ROMAN RUINS IN AMERICA

I

T.S.ELIOT once said of Samuel Johnson that, solely on the basis of his poem "The Vanity of Human Wishes," he could be considered a major poet. Johnson's poem appeared as a twenty-eight page leaflet in 1749, and was the first of his published works to bear his name on the title page. Obviously he had no previous reputation as a poet, nor do most people remember him as one, though Boswell somewhere speaks of Johnson as "perpetually a poet" (a statement intended to refer to his quality of mind. The only two poems which appear to have survived in editors anthologies and readers affections are "London" and "The Vanity of Human Wishes," both based on satires of Juvenal.

We have now a new version of the second century Roman's tenth satire, published as "The Vanity of Human Wishes" by the distinguished American poet Robert Lowell in Near the Ocean. This little book seems to me the outstanding production in what as Frank Sinatra recently said, "was a very good year"--for American poetry as well as for small-town girls. I think particular of the impressive collection of Robert Penn Warren, carrying us from 1923 to 1966 (Selected Poems)and the delicate one of Marianne Moore (Tell Me. Tell Me). To return to Lowell: not only does he give us new proof of his skill and originality in the form which he described in previous volume as imitation (not translation), this time from poems in Latin, Italian, and Spanish. He also demonstrates that the imaginative parturition of his mind is going steadily onward in the age of the pill. His new poems, and especially the five longer ones grouped under the title "Near the Ocean," show him as delightfully un-played out. Here is the first stanza of the collection (from "Waking Early Sunday Morning"):

O to break loose, like the Chinook salmon jumping and falling backnosing up to the impossible stone and bone-rushing waterfall--raw-jawed, weak-fleshed there stopped by ten

steps of the roaring ladder, and then to clear the top on the last try, alive enough to spawn and die.

Mr.Lowell has broken loose in a sense: I shall try to show this in speaking of Near the Ocean and the earlier books. He has indubitably spawned. But dying? Not a chance.

II

Let us consider first the second half of the book, including the version of Juvenal, three Horatian odes, the Brunetto Latini canto from Dante (Inferno XV),and four sonnets by the sixteenth century Spanish poets Gongora and Quevedo. I say versions because I do not think these poems belong in the class which Lowell described as imitations in the preface to his 1961 volume. There he concentrated on the transmission of tone, quoting Boris Pasternak's remark about the usual translator's sacrifice of tone to literal meaning. He then cautioned us to read Imitations as a book of original poems, with the communication of the tone, or of a tone, of their European ancestors as the major goal. Anyone who examines in French the Villon or the Baudelaire who then inspired Mr.Lowell will readily discover that he took great liberties. But I think most would agree that a tone emerged, in many cases very powerfully.

The Juvenal and Horace efforts in Near the Ocean now show Lowell as the proper envy of every translator in English: he has been able to have his cake and eat it. By this I mean that the relevance of Pasternak's remark, true enough for ordinary translators, has faded with respect of Lowell. Calling the poems "Translations" in the introductory more, and distinguishing among them the various degrees of freedom employed, he has managed to combine close fidelity to the literal text with tonal fidelity in an overwhelming percentage of lines and stanzas. And he has managed this working primarily with Latin, and language notoriously difficult for translators (witness the absence of any outstanding translation of the Aeneidsince 1967, when Dryden's was published).

Long ago J.W.Duff, one of the standard historians of Latin literature suggested that Juvenal's pointed hexameters might better be rendered in English with the use of blank verse than with the rhymed heroic couplet,Johnson notwithstanding. This, because blank verse, as the traditional meter of English narrative poetry might evoke for English readers of Juvenal what that poet, following the examples of Lucilius and Horace, evoked for Roman readers of satire: the suggestion of an ironic tone through the epic ring of the hexameter, used for very serious purposes by Lucretius and Virgil. Lowell has done exactly this, and sometimes achieves subtle effects with his rhythmical variation. Illustrating the latter are the first twelve lines of "The Vanity of Human Wishes" Note the suggestive variation of stress in the eleventh:

In every land as far as man can go from Spain to the Aurora or the poles few know, and even fewer choose what's true.

