Painful Mysteries

...the double querying of Apollo at Delphi by both father and son...

...Was the prophecy self-fulfilling because of the actions of those who heard it, or did the oracle merely describe what was preordained...

...Was it first written in Linear B, or perhaps in Phoenician cuneiform, or did the gods sing it in their own nonhuman language long before mortals developed speech...

...These disclose tiny pictures of angels, toys and such until the final door reveals a crèche...

...Part Three contemplates the fate of Osip Mandelstam— like Dante a literary victim of political persecution—who died in a concentration camp near Vladivostok...

...Unlike the God of Judaism, Christianity or Islam, the ancient Greek deities were "born in the same purple room/As slaves are bom, and tyrants...

...Schnackenberg meditates particularly about the forgotten origin of the tale: The long-broken, unrecoverable original First sent to him, the earliest tablet With a story about a nameless foundling Lost on the mountainside of his own life, Written, not in Greek, but in the language Of the gods, In gouged-out marks like howls of laughter And brief, snuffed screams, Tablets homely, sunken, heavy Lightless, pockmarked, Like pieces broken from the moon Above the citadel of Thebes— A story scourging the mud surface like a plague, A Mycenaean folktale told In a whispering poetry, Something about the woman's cleft, And a hint that Thebes, secretly wounded, Secretly bled, And a childbirth bed in an ancient palace And an infant maimed and left for dead...

...Gravel, that gives no clues About the mountain it broke off from long ago...

...Yet we pick up a book, or sit in a theater, and are profoundly moved by the way the writer has shaped a cry of agony into a song of endurance...

...As always, she writes intensely, weaving together strands whose repetition in different contexts ultimately deepens the resonance of her verse...

...All three works are being reissued by FSG in a 272-page paperback titled Supernatural Love, priced at $15.00...

...Familiar as this tale has become, its meaning is ambiguous...

...As Supernatural Love demonstrates, she is a formalist...

...Labdacus was the grandfather of Oedipus, so her choice of title might lead readers to guess that in her version the family is doomed like that other notorious and tragic dynasty of Greek myth, the House of Atreus, whose blood-guilt dogged them from generation to generation...

...No one sees that I've returned...

...It is as simple as it is scarifying: Having been told by Apollo that he would kill his father and marry his mother, the young Oedipus resolves not to return home to Corinth...

...IN EACH SECTION of The Throne of Labdacus Oedipus is approached from a different angle, yet the same scenes keep recurring: the infant pierced through the feet and supposedly abandoned on a mountainside (hence his name, which means "swollen-foot...

...This tangle of themes is linked to the writer's own return to poetry after a hiatus of some years...

...With the destruction of Mycenaean civilization around 1200 BCE, at the close of the Bronze Age, this form of writing vanished...

...For Schnackenberg, this involves the roots of civilization and human language...

...In life we can be crushed and broken by them...

...She suggests that Sophocles may be a kind of Sphinx himself, having devised a play that raises more enigmas than certainties...

...Acoordino to legend, the Greek alphabet originated in Thebes, which had been influenced by Phoenician settlers...

...From its very earliest versions, Apollo plays a major role in the myth—a god of poetry and music whose attributes include warding off flies...

...When the unfortunate Laius is struck down at the crossroads by his unknown son, the falling man catches a glimpse of Zeus seated alone on Olympus, In a chair of blinding-white, pure snow...

...Ultimately, The Throne of Labdacus is about the source of poetry...

...Is the protagonist a monster, a victim of circumstance, or a toy of the gods...

...Schnackenberg's ardent interest (passion is a quality that pervades her work) in family cycles, legendary material and epic forms has been clear from her earliest collection...

...Part Two evokes Christ's incarnation, death and resurrection, mostly in relation to a series of Renaissance and Byzantine paintings...

...One of Schnackenberg's enduring themes is her belief that any action, however well-intentioned, can have unbearable consequences...

...Clinging to my fingers only Pain, like glittering bits adhering, When I touch the shining crumbs...

