I have a bit of a thing for unfashionable ‘late modernists’. One of my favourites is the eccentric American poet Robert Duncan, most tenderly depicted in old age by Thom Gunn, who knew him well, as the Pindar to his Horace in his (Gunn’s) poem, ‘Duncan’:
When in his twenties a poetry's full strengthBurst into voice as an unstopping flood,He let the divine prompting (come at length)Rushingly bear him any way it wouldAnd went on writing while the Ferry turnedFrom San Francisco, back from Berkeley too,And back again, and back again. He learnedYou add to, you don't cancel what you do.
(You can read the whole poem here.)
In his poem, Gunn reworks Horace, Odes 4.2, in which Horace distinguishes his own precise and small-scale style from that of Pindar (Pindaric style, by contrast, is the ‘unstopping flood’ attributed here to Duncan). Duncan published a great deal, and perhaps didn’t edit himself that much: there’s plenty which isn’t much good and Gunn hints at that (‘you add to, you don’t cancel what you do’). But the best of it is really exhilaratingly good and bracingly un-British — so sweeping, so serious, so *big*. (France and America have, probably not coincidentally, both produced many more imitators of Pindar than England.)
Pindar is, with Homer, my favourite of the Greek poets, and there are several reasons why Gunn casts Duncan as Pindar here. The most obvious, though, is that one of Duncan’s best and most anthologised poems is ‘Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar’. A while ago I wrote a chapter partly about that poem, and I’ll come back to Pindar and some of the modern versions of him another day.
But I want today to look at a very early and rather un-Pindaric piece of Duncan, one of my very favourite of his early poems, a lovely little pretty-much-a-sonnet from his first collection, The Years as Catches (1966). It goes like this:
How in the dark the cows lie down.They sleep in grace, in their dumb remove.How the dumb sheep in the grace of darkhuddle to sleep. How the winter’s coldsharpens & glisters the whispering still.How each man to his beloved comes,to his dumb, to his grace, in the evening’s chill.How, at last, to his comfort, his death,comes even the damnd, to his final home.Alone I lie in the hush of my beastto hear upon my body’s lyrethe varying discords of my desireuntil the intervening nights and days,the sheltering darks, the revealing lights,have passt away.
As Stephen Guy-Bray pointed out in a very satisfying small article from 19991 (would that all scholarship were as modest and genuinely useful as this!), this is a reworking of a sonnet by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547):
Alas, so all things now do hold their peace!Heaven and earth disturbèd in no thing;The beasts, the air, the birds their song do cease,The nightès car the stars about doth bring;Calm is the sea; the waves work less and less:So am not I, whom love, alas! doth wring,Bringing before my face the great increaseOf my desires, whereat I weep and sing,In joy and woe, as in a doubtful case.For my sweet thoughts sometime do pleasure bring:But by and by, the cause of my diseaseGives me a pang that inwardly doth sting,When that I think what grief it is againTo live and lack the thing should rid my pain.
Surrey’s sonnet is in turn a version of Petrarch (Rime CLXIV), and Petrarch himself certainly had some passages of Virgil in mind, especially Aeneid 4.522-31, describing the contrast between the peace of the night and Dido’s restless agony.2 I don’t think it matters much at all if we don’t recognise any of the series of nested “models” here — these are all beautiful poems or passages in their own right — but it undoubtedly adds something if we do: each poet is tormented by desire which will not leave him alone, which comes back and back (‘When that I think what grief it is again’), (‘the varying discords of my desire’). The experience feels both unique and universal, and the poem too returns, in some sense, over and over again across the centuries.
There are some differences as well though. Duncan’s poem is a more peaceful though also in some ways soberer version: he seems less tormented, and more reconciled; but the peace of sleep in his poem is also much more directly associated with death than in any of the earlier versions (‘How at last to his comfort, his death / comes even the damnd, to his final home’). His sonnet manages to be both enormously comforting and actually, if you think about it, rather more austere than any of his models.
Helena Nelson published a thoughtful (and rather funny) short article a couple of weeks ago on modern poems titled ‘After’ some other poet or poem. Such titling, as she nicely indicates without quite saying, can be a rather pretentious and even an alienating move. In fact, I found a recent poem itself written ‘after’ Duncan’s lyric, though the poet, George Kalamaras, doesn’t put it quite like that: instead, he borrows Duncan’s own trick of starting a poem with someone else’s first line. This I think is even more of a gamble than the usual ‘after’ gambit: if your reader doesn’t know Duncan’s poem, you risk — as Helena Nelson points out — making them feel excluded right from the start. But if you do know it, how can you not hear the rest of Duncan’s exquisite lyric unfurling after that first line? It takes a bold poet to invite that kind of direct counterpoint. (Duncan himself avoids doing so, since the line he borrows for his Pindar poem is taken from a rather scholarly translation, with many other translations available.)
On the other hand, without such relationships, you’re hardly writing poetry as such at all. For my part, though I have once been guilty of writing an ‘after’ poem (in that case, in fact, ‘after and against’ a particularly objectionable bit of Ovid), I prefer the older tradition of leaving these relationships unstated and allowing your reader to notice them or not, and to make of them what they will. I think experienced readers sense how deep the literary roots of a poem are, whether or not they can play the scholarly game of identifying specific models: if you have read and loved plenty of sixteenth century sonnets, you will hear and respond to the yearning in Duncan’s poem that calls back to those lyrics as much as it does to the object of his desire, regardless of whether you make the specific connection to Surrey. And if you haven’t yet read any sixteenth century English poetry, reading Duncan will prepare you quite well for doing so.
Stephen Guy-Bray, 'Song and Sonnet: Robert Duncan and the Earl of Surrey’, ANQ 12.4 (1999), 39-42.
Such an interesting article. Thank you for it. I wish I was able to say "Pindar is, with Homer, my favourite of the Greek poets"; my Greek never got far enough for me to savour the work in the original. But maybe it's enough to read those poets influenced by the earlier sources. We can only come into the chain as early as we're able to understand it. I was really interested that Duncan's 1966 'The Year As Catches' is what I call a 'how' poem. Many poets in the last two decades have picked up this pattern of fragmentary 'how' sentences, with a finite verb merely implied, and I always wonder where and when it started. This must be a very early example. I didn't know it and I like it very much, and far more than most of the later ones, and I love the way he drops that pattern in his last six lines (his pretty much a sestet) and leaves the last line to unfold into silence.