Recapturing the Past

...As if the words themselves were mercy...

...The beautiful shards history leaves in its wake—ancient paintings, statues, and buildings, even ordinary household items —seem reminders of good times: "Portals to a sense of paradise,/[they] make our world more tolerable...

...From Princeton One Autumn Afternoon: Collected Poems of Theodore Weiss 1950-1987 (Macmillan, 436 pp., $27.00) contains the finest garnerings from that prolific writer's 11 previous volumes of verse...

...These days, many poets earn a living by teaching their craft in writers' workshops or Fine Arts programs...

...These ironies have been called to mind by two recent books...

...Ultimately, Weiss opts for the view that in refashioning the ancients the writer creates something new, not merely an echo of the original...

...The poem was inspired by an actual ship's log from 1607, in which one Captain Keeling noted that he had ordered Shakespeare's play performed aboard his ship as entertainment for himself and another captain in the convoy, as well as "to keep my people from idlenesse and unlawful games, orsleepe...

...In "The Period Rooms" he notes how painstakingly curators revive "what was once someone's intention/About the future" but is now nostalgia, roped of f from human interference...

...Oh I a sprightly ghost would welcome/but ghosts at best, alas, homebodies are,/by waves unsettled...

...the more barbed ones may make him sound as if he keeps company with such conservative misanthropes as Jonathan Swift and Hilaire Belloc, whose poison pens could make love seem ludicrous and poignancy repulsive...

...the child is told he must "tutor him in disappointment...

...The breakthroughs achieved by Alexander Pope and the neoclassicals, early Romantics like Thomas Chatterton or Robert Burns, the Pre-Raphaelite poets, and the neometaphysicals all arose out of efforts to re-create a vanished Golden Age...

...We may equally inquire whether Browning makes Weiss' poems tick, or whether the pupil has begun to influence the way we read the Victorian's monologues...

...The Museum Shop Catalogue" convinces us that "the past is perfectly darling"—an emporium of antique artifacts to clutter our own coffee tables, preserving everything except the original usefulness or significance of the objects...

...From Princeton One Autumn Afternoon, 1986" begins, "Someone said all poems compose/one poem...

...As if they were somewhere still they remind us A little of our lives—almost the only ones We still almost believe in...

...Morris uses this tantalizing entry partly as a gloss on Hamlet as it appeared to the 17th-century world, where "Nobody wonders what it means...

...This illusory glamour of the past is also the very focus of John Morris' fourth book of poems, A Schedule of Benefits (Atheneum, 56 pp., $14.95...

...Is Prospero truly a magician, Weiss asks rhetorically, or does his servant provide the element that makes the illusion work...

...The melancholy Dane comes across as a decisive and resourceful hero, not the vacillating neurotic of modern perception...

...Departing the make-believe world of an amusement park, he observes, "Now it is time we were exchanging/This place where everything is almost exactly like something/For home where nothing is quite as it seems"—thus illuminating our preference for artificially-induced surprise over the kind reality springs on us unexpectedly...

...How topical this is at the moment, as experts fill journals of opinion with arguments over the restoration of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel frescoes...

...With the vanquishing of the real by the ideal, poetry—predicated on a struggle between the two—would become otiose, or else be transformed into something unrecognizable...

...Even time is imitated here/The imperfect destroyer:/As a last touch the precise shade/Of faded pigment is added...

...These naturally evoke not only The Tempest, but his most obvious model, Robert Browning, whose "Caliban on Setebos" they extend and embroider upon...

...And our ancestors—do we control our memories of them, or do their ghostly reputations possess our lives...

...Artists, of course, are wont to fantasize about Utopias where humanity once lived, or will live someday, in harmony and with shared cultural values...

...Morris is kinder, if no more gentle...

...Weiss' latest book nevertheless includes several monologues for Prospero and for Caliban...

...In his second book of poems, Outlanders (1960), Weiss dreamed of the great literature lost forever in "The Fire at Alexandria...

...A father "has illusions, and you are one of them...

...In "Wunsch-zettel" (Wish List) an elderly Swiss woman is showing a visitor her house in language made poetic by its retention of German syntax: "My staircase knight a little startles you?/A creaky ancestor who guards me from night's/mares...