...And Apollo, in his temple at Delphi, keeps trying to recall the origin of this story that must predate the Greek language, and certainly its alphabet...

...Here Apollo himself plays the role of the "pitying slave" who rescues the maimed baby from exposure to the elements, thus saving the hero for his eventual fate...

...no text;/ Yet their aura belongs to the god...

...The poet identifies these documents written by the god with clay tablets containing inventories in Linear ? discovered when the ancient palace at Thebes was excavated...

...For the ancients, parricide and incest were crimes so heinous that they polluted the whole city where they took place...

...The third volume, A Gilded Lapse of Time (1992), starts by examining Dante's relationship with Ravenna, the place of his banishment, while describing the city's Byzantine origin...

...Advent Calendar" recalls a Lutheran teaching toy for small children to count off the days before Christmas...

...Here, the rhyme gives a sense of closure to the King's dying moments and also enhances the mysterious vision of the aloof god...

...Was it, indeed, a "Mycenaean folk tale...

...They emerged from the wombs of their mothers and, presumably, would eventually die like the Titans, their fathers, who preceded them...

...Meanwhile, Zeus sits enthroned and remote from the lives of humans on snowcapped Mount Olympus...

...At its climax, though, "A Gilded Lapse of Time" breaks into Dante's terza rima...

...In an early poem, "Supernatural Love," Schnackenberg pictures her father, a professor of history, searching out the etymology of "carnation" because her calling the bloom "Christ's flowers" puzzles him...

...On the road, he meets an old man whom he strikes down in a quarrel...

...This story proves no less mysterious in its greatest literary manifestations than in its ancient, preliterate origins, except that out of suffering, injustice, sin, and unanswerable riddles the music of literature emerges...

...Sophocles' Oedipus illustrates how truly literature is the story of almost unendurable events...

...Readers of Schnackenberg's previous output know how much culture and scholarship inform her verse...

...The poet/child therefore learns a darker lesson than the superficial anticipation of Christmas: that the world is full of tears, and we, like Christ, reach out to those who will not receive us...

...Of late, Schnackenberg is less inclined to use the hymn meters that once distinguished much of her work...

...The poem's 10th section describes "The Premiere of Oedipus" at the theatrical festival in Athens...

...She, as a four-year-old, sits beside him trying to sew...

...Farther on in the poem, the later writing system appears: The alphabet, in which lay hidden The tale of Oedipus, no longer gouged out In the gods' language, illegible to humans, But written in Greek...

...Gjertrud Schnackenberg has fashioned a profound meditation on the mysteries of feeling and language that inspire human beings to poetry...

...Give me entrance to the village From my childhood where the doorways Open pictures in the skies...

...Now, in The Throne of Labdacus, Schnackenberg wrestles with the Oedipus story, trying to tease out fresh meanings from the questions it raises...

...Coming to Thebes, he saves the population from the Sphinx, marries the Queen, Jocasta, and becomes the next ruler...

...Apollo knew the future, yet was evidently no more capable of averting it than any mortal can avoid the inexorable "piling-up of consequence/With a bleeding-through of episodes and accidents...

...Then there is the horrible moment when Oedipus, now King, realizes who he is, finds his mother/wife has hanged herself from shame, and blinds himself, underlining the role of Blind Necessity—the goddess who controls fate...

...At one point, Schnackenberg has Apollo "scribbling in Linear B,// Merely scratching out lists of supplies/ Of helmets and shields for a local infantry,//And tallies of royal chariots, /And tablets for counting by fifties// The populations of cattle and sheep...

...then turning/ To more savage reckonings,// Writing out the names of humans by the thousands,/ as if humans were merely quantities// To be counted out and bundled into sheaves...

...the benevolence of the slave who rescues the child from a miserable fate, without realizing that this act will ensure a horrible destiny...

...In the 20th century, it became the basis for Freudian psychoanalysis and modernist literature...

...Freud, however, believed these taboos sprang from an unconscious, universal desire in every man to supplant his father in the parental bed...

...They did not teach humans their language...

