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Mark Strand's "Elegy for My Father"
(New Selected Poems
2007 ($26.95)
Greg Orr's early surrealist verse finds its deepest source in a biographical fact: while both were still boys, Orr shot and killed one of his brothers in a hunting accident. Orr reached the apogee of this record in "Gathering the Bones Together," the title poem of his second volume, a short sequence blending elegy with nightmare and hope to create, perhaps, the poet's "bridge" out of the past. Like Orr, but far more prominent (as well as half a generation older), Mark Strand built his reputation with user-friendly dreams and nightmares more eager to invite than repulse the reader. Strand's poems, less rooted into specific personal horror, were not as disturbing as Orr's and even allowed for a kind of playfulness sometimes at war with his darker poems. (Darker (1970) was the title of Strand's third volume, though the poem which provides the title is oddly omitted from New Selected Poems.) Perhaps his most famous lyrics of this period are "Keeping Things Whole" and "Eating Poetry." Strand offsets the somber undercurrents in these two poems (and many others) with self-deprecation ("Keeping Things Whole") and gleeful imagery ("Eating Poetry"). But, like Orr, Strand mines sorrow for his greatest work from this period (and, quite likely, his entire career) with his "Elegy for My Father," which arguably both crowns and dispenses with Strand's need for a surrealistic distance in his verse. The capstone of Strand's fourth collection, The Story of Our Lives (1973), "Elegy" also heralds the long forms common to that book and unlike the mostly short (and short-lined) poems of the first three volumes. The expansiveness of the six-part sequence, with its frequently long lines and its almost Beat-like repetitions, accompanies the greater psychological openness of the poem, indicated not just by the title (which, after all, could head a fictive work) but also by its ascription--Robert Strand, 1908-1968.
"Elegy for My Father" arguably both crowns and dispenses with Strand's need for a surrealistic distance in his verse.
While Strand talks about personal emotion in a way not as evident in his earlier verse, he has not surrendered the dreamlike techniques for which he had become noted. Even so, "The Empty Body" begins the sequence in a much more directly realistic manner than Strand's already famous lyrics and prominently employs the kind of repetition which will mark the elegy as a whole and which links it to the formal loosening of American poetry in the '60s. The poem is a simple and brilliantly effective litany of things which exist, in contrast to the father who is addressed with the refrain, "But you were not there." Strand begins with the empty body--"The hands were yours, the arms were yours, / But you were not there."--before widening his view: the sun, the moon, the wind, "[t]he pale green light of winter," are all there, but his father is not. Like the gulls, also present, Strand then swoops in close, to his father's mouth, before again turning outward to nature and mankind. He closes, though, with a return to the contrast between the evident body and the absent You.
For the second section, "Answers," Strand employs the Q&A format poets like Merwin and Levertov had already used. For the most part here Strand asks his questions twice, presumably rejecting each first answer and eliciting a different response the second time. Strand--perhaps as the voice of the universal child--asks questions both predictable ("Why did you lie to me?") and less so ("Who did you sleep with?") His father's replies reveal a persona not unlike the archetype of the sad clown or the wise cracker: avoiding pain with humor. As in the first section, the language is more realistic than surrealistic, though at one point the father says, "A scarf of pain kept me warm." But the disjuncture between the father's first and second replies to the questions puts the reader on edge in a nightmarish way, especially as the second, presumably true responses build up an existential sadness that both evokes the reader's sympathy and points out his estrangement from the scene--
Why are you going?
Because nothing means much to me anymore.
Why are you going?
I don't know. I have never known.
This question loops back to the first question--"Why did you travel?" (suggesting the absent father common to twentieth century American writing)--as it points "ahead" to the father's death. But the poem's ending is both touching and disorientingly ordinary: "I am tired and I want to lie down."
Strand in both form and tone of voice echoes the (com)plaints to God in the Psalms.
In section three, "Your Dying," Strand's patience and acceptance are gone, replaced by anger. He both begins and ends the poem with "Nothing could stop you," words which occur a half dozen times in the poem, alternating with a rephrasing of the accusation "You went on with your dying." Both son and daughter appear among those people and things who can't stop the father, and Strand in both form and tone of voice echoes the (com)plaints to God in the Psalms.
