Lawrence Durrell's "Echo"

Below is one of my favorite Durrell poems, the fragile and gorgeous "Echo," which opens the 1956 edition of Durrell's Selected Poems. Read the poem out loud and notice its use of echo (rhyme), which builds to a crescendo in the final line, especially in the exquisite "unbeckonable," which overtly echoes "echo" in the very spine of the word, and in the final "bird," which nicely re-sounds the "b" from the prior word at the same time that it picks up the "word-heard" rhyme from lines 3 and 4, respectively. The poem manages to echo the ultimately inaudible ground from which language arises and to which it beautifully strains to return.

ECHO

Nothing is lost, sweet self,

Nothing is ever lost.
The unspoken word
Is not exhausted but can be heard.
Music that stains
The silence remains
O echo is everywhere, the unbeckonable bird!

Whitman's Poetics of Memory in "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"

“Recalling now the obscure shapes, the echoes, the sounds and sights after their sorts”:

Whitman’s Poetics of Memory in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"

As readers and critics have long intuited, Walt Whitman fancies himself the poet of the future. Eerily yet matter-of-factly, entreatingly yet confidently, Whitman’s multivalent, polymorphically-perverse poetic “I” often looks forward by employing a poetic fiction of looking backward. In other words, Whitman’s poetic voice has a tendency to speak from out of a liminal, immemorial “space” that is always already anticipating the reader. Among all of his real and imagined orientations, then, Whitman is generally future oriented – the later Whitman even exaggeratedly so.1 Perhaps because of this undeniable forward thrust of Whitman’s poetry, few critics have noted the richness with which some of Whitman’s poems – the Sea-Drift poems in particular – explore the complex workings of human memory. In “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” the human act of re-membering, of putting back together the “thousand warbling echoes” (392) of the lived-in past, merges with the self-reflective poetic act. Whitman’s poem thus offers readers a poetics of memory, one that remembers the act of remembering, as it were, and in so doing reveals memory itself to be an inherently poetic activity: memory as poiesis. If the late Whitman views the future as an abstract locus of poetic and democratic revolutions, the earlier Whitman sees the past as an imaginative topos where loss and desire come together to form the poetic impulse. To sing the poet’s memorial engagement with the past, Whitman’s poem implies, is to confront the “pains and joys” (388) of Love and Death, those two ultimately inseparable primal realities at the heart of the human condition.

Edward Hirsch insightfully claims that “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” formally creates the “very rhythm of a singular reminiscence emerging out of the depths of mind… Whitman creates through the rhetorical rhythm of these lines the very urgency of fundamental memory triggered and issuing forth” (22). Hirsch does not specifically name the prosodic techniques in Whitman’s poem that “loosen the intellect for reverie” (Hirsch 22), that rhythmically rock the reader back and forth into a kind of active dream state that is the sine qua non of memory as poiesis, but some of these techniques can indeed be made explicit. Rhythm in free verse, though subtle and seemingly immune to formal analysis, nevertheless results from precise poetic effects. The anaphora of the first three lines (“Out of”) combines with internal metrical echoes – note the dactyl plus trochee pattern that splits the ten-syllable first line into two echoing, mirroring halves, thus creating in effect the ghost of a caesura in the medial position ("Out of the cradle endlessly rocking"); the dactyl-trochee pattern recurs at the end of the second line (“musical shuttle”) – to create a sense of regularity within difference that immediately evokes in the first three lines the calm movement, the dreamy activity that the poem as a whole describes. Additionally the rapid flights of human memory, which proceed not logically but “[a]s a flock, twittering, rising, or overhead passing” (388), are imitated by an incredible prepositional energy released by the first word of consecutive lines: Out, Over, Down, Up, and From variously flitter about as the opening words of the first fifteen lines. As James Hillman claims in his psycho-linguistic analysis of the poetic imagination, prepositions both precisely position the reader in an imaginative scene and make propositions about the relational matrices at work within (or alongside, or underneath…) that scene. Hillman writes: “So, we never seem to catch imagination operating on its own and we never can circumscribe its place because it works through, behind, within, upon, below our faculties. An overtone and undersense: is imagination prepositional?” (175) The prepositions in Whitman’s poem indirectly suggest through the poem’s manner of proceeding that memory is fundamentally imaginative movement, imagination rhythmically rocking back and forth so that it can prepositionally dart where its memorial whims take it.

