to me many tirnes, don? you? And that I've never really sneered and fleered? (as cited by Frank, 13 9)

Chapter 5, Page 258

Bogan did not want to be one of "that senseless tribe / Who cal1 it humor when they jïbe"

abhorred by Swift in his epitaph for himself ("'Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, " 11,465-66). In

laying aside her old "sneering7* personality, Bogan is also able to see those around her with new

eyes. This tirne last week, she goes on to Say, "Everyone was a homile old bloated sneering old

Romanov" like someone out of a. Chekhov play, but ''Today 1 don7t h o w " (139).

Of course, we know that Bogan7s "recoveryyy after her 193 1 breakdown was short-lived,

and that she had to be hospitalized again two years later, "Exhortation" perfectly expresses the

despair and paranoia of her illness at its lowest point. The placement of 'FIypocrite Swift" afier

the bleak "Exhortation," in defiance of strict chronology, demonstrates the poet's ethos as

delineated in "Single Sonnet-" In the sequence of the poems of Part 1 of The Sleeping Furv, the

reader can follow the emotionai preparihon andsrestaging, the statement of artistic conviction

through its successful testing in the face of "a psychic and physical breakdown" which "partook

v. little of fantasy7' (WWL 368).

Part 1 closes with "At a Party," a poem Léonie Adams describes as "demoniac" in its

mood (70). Spirit and flesh take turns speaking, to culminate in what Frank calls "a picture of

secular corruption" (25 1). The first stanza picks up the motif of planetary influence fust

introduced in Dark Summer in "Fiend's Weather:"

Over our heads, if we but h e w , Over our senses, as they reel, The planets tread, great seven, great two, Venus, Uranus, in a wheel.

Over our heads, the planets "tread . . . / in a wheel," a ponderous, monotonous motion suggesthg

a treadmill. Or do they tread "as they reel"? Our senses are what reels - or are they? The

arnbiguity of the syntax allows for both constructions and multiple meanings. To reel is to

"whirl round or aboutyy or "to wheel suddenly." The verb combines the suggestion of rotation, as

Chupter 5. Page 259

of the spheres, with Bogan's obsessive turning-away fkom, or toward. One who reels is aIso one

unsteady, waverïng, swinging violently fkom side to side, staggering from a blow or tottering

because of intoxication, The planets are unreliable and off-course; our senses are careering out

of control. "If we but knew:" chaos reigns above, echoing the turmoil within us. The speaker of

the poem, who after al1 is "at a party," is unsteady on her feet, her senses impaired by dnnk: the

act of looking overhead makes her ccreel."u The word "reel" also suggests the working out of

destiny in the spinning of thread on a spool by Clotho, the Fate who spins the thread of our

existence.24

The reference to "Venus, Uranus" in "At a Party" signifies the eternal embrace of

masculine and ferninine, wheeling and locked like Dante's lovers Paolo and Franscesca, and

reinforces the role of the goddess as muse in The Sleeping Fury. Urania was one of the Muses,

daughter of Zeus by Mnemosyne. "Venus, Uranus" can be understood to represent the yin / yang

of female and male (Venus as goddess of love, Uranus as sky god, father of the Titans), but if so

we rnight wonder why Bogan situates Venus in opposition to Uranus rather than Gaia, who is his

wife and also the earth, Venus was originally a minor Roman goddess of spring and gardens who

later became identified with the Greek Aphrodite, associated with love and sexuality. Her

presence as muse throughout The Slee~ing: Furv is, we find, unobtnisive but sure. "Venus, the

Muses stare above the maze" in "Hypocrite Swift." In a subsequent poem which reads like a

hymn ("Evening Star," the closing lyric of Part m), Venus is quietly praised. Bogan echoes

Lucretius, who commences De Rerum Natura which a rnagnificent apostrophe to Venus in which

Yet another rneaning of "reef" calls to mind both the sound and motion of the dance. A reel usually involves two couples facing each other, descriiing a series of figures of eight; it is formal, but also exceptionaliy liveiy. The music o f the spheres is not what the speaker hem, try as she might. The cosmic dance of the planets envisioned by Renaissance thinkers is f i e r al1 a more restrained and refined affair than the revel of a jig.

24 The other two sisters Moirae (Latin Parcae, the Fates) are Lachesis, who assigus to humans the term of their iives and Atropos, who breaks tbat thread.

Chapfer 5, Page 260

she is ceIebrated as the creative, viviS,g force of Nature, the source of life and strength in al1

tl~ings.~' in Plato's Svmr>osium the dual role of Aphrodite, Greek counterpart to Venus, is

considered at Iength, and -£rom that text we Iearn that there are two goddesses of love: Aphrodite

Ouranus (the heavenly Aphrodite) and Aphrodite Pandemus (the earthly Aphrodite). Urania

(Ouranus) was the "sumame" of the heavenly Aphrodite, who "spning fkom no mother's womb

but fiom the heavens themselves," from the foam of Uranus. Like Goethe's homunculus, she

was conceived fiom spem alone, and thus has a "father" but no rn~ther.'~

Spirit speaks in the first stanza of "At a Party" (Frank 250), but Bogan undercuts its

naive pro testations of cosmic order, remembrance of hermaphroditic bliss (be fore the Fall), and

invocation of the heavenly Venus with an energetic response fiom cynical flesh. The odd,

bracketed phrase "(and let the flesh speak out)" reveals the voice which silences the spirit to be

that of the poet herself acting as stem moderator of the debate between ber two opposing sides:

Spirit, (and let the flesh speak out) Be still. To make this moment mine Al1 matter fa& into a rout; Both art and u s i u y combine.

And each bright syrnbol of their power Speaks of my triumph, and your fall. Step forth, then, malice, wisdom's guide, And enmity, that may Save us ail.

In Plato's text, the earthly Venus is identified with the deceitfùl. Because those who are inspired

'5 See Harry Thurston Peck's discussion in the Harper Dictionarv of Classical Antisuities (1643).

' 6 Pausanias, who is the one arguing the point in The Swioosium, even goes so far as to suggest that the attri'butes of Aphrodite Ouranus "have nothing of the ferde, but are altogether male" for the love she inspires is of the intellectual and spiritual rather than the physical(537). The homoerotic implications of this passage are extensive, but my emphasis here is the elevation in Plato's text of the mascdine over the feminine. In Plato's writings, women were entireIy dismissed, significant only as representative of inferiority. Feminists have contested the usefulness of the androgyne myth as li'berating or pernicious to women. Julia Esteva, in a provocative reading of The S m o s i u m and Phaedrus, denounces the androgyne as "the sliest masquerade of a liquidation of femininity" (as cited by MacLeod, 17).

Chapter 5. Page 261

by her love what is changeable, they themselves are also: "as soon as the body he loves begins to

pass the k s t flower of its beauty, he 'spreads his wings and flies away,' gîving the lie to al1 his

pretty speeches and dishonoring his vows" (537). This kind of love promotes chaos, rather than

the binding of the elements and the ûiurnph over discordance achieved by Aphrodite Ouranus,

Eryximachus, another participant of the symposium, explains that "mischief and destruction" are

al1 "due to the uncontrolled and acquisitive in that great system of Love which the astronomer

observes when he investigates the movements of the stars and the seasons of the yeaî' (541). In

"At a Party," the flesh argues that matter falling into a rout effectively "make[s] tbs moment

mine." The bright symbols (stars and planets) can thus be interpreted as forecasting the triumph .

of flesh rather than of spirit.

Part II: "Then there is tlteperiodoffirttierdespair, edged in upon by the pen'od of Beautz3l Males. - . "

Plato's title could be interchanged with Bogan's: a symposium was a Greek term for a drinking

Party. The enjoyment of dnnking was the main object of syrnposia, with wine being the

beverage of choice. RiddIing was the one of the most usual and favourite modes of diversion."

Guests were crowned with flowers and shared a cup. As Bogan described it, the period of

"despair, neurosis and alcoholism" reflected in Part 1 of The Sleeping Furv is extended and

M e r developed in Part II, toasted in its first poem with "To Wine," a companion piece to "At a

Party."

Cup, ignorant and cruel,

27 "Each of the company proposed [a riddle] in turn to his right-hand neighbour, if he solved it, he was rewarded with a crown, a garland, a cake, or something or a similar kind, and sometimes with a kiss; if he failed, he had to dnnk a cup of unmixed wine, or of wine mixed with salt water, at one draught" (Peck 151 1-12).

Chapter 5. Page 262

Take fiom the mandate, love, Its urgency to prove Unfaith, renewal.

Take fiom the mind its loss: The lipless dead that lie Face upward in the earth, S trong hand and slender thigh; Return to the vein Al1 that is worth Grief. Give. that beat again.

In "At a Party," we sense that the speaker in her divided self is at least slightly intoxicated; here

she confirms the suspicion with bellicose ferocity. Wine was not used in the libations offered to

the Aphrodite Ouranus (Peck 1629). By inciting chaos, and welcoming wine, the speaker is

tuniing her back in angry disgust on Venus in either of her personae: the heavenly Venus is not

tangibly present, the earthly Venus too urgently so. "Take Erom the mandate, love," she insists,

and take with it the memory of loss and death. Like Eliot's Webster in bbWhispers of

Irnrnortality," the speaker remembers the "lipless dead that lie / Face upward in the earth," those

"breastless creatures under ground" leaning '%ackward with a lipless grin." In "Hypocrite

Swift," the "Florence wine went sour," and "The satiric word / Dies in its horror."

"To Wine" is an appropriate first poem to the second section of the volume, "edged in"

as it is "by the period of Beautifid Males." Tt is followed by two poems exploring the experience

of physical love vis à vis the vocation of poetry. "Poem in Prose," the first of these, is about

capturing in words the object of her love.*' The poet is ironically proud that she cannot so easily

"put mm] down" or "give mm] out:"

1 tumed fkom side to side, from image to image, to put you down,

28 Citing Bogan's notebooks fiom the period as her evidence, Frank daims that "Poem in Prose" is about a love affair the poet was having with a man fiom Boston, a librarian of Jewish European background.

Chapter 5. Page 263

Al1 to no purpose; for you the rhymes would not ring - Not for you, beautiful and ridiculous, as are always the true inheritors of love, The bearers; their strong hair moulded to theu foreheads as though by the

pressure of hands. It is you that rnust sound in me secretly for the little time before my rnind,

schooled in desperate esteem, forgets you - And it is my virtue that 1 cannot give you out, That you are absorbed into my strength, my mettle, That in me you are matched, and that it is silence which cornes fiom us.

The act of wrïting the poem is the subject, not the lover. While the poet seems to regret that she

is forced from the precision of poetry to the less disciplined medium of prose, she €mds solace in

the "silence" which anses out of the matching of male and female. That dialogic tension which

leads io imbalance and forces speech does not exist between the two. Their union recreates the

primordial condition of Plato's third sex, the hemaphrodite, a male 1 female combination which

supposedly existed in such harrnony that the jealousy of the gods was aro~sed.'~ The poet

congratulates herself in the "virttie" of her failure to compose a formally constructed poern, but at

the same time achowledges that she will in tirne forget the lover. He "must sound in ber]

secretly" for a time, allowing her a delicious interva1 of peace under water, secure in the shell of

his protection fiom the buffeting open air. As we know fiom "Henceforth," however, her mind

must eventually again take precedence and control. The retreat to the unconscious is therapeutic,

much like the rest cure of the sanitarium, but the poet's Iife is tied to the "desperate esteem" she

derives fiom her autonomy, her work, her identity as a wrïter.

Poems such as "Exhortation" assume an instructional, peremptory note, testifjnng to the

'9 When Aristophanes takes his tum in Plato's Symposium, he recounts the story of how "in the beginning we were nothing like we were now." There were three sexes: male (descended fiom the Sun), female (descended ftom the Earh), and the globular-shaped hermaphrodite (descended korn the Moon). The hermaphrodites posed a problem for the gods because of their arrogance, strength, and energy. Zeus decided to "cut them aii in halfjust as you or 1 might chop up sorb apples for pickling, or slice an egg with a hair." The work of bisection resulted in each haif having a "desperate yeaniing" for the other, so much so that the race was dying out in sorrow. Zeus thus moved their genitals fiom the backs of their bodies around to the front , so that the two could conjugate and, temporaily at least, become one again. (542-44)

Chapter 5, Page 264

poet's inclination to lecture herself, to regard her being as consisting of competing impulses and

thus requiring vigilant supervision and constant direction. In "Short Surnrnary," she again adopts

a didactic tone,

As in "Poem in

chastising her "tiresome" self even as she seems to address her lover:

Listen but once to the words wrîtten out by my hand lin the long line fit only for giving ease To the tiresome heart. 1 Say: Not again shall we stand Under green trees.

Prose," the speaker draws attention to the construction of the lyric as artifice, as

well as its failure as formal poetry. The long line is Iax, loose, "fit only for giving ease / To the

tiresome heart." Already the.time of eating lotuses is over. "Listen, but once" and hear a short

summary of the interval of paradisal unity - of lover and beloved, of the divided self - which al1

the time, she acknowledges~now, consisted of a tremulous, tenuous balance of conflicting

opposites doomed to an eventual slide into discord on the "tilting air" descnied in "Fifieenth

Farewell:"

How we stood, in the early season, but the end of day, In the yes of new light, but at the hirice-lit hou, Seeing at one time the shade deepened al1 one way And the breaking flower;

Hearing at one time the sound of the night-fall's reach And that checked breath bound to the mouth and caught Back to the mouth, closing its mocking speech: . . .

The speaker reflects that the wondefil "siIence which cornes fiorn us" was to some extent the

result of restraint, or - at least - it became that, the catching of words in the throat, the resistance

of mocking speech. The moment of in-betweenness which partakes both of early (season) and

late (day), at the hour both eesh ("new") and revisited ("twice-lit"), is a moment of rest between

motion on either side, and is thus magical. As on Keats's urn, the balance is perfect, but for that

reason al1 the more poignantly evocative of the change which must follow. There is also the

Chaprer 5, Page 265

sense of opportunity rnissed, as if - in Eliot's words - '%human kind / Cannot bear very much

reality" ("Burnt Norton"). Between idea and realiv, between motion and action, between male

and female, falls the shadow of our failure to embrace the necessary risk to achieve an

impossl'ble integrity:

Between the conception And the creation Between the emotion And the response Falls the Shadow

Between the desire And the spasm Between the potency And the existence Between the essence And the descent Falls the Shadow ("The Hollow Men")

Bogan's poern closes with the expected fa11 into division:

Soon to dark's mid-most pitch the divided light Ran. The balance fell, and we were not there. It was early season; it was the verge of night; It was our Iand; It was evening air.

The split of her herrnaphroditic integrity into separateness - the two solitudes of male and

female, forever afierward incornplete and yearning each toward the other - is a kind of fa11 fiom

grace, a notion centrai to the creationist mythmaking of William Blake. Like Blake, Bogan

imagined the hell of "Fiend's Weather7' to be the afiermath of a world gone wrong,

Ridgeway, unfortunately confüsing "'Virtue" and "desperate esteem" and blaming her

muddle on the poet, States her opinion that "'Poern in Prose' doesn't ring true . . . ; the meaning

is unconsciously dishonest." "'Short Summary' is much better," she argues, as "It is musical and

Chapfer 5, Page 266

unified in feeling and thought," Ridgeway notes without explaining the relevance ber

observation that the 'long line fit o d y for giving ease" is present in "Poem in Prose" but not in

fact in "Short Summary," where it is mentioned (85-86). The point Ridgeway makes, without

seeming to realize it, is that the two poems are linked by the hinge of that reference- When the

poet announces at the beginning of "Short Sumrnary" that the reader is to "Listen but once," she

refers as much to the lines just concluded, of "Poem in Prose," as to the lines to come. The two

poems must be read in sequence, for the second counters, answers, and completes the first.

"Short Sumrnary" speaks irnmediately after the silence imposed by the last Iine of "Poem in

Prose," a breath-taking visually corûïrmed by the white space which insists on a pause before the

next poem is approached: the hesitation of the white space, the self-conscious silence, is

important to the rhythm of the reading of the two poems together. It is matched by the "dark's

rnid-most pitch" of the concluding lines which oppose it on the facing page, its rnirror image.

Like Ridgeway, DeShazer finds no relevance in the ordering. Working backwards, she

reads the first three lines of "Short Surnmary" as a means to introduce "Poem in Prose" and her

own extended consideration of Bogan's "central image of silence or thwarted speech" (55).

Colosurdo also takes "Poem in Prose" out of context in order to highlight Bogan's "creative

failure" as signified by silence. Interestingly, "Short Summary" was in fact written first, a few

weeks before "Poem in Pr~se , ' "~ so both critics have chronology on their side, but the placement

of the poems is surely deliberate and aesthetic rather than simply biographical. By neglecting to

understand the poetry of "Short SLmmary" as a response to the silence invoked by its "prequel,"

the poet's meaning is misrepresented and the totality of her vision obscured. As Frank suggests,

reading the two poems together shows "that formal poetry, among other things, was for Bogan a

30 This is clear fkom Bogan's letiers. "Short S w 7 was evidently written in July 1934, and "Poem in Prose" one month later @%T, 79-8 1).

Cizapter 5, Page 267

medium for separating and differentia~g herself from persons and situations, and for concluding

attachrnents and times of life" (252). Frank speculates m e r :

Perhaps, then, Bogan's obsession with betrayal had another source, one deep within herself, in that poeiry in form must always have required fiom her a severing, a repudiation of union with the object, or the person, who had driven her to utterance. To form attachments was thus hazardous, for the very feelings they produced would lead, as it were, to the need to write poetry, and poetry, if it was to be what Bogan took for poetry, inevitably exacted some form of emotional violence toward the attachrnent. (252-53)

"Italian Morning," according to Frank, was an attempt "To break the guilt and the grief

of these laws" by loosening the hold of form (253). Bogan wrote the poem many-months after

her return corn travel in Europe on the Guggenheim fellowship. She was excited at her

achievement, calling it "the best poem 1 have -done in years" and anticipating its inclusion in an

anthology of fernale verse would "raise the tone of the whole thing" (WWL 86).

