There’s still a problem with language, however, to which Hass speaks by the end of his poem, with those repetitions of “blackberry, blackberry, blackberry,” in that, as Jack Gilbert says in his poem “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart,” “How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, / but frightening that it does not quite.” There is still that “irritable reaching after fact & reason” that language, as communication, requires—I think Keats would agree that he wrote about a near-unattainable ideal in his letter that only Shakespeare and maybe Coleridge and a few others could achieve, this “Negative Capability.” Gilbert furthers Keats in asserting that no matter what we write, “the words / Get it wrong,” that utterance is itself that irritable reaching.
In Gilbert’s poem, though, he does reach after something. In the second half of the poem he begins to imagine what the “mysterious Sumerian tablets” could be as poetry, instead of just “business records:”
-[…] My joy is the same as twelve Ethiopian goats standing in the morning light. O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper, as grand as ripe barley under the wind’s labor. Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this desire in the dark.
+[…] My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley under the wind’s labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark.
This is my favorite part of the poem, and I think it’s because Gilbert, like Hass, reaches for the specific in the general; he brings huge ideas like the Lord or Love or Joy into the specific images of salt, copper, or honey, or like he says at the end of his poem: “What we feel most has / no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds.” This, ultimately, is what Keats was getting at, and Hugo, too: that the real subject of any poetry is not capturable in the words of the poem, but that rather a poem speaks around its subject. To be honest, all art may do this. What sets a poem apart is its honesty about that fact.
-- cgit 1.4.1-21-gabe81