Modern American Poetry

(^90) Thomas R. Whitaker
new Cubist constructions that enact the swift transit of the attention or raise
the disorder of the moment to the plane of abstract design. And there are
other experiments with large forms—loose seasonal sequence that render the
open imagination’s response to inner and outer weather.
I “TRANSITIONAL” POEMS ANDSOURGRAPES
Something of the range and balance of consciousness rendered in the
work of 1918 through 1921 may be suggested by certain poems which focus
upon the author himself. Perhaps the most notable quality of “Le Médecin
Malgré Lui” is its deft casualness. The ostensible conflict in this poem,
treated with engagingly light irony, is a matter of career; but the real conflict
concerns the deeper question of vocation. Should one really devote oneself
to the cleaning, ordering, keeping up, adding (debts), growing (“a decent
beard”), and cultivating (“a look / of importance”) that mean “credit”
according to the socially defined norms of “my Lady Happiness”?
In the poem’s ironic plot, such respectable ambition leads to an
ambiguous nullity: “and never think anything / but a white thought!” (CEP,
36). The implicit alternative is enacted by the poem itself: to let be—and
thereby to attend to one’s present “chaos.” In the rhythmic vitality of its
itemizing, the attention in this poem (as in the earlier “Pastoral” on a similar
theme) does its own ordering. When ambition and acquisition drop away,
what emerges (as “Thursday” states) is openness to the present field of
contact: rather than an empty order possessed, a fruitful disorder to be
contemplated and grown with.
The delicate balance implicit in such contemplation appears in
“Lighthearted William,” twirlingly poised between light and dark, Yang and
Ying. After dancing through its contrasts—fall and spring, sighs and gaiety,
“up and down,” “heavy sunlight” and “blue shadows,” out and in—the poem
pirouettes to a close on a surprising instance of a color-word that balances
“November”: “quietly / twirling his green moustaches” (CEP,226). That
transfiguration of the appropriately “half dressed” William springs from an
inner, quite as much as, an outer weather.
“Portrait of a Lady,” which is really another paradoxical self-portrait,
amusingly renders the descending movements of that fiber of swift attention
with which Kora in Hellwas primarily concerned:
Your thighs are appletrees
whose blossoms touch the sky.
Which sky? The sky