The Best American Poetry 2012 (3 page)

by Mark Doty

There was in that same monastery a brother, on whom the gift of writing verses was bestowed by heaven.
That sentence, originally in Latin, is from the Venerable Bede, who in 680 composed a history of the English people. It's the subtitle of chapter XXIV, in which Bede tells the story of Caedmon: an origin myth for the art of poetry, and a fable about the nature of inspiration that remains resonant despite the passage of over thirteen hundred years.

Caedmon lived most of his life—Bede tells us he was advanced in years when we enter his story—with no skill in the art of composing verse. When a harp was passed at a party, and each guest expected to contribute a poem or a song, Caedmon would slip out of the room to avoid the humiliation of having no poem to offer his fellows. One evening he'd done just that, and gone out to the stable where he cared for the animals. He lay down to rest, and something marvelous occurred in his dream. “A person appeared to him in his sleep,” Bede writes, “and saluting him by his name, said ‘Caedmon, sing some song to me.' He answered, ‘I cannot sing; for that was the reason why I left the entertainment, and retired to this place because I could not sing.' The other who talked to him replied, ‘However, you shall sing.' ‘What shall I sing?' rejoined he. ‘Sing the beginning of created beings,' said the other.”

My guess is that most poets will recognize something of themselves in Caedmon's story. He's an inarticulate man who can't find the right words in the company of his fellows, yet when he's alone—in the company of beasts, which perhaps is where he feels he belongs—something provokes him, someone appears in the dark and says “sing some song to me,” or, as Susan Mitchell translates the phrase in a strange and remarkable poem called “Rapture,” “Sing me something.”

Sing me something
is as good a description as I know of what the world or the dark or the visiting spirit seems to say to the poet, as if we were
presented with an imperative, a request, a desire coming from somewhere. Our work is to speak back, but to whom, or to what?

Caedmon's interlocutor has usually been understood as an angel, and that's the tradition Denise Levertov honors in this beautiful poem from 1987.

C
AEDMON

All others talked as if

talk were a dance.

Clodhopper I, with clumsy feet

would break the gliding ring.

Early I learned to

hunch myself

close by the door:

then when the talk began

I'd wipe my

mouth and wend

unnoticed back to the barn

to be with the warm beasts,

dumb among body sounds

of the simple ones.

I'd see by a twist

of lit rush the motes

of gold moving

from shadow to shadow

slow in the wake

of deep untroubled sighs.

The cows

munched or stirred or were still. I

was at home and lonely,

both in good measure. Until

the sudden angel affrighted me—light effacing

my feeble beam,

a forest of torches, feathers of flame, sparks upflying:

but the cows as before were calm, and nothing was burning,

nothing but I, as that hand of fire

touched my lips and scorched my tongue

and pulled my voice

into the ring of the dance.

Levertov's language intensifies in heat as Caedmon's vision kindles: first it's the earthly fire of “the motes / of gold moving / from shadow to shadow” with its calm, almost bovine chain of o's. Then comes the conflagration: “a forest of torches, feathers of flame, sparks upflying.” That phrase is dense and satisfying in the mouth, the f's and t's rubbing against one another, the subtle echo of “torches” and “feathers,” the double fl's of “flame” and “upflying.” Bede himself doesn't say that divine fire touches Caedmon's lips or scorches his tongue, or imply the passive nature of “pulled my voice,” as if poetry is something that is done
to
us; that's Levertov's vision, and a compelling one. Bede just says, “. . . he presently began to sing verses to the praise of God . . .” and allows what happened between the beautiful command and Bede's response to remain mysterious.

And Bede doesn't actually say that the one who appears to Caedmon is an angel. He refers to the apparition as “
quiddam
”—Latin for “someone.” Someone says, sing me something. Someone, something—the statement couldn't be much more open ended.

To what extent do we understand the process that calls a poem into being? Someone or something comes to us in the dark—literally, or in the darkness of not-knowing—and says “Sing me something.” It's the uncovering of what is to be sung, and how, which are not two separate things but an intertwining spiral, like a DNA molecule, that gives the process its tension, frustration, and, at least sometimes, elation.

The someone who speaks may be a vessel of divine fire, as Levertov says, or we might understand him as a shadow self, that side of us which is by nature in darkness, like a side of the moon, and walks a few steps ahead of us into what we don't know yet.

Or we might construe him as the embodied form of absence, a sense of lack within: something incomplete requires our attention.

Perhaps the interlocutory angel is an incarnation of the desire for order, the pressing need to locate and define pattern in the chaos of experience.

Or perhaps he or she is a form of the desire to praise. When faced with something beautiful, Emerson says of poets, they “are not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms.”

A little while later in Bede's text, he provides at least a metaphoric understanding of what the poet does with the mysterious prompting, wherever it comes from. The monks tell Caedmon the sacred stories, reciting to him tales from Scripture, and the poet works: “by listening
to them and then memorizing it and ruminating over it, like some clean animal chewing the cud, he turned it into the most melodious verse.”

Clean animal
is delightful. Levertov's Caedmon wanted to dwell

 . . . with the warm beasts,

dumb among the body sounds

of the simple ones.

In the barn, he's lulled by their “deep untroubled sighs.” Poetry may be the highest use of language, speech with all its multiple powers engaged, but paradoxically it seems to like animal company, the proximity of the purely, wordlessly physical. Perhaps that's another source of the summons: where there are no words, poetry springs into being.

Caedmon dwells among the animals, and presumably he's with them every day, but still it's necessary to sing about them; knowledge must be sung into place, a form of praise and of cartography. A map may show us what we already know, and point us toward what we don't, or reveal the character of what has been obscured by familiarity. To “sing of created beings” is a discipline of attention.

One could also read the silence of animals (not literally, of course, since they make all kinds of noises, but their wordlessness) as a figure for the resistance of all experience to language. Animals are themselves, but they also stand for a realm or register of being that breathes just beneath the surface of the everyday, which is monitored, shaped, and mapped by words; apart from them or beneath them is the creaturely life of the body, the momentous physical life that we are, and are surrounded by every second. I can't think about this without calling to mind George Eliot's remarkable, entirely disruptive aside in
Middlemarch
: “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” Poetry is an attempt to move closer to the other side of silence.

I've been talking about the originating impulse of poetry as if it were all interior, a spark arising within obscure regions of the self. But one thing that makes the story of Caedmon satisfyingly complicated is the second instruction the apparition gives to the dreamer. “Sing the beginning of created beings.”

And thus complexity and chaos enter into the lyric, since the song
that attends to “created beings” can never be pure praise, not if it has allegiance to the real; that requires also lamentation, and outrage, and probably irony as well. Auden addressed the tension between the lyric and the world with characteristic eloquence. He wrote that a “poem should be a verbal earthly paradise, a timeless world of pure play, which gives us delight precisely because of its contrast to our historical existence with all its insoluble problems and inescapable suffering. . . .” But Auden knows all too well that a poem cannot rest there. “At the same time we want a poem to be true . . . and a poet cannot bring us any truth without introducing into his poetry the problematic, the painful, the disorderly, the ugly.”

The inner spur, the breath of “inspiration,” sometimes is the apprehension of just those things Auden characterizes as the characteristics of truth; that which causes pain may well be the spur which leads the poet to begin. The inner voice and the social world are in endless dialogue; like form and content, it can—and should—be difficult to tease the two apart.