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Sometimes it seems odd to me how popular Larkin’s poetry was, how his poems were greeted with so much enthusiasm, first in the United Kingdom and, then, in America; his work, as I’ve shown, is very demanding. It might be, though, that he is read with such fascination just because of the great risks he took in circumscribing his work in such a potentially bleak way and, perhaps, even more so because the risks he took are so profoundly connected to the ineluctable conditions of our own spiritual reality. For if we are to tell the truth to ourselves, as presumably we have to if we are to do justice to our consciousness, then we, like Larkin, have to realize that we can’t predict whether we will emerge from our meditations with a sense that our endeavors have a purpose or whether, in contrast, the reality we experience will afflict us with a nihilistic meaninglessness, with a dire conviction that our world is spiritually hopelessly lacking. This is the universe with which we are presented when we read Larkin and in which it is our task to find redemptive significance.
Larkin had to have understood this; I think his greatest act of courage, and perhaps his doom, was to accept this challenge and to accept, further, the belief that in a contemporary secular consciousness the positive moments of comprehension and illumination are isolated, because without an overriding system, to any sort of which Larkin refuses to give credence, even our episodes of bliss, of aesthetic rapture, can simply evaporate in the ongoingness of time. Larkin accepted no program of commitment, to connect one potentially redeeming moment of his poetry to any other or to anything else. He would have no philosophical or social-political conviction that might have tempered his intellectual penetration or made it subservient to any merely utilitarian end. Larkin undertook his program of truth telling without knowing whether it might end in such despair that the poetic voice would be reduced to absolute silence, to a condition in which neither imagination nor intellect would be able to find inroads through the overwhelming possibilities of metaphysical and personal meaninglessness. This, we know, was a despair, and a concomitant silence, which did indeed take him painfully in his last years.
This was his personal tragedy, and perhaps the worst of it was that Larkin finally hadn’t even allowed himself to make an enduring commitment to poetry; he couldn’t grant himself the right to believe as most poets do that the composition of poetry is a personally redemptive act. Even Herbert, while chastising himself for it, takes more than mere pleasure in the act of writing. Though surely Larkin had once believed in his poetry in this way, too, because he couldn’t have written his great poems without that kind of faith in poetry, but for whatever characterological reason, towards the end of his life that faith deserted him; not even the process of writing interested or solaced him any longer, so that he wrote nothing but the most trivial occasional pieces after the end of 1977, when he composed “Aubade,” his last masterpiece, and one of his very greatest. But it’s such a mordant poem. “The mind blanks at the glare,” he says, punning on his own powers of perception,
“Not in remorse
—The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.”
Nothing, nothing, nothing. The last two lines close down any possibility of redemption a life of art might offer. And the poem resolves in as distressing a passage:
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
“Work has to be done,” the poem says, not meaningful work, not work that brings forth meaning, but work at its most absurd; labor, the hands or the mind mechanically performing what has been given them to perform, for no real reason. “Postmen like doctors go from house to house,” the poem ends: they do their work, but the task of delivering mail is the same as the task of healing lives: as repetitive, as rote, as purposeless.
But it wouldn’t be fair to leave Larkin at the time in his life when his powers were deserting him. Because Herbert died so young, in his prime, he abides as an inspiring poetic identity; when we look back on his work, we realize that the spiritual solitude of his poetry included much basic human affection. The phrase, “Love bade me welcome,” in “Love III,” might be his motto.
I sense that Larkin, like Herbert, felt much more love towards life than he was, because of the quirks of his personality, prepared to admit. A profound sympathy informs many of both poets’ work, and if less evident than in Herbert, Larkin’s compassion and ultimate affection are wonderfully articulated in “An Arundel Tomb,” the most touching of his masterpieces. Regarding the earl and countess who “lie in stone,” hand in hand before him, he ends the poem with a statement that might be the summary of at least the best of his poetic effort and accomplishment.
The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.
Amichai Near the End
When we were being mistaught poetry in grammar school and high school, the most off-putting misapprehension our teachers inflicted on us was probably the notion that poetry had something to do with wisdom, that not only did it embody wisdom but, more than anything else, it was wisdom. We were given to understand that poetry was a dazzling compilation of sage instruction and profound advice. It is boring just to remember how boring were those compilations of jingly-jangly maxims and supposedly inspired adages that had been extracted for us and that we were meant somehow to apply—a possibility that we knew was absurd. No wonder we ducked—and that most of us stayed ducked.
