232 Poetry for Students
Nemerov, by combining language that alludes
to the Christian tradition with the details of the
story that are most violent and pagan, underscores
to the reader the strangeness of the phoenix myth.
It is a disturbing story, really, rooted in the vio-
lence and foreignness of the ancient world. Like
the ancient gods, the phoenix “comes of flame and
dust” and is both born out of and consumed in fire.
The worship of the sun and the reverence of fire
permeate the myth, and are entirely other to the
monotheistic mind. The bird, the third line of the
poem tells us, is motivated by “a solar and unholy
lust.” This line could not be a more explicit rejec-
tion of the Christian tradition, evoking sun worship
and the “unholy.” Moreover, in the final stanza the
frightening actions of the phoenix—“incest, mur-
der, suicide”—are noted as the very means by
which the bird survives.But as we have seen, the bird just as aptly rep-
resents many facets of the Christian narrative, and
the language Nemerov chooses echoes the simple,
Anglo-Saxon-derived vocabulary of the King
James Bible. Such words as “cradle,” “myrrh,” “he
dies and rises,” “himself his father, son, and bride,”
and the mysterious mention of the “Word,” all point
to the story of Jesus as different from and consub-
stantial with the Father. But, the poet asks us to
consider, how can we reconcile these profoundly
different worldviews? The original phoenix myth
centered on sun worship, immortality, and the
power of fire, whereas Christianity emphasizes the
worship of a single omnipotent God, who grants
immortality. As we look at the poem more closely,
the strangeness and residual paganism of Chris-
tianity comes clear. If the Phoenix “comes of flame
and dust,” does not God do so, as well, when he
appears in the form of a burning bush to Moses in
the desert? The linking of cradle and bier in the fi-
nal line of the first stanza suggest the teleological
nature of the Christ story—he really is born solely
to die in order to bear sins away. The Trinitarian
resonances of the phoenix story are clear, as well.Subtly, then, Nemerov wishes to draw out the
pagan roots of Christianity by telling this pro-
foundly disconcerting story and sing the kind of
language and images that readers familiar with the
Christian tradition cannot help but catch. In this,
Nemerov’s poem has some important similarities
with the work of another poet who delved into the
strangeness at the heart of Christianity. The nine-
teenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson
wrote hermetic, off-kilter, and immensely deep and
resonant poems that were suffused with the lan-guage of the King James Bible. Her verse explored
questions of death, of holiness, and of humans’ re-
lationship to the divine, but did so obliquely and
quietly.
Unlike a religious poet such as Gerard Man-
ley Hopkins who exhorted, pled, and extensively
questioned in his work, Dickinson pared down her
religious thought, loading up small words with ex-
traordinary amounts of meaning in much the way
that Nemerov does here. Nemerov takes Dickin-
son’s emblematic line—the iambic tetrad—and
uses it to explore the same questions that preoc-
cupy Dickinson. He even goes so far as to imitate
one of her most typical stanzaic constructions: a
four-line rhymed stanza in which the final line is
significantly shorter than the previous three (which
have, generally, either been alternating iambic tri-
ads and tetrads or all iambic tetrads). These stan-
zas drift off disturbingly, for the rest of the lines
give us a sense of rhythm that is betrayed in the fi-
nal line, and Nemerov uses his final lines for pre-
cisely the same effect—the final words hang in
space. Much as Dickinson does when she uses the
language of “old-fashioned religion” to talk about
the strangeness of life and the omnipresence of
death, Nemerov uses Biblical language and struc-
tural allusions to Emily Dickinson to evoke the
links and disjunctures between Christianity and the
pagan tradition that preceded it.
Source:Greg Barnhisel, in an essay for Poetry for Students,
Gale, 2001.Jeannine Johnson
In the following essay, Jeannine Johnson out-
lines Nemerov’s unique theories about poetry and
examines his rather routine treatment of the
phoenix as a general symbol of renewal.Howard Nemerov was a much celebrated poet,
winning the National Book Award and the Pulitzer
Prize for his 1978Collected Poemsand receiving
the Bollingen Prize, awarded by Yale University,
in 1981. He also served, from 1988 to 1990, as the
third poet laureate of the United States. Nemerov
has been praised by some critics for his commit-
ment to aesthetic perfection and for his insights into
the ways that poetry links observation (or “seeing”)
and knowledge (or “saying”). However, since his
first volume of verse, he has also been dismissed
by others as unoriginal, unspontaneous, and un-
feeling, an example of the worst type of the so-
called “academic” poet.
Critical reaction to Guide to the Ruins(his sec-
ond verse collection and the text in which “TheThe Phoenix