|
Classic and Contemporary Poetry
TO TWO UNKNOWN LADIES, by AMY LOWELL Poet Analysis Poet's Biography First Line: Ladies, I do not know you, and I think Last Line: I only write to exorcise a ghost. Subject(s): Boredom; Contentment; Ennui | |||
Ladies, I do not know you, and I think I do not want to. And a strange beginning I make with that. Admitted; there's the odds. You live between the covers of a book, At least for me, but then I've known a crowd Of other people who do that. My mind Is stuffed with phantoms out of poets' brains. But you are out of nothing but the air, Or were, rather, for one of you is dead. Dead or alive, it is the same to me, Since all our contact lies in printer's ink. But even this, peculiar as it is, Is but a thread of singularity. Here is another, that I see you double, Each one beheld in profile, as it were. And yet the full-face view is not composite, But shows two totally specific halves Which do not blend and still are not distinct. And again why should I perplex my eyes With trying so hard to draw you both together As though you were a lighted candle, split Upon an oculist's dissecting spectacles? You see the thing is really not so simple As A. B. C., or Keats, or "Christabel," And that is where the plague comes in for me. For here, sitting quite calmly in my chair, Settled down comfortably to an evening's reading, I open up the queerest possibility, Namely: the visitation of a ghost. Suppose I throw you down the glove at once And say I'm haunted, does that bring the answer? If so, it blurs beyond what I can grasp And foggy answers leave us where we were. If either of you much attracted me We could fall back upon phenomena And make a pretty story out of psychic Balances, but not to be too broad In my discourtesy, nor prudish neither (Since, really, I can hardly quite suppose With all your ghostliness you follow me), I feel no such attraction. Or if one Bows to my sympathy for the briefest space, Snap -- it is gone! And, worst of all to tell, What broke it is not in the least dislike But utter boredom. Now I acknowledge you are sensible, And so I put it squarely; is there not A strange absurdity in being haunted By ghosts who crack one's jaws upon a yawn? If that were all of it! But nothing's all. For just as I am oozing into sleep, See-sawing gently out of consciousness, A phrase of yours will laugh out loud and clang Me broad awake. And still there's more to come: Sometimes I catch the faintest whiff of flutes. And that I hold to be a paradox. Did ever ladies lead so dull a life As you? At least according to my taste (I'll be polite enough to put it so). You wrote, but, Great Saint Peter, tell me how! With half a destiny. Now we, poor devils, Fill our ink-wells with entrails, pour our veins To wet a pencil point, and end at last As shrivelled as a pod of money-wort, And (let me say this in a neat aside) We hope as shining. So do artists live, And skulls are best when turned to flower-pots. Now your way: Half a year, or more, or less; A book tossed off between two sets of tennis, Or jotted down some morning of hard frost When the hounds could not run. Pale Jesus Christ, Is this an effort worthy to be classed Beyond the writing of cake recipes? One of you painted. Well, you have no shame To call such trash a picture. Years and years You studied with the patient, stupid zeal Of every amateur, and to this day You never guess how badly you have done. You speak of music, and my nerve-ends sting Thinking of Chopin sentimentalized By innocent young ladyhood; of Liszt Doted upon, his tinsel rhodomontade Held for high romance. And the ghastly nights On cracked hotel pianos! It would be Experience to read of washier stuff. And yet -- and yet -- this clearly is not all. Or why should I go back to you again, Evening and evening, in a kind of thirst, Surprising my tongue upon an almond taste. A puzzling business. Everything comes back And hooks upon a question. I suspect Myself of cheating, stacking a full pack With diamond Jacks extraordinary and Queens Of Spades enough to make a declaration Of quite superb inviolability. But if the pack were dealt again, what then? So what's the truth behind my set of it, If I can keep my eyes clear long enough To get a squint thereat? Almonds, I said, Smooth, white, and bitter, wonderfully almonds. Your fingers were unequal to the task Of fashioning pictures, they