Stargazing and Sufi Poetics

November 8, 2001 | This article appeared in the November 26, 2001 edition of The Nation.

Share
|
|
|
Recommended by 0
|
Text Size A | A | A

When I interviewed Robert Bly on an icy London evening in December 1997, he talked about the Eskimo. This was a short while after the English publication of his second popular prose work, The Sibling Society, a book far more radical in its propositions and conclusions than Iron John had been. Where the earlier book dealt with the boy-child's journey to maturity, this new book focused on the end of that journey--adulthood--or, rather, the lack of it in contemporary society. Without getting too close to what remains a touchy topic in liberal society, the book circled around the subject of authority, trying to wrest it from its negative associations and historical abuses. Bly was interested in the meaning of maturity, which he posited as a state of dignity, clarity and power, and he was concerned about the effects of our having removed the positive hierarchies and limitations that previously aided our passage to genuine adulthood. So he was intrigued to have read somewhere that the Eskimo were the most adult people on the face of the earth. This was because, as he put it, "Adulthood is connected, in some mysterious way that no one understands, with the number of limitations that there are in your life." And of course the deprivation and difficulty of living with extreme weather and other conditions give ample limitations.

About the Author

Ian Tromp

Ian Tromp writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and Poetry Review in Britain, has published reviews in...

Also by the Author

A Poet Duly Noted (Poetry)

The English edition of The Complete Poems of William Empson was reviewed by Frank Kermode in the London Review of Books under the sly headline "William Empson: a most noteworthy poet." Empson liked to append his own notes to his poems, and even as a young man, he asked when entering negotiations with a publisher, "If I publish a volume of verse with notes longer than the text, as I want to do, will that be a prose work or a verse one?" Add to the author's own notes the glosses and historicizing of the book's editor, John Haffenden, and you have a book with nearly three times the length of commentary as of text.

The book is divided into four broad sections: ninety-four pages of introduction, acknowledgments, bibliography and dating; 107 pages of poems; seven appendixes; and a further 266 pages of notes. I like very much poet Roy Campbell's view that "in the notes you meet Mr Empson himself, and that is a charming experience."

To judge by the good humor and diffidence of the notes, and the many letters and other private texts quoted here, Empson does seem to have been a charming man. (His notes on the poems are distinguished from Haffenden's by boldface type.) Where Haffenden's notes are expository and biographical, Empson's are quite enigmatic and puzzling--in his three-page note to the three-page poem "Bacchus," Empson wrote: "Columbus...once puzzled people about how to stand an egg on its end; the answer was to crack the shell. He is Humpty Dumpty the egg and a foam omelette because wisdom via drink requires breaking eggs..." and so on.

"It really ought to be possible to write simple, goodhumoured, illuminating and long notes to one's own poems without annoying the reader," Empson wrote in a posthumously published essay (probably dating from 1929, when the poet was just 23 years old). He saw his poems as a kind of puzzle, and the notes as a set of clues to solving them. In a preface to his 1940 volume, The Gathering Storm (a title he elsewhere accused Winston Churchill of stealing), he spoke of his notes as "like answers to a crossword puzzle" and presented this aspect as part of the pleasure of his poetry. He seems, in fact, to have thought it would have been impertinent to offer the poems without these clues, and so the notes were, to him, inseparable from the poems. He put this point playfully in 1927, in the draft of an unfinished libretto quoted in Haffenden's note to "Two songs from a libretto." The characters are a young girl, May, and her two aunts, and the sequence begins by referring to T.S. Eliot's quotation from philosopher F.H. Bradley in his notes to The Waste Land:

[May:] What did Professor Bradley say whom T.S. Eliot quotes?
[Aunt 1:] Surely but only in the notes.
[Aunt 2:] Why, should I have read all the notes?
[May:] His notes are part of what he quotes

The best of Empson's poems are the slighter of his works, expressing vulnerability, bewilderment or wonder. These often are poems of beautiful poise and tenderness; the two short stanzas of "The Extasie" are a good example:

Walking together in the muddy lane
The shallow pauses in her conversation
Were deep, like puddles, as the blue sky;
So thin a film separated our firmaments.

We who are strong stand on our own feet.
You misunderstand me. We stand on the reflections of our feet.
Unsupported, we do not know whether to fall upwards or downwards,
Nor when the water will come through our shoes.