...As if they had forgotten...

...We should not consider any work an isolated entity, Weiss tells us, but rather apart of the poetic canon, a joint effort among all who have written before and all who will read and interpret subsequently...

...imitative works, in particular, are in danger of having their rhythms drowned out by the echoes of more musical iambs from the past...

...Nowhere is this more successfully accomplished than in "Hamlet at Sea...

...In his Recoveries (1982), an art historian restoring a fresco and one of the painted figures beneath his brush have a lengthy debate on where the old leaves off and the new begins...

...Like you he will have to learn/To live with your limitations...

...Weiss' foreign transplants are not always invented people—we also hear Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Bleucher speak, as well as members of his own Polish and Hungarian family...

...Morris recollects that, at this time of year, the art of the past develops a practical usefulness for us...

...Should an earthly paradise become reality, however, there would be no need to exile a breed whose art had been forged under such different conditions...

...No one is more conscious of such ambiguities than the poet himself...

...Theodore Weiss twits our anxious suspicion that anything original has already been done or said before our time...

...Shakespeare may have been just another playwright to his contemporaries, but the rest of us can't help feeling puny beside his long shadow...

...The title comes from an ambitious new poem dedicated to the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert— an extended meditation on Herbert's "Old Masters...

...But in "The Library Revisited," from Fireweeds (1976) he looked aghast at the plethora of books preserved and sympathized with certain 18th-century philosophers who felt the Alexandrian conflagration might not have been so bad...

...A wry comment on Aristotle's dictum that tragedy is meant to produce pleasure, this further reminds us that we, too, picture the vignette idyllically, framed as it is by history's spyglass...

...In Our Elegies" resurrects "the dead we call by name": We tell them who they are and where they died On what occasion...

...It comes then as no surprise that their verse should display a vast range of literary interests...

...Weiss declares, in part, So now and then we must believe that one remote age or another, more coeval with our longings than the present, for its heroes and their storied deeds has left us far behind...

...There is a danger in quoting too many of Morris' epigrammatic lines...

...Weiss' narrative monologues often adopt the voices of Central European immigrants: women and men trying to salvage enough of their pasts to build a bridge between the culture they left behind and the one they face...

...That daily bread...

...While we arc somewhere still With our breath they inforni us...

...had all he could do/not to haul his massive boulder club/and finish off that handiwork...

...The sailors laugh at the ship's boy in drag as Ophelia, even at the pile of corpses in Act V. Meanwhile, the reader is invited to take up the vantage-point of someone standing watch on another ship across the water who "cannot make out that far-off palaver" that "sounds like happiness at a distance...

...Yet despite his sharp eye for the foibles and failures of the way we live now, he is quick to point out that foolishness is universal...

...In previous books, his pity lacerated...

...We tell them why we invoke them...

...Who's to judge him wrong...

...Indeed, the tendency of poets to be dreamers and malcontents led Plato to banish them from the Republic, his utopia...

...Gathering up his various strands—knowledge of history, an eye for incongruities, delight in form—he weaves them, in several new poems, into a broadly compassionate whole...

...They fill us full of our desiring...

...BringingUp Father" reminds a child who is teaching whom...

...Immersion in the 18th century has made Morris a satirist of his own culture...

...Paintings and lyrics of the old masters are reproduced on small, bookshaped pieces of cardboard, then mailed "at Christmas with our warm regards.' Put both these delightful volumes on your own Wunsch-zettel for the holidays...

...Morris wittily dissects the peculiar symbiotic relationship we form with what preceded us...

...Often he expresses himself aphoristically...

...here he sometimes employs it as balm...

...I am positive the latest/of the great Cro-Magnon masters,/pondering the Michelangelo among his/predecessors...

...Weiss and Morris are scholars as well as educators, authors of critical studies (Weiss on Hopkins and Shakespeare among others, Morris on the 18th century and English autobiography...

...Certainly Weiss and Morris revive our understanding of tradition through their individuality, breadth of imagination and humor...

...Writers of course take a tremendous risk when they train their imaginations on the legacy of genius...