Half circle's corne before we know. Full in the falling arc, we hem .

Our heel give earth a lonely blow, We place the hour and name the year.

High in a room long since designed For our late visit under night, We sleep: we wake to watch the Iined Wave take strange walls with counterfeit light,

The big magnolia, like a hand, Repeats our fl esh. (O bred to love, Gathered to silence!) In a land Thus garnished, there is time enough

To Pace the rooms where painted swags Of Fuit and flower in pride depend, Stayed as we are not. The hour wags Deliberate, and great arches bend

In long perspective past our eye. Mutable body, and bnef narne, Confkont, against an eady sky,

Chapter 5, Page 268

This marble herb, and this stone flame.

The first stanza of "Italian Morning" hearkens back to "Winter Swan," the poem which

introduces Dark Summer, and the lines "It is a hollow garden, under the cloud; / Beneath the heel

a hollow earth is turned." "Half circ2eYs corne;" half a year has gone by. It is now sunmer, the

poet recalling her Guggenheim visit to Italy - at its conclusion, when her daughter was with her -

and the two hear their "heel" giving to the hollow earth "a lonely blow." A s in "At a Party," the

wheeling rnovement of the planets, the rotation of the world and tirne, are evoked with a sense of

aclmowledgment of fate and inevitable circurnstance. The haif circle also refers to the passing of

hours on the clock, in a "falling arc" toward evening, Time of day, and time of year, are narned

and placed in the opening stanza, The coIlective "heel," which takes the plural form of the verb

"give," draws attention to itself. A "'heel" is of course a part of the foot, but the term also applies

to the latter or concluding part of a period of time, or of a book or writing (OED). As the visit to

Europe cornes to a close, the heel of the sojourn reminds of endings of al1 kinds, and ironically

fures the image in the arnber of memory at a particular place and time.

"ltalian Moming" sets in contrast the "Mutable body, and brief name" of the poet, her

flesh as living flower ' k e d to love," with the "painted swags / Of k i t and flower," the "marble

herb" and "stone flame" of Roman art. The poem repeats the antithesis of 'Winter Swan" of the

"leaf-caught world" and the proud swan-poet, but here the speaker does not forecast Cassandra

doomed to sacrifice; rather, she is sirnply awestruck by the enduring expression al1 around her of

artists past, and of her own finite opportunily and ability. She is humbled, but also excited. The

room was designed for her. The pattern of sleeping and waking echoes "Hypocrite Swift," and

the poet's sense of identification with her great forebears is evident in, for exarnple, the echoes of

Marvell ("world enough and time") and Eliot ("indeed there will be time") in the line "there is

time enough." In a poem written a few months after "'Italian Morning," Bogan confessed with

characteristic satlric humour her yearning for greatness and dignity. She joked with Wilson in a

letter that she wrote the poem after reading the "opus" of fellow poet Genevieve Taggard, whose

"new gag is being and becoming a second Ernily Dickinson" (WWL 82):

Lines Written After Detecting in Myself a Yearning Toward the Large, Wise, Calm, Richly Resigned, Baignant Act Put on by a Great Many People M e r Having

Passed the Age of Thirty-Five.

For every great sou1 who died in his house and his wisdom Several did otherwise. God, keep me fiom the fat heart that looks vaing1oriously toward peace and maturity Protect me not from lies. In T ' y infinite certitude, tendemess and mercy Ailow me to be sick and wel, So that 1 may never tread with swollen foot the calrn and obscene intentions That pave hell, Shakespeare, Milton, Matthew Arnold died in their beds, Dante above the stranger's stair. They were not absolved ~ o m either the courage or the cowardice With which they bore what they had to bear. Swift died blind, deaf arid mad; Socrates died in his cell; Baudelaire died in his drool; Proving no rule.

Years later, Bogan reduced this poem to four lines for publication as "To an Artist, To Take

Heart. "3 ' With "Man Alone," the second section of The Slee~inn Furv cornes to a close, and the

"Beautiful Males" make their exit.

It is yourse1f you seek In a long rage, Scanning through light and darkness Mirrors, the page,

31 Slipping in blood, by his own hand, through pride, Hamiet, Otheilo, Coriolanus faii, Upon his bed, however, Shakespeare died, Having endured them di.

Chapter 5. Page 7 0

Where should reflected be Those eyes and that thick hair, That passionate look, that laughter, You shouId appear

Within the book, or doubled, Freed, in the silvered glass; Into al1 other bodies Yourself should pas.

The giass does not dissolve; Like walls the M o r s stand; The printed page gives back Words by another hand,

And your infatuate eye Meets not itself below: Strangers lie in your arms As 1 lie now.

The vanity of the speaker's lover is such that he regards her poetry as a mirror, within which he

seeks his own image," In doing so he betrays hm, and not only because his attitude diminishes

the worth and autonomy of her work: his double, should it appear in her pages, would be "Freed"

somehow into a virtual prorniscui~ - "Into al1 other bodies / Yourself should pass." Absurdly,

he expects to see his own imprint on the page, as if his own "hand" participated in the

authorship. The poet resists the pressure of his intent; the woman withdraws f?om his betrayal.

We lmow fiom "Single Sonnet" that her poetic rnethod involves a bending to her own will the

mould of the stanza to achieve the transfer of the burden of love. As she implies here, the

transformïng act of creation renders the subject no longer theirs, and m e r , the product no

'' Carly Simon's 1970s pop song "You're So Vain" ("You're so vain I You probably think this song is about you") simdarly explores the fnistrated response of a female artist to her narcissistic male lover.

Chapter 5. Page 271

longer even hers: 'The printed page gives back / Words by another h~ind."~~ In "Poern in Prose,"

she speaks of her inability to "give mm] out," and yet in "Short Surnmary" she is able to. Once

the image is found, its source and inspiration are no longer recognizable: the individual is

translated into the syrnbolic. The vain lover seeks in vain to find in her words a reflection of

their relationslip, for al1 has been changed to poetry - the sonnet has taken the weight. The hard

fact of his search has reflected back on the lovers, and changed in turn what they once had. They

are now strangers, divided by the walls of the pages-

"Man Alone" is thus "about male narcissism" - as Frank concisely describes it (255) -

and a comment on the exclusivity of the domains of sexual love and art. The ostensible subject

of the poem is the betraying lover, but the betrayal of the speaker becomes evident in the last

stanza. Frank's analysis of Bogan's destructive cycle of loving, writing, rejecting in order to

write, loving in order to reject in order to write, explains the shift in emphasis. The poet here

congratulates herself as, with self-conscious Latinate sublimity, she castigates the "infatuate eye"

of her lover. She is passive yet distant in her lover's arms at the close of the poem, triumphant in

her feigned acquiescence to his embraces. Her position in relation to his, "below," implies not

only their sexual posture as they lie together, but as well her angry, repressed feelings which she

keeps silent, below the surface, biding her time as she condones the representation of herself as

mastered, subjugated, fernale.

33 111 her study of the literature of the looking glass, Jenijoy La BeUe refers briefly to "Man Alone." For Bogan, she contends, the acts of writing and looking into rnirrors were twinned activities, both "atternpts to create the self without another person literaily present" (155). Mirrors present walls which resist penetration; words, aIso, have an othemess to them.

Chap fer 5, Page 2 72

Part III: "?%en the spiritual side begins, with a fm m b l e s fiom the sensual bassoons and the rnysticjiddIes. "

The antfiology of female verse Bogan intended "Italian Morning" for was the volume she herself

had been originally asked by Malcolm Cowley to edit for The New Re~ublic. As she caustically

told Wheelock, "1 turned this pretty job down; the thought of correspondhg with a lot of femaIe

songbirds made me acutely i11. It is hard enough to bear with m y own lyric side" (WWL 86).

The task was taken on by one Hildegarde Flanner, who then wrote to Bogan requesting "an

immediate contriiution." Bogan wanted to send her "swell lyric" - "Italian M~rnuig'~ - "as a

kind of proud gesture against the Malcolm Cowleys, the Kenneth Burkes and the Bruce Blivens

of this world" ( W A X 86). The poem as "proud gesture" echoes the sentiment of "Winter Swan,"

("But spe& you proud!") and expresses the poet's entwined feelings of superiority and

inferioriq. "Italian Morning" is hardly the typical "female songbüd" sort of lyric Bogan saw to

be the constraining, delimiting expectation of women poets in the 1930s - one she refked to

accommodate. "Never shall 1 give the feminine sonneteers any cornpetition," she affirrned with

energy.

In the same letter to Wheelock, Bogan mentions another poem she had just composed,

"Baroque Comment." "It has some really beautifil lines in it, but it isn't a Iyric," she noted:

From loud sound and still chance; From mindless earth, wet with a dead million leaves; From the forest, the empty desert, the tearing beasts, The kelp-disordered beaches; Coincident with the lie, anger, lust, oppression and death in many forms:

h a m e n t a l stmctures, continents apart, separated by seas; Fitted marble, swung bells; fruit in garlands as well as on the branch; The flower at last in bronze, stretched backward, or curled within; Stone in vanous shapes: beyond the pyramid, the contnved arch and the buttress; The narned constellations; Crown and vesture; palm and Iaurel chosen as noble and enduring; Speech proud in sound; death considered sacrifice;

Chap fer 5, Page 2 73

Mask, weapon, uni; the ordered strings; Fountains; foreheads under weather-bleached ha* The wreath, the oar, the tool, The prow; The tumed eyes and the opened mouth of love.

"Baroque Comment7' sounds the opening of Part III as weighty, serious, masculine. The entire

poem is one long sentence, the first stanza setting the violent conditions of war and oppression,

which sornehow, inexplicably, have allowed for and perhaps even ironically prornoted the

elaborate, ornamental art of Italy. Bogm's theme in The Sleeping: Fwy of the "dead we live

arnong" is reiterated in the connection between the enduring beauty of art with the passing show

of physicaI existence. Flower is captured in bronze, but the frozen form at once foreshadows its

death and remernbers the pain of its conception: "stretched backward" like Eliot's "breastless

creatures under ground" or "curled within'' Iike a child in a womb. The aesthetic, erotic, and

spiritual impulses which came together in the creation of these works are alluded to in the last

Iine, a reference to Bernini's St. Theresa. Bogan's admiration for Italian art is reminiscent of

Goethe's; as he had done, she ven t a period of her life in that country which strongly marked her

aesthetic outlook. She became even more sculpturally inclined, aware of mass and volume -

counter influences, it would seem, to the "short cry" of lyric which she professed was her true

talent (JAR 9 1).

"To My Brother," subtitled "Killed: Haumont Wood: October, 19 18," '' follows,

confirming the poet's tough-rninded, anti-songbird stance. Bogan could not remember when she

had written it; she was reminded of its existence by Humphries, who found it written out in an

old letter she had sent hirn years before. Its deliberate placement immediately followïng

"Baroque Comment'' keeps the subject of war before her readers.

34 The subtitle was later absorbed into the title in CoiIected Poems and The BIue Estuaries.

Chapter 5, Page 2 74

O you so long dead, You masked and obscure, 1 c m tell you, al1 things endure: The wine and the bread;

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

The hay-stacks cut through Iike loaves And the hundred flowers fiorn the seed; Ml things indeed Though struck by the hooves

Of disaster, of time due, Of fell loss and gain, Al1 things remain, 1 can tell you, this is true.

Though burned down to Stone Though lost fkom the eye, 1 can tell you, and not lie, - Save of peace alone.

What endures, the poet insists, is hurnan nature, variously manifested. Peace is an impossible

union of elements which can be attained only to be lost again.

"Roman Fountain" - the next in sequence in Part III - is one of the best of the poems

Bogan wrote at this time. It is remuiiscent of "The Flurne" in its description of the force, shape,

and sheer size of the flow of the water; but here there is no fear of madness, only admiration of

magnificence:

Up fiom the bronze, 1 saw Water without a flaw Rush to its rest in air, Reach to its rest, and fall.

Bronze of the blackest shade, An element man-made, Shaping upright the bare Clear gouts of water in air.

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O, as with arm and hammer, Still it is good to strive To beat out the image whole, To echo the shout and stamrner When fill-gushed waters, alive, Stnke on the fountain's bowl After the air of summer.

The virile energy of "Roman Fountain" is evident not only in the gush and shape of the spray, but

as well in the arm and the hammer beating out the poetic image; the harnmer, endowed with the

mystic power of creation, is one of many tools associated in drearns and folklore with the phallus

(Cirlot 137, KIeinbard 178)). In "Baroque Comment7' the poet celebrates "The wreath, the oar,

the tool, / The prow:" the contrast of phallic instrument and ferninine medium (water) is

rnaintained in al1 but the fkst of these images. The Gerrnan poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whose

work Bogan expressed great admiration for in this period (her twin passions in the summer of

193 5 were Rilke and Roethke), also used the syrnbol of the "tool" when writing about the penod

he served as secretary to the sculptor August Rodin. Rilke described Rodin in the way Bogan

regarded Goethe, as the master of an immensity of work, continually growing. Michelangelo he

called "the man, gigantic beyond measure, who forgot the immeasurable," who - unlike those

who came before him - "feels only life's mass" (cited by Kleinbard 118). Both Rilke and Bogan

were fascinated by the art of sculpture, perhaps finding in the struggle of the sculptor to shape

and refine solid stone or marble a physicality and tangibility facking in their own struggle with

abstract language, an omnipotence which they longed to attain.

Bogan's admiration of the "fùll-gushed waters" striking on the fountain's bowl would

seem to suggest a sirnilar desire for masculine potency and mastery. According to Camille

Paglia, erection and ejaculation represent a man's unique capacity for the concentration and

projection necessary to art, and male urination is a way of making one's mark on the wotld, an

arc of transcendence (20-21). Rilke wrote that his own lack of the essential gifts which he

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attniuted to Rodin impeIIed him to try to discover "the tool of my art, the hammer, my hammer,

so that it may becorne mster" (cited by Kleinbard, 178). In a letter to Humphries, Bogan

explained her original choice of "thick" instead of "clear" gouts of water:

Clear wouid be better before gouts; 1'11 change it. 1 wanted to get thick in, because the point about the fountains of Rome is, that there's so much water in thern- None of your piddling little streams- Big gushes as thick as your arrn, simply leaping up and scattering around; making a lovely big strong noise; rushing up like whole rivers- Great big bronze gents with great big bronze cornucopias or shells, or something, on their shoulders, and fkom that, great, enormous thick jumping water, (WWL, 91)

In accepting Humphries's advice of "clear" over "thick," Bogan lost the echo of Coleridge's

"Kubla Khan," a poem about the unconscious processes of creativity and inspiration in which the

"thick pants" of the breathing earth also erupt into a "rnighty fountain." "Roman Fountain" c m be

read as a grand proclamation of Bogan's repressed (masculine) poetic purpose, a demand for

recognition of the virility and power of her feelings and the authonty of her voice. But Bogan

found this aggressive stance difficult to maintain, and ultimately foreign to her nature. Despite

her evident fascination with the "great big bronze cornucopias or shells" and the "great,

enormous thick jumping water," she concludes "To hell with that poern, It's minor, al1 Save the

The title poern of The Sleeping Furv follows "Roman Fountain," although in subsequent

collections the order of the two was reversed. Although "The Sleeping Fury" was completed in

1936, it was outlined in prose several months earlier and ftom the beginning was planned as the

book's centrepiece. Bogan told Wheelock, "The title poem should be rather long for me, and it

will be in carefüIly written quatrains, with, 1 trust, a good strong ring to them, and that will pull

the book together at the center" (cited by Frank, 257). At first, she managed only one quatrain:

Now it is time to .II of the fury sleeping: Having seen so much of both the living and the dead; Having turned so much between the heard and the said;

Chap fer 5. Page 277

Having suffered so much between the heart and its keeping.

These four Iines summarize with simple grace the fust half of The Sleepinn Furv: the "living and

the dead" have paraded before our view, as the dual and dueling selves in dialogue have

altmately spoken and listened, ever tuming and retuming, moving away fiom the heart, then

toward it, and once again away. At this point, the "narrator" of what we now realize is an

emerging " S ~ O I Y ~ ~ judges the time to be right to tell about the volume's subject, the Fury asleep

and childlike. The poem grew over tirne to the several stanzas Bogan had anticipated:

You are here now, Who were so loud and feared, in a syrnbol before me, Alone and asleep, and 1 at last look long upon you.

Your hair faIlen on your cheek, no longer in the semblance of serpents, Lifted in the gale; your mouth, that shrieked so, silent. You, my scourge, my sister, lie asleep, Iike a child, Who, after rage, for an hour quiet, sleeps out its tears.

The days close to winter Rough with strong sound. We hear the sea and the forest, And the flames of your torches fly, lit by others, Ripped by the wind, in the night. The black sheep for sacrifice Huddle together. The milk is cold in the jars.

Al1 to no purpose, as before, the h i f e whetted and plunged, The shout raised, to match the clamor you have given them, You alone turn away, not appeased; unaltered, avenger.

Hands fil1 of scourges, wreathed with your flames and adders You alone tumed away, but did not move from my side, Under the broken light, when the soft nights took the torches.

At thin morning you showed, thick and wrong in that calm, The ignoble dream and the mask, sly, with slits at the eyes, Pretence and half-sorrow, beneath which a coward's hope trembled.

You uncovered at night, in the locked stillness of houses, False love due the child's heart, the kissed-out lie, the ernbraces, Made by the two who for peace tenderly turned to each other.