The poem effects a kind of reversal, its simple language and limpid imagery twisting around something unsaid, around a current of confusion that is not named but is felt in its discomforted air. The knotted first image reveals this--"deep, like puddles, as the blue sky"--the contradictions here, the running together of shallowness and immensity, are the first hint at the uncertainty and confusion that lie beneath the thin film of the poem's composure.

"Camping Out" is another good example, and to my mind the best of Empson's poems. He managed here to draw a Metaphysical poem from an everyday act: "And now she cleans her teeth into the lake," it begins, and then the poem reads in the splatters of toothpaste on the water's surface "a straddled sky of stars," concluding: "Who moves so among stars their frame unties;/See where they blur, and die, and are outsoared." The central image is similar to that of the poem just quoted--but where "The Extasie" speaks of the real sky mirrored in a puddle, here the image is inverted so the sky is replaced, indeed is created, by the spreading pattern of white toothpaste floating on the lake.

Was Empson an important poet? He was certainly an important writer, and his critical works--most famously, his Seven Types of Ambiguity--will always be worth reading. Like his criticism, his poems are very much of their time--they are a necessary instruction in the aesthetic values of high Modernism, and they make the most sense when considered amid the work of his contemporaries, including Eliot. Empson consistently derided and dismissed his own poetry, and he eventually stopped writing it, arguing that "if I'd gone on it would have got appallingly boring. It's only because I stopped in time that you still think it's poetry." Introducing the epigrammatic "Let it go" on a recording of his poems, he simply said: "'Let it go' is about stopping writing poetry."

It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange.
The more things happen to you the more you can't
Tell or remember even what they were.

The contradictions cover such a range.
The talk would talk and go so far aslant.
You don't want madhouse and the whole thing there.

If this is simply about his decision to write no more poems, we must understand that the dangers of "madhouse and the whole thing there" lie in the direction of poetry, and that more poems would have led to things going "so far aslant." But you never know with Empson; you're never sure whose voice speaks, or what it portends, or whether this is just a well-considered move within the construct of the poem. Discussing Empson's annotations, Haffenden avers, "Though tricky, his poems were not intended to be tricksy." This is generous, but occasionally untrue. In his signature modesty, Empson spoke of his own verse as "clotted," and he confessed, in a letter to Eliot, his "air of having to be clever all the time." Before a reading of the poem "Bacchus," Empson used the very word Haffenden denies, describing the poem as "slightly tiresome to listen to, really, because it is so tricksy." This was always a tendency of the poetry, and if one does not adopt the view of poetry-as-puzzle, his work can be frustratingly obscure, and sometimes raises the question of whether it is worth the considerable effort and concentration it demands.

English poet and critic Craig Raine has argued that Empson's verse suffers from what he calls "the undistributed middle"--beginnings and conclusions are presented without adequate connection, and so "the reader doesn't get it." And then the poems can often seem inconsequential. Yet poets as various as Geoffrey Hill and John Fuller and John Berryman have spoken up for Empson's verse. Berryman noted in the margins of his copy of the 1949 issue of Empson's Collected Poems, "a poetry matter-of-fact, alert, spare; & yet elegant." All of these terms apply, and I would emphasize, too, that Empson was, for all his complications and complexity, a poet of tremendous feeling.

In a 1963 interview reprinted as the second appendix to this volume of the Complete Poems, William Empson spoke of his interlocutor's "beautiful sympathy," and the phrase fittingly describes the careful and affectionate tone of Haffenden's introductory essay and copious notes to Empson's work. Haffenden has done an excellent job of unraveling the poems and situating them within their literary and personal contexts.

I'm left with an odd tension over Empson's ultimate significance, and yet am wholeheartedly convinced of the value and achievement of what Haffenden has done in preparing and presenting Empson's work. This is both a collected and a variorum edition, and the editor's devotion to Empson (this is the sixth book of the poet's writing that he has edited), his thorough knowledge of his subject and his careful unraveling of allusion and reference are of great value. The book will not reinvent Empson's verse or make its difficulties much easier, but Haffenden's dedication and "beautiful sympathy" have created an affable and engaging context for it. Despite the poetry sometimes being frustrating, and even though the hundreds of pages of notes occasionally distract from the poems themselves, The Complete Poems of William Empson is an extraordinary book.

