September 15, 2004
In an Academic Tone
I feel bad. I haven't posted anything substantial in quite a while. I've been so busy writing essays for my courses that I haven't really had the time to keep up with the news or had the energy to write a long post. I still don't. So, instead, I'm going to just post an essay I wrote for my poetry class. I apologize in advance for the blog-inappropriate tone. It's stuffy and academic and references poems you probably haven't read (but should). There's Anthony Hecht's "Peripeteia" and Richard Wilbur's "Walking to Sleep" (which I haven't been able to find a copy of online). Both of them are in The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry if you want to read them. Also, I think my reading of Wilbur's poem is a bit strained, but I liked the idea so I went with it and it's too late now to rewrite it. Well, maybe not too late, but I'm too lazy. In other words, I don't think this is my best work (it's a bit schoolboyish, to be honest), but I have a lot of reading to do yet so here it is:
Poetry and dreams have been connected from the beginning of literature. Whether the writer transforms actual dreams into poems or, like Chaucer, creates poems as dreams, the two seem to share characteristics that intrigue poets. Of course, what fascinates them seems to be, in many cases, insomnia rather than sleep. Given the preponderance of poems like Elizabeth Bishop's “Insomnia” and Chaucer's “Book of the Duchess” and books like Charles Simic's Hotel Insomnia, one wonders if this fascination with dreaming could be due to something as mundane as sleepless writers longing for the bliss of dreams. Such questions may even be more interesting than the answers. Continuing this tradition are Richard Wilbur's “Walking to Sleep” and Anthony Hecht's “Peripeteia,” albeit in significantly different ways. If Wilbur's advice to insomniacs might be called an art of dreams, then Hecht falling asleep at a play is a dream of art.
Although on its surface, Wilbur's poem appears to be merely advice on how to fall asleep, it is, as expected, more than simply a warm glass of milk. Much like Coleridge's “Kubla Kahn,” it can be read as an examination of how one creates a poem. In fact, without the title the lines “Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind. / Something will come to you” might be interpreted as advice to an aspiring writer. The title, although a pun on “sleepwalking,” inverts the word's usual sense. Instead, it emphasizes the “walking” or work-like aspect of the process while converting “sleep” into a destination rather than a state of being. Wilbur also describes the way in which our creations tend to outstrip our intentions to become to an extent self-created. The work “[m]ay take on whims and powers of its own.” He also advises the prospective writer not to “[watch] your step too narrowly” for it will result in “shrinking your purview / To a tight vision of your inching shoes.” The poet must remain alert and open to the world as the raw material of art. However, with its ability to break free from the poet's control, the work might dredge up dark images of a “trotting cat whose head is but a skull.” As William Carlos Williams wrote, "poetry is a dangerous subject for a boy to fool with, for the dreams of the race are involved in it." Even if one takes precautions, “[t]he abrupt structure... [w]ill improvise like vapor.” The creative act is chaotic and unplannable. Even the end results will “acquire / Insensibly the look of hieroglyphics” and demand interpretation. Writing well also requires discipline in order to “not be detained by dread, or by / Such dear acceptances as would entail it.” Too much distraction and leisure may be only procrastination and ultimately prevent the author from writing down even a single line. The goal, instead, is to keep writing or “moping on” until inspiration takes hold to “blow your brains out” with some novel and unexpected phrase or thought. At this point in the poem, Wilbur introduces the first break, recognizing that this tack may not work. Rather than a deep introspection, it may be necessary to “open your eyes / To the good blackness not of your room alone.” One must seek out nature and, in true Wordsworthian fashion, find as inspiration “groves which are not you / But answer to your suppler self.” Through this method, “you may be granted... a moment's perfect carelessness” and, like Bishop, make “the casual perfect.” Ultimately, however, Wilbur suggests that writing may be little more than “Vishnu sleeping... dreaming by a pool.” Poets love to declare the uselessness of poetry, but the dreams of a god should not be ignored by mortals.
If Wilbur's poem attempts a description of how an artist finds inspiration and transmutes that into poetic meaning, Hecht's concern lies more with the use to which poetry is put. With the title itself, Hecht announces that his poem examines literature. It opens with an image of the audience, “a crowd, / Foul-breathed, gum-chewing, [and] fat with arrogance.” He emphasizes the physical, earth-bound nature of humans and displays us in unflattering light. He also recognizes the artifice of art and how it is “something less than perfection” as he surveys “the cast, / Management, stand-ins, make-up men, [and] designers.” However, once the house lights lower to announce the play, an act akin to opening a book and reading a poem's title, the speaker's state of mind shifts into one of “calm, invulnerable isolation,” a state which “might lead / To solitary, self-denying work / That issues in something harmless, like a poem.” While Hecht like Wilbur seems to deflate the importance of poetry the adjective “harmless” may in this context also mean “causing no harm” or even “beneficial.” It does, after all, “aim... at the soul's knowledge and habiliment,” a lofty and worthy goal. Before the play begins though, the speaker is only conscious “of consciousness” and “touched with a small grace.” The key word here is “small,” as we will discover later. Once the play begins—notably one by Shakespeare—the speaker drifts into a hallucinatory state well known to drowsy symphony patrons. Shakespeare's poetry induces a change in how the speaker relates to and experiences reality, one that is different from the ordinary not just in degree, but in kind. He links poetry to magic when he asks if “the magic cloak and book [can] protect.” The end of the vision comes with a transcendence that singles out the speaker as chosen and unique. Whereas before he was “touched with a small grace,” now:
Miraculous Miranda, steps from the stage,
Moves up the aisle to my seat, where she stops,
Smiles gently, seriously, and takes my hand
And leads me out of the theatre, into a night
As luminous as noon, more deeply real,
Simply because of her hand, than any dream
Shakespeare or I or anyone ever dreamed.
Through the touch of poetry's hand the dreamer's world is transformed. He experiences it as “more deeply real” than before. Though greater than art, it is made accessible through it as if in a dream.
Naturally these readings, particularly that of Wilbur's poem, do not encompass either work completely. Nevertheless, both demonstrate poets working with the materials of art and dream, discovering correspondences between the two while questioning their value. Modern science comes close to providing a complete evaluation of our need for dreams, but the work is far from over for poetry. It is likely no definitive answer is even possible. Similarly, no reading can be fully sufficient to a poem. If these particular ones intersect the more apparent or more substantial themes of the poems only haphazardly or not at all, perhaps they compensate by adumbrating some of the shadowy connections at which the poets hint. After all, those connections are themselves unclear, comprised as they are of intriguing questions and speculations more than final answers and clear comprehension.