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Simrnons remarks that "Bogan's life lies whole in the seventh stanza: the 'false love due a childys

heart,' the 'kissed-out lie,' the two 'who for peace tenderly tumed to each other,' record in a kind

of shorthand the drastic hopes and self-sacrifices that comprise Bogan's experience of love"

(18 1). According to Bowles, the poet "brought together in a single powerfiil symbol her war

with her mother and the child in herself' in ''The Sleeping Fury" (1 16). Frank agrees that here

"Bogan achieved psychic reconciliation with her mother" and that "the poem was as

autobiographical as any Bogan ever wrote, . . . as strong an act of mastery over the facts of the

poetys existence as she was ever to put into poetry" (260):'

In "Man Alone," the speaker repudiates the vaniw of her lover, who seeks bis image in

her poetry as in a mirror-. Ironically, like Perseus, he is protected f?om reality by that mirror; he

could see there - if he wished to - the reflection of the speaker's Gorgon self. It is Medusa who

is in danger from the gaze, not Perseus. He has a lying nature - he wears the mask descriied in

"The Sleeping Fury," "sly, with slits at the eyes": he looks to the speaker's words not to find

truth but rather false beauty as an extension of himçelf. In this poem, the speaker delineates with

some care her own double, her "scourge" and "sister," who does not move fiom her side, who is

both her child self and mother-other. The Fury shows, in the morning, the "ignoble dream and

the mask," the lie: she might be the one wearing the mask, or the one who reveals another to be

wearing it - the meaning, because of the ambiguity of the verb "show," allows for both sides of

the story, either side of the mask, The act of uncovering of the next stanza impIies again

reveIation and brutal honesty, but also the reverse of the act of putting the child to bed - not

covering, but uncovering the child, ironically exposing it to danger and deceit. Throughout the

poem the speaker describes a Janus-face like the two-sided h i t of ''The Crossed Apple," one

'' Barbara Sbapiro argues that the finest of the Romantic poets reveals the efforts of the raging, destructive self to overcome its attachent to the mother, "to give the woman back her wholeness, her separate reality, and thereby to make itself whole" (130).

Chapter 5, Page 2 79

which is her own and not hers, forever turning and returning, light into darkness and into light

again with the changing of night to morning to night.

You who know what we love, but drive us to know it; You with your whips and shrieks, bearer of truth and solitude; You who give, unlike men, to expiation your mercy.

Dropping the scourge when at last the scourged advances to meet it, You, when the hunted tms, no longer remain the hunter But stand silent and wait, at last returning his gaze-

Beautifil now as a child whose hair, wet with rage and tears Clings to its face. And now 1 may look upon you, Having once met your eyes- You lie in sleep and forget me. Alone and strong in my peace, 1 look upon you in yours.

The c i rchg mediation of the poem closes with the speaker's acceptance - of the past which

informs her present and of her divided nature. She embraces her "other" and, by doing so, finds

peace. The Fury, her double, has been at last integrated: she meets '?iis" gaze and the two are

reconciled.

Bogan slips the masculine possessive pronoun in unobtmsively. Readers of the poem

either do not notice, or choose not to comment; Cheryl Walker is the exception when she notes in

passing the transformation of the hunted fi-om female to male, rnarkuig it as "interesting" and

apparently attributable to the process of achieving mental serenity (1 87). The scourges of the

Fury link her to the Great Mother goddess, masculinized by the presence of snakes wound about

her arms and body, prominent in primitive cultures (Paglia 44). Ancient Greek vegetation &es

included whipping to increase fertility and drive out evil spirits (44). Certainly the Fury engages

in a bloody violence wfiich heralds a masculinity in its role as hunter, its knife whetted (wetted)

and plunged. The liquid, phallic thrust of "Roman Fountain" is repeated, but now viewed from

the dark side of Janus; the sculpter's tool carves flesh, not Stone. The scenes of the poem (forest

at night, sheep ready for sacrifice, the shout of the crowd) are rerniniscent of the bloody, orgiastic

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cult of Dionysius, an illegitimate son of Zeus who was raised in disguise as a girl to protect him

ffom the anger of Hem, and who came to be associated with water, rnilk, blood, Sap, honey, and

wine.fs In the Iight of this poem, the revelling speaker(s) of "At a Party" and "To Wine" cm be

understood to have been seeking spiritual regeneration,

The hunter, the Fury, is the speaker's "sister," who - "unlike men" - gives to expiation

her mercy, who does not remain hunter when the hunted fmally turns to face her but c m only

"stand silent and wait, at last returning his gaze." The situation of "For a Mamiage" IDS) is

ironically replayed: the woman here "gives most dangerous sight" to her husband by revealing to

him her cruel and violent nature, the "sullen other blade" of her "barbed heart." While there are

three Furies (sisters), we h o w fkom Bogan's worksheets for the poem that she had in rnind

Megaera, the Fury representing sema1 jealousy (Frank 258). The "he" who is hunted is thus both

the beloved "hart" pursued in Renaissance courtly love poetry and deadly Perseus facing the

doomed Gorgon. He is the artist quester of "A Tale" who seeks what endures but finds, at the

close of the poem, the other, the female. He is also the poet's rational, worldly side, the superego

which exists in eternal contradistinction to the ferninine unconscious, the Epicurean equilibrium

promoted by Lucretius which outlasts the buffeting and beating of emotional turmoil and sexual

passion. In another manuscript version of the poern, the lines "You, this scorner, this sister /

Driving insane, because your purpose was hidden" (cited by Ridgeway, 92) reveal Bogan's

determination to leave behind her "high sneenng and fleering days" and the dark motivation

behind them. "The Sleeping Fury" is a celebration of the achievement of mahirity at great cost.

Bogan is relieved she can at last put the "puling child" of her infantile needs to bed.

The persecution of Dionysus at the han& of his "stepmother" was so great that he was thought to die annuaiiy, yet each spring be reborn. When he was a young man, Hera drove him insane; the mad, intoxicated god wandered amund the world, followed by bands of female foiiowers (Reinhoid 1 18). According to Paglia, Dionysus's transvestism "symbolizes his radical identification with mothers" (9 1). Paglia quotes Lewis Famell in calling Dionysus "the iiquid principle in al1 things" (9 1).

Chapter 5, Page 281

In "To My Brother," the speaker pronounces with assurance, "Al1 things remain 1 . , . . /

Save of peace alone." She "can tell" this, "and not lie." ''The Sleeping Fury" is also about

violence, the pursuit of peace, and the struggle to be truthful, but the context now is intensely

personal. The poem began as a meditation on a work of art, a poetic practice of the admired

Rilke, and grew into an expression of the artist's development. On the dust jacket of the original

edition of The Sleeping Fuw, a line drawing reproduced the image of a relief sculpture Bogan

had seen in Rome at the Museo Nazionale delle Terme: "L 'Erinni Addomentatu," or "'The

Sleeping Fury." Frank explains that the figure was also listed in the museum catalogue as the

"Medusa Ludovisi," and descnbes it as "a female head of remarkable beauty, its eyes closed and

lips half-open in sleep. Surrounded by serpentine loch of hair, the face lies in a repose of

serenity, innocence, and peace" (242). The description also uncannily fits the "Medusa

Rondanini," a bust which Goethe kept in his home but of which Bogan would have lcnown

no thing?'

"Rhyrne" was published in The New Yorker in June of 1935, thus was written prior to

"Roman Fountain" and "Baroque Comment," poems which came to Bogan along with five others

during the summer of her affair with Roethke (Frank 262). Chronology, then, did not dictate its

place next in the sequence.

What laid, 1 said, My being waste? 'Twas your sweet flesh With its sweet taste, -

Which, like a rose,

" Catriona MacLeod notes that the image of îhe Medusa appears in several of Goethe's works. Faust, for example, expenences an uncanny encounter with a Medusan figure who bears an eery resembIance to his dead lover Gretchen. in the Italienische Reise, "Goethe expresses his fascination with the tensions revealed in a cast of the Medusa Rondanini between 'Tod und Leben, . . . Schrnerz und Woliust" (death and We, grief and sensual pleasure)." (26411)

Clrapter 5, Page 282

Fed with a breath, And at its fidl Belied al1 death.

It's at springs we dnnk; It's bread we eat, And no fuie body, Head to feet,

Should force al1 bread And drink together, Nor be both sun And hidden weather.

Ah no, it shodd not; Let it be. But once heart's feast You were to me.

Ridgeway describes "Rhyme" as "a lyric in the Cavalier manner but with the mark of its

twentieth-century writer in its fast-moving lines" and cornments M e r that its placement after

"The SIeeping Fury" provides "a change of pace" (92). Certainly the short lines provide a

pleasing acceleration after the "long Iines fit only for giving ease" which make up its

predccessor. Frank cornments that the poem's "erotic generosity" indicates forgiveness, that its

"play of sensuality and gentle regret shares the benevolence of the poems written during the

sunimer of 1935" (262-63). Yet, as Ridgeway goes on to suggest, the poem "is not without its

own anxious overtones."

The poet relates her own destructiveness in 'Rhyme." The "fine body" of the

homunculus is the poem written; after its creation, as Frank has suggested of Bogan, the woman

needs to "enact some form of emotional violence toward the attachment" which inspired it.

Revelling worshipers of the Dionysian cult tried to acquire potency by drinking the god (wine)

and eating him (meat) (Reinhold 123). They tore apart wild creatures in order to feast on a

sacred meal of raw flesh. With a nursery-rhyrne regularity, the speaker describes her

Chapter 5, Page 283

cannibalistic relationship with her lover. In her lust and greed she consumed only his flesh,

ignoring the bread and water which should sustain her, and has been destroyed. She is Bluebeard

in the bloody chamber, the hunter prepared to slaughter Snow White, the Firry with her "knife

whetted and plunged." Yet, she sings lile a little girl skipping in the yard, rhyming what we

might take to be loving nonsense, One of the most honific of the Gnmmsy fairy tales is "The

Jacaranda Tree," about a child who is killed by his (step)mother then made into a stew for his

father to eat. The little boy comes back as a bird, singing a Song which tells the story of the

crime. With "Rhyme," Bogan deliberately reminds the reader of the "puling child" violently

banished but not forgotten, asleep but still present. The speaker is a spirit corne back to haunt its

beloved, but Bogan puts a twist on the fairy tale: the speaker is both cannibal lover and victirn,

the bird she has become both nightingale and crow.

The child sings in "Rhyrne," In Singing" - the poem which follows - the speaker is

once again adult, now watching the child sing, hearing the Song which has gone before.

Now, innocent, within the deep Night of al1 things you turn the key, Unloosing what we know in sleep. In your fiesh voice they cry aloud Those beings without heart or name.

Those creatures both compt and proud, Upon the melancholy words And in the music's subtlety, Leave the long harvest which they reap In the sunk land of dust and flame And move to space beneath our sky.

The quester of "A Tale" appears in "The Sleeping Fury," locked in deadly sight. Here is

described his landscape, "the sunk land of dust and flame," where stands like a hardened stem the

woman who %ows desire must die, / Yet turns to love again" of "The Crows." The world of

sleep, which seems peaceful to the speaker as she looks on the childlike face of the Fury in

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repose, is a fightening realm at times, one where repressed hgments of the past are

reformulated in dreams. The "creatures both compt and proud" leave the harvest fields of the

unconscious and move to the conscious present, beneath the "sIq" of mind: they are the vying

voices of Bodv of This Death, buried deep within the poet but brought to the surface now like

snakes swaying as they rise in a hypnotic trame, responding to the music. As demons, they

inhabit the child's "fiesh voice" and "cry aioud" in her ~ong.~ '

Sing, heart, sing; Cal1 and car01 clearly. .-*......-..-.... C ~ Y 9 Song, cry, And hear your mying lost. ("Chanson un Peu Naïve")

Bogan wondered in a Ietter to Humphries about her description of the "creatures both compt and

proud": ''1 don? think the beings should be exactly compt , but they (the impulses dignified by

the personification) are so inhuman, according to waking standards, that perhaps compt is right,

after all" (cited by Frank, 264). The most obvious meaning of the word Bogan has in mind is

depraved or evil, but other possible denotations are rotten, spoiled, and impure: the artist lacks

purity and exists in a decaying animal carcasse, but still is defiantly proud to create that which

endures beyond individual human lives. Ridgeway clairns that the %eings" become Iess

fearsome as they move upward into consciou space (92). According to Frank, by "inhuman"

Bogan meant detached, like celestial bodies (264). Certainly, there is an underlying acceptance

and understanding of the "impulses" in "M., Singing" just as there is in "Rhyme," as Frank

suggests. Perhaps the poet was drawing strength fiom her increasing fascination with the

movement of planets and stars. "Evening Star," the final poem in Part III, is a hymn to celestial

The "M." of "M., Singing" is Bogan7s daughter, Mathilde (Maidie) who was studying voice at Juilliard in 1936-36 and often practiced at home, while her mother accompanied ber on the piano (Frank 263).

Chapzer 5, Page 285

light:

Light f?om the planet Venus, soon to set, Be with us.

Light, pure and round, without heat or shadow, Held in the cirrous sky, at evening: Accompany what we do.

Be with us; Know our partial strength. Serve us in your own way, Bnef planet, shining without buniing.

Light, lacking words that migtit praise you; Wanting and breeding sighs only.

The poem echoes "At a Party," the lyrïc which closed Part 1. Venus and Uranus were, in

the section of the book which deals with the time of despair and alcoholism, reeling out of

control, in a state of chaos; the speaker was into,uicated. The conflict of female and male

invested the universe with violence, an etemal strïfe which left no hope of harmony. Now Venus

is celebrated singly, by a speaker accepting of her "partial strength" in her state of female

incompleteness; the poet welcomes celibacy, puriv, light without heat or shadow which shines

without buming. Bogan again alludes to Lucretius, who opens De R e m Natura with an

invocation to Venus:

O mother of the Roman race, delight Of men and gods, Venus most bountiful, You who beneath the gliding signs of heaven Fil1 with yourself the sea bedecked with ships And earth great crop-bearer, since by your power Creatures of every kind are brought to birth And rïsing up behold the light of sun; . . . . . . S . - . * * - - - - . . . . * . . . _ . . Since you and only you are nature's guide And nothing to the glorious shores of light Rises without you, nor grows sweet and lovely,

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You 1 desire as partner in my verses . . . . (I, 1-5, 20-240)39

As Lucretius indicates, Venus is associated with both light and sexual desire. Bogan side-steps

the latter implication of her prayer, until her last Iine: "Wanting and breeding sighs only." Venus

is, after all, "mother of the Roman race" and "most bountiful:" it is hardly appropriate to

worship the goddess of love, even as a "pure and round" planet, as inspiration to chastity. The

word "breeding" recalls the opening of Eliot's The Waste Land, April, the cruellest month, is

also the month of Venus (Peck 1643). Bogan plays on the reader's expectations of

intertextuality, for - by the time the poem's conclusion is reached - echoes of the "invocation to

light" chorus fiom Eliot's The Rock are in our minds. In a mentoring letter to Roethke, she

addresses the issue of "sounding like other people" and uses "Evening-Star" as an exampIe: "

'Evening-Star' echoes a chorus in The Rock in a perfectly open way. The chorus about light.

The word praise and the invocation, repeated invocation to light, are identical. If 1 put it in the

book I'm going to have a note acknowledging the source" (WWL 116).

Ruth L imer , Bogan's editor, explains in her own explanatory note to the letter that

Bogan never did cany through with her intention to aclaowledge Eliot as a source for the poem,

. . . for good reason, since LB is speaking more to comfort than to repent. Eliot's 'O Light Invisible, we praise Ttiee! . . . we worship Thee! . . . we glorie Thee!' was neither the verbal nor the emotional equivalent of her own lines: 'Light from the planet Venus, soon to set, / Be with us . . - Light, lacking words that rnight praise you; / Wanting and breeding sighs only. (1 18-19)

Lirnrner's protestations reveal a ferninist reluctance to see in Bogan's meaning any semblance to

Eliot's reverence and thankfulness for the gift of light in a dark world- In fact, the poems are

"identical" in certain ways, notably in the attitude of hurnility and simple acceptance. The

39 Anthony M. Esolen7s translation-

Chapter 5, Page 287

differences take their meaning fiom the starting point of the sirnilarities. Bogan addresses the

goddess / planet Venus, thus indicating that the nature of ber worship is pagan and astrological

rather tban Christian, and her ironic play on the word 'beeding" suggests that she has not gone

as far down Eliot's road to (conventional) spirituality as he himself has. Even Eliot's early,

physical attraction to haif" finds its counterpart in Bogan's poem. The word "cirrus" (spelled

''cirrous" in The SIeevin~ Furv, "cirrus" thereafter), Bogan told Roethke in another letter, " is

important because it echoes the "us" of the fkst stanza (107), but, as well, a cirrus is a tendnl. A

cirrus cloud is one "with the appearmce of diverging filaments or wisps, often resembling a curl

or lock of hair or wool" m). Medusa sleeps in the sky.

Part IV: "AU en& on a note of calm: me and the Zandscape clasped in each other S arms."

Bogan's readers have had iittle to Say about "Spirit's Song," the poem which opens the fourth

and last section of The Sleenin~ Fuw. "As though not to begin with too sofemn a note, 'Spirit's

Song' is a short, lightly meh l lyric," Ridgeway offers, in one sentence beginning and also

ending her own short, lightly ruefil analysis (94). Frank lumps the poem together with two

others in Part III, "Heard by a Girl" and "Packet of Letters," regarding al1 three as examples of

Bogan setting aside destructive eras of her life - in the case of "Spirit's Song," of "sensual

excess" (268).

How well you served me above ground, Most tnithfirl sight, fïrm-builded sound.

And how you throve through hunger, waste, Sickness and health, infonning taste;

40 See particdarly "The Love Song of J. Alfied Prufiock," "La Figlia che Piange," and The Waste Land (II and IV). -

Cllaper 5, Page 288

And mell, that did kom dung and heather, Corruption, bloom, mix well together.