Ian Tromp

Related Topics

Abraham Called Bly James Wright London Louis Simpson Person Career Person Relation Robert Bly Rumi Sibling Society Sunil Dutta United States William Stafford

But the reason we turned to the Eskimo was that we were speaking about poetry, and poets have always had to work with limitations. Most of the poets of Bly's generation--he spoke specifically of Ginsberg, James Wright and Louis Simpson--learned and practiced traditional forms at the beginning of their careers. "And then free verse came, and we went into free verse, which is really un-Eskimo-like behavior." He and his young fellow poets gave up their limitations and wrote the free-form work for which they are now best known. But Bly went on to say, "I'm 70 now, and I'm more and more interested in finding limitations in poetry, so I'm going back and finding ones, even though I don't have to."

He had then just published in the United States his last volume of new work, Morning Poems. The self-imposed limitation that governed that book was the discipline of writing a poem every morning--following the habit of his friend William Stafford, who woke early most mornings to write, from the period of his internment as a conscientious objector during World War II until his death in 1993. Bly explained that his own working method had been to remain in bed until he finished the poem, which on some days meant getting up at dawn, on others at noon.

The Night Abraham Called to the Stars has a different set of limitations entirely: The poems are all written in an invented eighteen-line form consisting of six three-line stanzas, with unrhymed lines of between nine and fourteen syllables in length. The stanzas, like those of the Islamic ghazals on which Bly based his form, are not necessarily linked in theme or narrative. As Bly put it in his introduction to the volume of Ghalib's ghazals that he translated with Sunil Dutta, "It slowly becomes clear that we are dealing with a way of adventuring one's way through a poem utterly distinct from our habit of textual consistency in theme" (The Lightning Should Have Fallen on Ghalib). Like Ghalib's work, Bly's new poems often jump from praise to despair, from absurdity to love, but sometimes he runs lines on between stanzas, as in the first poem, from which the book takes its title:

Do you remember the night Abraham first called
To the stars? He cried to Saturn: "You are my Lord!"
How happy he was! When he saw the Dawn Star,

He cried, "You are my Lord!" How destroyed he was
When he watched them set. Friends, he is like us:
We take as our Lord the stars that go down.
("The Night Abraham Called to the Stars")

The poems of the book's final section tighten the limitation by requiring also that each stanza end on the same word:

I never understood that abundance leads to war,
Nor that manyness is gasoline on the fire.
I never knew that the horseshoe longs for night.

During my twenties I worked in the opal mines.
No one could open the door to Saturn's house.
I had no choice but to live in my father's night.
("Noah Watching the Rain")

Since his 1994 volume, Meditations on the Insatiable Soul, Bly's work has more clearly expressed his interest in spiritual themes, and in the imagery and storytelling of several spiritual traditions, especially the Gnostic heritage and that of Sufism, the mystical aspect of Islam. Indeed, the title of that book was itself a translation of a distinction observed in Sufism--it designates the lowest aspect of the nafs, the fourfold Sufi concept of the soul. In The Sibling Society, Bly quoted Dr. Javad Nurbakhsh, head of the Nimatullahi Order of Sufis, and the person to whom his new poems are dedicated:

This nafs is of a bestial character that harasses other created beings and consistently sings its own praise. It always follows its own desires and grazes on the field of material nature; it drinks from the spring of the passions and knows only how to sleep, eat, and gratify itself.

Rumi sometimes calls this the "Animal Soul," which he symbolized as a snake in a poem quoted in The Sibling Society. The poem tells the story of a snake-catcher who goes into the mountains: "He wanted a friendly pet, and one that would amaze/audiences, but he was looking for a reptile, something/that has no knowledge of friendship." He finds a snake that he believes to be dead, but that is actually only sleeping, which wakes and eats him as well as the audience gathered round to witness his remarkable bravery. The "insatiable soul" is like this--mean, unpredictable, likely to harm us and those around us; it will not be our friend.

