Tales of Eros in Verse
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing TALES OF EROS IN VERSE BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Verse novels are suddenly back in fashion. How our ancestors loved this peculiarly Victorian genre. Many of you will no doubt...
...Mythology provides a useful ragbag of archetypal stories about emotional trials and vicissitudes, which can be appliqued onto contemporary predicaments...
...Meanwhile, contemporary poets have been emulating the novelistic poems of their forebears...
...Her narratives are related by various voices...
...Hine notes in passing that he first wrote this book in the aftermath of his own eventual manic-depressive breakdown...
...Our hero, experiencing "that continuous sense of unworthiness/that undermines the neurotic and gifted," associates his heartbreak with the wages of sin...
...In a brilliant allusion to the myth of Daphne, one poem begins: As lightning passes from cloud to branching tree, forked and stripped like a body, love struck me where I stood and I was changed, changed into wood...
...Displaying the zeal of a convert, he mortifies his still relatively innocent flesh with fasts, predawn masses, frequent compulsive confessions, and finally with a stint working in Montreal's slums alongside a disciple of the redoubtable Dorothy Day...
...Now we have In and Out (Knopf, 284 pp., $19.95), the second installment of Daryl Hine's fictionalized life story, following in the footsteps of his Academic Festival Overtures (1985...
...Yet this new religion comes off no better than Catholicism...
...In and Out employs all these devices, despite a thoroughly contemporary plot and manner...
...A third female speaker, mending her lover's shirt, identifies herself with those fairy tale heroines who can only break a cruel spell by some feat of sewing: Your favorite shirt is torn...
...After her attempted seduction of Daryl goes ludicrously awry, she enslaves the passive Mark...
...There the third and most powerful female, Nature, reasserts her authority by introducing the protagonist to Hyacinth Star, son of a prominent psychiatrist...
...Today, thanks to feminist pressure, it is back in print and thought to be entertaining, if high-minded...
...This form suits Hine's discursive style, full of asides and wry philosophical and psychological insights, replete with poetic simile...
...It is the book's most complex and effective piece...
...The book begins with a carnal fall—a homosexual encounter joins Daryl, a hitherto innocent, intellectually precocious college freshman, and blond, athletic Mark, who has already been initiated by another friend...
...For decades we have complained about the bumedout heroes and stunted heroines of modern fiction...
...ELIZABETH Spires has not yet written a verse novel, but her third collection of poems, Annonciade (Viking, 67 pp., $17.95), suggests a current may be pulling her in that direction...
...But that stance, too, seems stylish once more, along with a taste for Morris chintz and heavy oak furniture...
...Steeped in classical learning, the abbot ships Daryl back to college to acquire the educational polish so valuable in a political church...
...Nevertheless, hearts rise as the horizon widens...
...The title poem takes place in an Alpine sanatorium near Menton, France...
...the poet wonders in this wise meditation on malaise...
...they turn the tiller toward rough, uncertain seas...
...Their vocabulary for love and grief was larger...
...In keeping with its cultural sources, the poem is written in anapests, a tripping meter prevalent in Latin pastorals that is more familiar to English readers from light verse...
...This indeed is the guilt sickness tends to bring—a persistent nagging worry in our culture that has outlasted faith in a punitive deity...
...Had I wanted, I couldn't go back, for in place of the house of his father, the prodigal, on his return, would discover not even a picturesque ruin, but only a parking-lot...
...Caught up in the monotonous monastic routine of invalidism, the narrator thinks, "Surely the spirit chooses its affliction/and makes it manifest, watching itself/fall and retreat from the world to atone,/as holy hermits did, for some secret/failing only its own heart knows...
...Spires' Muse is Eros...
...Perhaps poets can provide us with a broader emotional spectrum...
...The book's title now becomes clear...
...Hine is a wizard at prosody...
...Hyacinth's formidable father suffers from the same myopia toward nature as the monks...
...In common with many young poets of considerable lyric talent, she is a miniaturist...
...The ultimate effect of the poet's study of the classics, so desired by the abbot, has been his learning that Eros is a careless god who can bring transporting ecstasy, but also despair and ruin...
...The reader's eye and ear finally tire peering at so many infinitesimal jewels...
...he can subdue the most intractable rhythms into a fluid line that reads at least as naturally as prose...