What do we fear with reason, or desire? Is a step made without regret? The gods

ruin whole households for a foolish prayer. Devoured by peace, we seek devouring war,

the orator is drowned by his torrential speech,

the gladiator's murder by his skill at murder. Wealth is worse: how many pile

fortune on fortune--like the Atlantic whale,

they bulk above the lesser fish and die.

Lowell composes much of the time in a startlingly direct, meaningful and contemporary idiom--so did Juvenal. Speaking of the ambitious man: "Your long list/ of honors breaks your neck." Of the emperor Tiberius: "Would you be/Tiberius' right hand, while he sits and suns/ himself at Capri, fed by eastern fags?" Of Cicero: "Yes, all in all, I like such pompous verse/ more than you force, immortal fifth Phillipic!" The passage on Hannibal moves exceptionally well, and is an obvious illustration of the epic note that reverberates hollowly through Juvenal's revulsion:

Throw Hannibal on the scales, how many pounds

does the great captain come to? This is he

who found the plains of Africa too small,

rich Carthage with her mercenary grip stretched from Gibratar to the steaming Nile

and back to Ethiopia, her stud for slaves and elephants....

And What's the end? O glory! Like the others,

he is defeated, then the worried flight, the great, world-famous client cools his heels

in royal anterooms, and waits on some small despot, sleeping off a drunken meal.

What is the last day of this mighty spirit

whose valor turned the known world on its head?

Not swords, or pikes, or legions--no, not these,

his crown for Cannae and those seas of blood

is poison in a ring. March, madman, cross

the Alps, the Tiber-be a purple patch

for schoolboys and them for declamation!

Compared to the previous imitations, "The Vanity of Human Wishes" is a substantial effort (nearly four hundred lines) and a novel one. The closing verses, which provided Johnson with material for a fine passage ("Where then shall Hope and Fear their objects find? ..."), seems in the Lowell version to be more faithful to the original sprit. Juvenal, in a rate constructive comment, here urges man to pray for mens sana in corpore sano. Johnson's soaring close inspires, but is un-Juvenlia on that account. Lowell's tone is simpler, lightly ironic, and a little irritated: just right, as far as I can see.

Success is worshipped as god; it's we who set up shrines and temples in her name.

I give you simply what you have already.

Of the three Horatian poems, the version of the Cleopatra ode (Nuncest bibendum, nunc pede libero/ pulsanda tellus ...) seems the best. The first stanza is ecstatic in its joy:

Now's the time to drink, to beat the earth in rhythm toss flowers on the couches of the gods Friends!

Horace is delighted at the defeat of Anthony and Cleopatra at Atrium, but admires the courage of the queen. Both moods are conveyed by Lowell. Cleopatra's "depraved gangs" are "germs of the Empire" while Caesar is seen in "the scowling truth of his terror." But at the end:

...Then bolder more ferocious, death slipping through your fingers, how could you go aboard Octavian's galleys,

how could you march on foot, un humbled,

to crown triumphant Caesar's triumph--

no queen now, but a private woman?

Lowell excusably makes no attempt to duplicate the intricate metrics of Horace; for the Alsaic stanzas of two of the odes he successfully substitutes short lines with a varying number of stresses. In the "Spring" ode, however, the meter of the original, a strange mixture of falling dactyls and trochees alternating with rising lambs is important for the poem's mixture of moods. Mr.Lowell substitutes a more regular series of five-stress lines, but supplies energy and excitement with repetition, and improves in at least one passage of typically Horatian philosophy by turning a flat statement into a metaphor:

Move quickly, the brief sum of life forbids

our opening any long account with hope.

