Janet Loxley Lewis, "Austerity"

Austerity

by Janet Loxley Lewis

 From "Cold Hills" 

  

I have lived so long

On the cold hills alone ...

I loved the rock

And the lean pine trees,

Hated the life in the turfy meadow, 

Hated the heavy, sensuous bees.

I have lived so long

Under the high monotony of starry skies,

I am so cased about

With the clean wind and the cold nights, 

People will not let me in

To their warm gardens

Full of bees. 

Thanks to The Academy of American Poets' poem-a-day at their website, poets.org, for introducing me to this spare, hard gem by a poet I didn't know at all.  I think Janet Loxley Lewis' "Austerity" illustrates the old, valid concept that unpleasant messages can still be gifts because of the beauty and impact in their presentation. Who knew that "turfy meadow" could sound almost like profanity? Or the puffy, losing church-league softball team? Who thinks of bees as "heavy,"  yet they surely can resemble lumbering blimps, or pornographic invaders,  once a good witness points out that they are "sensuous." And the romantic old "starry skies" are now demoted to "high monotony." Whether or not I see the night sky that way, I have to admit that it's an understandable, plausible perspective.  A professor at Stanford and Berkeley, Janet Loxley Lewis (1899-1998) was also the wife of famed literary scholar Yvor Winters. I wonder if that's why she's not better known in her own right. Austerity by Janet Loxley Lewis  From "Cold Hills"     I have lived so long On the cold hills alone ... I loved the rock And the lean pine trees, Hated the life in the turfy meadow,  Hated the heavy, sensuous bees. I have lived so long Under the high monotony of starry skies, I am so cased about With the clean wind and the cold nights,  People will not let me in To their warm gardens Full of bees.     Today's poem is in the public domain.

Mona Van Duyn’s “A Time of Bees”: Manly Men in Half-Rhyme

Mona Van Duyn’s “A Time of Bees”:  The Half-Rhyme of Men Being Men

A Time of Bees by Mona Van Duyn : The Poetry Foundation

“A Time of Bees” by Mona Van Duyn (1921–2004, our first female Poet Laureate) might seem daunting as we look at it on the page. Her lines are long; there are two pages of them, and maybe there’s something a little intimidating about stanzas that are consistently (rigidly?) five lines long. It’s a good time to practice what I’ve preached before:  look for small gifts along the way, in single images, or find in single lines the hints of larger ideas, even if we must wait to see if they ever expand and cohere. All the while we’re hoping the whole is worth our patience. (Ditto the length of my post).

It would also be easy to overlook Van Duyn’s use of form in “A Time of Bees.” I first noticed the uniformity of the five-line stanzas. Then I saw that quite a few of the line breaks, the enjambments, came at odd places (emphasizing some interesting meanings in individual lines, apart from their meanings in the poem as a whole). In a few lines, chosen randomly, I counted syllables and listened to stresses, but found no consistent pattern. Eventually, however, I saw the half-rhymes, in lines 1,3,5 and sometimes in lines 2 and 4. Some are so subtle, so “halved,” that we might call them eighteenth rhymes; but the rhyme becomes more definite as the poem goes along, and it’s reasonable to claim a rhyme scheme of ababa.

Sneaky Crawling

Why does this matter? Rhyme and meter can be merely decorative, and they often create comedy, as in limericks. To a poet, they can be as much a risk as a weapon. But in the hands of serious writers,  they suggest the poet’s tendency toward perceiving and valuing order in her subjects and her world view. A sense of music is another likely result of rhyme and meter, but not so much when the form is as understated as Van Duyn’s, where the rhyme is hanging by a thread.

Half-Rhyme?

So is she just a sloppy, half-hearted formalist? I don’t think so. The poem centers on the menacing but perhaps alluring way men tear things apart as they pursue a prey, an enemy, in order to repair and make things right and safe. Yes, that sounds a little pre-feminist, but in casual conversation, I’ve heard a number of intelligent women confess to finding muscle, sweat, labor and combat appealing. Some brainy women like seeing the torque of a man as he rips at things in order to fix them—to build, make, create. Isn’t that the end to which he’s been evolving?

