Poetry for Students

(Rick Simeone) #1

Volume 24 151


orthodoxy, as that orthodoxy was embodied by the
previous, largely European generation (“my father
was everyone’s father”).


Religious rebellion is never, however, a settled
issue. And it reenacts itself throughout Amichai’s
poetry, which obsessively conjures up the figure of
the simultaneously revered and rebelled-against fa-
ther, and which repeatedly alludes to sacred texts
in order to expose—sometimes with nostalgia,
more often with some blend of worldly cynicism
and good-natured humor—the gap between what
we might think of as the Old Word and the New
World. As just one example of this allusive prac-
tice, here from another poem is this soldier-poet’s
sardonic commentary on a phrase from the tradi-
tional Memorial Service:


God-full-of-Mercy, the prayer for the dead. If God
was not full of mercy, Mercy would have been in the
world, Not just in him.
Irreverent as they are, Amichai’s frequent tex-
tual commentary and reinterpretation are in the tra-
dition of Rashi and other Talmudic commentators.
His ambivalent and argumentative stance puts him,
as Amichai himself acknowledges, squarely in the
tradition, too, of Abraham and Job: “I think my
sense of history and God, even if I am against his-
tory and God, is very Jewish. I think this is why
my poems are sometimes taught in religious
schools. It’s an ancient Jewish idea to fight with
God, to scream out against God.”


The unresolved family quarrel throughout
“When I was young” is not only with God the Fa-
ther, but also with the modern Jewish nation that for
Amichai’s generation seemed to promise a utopian
community, but that ended up—as of course it had
to end up—as one more morally culpable nation
among other culpable nations. When this advocate of
the land-for-peace settlement (and former Haganah
commando) writes, “I managed to hear the evening
news,” he is evoking the commonplace close of an
ordinary day; but he is also inviting his reader to
imagine hearing what he no doubt heard: the next in
what seems to be an interminable series of news re-
ports about Arab-Israeli mutual mistrust and vio-
lence. Since the early, heady days of socialist
idealism, Israel and her writers perforce have dealt
with guilt and with all the grubby pragmatics of na-
tionhood; reluctantly, they have had to come down
to earth. It is a resigned, world-weary, but residually
romantic speaker who goes to sleep at the end of the
poem with only “the memory” of his first love.


Amichai has written a remarkable number of
poems having to do with the erotic life: it is almost


(as others have remarked) as though, having given
up on religion, the poet made an absolute value out
of love. Almost, but not quite—because nothing in
Amichai’s gallimaufry of a world is allowed to
stand as absolute or unadulterated. The love poems
are elegiac as well as earthy; the speaker looks
back, sad-eyed yet ruefully smiling, on sexual ex-
periences now inextricably intertwined for him
with limitation and loss. Here, for example, from
his 1963–1968 volume Now in the Din Before the
Silence,is the brief love poem “Pity, We Were a
Good Invention”:
They amputated Your thighs from my waist. For me
they are always Surgeons. All of them.
They dismantled us One from another. For me they
are engineers. Pity. We were a good and loving In-
vention: an airplane made of man and woman, Wings
and all: We soared a bit from the earth, We flew a bit.
Some cruel and unspecified “They” have sun-
dered the harmless lovers, but there is in any case
something endearingly impossible about the lovers’
hopeful “Invention,” just as there is something en-
dearingly impossible about every lover’s dream of
overleaping all obstacles. Even before the baneful
interference, these two managed to get off the
ground only “a bit”—the counterforce of reality al-
ways tugging their quixotic flying machine back
down to earth, toward disillusion and dissolution.
The scientific or technological language—“ampu-
tated,” “surgeons,” “dismantled,” “engineers,” “In-
vention,” “airplane”—is fresh and unsettling in the
context of sexual love; the poet seems something
of a surgeon himself as he cuts up syntax into neat,
brief units. This extreme terseness is a little fright-
ening, suggesting both the zombie-like numbness
of the victim and possibly even identification to
some extent with the oppressor. The result here as
elsewhere in Amichai is a complex tone, mixing
helplessness and assertiveness, feyness and frisson,
affection and anger, woefulness and whimsy.
From the beginning of his writing career
Amichai’s love poetry has inclined toward the pes-
simistic and worldly. In this, if not in sexual pref-
erence, Amichai follows his most important
English model, W. H. Auden, who also composed
modernist love poems in a wartime setting—among
them the beautiful and frequently anthologized
“Lullabye” (1937), which begins: “Lay your sleep-
ing head, my love, / Human on my faithless arm.”
Amichai has composed a number of Audenesque
lullabies. His “Lullaby 1957” borrows Auden’s
ballad-like stanza and incorporates colloquial lan-
guage and everyday urban imagery reminiscent of
Auden. Here is its concluding quatrain:

Not like a Cypress
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