If the formal aspects of “Out of the Cradle” imitate the ebb and flow of memory’s imaginative flights in general, the content of the poem directly recounts a specific act of memory that is complexly doubled back upon itself. The poetic voice revisits a childhood scene in which “the child / leaving his bed wander’d alone” (388) down to the sea, where he heard the mockingbird’s mournful song. The poetic voice thus conjures up his reminiscenceFrom the memories of the bird that chanted to me,
From your memories sad brother, from the fitful risings and fallings I heard,
From under that yellow half-moon late-risen and swollen as if with tears,
From those beginning notes of yearning and love there in the mist. (388)

In the line “From the memories of the bird that chanted to me,” “memories” functions in an ambiguous, double sense: on the one hand, it refers to the poetic voice’s memories of the bird that he heard as a child down by the sea; on the other hand, though, the “memories of the bird” must be taken as the bird’s own memories of his vanished loved one, the content of the bird’s song. The poet is therefore remembering the bird’s memories, turning memory upon itself so that its imaginal ground can be recovered and re-membered. In the last four lines of the first stanza, memory’s double movement is so successful that the poetic voice becomes indistinguishable from his childhood past. In the hands of the poet, memory unites dream and action so as to bring the past directly into the present of the poem:A man, yet by these tears a little boy again,
Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves,
I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter,
Taking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them,
A reminiscence sing. (388)

Note that the past and present are united by the poet “by these tears,” as if memory remembered itself only by recollecting the timeless ache in its heart. The above final lines of the first stanza also initiate a process in which the poet’s own song merges with the song of the bird. From the “beginning notes of yearning and love” sung by the bird in memorial longing for his mate, the poet sings the “pains and joys” of memory writ large. For the rest of the poem, the poet and the bird, the rememberer and the memory, remain virtually indistinguishable.

As absorbed and translated by the poet, the song of the bird expresses yearning for the bird’s mate, now vanished. Because of the present absence of the beloved, the past becomes the “object” of the bird’s loss and desire, the place simultaneously out of which and to which his mournful memory sings. In an apostrophe that contains one of the most stunning uses of epizeuxis ever utilized by a bird (much less a poet), Whitman’s bird addresses the past directly:O past! O happy life! O song of joy!
In the air, in the woods, over fields,
Loved! loved! loved! loved! loved!
But my mate no more, no more with me!
We two together no more. (392)

The haunting past participle “Loved!” reveals the interrelationship between loss and desire as the fundamental ground of memory. The bird desires a lost object, and the loss of the object issues in the bird’s desire – from this irresolvable tension memory attempts to recreate the past in the present. Strikingly, while the bird’s song directly embodies this movement of memory through the circuits of loss-desire, the poet’s attempt to remember the bird’s song and re-create it in the present of the poem indirectly communicates such a movement of memory – in this regard, the poet’s skillful use of onomatopoeia serves not only as a poetic technique but also as a metaphor for an act of memory that seeks in essence to imitate the past and thereby re-call it in the present. Readers thus experience the act of memory in both the content and the process of the poem.

The act of remembering appears successful for the poet, who again becomes exultingly inseparable from the boyhood self who directly witnessed the bird’s memorial “aria”:The boy ecstatic, with his bare feet the waves, with his hair the atmosphere dallying.
The love in the heart long pent, now loose, now at last tumultuously bursting,
The aria’s meaning, the ears, the soul, swiftly depositing,
The strange tears down the cheeks coursing,
The colloquy there, the trio, each uttering,
The undertone, the savage old mother incessantly crying,
To the boy’s soul’s questions sullenly timing, some drown’d secret hissing,
To the outsetting bard.

