Wandering through the Listening Booth, my ear was piqued by the accents of men and women from another age. I found myself less interested in the accents of my own time. This isn’t surprising—one of the great gifts of poetry is that it takes us out of our own skins, and out of our own times and out of the familiarities and clichés of our common tongue. When Wordsworth felt “the world is too much with us,” he cast his imagination back to the Greek myths of Proteus and Triton. When I feel the world is too much with us, I transport myself through the rich language and mysterious symbolism of poets like Laura (Riding) Jackson and James Merrill, poets who intrigued me even when I was a teenager thumbing through a second-hand copy of the Norton Anthology.
Riding and Merrill are two poets one seldom reads side by side. They are of different generations (born 25 years apart), temperaments (she a cerebral Modernist; he an autobiographical aesthete), and upbringings (she the daughter of Austrian Jewish immigrants; he the scion of Charles Merrill, founder of the Merrill Lynch investment bank). But there are overlaps. Both were born in New York City and fled to Europe as young adults; both spent significant time in the Mediterranean, steeped in classical mythologies. Both ended up with partners named Jackson! I can't find any evidence that they ever met—by the time Merrill went to college, Riding had married her last husband and settled down on a citrus farm in Wabasso, Florida, far from any literary scene.
Yet, it struck me that there is some point of contact between Riding’s 30-line “Doom in Bloom,” which according to Robert Graves’ diary, was written around September 1937, and Merrill’s 31-line poem “The Greenhouse,” first published in 1952. “Laura has been having trouble with her poem now called Doom in Bloom & did little else all day but 8 lines of it,” wrote Graves on September 21. When you listen to her read it, you notice the British clip of her voice, acquired somewhere between 1926 and 1939 (the era of her European self-exile) and still prominent in 1972, the year of the recording. You also notice the precision with which she enunciates, and the briskness of the whole performance: The coldness with which she reads is thrilling with respect to this dark spell of a poem, but it suggests too a distance from the obvious difficulty of it—both the difficulty of its meaning and the difficulty of writing it on that long-ago afternoon in 1937.
“The Greenhouse,” on the other hand, is much more sensual, and Merrill’s languid reading is entirely of a piece with its lush reverie. But it, like “Doom in Bloom,” contains much that is obscure—or better yet, camouflaged.
Both poems hide an allegory about womanhood under elaborate phrasings like tangled vines—“Gruesomely joined in hate/Of unlike efflorescence...”; “Down ferned-faint-steaming alleys of lady slipper....”—mimicking the floridity of their subject. We guess that these are about sexual maturation. There is a difference, though, in tone—Merrill’s is romantic while Riding’s is full of “ultimate misgiving.” Both have a fairy tale quality to them: the fronds “touch my arm,” Merrill says; I think of the nursery rhyme: Mary, how does your garden grow? ...pretty maids all in a row. But his fairy tale takes place in a hothouse. Riding’s is all witch: “Now flower the oldest seeds.” They seem to want to stay in the ground; there is a “long reluctance.” But “time has knit so hard a crust” that the seeds must “speak and differ” lest they die in the ground “in pride encased.”
What really strikes me is the way in which both poems distinguish a “one” against a multitude of sameness. There is a subtler allegory in these poems than the passage from girlhood to womanhood. Flowers are copies of each other. They are a mass of conformity. Merrill begins: “So many girls vague.” He repeats, later in the poem: “So many women.” They are all beautiful, but all interchangeable. The turning point in the poem comes with his exclamation:
Tell me (I said)
Among these thousands which you are!
Who is he speaking to? The One, as we say: the soulmate, the bride, “the proud love fastened on.” As the poem ends, it predicts that her cohort, all those masses of beautiful interchangeable others, will be allowed to rot so that “none shall tempt, when she is gone.”
And Riding, too, selects one from her masses of conformist florets:
The lone defiance blossoms failure,
But risk of all by all beguiles
Fate’s wreckage into similar smiles.
What is her “one” defying? What is the “risk” that the others take? I think it is reproduction. All of them are reluctant to do it, but “Hope makes a stronger half to beauty” and the majority choose to replicate their kind despite “peril.” Knowing how risky childbirth used to be, it’s no wonder that women subliminally fear reproduction. But there is another, existential aspect to this fear—that one’s very singularity is put at risk by reproducing. This is the singularity by which we are loved and loved alone—as Merrill's poem elaborates.
In these recordings, as I mentioned, Riding sounds cold and thrilling, Merrill more languid and seductive. Her rhymes beguile the ear, but even without regular rhyme, he too strikes the ear as formal; where Riding sounds hieratic, he sounds elegant (I hear overtones of Cary Grant and Peter O’Toole!). This formalism might put off some listeners. But I would make the case that poetry occasionally needs to step outside the contemporary (in this case the contemporary bias toward plain, demotic speech), if only to better examine its own prejudices.
Ange Mlinko’s new collection of poems, Marvelous Things Overheard, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in Fall 2013. She received the Poetry Foundation's Randall Jarrell Award in Criticism, and teaches poetry in the Creative Writing program at the University of Houston.