Poetry for Students Vol. 10

226 Poetry for Students

soon found themselves in need of money and Ne-

merov took a job teaching English at Hamilton Col-

lege in upstate New York. In 1948, Nemerov left

Hamilton and began teaching at Bennington Col-

lege in Vermont, where he stayed until 1966, at

which point he moved to Brandeis University near

Boston. In 1969, Nemerov began teaching at Wash-

ington University in St. Louis, and made St. Louis

his home for much of the rest of his life.

By 1948, Nemerov had begun writing in

earnest. After The Image and the Lawin 1947, he

published a novel, The Melodramatists,in 1949,

and then Guide to the Ruins,the collection in which

“The Phoenix” appears, in 1950. Over the next

decades, Nemerov continued to teach, to write po-

etry, fiction, and criticism, and to win the respect

of his peers. He has won numerous prizes, grants,

and fellowships, most notably the Consultancy in

Poetry at the Library of Congress in 1963-1964, a

Guggenheim Fellowship in 1968-69, an Academy

of American Poets Fellowship in 1970, election to

the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1976,

and the Pulitzer Prize for his Collected Poems of

Howard Nemerovin 1978. In 1988, he was named

Poet Laureate of the United States. Nemerov died

in 1991. His papers are housed at Washington Uni-

versity.

Poem Text

The Phoenix comes of flame and dust

He bundles up his sire in myrrh

A solar and unholy lust

Makes a cradle of his bier

In the City of the Sun 5

He dies and rises all divine

There is never more than one

Genuine

By incest, murder, suicide

Survives the sacred purple bird 10

Himself his father, son and bride

And his own Word

Poem Summary

Stanza 1:

In the first stanza of the poem, the narrator in-

troduces the topic of the phoenix. The phoenix is

a mythical bird, originally appearing in Egyptian

mythology but taken from that tradition by the

Greeks and then the Romans. The bird, as described

in the first stanza, “comes of flame and dust.” Ac-

cording to the myth, the phoenix is born out of the

funeral pyre of its father, and in this stanza Ne-

merov’s narrator notes that it “bundles up his sire

in myrrh” and “makes a cradle of his bier,” or rest-

ing place.

Stanza 2:

The second stanza continues the description of

the phoenix, and places the phoenix in a meta-

physical context. The bird rises “all divine” “in the

City of the Sun.” The reader does not know what

this means—what and where is the City of the Sun?

What does it mean, specifically, that the bird is “di-

vine?” He is also “genuine,” a word that has come

to be attached almost exclusively to commercial

products. What, the reader asks, does it mean that

the bird is “genuine?” Is the poet somehow being

ironic?

Stanza 3:

The final stanza portrays the phoenix as an en-

tirely self-sufficient being. He is his own primary

cause—“himself his father, son and bride”—and

the continuance of his race is ensured through

means that humans consider abhorrent—“incest,

murder, suicide.” At the end of the poem, the nar-

rator compares the phoenix to God Himself, for like

God, the phoenix is self-sufficient. The doctrine of

The Phoenix

Howard Nemerov