‘this is plenty. this is more than enough’ depths; stylistic plainness, meaningful complexity. The simple pronominal clause
‘Itis’, recurring nine times in the first six lines, becomes dense with significance
and signification, begging the poem’s central question, ‘whatis?’ ‘It’ becomes the
poem’s subject, all that is unspeakable, as well as the fact of unspeakability. ‘It’ turns
into silence, the act of forgetting, as well as that which is forgotten, into memory
and denial of memory. ‘It is not the streets that exist’ almost says that the absence
of streets exists, which is given a further twist in the rest of the line, ‘It is the streets
that no longer exist’. Similarly with ‘It is not your memories’ and ‘It is not what
you have written down’. The not-memories, what have been wilfully forgotten,
and the not-written, the unrecorded, are what ‘is’. This way of putting it reifies
absence. The poet would write down the absence, would ‘discover a ritual’ parallel
to that of the unspecified (at this point in the poem) addressee(s), a ritual to enable
‘go[ing] on forgetting all your life’. Here passive forgetfulness turns into the activity
of forgetting, denial into confirmation. The speaker thus early in the poem finds
himself in mysterious collusion with his subject, as the stunned style testifies, and
as becomes explicit by the end of the poem.
But for the time being, the ‘you’ are war widows, and the ‘ritual’ is ‘the Widow’s
Shuttle’, the visit ‘once or twice a year’ to ‘the eloquence of young cemeteries’,
where it is ‘comforting’ ‘To get together and forget the old times’—an acutely
underspoken collocation of ‘get’ and ‘forget’ that turns the act of forgetting into
a conspiracy. The collocation is part of the scenario in which, as Robinson again
explains, the visit to the cemetery is fused ‘with a recreation of the euphemistic
fictions with which Jewish deportations to the gas chambers were veiled by the
Nazis’.^31 Nazi victim and contemporary war widow merge in lines that, with
cryptic poise, conflate the deceptive ‘routine’—to use Hill’s word from ‘September
Song’—of present-day Germany with that of the Holocaust:
Here comes the driver, flicking a toothpick into the gutter,
His tongue still searching between his teeth.
See, he has not noticed you. No one has noticed you.
It will pass, young lady, it will pass.Sinisterly uncaring nonchalance hovers over the toothpick and the searching tongue,
the latter detail just missing metaphorical euphemism for the speaker’s, and the
reader’s,enquiry.And,withmasterfuleconomy,thesentence‘See,hehasnotnoticed
you’ captures the visible absence, or the invisible presence, of the past from which
contemporary society has barely emerged. The ‘it’ that floats back into the poem
here—‘It will pass, young lady, it will pass’—encompasses resentment, memory,
conspiratorial silence, the fact of the Holocaust, and the whole gamut of emotions
belonging to victim, perpetrator, and onlooker. The lines are the mirror image of the
sentence in ‘September Song’: ‘Not forgotten|or passed over at the proper time.’^32
(^31) Ibid. 4. (^32) Hill, ‘September Song’, 67.