Faulkner poetry

Henry's first poems, written about 1946, were no more than versified metaphors that were notes for his novel in progress. "The praising leaves / Are dancing with joy / Chattering about / The great cool rain" is a typical one, haiku-like in its simplicity, but not saying much in a poetic sense. Another might just as well have been a sentence from his novel:
Old buildings Sleep utterly, While the warm sun Runs over them Like a gentle smile, Spreading over them, Leaking down into Each crevice, Like warm honey.

By 1949, lonely in New York, experience began to intrude and he began to write real poems. "Speak to me in my native tongue / Words that spill soft as earth / Sweet and sound as the corn I eat." Whereas his prose of the time was rooted in immediate experience, resembling that of the emerging beats, he turned toward the hills for his poetry: "And where my bones / Lime old Kentucky clay, / There will be sweeter corn / My friend; and sweeter golden hay."

Gradually during the next few years, as the fantasy-cloaked past became more attractive than the grungy present, poetry replaced prose as his principal interest. His reading list expanded to include Dylan Thomas, E.E. Cummings, Muriel Rukyser, Kenneth Patchen and Karl Shapiro - all of whom had noticeable influence on his work. Poetry became a kind of holy medium with which to ponder such themes as youth, color, memory, spring, good and evil, God, and nature in all its abundance-all in the context of his past spent on Falling Timber Branch. Many poems incorporated most or all of these themes, tightly packed: "And the smell of walnut leaves / Will return your childhood / You will know it in April / While God shakes morning / From his hair like sarvis bloom"

Nature, especially, received the royal treatment. He wrote of it as if he were in a rapturous agony, as much in awe of it as in love with it: "When God picks purple grapes / from the thunders of the spring, / when the world-green earth / trembles-at His breath's / green storm"; "The gate awaits the visitor spring / The moss backed rocks have turned in silence / Toward the green, green eyes of God."

In keeping with his unorthodoxy, Henry's reverence for nature was more akin to Emerson's than to Wordsworth or Coleridge's. Emerson's thinking that "the ancient precept, 'Know thyself' and the modern precept, 'Study nature' become at last one maxim" was as close to a personal philosophy as Henry espoused in his early poetry.

"Oh, and how will I tell my children
Of what I have learned of life?
Shall I tell them the real reason for the flowers?
That they are trying desperately to show us the ways of humbleness?
And that the winters of a man's loneliness are unbearable,
And that humanity is sick?
And that nature is on the verge of changing her language
Because humanity is failing to understand her,
And that every April the spring is trying to save us,
And that the mountain sarvis trees are still holding their white prayermeetings of blossoms each year?
And that God may withdraw his hand at any moment. . .

Of all his recurring themes, it was God, who for Henry had the nagging presence of a toothache, that was woven most often through his poetry. His utter fascination with his maker, his oneness with Him, was just one of the obvious preoccupations he shared with Emerson's disciple Walt Whitman. "I hear and behold God in every object, yet I understand God not in the least:' Whitman wrote. "Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself." Henry expressed the sentiment, the celebration of the godly Self, countless times, in myriad variations. In an early fifties poem, voluptuously Whitmanesque, he wrote,

He says He remembers,
In an act of creation, that
Grapes were the colors of my soul
And that He had been watching me
Ever since I came into the world
And that my grape colored soul Is where
He got the idea For the spirit of man.

He continued the theme in a rambling prose/poem letter to Jamie Herlihy. "I am the bird of celestial gardens, singing in unknown tongues, holiness is the water that gleams in my singing, I stir, when the million years of His knowing moves me, it is that slow music in me, Godly. . . It is holy to give song to color, the hour of voices in the light, sing oh, sing to His high glory, sing to thyself, for He is God and we are He, God, you and me. . . ." He acknowledged his debt to God for providing him with an endless variety of material-- "I am a poet cranking God for more poems"-- but was not always grateful. "Sorrow is bread for hungry people / who have no taste:' he wrote, probably in the early seventies. "Birds cannot sing through this sorrow / Trees cannot shake it away / God created no sin when he created man / He was insane. . . ." In the end, though, it was his wonder of God that transcended any feelings of oneness or apartness, love or anger for Him.