In his ability in and through language to articulate the stirring of memory, or, better put, in his ability to singmemory, the poet discovers a sense of poetic vocation: “Now in a moment I know what I am for, I awake… A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never to die” (392). The ancient connection between poetry, particularly oral poetry, and memory – Mnemosyne is, after all, the mother of the Muses – is remembered by the poetic voice in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.”

In the latter stages of the poem, the sea, implicit throughout the poem as its guiding image, as indeed the “cradle endlessly rocking,” emerges explicitly as a complex trope that manages to locate within the same poetic image both the workings of memory and the work of poetic craft. The sea is both memory poeticized and poetry remembered. Mimetic of the mockingbird’s direct address to the past as the locus of loss and desire, the poet addresses the sea as the ineffable reality in which the interrelated mysteries of both poetry and memory resound:O give me the clew! (it lurks in the night here somewhere,)
O if I am to have so much, let me have more!
…Are you whispering it, and have been all the time, you sea-waves?
Is that it from your liquid rims and wet sands? (393)
The sea responds with the “delicious word death,” expressing it using epizeuxis – which inevitably ties the sea’s “Death” to the bird’s “Loved!”:Death, death, death, death, death. (393)

The poet directly connects – or fuses, as he puts it – the bird’s song with the sea’s delicious utterance, as well as with his “own songs awaked from that hour” (393). Love and death, loss and desire are the prima materia of both memory and poetry, and the sea is their imagistic “place” – a paradoxical place out of which memory and language attempt to satisfy a never-to-be-satisfied desire, whose hidden face is loss. Yet only the poet can fuse all of these realities into one delicious word, Death, a word whispered by the sea. The poetic voice in “Out of the Cradle” finally exults in the ability of poetry to name, to absorb and to translate both the workings of human memory and indeed its own workings. Where memory ends and poetry begins, however, remains an open question. Hints and indirections are no doubt whispered, now and then, by that Whitmanian trope of tropes: the sea.


1 As Roy Harvey Pearce persuasively argues, the later Whitman seeks rather unsuccessfully to transform his poetry from “archetypal autobiography” into literal prophesy. See Pearce’s “Whitman Justified: The Poet in 1860,” as reprinted in Walt Whitman: Modern Critical Views, edited by Harold Bloom.


Works Cited

Bloom, Harold. Walt Whitman: Modern Critical Views. NY: Chelsea House, 1985.

Hillman, James. “Image-Sense.” In Working with Images: The Theoretical Base of
Archetypal Psychology, ed. Benjamin Sells. Connecticut: Spring Publications, 2000.

Hirsch, Edward. How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry. NY: Harvest, 1999.

Whitman, Walt. Poetry and Prose. Library of America Edition, 1996.

Seamus Heaney's 'Death of a Naturalist'

Question(s): Is digging possible for a dead-naturalist?; or: How to dig from above the ground?; or: How can Antaeus best avoid his “elevation, [his] fall”?; or: Can the work of poetry (“I rhyme / To see myself, to set the darkness echoing”) turn up an imaginal ground when the poet himself is a physically ungrounded, struggling Antaeus?; or: Can poetry catch the fleeting sound of a mythical landscape (“the squelch and slap / Of soggy peat”) when the poet’s ears are plugged by a map of sociopolitical categories?; or: How does poetry proceed in/respond to a climate of what Yeats calls “intellectual violence”?