This has become a commanding image in Bly's work: It stands for all the powers of immaturity, for all that blocks us from true individuation and adulthood, eventually for what most fundamentally keeps us from union with the Beloved, the transcendental ideal for which Sufi mystics long. In the new poems, this nafs has different names and a range of imageries--sometimes Bly speaks of it directly, as when he writes, "We all live close to our greedy souls./We have inherited so many longings/That in the other world our name is 'So Many.'" But it is invoked, too, when he says "a dove's breastbone is a cathedral of desire." This nafs is the animal aspect of our consciousness not only in the sense that it is desiderative, but in that it is also frequently stupid, motivating us to do things we regret, or to harbor feelings that harm us or others, or simply to think in ways that are foolish and ridiculous:

My greedy soul and I share the same room.
When I see a book written two thousand years
Ago, I check to see if my name is mentioned.
("The Five Inns")

Without directly invoking this nafs, Bly speaks of its effects when, in another poem, he confesses some of the stridency and opinionatedness of his own earlier writing:

One teaspoon of envy was enough for me
To attack Robert Lowell; with a tablespoon
I could have taken on Henry James or Abelard.
("The Way the Parrot Learns")

One of the stages of the journey described in Iron John is a period of humiliation, which Bly termed katabasis, a word referring to military retreat but derived from Greek roots meaning literally "to go down." In the Iron John story it refers to a time when the young hero works in the kitchens of a castle, way down in the building's basement, close to the earth. The kind of self-parody and playful confession in the passage quoted from "The Way the Parrot Learns" exemplifies a kind of katabasis in Bly's mature work. Increasingly in his last few books he has considered his past work and opinions, and reflected with humility and sadness on some of his own attitudes. Eating the Honey of Words, the new and selected volume published in 2000, included some telling revisions of earlier work, changes that usually made the poems less strident and opinionated. In another of the Abraham poems, Bly admits, "The muddler you are reading has lied to you/Often." Humiliation is one of the best ways of dealing with the "hungry soul": It longs for praise and gratification--telling the truth undermines its vanity and desire. A poem about a painting by Rembrandt ends saying, "The father protects his son by washing him in the night." The line is ambiguous: The father washes the child at nighttime, and in the waters of darkness. Another poem declares, "The soul is in love with marshy ground and snails,/With mud, darkness, wind, smoke and fire." This elemental imagery of descent runs through Abraham--there is much mud here. "My poems are sad," Bly writes. "How could it be otherwise?" But his poems are also joyful, filled with a reflective pleasure in the passing moment but tinged with sadness at each moment's ending. The collection begins and ends with poems about setting stars, the closing lines of the final poem circling round to the book's first words, quoted above:

People in love with the setting stars are right
To adore the baby who smells of the stable, but we know
That even the setting stars will disappear at dawn.
("Dawn")

Like the line about the father washing his son in the night, there is poignant ambiguity in this image, for though, like Abraham, we are "destroyed" when we watch the stars we love go down, it is into the brightness of day that they disappear.

Many of the poets who began writing around the time Bly did have already died; almost all the masters and exemplars who guided him are long dead, many have already faded from public memory, some from literary memory. The patterns of influence within his work are wide-ranging--Bly has read voraciously in the literatures of many languages and times. Among his contemporaries, the late William Stafford stands out more and more clearly as Bly's closest confrère--his vision and his sympathies were similarly broad, and he expressed in his poems a sense of care and value that resonates with Bly's work. The poems of The Night Abraham Called to the Stars mark the ripening of a new current in Bly's career: Now in his mid-70s, he is writing with tremendous energy and clarity and force, and producing some of the best work of his long career.

During a reading at the Globe Theatre in London, Bly spoke of Rumi as the most popular poet in America. The expression of longing is one of the most characteristic aspects of Rumi's poetry--the longing of the aspirant for his spiritual teacher, of man for God, which is often expressed in Sufi poetry as longing for the Beloved. The Night Abraham Called to the Stars expresses this yearning more urgently than any of Bly's prior work, and it's certain to be said that his poems are influenced by Rumi. But the points of coincidence run deeper than this, and too closely likening Bly's new poems to those of the great Sufi teacher is to take away from Bly's achievement. He has previously made versions of Rumi's work--as he has of work by Ghalib, Kabir, Tranströmer, Machado and others. Bly tells at least one story in Abraham that was told previously by Rumi. Coleman Barks, who is probably the best known of Rumi's many contemporary translators, has spoken of the pivotal role of Bly's early encouragement in his decision to dedicate so many years to the task of translation. But the poems of The Night Abraham Called to the Stars express more than influence, a word meaning, literally, a flowing-in from another source--Bly's poems flow from the same source as did Rumi's, the great current of longing for reality, for true maturity, the devotee's call to the Beloved.

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article—and every article published since for the past five years—right now.

There's no obligation—try The Nation for four weeks free.

Get your subscription
to The Nation