THE POETRY OF LOUISE BOGAN
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or in "Winter Swan":
It is a hollow garden, under the cloud;
Beneath the heel a hollow earth is turned;
Within the mind, the live blood shouts aloud,
Under the breast the willing blood is burned,
Shut with the fire passed and the fire returned.
Louise Bogan rarely, if ever, repeats a cadence, and this in an age when some poets
achieve a considerable reputation with two
or three or even one rhythm. The reason for
this is, I believe, her absolute loyalty to the
particular emotion, which can range from
the wry tenderness and humor of "A
Crossed Apple" to the vehemence of "Several Voices Out of a Cloud":
Come, drunks and drug-takers; come, perverts
unnerved!
Receive the laurel, given though late, on merit;
to whom and wherever deserved.
Parochial punks, trimmers, nice people, joiners
true-blue,
Get the hell out of the way of the laurel. It is
deathless
And it isn't for you
This, for me, incorporates the truly savage
indignation of Swift-and still manages to
be really funny. And even in a poem on a
"high" theme, "I saw Eternity," she can say:
Here, mice, rats,
Porcupines and toads,
Moles, shrews, squirrels,
Weasels, turtles, lizards,Here's bright Everlasting!
Here's a crumb of Forever!
Here's a crumb of Forever!
I HAVE said that Miss Bogan has a sharp
sense of objects, the eye that can pluck
out from the welter of experience the inevitable image. And she loves the words, the
nouns particularly, rich in human association. "Baroque Comment" ends:
Crown and vesture; palm and laurel chosen as
noble and enduring;
Speech proud in sound; death considered
sacrifice;
Mask, weapon, urn; the ordered strings;
Fountains; foreheads under weather-bleached
hair;
The wreath, the oar, the tool,
The prow;
The turned eyes and the opened mouth of love.
But let us see how this side of her talent
operates when she is absolutely open, as in
the deeply moving elegy "To My Brother":
O you so long dead,
You masked and obscure,
I can tell you, all things endure:
The wine and the bread;
The marble quarried for the arch;
The iron become steel;
The spoke broken from the wheel;
The sweat of the long march;
The hay-stacks cut through like loaves
And the hundred flowers from the seed;
All things indeed
Though struck by the hooves
Of disaster, of time due,
Of fell loss and gain,
All things remain,
I can tell you, this is true.
Though burned down to stone
Though lost from the eye,
I can tell you, and not lie,Save of peace alone.
The imagery in some of the last poems is
less specific, yet still strongly elemental; we
have, I think, what Johnson called the grandeur of generality. They are timeless, impersonal in a curious way and objective-not
highly idiosyncratic as so much of the best
American work is. Her poems can be read
and reread: they keep yielding new meanings, as all good poetry should. The ground
beat of the great tradition can be heard, with
the necessary subtle variations. Bogan is one
of the true inheritors. Her poems create their
own reality, and demand not just attention,
but the emotional and spiritual response of
the whole man. Such a poet will never be
popular, but can and should be a true model
for the young. And the best work will stay in
the language as long as the language survives.
