Ulysses and Orpheus

...As one of his own personae puts it, "Each of us circles/Around some simple but vital missing piece of information...

...He keeps his humanity on Circe's isle ("How can I please you/if I am not a man...

...Orpheus proves as natural a subject for John Ashbery as Ulysses was for Lowell...

...The poet watches the attrition of his third marriage (celebrated in The Dolphin...

...Day by Day now reads as a valedictory to a poetic past: Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme why are they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled...

...Like his model, Ashbery's work alternates stanzas between a male and female speaker...

...He always charted an unexpected course, and this was no exception...

...He is transformed at last into "a bluish cloud with white contours" a gentle deity lecturing on the mysterious processes of poems...

...A book that seemed to be a transitional stage in a career of surprising conversions must stand as a postscript to his Selected Poems of 1976...

...And since a primary function of poetry is giving pleasure, Ashbery ranks very high...

...This understanding is qualified, however, by a series of denials: The poem is "so turned inward/That the meaning, good or other, can never/Become known," and the poet is not helped by the act of creation (which will, in any case, soon be forgotten...

...Still, we are somehow left with a sense that the conclusion is satisfactory, with a wondering delight at what we've heard...

...and gives us some "Imitations"-including one of La Fontaine's political fable, "Rabbit, Weasel, and Cat," that is so full of the violent energy Lowell was still able to inject into a couplet, it raises the specter of the long-lost author of Lord Weary's Castle...

...While only parts of the harmony are fully comprehensible in themselves, these put everything else in order...

...offers the usual letters to friends, living and dead...

...It too is flowing, fleeting...

...Orpheus, who "liked the glad personal quality of the things beneath the sky," finds that his landscape changes when Eurydice dies...

...A very modern man, he finds his affair with Circe ultimately uxorious, and fears that "the whining, greasy animals who bury chewed meat beneath his window/are only human, and will claim/his place of honor on the couch...

...Abandoning the Shandyesque rambling of his recent poems-as-novels, he once again changed his style...

...the man addresses her first with the words, "you walk out of the dream...

...the unrhymed sonnets were discarded in favor of longer pieces with short lines, spare imagery and language simpler than ever before...

...Ultimately, the woman appears to function as muse what Ashbery's worthy master, Wallace Stevens, termed "the interior paramour...

...As Lowell reminds us that it was fraud, not valor, that defeated Troy, Ulysses moves toward his death (beautifully paraphrased from Dante): drowning his last crew in uncharted ocean, seeking the unpeopled world beyond the sun, lost in the uproarious rudeness of a great wind...

...The man echoes lines from the parent poem, threatening to retreat from the falseness of women, and to "the green wood go, alone, a banished man...

...Syringa" is a lovely parable of the poet's art...

...Like everything in Day by Day, this poem traces patterns of breakdown and recovery, rather than concentrating on narrative as Lowell used to do...

...Actually, leaving out data is central to the poet's method...

...Ulysses and Circe," the most memorable poem Lowell has produced in years, stands by itself as "something imagined, not recalled...

...Just as we feel we are beginning to make sense of one of his poems, meaning eludes us again...

...Nevertheless, the use of myth liberated him briefly from the confines of fictionalized autobiography, from the problems inherent in writing about characters who bear the names of his real family...

...But the two characters (if indeed there are two, and not merely the voices of an inner dialogue) do not appear to be lovers...

...For Robert Lowell, the artist's impetus was closely related to his power to hurt and destroy (though the autobiographical section of Day by Day displays a surprising gentleness...

...She may be the projected image of a remembered beloved as well...

...A serene poetic old age would, perhaps, have been incompatible with his relentless searching-crafty as his Ulysses, nothing could ever hold Lowell long...

...Although Lowell's figure is "bleak-boned with survival," too, he has abdicated the willed act to drift with his fate...

...The end crowns all" Ashbery carries the saw that "poetry does not have subject matter because it is the subject" to its furthest limit...

...The woman's part is more freely improvised...

...Like their ballad prototypes, they partly relate someone else's story, a story that is only obliquely referred to here, never told...

...You must Wait till it's over...

...The music of the spheres floods through John Ashbery's poetry...

...The book's most remarkable production, though, is "Ulysses and Circe," where the poet identifies himself with the Greek hero during his dalliance with the enchantress who turned men into beasts...

...Where Lowell's vision of the artist is one of overflowing destructive forces, Ashbery sees poetry as a benign power...

...The key seems to be provided near the end when he asks, "But if each act/Is reflexive, concerned with itself on another level/As well as with us, the strangers who live here,/Can one advance one step further without sinking equally/Far back into the past...

...Writers & Writing ULYSSES AND ORPHEUS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL The untimely death of Robert Lowell on September 12 alters our perspective on his final book, Day by Day (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 139 pp., $8.95...

...Houseboat Days is evidence of the transcendent power of the imagination, and one of the major works of our time...

...His long "Fantasia on 'The Nut-Brown Maid,'" for instance, a set of free variations on a 15th-century ballad defending woman's constancy, works primarily by indirection...

...The Orphic rebirth of the poem's vision takes place during a revolution of sensibility when "an arbitrary chorus/Speaks of a totally different incident with a similar name/In whose tale are hidden syllables/Of what happened so long before that/In some small town, one indifferent summer...

...Lowell envied Vermeer-a "painter's vision is not a lens"-and both apologizes for and defends his own recent work for lacking that sense of craft: "sometimes everything I write/with the threadbare art of my eye/seems a snapshot./lurid, rapid, garish, grouped/heightened from life,/yet paralyzed by fact...

...It is to our sorrow that Day by Day is not the ambiguous marker on a voyage to new worlds that I first thought it was when it appeared just before his death, but the final testament of a great poet...

...With past and present converging and merging in the poetic moment, nothing is static: Ashbery's universe is in a state of Heraclitean flux...

...There was always something to see,/Something going on, for the historical past owed it/To itself, our historical present...

...individual sentences are logical, an idea flickers past followed by a trail of related images, but there is always something we are never told...

...Perhaps the "simple but vital missing piece of information" should be the nut-brown maid's refrain in the original: "For, in my mind, of all mankind/I love but you alone...

...He labored hard to attain the precise effect of immediacy in the captured moment, endlessly reworking themes and material, yet the skeletal rhetoric of Day by Day enforces our impression of a ghost looking over old scenes: The familiar musings about life, pleasures, despondency, and madness are there, but in a minor mode...

...not unbecoming men who strove with Gods," and found himself "made weak by time and fate, but strong in will/To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield...

...until he returns to Penelope and becomes "a foolish but evil animal," a shark whose mission is to destroy...

...Another poem, "Syringa," similarly affirms that "For although memories of a season, for example,/Melt into a single snapshot, one cannot guard, treasure/That stalled moment...

...Houseboat Days (Viking, 88 pp., $7.95), the latest volume of this difficult poet whose musicality charms and transforms the most ordinary material into a radiant strangeness, celebrates: The way music passes, emblematic Of life and how you cannot isolate a note of it And say it is good or bad...

...There is also an ironic contrast with Tennyson's Romantic quester (likewise derived in part from Dante) who, against all odds, set sail in old age to achieve "some work of noble note...

...Instead of Ulysses the seeker, Lowell shows us Ulysses in flight from himself, staving off the fear of old age through sexual enslavement to a young woman...

...Lowell modelled his Ulysses less on Homer's wily Odysseus than on Dante's sinister, smooth-tongued villain, damned among the false counselors...

...Yet the artist's function is not to save himself, but to be a sacrificial seer (like Orpheus) whose epiphanies render all matter, language and action significant and life-giving...