...The verse novels our ancestors poured over often featured a rather autobiographical romance that ended sadly, although with an inspiring uplift...
...Spires' cast of characters includes several shipwrecked sailors, schoolboys, a mermaid, goldfish, and an Indian hornbill, as well as herself...
...Great poets do not steer their barques through ponds...
...A long digression on the beauty of the Tridentine Mass ends in a threnody for the Latin poetry banished by the church in favor of an unidiomatic vernacular...
...Augustine's Confessions...
...Hine's latest book, in imitating the pattern of an earlier age, becomes a liberating expression of feeling...
...All center around "the past preserved and persevering,/the sentimental past"—surely one of the prime inspirations of fiction...
...The chronically sick feel set apart, an ironically chosen people, yet for what purpose...
...As Spires notes, shipwreck may occur...
...Many of you will no doubt recall a great aunt who could still quote by heart favorite passages from Longfellow's Evangeline or Tennyson's Idylls of the King...
...Confused emotions catapult him into the arms of a far more demanding dominatrix—the pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church...
...It is derived from Horace, who observed in Hine's elegant paraphrase: "Although/you may drive away nature by means/of a pitchfork, she never the less/will return all the way.' It is no accident that psychoanalysis becomes a running theme throughout the poem: especially the doctrine of "the return of the repressed...
...Another girl shudders to discover that "love is a power/releasing darker powers...
...But in Hine's scheme of things the values have been reversed: Puritanical "spirituality" seeks to overthrow the beauty of love incarnate in flesh...
...James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover and Alfred Corn's Notes from a Child of Paradise transform autobiographical material into the stuff of fiction, including conventional plot devices and character development, albeit in stanzas rather than paragraphs...
...Will our suffering/ redeem others...
...When we criticize the Victorians for their sentimentality, we forget that they also managed to be much less emotionally constricted and self-conscious than we are...
...For variety there were bits of social satire, purple passages, and many beautiful epigrammatic lines on the nature of life and love—suitable for committal to memory so that the reader might recall them in times applicable to his or her own needs...
...Worn for too many years, The threads above the heart Have pulled apart, a ragged tear I'll mend and mend again, helpless against the words we sharpen to a fine point against each other...
...The novel forecasts a time when his therapeutic reconversion of his son to heterosexuality will result in the young man's suicide...
...As in Academic Festival Overtures, much is made of the bittersweet mismatch between the jock with an undeveloped heart, for whom sex becomes one more kind of calisthenics, and the romantic bookworm who longs for the tenderness and passionate language literature has led him to anticipate...
...The story ends with Daryl's discovery that, for him, theMysticalBodyisnotChrist'sintheEucharist, or His members in His church, but the joy experienced in the arms of a very human beloved...
...Scenes range from a mutoscope on Brighton Pier (the old crank kind that displays that Edwardian striptease, "What the Butler Saw"), to a convalescent spa in the Alps, to Chesapeake Bay, Key West, and a Korean temple pond...
...But Spires' gift can degenerate into weakness...
...Given the potential she demonstrates, I hope Elizabeth Spires will risk more in her next book...
...However, the monkish authorities will not allow him to lose himself amid the farm boys who make up the lower ranks of religious communities...
...Or only ourselves...
...But even among the indigent unwashed he cannot entirely repress his appreciation of handsome male bodies...
...Hyacinth was the friend who initiated Mark...
...Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate actually made a hit with regular novel fans, though composed throughout in Byron's Rhyme Royal...
...Browning's Aurora Leigh although few of them had read it...
...Soon this uneasy ménage is blown apart by a woman—the awful bluestocking Theodora...
...So he flees to a Benedictine monastery hoping to be accepted into this chaste sanctum...
...Hine chooses to parody "that first psychological novel" of sexual transgression and redemption, St...
...No one has more shrewdly described the war between fallen human nature and Divine Grace than the Bishop of Hippo...
...Careful observation, delicately nuanced language, wry comments about life's beauty and terror—these are not necessarily enough to sustain a volume of verse...
...Until recently, Modernist critics made fun of E.B...
...Frequently, the seriously sick find comfort in the community of fellow-patients who can share that particular self-doubt, a modern version of sin, and the desperate hope for redemption that turns up more often in our clinics and hospitals than in churches...
Vol. 72 • March 1989 • No. 5