He once wrote, on the flyleaf of a book of poetry by Muriel Rukeyser, "And what is so beautiful about life is the fact that there are shapes and fantasies and fabulous stories to be told by God that He has never yet told. And that while we grow old and die, He is always so young and the world is so new for all the beautiful people to come."

As original as he was as a person, Henry nevertheless was pulled from a familiar poetic mold. There were Rimbaud and Blake, of course, and, equally obvious, Whitman. It was the same mold that produced Hart Crane, who worked religiously at his excesses, who had a fondness for sailors, and who made an art of imposing on friends. Henry undoubtedly was conscious of his similarities with Crane -- he was reinforced in them by Tennessee Williams, who carried a volume of Crane's poetry as others carry the Bible. He may also have been aware of the stylistic similarities, of Crane's tendency to bloat his poems with more gas than they had room for. He shared an affinity of spirit with Dylan Thomas, the same sacramental view of the world, the preoccupation, blasphemously irreverent at times, with God, the same air of reckless flamboyance infused by innocence. Allen Ginsberg too was an obvious influence (although, among the beats, it was Lawrence Ferlinghetti whom Henry most admired).

In his thinking, Henry mined the same lodes of derangement as Rimbaud and Crane, drawing also on Blake's mysticism and inspired unorthodoxy, Whitman's high-minded narcissism, Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti's brooding philosophical indictments of crass society. All these and others contributed to his style and to his way of looking at things. But, in the end, the influence most evident in all his poetry, from the first to the last phase, was that overly sensitive mountain boy they called Lawrence, the ageless child that lived in Henry's soul like a symbiotic parasite.

The inevitable question is, was this child's spirit released finally through a man's writing good poetry? There is a problem, of course, of using prose to examine anyone's poetry. (Archibald MacLeish said a poem should not mean, but be.) Prose is not suited, as is poetry, for expressing immediate feeling-it takes too many words to do it precisely. If tried-a catch-22-it loses both its immediacy and feeling, retaining only precision. In order for language, an invented, abstract means of expression, to properly express a feeling, it is necessary to modify the language, to use it intuitively, symbolically, metaphorically, to boil it down impressionistically -- and thus it becomes poetry, not prose.

Judging such a highly personalized language in prose is a risky business, often doomed to failure. With Henry's poetry, there is a special problem. He was an emotional denizen of a plane of higher consciousness who, unfortunately, was unschooled in language, having gone only through the sixth grade. With him, language was a clunky old Ford tri-motor trying to serve a jet route, an abacus in the service of a computer engineer. Moreover, he used his later poems as something apart from art -- poetry became a safety valve, a primary language, a weapon.

Is criticism, then, especially of the later poems-in which, as an outlaw poet, he eschewed convention totally- beside the point? The answer was provided by Henry himself. He called himself a poet, and on more than one occasion asked to be judged as one. And why not? Low station and a meager formal education hadn't hindered Keats; and painter/poet and visionary outcast William Blake had overcome similar shortcomings to become one of the world's great poets. As for Henry's later stream-of-consciousness broodings, diatribes, and disquisitions, they are an excellent mirror of the mind that produced them; if that mind is an original one, then the vehicle for looking into it-the poetry-ought to be examined fairly closely.

In fact, much of Henry's poetry, especially the poems of his early and middle years, hold up well under conventional criteria. Ironically, but understandably, these conventional poems show less of the brilliance exhibited in his later poems, which had about as much concern for convention as Blake had for materialism. Many of the earlier poems suggest a self-consciousness, as if he were at that stage where writers are more concerned with craft than art. It is easy to see what merit may be in these poems. One of the best of that period, written when he was incarcerated at St. Elizabeths in 1952, is "Return Home"

The train comes snorting in
Through the field like a horse
Past those squatted shacks
With sad-eyed windows
Where smoke moves like the devil
To do its dirty work
Clothes hang on lines like souls of the poor
In the back yards of shantytown,
And in the streets, time loiters
Like a young boy with hands in his pockets,
Fumbling the marbles of memory.
When the yard gate waves you in,
And birds sing you home again,
Memory is youngness gone. . .
Memory brought you home
And slipped away without pity.
The sunflowers have no part
In sentimental reasons
And the apple trees of truth
Will hurt you real as orphan cries.
You smile because you understand,
Not because you're happy.

