Late in the Day (4 page)

and no voice calls

I

The Queen of Spain, Grown Old and Mad,

Writes to the Daughter

She Imagines She Had with Christopher Columbus

Most beautiful,

I disclaim you.

You are not my new found land

nor my Hesperides

nor my America.

You are not mine

and I do not name you.

I tear up the map

of the world of you

that had your rivers

in the wrong places,

imaginary mountains,

false passes leading my expeditions

to quicksands,

cannibals, jaguars.

Most truthful,

I disown you.

I do not own you.

Truly I have never known you.

When you tell me

who you are

I will call you by that name.

When you tell me

where you are

my compass will point there.

When you tell me

of your prairies, your sierras,

I will see them in the blue air

above the western sea.

O golden Peru,

treasure never mine,

most beautiful, most true!

Between us

is neither forgiveness

nor reparation

but only the sea waves, the sea wind.

If ever you send

across the sea,

bells will be rung

in the old towers

and the Te Deum sung.

Crowned, jeweled, furred,

I will come forward:

Tell me, my Lord Ambassadors!

From the New World

what word, what word?

II

The Queen Despairs

A dark water flowing deepening

till there is nothing but dark water

and dark air and the wind blowing

At the far side of the sea the sea

falls over the end of everything

in a wide smooth silent stream forever

Three ships on silent water

and nothing else ever but the wind

blowing and blowing to the west

O my daughter my secret daughter

unborn and borne away into the west

over dark water never to come to me

III

The Queen's Ballad

He was the sailor of my heart,

but I was Queen of Spain

and so I could not follow him

when he sailed away again.

He took our daughter with him

and she was all I had.

Clear to the River of Paradise

he sailed, and there went mad

with drinking of that water

that runs from Heaven to earth

and back to Heaven forever

through the hills of death and birth.

His soul came weeping to me

from the Isles of the Unblest:

“Our daughter rules in far Cathay

and all the utmost West:

she rules a land of savages

who have no god or priest.

Oh, call her to come back to you,

back to the pious East!”

But she is far too far to hear

across the ocean's plain.

No captain now will sail for me

though I am Queen of Spain.

So I have built a secret ship

of moonlight and the wind

and ordered his soul to sail with me

west to the Isles of Ind.

And there the Queen my daughter

will take and hold my hands,

and we will dance the night away

on those unblessèd sands.

A Moral Ballad

It laughed and sang, it leaped and ran,

The gleeful Happy Beast,

And swift it raced from East to West

And back from West to East.

And close behind in hot pursuit,

Fearless of feint or fall,

Sir Thomas rode, to catch and keep

That gladsome animal.

But ever the Beast ran on and laughed

And giggled and cavorted,

Until Sir Thomas' steed, forespent,

Hung down its head and snorted.

Then cried Sir Thomas, “Gallop on!

On oats tonight you'll feast,

My brave Content, when I have caught

The fleeting Happy Beast!”

He spurred his horse and whipped it sore

To gallop bravely after

The cheerful prey that fled away

In gales of merry laughter.

The horse ran hard, it burst its heart,

It fell and could not rise.

And as it lay it turned to look

Its master in the eyes.

“O faithless one,” Sir Thomas cried,

“You have betrayed and shamed me!”

Then as it died, the horse replied,

“Remember what you named me.”

Over his horse's grave he raised

A marble monument,

And on it carved a single word,

The horse's name, Content.

Yet still Sir Thomas' ghost must run

From East to West on foot,

And West to East, behind the Beast

That laughs at his pursuit.

Our prophets lead our people on

Fast to the promised land,

And where we pass, the green of grass

Turns to bare brown sand.

So high our cities' towers soar

Above the deep-set fault,

Immense they rise into the skies,

Pillars of cloud and salt.

Impatient with the patient day,

We rush to gain tomorrow.

Our ships that plough the seas with nets

Leave a long, empty furrow.

Our quick inventions spend our time

Faster and ever faster,

While kind and unforgiving Earth

Endures our brief disaster.

For all we do is nothing to

Her bright eons of days.

So let my dark tune turn and end

As all song should, in praise.

And in the hope of wisdom yet,

I'll sing the hymn that praises

Earth's greater life that gives us life,

The grace that still amazes.

O daughter of November

come riding, come riding

on the red dun mare

the wise dun mare

blind in one eye but sure-footed

across the sunlit lands, the uplands

of the standing wheatstraw

down to these cloudy lowlands

of crowded alders.

Come riding, O my autumn daughter,

come riding and dismount

here where I may watch you dance

almost unmoving with the mist horse

the young white mare

among the rainy alders

in silence, almost unmoving,

the wild white mare of Iceland

and the daughter of autumn, dancing.

A poem that rhymes, has a regular meter, or follows a particular pattern is said to be “in form.” If it has no regular pattern, it's “free verse.” Some poets get entrenched behind form, some behind free verse, and these days many caper about in the minefield between the two extremes.

