Poetry for Students

152 Poetry for Students

Let us fall asleep. In the dark corridor The electric

meter will go on Keeping score, all night, Always

awake, and we shall not worry.

In Auden’s case (in “Lullabye” and else-

where), the use of present tense is a means of hold-

ing on to the ephemeral moment and drawing a

wishful, charmed circle around the lovers—

threatened from within by the expectation of ho-

mosexual infidelity and from without by social

disorder and hostility. Amichai tries, much less suc-

cessfully, for a similar effect: his “Keeping score”

has a forced cleverness, and the uncharacteristic

present and future tenses give him trouble. Amichai

in his own voice is almost always a love poet of

the past tense, of “we were” rather than “we are.”

But it must also be noted that “Lullaby 1957”

clearly suffers in translation, as do others of

Amichai’s earlier and more formally traditional

verses, and that the Hebrew text has a wider ef-

fective range of tenses.

A predilection for the distant perspective is

bound up with Amichai’s most telling difference

from Auden: his use of love poetry as a field for

specifically Jewish reenactment, rebellion, and ru-

mination on history. Frequently juxtaposing erotic

descriptions and religious texts, Amichai tweaks

the law of the father(s) and brings the spiritual

realm abruptly and often shockingly down to earth.

At the same time, he points to the ephemerality of

sexual bonding, its flimsiness as a substitute for re-

ligious belief. Here, for instance, is a passage de-

scribing a sensual, skewed Sabbath (black instead

of white, despairing rather than renewing) from

Amichai’s longest poem (some forty-two pages),

“The Travels of the Last Benjamin of Tudela.”

Words in quotation come from Lecha Dodi, the fa-

miliar, beautiful hymn for welcoming the Sabbath

as a metaphorical bride:

This could have been a song of praise to the sweet,

imaginary God of my childhood. It happened on Fri-

day, and black angels filled the Valley of the Cross,

and their wings were black houses and abandoned

quarries. Sabbath candles bobbed up and down like

ships at the entrance to a harbor. “Come O bride,”

wear the clothes of your mourning and your splen-

dor from the night when you thought I wouldn’t come

to you and I came. The room was drenched in the

fragrance of syrup from black, intoxicating cherries.

Newspapers, scattered on the floor, rustled below and

the flapping wings of the hemlock above. Love with

parting, like a record with applause at the end of the

music, love with a scream, love with a mumble of

despair at walking proudly into exile from each other.

Come O bride, hold in your hand something made of

clay at the hour of sunset, because flesh vanishes and

iron doesn’t keep....

Amichai’s intermingling of the sensual and

spiritual recalls strategies of metaphysical poets

such as John Donne, but the Anglican metaphysi-

cal and the Jewish modernist own very different

poetic projects. In his early love poems, Donne

spiritualizes sex; his later, religious poems sexual-

ize the sacred, making religious subject matter con-

crete and apprehensible. Donne’s transposition of

phrases and images may be lewd or pious, silly or

psychologically tortured: always, Donne is showy,

and always his work situates itself within an or-

thodox Christian context. Amichai’s admixtures of

the sacred and the sexual can be as flamboyant, but

they are un-Donneish in their post-existential reg-

istration of both religious and romantic inadequacy.

Perhaps because Amichai is underscoring a

philosophical point, in his love poetry whom we

meet is not so much this or that woman as all

women, the abstract Female. Whether or not

Amichai’s poems echo individual encounters, dis-

concertingly, the women encountered remain on

the whole voiceless and faceless, the speaker’s

emotions not much different toward each one, and

each subsumed under the rubric of Love-That-Had-

To-Be-Lost. Here are the concluding lines of a lyric

from Amichai’s 1989 book, From Man You Came

and to Man You Shall Return:

I’m still inside the room. Two days from now I will

see it from the outside only, The closed shutter of

your room where we loved one another And not all

mankind.

And here are lines from a poem in his

1963–1968 collection:

And to be alone is to be in a place Where we were

never together, and to be alone is To forget you are

like this: to want to pay for two In a bus and travel

alone.

We know in each case that the speaker is feel-

ing woebegone, yet his voice participates in, even

precipitates, the distancing that pains him. Because

we are allowed to see his experience “from the out-

side only,” the grief in these poems remains iconic,

generalized, at some emotional remove; nor do we

know anything in particular about the woman

whose presence the speaker mourns. This tonal

sameness and this blurring of otherness arise from

Amichai’s more or less conceptually constant, if

metaphorically various, treatment of love. It makes

sense, of course, to internalize God as a concept to

be turned over and over in the mind while the con-

cept remains essentially unchanged; it likewise

makes sense that a dead father would become in-

ternalized and fixed in time, so that scenarios re-

play or repeat with limited variation. But there is

Not like a Cypress