"Law Like Love"

I’ve started flipping through my burgeoning collection of poetry books, but nothing's really called out to me except for the first poem in another Mary Oliver book that I borrowed from the library, and since I just wrote something about Oliver, I decided to look back over the samplers instead. Alternately skimming and reading the post-war sampler again, I was struck by how much I liked W. H. Auden’s “Law Like Love” on second reading. The first time, as I recall, only the last stanza out to me. It sounded so incredibly cynical about love that my internal skeptic could barely contain its glee. But I had a whole sampler to finish reading, after all, so I continued on without reading the poem a second time.

Coming back to it now, I think I like it because Auden’s tone throughout the whole poem (at least, in my opinion) seems subtly pessimistic. It seems to me like he’s calling out society; we always act like we know how things are, like we’re right, like we’re good, when in reality we don’t and we’re not. The last line is what really seals it for me. “Like love we seldom keep.” It sounds almost scathing. I suppose you could read it as a reference to loves lost, but my gut instinct is to read it as a reference to how fickle people can be—an accusation rather than a lament. When I first read the poem, without really stopping to think about it, I took it as a quaint observation of how everyone defines things differently, using the example of both love and the law. But I think there’s actually this subtle undercurrent of cynicism going on. The way I interpret it, law isn’t necessarily what we think it is, and neither is love. We build up these grand ideas about these concepts, romanticizing and idealizing them, but in fact they aren’t quite so grand as we imagine. The law isn’t perfect, and neither is love. Both are flawed, unstable, and ultimately unreliable. That’s my take, anyway.

I think the form of this poem also makes it really effective. It’s not so repetitious that it gets boring, but it’s not so formless as to be uncompelling. His language is understandable and clear, and it sounds to me like the way people actually talk. Also, it’s kind of fun to read out loud; it helps you see the differences between the stanzas and the different people in them. Furthermore, I just like the comparison between love and the law. I think it’s very clever.

"One Train May Hide Another"

I’ve been meaning to post something about this poem since our last poetry class on Tuesday. The girl who sits on my left (Lauren?) talked about responding positively to certain words in a given poem, even if she wasn’t entirely sure what the poem means. It made me realize that I feel that way about Kenneth Koch’s “One Train May Hide Another,” except that rather than specific words, I was responding to sentences. I’m not sure I completely understand this poem, but I find myself loving it anyway.

Like I said, there were certain lines that just sealed it for me. For example, “One bath / may hide another bath / As when, after bathing, one walks out into the rain.” I just love that. The image is so vivid to me, and I like the contrast of the similar but different; a bath and a rainstorm are certainly not the same thing, but the parallel is there, and I can relate to it. I also like this one: “One dog may conceal another  / On a lawn, so if you escape the first one you're not necessarily safe.” A good life lesson if ever I heard one. And then there’s this too: “So one hitchhiker / May deliberately hide another and one cup of coffee / Another, too, until one is over-excited.” There’s something really subtle about the humor here that I really enjoy. It’s not flamboyant and in-your-face, but if you’re paying attention, it’s definitely funny. The whole poem feels slightly cynical, maybe a bit tongue-in-cheek, but also somewhat serious as well. I also really like this phrase to describe memory: “The eternal reverse succession of contemplated entities.” Something about the word choice there just really works for me, and I’m not really sure that I can explain it.

Also, also, this whole section:

In a family one sister may conceal another,

So, when you are courting, it's best to have them all in view

Otherwise in coming to find one you may love another.

One father or one brother may hide the man,

If you are a woman, whom you have been waiting to love.

So always standing in front of something the other

As words stand in front of objects, feelings, and ideas.

One wish may hide another. And one person's reputation may hide

The reputation of another.

For some reason, everything in it totally makes me think of Jane Austen. (I’ve been reading Pride and Prejudice out to my sister, so her language is especially fresh in my mind.) I can just imagine that first sentence as words of wisdom that Mr. Bennet shares with, say, Mr. Collins as a joke. The reputation bit also reminds me of Darcy and Wickham. That subtle humor I mentioned before seems very Austen-like to me.

Additionally, on a not-related-to-Austen note, I like the line “As words stand in front of objects, feelings, and ideas.” That’s really interesting. It makes me think of linguistics, and words as symbols, and how we’re constantly coming up with new words to try to explain our experiences (at least, some of us are).

When I read this poem as a whole, I kind of feel like it is genuinely advocating caution, but in a subtly humorous way, so as to win you over by making you smile. That’s how it strikes me personally, anyway.

Right. Now back to studying.

