Row after row with strict impunity
The headstones yield their names to the element,
The wind whirrs without recollection;
In the riven troughs the splayed leaves
Pile up, of nature the casual sacrament
5
To the seasonal eternity of death;
Then driven by the fierce scrutiny
Of heaven to their election in the vast breath,
They sough1a the rumor of mortality.
Autumn is desolation in the plot
10
Of a thousand acres where these memories grow
From the inexhaustible bodies that are not
Dead, but feel the grass row after rich row.
Think of the autumns that have come and gone!---
Ambitious November with the humors of the year,
15
With a particular zeal for every slab,
Staining the uncomfortable angels that rot
On the slabs, a wing chipped here, an arm there:
The brute curiosity of an angel's stare
Turns you, like them, to stone,
20
Transforms the heaving air
Till plunged to a heavier world below
You shift your sea-space blindly
Heaving, turning like the blind crab.2
Dazed by the wind, only the
wind
25
The leaves flying, plunge
You know who have waited by the wall
The twilight certainty of an animal,
Those midnight restitutions of the blood
You know---the immitigable pines, the smoky frieze
30
Of the sky, the sudden call: you know the rage,
The cold pool left by the mounting flood,
Of muted Zeno and Parmenides.3
You who have waited for the angry resolution
Of those desires that should be yours tomorrow,
35
You know the unimportant shift of death
And praise the vision
And praise the arrogant circumstance
Of those who fall
Rank upon rank, hurried beyond decision---
40
Here by the sagging gate, stopped by the wall.4
Seeing, seeing only the leaves
Flying, plunge and expire
Turn your eyes to the immoderate past,
Turn to the inscrutable infantry rising
45
Demons out of the earth---they will not last.
Stonewall,5 Stonewall, and the sunken fields of hemp,6
Shiloh, Antietam, Malvern Hill, Bull Run.7
Lost in that orient of the thick-and-fast
You will curse the setting sun.
50
Cursing only the leaves crying
Like an old man in a storm
You hear the shout, the crazy hemlocks point
With troubled fingers to the silence which
Smothers you, a mummy, in time.
The hound bitch
55
Toothless and dying, in a musty cellar
Hears the wind only.
Now that the salt of their blood
Stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea,
Seals the malignant purity of the flood,
What shall we who count our days and bow
60
Our heads with a commemorial woe
In the ribboned coats of grim felicity,
What shall we say of the bones, unclean,
Whose verdurous anonymity will grow?
The ragged arms, the ragged heads and
eyes
65
Lost in these acres of the insane green?
The gray lean spiders come, they come and go;
In a tangle of willows without light
The singular screech-owl's tight
Invisible lyric seeds the
mind
70
With the furious murmur of their chivalry.
We shall say only the
leaves
Flying, plunge and expire
We shall say only the leaves whispering
In the improbable mist of
nightfall
75
That flies on multiple wing;
Night is the beginning and the end
And in between the ends of distraction
Waits mute speculation, the patient curse
That stones the eyes, or like the jaguar
leaps
80
For his own image in a jungle in a jungle pool, his victim.8
What shall we say who have knowledge
Carried to the heart?9 Shall we take the act
To the grave? Shall we, more hopeful, set up the grave
In the house? The ravenous grave?10
85
Leave now
The shut gate and the decomposing wall:
The gentle serpent, green in the mulberry bush,
Riots with his tongue through the hush---
Sentinel of the grave who counts us all!11
90
1928, 1937
1. In
an essay "Narcissus as Narcissus," Tate explains that this poem
"is 'about' solipism, a philosophical doctrine which says that we
create the world in the act of perceiving it; or about Narcissism, or any
other ism that denotes the failure of the human personality to
function objectively in nature and society."
1a. Sigh. Rumor:
in addition to the usual sense, Tate uses the older meaning of "a soft
noise."
2. "The structure
of the Ode is simple. Figure to yourself a man stopping at the gate of a
Confederate graveyard on a late autumn afternoon. The leaves are falling;
his first impression bring him the 'rumor of mortality'; and the desolation
barely allows him, at the beginning of the second stanza, the conventionally
heroic surmise that the dead will enrich the earth, 'where these memories
grow.' From those quoted words to the end of that passage he pauses for a
baroque meditation on the ravages of time, concluding with the figure of the
'blind crab.' This figure has mobility but no direction, energy but, from
the human point of view, no purposeful world to use it in: in the entire
poem there are only two explicit symbols for the looked-in ego; the crab is
the first and less explicit symbol, a mere hint, a planting of the idea that
will become overt in its second instance---the jaguar towards the end. The
crab is the first intimation of the nature of the moral conflict upon which
the drama of the poem develops: the cut-off-ness of the modern 'intellectual
man' from the world" (Tate's note).
