Poetry for Students

146 Poetry for Students

children describe their emotions in terms of the out-

side world (“I love you like the whole world”), so

he too has the need to describe his emotional re-

sponses in metaphoric terms, by using objective

correlatives in the outside world.

When I pointed to the despair displayed in his

so-called love poems, to a kind of disillusionment

with heterosexual love as such, he told me that he

usually wrote his poems as a summary of a partic-

ular phase in his life. When a person is in love, he

told me, he does not analyze or reflect on it. He is

too busy experiencing it. When the relationship is

over, it is time to think about it and write about it.

Indeed, many of Amichai’s love poems refer

to the physical remains of love, to an impending

separation, or to the results of an actual separation.

In “What’s it like to Feel a Woman,” Amichai

refers to the remains of seminal fluids in the body

of a woman, and to the woman’s remains on the

male body. These remains “augur the hell” and the

“mutual death” that awaits the lovers. Is the hell

the yearning for the full erotic moment, the mo-

ment of love that is gone? Amichai does not usu-

ally offer information about the circumstances

leading to the “mutual death” of the lovers, or to

the termination of love relationships, because love

in his poems seems ephemeral by definition. In

“Once a Great Love,” Amichai describes the ter-

mination of a love relationship as a violent cutting,

which leaves half his body writhing and “twisting

like a snake cut in two.” The second stanza de-

scribes the abandoned lover as a man lost in the

“Judean desert.” The man remembers the woman,

like one who notices the sign “Sea Level” in the

middle of the desert. There is no sea, no sign of

water or life, just like the woman’s face that is no

longer there. All that is left is a sign recalling an-

other geological level, or a memory corresponding

to another existential and experiential level. The

metaphor of a violent cutting recurs in yet another

love poem. But whereas this poem alludes to a vol-

untary separation, “A Pity, We Were Such a Good

Invention” alludes to separation as a violent impo-

sition by an outside social intrusion. “They ampu-

tated your thighs off my hips. As far as I am

concerned they are all surgeons. All of them.” The

couple’s divorce is depicted as a violent surgery.

“They” is a general reference to other people

who may have meddled in the couple’s affairs, or

who may have completed the legal transaction.

“They” refers to a collective pressure that caused

the couple to break up. Amichai indicts the sepa-

rators as “surgeons” and “engineers”—the practical

and lucrative professions that are here indicted for

their blindness to the more subtle expressions of

love. Amichai uses the unlikely metaphor of a plane

to capture the united couple, and the experience of

flight to express their erstwhile happiness: “A pity.

We were such a good and loving invention. / An

airplane made from a man and a wife. / Wings and

everything. / We hovered a little above the earth.”

The couple’s divorce is presented in this poem as

a violent cutting off of body parts from each other.

Love, whether marital or casual, is bound to

end in Amichai’s poetry, is bound to die. But its

transitory nature cannot obscure its force. The

metaphor for love here is an airplane; in another

memorable poem, love is compared to the human

struggle with a divine force. In “Jacob and the

Angel,” Amichai uses a Biblical allusion, Jacob’s

struggle with the mysterious messenger who

changes his name from Jacob to Israel to frame a

poem about casual love. The process of making

love is described as a kind of struggle for playful

supremacy. The lover does not know the girl’s

name, which he learns only when she is called

“from upstairs.” Jacob, in Genesis 32, is also named

twice—his name is changed by the angel who wres-

tles with him. The use of the Biblical allusion

serves a double purpose: on the one hand, it trans-

lates the heterosexual encounter into sacral terms.

For the lovers, their fleeting moment is indeed sa-

cred, despite its anonymity. On the other hand, the

Biblical allusion undercuts the heterosexual en-

counter by juxtaposing it with a truly momentous

encounter between the nation’s progenitor and a di-

vine emissary.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Amichai showed a

continued predilection for privacy, pensiveness and

sensuality, preferring a colloquial insularity to fig-

urative and allusive discourse. The female love ob-

ject in his poems nevertheless proclaims Amichai’s

belief in the validity of personal-subjective

expression.

In my interview with Amichai, the poet in-

sisted that he wrote poems because they gave him

joy. He insisted that he was no professional poet.

He objected to the tendency among other poets

to philosophize about the poetic process, and to

analyze or theorize upon it. He assured me that his

poems were spontaneous responses to his personal

experiences. Amichai objected to the modernist

tendency to use difficult and figurative language.

Nevertheless, as Chana Kronfeld demonstrates,

Amichai’s poetics of simplicity is often combined

with aesthetic sophistication and artistic complex-

ity. On the one hand, Amichai succeeded in “gen-

erating a truly popular poetic voice able to reach

Not like a Cypress