were not enough. For pictures take the whole and whip it round To something out of you; and this you could Contrive, but not as artists, since this thing Was not your making. You were pigment, line. I will not split you up to parts and parts, Suffice it that the pictures here are you. Double and single, like chrysanthemums, Each of one family, but with just differences Of color and habit and the arch of stem. Two halves, I said, and here I patterned rightly. A frail half and a virile, but both shoots Of one straight mother tree. It is your nobleness That shocks a fire across these photographs And makes them a contentment for strained eyes Hurt by the ugliness of crowds in streets, Stumbling short-sighted in a group of gargoyles. You might have posed for caryatides, With wind-drawn garments sucking round your limbs, Your beauty blushing through their flattened gauze, Before a temple, on a sunny day. I wonder I am Greek enough to feel Such solace in mere outline. But again, As always where I find you are concerned, This does not finish your effect. For when I write down Greek, it is inadequate. Marble you are, but there's that jet of fire Like a red sunset on a fall of snow. I feel a wind blowing off heather hills, Am vaguely conscious of the moan of waves, And sea-weed fronds pulsating in a pool. Now this, of course, is anything but Greek. Horses and dogs! You say yourself that they Are stuck with limpet-closeness to your life. And there, I think, is more than parallel. For dogs and horses have a wistfulness, A pathos, in their bursts of gaiety Which tears the heart, even when crinky-tail Sets dogs in bundles racing round a lawn Or snaps a horse's feet to jigging springs Cat-dancing with a sudden twitch of ears. And you are both like that, for your jokes bob Under taut flags across a bay of tears. That figure is so old, I feel a twinge Of hot compunction at using it again. But even artists stub their toes sometimes Upon the fallen centuries, and Helen Was much considered by the youth of Troy. I think perhaps your prototypes in Sparta Called forth that metaphor. But let it pass. It is a fact that my eyes itch and burn At this of you on horseback. Foolish! Oh, Shall you call folly at this time of day, You, who tell tales of banshees in a park! Again a facet. Like a lapidary I cut and cut in microscopic flakes, But never get the gem for all these sides. There's more to you than single flesh and blood Though these be fine and clear as new-stripped almonds. And more than tears; but what it is drifts out Beyond the surf-line of my consciousness And blurs in dazzle so I lose its edge. The puzzle grows as I unravel it, For all these feelings come out of a book And you, who cannot write, have written it. There's food for many solitary munchings, And sticks to beat an artist's soul withal. You cannot write and look what you have written: Two lives which stare and twinkle on the page So that I blind in looking. That's a glare To put out farthing candles of professionals. Had I not seen your drawings, I might almost Have been bewitched by that hotel piano And guessed you better understood your Chopin. Now I am all at sea and clinging To horses and a cat-leap at a fence. Well, there it stands, and what I get is life, And love held back and breaking up and out. Your heart is never on your sleeve, you say; But try your hardest, it is in your pen, And death is nothing to vitality Swinging across a second heart. At best One sees a breeding like those draperies Which cool my naked caryatides. Why, I'm not dead, but merely gone in space And that you slap away with easy hand Drawing me closer much than you intend. Perhaps the very queerest of these facts Is that I feel apologies are due For just this thing which wakes my admiration. You do not want me crowding in behind That carefully embroidered sleeve, and yet What I behold mounts to a blazing altar, And both are there before it, worshipping. Will you forgive this little pinch of incense, For one of you is dead and she will know, Perhaps, at least, what magic brought me here. And I will never seek to meek the other, I only write to exorcise a ghost. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE INSTRUCTION MANUAL by JOHN ASHBERY THE DREAM SONGS: 14 by JOHN BERRYMAN TWO OF A KIND by WALTER TALLMADGE ARNDT THE LORD OF THOULOUSE; A LEGEND OF LANGUEDOC by RICHARD HARRIS BARHAM |
|