390 Making It New: 1900–1945“ terrible horse” is used to dramatize and objectify the attraction, and the fear, of
desire. In “Stanzas” (1968), the dying away of desire itself is expressed in jeweled yet
implicitly sensual imagery (“No longer burn the hands that seized / Small wreaths
from branches scarcely green”): there is a personal inspiration here, certainly, but
the hieratic treatment turns it into something separate from the poet, rounded and
crystalline. In turn, “Simple Autumnal” (1923) begins with an evocative portrait of
autumn (“The measured blood beats out the year’s delay”), and then modulates into
a subtle evocation of grief ’s longing, and failure, to find in the season a consoling
mirror of its mood. “Full season’s come, yet filled trees keep the sky,” she concludes,
“And never scent the ground where they must lie.” Characteristically, Bogan makes
“grief in its prime” all the more moving by her rejection of the pathetic fallacy –
because of the contrast she draws between “sorrow” longing for fallen leaves to
reflect its mood and the stubborn indifference of the “filled trees” to such pressures.
The setting and theme that Bogan deals with so astutely in “Simple Autumnal”
are ones that Léonie Adams has made peculiarly her own. Adams’s early poems are
a little precious, perhaps, with their deliberate archaisms and invocations to “Beauty.”
Yet even here the preciousness is tempered and qualified by a harsh sense of what
she calls “the old cheating of the sun”: the recognition that even the most beautiful
of days must pass, even the most intense of experiences wither away. This harsher
element grew as she and her poetry matured. Poems like “Grapes Making” (1925)
or “Sundown” (1929) are exquisitely shaped, vividly sensuous portraits of rural
America that, however, derive much of their color and poignancy from the
recollection that “The careless autumn mornings come, / The grapes drop
glimmering to the shears.” “The faint leaf vanishes to light,” Adams declares in
“Grapes Making”: sunset, late summer, and early autumn are her favorite occasions,
moments when everything in nature seems to be waiting, hushed with expectancy,
for the ebb tide, the falling away of things. She is like Emily Dickinson and
Robert Frost in this, her interest in what Dickinson called the “spectral canticle” of
late summer and Frost, “that other fall we name the fall.” However, she is unlike them
in that premonitions of mortality are rarely dwelt upon in her work, and the
immediate, personal note struck even more rarely. Transience, or rather awareness
of it, is always there shaping her verbal landscapes, but it is all the more powerful
for remaining in the background, an admonitory presence. Like Moore, Adams
clearly believed that, as Moore put it, “The deepest feeling always shows itself in
silence; / not in silence, but restraint.”
“To be nobody-but-yourself in a world that is doing its best, night and day, to
make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being
can fight.” Marianne Moore would undoubtedly have approved of this remark made
by e.e. cummings (1894–1962). Perhaps she knew of it, since the two were friends
and not only liked but admired each other. But whereas Moore’s individualism
led her toward a firm (if idiosyncratic) belief in discipline, measure, cummings’s
individualism led him toward a kind of imaginative anarchism. To be “nobody-
but-yourself,” he felt, you had to achieve liberation from the “unworld,” the mind-
forged manacles of society and culture. You would then become “incorrigibly andGGray_c04.indd 390ray_c 04 .indd 390 8 8/1/2011 7:53:53 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 53 AM