I'm one of the caperers. I'm at home in no-man's-land. In this matter, I have no theories, no lasting preferences, not even many opinions. So long as a poem works, it makes no qualitative difference to me what its form is or if it has no discernible, describable shape but its own.

As a kid writing poetry, I wrote in rhyme and meter because the poetry I heard and read was in rhyme and meter. Also, I think, because most kids respond naturally, physically, to a drumbeat, the soundplay of language, and the kinetic dance of regular change and repetition.

As I got a little older I began to read poetry without regular meter and with only hidden rhymes or subtle echoes, and began writing that way too. I felt the ease and independence of not having to think about how many beats per line, what rhymes with the word at the end of the line … the freedom of free verse.

But then sometimes a poem as I wrote it would begin to seek a pattern of its own, and I would follow it.

For the last ten years or so, I've met regularly with a small group of poets who write (if we feel like it) to assignments we give one another. Some of these assignments
have to do with form, others with content. Challenged to write in some complex classic patterns I'd never tried before, I became aware of certain aspects or effects of writing in form that I hadn't thought about before.

My most revealing discovery was that a form can give me a poem.

I don't mean that if I write a formally correct sonnet, fourteen lines in iambic pentameter with one of the obligatory rhyme schemes, I've written a poem. Simple diligence can produce an example of any form. Being
given a poem by the form
is quite another matter.

Free verse is individualistic: the entire poem is entirely up to you. Every aspect of it is your choice, your decision. You make it all. In a sense, every free-verse poem reinvents the poem.

Writing in form, you agree to use a certain conventional pattern. It may be simply a stanza, a meter, a rhyme scheme, or it may be one of the classic named forms with a set of technical requirements. Whether it's as simple as a rhymed quatrain or as complex as a villanelle, only part of it is up to you: the words. The shape your words go into was chosen and decided, was made, by other people, often long ago and somewhere else.

A form has rules, and to write in form is to obey the rules. So why would you choose to obey arbitrary rules? Isn't freedom an absolute good?

The conventional patterns of English verse, and the rules of a formal poem, are matters that the general community of poets and their readers agree on, much as the general community of musicians agree on what the scales are. When you use these forms you're not entirely on your own. You're an individual working within, as part of, a community, within a consensus. So what you have to say is no longer totally and entirely up to you. It has to find how to say itself not only
within
this pattern, these set confines,
but
through
them. The words must fit themselves into the pattern, and the form must express the content.

When you're working in a strict form sometimes a certain magic takes place. You realize that the content is finding itself through the form. The form gives you your poem.

“Form follows function,” engineers say. Evidently it can go the other way round. Following form, you find function.

You begin saying things you didn't know you had to say. The rhyme-pattern forces you to find it, or the meter demands it, or the required repetition of a line leads you further than you knew you were going. Your poem is more than you intended or envisaged.

This doesn't by any means always happen. But when it does, it is impressive and mysterious. Enough to explain why poets write in form.

Enough that I'd like to encourage any young poet who hasn't tried writing in form to give it a try.

For those interested in the mystery of form but unused to recognizing it or unfamiliar with its technical terms, Lewis Turco's
New Book of Forms
is an almost obsessively exhaustive but quite reliable source-book. Like all crafts, formal verse has a jargon vocabulary. It looks formidable, but is easy to learn by doing the things it describes.

Some poets make very free with the classic names; having written a poem that in some ways or even in only one way does what a sonnet does, they call it a sonnet. This seems rather arrogant. For me, the specific power and vigor of a set form lie in the observance of the form. A game's good only if you play by the rules. And writing a poem in a strict, complex form such as the villanelle can be a terrific game. It requires both caution and daring. It beats solitaire all hollow.

One may feel that a form has been pretty much worn out by time and unsurpassable example (as indeed I find
the sonnet), in which case there's good reason to change the rules, make up your own. But since the result isn't a sonnet, give your variation its own name—as G.M. Hopkins did with his Curtal Sonnets, the greatest of which is “Pied Beauty.”

This brings us close to the large region between form and free verse now inhabited by poets writing in what I call “free form.” (It may have other names, but I don't know them.) By free form I mean a discernable pattern—involving a regularity, repetition of stanzas, line lengths, metric beat, end-rhymes, inner rhymes, whatever—that is unique to a certain poem. The result has no name and description in the Book of Forms, yet it is a describable, essentially rhythmic, pattern.

Some poets invent such free forms, either spontaneously or following a theory, and then use them repeatedly. Sometimes other poets think “Hey, look at that, I wonder if I can make that work?” and borrow the technique. This must be the way all the classic forms got started.

The fact is that having been long freed from a tyranny of conventional forms, we have no need to shun all regularity, all pattern, in obedience to a tyranny of formlessness. We can use rhyme, meter, repetition, however and whenever we choose—in conventional forms, or semi-conventional forms, or in once-only patterns we discover or invent at need. This, I think, is true freedom of verse.