Despite its ostensible status as primarily a volume of ars poetica – a kind of imaginative excavation that simultaneously investigates and demonstrates the craft of poetry – Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist reverberates with the above variously articulated question. Though the violence in Northern Ireland to which Heaney would overtly respond in North was still a few years away when Heaney wrote Death of a Naturalist, latent political tension and a history of cultural dislocation were present in the soil worked in Heaney’s first volume of poetry. To put it another way: In Death of a Naturalist, Heaney is digging imaginary gardens of peat with real explosives in them. In response to a potentially volatile political situation, Heaney uses his squat pen to “dig” through personal and collective layers of memory in service of uncovering/creating a “personal Helicon,” a mythical Ireland that can serve as an imaginative ground for wandering – and increasingly threatened – Antaeuses: those for whom the oppositional, absolutist, grid-like logic of political ideology is not adequate for responsibly negotiating the contingencies of human life. As such, Death of a Naturalist reveals a characteristic of poetry missed by those critics who charge Heaney with irresponsibly shirking the political realm in some of his work: namely that, by creating

an order… true to the impact of external reality and… sensitive to the inner laws of the poet’s being… An order where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew. An order which satisfies all that is appetitive in the intelligence and prehensile in the affections (From “Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture, in Opened Ground, pg. 417),

poetry touches upon a fundamental human activity – imagining reality – antithetical to violent political movements that require fixed views of reality in order to proceed with their bloody work. In short, poetry redresses the falsely narrow vision of political ideologies that view the world in static us-them/right-wrong terms.

Many of the poems in Death of a Naturalist both affirm the poetic vocation and express doubts as to its efficacy in a non-literary, gun-filled world. In “Digging,” even as the poet’s pen powerfully evokes three overlapping layers of time, bringing together in a single lyric moment three generations of diggers in the Heaney line (pardon the pun); and even amid the stunning onomatopoeia of “the squelch and slap / Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge” (note the placement of “edge” at the end (edge) of the slightly enjambed line), the poet hints that his work with words comes out of a felt lack, as if digging with a pen is somehow less “manly” than digging with a spade – “But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.”[1] The crisis of the poem turns upon the spade-less poet’s endeavor to find a way to “follow” ancestors at once personal and collective, ancestors who by digging into peat and bog are working a pre-political landscape, a mythical Ireland, an imaginal terrain. The final stanza provides an affirmation of the poet’s ability to work this terrain with his pen so as to unearth images of sensual specificity that nourish the collective inhabitants of a landscape. The poet discovers that joining his ancestors in digging occurs precisely through his ability to commemorate their – and his – activity: the poet digs by digging into the process of digging. The last three lines of the poem echo the opening stanza, with one change: “snug as a gun” in the first stanza gives way to “I’ll dig with it.” Thus at its end the poem both echoes its beginning and responds to it in such a way as to bring about a sense of resolution. One wonders: what else could the poet have done with his pen besides dig, and does the alternative to digging relate to the gun-like quality of the pen? In other words, is the declaration that “I’ll dig with it” a decision necessitated because the opening stanza obliquely raises a more violent alternative?

“Digging,” like Death of a Naturalist as a whole, poetically renders poetic craft. Part of this poetic rendering involves making thematic a tension concerning the role the poet can (should? must?) play when confronted with the threat of a form of violence that seeks to circumscribe personal memory and mythical landscape within reductive, factional categories. A distinction between, on the one hand, the attempt to dig into the reality-constructing wellsprings of the imagination, and on the other, the attempt to map reality rationally in the service of hierarchical sociopolitical projects (is this what a gun-like pen does?), is tentatively represented in Death of a Naturalist.[2]

---

[1] Granted, this line could be read in other ways. Instead of revealing an insecurity, or at least an uncertainty, in relation to poetry’s role(s) in the world, it may display the opposite sentiment. Much depends on how one reads the phrase, “men like them.” Based on the poem as a whole, which appears to express a sense of awe toward these digging men, I reject a reading that would see a derogatory quality to the poet’s assessment of his digging predecessors.

[2] In order to develop this notion I would need to spend more time with the poem “Death of a Naturalist” in particular. Violence – both in the forced dislocation of the frogspawn and in the resulting vengeful response of the frogs – plays a more overt role in this poem. Removing the frogspawn into a classroom to observe the burgeoning tadpoles echoes the violence of constructing/ manipulating sociopolitical categories. Also, “Antaeus” appears to touch upon the incipient violence involved in the abstracting, lifting-off-the-ground movement of “map thinking.”