"Soap Suds"

[If you’re wondering where all these posts are coming from, all in a row like this, well, it’s like this: I wrote them yesterday and today, and just neglected to post them until now. This is the one I just finished, and I hope it makes sense, because I am quite sleepy.]

"Soap Suds"

This brand of soap has the same smell as once in the big
House he visited when he was eight: the walls of the bathroom open
To reveal a lawn where a great yellow ball rolls back through a hoop
To rest at the head of a mallet held in the hands of a child.

And these were the joys of that house: a tower with a telescope;
Two great faded globes, one of the earth, one of the stars;
A stuffed black dog in the hall; a walled garden with bees;
A rabbit warren; a rockery; a vine under glass; the sea.

To which he has now returned. The day of course is fine
And a grown-up voice cries Play! The mallet slowly swings,
Then crack, a great gong booms from the dog-dark hall and the ball
Skims forward through the hoop and then through the next and then

Through hoops where no hoops were and each dissolves in turn
And the grass has grown head-high and an angry voice cries Play!
But the ball is lost and the mallet slipped long since from the hands
Under the running tap that are not the hands of a child.

 —Louis MacNeice

I seriously love this poem. I love the immediacy of it. When I’m reading, it’s like I’m right there, seeing exactly what’s being described. I like how MacNeice frames it with the same image of hand-washing at the beginning and the end. I also like how he kind of blurs the lines between reality and memory in the first stanza and the last. It’s not like a jarring flashback moment, but rather it’s a casual and seamless transition in memory, just like how memory happens to real people. And I like the way this memory progresses, starting at one experience at this house, and then moving on to this collection of associated memories, and then back to the specific experience. Except that this good memory can’t be appreciated for what it is anymore, because it’s tainted by knowledge of the present, and so it turns angry and sad and dark.

I think this poem is about the passage of time. I look at it as a combination of nostalgia for childhood and a subtle criticism of our tendency to create that nostalgia. It’s like when we talked in class about how romanticism created the idea of childhood as this special, different time of one’s life that was worthy of nostalgia. The grown-up voice in MacNeice’s poem strikes me as that stereotypical adult who tells children to enjoy their childhood now because it’s never coming back—and who is also envious of the children, being no longer a child themselves. The voice orders the child to play, to make the best of youth, and then starts to grow angry as time passes, which in turn disturbs the child. It’s like a vicious cycle. The adults around you are jealous of you and hassle you to enjoy your childhood, so as a child you’re overcome with nervousness about growing up, and you put pressure on yourself, and you start to idealize your childhood before it’s even gone. Then, once you grow up, you do the same thing to the children around you.

It makes me think that, the more you struggle against the natural passage of time, the more you will be acutely aware of its passage, and the more unhappy you will make yourself.

But I don’t think that this poem is solely about the negative aspects of memory and nostalgia. I think there’s also something to be said for the power of memory that MacNeice conveys. I think it’s about how one simple thing can take you immediately back to this rich, vivid memory from years and years before. It reminds me of something that happened to me recently. My hands have been exceptionally dry this past winter, so I got some calendula ointment for them. When my little brother was a baby/toddler, he used to get really bad eczema, and we’d put calendula on it, so he always smelled like this cream. As time passed, I’d totally forgotten about it. But the second I opened the new calendula, over ten years later, instantly I was seven years old again and cuddling with my baby brother. It was such a powerful reaction that I had to sit down.

That might be one of the reasons this poem resonated so much with me the first time I read it; because I could totally relate to the experience of being pulled back in time by such a small thing as a scent.

Modernist Techniques in the Post-War Era

The question is this: Who do I think is doing the best job with techniques first seen in the Modernism sampler? Or, who do I think is making use of what parts of Modernism in the most effective ways?

Okay, so, I went through the postwar sampler and have settled for the moment on Elizabeth Bishop and Frank O’Hara. Both of them had really clear, easy-to-understand diction and syntax. O’Hara, I felt, managed the sound of the average person’s speech really well. He mastered the technique of treating all subjects equally, writing about seemingly simple things and experiences that really speak to the everyday person. Bishop—wait, let me back up a bit. We talked in class about how Modernism, since it fell during and after WWI, was concerned with how to react to or make sense of the stupidity of war. It seems to me like that could be extended to how to react to senselessness in general (like, we mentioned that “things fall apart” was the theme of Modernism). Bishop, I think, totally has that vibe down. All of the poems we read by her reminded me of reacting to the senselessness of war—and other things as well. Also, her use of form felt totally modern to me, in that it was very traditional but she still used it to experiment and write about modern issues.

I really liked both of them, actually. I might write more about them later.