But you, fierce delicate tender touch, Betrayed and hurt me overmuch,

For whom 1 lagged with what a crew O far too long, and poisoned through!

The poet brings to the forefront in this poem the sense of touch, which alone among the senses

has betrayed the tmst of the spirit. The instinct to sculpt allies touch with writing: as Bogan

once said, a poem "is carved out of agony, just as a statue is carved out of marble7' (MWL 97).

But, touch always cornes back to flesh, and because of this cannot help but eventually betray and

oppose spirit. The voice of flesh speaks out in "At a Party," and is heard again in "To Wine,"

recalling the "Strong hand and slender thigh" of the "lipless dead." The strong hair of the "tme

inheritors of love" is "rnoulded to their foreheads as though by the pressure of hands" in "Poem

in Prose." In the land of "Italian Morning," the '%ig magnolia, like a hand, / Repeats our flesh.."

Like the speaker of "Rhyme," the singer of "Spirit's Song" is disembodied, a voice-no longer

connected with the physical being now laid waste, below ground. Because of "fierce delicate

tender touch," she has "lagged" - faIlen back fkom her better self - poisoning al1 the rest of the

senses in stagnation. In "Rhyme," the sense of taste is described, corrupted and obsessed. Both

songs are the cries of the "creatures , . . compt and proud" which are heard interwoven in the

melodies of M.'s siriging. Like the damned in Dante's Hell, they tell their stories of perdition,

In two of the Bogan's three subsequent volumes of collected poems, "Spirit's Song"

changes places with the poem which succeeds it in The Sleeping Furv, "Putting to Sea." It is

possible that the length of the latter poem, filling two pages on its own, played a role in the

decision.

Who, in the dark, has cast the harbor-chain? This is no journey to a land we h o w .

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The auturnn night receives us, hoarse with min; Storm flakes with roarïng foam the way we go.

Sodden with surnmer, stupid with its loves, The country which we leave, and now this bare Circle of ocean wbïch the heaven proves Deep as its height, and barren with despair.

Now this whole silence, through which nothing breaks, Now this whoIe sea, which we possess alone, Flung out Erom shore with speed a missile takes When some hard hand, in hatred, flings a Stone.

The Way shouId mark our course within the night, The strearning System, turned without a sound. What choice is this - profundity and flight - Great sea? Our lives through we have trod the ground.

Motion beneath us, fixity above. "0, but you should rejoice! The course we steer Points to a beach brÏght to the rocks with love, Where, in hot calrns, blades clatter on the ear;

And spiny fnuts up through the earth are fed With fire; the palm trees clatter; the wave leaps. Fleeing a shore where heart-loathed love lies dead We point lands where love fountains fiom its deeps.

Through every season the coarse Eniits are set In earth not fed by streams." Soft into time Once broke the flower: pear and violet, The cinquefoil. The tall elm tree and the lime

Once held out fniitIess boughs, and fluid green Once rained about us, pulse of earth indeed. There, out of metal, and to light obscene, The flamy bloorns burn backward to their seed.

With so much hated still so dose behind The sterile shores before us must be faced; Again, against the body and the mind, The hate that bruises, though the heart is braced.

Bend to the chart, in the extinguished night Mariners! Make way slowly; stay fiom sleep; That we may have short respite fkom such light. And leam, with joy, the gulf, the vast, the deep.

Cltaper 5. Page 290

Bogan onginally called the poem "Goodbye at Sea," and told Wheelock in June, 1936, when she

was working on it, that it would "sum up the Holden suffiering, endured so long, but now, at last,

completely over" (WWL 132). A few weeks later she had changed the titled, and reported to

Wheelock: "1 h o w what it's about, with my upper reason, just a little; it came fi-orn pretty far

down, thank God" (133n). It is interesting that she would Say this, for in another sense Bogan

regarded the poem as a disciplined exercise, written on demand. She toId Rolfe of her regime:

"1 am sitting d o m every morning, just like those old non-occasional verse writers, Dante and

Milton, and writing poetry to order. Can you imagine that? 1 set myself a therne, and off 1 go.

I'm engaged with a nautical, or maritime, effort, at the moment" (WXL 2 33). "Putting to Sea"

was important to Bogan; together with "The Sleeping Fury" it constituted in her mind the

"nucleus" of the book in the planning stages. The notion of the quest combined with the subject

of the leaving off of suffering was no doubt essential in her rnind ro the movement and shape of

the volume. "The Sleeping Fury" is a moment of rest and revelation; "Putting to Sea" signals the

renewal of action.

Bogan's readers have been generally laudatory in their assessment,J1 Frank, however, is

uncharacteristically harsh, arguing that Bogan "found herself w e 1 t e ~ g in a SymboIist tide, with

very questionable results . , . . The scenic and pictorial details are derived fiom both Baudelaire

and Bogan's earlier poems, but they fail to connect with sorne emerging and ordered experience

they are meant to serve. They are also obscure; the text is Iittered with phrases that don't make

sense . . , " (265). She cites Bogan's own doubts during the poem's composition, concluding that

the eventual form did in fact meet with her satisfaction: "she may have persuaded herself that the

poem was more resolved than it actually was, or even

4' Cookson calls it one of her "most distinguished of her best, aithough not widely hown (178).

that clarity didn' t h a l l y matter" (265-66).

poems" (196) and Simrnons agrees that it is one

Chapter 5. Page 291

1 suggest that the point of "Putting to Sea" is that we rnust cherish the voyage rather than trust in

the destination, although the tetms of this grand theme, undertaken by writers £kom Horner (The

Odvssev) to Eliot ("Dry Salvages") are hardy recognizable in Bogan's highly personalized

rendering. Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium" begins, "This is no country for old men"; Bogan

prefaces her own anti-description, "This is no journey to a land we l a i ~ w , ~ ~ by asking "Who . . .

has cast the harbor-chah?" Others questions fùllow, such as "What choice is this - profùndity

and flight - 1 Great sea?" The perplexed, querulous mood of the speaker is disconcerting, for

there are no clear answers and cornfort is rejected without explanation. Simrnons argues that the

arnbiguities of the poem contriïute to its power.

Tt ["Putting to Sea"] is not easy to interpret without some knowledge of Bogan's own growth as a poet. What is the relation of the paradisal vision to the rest of the poem? Why, if this paradise is so Iovingly descnied, does it not receive the speaker's adoration? Why, if the country being left is so appalling, is the voyage appalling as well? And why, given the horrors of the voyage, should it be undertaken with joy? The answers to these questions not only c o n f i the excellence of the poem, but demonstrate the power of a human being in the process of lherahng herself fi-om the beautifid and treacherous typologies of her past. (1 78)

- The dialogic form of "Putting to Sea" hearkens back to "Surnmer Wish," but here the argument is

more subtIy articulated and difficult to follow. Quotation marks in the f i f i stanza ("0, but you

should rejoice!") indicate the intrusion of a second, optimistic voice:' responding at last to the

peevish, despairing persona which carries the first half of the poern and resumes afier the

interruption to bring it to a close. The insistence of the optimistic voice that the land to come

will be better than the Iand left is ignored. The speech of the second voice begins embedded in a

4' Bogan probably intended an allusion ro Yeats' "The Gyres": "Out of cavem cornes a voice, / And al1 it knows is that one word 'Rejoice!' "

Chaprer 5, Page 292

stanza 43 and ends in the same way; it floats on the stream of the flowing lines like a piece of

flotsam, or the craft itself, on the "streaming Systern-" The sea, the night, the unconscious ("the

gulf', the vast, the deep") may not be out choice ("profundity and flight"), but here in the dark, at

sea, we at Ieast have "short respite" fiom the "light obscene" and "sterile shores," such light and

land which bruise our hearts with hatred.

Frank disapproves of 'Tutting to Sea," but claims that the poem which foIlows it,

'Xept," "more than makes up for" its "failure" (266). Bogan explores what Rilke, in the fourth

Duino elegy, called the "Zwischenraurne Awischen Welt und Spielzeug," or "the gap le ft between

world and toy," says Fra.nk, but denies that Rilke is a likely source. "It is far more likely that the

poem . . . may echo the nursery rfiyme 'London Bridge' " (266).

Time for the wood, the clay, The trumpery dolls, the toys Now to be put away: We are not girls and boys.

What are these rags we twist Our hearts upon, or clutch Hard in the sweating fist? They are not worth so much.

Frank also draws attention to an essay Rilke wrote on dolls ("Puppen"). It is "unlikely that

Bogan knew it, though she could certainly speak Gerrnan," she asserts, since it appeared in an

EngIish translation for the frrst time in 1954. Frank's reluctance to regard Rilke's writing about

dolls as more than "useful coincidental cornmentary" on the poem is somewhat odd. In 1934-45,

43 in The Blue Estuaries, the line "Motion beneath us, fixity above" is set off by itself, so the beginning of the speech is more obvious- Again, issues of available space on the page probably dictated this decision. There appears to be not enough room for an extra blank line in The Sleeping F w , whereas in The Blue Estuaries the choice of font ailows for more flexi'bility.

Chapter 5. Page 293

Bogan was reading German, in particular Rilke, with great attention? In her letters, she quotes

him in the rig gin al?^ Indeed, the epigraph for The Slee~ine: Fuw is fYom Rilke, cited without

translation: " Wie ist dar Hein, wornif wir ringen, / was mi? uns ring?, wie is das grop . . . (How

small that is, with which we wrestle / what wrestles with us, how immense."46 Rilke's essay

'Tuppen" ("Some Reflections on Dolls") explores the non-life of dolls: how they are "dragged

about through the changing emotions of the day, remaining where they lie; made a confidante, a

confederate, like a dog . . . . taken into cots, dragged into the heavy folds of illnesses, present in

dreams . . . . allowing themselves to be drearned; as it was their habit, during the day, to be lived

unwearyingly with energies not their owd7 (44):' The childenlivens the empty do11 with his .

own ego: its emptiness both allows for and requires this transference. The relationship between

the child and the do11 fosters, ironically, the child's developing personality even as it enforces a

strange dualism. Rilke's essay has the tone of a persona1 rnemoir:

The simplest love relationships were quite beyond our comprehension, we could not possibly have lived and had dealings with a person who was something; at most, we could only have entered into such a person and have lost ourselves there. With the do11

a Bo- wodd later coliaborate with Ekabeth Mayer in translations fiom German of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, Novelia, and Elective Affbïties, and Ernst Juenger's The Glas Bees.

jS See, for example, a letter written in December of 1935 to Roethke in which sonnet 29 of Sonnets to Omheus is cited- "As old W e said," Bogan notes by way of conclusion, "Und wenn dich das irdische vergass, 1 zu der stillen Erde sag: Ich rime. 1 Zu dem raschen Wasser sprich: Ich bin. (And if the worldy forget you, Say to the silent earth: 1 flow. To the swift water Say: 1 am" (WWL 122).

46 The lines are taken fiom Rilke's poem, "Der Schauende" ("The Man Watching") which teus of a man lookîng out his "anxious windows" at an approaching Storm. The Storm is, to him, a swirling "Umgestdter" ("rearrangei'); the landscape "is Ernst und Wucht und Ewigkeit" ("weight and ardor and eternity"). Were we to let ourselves be conquered, we would become "weit und namenlos" ("far-reaching and nameless"). The success of triumphing over the small d e s us, ourselves, petty, See The Book of Irnanes (21 0-1 1).

57 Rilke's essay: ". . . trage: hingeschleift durch die wechseinden Emotionen des Tagas, in jeder liegenbleibend; wie ein Hund zum Mitwisser gemacht . . . mitgezogen in die Gitterbetten, vershleppt in die schweren Falten der Kranklieiten, in den Trihmen vorkommend - . - . sich triiumen lassend; wie sie's gewpont waren, am Tag mit fiemden KrUten unermiidlich gelebt zu sein" ("Puppen" 266-67).

Chapter 5. Page 294

we were forced to assert ourselves, for, had we surrendered ourselves to it, there would then have been no one there at all, It made no response whatever, so that we were put in the position of having to take over the part it should have played, of having to split our gradually enlarging personality into part and counterpart; in a sense, through it to keep the world, which was entering into us on al1 sides, at a distance. The things which were happening to us incomprehensi%ly we mked in the doll, as in a test tube, and saw them there change colour and boil up. (45)48

Rilke implies that the do11 is a kind of homunculus, a human shape within which the child c m act

out a dialogic completion of himself, a container into which he can decant his mixed emotions

and observe their interactions rather than simply experience them, Bogan suggests the same, but

her perspective is that of the adult looking to reanimate the toys of the past in order to achieve an

integration of personality, to subsume the stray and disernbodied voices which occasionally cry

out fiom dark corners:

But we must keep such things Till we at length begin To feel our nerves their strings, Their dust, our blood within.

The dreadfiil painted bisque Becomes our very cheek. A doll's heart, faint at nsk, Withïn our breast grows weak.

Our hand the doll's, our tongue. Time for the pretty clay, Time for the straw and wood. The playthings of the young Get broken in the play, Get broken, as they should.

"Der einfachste Verkehr der Liebe ging schon über unsere Begriffe hinaus, mit einer Person, die etwas war, konnten wir urmijgiich leben und bandleIn, wir konnten uns hochstens in sie hineindrücken und in ihr verlorengehen. Der Puppe gegenüüren wir gezwungen, uns zu behaupten, denn wenn wir uns an sie aufgaben, so war überhaupt niemand mehr da. Sie erwiderte nichts, so kamen wir in die Lage, für sie Leistungen zu iibemehmen, unser allmahlich breiteres Wesen ni spalten in Teil und Gegenteii, uns gewissermaBen durch sie die Welt, die unabgegrenzt in uns überging, vom Leibe ni haiten. Wie in ehem Probiergias mischten wir in ihr, was uns unke~tlich widerfuhr' und sahen es dort sich fkben und aufkochen." ("Puppen" 269-70)

Chapter 5. Page 295

"Kept" and "Homunculus" are (reverse) cornpanion poems, each rnirroring the other in their

positions at the end and beginning of the volume. In "Homunculus," the poet creates a "slight

thing" which yet Yacks but life": "Some dust of dead content / Will rnake it Iive forever." The

speaker of "Kept" animates the wooden form, imbues the "dreadful painted bisque" with the

blood of her own cheek, but her aim is to break the "pretty clay" rather than "make it live

forever." The roles of child / do11 / mother are blended, then reforrndated-

Like Wordsworth's "The Thom," Rilke's short story "Frau Blaha's Maid" is about a

rnother who kills her illegitimate newborn. According to Eva-Maria Simmons, as a piece of

fiction the story "does not work because the character of the maid is not convincing." She

surnrnarizes it as follows:

The maid is a simple country girl who lives her life inside the grey, dark walls of a kitchen in the city. Unnoticed by anyone, she gives birth to a child whom she strangles, wraps in a blue apron, and then hides as her 'big doll' in a t m k . During one of the next days, she measures the corpse and proceeds to buy a puppet theatre with a king, a peasant, and a tower but which, alas, are much smaller than her 'doll.' She sets up the theater in the kitchen, and the neighbors' children corne to watch her perform little dialogues and stiff movements, 'but they never turn out to be a real play.' She tells them about her 'really big doll,' and they press her to show it to thern. (66Q4'

At this point, Simms quotes the closing paragraph of Rilke's story:

Anushka went to the back to her tnink. It was already getting dark. The children and the puppets faced each other, very quiet and alike. But ftom the wide open eyes of the punch, which were as if they expected something terri@ing, a sudden fear swept over the children so that without exception they began to scream and run away. Anushka

49 Der einfachste Verkehr der Liebe ging schon über unsere BegrifTe hinaus, mit einer Person, die etwas war, konnten wir unm6glich Ieben und handeh, wir konnten uns hochstens in sie hineindrücken und in ihr verlorengehen- Der hppe gegenüber waren wir gezwungen, uns zu behaupten, denn wenn wir uns an sie aufgaben, so war überhaupt niemand mehr da. Sir erwiderte nichts, so kamen wir in die Lage, fiîr sie Leistungen ni übemehmen, unser allmahlich breiteres Wesen zu spalten in Teil und Gegenteil, uns gewisseden durch sie die Weft, die unabgegrenzt in uns überging vom Leibe zu halten. Wie in einem Probierglas mischten wir in ihr? was uns unkenntlich widerfuhr, und sahen es dort sich faben und aufkochen. (269-70)

Chapter 5, Page 296

came back with the big blue thing in her arms. Suddenly her hands trembled. The kitchen had become so quiet and empty after the children had gone. Anushka was not afiaid. She laughed sofily and kicked the theater over with her feet and broke al1 the thin boards which were meant to be the garden- And then, as the kitchen was completely dark, she went about and split open al1 the dolls' heads, also the big blue one's.

Simms grants that while the story "poetically . . . may be a failure, psychologically it seems to

work . . . . we suspect an overcompensation of extremely disturbing emotions. Something has

been repressed" (667-68). The maid is "not convincing7' as a character because she has become a

doil herself, living as one dead among the dead, the marionettes. Her emotions have been

cornpletely transferred into the "little dialogues and stiff movements" controlled at one remove,

their strings at length fkom her nerves. An unpublished poem of Bogan's entitled "Hell" depicts

life as etemal, mechanical stage performance. The vaudeville performers are as depleted as

dolls, twisted into rags, clutched hard "in the sweating fist" of the equally lifeless audience.

The dead, in endless rows together, Laugh briefly at the acrobats. They sit in silence without.hats Under a dirty plastered weather. (LBP) 50

In a letter to Humphries, Bogan explains that the vaudeville she describes -k the poem "is just a

curiosity now, since there isn't any vaudeville any more, not the shabby kind that we knew as

children" (WWL 105)- The poem, based on childhood mernories, had become unpublishable

because "everything now is slick and smooth." ''No child ever sits with its heart wning because

the Jap balancing on the picket fence is so obviously old and tired, or because the soubrette has

asthma and vancose veins and fallen chops, or because the monologist is so obviously dead

dru&," Bogan went on. "Radio and the talking pictures have winnowed out the totterers . . ."