Nothing could stop you.
Not the best day. Not the quiet. Not the ocean rocking.
You went on with your dying.
Not the trees
Under which you walked, nor the trees that shaded you
Not the doctor
Who warned you[. . . .]
Strand is hectoring his father, presuming his father aims to die and deliberately ignores rescue. Images are both realistic--the trees cited above--and dreamlike--the cold that enters his clothes, the blood seeping into his socks, his dreams of the world without him.
In section 4, "Your Shadow," the father's shadow functions as an ambiguous image, not as a symbol, which returns to his possession after belonging to his past: "The places where you were have given it back[,]" the orphanage, the Newsboys' Home, New York, Mexico City, Halifax. From the litany of specific places--and its unsettling sense of almost literalism--Strand moves to a more openly metaphoric sequence: "When you traveled the white wake of your going sent your shadow below, but when you arrived it was there to greet you. You had your shadow." The attendant images still cling to a physical reality but also beg to be interpreted--influence, reputation, unconscious, "dark side." Strand ends this section with a sequence of short lines harking back to his earlier work and a dreamlike language which exudes feeling more than sense: "[Your shadow] composed itself like air. / It wanted to be like snow on water." But after only a half dozen of these more nebulous lines Strand sharply tugs the poem back to the longing and pain at its core--
It came to my house.
It sat on my shoulders.
Your shadow is yours. I told it so. I said it was yours.
I have carried it with me too long. I give it back.
Despite the prosy nature of these sentences, their bleak strength is distinctly poetic, and the appeal is broadly universal, touching any child who still, as an adult, feels trapped by a parent's influence.
In the poem's last two sections, Strand moves through a decidedly peculiar preparation of the body and into the resumption of life without the deceased. In "Mourning," the women sit with the father, apparently still living, even as they stroke his fingers, comb his hair and dress him in fine clothes. The melancholy tone is utterly of a piece with what has preceded it, and yet Strand here closes with a diffidence strikingly at odds with the rest of the poem: "They mourn for you the way you can."
Strand's short direct sentences hammer--like, if you must, nails into a coffin.
And then, at last, "It is winter and the new year. / Nobody knows you." In many ways, section 6, "The New Year" mourns more fully, more truly, and with more pathos than any of the first five sections. "Nobody knows you"--a repeated line--harshly emphasizes the dead man's absence because, of course, it is a lie: this soon after the death, many people still know him. Or-- Or maybe Strand means instead that no one knows what his father is now, "the neighbor of nothing" who does not see "the rain falling" or "the scars of plenty." "It is over and nobody knows you." Strand's short direct sentences hammer--like, if you must, nails into a coffin. They enact the finality of death, our ignorance of what, if anything, lies beyond it. His assertion that "the meek are hauling their skins into heaven" seems neither positive nor applicable to his father. It is as though Strand has determined not to "teach" us anything about the healing power of grief or the lasting impact of every life, until he tells us-- There is starlight drifting on the black water.
There are stones in the sea no one has seen.
There is a shore and people are waiting.
--lines whose beauty recalls traditional images of peace and the call of faith to turn toward what is unseen. But he pushes relentlessly on--
And nothing comes back.
Because it is over.
Because there is silence instead of a name.
Because it is winter and the new year.
These lines are slyer--Strand is slyer--than any convention suggests. What could be more final, less hopeful than "nothing comes back" or "it is over"? But look at the dichotomy, implicit in our calendar, of winter and the new year: death and beginning in one hand at the same time. Now, however, it is a new year, a new beginning, in which Robert Strand does not share.
If Mark Strand's verse in the decades following "Elegy for My Father" does not equal the strength of this six-poem sequence, why should this surprise us? How many poems of the past forty years, by any of our poets, are its equal?
Mail to Cooper Renner
About
Cooper
Cooper Renner edits the online magazine elimae. Mosefolket, his new and selected poems (published under the name Cooper Esteban), was released last year by Alhambra/Ravenna Press.
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