And maybe the sweaty stuff becomes more appealing as technology evolves away from our need for physical labor on the home front. Let the robot do it. Or let the men, women and children from afar do it. For better or worse, our airplane drones even show the potential for an evolution away from physical combat.

Wouldn’t the law of supply and demand tell us that, as hunks thin out in the work force, giving way to I.T. guys and lab techs, the appeal and the price of hunks will grow more dear? I’d guess gym memberships are at an all-time high and will continue to grow, unless some dire upheaval returns us to an economy of agriculture and heavy industry.

Frontal

So, as Mona Van Duyn’s speaker watches her husband rip up part of their home in order to destroy an animal-enemy, she loves him. She embraces his animal nature as protector of the home as she watches it emerge. His tearing into things becomes almost a paradigm of the erotic.

But she’s not a dumb woman, and she’s aware that this is something like a double-edged sword. Shall she be cold and mechanical about being rid of the nuisance bees? Or shall she sympathize with an animal that was only doing what it was designed to do? She is so honest that she does both:

                        they writhe, some of them, but who cares?

                        They go to the garbage, it is over, everything has been said.

                        But there is more. Wouldn’t you think the bees had suffered

                        enough?

          

Love, labor and war make tenuous what she thought she thought—and valued. She’s a bit uncertain, so there is in Van Duyn’s poetic structure an air we might call tenuously formal—rhymes that almost challenge the definition of rhyme. And her clinging to a symmetrical five-line stanza gives way at the end to a single line that highlights a “grubby softness” that “wants to give, to give”—which is surely a reference to women as well as infant bees.

Such a world, such a mind, an experience such as this bee hunt, is surely not as neat and orderly as tidy, self-conscious, exact rhyme or meter would imply. Yet there is some kind of order in Van Duyn’s world of partially-evolved cave dwellers. If someone wants to call her rhymes crude, it’s all right because the world she’s presenting and accepting is also crude—in part. Eroticism is crude. Survival is crude. It’s about tearing things up to get to the bottom of things, where enemies live.

Still, the couple reads “books on bees” and later they bring home a scientist friend, for “they need/the idea of bees” (what an expression, by the way!). But in the end, understanding is secondary to elimination. There are only two forces: the squirming of bees with some life left in them and, with a remarkable adjective, the “unpleading” male’s need to kill them all, permanently, to protect home and hearth. 

There is nothing to plead about here; he is doing the necessary work.

Hiding Its Head in the . . . Sand?

Van Duyn denies us our penchant for simplistic dichotomies. She won’t let her gender, or any of us, say,  “I’m all brain, beauty, and spirit. I am not a savage. I am lofty. God made me in his image.”

To which Van Duyn calmly replies, “Don’t be silly. That sweaty, aggressive, murderous, rampaging, repairing man makes me aware of my own softness. I accept it. Maybe I even like it, and I’m honest enough to say so.”

“A Time of Bees” presents a rough-hewn, physical, even bestial world that continues to call to us, contain us, define us. It has a kind of order, but it’s a brutal order, and trying to prettify it with loud, exact rhymes or overly sweet music, would miss the point, would be a lie. 

A Time of Bees by Mona Van Duyn : The Poetry Foundation

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John Ciardi, "Lines": Bee Pirates

Bob the Pirate Boards the Ship

 

I don’t think these purple flowers are morning glories, but they’re a rich purple, and after an hour of searching for their name, enough’s enough. 

I’m telling myself it’s more interesting that they seem to be a chorus, or at least a barbershop quartet, groups of three or four heads leaning in one direction, mouths open, as if they’re shouting at or calling to the bees. 

Singing? Calling? Yelling?