Strangely, I think that when nonreaders of poems explain their disaffection from the art by bemoaning the lack of rhyme and meter in contemporary poetry, this is often an expression of a nostalgia for this kind of quasi-philosophical counsel, although in truth there is precious little of it in real poetry. If there is anything morally useful in poems, it is to be found, I believe, in their spiritual and emotional drama, just as what is most useful in our own lives is inextricably embedded in our experience and tends to disintegrate when we abstract it and attempt to make it relevant.
And yet, there is in poetry, or in great poetry, poetry like Yehuda Amichai’s Open Closed Open, a certain intensity of attention, an ethical focus so absolute that there is no question that a significant knowledge is crucially entailed, and wisdom, as a category or a value, seems inescapably germane, no matter how our aesthetic understanding might make us veer away from it.1 And we do veer: even when Amichai, the shrewdest and most solid of poetic intelligences, finds himself formulating what sound like elements of some ultimate comprehension, he seems to doubt what he is doing and he backs away, and undercuts, and undermines, sometimes with irony, sometimes with humor, sometimes, though only for moments, with something like self-scorn.
For one does not have to accede to the illusion that poetry is essentially didactic to recognize that there is a tradition, of which Amichai is quite clearly aware, of poetry as a summing-up, of long or longish poems that intend to recapitulate the realizations at which a rigorous intelligence and a forceful poetic will can arrive. In a tradition that exists apart from but adjacent to epic and t
ragedy, probably beginning in the West with Lucretius, it comes to us through Dante, Milton, Pope, and Goethe, among not all that many others. In our century, the two most admired examples of it are Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Eliot’s Four Quartets. Amichai seems to have had both those poems in mind in writing Open Closed Open: he infuses some of Rilke’s metaphoric detail into his own and refers directly several times to Eliot, even going so far as to quote from him several times, most obviously in a passage that elaborates on “what was and what might have been.”
Certainly Rilke’s and Eliot’s poems incorporate ranges of experience that make them worthy of being described as “wise,” though as a means of articulating the sort of sanctified sagacity that my teachers fancied they certainly disappoint. Rilke’s poem, undeniably one of the masterworks of twentieth-century literature, was taken by some of his more rapt enthusiasts as the basis for a spiritual cult; but if the work is supposed to point toward systems of belief and action, they are even more elusive and inconclusive than what we find in our more sanctioned canonical writings. To be sure, there are readers who take any text short of the sports section as though it was meant to bring about “illumination”—Wittgenstein can, alas, be read like Khahil Gibran—but even for Rilke’s most devoted countesses it was hard to find much heartening ground for faith in the Elegies. The poem concludes in a rapture glorifying “lament,” and what that might indicate as a spiritual directive is impossible to say. The Four Quartets have evoked a similarly hopeful reverence in some of its readers, not least because Eliot set out quite consciously to echo liturgy; the poem employs various prayer-like devices of repetition, rhythm, and phrasing. Both works are imaginatively inspired, and they treat aspects of experience that are rarely elucidated in any way. And yet even these vatic masterpieces are not of much use, if it is a coherent metaphysical or ethical doctrine for which one is searching.
Amichai’s new book of poems comprises a sustained outburst of inspiration, and it has a similarly complicated relation to wisdom and to matters of the spirit. There are differences, of course. Amichai’s work is longer, and it incorporates a personality distinctly different from Eliot’s and Rilke’s. Amichai is a Jew, and an Israeli, and he is exquisitely aware of the conditions entailed by those identities, both historical and spiritual. He is on a much more familiar and easier footing with the traditional term “God,” and his unexpected, almost casual intimacy with divinity seems much closer to traditional piety than anything found in either of the other poets. Amichai surely meant his poem—again, in a deep sense Open Closed Open is one long poem composed of many parts—to consider the same grand and fundamental issues of life and death, but his yield of meanings, his “wisdom,” is unmistakably his own.
Amichai is a poet of powerful feeling, of nearly boundless appetites and affections. He is attached, with a commitment that sometimes drives him to distraction, to the things of the world, to the natural and the human, to the other and the self, to the divisions of his own body; but his poetry is informed by a skepticism, a rage for objectivity, that is just as vigorous. Several times near the beginning of his book he uses the image of two heavy grindstones—“the spirit is ground up as by two heavy grindstones, / upper and lower”—and there is no doubt that the genesis of the image is to be found in the seemingly irreconcilable aspects of his imaginative and moral struggles. He adores the world, in detail and in large, as much as any poet who has ever lived, but a part of his mind is taken with a wild doubt that drives it relentlessly towards lucidity.