3. Parmenides and his
follower Zeno, both of Elea, were Greek philosophers of the fifth century
B.C. They held that the real universe is a single and unchanging whole,
while the apparent universe of mutable things is illusory and unknowable.
4. "The next long
passage or 'strophe' . . . states the other term of the conflict. It
is the theme of heroism, not merely moral heroism, but heroism in the grand
style, elevating even death from mere physical dissolution into a formal
ritual: this heroism is a formal ebullience of the human spirit in an entire
society, not private, romantic illusion---something better than moral
heroism, great as that may be, for moral heroism, being personal and
individual, may be achieved by certain men in all ages, even ages of
decadence. But the late Hart Crane . . . described the theme as the 'them of
chivalry, a tradition of excess (not literally excess, rather active faith)
which cannot be perpetuated in the fragmentary cosmos of today---"those
desires which should be yours tomorrow," but which, you know, will not
persist nor find any way into action.' The structure then is the objective
frame for the tension between the two themes, 'active faith' which has
decayed, and the 'fragmentary cosmos' which surrounds us. . . . In
contemplating the heroic theme the man at the gate never quite commits
himself to the illusion of its availability to him. The most that he can
allow himself is the fancy that the blowing leaves are charging soldiers,
but he rigorously returns to the refrain: 'Only the wind'---or the 'leaves
flying.'. . . More than this, he cautions himself, reminds himself
repeatedly, of his subjective prison, his solipsisms, by breaking off the
half-illusion and coming back to the refrain of wind and leaves, a refrain
that, as Hart Crane said, is necessary to the 'subjective continuity' "
(Tate's note).
5. Thomas Jonathan
Jackson (1824-1863), Confederate general in the Civil War, earned the
nickname Stonewall at the first battle of Bull Run (Virginia), July 21,
1861. He was killed in 1863 at the Battle of Chancellorsville.
6. Sunken because not
cultivated during the war.
7. Famous battles of the
Civil War, slightly out of chronological order. Shiloh (Tennessee), April
6-7, 1862, ended with the Confederate troops in retreat; Antietam or
Sharpsburg (Maryland), September 17, 1862, and Malvern Hill (Virginia), July
2, 1862, also were disadvantageous to the South; the two battles of Bull
Run, in 1861 and on August 29-30, 1862, were both victories for the
Confederate armies.
8. "This figure of the jaguar is the only
explicit rendering of the Narcissus motif in the poem, but instead of a
youth gazing into a pool, a predatory beast stares at a jungle stream, and
leaps to devour himself" (Tate's note).
9. "This is
Pascal's war between heart and head, between finesse and géometrie"
(Tate's note). The allusion is to Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), the philosopher
who wrote in his Pensées (Thoughts), #277, "The heart has
reasons that the reason does not know."
10. "These two
themes struggle for mastery up to [lines 77-78]. . . . It will be observed
that the passage begins with a phrase taken from the wind-leaves
refrain---the signal that it has won. The refrain has been fused with the
main stream of the man's reflections dominating them; and he cannot return
even to an ironic vision of the heroes. There is nothing but death, the mere
naturalism of death at that---spiritual extinction in the decay of the body.
Autumn and the leaves are death; the men who exemplified in a grand style an
'active faith' are dead; there are only the leaves. Shall we then worship
death . . . that will take us before our time? The question is not answered,
although as a kind of morbid romanticism it might, if answered
affirmatively, provide the man with an illusory escape from his solipsism;
but he cannot accept it. Nor has he been able to live in his immediate
world, the fragmentary cosmos. There is no practical solution, no solution
offered for the edification of moralists. . . . The main intention of the
poem has been to make dramatically visible the conflict, to concentrate it .
. ." (Tate's note).
11. "The closing
image, that of the serpent, is the ancient symbol of time, and I tried to
give it the credibility of the commonplace by placing it in a mulberry
bush---with the faint hope that the silkworm would somehow be implicit. But
time is also death. If that is so, then space, or the Becoming, is life; and
I believe there is not a single spatial symbol in the poem. 'Sea-space' is
allowed the 'blind crab'; but the sea, as appears plainly in the passage
beginning, 'Now that the salt of their blood . . .' is life only insofar as
it is the source of the lowest forms of life, the source perhaps of all
life, but life undifferentiated, halfway between life and death. This
passage is a contrasting inversion of the conventional
. . . inexhaustible bodies that are not Dead,
but feed the grass . . .
the reduction of the earlier, literary
conceit to a more naturalistic figure derived from modern biological
speculation. Those 'buried Caesars' will not bloom in the hyacinth but will
only make saltier the sea" (Tate's note).
__________
Ellmann, Richard and Robert O'Clair. Modern Poems: An
Introduction to
Poetry. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973, pp.
243-246.
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