...Present as well are the Sphinx who kills anybody failing to answer her riddle, and the servant who takes pity on the maimed infant and gives it to the childless King and Queen of Corinth to raise as their own...

...Her early work was often composed in conventional stanzas, although frequently the effect was anything but conventional...

...Schnackenberg's powers of description of feeling are reminiscent of other formalists: the young Robert Lowell of Lord Weary's Castle, Anthony Hecht and Thom Gunn, to name but a few...

...A Gilded Lapse of Time," from her third collection, weaves together Dante's Platonic cosmology, theology, Byzantine culture, astronomy, and angels...

...Their vulnerability appeals to Schnackenberg...

...This accretion of associations with pain, the passion of Christ, the flesh, and the meaning of language is basic to Schnackenberg's imagination...

...Yet, the actual subject of this lengthy work is her own struggle with poetry—which she had lately found too painful to herself and hurtful to others to continue writing...

...Although this syllabic system (only deciphered in 1952) seems to have been used merely for keeping lists and tallies, its symbols look poetic, mysterious, as if offering clues about a culture otherwise cut off from our own day...

...At their most successful, the densely packed images that work on their own as symbols take on additional layers of meaning when you are familiar with what the poet is discussing, be it literature, history, art, botany, myth, or some other subject in her cornucopia of disciplines...

...For Aristotle, Sophocles' play on the subject was the supreme example of tragedy, but other classical authors, most notably Euripides and Seneca, also treated the story...

...The word unpacks its complex associations—"flesh," "incarnate,"—as does the botanical name, "a pink variety of Clove—/from French, for clou, meaning a nail...

...In the meantime, the little girl has just accidentally driven the needle into her finger, down to the bone...

...Though the Olympians lived on a different scale than kings or shepherds or slaves, they too were subject to Nature, which they had not created, and to Fate...

...In the course of the volume, she takes an ancient story of ambiguous meaning and humanizes it into a story about the vicissitudes of life: the cruelty of desperate acts, like the mutilation and abandonment of a helpless baby...

...Then a faceful of gravel...

...The Throne of Labdacus also employs rhyme at its most ecstatic moments, as if mimicking Apollo's lyric song...

...Rhyme can intensify the effect of poetry...

...The opening section, "The God Tunes the Strings," begins mysteriously with a tiny sound reminiscent of "a housefly alighting from Persia/And stamping its foot on a mound...

...But when all the doors are open...

...The scene is generally sprinkled with glitter, suggesting snow...

...Gjertrud Schnackenberg takes up the myth in her fourth book of poems, The Throne of Labdacus (Farrar Straus Giroux, 100 pp., $23.00...

...The Greek letters, Waiting in silence to be arranged Into the comedies and tragedies...

...But to Schnackenberg, even that idyllic depiction "hints of something bought and sold,/ hints of murder in the stars...

...When lay to be admitted, No one answers, no one comes...

...One opens numbered doors each day until Christmas...

...All the questions about beginnings and meanings remind her of the Sphinx' riddles...

...As Schnackenberg puts it, "No poetry whispers [from these tablets...

...Throughout The Throne of Labdacus Apollo increasingly represents not only the god of poetry but the poet...

...The Christ child, for whom these happy preparations are being made, has suffered the agony and death common to humanity...

...Usually, these are small paper illustrations of a German village in winter, showing shops and houses, with people preparing for the holiday...

...The primitive tale of Oedipus' hardwon self-knowledge becomes for her the account of how cultures learned to tell stories that described their understanding of the cosmos, divine and human laws, mortal suffering, and the process of redemption necessitated by misdeeds, whether intentional or unwitting...

...Only later does he discover that his true parents—the King and Queen of Thebes—abandoned him as an infant because Apollo's oracle had foretold his destiny...

...Both her first book, Portraits and Elegies (1982), and her second, The Lamplit Answer (1985), chronicle her parents' and ancestors' histories, in the course of telling her own story through filters of fairy tale and legend...

...Apollo, the Greek god of poetry, is tuning his lyre "With the squeak of wooden pegs—/ Rotating in their holes/As if he were setting the tragic text/ To the music of houseflies...