III

Of the seven original poems which occupy the first half of Near the Ocean, "Waking Early Sunday Morning" and "Forth of July in Maine," standing first, seem best. But they are all good. The reader of Lowell will recognize much familiar thematic material: New England, the sea, war, religious allusions, classical references, and the effect of technology in the large city. There are quite specific reminiscences (Compare "Forth of July" with "The Mills of the Kavanaughs," for example). Mr.Lowell's mastery of rhyme seems as vigorous as it was twenty years ago in Lord Weary's Castle; indeed, the collections in that book entitled "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket: and "In Memory of Arthur Winslow" may be profitably compared with "Near the Ocean" if the reader has the inclination. Lowell seems most natural, lucid, and powerful when writing of Maine in the first two poems. The other three are of New York: "The Opposite House" and "Central Park" are brief, clear, and properly depressing. But the final poem, itself called "Near the Ocean," although it boasts an impressive technical display of straight rhymes, off-rhymes, and sight rhymes, and some extremely forceful language, is loosely constructed and lacks the clarity of the other pieces. The police in the last stanza of "The Opposite House, the lion and the kitten in "Central Park," the end of "Fourth of July" set in the firelight in the dead of winter--these are all memorable moments in this collection,and by no means all of them. The short poem "For Theodore Roethke" is a moving testimonial, in which the sea is used in one more imaginative way by Lowell, while the sonnet "1958," an impressionistic series of recollections, seems poor if compared to "Water" the opening poem of For the Union Dead, and a simpler and more effective memory of lost love.

I hardly dare attempt a statement on the book's unity. Lowell says in his note that the theme connecting the translations in Rome, but that he does not quite understand how one couples Rome with the America of his own poems. I feel quite sure there is a unity, and that such a coupling can be made, but equally sure that it should be made in a suggestive way that remains open to modification. There are certain parallels between Juvenal-Lowell on Rome and Lowell on New York, for example. Consider the lines "Behind each bush perhaps a knife" ("Central Park") and "If you take a walk at night/ carry a little silver, be prepared/ to think each shadow hides a knife or spar" ("The Vanity of Human Wishes"). The more significant parallels with Juvenal, however, lie in the Maine poems, where the wish "to break loose" is in profound tension with the wish to return to "when the universe was young" (if one takes the context of breaking loose as implying movement into the future).

Juvenal wrote soon after the dark reign of the emperor Domitian, and the subject of his satires is the corruption in Rome of the last two decades of the first century. Consideration of man's folly in the things he prays for is his topic in "The Vanity of Human Wishes," and leads to the more positive question: what should man pray for? Lowell, obviously as disturbed as Juvenal about his age, though perhaps for slightly different reasons, asks a yet more basic question: can we, at this point, find it in us to pray at all? I return again to "Waking Early Sunday Morning," in which the narrator is summoned to church by electric bells to hear the hymns which "sign of peace and preach despair. "Decline and the brink of despair, commonly held by those who spent their youth in the shadows of Domitian and Hitler, are powerfully communicated in this fine stanza:

When will we see Him face to face? Each day He shines through darker glass.

In this small town where every thing is known, I see His vanishing emblems, His white spire and flagpole sticking out above the fog, like old white china doorknobs, sad, slight, useless things to calm the mad.

Sidney Nolan's drawings do not, in general, add much to this excellent book. Where the intent is light humor, they succeed modestly; but Lowell and Juvenal are similar in that they frequently intend to repel through the use of humor not light but grim, and Mr. Nolan's attempts to repel only amuse. But one buys the book to read Lowell, and what one reads is surely contemporary poetry of the first rank. After twenty years, this seems for the present generation closer to fact than opinion, though taste in succeeding ones will doubtless fluctuate. For the present. I must make the canned appeal to those faintly interested to go out and buy the book--if possible, today, April 21, as the celebration of an anniversary. Anyone wondering what Juvenal, Horace, Domitian and all the rest were doing on this date during their lifetimes could be reliably assured that they were celebrating the Parilia, the traditional birthday of the city of Rome. That was exactly 2,720 years ago