Box 1 1, Folder 19. Vaudeville shows reaily must have seemed almost "endless," ninning 13 hours a day (Ro yle 22).

Chaprer 5, Page 297

(105). In "Kept," the poet insists that we must re-invest our childhood mernories - as

represented by the lifeless, yet lifelike, dolls - with our transferred beings, so that we can fma11y

break their clay and wood forms and be done with them. Once we have integrated these

memones into ourselves, we cm destroy the shells; they will no longer have an uncanny presence

distinct fiorn us.

Just as "Kept" mirrors ccHomuncuZus," "Heard by a Girl" answers "Spirit's Song." Both

poems consist of five stanzas, two lines of tetrameter each:

Something said: You have nothing to fear From those long h e bones, and that beautifil ear.

From the mouth, and the eyes set well apart There's nothing can corne which will break your heart.

From the simple voice, the indulgent rnind, No venom breeds to defeat your kind.

And even, it said, those hands are thin And large, well designed to clasp within

Their fingers (and O what more do you ask?) The secret and the delicate mask.

The "fierce delicate tender touch" of "Spirit's Song" (s tanza four ) is alluded to here (stanza

four), in the large, thin hands of the lover, presumably one of the beautifid males of Part II. The

feeling of being touched, as well as of touching, is implied; the mask which is both secret and

delicate suggests the folds of female genitalia, With the erotic last stanza, the speaker teases the

distracted, listening girl who imagines the clasping fingers at work-

Who speaks in "Heard by a Girl"? The poet begins: "Something said." Presumably, the

voice is that of flesh responding to spirit, the two continuing the dialogue like a pair of opera

singers. Coming as it does after 'Xept," the poem makes manifest a memory of sexual Iove like

Chapter 5. Page 298

a painted do11 coming to life with the beating heart of the poet: "Our hand the doll's, our tongue,"

In ''Packet of Letters," the memories are both embodied and embalmed, dead and cold yet ravùig,

grief-stricken, The speaker expressesthe childish fear of Pip at the opening of Dickens's Great

Ex~ectations, terrified yet drawn to the murderer suffering in chains in the rnarsh.

Ln the shut drawer, even now, they rave and grieve - To be approached at times with the fkightened tear; Theu cold to be drawn away fiom, as one, at nightfall, Draws the cloak closer against the cold of the marsh.

There, there, the thugs of the heart did murder. There, still in murderers' guise, two stand embraced, embalmed.

Frank notes that the title of the poem refers to the Bogan-Kolden correspondence of the spring

and surnrner of 1933, as welI as the letters following their separation in 1934 (268).

The last poem of the volume, "Song for a Lyre," b ~ g s The Sleeping Fuw rather

suddenly, unexpectedly, to a close. As Bogan said of the book, "MI ends on a note of calm: me

and the landscape clasped in each other's arrns."

The landscape where 1 lie Again fiom boughs sets fiee Surnmer; al1 night must fly In wind's obscurity The thick, green leaves that made Heavy the August shade.

Soon, in the pictured night, Returns - as in a dream Left afler sleep's delight - The shallow auturnn Stream: Softly awake, its sound Poured on the chilly ground.

Soon fly the leaves in throngs; O love, though once 1 lay Far fiom its sounds, to weep, When night divides rny sleep,

Chopter 5. Page 299

When stars, the autumn Stream, Stillness, divide my dream, Night to your voice belongs.

Bogan wrote the poern after visiting Edmund Wilson at his house in Stamford, Connecticut. She

called it "a love poem to end love poems - perhaps the only real love poem I ever wrote," a lyric

to "stand against winter and silence and hatred and party politics (if need bey in italics) at the end

of my book'' (WWL 142). Referring to Wilson's book about Russia, To the Finland Station, she

jokingly tells ber fiiend she will dedicate "The Slee~ing Furrv, a Tale of the Russian Steppes" to

him, "in hatitude" (sic). The Sleaing Fury would indeed be dedicated to Wilson, in gratitude.

Bogan's "love poem to end love poems" was an acknowledgment of the deep and enduring

Eendship which, in spite of differences of political opinion, sustains, in contrast to the

murderous sexual passion which divides and destroys.'' Once again, the poet closes her volume

with conscious purpose, cornmenting not only on the sequence just completed but on the senes of

three volumes together. The familiar motif of the trees and s b reappears. In "Statue and Birds"

(BD), "the woods rake on the slqr" and the figure of a young girl is irnmobilized as Stone. As

speaker of "Song for a Lyre," older and wiser, she lies on the ground looking up, parodying her

precocious pose in 'Xnowledge" m. This time she is gratefül to see the sky coming through

the trees as the leaves are loosened by the season, finally set fiee fkom the imprisoning boughs.

Dark sumrner, which kept the poet emotionally caged, is at last over; the "filled trees" of "Simple

Autumnal" no longer keep the sky. A love poem which is not one reminds the reader that

The Sleeping Furv is about the will to survive. Coming as it does at the end, "Song for a Lyre"

stands defiant against winter and silence, aging and the poet's retreating muse.

Bogan addressed Wilson jokingiy as "Uncle Ed" and told him "1 wish we were absolutely compatiile, and then 1 could go to Russia with you, on my alimony" (WWL. 81). In a reveahg letter to Humphries only three weeks later, she wrote, obviously by way of reply, with witty energy, "You know perféctly wel that . . - 1 wouldn't marry Edmund if he were the last man on earth. W h y should I?" (144).

Chapter 5, Page 300

Bogan also obliquely alludes to the anger she has felt at the pressure of party politics.

In a letter to Humphries in 1935, she stated her position unequivocally: "1 have always thought

that the pure artist had his place, md shouId stick right in it, being as productive as possible and

as pure as hell, whatever was going on outside. And that place doesn't have to be an ivory tower.

But it shouldn't be right in the middle of a boiler works or a Red Square, or a propagandist's

ofice, either . . . " (WWL 92). She was painfülly aware that even her best fiends - notably

Wilson and Humphries, who were sympathetic to the Communist movement - thought her too

aloof fiom the escalating crisis in Europe. The Ietter to Humphries concludes: "So, although

you tell Edmund Wilson] that my ideas of social justice are depraved, 1 tell you that 1 want a

little peace, a little troubled peace, in which to fmish out the time allotted to me in life as a

human being" (94). Bogan was immensely fhstrated at the fùtility of war- M e r her own hard-

won psychic battle to achieve stability, she was impatient with the flagrant waste of hurnan

potential, regarding it as "childish." "The reconciliation of the warring elements in my own

nature was effected in such an unconscious and unlcnowable Jungian manner that 1 have become

rather impatient with surrogates for religion, and Iifelines and rocks of ages and snug harbors and

other dogmatic frameworks," she told Zabel in 193 5 (WWL 83-84). What good does it do to

shoot the bad guys? "It is human nature which must be changed, and making live ones into dead

ones doesn't change it," she insisted. Wilson, apparently, agreed with her on this point, for she

goes on to say: "1 think Edmund's point is well taken: if you feel there should be a war, then go

and fight in it. Stop breeding childish hatred on the side-lines. Stop trying to shifi what we must

do with ourselves - the hatreds we must overcome or bear, the egocentricity we must grow out

of, into adult life . . . . Grown-up people do not want to shoot other people" (WWL 150).

Chapter 5. Page 301

The Sleeping Furv maps the poet's passage into maturity. Bogan's summary of the

shape of the volume is both helpfûl and misleading. Part 1, for example, is indeed about the years

from 1930-33, a period of "despair, neurosis, and alcoholism-" The speaker's state of

intoxication in "At a Party" and '"To Wïne" (''Mer despair") is entirely to the point. Bogan

was aware that she was drinking more than she should; she must have been aware also that others

talked about it (cf. Sarton's irrelevant snipe, "1 hear she drinks a great deal"), "Exhortation" is

an angry reply to the gossipers, expressed in the fonn of an interna1 dialogue. The poet takes to

lecturing herself in an attempt to pull her component parts together by sheer force. As Bogan

told Zabel in a Ietter (1937), "Everyone has to shift into maturiv at your age, Morton. And rnost

people of our calibre are just infants d l they do .. . . Think of Edmund out in the woods- Think

of me, up in Wash. Heights. Think of Dante climbing the stranger's stair, and everyone else

- who were tested to their full strength, and came through" (WWL 166). Yeats, she said, "fell to

pieces" after a "hard emotional youth, with lots of work and fi-ustration in it." But after coming

to a blank wall, he eventually recovered and '%egan learning how to write, al1 over again." The

disintegration and subsequent reconstruction of self he experienced made him emotionally

stronger, said Bogan: "What do you suppose those later poems came out of? A break, a tragic

break, which he Iived through and got over, and mended from. And he never repeated the thing

again. And how strong he became; what a fighter!"

Bogan felt she had survived a similarly cataclysmic break following her two mental

collapses and the dissolution of her marriage. Iii the first part of The Sleeriing Fuw, she traces

her "despair" and "neurosis," indicating fiom the frrst lyric a different perspective than in

previous volumes. "Song" says that "It is not the heart" any longer; the second poem,

"Henceforth, fkom the Mind," answers the unspoken question. The poet vows that in future she

will look to the pleasures of thought and speech over love. "Henceforth" dernonstrates the

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psychic split which has taken place between the will, which bullies even as it protects, and the

vulnerable, artistic side. The poet is concemed that she must somehow salvage her destiny as a

writer fiom the ruins of her breakdown. In '~omunculus," she marvels over the small, perfect

thing made - a poem, like a child - with the uncanny disinterest of a motber fondling an aborted

fetus. The depiction of the "slight thing," the tiny homunculus, is Iinked to the poet's nostalgia

for her own childhood and previous lyric output; representation of the miniature in literature is a

means of presenting "a diminutive, and thereby manipulatable, version of experience, a version

which is domesticated and protected fkom contamination" (Stewart 69). The pairing of

"Homunculus" with "Single Sonnet" marks the effort of will to retrieve the soft side f?om its

protected interior space and bring it into the realrn of the large, to Yake up . . . / The burdm" of

art. Eshe succeeds in bending it to.her will, the srna11 lyric can be a "great stanza," a "heroic

mould" and "great song" which will prove stronger than she herself.

The poet faces more challenges than the determined maintenance of her own integrity.

Extemal forces cannot be ignored. There are the others, the dead, which take various forms:

those she mourns among the lost; those who stand ta11 in the literary tradition and whom she

aspires to join; and tlose al1 around her who mock and jïbe. At the opposite end of the

manageable miniature is the limitless influence of the phnets and stars, wheeling in vast space,

far beyond control. In "At a Party" and "To Wine," the poet "reels" at the overwhelrning

realization of cosrnic chaos and persona1 helplessness. Her grief is at its highest pitch in the

latter poem as she contemplates the victory of flesh over muid, which promises only death and

oblivion.

In Part 11, "the period of M e r despair, edged in upon the period of Beautiful Males,"

Bogan explores the interconnections of the twXnned motivations of her life: rornantic love and

artistic achievement. Frank speculates that Bogan found herself in a cycle both creative and

Chapter 5. Page 303

destructive: she wrote poetry out of the violent severance of a love relationship, which she in

t u r ~ craved. The eternal union of female and male is a mode1 for both happiness (in love) and

integrity (the two sides of the self, the androgynous mind described by Virginia ~ o o l f , ' ~ existing

in harmony)- The balance resulting, however, does not require words; poetry falters. Once man

and woman are matched, "it is silence which comes fiom us" ("Poem in Prose"), In "Short

Sumrnary," the poet realizes that this silence she has just praised is a fonn of restraint, a catching

of words in the throat. "Italian Morning" retunis to the conternpIation of art and the poet's

affiliation with her great forebears: the poet considers the "long perspective past o n eye" of

posterity, the "Mutable body, and brief narne" confronting the "marbIe herb" and "stone flame."

''Man Alone" marks a severance with the narcissistic lover who fails to understand that he, and

the temporal relationship, have been subsurned into the permanence of poetry-

Part DI is, according to Bogan's flippant outline, when "the spiritual side begins, with a

few rumbles fkom the sensual bassoons and the mystic fiddles." "Baroque Comment" is the

poet's statement on the tragic dividedness of human nature, as rnanifested in war and in art; her

voice sounds proud and alone, implicitIy taking the unpopular stand that the true poet rnust

maintain autonomy and thus distance even in times of crisis. Wars will recur; al1 things endure,

"Save of peace alone," she intones at the end of "To My Brother," Bogan adrnired the

traditionally manly +es of courage and heroism, seeing them as essential to the maturis she

had herself gained with such effort. The third section of The Sleeping: Fury c o n f m her

identification with the solid yet eruptive, space-taking achievements of Italian sculpture. Her

admiration of German poetry in this period of nsing Fascism firrther bespoke Bogan's

determined political disinterest.

'' In "A Room of One's Own," Woolf quotes Coleridge in saying that the great rnind is androgynous, meaning, she suggests, a mind which "is resonant and porous;. . . . naturalIy creative, incandescent and undivideci" (1 08).

Cfrapter 5. Page 304

With "The Sleeping Fq," the poet is able to celebrate the new "peace" she has gained

by at last facing fully her own dernons. In the typescript for her short story "Half a Letter,"

Bogan wrote of the necessity of living "in the present" ~ B P ) . ' ~ When we are Young, life in the

present is "indicated only by the sense of dramatic importance."

But later, we find that in the present we must continualIy carry ourselves as we are (and we join, at that t h e , the rnuddled and rnisshapen, the character parts, stepping down fkom our roles as leads in the play) fiom moment to moment, conscious and breathing and acting and deciding and thinking, - we have to move through every moment, without benefit of lapses into coma or surprises into a heightened state of being. We are literally ourselves, and thuigs f'unction literally around us, tembly apparent and undisguised.

The high theatre, the youthful sense of "dramatic importance" so evident in Bodv of This Death,

must eventually be left behind as we relinquish our "roles as leads in the play," says the older,

wiser poet of The Sleaing: F m . The new present is endowed with size, but what has become of

the past? It is rniniaturized: once loved, it has "dwindled to the size of people on postage

stamps." The Fury, always a child, is now at Zeast sleeping, calm in reconciliation. To

demonstrate, however, that the psychic war recurs, Bogan follows "The Sleeping F q " with

"Rhyrne" and "M., Singing," poems which give voice to the buried cries of the poet's violent,

childish self and the proud, compt figures who participate in the battle. The last poem of the

third section, "Evening Star," is a prayer for knowledge of "our partial strength."

In Part IV, the emphasis is on the voyage to leave behind suffering, as articulated in

"Putting to Sea." The poet seeks to leave behind her emotional immaturity; the dolls and toys of

"Kept" are 'Wow to be put away: / We are not girls and boys." While "Heard by a Girl" and

"Packet of Letters," like 'Xhyrne" and "M., Singing," function to show that maturity is not a

plateau reached once and the struggle forgotten, the last poem of the volume demonstrates the

53 BOX 13, Folder 3. "Haif a Lettei' was never published.

CJzaprer 5. Page 305

poet's relief to have crossed into a season both chi11 and quiet. The reader might wonder,

however, why the speaker of "Song for a Lyre" seerns to feel so assured that "Stillness" will now

be the voice of her night. As William Kerrigan suggests, as one ages the past becornes larger, not

smaller, and - as the future lessens - the 'titality of real fiu~,~' that "rich wrath of creativity,"

may r e tm; the "ambition to remake the world, even as it confronts a progressively more final

hsû-ation, may never slacken" (1 80, 189-90).

After The Sleeping Furv appeared in 1937, Louise Bogan published no h t h e r volumes

of new poems. Her last three books were al1 collections of previous work Eom the first three,

with a few new poems added each time. In Poems and New Poem (1941), sixteen new poerns

make up sections four and five of a five-part structure. "The Daemon" is the last of the lyrics:

Must 1 tell again In the words I know For the ears of men The flesh, the blow?

Must 1 show outright The bruise in the side, The halt in the night, And how death cried?

Must 1 speak to the lot Who little bore? It said Why not? It said Once more,

In a letter to her fnend May Sarton eighteen years later, Bogan recalled that the poem '%as

written (@veng one afternoon alrnost between one curb of a street and another. FVhy no&? is

always a great help. God presses us so hard, often, that we rebel - and we should. Auden once

told me that we should talk back to God; that this is a kind of prayer" (WWL 3 17). An

unpublished poem entitled "To the Unknown," probably written in the 1940s, expresses Bogan's

Chapter 5, Page 306

conflicted feelings about addressing God (LBP)? The poet wonders that she speaks to one

whose existence she doubts, admitting at one point that the need to consult is a compulsion.

Mary DeShazer hears, in addition to the religious overtones of the poem, the suggestion that the

female poet's possession by an aggressive male muse is "tantamount to rape" (53). Bogan's

detemination to "talk back" might have derived in part fkom the discipline of her psychoanalytic

therapy, the taking cure which required that she continue, as necessary, the process of telling

and retelling, to work at the ~ o r d . ~ ~ Ehwever painhl Bogan was finding the continuing

production of poetry to be, in 1941 she was yet adamant to "speak to the lot / Who little bore."

Bogan kept the Rilke inscription she used for The Sleeping Fuw, "How small it is, that with -

which we stmggle / What stniggles with us, how great," for the three collections which followed.