Are the bees an enemy (pirates?) attacking or are they a food or friend or mate the flowers have been begging for?

Here’s a John Ciardi poem that captures the bee, if not the flower.

 Lines by John Ciardi : The Poetry Foundation 

The opening image might be one of those verbal wonders that re-define our notion of a thing for the rest of time. How can we un-see bees as hunchbacks in pirate pants, with peg-leg hooks? 

On the other hand, I wonder if there’s enough in the poem. After the charm of the opening and the extended simile of pirates boarding a ship, what new insights are we given? There is the theme of fleeting beauty, of transience, but I wonder how much the poem changes our lives or our understanding. Is that asking too much of a poem? Yet some poems do that. 

About the photos: bees zip about so fast that their visit seems one slurp and they buzz off, no loyalty to any single activity or song—like pirates indeed, rapacious. Surely that excuses the blur in my photos—when in doubt, blame the subject. 

Bee Butt

Lines by John Ciardi : The Poetry Foundation

Jean Valentine, W.S. Merwin: Bees in Poems and Show, Don't Tell

Go, Tigers!

Moreover, in my latest chats with bees, they have seemed healthy and busy, unlike that alarming experience a month ago (September 6, 2011).  Naturally that's led me to look again for poems involving bees.

One of the most common maxims about writing poetry (and fiction, for that matter) is, "Show, Don't Tell." Don't summarize, generalize or preach to readers; create an experience and let readers draw their own conclusions.

I've been thinking about that in relation to these two rather different poems by long-established American poets Jean Valentine and W.S. Merwin  (Merwin was U.S. Poet Laureate until Phillip Levine took over recently). I'm interested in your responses, whether or not they are specifically connected to the issue of Show, Don't Tell.

Bees by Jean Valentine : The Poetry Foundation

The River of Bees by W. S. Merwin : The Poetry Foundation

Henry Reed's "Naming of Parts" and the Importance of Bees

"Naming of Parts" by Henry Reed

Yesterday I came across some bees. It happened because they were sluggish.  Or dying. They were barely moving on these flowers that camouflaged them so well. What do I know about bees? Maybe they just sit, barely moving, on a flower, for some reason only naturalists know. Maybe this is the bees’ lazy cycle. Nap time for bees. Other animals do it.  

So I googled some phrase like “lazy bees”—actually, I think it was “bees in September”—which took me to the link you find here.  I’d heard about bees being in trouble a couple of years ago, then it slipped from my attention.

Bees Dying at Alarming Rates - CBS News Video

Another question arises. What do bees have to do with poetry? Then I remembered “Naming of Parts,” by Henry Reed (British, 1914-1986).  I’ve been away from the poem for several years, but I still find it brutally subtle (oxymoron intended), at least compared to most anti-war poems, which lay the message on thick. Less really is More, most of the time.

In the fog of memory, I think “Naming of Parts” worked well at showing students how kinds of language can be so different, can convey character and different ways of being in the world.

Here are two speakers, a military instructor and a newbie at some stage of rifle training. His thoughts drift in response to the spoken words of the instructor, who apparently has no sense that his words are numbingly rote and cold at the denotative level, but also vaguely sexual in their connotations. 

If this poem doesn’t illustrate that how we say things is as important as what we say, then maybe we’ll never get beyond shouts versus whispers. I guess I’d describe the difference as the cold, mechanical language of business, war, and old-fashioned, lecture-based classrooms. On the other hand, we hear the recruit’s lyrical, sumptuous language of daydreams, poetry, love, and longing.  Each language embodies and conveys a way of being in the world, and the two ways are anathema to each other. 

In the recruit's way of being, the widespread death of bees would matter, on aesthetic grounds, long before the bee apocalypse affected his food supply. One could almost wonder if seeing and preserving beauty are matters of survival.

"Naming of Parts" by Henry Reed

  

Bees Dying at Alarming Rates - CBS News Video

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