But if you listen to Auden read it, you can't skip ahead to the Icarus part, and you realize that a lot of the poem isn't about that painting. It's about the torturer's horse, and about how the "dogs go on with their doggy life." Nobody ever put that way of talking in a poem before. That's the Christopher Isherwood note. "The dogs go on with their doggy life / And the torturer's horse scratches its innocent behind on a tree." When Auden reads it, that's what you remember. You can hear his own amazement that he had been capable of that simple, completely new bit of poetic speech. Christopher Isherwood was a huge influence on Auden. That's what people don't understand. Isherwood is partly responsible for Auden's greatness. When they went their separate ways, Auden's poetry grew colder and more abstract. Isherwood was the wax on Auden's wings.
I BOUGHT A CHIN-UP BAR and a badminton set. They were both surprisingly cheap. The badminton set comes in a clear zippered case-birdies, rackets, and net, all neatly packed. You can buy purple birdies now, as well as white birdies. What is it like to play in the cool of the twilight with a purple birdie? I don't know. Does anyone make birdies out of actual tailfeathers anymore?
I think I bought the badminton set because I had an idea that I would practice, refine my skill set. Perhaps work on picking up the birdie from the grass without getting a nose-bleed. But how can you really practice badminton on your own? You can't. You can bounce a tennis ball against the barn door, and I used to do that in the summer when I was fourteen and didn't have anyone to play tennis with. But you just can't bounce a birdie against the barn and get anything useful from it. I thought of calling up my friend Tim and asking him if he would like to play badminton, but that just seemed silly, and anyway I'd be using him to improve my game so that if Nan and Chuck invited me to play badminton again I'd be better at it, which didn't seem very nice. He'd be like a human batting cage. Also Tim's stomach has gotten large, and he's self-conscious about that.
What's the meter of badminton? There's a hard one, friends. Poink, poink, poink. "Break, break, break, / On thy cold gray stones O Sea." A monosyllabic meter. And tennis? Tennis is a slow duple meter. Pa-pock, pa-pock, pa-pock. "Two roads-diverged-in a yell-ow wood." Hm, "yellow" doesn't work. Fault-thirty love. Love means nothing in tennis, as you know. Frost said that free verse was like playing tennis without a net. Lawn Tennyson. Marianne Moore was a lifelong tennis player but not a good metrist. She had a pet crow, and she circled her rhyme words with different colored pencils. Mina Loy once said, Imagine a tennis player who wrote poems. "Would not his meter depend on his way of life?"
Ping-Pong-now there's a fine rollicking meter. You can recite Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome to a game of Ping-Pong. Try it:
Through teeth, and skull, and helmet
So fierce a thrust he sped,
The good sword stood a hand-breadth out
Behind the Tuscan's head.
Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay. This used to be the poem that all little boys read in English private schools. It was violent, and it was nasty, and it galumphed right along. Headmasters would give this poem out as a present to their prize students. And 0.00001 percent of these little boys who read this poem ended up becoming great English Ping-Pong players. More to the point, 0.0000000001 percent of them ended up becoming great English poets. That was the glorious, indispensable inefficiency of the British educational system.
Macaulay's theory, which he explained in his introduction, was that the Latin poetry that survived, that made it through the dark and sketchy times, wasn't representative of the songs people had sung in Rome. The literary poetry of Horace and et cetera had survived because it wasn't memorable. It had to be written down. It didn't stick in your head. The "lays"-the popular love songs and drinking songs and war songs-were all lost, every single one. So Macaulay, who was by the way a venomous essayist, wrote these bloody imaginary battle ballads to supply the lack.
Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome. "Through teeth, and skull, and helmet-" Crunch. "So fierce a thrust he sped-" It's completely disgusting and repellant.
Three end-rests in that four-line stanza. Right? Four beats in each line. Lines one, two, and four have rests, line three doesn't, and that longer line gives it that parrun tun tan, tarran tan tan, tarRUM pum pom pom pom ending.
English is a stressed language, and you want to boom it out sometimes. Then sometimes you want to whisper it, like this: "Give me my scallop-shell of quiet." Poetry is written sometimes, I think, in a whisper. Not a stage whisper but a real human whisper. A confiding sorrowful whisper, brimful of emotion. And when it's declaimed it's ruined. Which is sad, really. Very very sad.
You hear that bird? Chirtle chirtle chirtle chirtle. With birds it's different. Birds are very different than we are. They don't know what an upbeat is. They go, Chirtle, chirtle, chirtle, chirtle. And then the next time they might just go, Chirtle-chirtle, chirtle. It's like some kind of wigged-out aimless Gregorian chant. And then sometimes: Chirtle chirtle. And then: Chirtle chirtle chirt? Questioning. You don't know where you are with that. The meter is primitive. It's a primitive meter. But we obviously respond to it. When I hear that chirping, I know that the world is starting up. And that I'd better get something done that day, or I will have failed once again. As I have failed today.
Chirtle chirtle. Chirtle. Chirtle.
Nice chirpin' there, Mister Birdie! Good one. I like what you did there. That's good! Funky bitch! Love your work!
5
I PACKED FOUR BOXES of papers in my office, and I threw out lots of things. This cleaning is helping me move forward. I put the chin-up bar in the door and hit my head on it twice because I forgot it was there. Then I took it down and put it in another door. I think if I really cleaned up my office it might be easier for me to finish the introduction, and if I finish the introduction I think I could call Roz with genuine confidence in my voice and tell her that yes, I'd been too much of a wallower in self-doubt but that things were on the mend and I wanted her to come back. I'm about one-seventh done with cleaning the office. Still quite a ways to go. One corner of the room is starting to get that spare, empty look. I do love that spare look.
One of the piles I packed away was a small heap of reviews of my third book of poems, Worn. Not many of them. It wasn't a good book. Too political in an easy-breezy sort of way. A copy of Rain Taxi had a thoughtful reaction to it by Renee Parker Task. Charles Simic mentioned the book in one of his omnibus pieces in The New York Review of Books. It was just after Worn came out that I read Amy Lowell's book Six French Poets. In it Lowell observes that Henri de Regnier had just passed his fifty-first birthday. And she says: "Poetry seems to be, for some strange reason, a young man's job." This slapped me in the head like a big heavy cold dogfish. Poetry is a young man's job. What a frighteningly true thought. Poetry is like math or chess or music-it requires a slightly freaky misshapen brain, and those kinds of brains don't last. Sometimes if you can hold on into old age you can have another late flowering, like Yeats-much of adult-hood crumbles and falls away, and you're left with highly saturated early memories and a renewed urge for rhyme. But that happens rarely.
Also as I was cleaning I came across a small paper bag with several strands of raw beads in it. I'd bought them for Roz in a store on Second Avenue in New York. Roz strings beads, she's very good at it, very quick-she can watch a Chinese movie with subtitles and string beads at the same time, which is very impressive-and as I was walking toward Penn Station I found that I was passing through some kind of wholesale bead-supply neighborhood, with store after store selling raw beads. In each store the strands hung on hooks, arranged by color, strung on fishing lines, and when you went in you felt as if you were in some strange sort of crystallography experiment. I bought some pale gray green-veined beads and some smoky deep-red ones that I thought she would like-they weren't horribly expensive-and I hid them in my office for her birthday and now here they were. And it wasn't as if I could call her up and say, Roz, I found a bag holding several strings of raw beads from New York that I was going to give you and would you like to come on back and live here again and string them expertly the way you do while we watch movies together? Because she'd moved out. It was not a nice or welcome development for me for her to move out, it hurt me badly, I'm tottering, but I suppose I deserved it. And now what?