Truthtelling Tropes

...The pen was cool to the touch...

...Vétiver" is an essence used in perfume...

...We should listen to it...

...Flowers become performers—though since the verb "recite" also means "to repeat," the poet may be describing the continuous pattern created by the stalks...

...Yet in despite its pride Only of fumes and foolish fancy bred, And sounding solely in the sounding head: The other soft and low, Stealing whence we not know, Painfully heard, and easily forgot...

...There are certain antecedents in the philosophical musings of Wallace Stevens, in the French Symbolists' evocation of mood through surreal devices, in Emerson's Transcendentalism...

...They marry, and emigrate to New Zealand to help form a new society...

...The result was a class of privileged young men plagued with boredom, perpetually at loose ends, deprived of the certainties of their fathers with no ideals to replace them...

...Consequently, much current verse seems to have only one foot in the present...

...with general wants and ordinary feelings," hedeclared in reaction to his contemporaries' concentration on a glamorized past and heroic acts...

...The family escapes to Florence...

...Ashbery has put trickiness behind him...

...Seek it and leave mere Faith and Lo ve to come with the chances...

...He particularly deplored the insincere idealism of minor poets: Are there not, then, two musics unto men...

...Admirers point to the grace of his style and its instant recognizability: Ages passed slowly, like a load of hay, As the flowers recited their lines And the pike stirred at the bottom of the pond...

...Critics admit these tilings are not the subjects of poetry, but usually treat them as if they were because the relevant vocabulary comes readily...

...As our culture becomes increasingly fragmented, poets search desperately for an audience to share insights with...

...The Bothie of ToberNa-Vuolich" concerns a group of university undergraduates vacationing in the Scottish Highlands...

...One of their number experiences democracy first-hand when he falls in love with the daughter of a local cottager...

...No such simple resolution occurs in "Amours de Voyage...

...He speaks to his reader as if chatting about ordinary things...

...Poetry should deal more...

...April Galleons" (a reference to spring cumuli) presents a succession of shifting skyscapes, culminating in the thought that "Obviously, /It was time to be off, in another/Direction, toward marshlands and cold, scrolled/Names of cities that sounded as though they existed./But never had...

...Poor Clough has been remembered primarily as the subject of Matthew Arnold's nostalgic elegy "Thyrsis, " and for an uncharacteristically "inspiring" chestnut often included in anthologies, " Say Not, This Struggle Naught Availeth, " whose final stanza was frequently quoted by Winston Churchill: And not by eastern windows only, When daylight comes, comes in the light, In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly, But westward, look, the land is bright...

...Who could not appreciate the sense of mutability expressed in " Night is full of kindred spirits no w. / Voices, photos of loved ones, faces/Out of the newspaper, eager smiles blown like leaves/Before they become fungus...

...a moment later the message seems locked in code...

...I hasten to add that April Galleons is nevertheless a particularly accessible book...

...Against the backdrop of the short-lived Roman republic of 1849, the gentlemanly Claude takes "the Grand Tour" of famous ancient sites and describes it in jaded letters to his friend Eustace back in England...

...Granted, this is not the kind of poetry that lends itself to the paraphrase required of us by English teachers, yet we can identify with the pungent air of nostalgia for lost Arcadia...

...The situation of Victorian poets appears enviable from our perspective: They knew their public, the lucky dogs, and everyone had the same concept of tradition...

...Significantly, Ashbery ends with March winds and April showers...

...In fact, Ashbery's uniqueness lies in his colloquial, easy-going voice...

...Many of the tropes, at least on first reading, seem askew: Is the hay supposed to make us remember that "All flesh is grass," as in Breughel's "The Hay Wain...

...By this time French troops are besieging the city...

...A more representative impression may be obtained from Arthur Hugh Clough: Selected Poems (Carcanet, 240 pp., $9.50), edited by Shirley Chew and issued under the Fyfield imprint, which is devoted to editions of neglected poets...

...Arthur Hugh Clough(1811-1861) was not content, however...

...becomes unbearably poignant with loss...

...Still, he lamented the old values as much as anyone...

...His verse is flawed by aphorism, and awkward "poetic" syntax—almost as affected, sometimes, as that of the unfortunate Claude...