Collected Poems: 1923-53 (1956) retained the five-part structure and content of its

predecessor, only expanding the last section to include three more poems. These last three

convey a sense of finality which suggest that, after several long years with little lyric production,

Bogan regarded Collected Poems as her sumrnary statement. "Goodbye, goodbys!" says the

protagonist of "After the Persian," "There was so much to love, I could not love it all; / 1 could

not love it enough." As if to ernphasize its dramatic structure, a poetic tragedy complete with

climax and closing curtain, Bogan ends the book with "Song for the Last Act." The last stanza

describes "a voyage done":

Now that 1 have your heart by heart, 1 see The wharves with their great ships and architraves; The rigging and the cargo and the slaves

55 JefEey Berman notes that Freud perceived both artists and women as devoted to the pleasure principle, intuiting mystenous tniths whîch they could not rationaliy understand: "The artist, in Freud's judgement, creates beauty, but the psychoanalyst analyzes its meanings and 'penetrates' it, with a11 the phailic implications thereof' (xi].

Chaprer 5, Page 307

On a strange beach under a broken sky. O not departme, but a voyage done! The bales stand on the Stone; the anchor weeps Its red mst downward, and the long vine creeps Beside the salt herb, in the Iengthening sun.

Now that 1 have your heart by heart, 1 see.

Over a decade later, two years before her death, Bogan brought out one more and this time the

last version of her definitive oeuvre, The Blue Estuaries (1968). A sixth section consisting of

twelve new poems provides a kind of coda to the rest of the volume, which was otherwise

identical in structure and sequencing to ColIected Poems. The Blue Estuaries closes with a

trilog5 titled as a group as "Three Songs:" "Little Lobelia's Song;" ''Psychia&istYs Song;" and

"Mas ked Wornan' s Song."

In these final three lyrics, Bogan neatly surnmarizes in an uncanny trinity the multi-

vocal pattern of struggle and suffering which shaped her life and work. "Little Lobelia" is her

raging child-self who insists on being heard despite the woman poet's determination to reconcile

her component parts, to be "mature." Lobelia disappears at dawn but cornes out in the poet's

sleep; in a tantnun, she rejects her abandon~nent:~~

Give me back your sleep Until you die, Else I weep, weep, Else 1 cry, cry.

% Ienijoy La Beiie claims that it is "the girl's reflection that does the speaking," basing her assessrnent no doubt on the stanza, "You look at your face / In the looking glass. / This is the face 1 My likeness has" (38n). La Belle ignores the poem's place in the context of the volume as well as simple chronology: Bogan was not a girl when she wrote the poem, so are we to assume the implied poet is a girl sùnply because her refïection speaks as one? Rather, Bogan is presenting a twisted Queen / Snow White confrontation. A woman late in IXi look in the mirror and sees. with both anguish and vanity, her younger, more beautiful seIf. The result is an uncanny moment, with the poet facing herself at an early stage.

Chaprer 5. Page 308

the impossibility of ever completely overcoming past trauma and the emotional necessity of the

quest for peace and integrity. In the frst part of the poem, he (fhctioning as the poet's

masculine side and as analyst in the psychoanalyîic dialogue) achowledges the people, places,

and time which have scarred the analysand's childhood - voices which continue to speak in a

house hidden yet preserved: 'The young will broken / And al1 time to endure- / Those hours

when murderous wounds are made, 'Often in joy'." Says the analyst sadly, "1 hem." The second

half of the "Psychiatrïst's Song" recounts the relief of amival on dry land after a long voyage.

nere is silence; the voices are stilled: "Farewell, phantoms of flesh and of ocean!" The youth of

the introductory poem of the collection, "A Tale," at last completes his quest to escape the noise

of "the break / Of waters in a land of change." Appropriately, the voice of the analyst figure is

situated between the child's cry and the mature woman's defiant announcement that the

consurning passion of heterosexual love has always been, for hm, not only an alternate to art, but

beyond good and evil. The masked woman has the last word:

Before 1 saw the ta11 man Few women should see, Beautifül and imposing Was rnarble to me.

And virtue had its place And evil its alanns, But not for that wom face, And not in those roped anns.

Bogan's progress through her successive voIumes of poerns can be compared to

Whitman's through the different editions of Leaves of Grass. From the first he added new poerns

to his initial slim volume - 20 in 2856, 124 in 1860, gradually discovering that he was writing

Chapler 5. Page 309

one long, complexly orchestrated poem.'' The definitive, final productions designed by

Whitman and Bogan can be seen as subjective epics in the tradition of Wordsworth's Prelude,

works of introspection which represent the experience of multitudes. William Carlos Williams

engaged in a similar effort, according to Robert Cirasa. Like Bogan, he put out successive

volumes of his coliected poetry three times in an attempt to assemble al1 his poems into a single

coherent work of major proportions, While the basic eIements were the lyric sequences of the

previously published, individual volumes of verse, Williams made additions and changes in an

effort to provide definition to the "great bulk of his poetic record" (17). Williams was driven by

the need to go beyond the limits of his shorter lyncs, claims Cirasa, because despite his long and

disthguished record of publication, he had been constantly criticized for failing to produce work

of greater depth and sc~pe .~* With Paterson, William made of gigantic size a value in itself,

followed Whitman's identification of the (male) body of the poet with the body of the work.

The relation of the (gendered) body to the body of work presented a difflculty for

Bogan. In Beinn a Minor Writer, Amencan poet and author of short stories Gail Gilliland traces

a comection between body size and body-of-work size which privileges masculinity, remarking

on the "traditional male criterion of bigness of body" associated with artistic success:

. . . one has the feeling that the body of one's artistic work, or corpus, must be big - even pumped up, If the body of one's work is small and / or exquisite - if it is fiagile rather than corpulent, if it tends more toward the practiced weightlessness of a gymnast

"Leaves of Grass is Whitman's one book, a book which appeared in many versions and was transformed in response to changes in its author's Iife and in the history of his nation," daim Richard Elirnann and Robert O'Clair in their introduction to his work in The Norton Antholom of Modem Poeîw (20). Whitman "slowly discovered that he was writing an increasingly long and complexly orchestrated poem, the unity of which was clear to hirn o d y as he worked at it."

SB Kenneth Burke, for example, complimented Williams on being "the master of the glirnpse . . . the minute f~a t i ng of a mood, an horizon, a contrast," but complained that "such miniature effects were so detached fiom any larger governing context as to render the very principle of organization meaningless." Babette Deutsch agreed that "the singling out ofthe brief moment, however intense, is a limitation upon his work" (both cited by Cirasa, 18).

Chapter 5, Page 3 1 O

rather than toward the sinewy earthboundness of a two-hundred-pound male who makes a practice of lifting weights - then, one rnay assume, it must by definition be a minor work (17)

Bogan acknowledged that her particular gift lay in brevity and compression, was best realized in

"the short cry (lyric poetry) and the short remark tiournalism) . . . the talent of the cxy or the

cahier" (JAR 9 1). But, Iike Williams, she resisted the minor designation, and regretted that a

lifetune spent writing lyric poetry, brief criticai reviews, and short storïes was destined to be

classified as a small body of work- Feminist critics have done little to protect Bogan firom the

tyranny of genre, thernselves inclined to respect the equivalence of worth and weight; women

writers who have been successful in t e m of producing a large body of work may be just as

guilty as male critics when it cornes to judging another writer's work on the basis of being big,

claims Gilliland. (19). While Carolyn Burke argues that Mina Loy was udàirly shackled by the

expectation of an oeuvre, an "anachronistic demand for a woman of her tirne" (8)' Gloria Bowles

echoes the prevailing assesment of Bogan's accomplishrnents as limited, the unfortunate result

of paûïarchal strictures. Bowles daims at the outset of her book to be arguing that Bogan "is a

major rnodernist poet," but does not attempt to disentangle the h o t of size; her analysis of

"suppressed" poems and interpretation of Bogan's "tiny production" in her later years promote

an image of the poet as a taiented failure.

Maria Aldrich argues that "The absence of an alternate tradition in women's poetry

made it difficult for @3ogan] and other lyric poets of her generation to develop a late style" (1 16).

The poet's female body, gradually acquirïng corpulence with age, "thickening with tirne,""

was undoubtably a rerninder to Bogan of her dilemma. According to Jeanne Larsen, "no one

aspect seems more essential to our understanding of her art than its grounding in the body: the

body that pulses, hears, and sings,"and "Bogan seerned intensely

59 From Bogan's journal, as cited by Frank (205).

Chapter 5, Page 31 1

aware that her body was a female one" (23 l).4 What could it mean for a modemist lyric poet to

watch herseif change from a slim yoimg girl into the grotesque female flesh which her literary

generation despised as representative of the excess to be rejected, the undifferentiated chaos

which must be ref~rmulated?~' It is one thing for Yeats in his old age to celebrate the wisdom of

Crazy Jane; it is quite another to embody her. The continued '%blows of air" to the body

described by Lucretius result over time in the collapsing of limbs. "Women collapse so

thoroughly, so soon," reflected Bogan after having tea with Willa Cather, "already an old

woman, quenilous and set .in her ways" (WWL 65). In her journal, Bogan noted "the fnghtfùl

collection of old female wrecks in the uptown streets" and recorded a moment of horror as she

faced her future: "Today it seemed as though nothing would ever happen again. Saw my real,

half-withered, silly face in a shop mirror on the street, under the bald light of an evening shower,

and shuddered. The woman who died without producing an oeuvre. The woman who ran away"

(JAR 104, 103).

In The Poetics of Disaripointment, Laura Quinney traces a continuity in the Iiterary

tradition which reverses our usual reading of romanticism as celebrating the seif. She sees poets

That rnay be tme, but it couId aiso be said that Bogan displayed the Freudian hystenc's defensive refùsal of difference, playing out a sexuaiized contestation of identity in both her body and her poetry. Her occasional use of a male persona in her poems was confusing to many of her readers. Interestingly, while as a young wornan Bogan was vain about her physicai attractiveness, fearfid at times of appearing too d y , a lesbian, as if the masculinity of her career aspirations might affect her appearance. Departing for Europe in 1933, wearing a brown suit and a hat tilted on one side, Bogan reportedly said to Edmund Wilson, "Do 1 look like a Lesbian? I don? look like a Lesbian, do I?" (as cited by Frank, 158). Kahane cornments that "hysteria is £iequentiy marked by disturbances of voice, vision, hearing, and even breaking - disturbances involving the earliest bodily zones of exchange between inside and outside." Poems such as "The Drum" and "Fuernacht" fit Kuhane's description.

6' Aldrich pub the question in somewhat dïfferent terms. She ties Bogan's creativity and "sense of the vocation of the feminine lyric poet" to her "ideology of youthfd romantic love." This sense of vocation shaped Bogan's career, "For what does such a complex of assumptions leave to the middle-aged feminine lyricist?" (106) Bogan found it difficult to continue to write poetxy late in life because she no longer had the intense feelings associated with overpowering sexual love; the brevity of her productive artistic Me is illustrative of Aldrich's point "that a woman trying to corne to temis with herself and with the world may not be aided by the recognized mode1 of female aging" (1 18).

Chopter 5, Page 3 12

bewildered and depressed, not excited by the riches of their inner lives but estranged fkom the

hope of selfhood. Quimey coins the term bcdisappointrnent" to signify the "distinct, fearsome

psychological state - a twilight of paralysis - that the preromantic, romantic, and postromantic

lyric portrays," a much more traumatic experïence than mere hstration of wishes or

expectations (ix). She argues that poerns about disappointment are not about the failure of

literary ambition or romantic love, but a deeper "hstration of eros, in which the self is fiozen

and isolated," "humiliated." (ix). The poet has experienced a loss which ''fIactures and

paralyzes" his or her formerly hopefül self, a self which in retrospect is seen as arrogant and

naive. Bogan's disappointment was such: In "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Wornan," a poem

not published until Limmer included it among the fkagments in Journev around MY Room, the

poet recalls herself, ât the age of twenty-two, living in a "cubicle" and writing in~essantly?~

Sitting on the bed's edge, in the cold lodgings, she wrote it out on her knee In terror and panic - but with the moments's courage, sumrnoned up fiom God knows

where. Without recouse to saints or angels: a Bohemian, thinking herself fiee - A young thin girl without sense, living (she thought) on passion and air.

Those around her are kînd to the "silly young creature caught again in a month of the rose."

1s there a way through? Never think it! Everything creaks. And here once more is the cold room, between thin walls of sadist and lout. But at last, asking to serve, seeking to earn its keep, about and about, At the h o u between the dog and the wolf, is it her heart that speaks? She sits on the bed with the pad on her knees, and writes it out.

LookYig back on herself as a young woman, Bogan saw one extravagant and careless with her

talent and emotions, "suffer[ing] mindlessly," Such suffering was no longer; it had been

'' The date of the poem is not certain. According to Frank, Bogan sketched it out in 1940 and rewrote it - caiiing it 'a rather sappy (I fear) thing' - in 1956 (390).

Chapter 5, Page 313

"expensively excised" (JAR 55-56), "There are whole tracts of life which 1 have given up

entirely, and shall never see again," wrote Bogan in a 1940 letter to Mildred Weston (OF 24).

Her &ends must understand that she has become "one who has had to learn that energy cannot

be thrown around . . . . a truncated person," she went on, adding ruefülly, 'Now, this does sound

Iike a middle-aged female Hamlet!"

Poetry provides the perfect venue for the description of disappointment, says Quinney,

because a lyric portrays a "delimited psychological moment," arresting the psyche in crisis. To

understand narratives, however, Quinney feels compelled to turn to prose fiction in her

'Afterward." She claims not to understand how romantic (and postromantic) iyric poets might

be able to make a narrative of their disappointment, spanning months or yens in outline. But

what about narrative as a series of "delimited moments"? Read in sequence, Bodv of This

Death, Dark Sumrner, and The Slee~inp; Fury tell a story of loss tied up with the failure of

romantic love and literary ambition but deeper than either, the "fnistration of eros, in which the

self is fiozen and isolated." Bogan desmied her slim, young self with a kïnd of despairing

disdain: "1 was "stupid, an exile in myself, sunk in a deep self-mirroring, self-effacing dream. 1

presented a still surface to the appearances around me, Iike a glass, stiffened into a polish capable

of reflection by the same insane cohesion that keeps the particles of stone firmly within the

stone" (JAR 56). By the time of the publication of Poems and New Poerns, Bogan might well

have been asking herself, why continue to write, "to speak to the lot / Who 1ittIe bore?" As

Gilliland says, "in the absence of major recognition, the minor wrïter must continually ask

himself or herself: Why do 1 (still) wrïte? Why do 1 write (anyway)?" (x).

Chapter 6: Conclusion

And, take the word of one who has lain on the icy floor of the ninth circle of hell, without speech and will and hope, it's the self that must do it.

(Letter to Theodore Roethke, 193 5)

In the words of T.S. Eliot, "The difference between major and minor poets has nothing to do with

whether they wrote long poems, or only short poems" but can rather be found in the extent of a

"significant unity" of the whole body of work. W.H. Auden remarked on that uniq in the poetry

of Louise Bogan. In a review of Bogan's first collection, Poems and New Poems, Auden

discusses at length by way of a preface the challenge faced by modem poets of the temptation "to

choose / Perfection of the life or of the work." On the one hand there is the error of believing

that the relation of Iife to work is a direct one; on the other is the error of denying that there need

by any relation at all, of believing that the poetry can develop autonomously (56). "To have

developed to the point where this temptation is real, and then to resist it, is to realize that the

relation of Life to Work is dialectical, a change in the one presupposes and demands a change in

the other," Auden maintains. "And to see this is to see that one's poetic development must be

restrained fiom rushing ahead of oneself while at the same tune one's self-development must not

be allowed to fa11 behind" (57). The reader of Poems and New Poerns cornes to understand what

is the pnce and the reward for such a discipline.

The hasty reader hardly notices any development; the subject matter and form show no spectacular change: he thinks - "Miss Bogan. O yes, a nice writer of Iyrics, but al1 these women poets, you h o w , slight. Only one string to their bow." It is only by reading and rereading that one cornes to appreciate the steady growth of wisdom and technical mastery, the persistent elimination of the consolations of stoicism and every other kind of poetic theatre, the achievement of an objectivity about persona1 experience which is sought by many but f o n d only by the few who dare face the Furies. (57)

As a literary critic, Bogan herself appreciated "the steady growth of wisdom" when she

Chapier 6, Page 3 15

found it in the work of other poets; Auden's praise must have moved her deeply. In a review of

Edna Millay's Wine from These Graves. Bogan considers how the mahiring poet ''is faced with

the antagonisms of cornpIexity and loss," a challenge particularly acute in the 1930s: "Our time

presses this individual battle into an unbearably tight compass and gives it no aid" (67). Unlike

many of her contemporaries, Bogan was detennined to remain aloof from political controversy, a

decision unpopular at the time and one which is still a sore point with some of her readers. The

poet must achieve a conversion of his earlier self into his later self, she contends, citing Yeats,

"the great example of a poet who fronted the grappling world, yet kept his eye, his mind, and his

hand free for the act of continual maturing creation" (67). In Wine from These Gra~es, Bogan

h d s that "maturity sounds skongly, though interrnittently." Millay at last gives evidence, in her

latest book, "that she recognizes and is prepared to meet the task of becoming a mature and

selfsufficing woman and artist. It is a task she never completely faced before . . . " The

intimation 2nd mood felt and projected in the lyrics "is neither young nor transitional, but grown.

And the sonnet sequence, 'Epitaph for the Race of Man,' figures forth at length a mature

disaffection which Miss Millay has never before sustained" (68). Millay's readers owe it to her

to read the book in its entirew; Bogan, as reviewer, pointedly does not cite "chapter and verse" to

support her claims about its worth "ecause the book exists and deserves to be consulted as a

whole" (68).

