Jack Gilbert, a Reappraisal: Part Three
B. Renner

Despite the apparent strength of a number of poems in Jack Gilbert's first book of poems (in either of its forms), the new poems in Monolithos constitute Gilbert's first collection as a mature poet. Gilbert's voice, though recognizably his in the earlier volume, is more firmly established in "1982" and is markedly more consistent, less prone to slip into fatuity. Other elements of Gilbert's poetic persona are likewise rooted in the first volume--the persistent focus on an "I" who seems to be Gilbert himself, the Romantic inflation of that "I" in (too) many instances, and a "hard" rhetoric based in large part on a reliance on sentence fragments, a technique by which Gilbert removes forward motion from his poems even as he often deals with the passage of time in the content of a poem. One might say that the poems in "1982" are recognizably the work of the earlier poet, but more so. Gilbert--rather than developing through shifts of style, content and presentation, like his peers Merwin, Wright, Hall and Rich--instead became better at what he seems to have been doing all along, like Donald Justice or (perhaps) Geoffrey Hill. The Romantic self still reigns in many of Gilbert's poems, but it does so more artistically, with more fully developed rhetorical skill and less overt sentimentality. When Gilbert "goes wrong" in "1982," he does so at a higher level, and generally for reasons primarily of content, rather than for both content and rhetorical skill. Put more simply, the mature Gilbert's flaws are less likely to be flaws of artistic ability than of thought.
It can be argued, of course, that we do not come to our poets for thought but for artistry. If so, then, poets should not offer us thought. But Gilbert does--many of his poems are not lyrics only, but philosophical lyrics. In this situation, we are not out of bounds, as readers, to expect a philosophy that challenges us to think in new or deeper ways. "Walking Home across the Island" offers an example of this sort of failure, compounded in this case by rhetorical flaws as well.

Walking home across the plain in the dark.
And Linda crying. Again we have come
to a place where I rail and she suffers and the moon
does not rise.

There is a bareness to the language here, which approximates the bareness Gilbert fans love, and an admirable refusal to give specifics which could only trivialize the pain such arguments create. But Gilbert trivializes the pain anyway by employing the casual "location" metaphor common to ordinary speech--"we have come / to a place where. . . ." These are empty syllables, one of the instances in "1982" where Gilbert fails both rhetorically and conceptually. But even if we forgive the rhetoric, the concept is achingly unnoteworthy--"I rail and she suffers". He adds another cliche--"the moon / does not rise"--a cliche not because it is an overused figure of speech or common comparison--i.e., argument = no moonrise--but because it is such an overreaching application of conventional thought--pain on earth = distress in the heavens. Shakespeare produced a storm in Macbeth to underscore the murder of a king, not a spat.
"We have only each other," Gilbert says next, further degrading the pain by actually reaching for a pop music homily--another failure of rhetoric. He continues--

but I am shouting inside the rain
and she is crying like a wounded animal,
knowing there is no place to turn. It is hard
to understand how we could be brought here by love.

More cliches of both sorts. There is nothing here of value but linguistic restraint and a certain desentimentalizing flatness.
As often as Gilbert fails at this kind of non-emotional description of emotion, he succeeds at something sparer yet--a kind of vignette in which the flatness of the speech reflects the insignificance of the content but, by being precise and accurate, elevates the moment into a pleasing miniature, an "ordinary" scene which we would perhaps like to share. "Leaving Monolithos" begins--

They were cutting the spring barley by fistfuls
when we came. Boys drove horses and mules over it
all day in threshing pits under the powerful sky.

Except for the vague and weak "powerful", these three lines are sharp and evocative of an experience most of us have never had. "They came from their white village on the horizon," he goes on, "for tomatoes in June. And later for grass. / Now they are plowing in the cold wind." These lines combine with the first three to depict the traversal of three seasons with classical taste and distinction, wasting only one word, and I suspect that Gilbert has now lulled the reader into forgetting the melancholy title. But he brings us back to that "present" with the one word at the end of line 6 which, enjambed, takes us on into the poem's finale--

Yesterday
I burned my papers by the wall. This morning I look
back at the lone, shuttered farmhouse. Sun rising
over the volcano. At the full moon above the sea.