Li-Young Lee's "This Room and Everything in It"

“it had something to do / with death… it had something / to do with love”: The Eroticism of Memory in “This Room and Everything in It”

Li-Young Lee’s “This Room and Everything in It” explores human memory as inherently erotic, in other words, as grounded in the restless vicissitudes of human desire. The act of memory figured in Lee’s poem involves the desire to transcend desire so as to reach a state of perfection in which the fundamental connection between love and death can be remembered. In the end, though, desire slips through memory’s fragile constructions and resumes its pre-rational primacy in the “room” that is human life.

The principal trope at work in “This Room and Everything in It” centers upon the ancient art of memory, the practice of utilizing a multifaceted, imaginatively complex topos in which to store various items or facts wished to be remembered. The memorial topos, in addition to featuring a “room” of some sort – an internal dwelling through which the person practicing the art of memory could move in imagination, associating the items to be remembered with the unchanging characteristics of the room – also commonly involved a fully developed cosmology in which various divine figures were utilized as mnemonic objects. This ancient art reveals the inherent bi-directional connection between imagination and memory: humans imagine so as to remember and remember so as to imagine. In Lee’s poem, however, the art of memory, “the one thing I learned / of all the things my father tried to teach me” (49), proceeds in a seemingly inverse manner. Rather than starting with the general and unchanging, and imaginatively associating concrete particulars with it, the speaker in the poem starts with fleeting, individual erotic moments – the very moments that one would think would need to be remembered rather than would serve as the imaginative ground for an art of memory! When the speaker proclaims that “I am letting this room / and everything in it / stand for my ideas about love / and its difficulties” (49), the room and everything in it is not an architectural but an erotic space:

I’ll let your love-cries,

those spacious notes

of a moment ago,

stand for distance.

Your scent,

that scent

of spice and a wound,

I’ll let stand for mystery.

Your sunken belly

is the daily cup

of milk I drank

as a boy before morning prayer. (49)

In the traditional art of memory, various “ideas about love,” personified as gods or goddesses, would often serve as mnemonic devices; in Lee’s poem, though, ideas about love are the items that the poet wishes to remember: specifically, “distance,” “mystery,” and some idea figured in “the daily cup / of milk I drank / as a boy before morning prayer.” By reversing the associative direction of the art of memory, Lee’s poem seems to suggest that if memory itself arises out of desire, then desire can only be remembered in the form of “ideas” that allow memory the means of getting beyond its own ground so as to articulate it.

The speaker’s art of memory ostensibly comes about so that “one day, when I need / to tell myself something intelligent / about love, / I’ll close my eyes / and recall this room and everything in it” (50). On a deeper level, though, the speaker’s activity seems to be in service of fixing (i.e., making permanent) the exultation of desire that is possible in physical love: “My body is estrangement. / This desire, perfection.” In other words, the speaker marshals various “ideas about love” so as to remember the longed-for self-oblivion of physical love: the speaker longs to remember that at times of physical passion he is capable of forgetting himself. This is the “greater idea” that the speaker seeks to inscribe in and through his various ideas of love. If memory succeeds for a moment in remembering the mystery of physical passion – a mystery that “ha[s] something to do / with death… something / to do with love” – soon enough the memory is gone and must be re-discovered. This necessity of re-membering physical passion stems, according to the insight offered by Lee’s poem, from the inherent eroticism of memory, from its inseparability from human desire.

Now I’ve forgotten my

idea. The book

on the windowsill, riffled by wind…

the even-numbered pages are

the past, the odd-

numbered pages, the future.

The sun is

God, your body is milk…

useless, useless…

your cries are song, my body’s not me…

no good… my idea

has evaporated… your hair is time, your thighs are song…

it had something to do

with death… it had something

to do with love.

By the poem’s end, memory appears scattered, forgetful of or at least blurring its prior associations: both the lover’s cries and thighs become song. Desire seems to have collapsed the formerly clear ideational associations that memory had made vis-à-vis physical passion, and thus desire must in a sense remember itself anew.