...The staircase swept upward Through fragmented garlands, keeping the melancholy Already distilled in letters of the alphabet...

...But he could not retreat into the Arthurian dream of Tennyson, or the Renaissance rogues' gallery of Browning, or even the sense of shrunken hopes conveyed by his friend Arnold...

...His was a quirky, original voice...

...Claude remains, having been struck with enthusiasm for Garibaldi...

...Inevitably, Claude and one of the girls attract each other, yet they cannot admit their feelings until prodded by their respective correspondents...

...the incantatory power of language to put inchoate sensations into words is harder to analyze...

...The industrial boom of the mid-19th century catapulted a society used to gradual change into a hyperkinetic age that offered undreamed of comforts and opportunities, and equally unimagined dislocations...

...Poets who thro w out rhyme and meter may cling tenaciously to plot, elevated diction or some other device from the old grab-bag of tricks...

...Clough tried to capture their deracinated condition and suggest solutions in two long poems...

...And the ironic fantasy Ashbery employs was once the province of psychedelic rock: Ah, you don't know what fun it is Arriving in the rain just as night has changed the subject To a downhill story of professors, pigs, and pianos...

...Many of their artifices look to a past when the appeal of poetry was more universal...

...Train travel, cheap mass-produced objects, gas lighting—these and comparable wonders transformed a static life bound up with daily tasks into a mobile existence filled with leisure time for all save the very poor...

...Clough believed that his generation was called to look at life in a radically new way: "Go to your homes, your living children tend,/Your earthly spouses love;/Set your affections not on things above/Which moth and rust corrupt, which quickliest comes to end...

...Although he is the antithesis of a "confessional" poet, Ashbery reveals more about himself than nearly anyone else does—not the details that absorb gossip columnists, but his benign, generous view of life...

...Thus the title expresses the odor of some memory, its uncovering through the symbolic expression peculiar to dreams...

...It evokes a scene specific in sensual detail but mysterious in other respects: Where is this place, what is happening...

...the name derives from a Tamil word signifying "the root which is dug up...

...Many of the titles reflect this: "Adam Snow," "October at the Window," "The Big Cloud," "Winter Weather Advisory," "Fall Pageant," "The Ice Storm...

...Easter Day," with its refrain, "Christis not risen...

...Is Ashbery's technique really so unprecedented, his imagery so novel...

...April Galleons could be described as mapping the changeable weather of emotions...

...This opening stanza of "Vétiver," from Ashbery's 12th book, April Galleons (Viking, 97 pp., $15.95), contains all the characteristics of his manner...

...His detractors complain loudly that it is impossible to tell what is going on in his poems...

...These days Clough, who was admired by his peers for his bravery and irony, is virtually forgotten...

...His poems are like songs heard in dreams, or by heroes in fairy tales: While we listen they communicate plain wisdom...

...In an era when poets have adopted hectoring or edifying personae, or guarded, world-weary ones, such trustful expansiveness is a breath of spring...

...The "difficulty" many reviewers have with Ashbery is actually a reflection of their own propensity to concentrate on narrative, or scene, or didactic ideas...

...Confused, he vacillates, but the girl—not quite a "lady"—takes the initiative...

...Letters between the would-be lo vers go astray, and the chastened Claude concludes, "Faith, I think, does pass, and Love: but Knowledge abideth..../Knowledge is painful often: and yet when we know we are happy...

...They argue halfbaked philosophy, flirt with the available women (whether fellow house-guests or servants) and wrestle with the question of how to live in an evolving society where those born below them were becoming their equals...

...To the sermon of the moment...

...Nonetheless, Clough's awareness of the ambivalence of his times speaks powerfully to our own, and his devotion to truthtelling makes him admirable in any period...

...What remains is the voice—honest and open, speaking optimistically of poetry today, and in the future...

...Ashbery has molded and remolded the very vessels critics fall back on examining, and in the process has challenged us to invent new ways of discussing his work...

...One loud and bold and coarse, And overpowering still perforce All tone and tune beside...

...Meanwhile, he has become the object of romantic speculations in letters written by the daughters of a slightly vulgar British family visiting Rome...