Auden predicted that, some day, Bogan would be "paid the respect she deserves," In

1968, on the occasion of the publication of The Blue Estuaries and twenty-six years after

Auden's review, William Meredith ' ka s s b c k . . . by how Louise Bogan's reputation has lagged

behind a career of stubborn, individual excellence" and hoped the new book "may set things

straight" (98). When The Blue Estuaries was reissued in 1977, R Phyllis Goldfein suggested

that it was "tirne that we think again" about Bogan's continuing obsckty. We can hope that

Chapter 6, Page 3 16

Auden's insight will yet be proven true. Writing in 1993, Larsen found Bogan's place in the

canon to be growing more secure (228). ft is doubtful, however, that the poet's worth wîlI be

appreciated until her volumes are seen to "exist," each deserving "to be consulted as a whole."

Lee Upton's recmt (1996) rnonograph Obsession and Release is an example of the kind of study

which fails Bogan, and is particularly disappointing because of its relative ambition and its

timeliness, the only book-length study of the poet's work to be published in a decade. Upton's

haphazard analysis - filled with phrases such as "in this context it is useful to consider" which

vioIate Bogan's own context - ironically work agauist a wider readership for the poet, because it

obfuscates the "significant unity in [the] whole work" which, as Eliot tells us, distinguishes the

major poet fkom the rninor (50).'

In an essay probing the explosion of interest in the poet Elizabeth Bishop, Thomas

Travisano claims that Bishop has emerged as a key figure in a contemporary, neo-formalist

canon. Bogan herself was among Bishop's early advocates, mostly fellow poets who stressed her

modesty and superb artistry. "Quiet inwardness, controlled self-exploration and self-revelation,

conversational poise in a context of emotional impediment, verbal invention within visible reach

of the forma1 conventions, and an environment of brooding moral uncertains are some of the

' It would help also if the Iiterary world could sort out its definitions and standardize its termïnology. Despite Eliot's attempt to disentangle the co~ota t ions of "majoi' and "minor," confusion continues to reign. For example, how do we assess the metaphysical poets? Bogan "claimed the titie of 'minor poet'," says Hayden Carxuth, "which m u t be understood as it was in her time by Eliot and the New C ~ ~ C S . . .. Donne was a &or poet, Herbert and Hemck, Landor and Hopkins were minor poets- . . . Louise Bogan belongs with this company" (13 1). Bruce Bawer insists that she does not Elizabeth Frank overestimates the subject of her biography when she places her alongside "such great lyric poets as George Herbert and Gerard Madey Hopkins," says Bawer, for Bogan "was, admittedly, a minor poet" (3 1). If it be granted that Bogan is indeed in the same class as Herbert and Hopkins, we should be prepared to admit that we are no more confident of consistently applying the obviously arbitrary classification ''minor" to her than we are to them. According to Gilliland, much of the cntical confusion over definitions of "major" and "minor" c m be traced to the radically different theoretical perspectives inherited fkom Aristotle and Horace. Aristotle attempts the pose of critical objectivity in discussing the merits of tragedy and epic, but Horace, initiating the ars poetica tradition (the writer's own commentary on his or her art), concentrates on the subjective evaluation of the poet of his own art (x).

Chap fer 6, Page 3 1 7

qualities valued by neoformalist poets," says Travisano ('Thenomenon" 229). Bishop has also

been claimed by the postmoderns for her poerns representing ambiguity and the play of

observations (230). Neoforrnalists and postmodems would h d the same traits to admire in

Bogan. As well, there is potential that interest in Bogan will rekindle as feminist critics reject

anger and alienation as necessary descriptors of female writers?

Even in such a clirnate, however, it is likely that Bogan's inherent complexity will

continue to elude appreciation, despite the mysterious attraction she holds for orne.^ Travisano

quotes David Kalstone's comment about Bishop, that she has been "hard to place" (235). As

Suzanne Clark notes, Bogan held apparently contradictory views, at one time writing critically of

the sentimental past (of the songbirds) fiom a modernist position and at another arguing in favour

of the intensity of emotion of women writers (252). Bowles believes that Bogan's "integration of

a glassy poetic surface and female subject matter have confused formalist and feminist critics

alike" (1). One of those most recently misled to an under-evaluation of Bogan is Karen Kilcup.

In her introduction to a 1999 collection of essays on the subject of American women writers and

the masculine tradition, she expresses concem about the increasing bifurcation of literary culture

Margaret Ezell, arguing that feminists need now to examine the theoretical p ~ c i p l e s underlying their readings, speculates that we might have'bnintentionally marginalized or devalued a significant portion of female iiterary experience" (6-7). What is needed now is a consideration of ferninist historiography and reconsideration of our pattern of inquiry, she insists, for it is essential "to preserve our ability to hear multiple voices of women writing in the past, not simply a universai female voice, and not to insist on continuity where diversity flourishes" (12-13). Jayne March agrees that, although the pervasive nature of the ciifferences of experience of women and men "shows the need to continue studying the implications of gender bias in the &tory and operations of literary production, criticism, and evaluation," we must take care not to fd into a rigid dualism, for "what is needed is a flexible f'ramework that can accommodate as many versions of literary creativity as there are writers" (5,20)

' See, for example, the commentary of Rachel Hadras on Frank's biography. She reports feeling intrigued by the poet's "deepest silences" which "seem to emanate front, to surround or shield her sexuai core." "[Olne wants to know more about this hooded woman," she explains, and herseif offers "a few tantalking clues," such as Bogan's remark that women wrote poetry with their ovaries and hence dried up at 40, and the poem "Women," "written as if by an alien observer of the female sex if not the human race." Evidently puzzlecl, Hadras wonders, "Do these hgmentary reflections lead us toward or away fiom the center of Bogan's sense of what it rneant to be a writer who was also a woman?" (300)

Chapter 6, Page 318

which culmuiated in modemist critics "disappearing" some popular wornen writers fiom the

canon, but herself rnisrepresents Bogan's literary opinions and goes on to descriie her poetry as

masculine, unemotional, detached, and intellectual(4).

The effect on Bogan's reputation of the anthoIogizing of poems such as "Women" and

'Medusa" has been considerable, at once highlighting and misrepresenting the poet, but it is not

unlikely that The Blue Estuaries will see print again soon and that the poems published in

context. We can continue to hope that Bogamwork will be read as lyric collections and the

writer herself "paid the respect she deserves." 1 suggest, however, that Bogan's achievement will

be underestimated as long as we consider even The Blue Estuaries - which retains with somt

exactness the lyrïc sequences of the three volumes of new poems within its overall ordering- as

its definitive sum~nation.~ We may have to assign to Bogan herself some of the blame; perhaps

she erred by naming her fuial collection as if it were just another slim volume, compelling as that

name is, and no doubt she felt she had already published two obviously titled compilations of her

poems. In so doing, however, she inadvertentIy disguised the status of her last work as that o f a

single volume like any other single volume or sequence. Readen unfamiliar with Bogan's

career, approaching The Blue Estuaries, are unaware of the hidden spatiaI and temporal

dimensions necessary to a full appreciation of the true "size" of the book before them, a glacier

discemible only by its tip. They see a series of short poems, numbered modestly in sections I

through VI, existing on 134 slight pages. Bogan was deliberate and even calculating in her

See Anne Ferry's illurninating discussion of the Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish" in "The Anthologizing of Elizabeth Bishop-"

' According to David Holdeman, we should be carefil of the traditional editoriai caveat, which pnvileges the author's final intentions, that there is such a thing as a final, definitive text to which previous versions have ody been leading (13). The editing practices of Greg-Bowers taught most critics to see as completed and metaphpicai what many modemists themselves regarded more as ongoing and partly material, he argues. The Waste Land, for example, was once considered the "epitome of cold modernist impersonaiity," but reappraisals since the publication in 197 i of the cirafts of the poem have transformed it into "a record of agonizing persond struggles."

Chapter 6. Page 319

minimalist aesthetic, but since as a literary critic she herself appreciated the representation of

artistic development and emotional maturity over tirne, her insistence on a cold classicisrn was

ultimately unfair to her readers. As Goldfein justly said, Bogan's demands on her reader - "to

bear what is essentially unbearable" without even congratulation for the "valiancy of the effort"

- have hampered her popularily.6 The excision of the long poem "The Flurne" fiom the Dark

Surnrner sequence satisfied Bogan's desire to repress al1 of the "outright narrative" of her life, so

that the repressed became the poetry, but her decision left the reader with little access to the

intenor of her work. For readers of the original volume Dark Summer, "The Flurne" provided an

important legend to the map of Bogan's mind. After reading that poem, about a woman &tic

and angry, fearful and jealous, we understand the poet's symbolism. The house of her being was

filled with "alien voices."

A modern poetic sequence of a new order, The Blue Estuaries is a masterpiece of a form

which the weighted tenninology of size, the fieighted classifications of major and minor, cannot

encompass. Ideally, it should be read in context, as a summary, final volume taking its place

beside and after the volumes which precede it. However, the reprinting of Body of This Death,

Dark Sumer , and The Sleeping Furv will probably never happen. Ironically, Bogan effectively

gave her readers permission to disregard them as distinct. Reclassification of Bogan as a major

writer based on the unity and scope of her work is unlikely, but not impossible. As Travisano

remarks philosophically, "critical paradigms corne and go, and as they do, the reputations of

Not counting The Book of Practical Cats, the collected poem of T.S. Eliot fit onto only 142 pages, but Eliot's definitive volume presents itseifas such, by providing dates for the serial volumes represented to give the reader a clear sense of the time travelied in the poetry, and by including three of his late play to lend an appropriate weight and dimension to the book Bogan might have elected to incorporate into her final Iyric collection a selection of her shoa stories (written during the early 1930s and originaiiy published in The New Yorker) - a radical suggestion, perhaps, and one that Bogan would have rejected outright because the effect of the volume would be incalcuiably "blurred" -but their inclusion between the sequerices from Dark Summer and The Sleeping Fury would have ailowed the reader a much- needed breathing space, relief fiom the intensity of the former and preparation for the resolution of the latter.

Chapter 6. Page 320

selected writers rise and fall" (227). Debra Fried's comment about the reputation of Millay, one

of those popular female writers Kilcup says was "disappeared" by modernist critics, is tefling to

cite by way of closing. MilIay is now being subjected to serious critical smtiny. What will it

mean for her place in the canon? "While more work on Millay is not likely to resuit in the

elevation of her to the status of a major twentieth-century poet," Fried states, "it should lead to a

more searching understanding of why we judge her to be rninor, and to our estimate in generai of

poets in the modernist period who continued to write in traditional forms" (243). If we continue

to judge Bogan as rninor, we should at least understand the terms of o u . assessment, and its

limitations. As she herself said, "if one is minor, one is minor: being good AND minor is

something" @WVL 104).

Gertrude Stein once said that the genius is free fiorn ordinary senses of size: "A sentence

is an irnagined masterpiece." Gaston Bachelard recornmends that we shed our assurned

definitions and reconsider the meaning of adjectives from the perspective of the poetic

imagination, In that light, "the attnïutes of greatness" are contained in the details of a thing:

"Large issues fkom srnall, not through the logical law of a dialectics of contraries, but. th& to

liberation fiom al1 obligations of dimensions, a liberation that is a special characteristic of the

activity of the imagination" (155, 154). An uncollected poem of Bogan's demonstrates that she

understood the paradox:

1 thought to make The smallest possible compass for loveliness For safety's sake;

To cheat the ski11 Of any who rnight well measure or covet it Against my will.

"They have big eyes; This, if it be but a little seed-point of brightness, They will not prize."

Chapter 6. Page 32 1

But you said 'No; It is the little thing that the marksman looks for With his long spliced bow.

The arrow takes (With luck) a line into the target's center, Holds there, and shakes.

If the archer be clever The Iandscape about hirn is scattered with tiniest marks Speared neatly forever."

What shall 1 do? It cannot be srnaIl, so that any casual arrow May rive it in two.

Beyond al1 size, Secret and huge, I shall mount it over the world, Before the bolt £lies.'

A lyric poet is an intermittent illurninator, like a lighthouse emitting blips into the night.

The individual lyrics which rnake up the poet's body of work are isolated interjections voiced

into a void. Whether or not we are to interpret a larger meaning Erom the pattern of Iight and

sound, which develops as the shadows and echoes accumulate, is typicalIy at the author's

direction. We may be slow to discem that direction, however. According to George Bornstein,

critics have failed to appreciate that rnodernist writers were often exceptionally carefd to control

the forrn in which their work appeared:

Thus, one can have a distinguished book on Yeats impervious to the carefiil sequencing by which his poerns speak to and undercut each other within individual volumes, or an article about gaps in Stevens 's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" based solely on the truncated eleven-section version in Selected Poems with no awareness of the fuller thirty-one-section version in The Auroras of Autumn and Collected Poems (2).

Michèle Lowrie, in her book on the poetic sequences of Horace, notes that "Warnings not to

' "Hidden" was published in the New Yorker, 15 February 1936 (p. 20).

Chapter 6. Page 322

push too hard abound, and the accusation of 'over-reading' reveals a deep distrust of the

relocation of sensemaking toward the reader, away Eom the author or the text"; she believes,

however, that the "real threat" cornes "kom those who question the possibility of un i s at all"

(10, 1 1). Bogan left no explicit instruction that her readers should regard her own three volumes

as having contextures which exceed the sums of their component poerns, but her appreciation of

the careers of poets who did communicate in their books the sense of a developing, maturing

personality was clear. In her repeated efforts to publish a definitive compilation of her work-

issuuig collections in 1941, 1954, and finally in 1968 - Bogan revealed her concem that the

sequence and structure of the lyrics represent her difficult, painful growth as an artist and

woman. Body of This Death was the work of a young poet confident of her own talent and

beauty, but unsure of her integrity. The miscellany of voices (youth, young woman, older

woman, older man, narrator, implied author) demonstrate a hdamental uncertainty of position:

the perspective changes without warnïng, as if the poet is continually hedging her bets. The

''uncanny space" of Body of This Death aIlows the poet the opportunity to explore and work out

aspects of her own being, but she is on emotionally dangerous, by definition shifting, ground.'

The defiant tone at the volume's end verges on the hysterïcal; her uisistence on an ultirnate unity

of vision and self denies the multiplicity already manifested. Like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner,

the poet is determined to make sense of her suffering, "but in a tragically subjective way:

pathologically, as an aspect of the needy spirit, badgering the disparities of experience for the

consolation of a coherent, resolving meaning" (Perry 286). Bogan's asswance was unabated in

Dark Summer; the poet is confident that she has the strength to undertake a journey traditionally

required of epic heroes: to go to He11 and back Odysseus, Aeneus, and Dante al1 visit the

Terry Castle has argued that eighteenth-century masquerade b a s created an "uncanny space" in English culture, a "dream-like zone where identities became fluid and cherished distinctions - between self and other, subject and object, real and unreai - temporariiy blurred" (17).

Chapter 6, Page 323

Underworld, encomtering their own worst fears along with the dead, Bogan's persona in Dark

Summer descends into her unconscious to face traumas fiom childhood, tuniing up to the light

scars incurred in the past The immature self speaks out as one caged and violent, empowered by

the attention, as relieved to be heard as the tormented who tell their stories in the Inferno. Like

Bluebeard's wife, the poet is consumed with a transgressive curiosity allied to a passionate

honesty. Bogan closed this book also with an unambiguous demonstration of authorial control:

the dialogue format of "Summer Wish" acknowledges division but heralds unity. By the time

The Sleenins Fuw appeared several desperate years later, the several voices have resolved into

an uneasy trinity: desperate child, passionate woman, rational psychoanalyst. The prediction of

relative stability is shown to have corne true, but at great cost: the poet's pride and ambition

have been destroyed with her achievement of an integrated personality? The Sleeping F u n

recounts the protagonist's hubris and subsequent anagnonkis. In 1935, Bogan was reading "al1

the mental-collapse-period in Shakespeare: Timon and Troilus and straight through the big

dramas to the heath in Lear, full of real and simulated madmen" (WWL 83)- Althougti she

would Iater wonder aloud why woman have been detelmined over the years to "out-Shakespeare

Shakespeare,"contest Virginia Woolf s contention that a five-act tragedy is the final test of a

female poet, and suggest that "women have more sense than to linger over an obsessing form of

this kuid" 426), Bogan was obviously attracted to the genre. Not to accuse Bogan of

obsessive lingering, 1 still suggest that her three volumes of new poems read in sequence

constitute a kïnd of poetic tragedy, as well as epic.

Jeffi-ey Berman, claiming that most artists do not want to be 'cured' because they fear their creativity wiIl be imperiled, cites as evidence Vladimir Nabokov's sardonic reference to Freud as the "Viennese witch doctol' and contemptuous dismissal o f psychoanalysis as black magic (xi).

BIBLIOGRAPHIES OF WORKS BY LOUISE BOGAN

Knox, Claire E. Louise Bo~an: A Reference Source. Scarecrow Author Bibliographies, No. 86.

Meuchen, N.J. and London: Scarecrow P, 1990.

Smith, William Jay. Bibliography in Louise Bo~an: A Woman's Words. Washington DC: Library

of Congres, 197 1.

PLUMARY SOURCES: WORKS BY LOUISE BOGAN

A. POETRY

Bodv of This Death. New York: Robert McBride, 1923.

Dark Summer. New York: Charles Scriibner's Sons, 1929.

The Sleeping; Furv. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937.

Poems and New Poems. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 194 1.

Collected Poems, 1923-1 953. New York: Noonday P, 1954.

The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968.

Rejérences. Page 325

B. PROSE

Achievement in Arnerican Poetw. 1900-1950. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1% 1.

Journey Around M y Room: The A u t o b i o p ~ h v of Louise Bogan, A Mosaic. By Ruth Lirnmer.

New York: The Viking P, 1980.

"Conversion into Self." Poetw 45(5) (1935): 277-79. Review of Wine fiom These G r a ~ e s

by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Rpt- in Critical Essavs on Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Ed, William B. Thesing.