Amichai despises all the disfiguring and degrading illusions attached to so much of human life, public and private, present and past, but he also allows no room in his poetry for avoidance, for omission, for a prematurely resolving subjectivity. His own overfull consciousness is his subject and his object; and he vividly demonstrates, and tries to rectify, the way that even our best intentioned drive for understanding is susceptible to sentiment and to wistful self-delusion by our reflex to make the world fit our seemingly admirable preconceptions and longings.
At the same time, there is in the poems the sense of a synthesis and an acceptance—an acceptance that triumphs not in the negation of doubt but in the incorporation of the poet’s perplexity into an ardently comprehensive awareness. Amichai has lived, and has distilled in his writing, a life of really singular richness. His own adult life has been almost precisely coeval with the history of his country. He has led as energetic and as rewarded a literary career as any of his contemporaries, anywhere. He has fought the wars of his nation, and the wars of love and marriage and parenthood, and the struggles of self-overcoming that the life of a conscious artist demand. Now, he is saying to himself, now that you have seen and felt everything, and caused yourself to feel everything in poetic reflection again, felt it backward and forward, in elation and despair—now what have you come to? And his answer is: a negation for every assertion, to guard against falsehood; a speculation counter to every supposition, to guard against self-deception; and an unaccomplished act remembered for every seemingly admirable but possibly falsely valued accomplishment.
His methods for working through all of this are various: paradox, irony, reversal, commentary, contradiction. He can bring himself to say, “we cannot be fooled. Yes, we can be fooled,” and then, just a few pages later, “We can be fooled. No, we cannot be fooled.” He proposes alternative narratives for personal experience, for history, for myth. With biblical myth, the results can be fanciful, and enchanting. One section of the book is a retelling of biblical stories in forms not unlike some of the zanier passages of The Waste Land.
King Saul never learned how to play or to sing
nor was he taught how to be king.
Oh he’s got the blues.
he’s nothing to lose
but the moody tune
on his gramophone
and David is its name-oh. David is its name,
its name its name its name . . .
Our father Jacob, on the beaten track,
carries a ladder on his back
like a window washer to the VIPs.
He does God’s windows if you please. In “Jewish Travel: Change Is God and Death Is His Prophet,” Amichai marvelously recasts biblical history by having Moses write the Torah “as a travel book.”
a memoir, every chapter with something very personal
that was his alone—like Pharaoh’s daughter, like his sister Miriam,
his brother Aaron, his black wife, the Ten Commandments.
Then, in one of the most endearing passages in the book, he returns to the story of Abraham and Isaac:
Every year our father Abraham would take his sons to Mount Moriah
the way I take my children to the Negev hills where I once had a war.
Abraham hiked around with his sons. “This is where I left
the servants behind, that’s where I tied the donkey to a tree
at the foot of the mountain, and here, right here, Isaac my son, you asked:
Behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?
Then, up a little farther, you asked for the second time.”
And he goes on, so intimately, so lovingly:
After Abraham died, Isaac started taking his sons to the same place.
“Here I lifted the wood, this in where I got out of breath.”
And ends:
And when Isaac’s eyes were dim with age, his children
led him to that same spot on Mount Moriah, and recounted for him
all that had come to pass, all that he might have forgotten.
There are also moments in which the past and the present, the mythic and the personal, fuse even more clearly and intensely. About intimacy and love, Amichai is always more gentle and forbearing than about anything else; and about love he evokes emotions grounded in the pure origins of affection.
Every woman in love is like our mother Sarah,
lying in wait behind the door while the men inside
She laughs into her palm, her hollow palm, as into a womb,
ocarina of a future, like the light cough of a clever fox . . .
And every loving woman is like Rebecca at the well, saying
“Drink, and thy camels also.” But in our day Rebecca says:
“The towels are on the top shelf in the white closet
across from the front door.”
Yet Amichai’s purposes are not always so uncomplicated. He means to confront, to demand, to analyze everything. Nothing may be allowed to escape his exigent, mordant scrutiny: not history, not belief, not his nation, not his self. He questions gender foolishness, as when he challenges the casuistical puritanism of the ultra-Orthodox by expressing what sounds like an innocent desire to be prepared for burial by women, for them a sin. And he juxtaposes the intimate and the horrendous in combinations that can be chilling, for instance, when he evokes the Angel of Death during the exodus from Egypt:
standing over them, legs wide apart . . .
crotch gaping male and female
like a bloody sun in the thick of frizzled black death.
And God, too, especially God: Amichai’s is a God composed of absence, of negation, of accusation, a God of excruciating nearness and agonizing inscrutability, of power and of impotence. Sometimes the closeness, the approachability, of God brings forth a tone of fondness, even of conviviality.