This poem, a lyrical distillation of the Thomas Wolfe theme, nicely achieved Henry's purpose. It is a clean poem. His subject is as plain as his imagery, his style unmuddled, his feelings toward the subject clear. He accurately portrayed the hollowness, visually and spiritually, of trying to recapture an ideal that was built on fantasy in the first place. The language is clear, the metaphors -- "fumbling the marbles of memory" -- refreshing, the conclusion apt, if not exactly startling.

It indicates to what lengths he went to improve his work that this version of the poem is considerably different from the one which was published in The Elizabethan at the time. This latest version was probably reworked a few years later for inclusion in the batch that he sent with his Guggenheim application in 1958. The original, which was considerably longer (and which may well have contributed to Pound's advice to become a painter instead of a poet) was an undisciplined, sentimental romp, full of fuzzy imagery, and lacking the simple directness of the final version. In the second stanza, the crisp metaphors of the final version were, in the original, a dullish "You smile upon the past, for nothing has changed / And time, which loitered like a young boy / With hands in his pockets, / Walks through the streets with you."

Fortunately, such lines as "Only the sky is free at times / And at other times is caught in the chicken wire" are missing from the final version.

Other early and middle period poems received similar polishing and revision. A poem entitled "The Insane" (which he read at his oneman extravaganza at Lexington's Opera House and which is similar in content to one he wrote at St. Elizabeths, but substantially different in structure) received an extensive revision of a different sort. It doesn't say much about the structure of the poem that the final version was considerably changed only by mixing up the order of the stanzas. But as an example of his powers of observation, and, in sheer impact, it is one of his most successful poems. They come through life Taking the sacrament of hope While the serpent lays its eggs In their wild and frightened brains They spread their tablecloth of hope For dinner in the sky And like dissolving clouds The linens of their hopes go To some eternal sea of sorrow.

Which has never been named. . . or found, But somewhere beyond the gates of memory is real A sea which consumes The souls of the lost As endless as their misery. They look for messages In the sky And in birds with dark songs, Which are never sung but still are heard
.
Whatever light is in their eyes Is only the yearning for eternity, And in the garden they grow Suicidal flowers, Yearning for death. They hang their laundry on the moon, And leave their souls In the thicket of nettles. There is no argument with more justice than theirs About God.

They build boats for rivers To eternity And never depart on their journey. They cut their cards On the full moon to break the evil, But the cards lose their color. There is a dignity in their misery As though arranged by God. A spiritual grace, as a last blessing, Saving them from being Entirely away. . . and far.

Sometimes they behave as though God Were pleased with the world, And sometimes as though He had Murdered many children.

Like "Return Home;' "The Insane" accomplishes what it set out to do. Reminiscent of Ferlinghetti and the beats, it successfully challenges the reader to look at stereotypes in new ways. It's easy to believe that the poet has observed these strange cases close up, and his portrait of them has the feel of truth. These poems, representative of some of the best of Henry's conventional poetry, weren't terribly sophisticated; they didn't depend on obscure themes or imagery to carry them off-that came later. But, while their intentions were modest in scope, the technique less than dazzling, the words and images were right for the subjects, with no metaphorical phrases more opaque or overblown than they needed to be, no camouflaged redundancies, no gratuitous obscurity.

That is not to say obscurity was lacking in many of the earlier poems. Such lines as "The wild geese will flyaway with my grief, / And the sheep of sorrow will graze / To pastures of happiness" frustrate understanding pretty effectively. Unintentional obscurity, the result of his linguistic abilities being less refined than his visions, marred many poems such as this one, one of several he wrote about New Orleans: "On the bridge that leads to New Orleans / You will find the blue-eyed summer children / Holding their happiness like kites / High above the bruised mulberries of memory. . . ."

Even when he seems to have been conscious of using obscurity in some later poems, it remained a problem distracting rather than contributing to the poems. It seems to be the result of his trying to express mystical experience along with worldly experience. Emotional feelings about worldly experience is the very stuff of poetry; mystical experience tends to resist explanation except in the hands of the very best poets. A gifted musician-a jazz saxophonist or a country dobro playercan sometimes brilliantly interpret mystical experience through his instrument. But let him try to express it verbally.

(The above is a portion of an essay on Henry's poetry exerpted from the book)