There is not a single emotionally descriptive word here, unless you find "lone" automatically sad, but the images take on the melancholy of the title because of Gilbert's skillful construction. We are given only one mournful image--the burning of the papers--but that image so shifts the tone of the poem (a shift hinted at by the cold wind) that the ensuing images inevitably take on the sorrow--the shuttered farmhouse in a fashion nearly cliched, but the final two in a manner completely reversed from the "normal": that is, a sunrise or a full moon shining over water "ought" to make us happy, but here they do not. And because of the setting of the first six lines, which include the natural progression of the farm year, the leaving of the "we" is cast as a natural event as well, not as a man-made woe, as in the previous poem. That poem swamps itself in its autobiographical elements--this poem, perhaps just as autobiographical, feels classically bucolic. There is, in fact, nothing in the poem which could not have been translated from Ovid, including Gilbert's avoidance of a comparison between his own looking back and that of Lot's wife.
An equally involving poem, though much more "modern," is "Hunger" in which Gilbert transforms "[d]igging into the apple / with [his] thumbs" into a metaphor for trying to find the heart of something--life, the universe, love, who knows? In "Hunger" Gilbert refuses to identify his digging with any other "search," instead choosing to focus entirely on the physical aspects of his activity. He mentions his "clogged nails," the juice "running along [his] hands unpleasantly," the skin "itching." But the poem becomes a metaphor for all "grand" searches for two reasons--first because, six lines into the poem, Gilbert tells us he is refusing to settle for "memories," which I take to mean a refusal to intellectualize, and second because he does not stop when Nature tells us he must: he insists he is

Going on.
Not taking anyone's word for it.
Getting beyond the seeds.

He has now completely torn the apple apart and reached its core, and yet his deliberation is not done. The poem succeeds both because his language is correct--that is, he accurately describes digging through an apple--and because his refusal to end the digging invites us into a metaphoric application of our own choosing.
Another nearly perfect lyric--and one which likewise avoids the excesses of the Romantic "I"--is "Mexico."

I went to sleep by the highway
and woke just before dawn,
to see people drifting toward me
across the fields. Silently
getting into trucks.
Blurred like first love.

"Drifting" feels cliched, a too ready metaphor for a gait perhaps somnolent, but otherwise the words are simple and pointed--painting a vivid vignette in a vaguely rural setting--and they create a subtext whch the reader must define: where are the people going? Is this another, but more contemporary, pastoral in which we see farm laborers loading up for the ride to the field of the day? Or something more dangerous--the preparation for an attempted entry into the U.S., with the riders at the mercy of a "coyote"? There is no way of telling. "Blurred" in line 6 is likewise vivid, suggesting both the narrator's sleep-bleared eyes and an early morning haze, though the simile is unfortunate--evocative, sure, but also overly sentimental. Gilbert's conclusion, on the other hand, makes recompense--

Another inappropriate beauty
I leave out of what I am making.

--words by which Gilbert takes note of the "negative" aspect of a writer's activity, that is, everything in the world which he leaves out. At first reading, "inappropriate beauty" seems to be a slip, another sentimentalization, but I am not sure it is--"inappropriate" in some way counterbalances the judgmental "beauty" and encourages us to puzzle out both the scene Gilbert puts before us and first love, to wonder in what way the beauty of either is inappropriate.
I seem to be arguing that Gilbert is best when he is smallest, which is in some way, I think, the proper mode of the lyric poet. The grandeur of a Dickinson poem is not in the "size" of the situation which she depicts but rather in the deliberate accuracy with which she depicts it. And in many of the poems of "1982" Gilbert achieves great deliberation. True, most of the best poems offer up one or two flaws, either of overly ordinary or easily sentimental language, but even so, the overriding strength of the lyrics' otherwise careful language overcomes the flaws. Poems that repay repeated readings include, in addition to the three just discussed, "Registration," "Sects," "Translation into the Orginal," "Breakfast" (especially), "Loyalty," "Song," "Love Poem" and the slyly humorous "My Marriage with Mrs. Johnson."
Here Gilbert weaves together four disparate elements--the narrator's fording of a river during a rain storm, the narrator's adoration of his lover, Samuel Johnson's sorrow after the death of his wife, and David Garrick's impersonation of the Johnsons making love. The narrative flow is linguistically smooth, due to the presence of only one fragment, but conceptually a bit rough--like a rain-swollen river--as Gilbert jumps from subject to subject. The "theme" is the ungainliness of love, represented by Garrick's "walruses pretending to be lovers," whose lovemaking, presumably, is as chaotic and boisterous as a tropical storm, but "she"--either Mrs. Johnson or Gilbert's unnamed lover--still insists, "Oh, it is such a marriage, however it looks / through any keyhole." And this indeed is both the method by which Garrick obtained his knowledge and the apt metaphor for any love as seen from outside--outsiders to a marriage can only see it, as it were, through a keyhole. But love's grandeur is something Gilbert insists upon--as he brings us away from the keyhole, back into the fording of the river for his love, and then into his dream--

entering
the great hall at Versailles: everyone gaping
and elaborate Louis Quatorze wondering at his envy.

This overblown tie-up is not in fact inappropriate because it is humorous--Gilbert is still, one can only assume, wet and stinking of fish--and is a fitting companion to Garrick's mating walruses. Seen in the larger context of Gilbert's work, this poem succeeds so conclusively because Gilbert has found, with it, a way of countermanding his own romanticism by submerging it in humor.
With the poems of "1982" Gilbert finally attained the stature he had so long and so obviously desired. In the next section of this essay, I will attempt to show whether or not that stature was maintained or diminished by the publication of The Great Fires.

Previous | Next

1996 © 2004