Modern American Poetry

(^446) Bonnie Costello
for America, and knows that small-town life is not an escape from the
corruptions that plague America. Named for a Saint, and the embodiment of
Emerson’s American scholar, he appreciates the charms of this place while
recognizing its imperfections and the artifice behind its placid surfaces. From
the distance of the hillside he can delight that “there is nothing that ambition
can buy or take away,” yet he knows that such ambitious buying and selling
drives American life, so recently shaken to its foundations. Here is a respite
from Wall Street, not a cure for it. If heappreciates locality for itself, rather
than for its speculative value as souvenir or natural resource, still, the placeis
not innocent. Ambrose conducts us to the pitch of the church, which, while
it is part of the overall picturesque charm of the place, is “not true.”
This has been from the beginning a poem about seeing.Dürer’s stylized
gaze conducted us through the first part of the poem, with its etched water,
its play of scale, and its enhanced colors. But as the poem turns to Ambrose
for direction, a transition occurs. The body enters the scene, since Ambrose,
unlike Dürer, is in it. From his hilltop prospect he can miniaturize the world
and make it a kind of souvenir (memorizing the antique-sugar-bowl-shaped
summerhouse, the mechanical boats), but he must finally surrender the toy-
like scenery and confront what has hitherto been disguised by fog. The
decorative palette of the poem now turns to stark and unambiguous black,
white, and red. Humans, in various social positions, enter the poem, and so
does a worker: the steeple jack of the poem’s title, the moral counterpart of
the artist, placing danger signs even as he “gilds.” We are reminded that what
is seen has been made, and with that recognition danger and sin become
explicit. The “not true” has exposed not just fiction, but falsehood and
corruption.
There are other prospective inhabitants of this hitherto empty town,
“waifs, children, animals, prisoners, / and presidents,” escaping “sin driven
senators,” all of them creatures who are vulnerable or corrupt. These “simple
people” do not ensure the innocence we cling to as a legacy of American
small-town life. Rather, this is a place where presidents (Coolidge was in
office) evade their responsibilities, choosing not to see or think about the evil
in their midst, and thus serving its ends. As Moore turns to the institution of
the church, she locates the worst form of hypocrisy (whitewash) exactly
where there should be none. But as a pious Presbyterian, she believes that all
human institutions are erected in hope, not in innocence. The church may
be most susceptible to corruption because presumed most innocent. The
columns of the church, supports for a frail humanity, are “made solider by
whitewash” (thus to appearances only, and not reliable at all). The steeple
jack, the very figure assigned to correct the collapsing steeple, is himself only