Open to the Weather 91where Watteau hung a lady’s
slipper. Your knees
are a southern breeze—or
a gust of snow. Agh! what
sort of man was Fragonard?
—as if that answered
anything. Ah, yes—below
the knees, since the tune
drops that way, it is
one of those white summer days ...The descent, of course, is not merely visual. The poem moves, through
interior dialogue, from an easy formalized tribute toward a more disturbing
contact. The witty and sentimental style of Watteau or of Fragonard (whose
“The Swing” does leave a slipper hanging in the sky) defines that delightful
art which is yet a means of fending off immediacy. The sequence of initial
composition and sardonic question or retort carries the speaker beneath such
decorative surfaces toward an inarticulate contact from which he attempts
(with half a mind) to defend himself: “Which shore?— / the sand clings to
my lips—” And, in the poem’s final line, the tribute has lost the simplicity of
its formal distance: “I said petals from an appletree” (CEP, 40). As a
whimsically protective mask, the tribute becomes an accurate figure of the
speaker’s relation to himself and to his lady.
When this central consciousness, with its appetite for the novel and its
candid self-observation, turns to the world at large, it may discover or
become a variety of figures of contact. Some of the resulting poems are, in
structure, little forays out into the banal or the random which neatly
conclude with the discovery of a gestalt. Two such, firmly realized, are “The
Nightingales” and “Complete Destruction.” Each focuses the fullness and
the emptiness of the world: the first, by its deft reversal of perspective upon
substance and shadow, or solid object and artistic plane; the second, by its
arrival (in a flat statement that includes the particular and the universal, the
whimsical and the terrible) at the full stop that was implicit in its beginning.
Elsewhere the indirections and discontinuities become more complex.
The poem may be a montage or a multifaceted construction that points to an
experience not directly presentable in an outworn language. Such is the
montage of “To Mark Anthony in Heaven,” which joins the speaker’s “quiet
morning light” (reflected from, and in turn reflecting, a world of loved
particulars) with what Anthony apprehended through attention to the
particulars of “that beloved body” (CEP,33). Such too is the ABA movement