Our 30 Year Old Friendship. Letters fkom Louise Bo~an, Comments bv Mildred Weston;

and, Lenacv: Poerns fiom the 'Twenties to the 'Nineties. By Mildred Weston,

Cheney, Washington: Eastem Washington WP, 1997.

A Poet's Alphabet: Reflections on the Literaw Art and Vocation. Ed. Robert Phelps and

Ruth Limmer. New York: McGraw Hill, 1970.

"Reading Contemporary Poetry." English Journal 43 (1953): 57-62.

"Springs of Poetry," New Republic 37 (5 Dec. 1923): 9.

What the Woman Lived: Selected Letters of Louise Bo~an, 2920-1970. Ed, Ruth Limmer.

New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973.

References. Page 326

SECONDARY SOURCES

A. WORKS ABOUT BOGAN

Adams, Léonie. "'Ail Has Been TransIated into Treasure," Rev. of Collected Poems, 1923-1953.

Poetry 85 (1954): 165-69. Rpt, in Critical Essavs on Louise Bogan. Ed. Martha

ColIins, 68-7 1.

Aldrich, Maria. "Lethal Brevity: Louise Bogan's Lyric Career." A ~ n n and Gender in Literature.

Ed. Anne M. Wyatt-Brown and Janice Rossa. Charlottesville and London: UP of

Virginia, 1993. 105-120.

Auden, W.H. "The Rewards of Patience." Rev. of Poerns and New Poems. Partisan Review 9

(1942): 336-40. Rpt. in Critical Essays on Louise Bogan. Ed. Martha Collins. 54-58.

Bawer, Bruce. "Louise Bogan's Angry Solitude." Rev. of Louise Bogan: A Portrait, by

Elizabeth Frank. The New Criterion. 3.9 (1985): 25-3 1.

Bloom, Harold. "Louise Bogan." Jacket notes for Louise Bogan Reads fiom Her Own Works.

Yale Series of Recorded Poets. Decca, DL 9132,1958. Rpt. in Critical Essays on

Louise Bogan. Ed. Martha Collins. 84-87.

Bowles, Gloria. Louise Bo2an7s Aesthetic of Limitation. Bloomington and Indianapolis:

Indiana UP, 1987.

Refirences, Page 327

Carruth, Hayden. "Louise Bogan: Poetry and Excess." Rev, of Louise Bogan: A Portrait, by

Elizabeth Frank. Sewanee Review 94 (1986): 127-13 1.

Colasurdo, Christine. "The Dramatic Ambivalence of Self in the Poetry of Louise Bogan."

Tulsa S tudies in Women's Literature 13 (1 994): 33 9-361.

Collins, Martha. Introduction. Critical Essavs on Louise Boean. Ed. Collins. Boston:

G.K. Ha11 & Co, 1984. 1-23.

DeShazer, Mary K. in mir in^ Women: R e i m a ~ n i n ~ the Muse. New York: Pergamon P, 1986.

Dodd, Elizabeth. The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet: H.D., Louise Bogan. Elizabeth

Bishop, and Louise Gluck- Columbia and London: U of Missouri P, 1992.

Dorian, Donna. "Knowledge Puffeth Up." Pamassus 12-1 3 (1985): 144-1 59.

Douglas, A. Donald. "Body of This Death." New Republic 5 Dec. 1923: 20,22.

Drake, William. The First Wave: Women Poets in Amenca 19 15 - 1945. New York:

MacMillan, 1987.

Evans, Elizabeth. "Poets and Friends: The Correspondence of May Sarton and Louise Bogan,"

That Great Sanitv: CriticaI Essavs on Mav Sarton. Ed. Susan Swartzlander and Marilyn

R. Mumford. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1992, 15-48.

References. Page 328

Fletcher, John Gould, "Minor Poetry." Freeman 5 Mar. 1924: 622,

Ford, Ford Madox. "The Flame in Stone." Rev. of The Sleming Furv. Poetq 50 (1937):

Rpt. in Cntical Essavs on Louise Bo~an- Ed- Martha Collins. 45-47.

Frank, Elizabeth. "A Doll's Heart: The Girl in the Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Louise

Bogan. Twentieth-Centurv Literature 23 (1977): 157-79. Rpt. in Critical Essays on

Louise Bonan. Ed- Martha Collins. 128-49. Rpt. in Critical Essays on Edna St. Vincent

Millay. Ed. William B. Thesing. 179-1 98.

-. Louise Bonan: A Portrait. New York and Toronto: Alked A Knopf, 1985.

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. Introduction to "Louise Bogan." The Norton Antholon, of

Literature by Women. Ed. Gilbert and Gubar. New York and London: W. W. Norton

& CO., 1985. 1609-1 1.

Goldfein, R. Phyllis. "Words She AIways Knew: A Consideration of Louise Bogan and

Her Poetry." Movin~ Out 7.2 (1978): 73-77.

Gould, Jean. American Women Poets: Pioneers of Modem Poetrv. New York: Dodd, Mead

& Co, 1980.

Grove Hall, Susan. "Louise Bogan's Groundwork for Art in Women's Nature Poetry."

Kentucky PhiloIopical Review 10 (1 995): 17-2 1.

Refirences, Page 329

Hadras, Rachel. "The Eyes in Hiding." Rev. of Louise Bo~an: A Portrait, by Elizabeth Frank.

Partisan Review 53 (1986): 297-300.

Heyen, William. "The Distance fiom Our Eyes." Rev- of The Blue Estuaries: Poerns 1923-1 968,

Prairie Schooner 43 (1969): 323-36. Rpt. in Critical Essays on Louise Bonan- Ed.

Martha Collins. 10 1-1 8.

Jones, Llewelyn. "Louise Bogan." First Im~ressions: Essays on Poetry. Criticism and Prose.

New York: Knopf, 1925. 1 18-22, Rpt. in Critical Essays on Louise Bonan. Ed.

Martha Collins. 27-29.

Kaplan, Cora. Salt and Bitter and Good: Three Centuries of English and Arnerican Women Poets,

. New York: Paddington P, 1975.

Kerr, Frances. "'Nearer the Bone': Louise Bogan, Anorexia, and the Political Unconscious of

Modernism." Literature, Interpretation, Theory 8.3-4 (1 998): 305-330.

Kerrigan, William. "Louise Bogan, Marvell of Her Day." Raritan. 18.2 (1998): 63-80.

Kumin, Maxine. '"Stamping a Tiny Foot against God': Some Arnerican Women Poets Writing

between the Two Wars." Ouarterlv Journal of the Librarv of Congress 3 9.1 (1 98 1):

48-6 1.

Larsen, Jeanne. "Lowell, Teasdale, Wyle, Millay, and Bogan." The Columbia Histow of Amex-ica

References. Page 330

Poeûy. Ed, Jay Parini, New York: Columbia UP, 1993. 203-32

Lirnmer, Ruth. "Circumscriptions-" Critical Essavs on Louise Bonan. Ed- Martha Collins.

166- 1 74,

Middlebrook, Diane Wood, "The Problem of the Woman Poet: Louise Bogan, 'The Alchemist."'

Critical Essavs on Louise B o r n . Ed- Martha Collins. 174-180.

Moore, Marianne. "Compactness Compacted." Rev. of Poerns and New Poems. Nation (1941).

Rpt. in Predilections, by Moore. New York: Viking, 1955. 130-33. Also rpt. in Crîtical

Essavs on Louise Bortan, Ed. Martha Collins, 61-63.

Moore, Patrick. "Symbot, Mask, and Meter in the Poetry of Louise Bogan." Gender and Literarv

Voice. Ed. Janet Todd. Vol. 1. Women and Literature. New York: Holmes & Meier.

Muller, John. "Light and the Wisdom of the Dark: Aging and the Language of Desire in the Texts

of Louise Bogan." Memonr and Desire: Aging - Literature - Psychoanalvsis. Ed-

Kathleen Woodward and Murray M. Schwartz. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1 986. 76-96.

Novak, Michael Paul. "Love and Influence: Louise Bogan, Rolfe Humphries, and Theodore

Roethke." Kenvon Review 7:3 (1985): 9-20.

Olsen, Elder. "Louise Bogan and Léonie Adams." Chicago Review 8 (Fa11 1954): 70-87.

References, Page 33 1

Rpt- in Critical Essavs on Louise Bo~an. Ed. Martha Collins. 71-84.

Peterson, Douglas L. "The Poetry of Louise Bogan," Southem Review 19.1 (1983): 73-87.

Pope, Deborah. "'Music in the Granite Hill: The Poetry of Louise Bogan." Criticai Essays on

Louise Bo~an. Ed. Martha Collins. 149-66.

Ramsey, Paul, "Louise Bogan." Iowa Review 1 (1970): 116-24. Rpt. in Critical Es sa~s on

Louise Bogan- Ed, Martha Collins. 1 19-28.

Ridgeway, Jaqueline. Louise Bo~an. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984.

Roethke, Theodore. "The Poetry of Louise Bogan." 1960 Hopwood Lecture, Critical

QuarterZy 3 (1961): 142-50. Rpt. in On the Poet and His Craft: Selected Prose of

Theodore Roethke. Ed. Ralph J. Mills, Jr. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1965.

Also rpt. in Critical Essavs on Louise Bonan. Ed. Martha Collins. 87-96.

Sarton, May. A World of Light: Portraits and Celebrations. New York: W. W. Norton, 1976.

Schechter, Ruth Lisa. "Louise Bogan: A Reminiscence." Croton Review 10 (1987): 30-33.

Simmons, Thomas. Erotic Reckonings: Mastew and Ap~renticeshi~ in the Works of Poets and

Lovers. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1994.

References Page 332

Smith, William Jay. Louise Bo~an: A Woman's Words. Washington: Lïbrary of Congress, 1971.

Tate, Allen. "Review of The Sleeainn Furv." Southexn Review 3 (1937): 190-92. Rpt, in

Critical Essavs on Louise Bogan. Ed- Martha Collins. 41-43.

Upton, Lee. "Corning to God: Notes on Dickinson, Bogan, Cixous." Denver Ouarterlv 27:4

(1993): 83-94.

-. Obsession and Release: Rereadinn the Poeûy of Louise Bogan. Lewisburg: Bucknell

UP, 1996.

- - "The Re-Making of a Poet: Louise Bogan." Centennial Review 36:3 (1992): 557-72.

Van Doren, Mark. "Louise Bogan." Rev. of Bodv of This Death. Nation 3 1 Oct. 1923: 4.

Rpt. in Critical Essays on Louise Bosan. Ed. Martha Collins. 29-3 1.

Via Pais, Sara. "Shapes of the Ferninine Expenence in Art," Wornen. the Arts. and the 1 920s

in Paris and New York. Ed. Kenneth W. Wheeler and Virginia Lee Lussier.

New Brunswick and London: Transaction, 1982. 49-55.

Walker, Cheryl. Masks Outraneous and Austere: Culture, Psvche, and Persona in Modem

Wornen Poets. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 199 1 -

Walton, Eda Lou. "Verse Delicate and Mature." Rev. of Dark Sumrner- Nation 4 Dec. 1929:

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Bodv of This Death (1923)

ATale .............................................................. 1

............................................................. Decoration 2

Medusa ............................................................... 3

SubContra ............................................................ 4

............................................................... ALetter 5

TheFrightenedMan ..................................................... 8

.............................................................. Betrothed 9

WordsforDeparture .................................................... 10

AdCastitatem ......................................................... 12

Knowledge ........................................................... 13

Portrait ............................................................ 14

TheRomantic ......................................................... 15

.............................................. My Voice Not Being Proud 16

StatueandBirds ...................................................... 17

........................................... Epitaph for a Romantic Woman 18

......................................................... TheAlchemist 19

....................................... Men Loved Wholly Beyond Wisdom 20

............................................................ TheCrows 21

.............................................................. Memory 22

Women .......................................................... 2 3

..................................................... LastHillhAVista 24

Song ............................................................... 25

Stanza ............................................................. 26

Appendir. Page 353

TheChangedWoman ................................................... 27

Chansonunpeunaïve ................................................... 28

FifieenthFarewell ...................................................... 29

............................................................... Sonnet 30

Dark Summer (1929)

1

WinterSwan ........................................................... 3

IfWeTakeAllGold ..................................................... 4

TheDnun ............................................................. 5

Division ............................................................... 6

Cassandra ............................................................ 7

TheCupola ............................................................ 8

GirlYsSong ............................................................ 9

Feuernacht ............................................................ 10

SecondSong ......................................................... 12

TheMark ............................................................. 13

Late ................................................................ . 14

SimpleAutumnal .................................................. 15

m

Medusa .............................................................. 33

SubContra .......................................................... 35

Appendk Page 354

AdCastitatem ......................................................... 36

Portrait .............................................................. 38

TheRomantic ......................................................... 39

......................................................... TheAlchemist 40

....................................... Men Loved Wholly Beyond Wisdom 41

Stanza ............................................................... 42

Chansonunpeunaïve ................................................... 43

Fifieenth Farewell ...................................................... 44

.......................... Since You Would Claim the Sources of My Thought 46

IV

DarkSumrner ......................................................... 49

ForaMamage ........................................................ 50

DidacticPiece ......................................................... 51

TearsinSleep ......................................................... 53

.................................................. Song for a Slight Voice 54

TheCrossedApple ..................................................... 55

Sonnet ............................................................... 57

Fiend's Weather ....................................................... 58

ISawEterniîy ......................................................... 59

................................................. Corne, Break with Time 60

OldCountryside ....................................................... 61

Appendù. Page 355

The Sleeming Furv (1937)

1

Song . ............................................................ 3

............................................... Henceforth, From the Mind 4

HomuncuIus ....................................................... 6

SingleSonnet .......................................................... 7

Exhortation ............................................................ 8

........................................................ HypocriteSwi fi 10

AtaParty ............................................................ 12

II

ToWine ............................................................. 15

PoeminProse ....................................................... 16

ShortSummary ........................................................ 17

........................................................ Italian Morning 28

ManAlone ........................................................... 20

m

BaroqueComment ..................................................... 23

ToMyBrother ........................................................ 24

RomanFountain ....................................................... 26

...................................................... TheSleepingFury 27

............................................................... Rhyme 30

M.,Singing ........................................................... 31

Evening-Star .......................................................... 32

Appendk Page 356

N

Spirit'sSong .......................................................... 35

PuttingtoSea ......................................................... 36

................................................................. Kept 38

HeardbyaGirl ........................................................ 40

PacketofLetters ....................................................... 41

........................................................ SongforaLyre 42

4 . The Blue Estuaries (1969)

1

ATale ................................................................ 3

Medusa ............................................................... 4

SubContra .......................................................... 5

TheFrightenedMan ..................................................... 6

Betrothed .............................................................. 7

.......................................................... AdCastitatem 8

Knowledge ...................................................... 9

Jum'sSong ........................................................... 10

Portrait ......................................................... 11

TheRomantic ....................................................... 1 2

My Voice Not Being Proud .............................................. 13

....................................................... StatueandBirds 14

......................................................... TheAlchemist 15

Men Loved Wholly Beyond Wisdom ....................................... 16

............................................................ TheCrows 17

AppendUr. Page 357

Memo y.... .......................................................... 18

Women .............................................................. 19

Fifieenth Farewell ...................................................... 24

Sonnet ............................................................... 26

II

WinterSwan .......................................................... 29

IfWeTakeAllGold .................................................... 30

The- ............................................................ 31

Division .............................................................. 32

Cassandra ............................................................ 33

TheCupola ........................................................... 34

Girl'sSong ........................................................... 35

Feuer-Nacht ........................................................... 36

SecondSong .......................................................... 37

TheMark ............................................................. 38

Appendk, Page 358

TearsinSleep ......................................................... 44

..................................................... The Crossed Apple 45

Song for a Slight Voice .................................................. 47

Sonnet ............................................................... 48

FiendlsWeather ....................................................... 49

ISawEternity ......................................................... 50

Corne, BreakwithTime ................................................. 51

OldCountryside ....................................................... 52

SummerWish ......................................................... 65

Song ................................................................ 63

.............................................. Henceforth, From the Mind 64

Homunculus .......................................................... 65

SingleSomet ......................................................... 66

Exhortation .......................................................... 67

HypocnteSwi fi ........................................................ 68

AtaParty ............................................................ 70

ToWine ............................................................. 71

PoeminProse ......................................................... 72

........................................................ ShortSummary 73

ItalianMoming ........................................................ 74

ManAlone ........................................................... 75

BaroqueComent ..................................................... 76

Appendrir. Page 359

ThesleepingFusr ...................................................... 78

RomanFountain ....................................................... 80

Rhyme ............................................................ 8 1

........................................................... M.,Singing 82

Evening-Star .......................................................... 83

PutîingtoSea ......................................................... 84

SpintysSong .......................................................... 86

Kept ................................................................. 87

HeardbyaGirl ........................................................ 88

PacketofLetters ....................................................... 89

........................................................ SongforaLyre 90

N

............................................ Several Voices Out of a Cloud 93

........................................... Animal, Vegetable. and Mineral 94

QuestionhaField ..................................................... 97

Solitary Observation Brought Back fiom a Sojourn in Hel1 ...................... 98

Variationonasentence ................................................. 99

N

TheDream .......................................................... 103

.............................................. To an Artist, to Take Heart 104

ToBeSungontheWater ............................................... 105

Musician .......................................................... 106

Cartography .......................................................... 107

Appendix. Page 360

"Corne. Sle ep ......................................................... 108

Zcne ............................................................... 109

TheDaemon ......................................................... 114

AfterthePersianï ..................................................... 115

AfterthePersianII, DI .............................................. 116

AfterthePer~ianIV~V ................................................. 117

TrainTune .......................................................... 118

SongfortheLastAct .................................................. 119

................................................ The Sorcerer's Daughter 125

Night ............................................................... 130

Moming ............................................................ 131

Little Lobelia's Song Psychiaûist's Song Masked Woman ' s Song