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Jack Foley
New member
Username: Foley
Post Number: 52
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Friday, February 05, 2010 - 03:12 pm: | 
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WENDELL BERRY ON MARRIAGE
Today's poem of the day, sent around Sonoma County:
Subject: A Marriage, an Elegy - Wendell Berry
"A Marriage, an Elegy
They lived long, and were faithful
to the good in each other.
They suffered as their faith required.
Now their union is consummate
in earth, and the earth
is their communion. They enter
the serene gravity of the rain,
the hill's passage to the sea.
After long striving, perfect ease."
In short, the true consummation of a marriage is BEING DEAD.
I answered in somewhat extravagrant doggerel:
O county Sonoma
You're all in a coma
Or else in a funk
Admiring such junk
"Hooray for the pain"
—Ain't you got a brain?
O no we have not
We let our brains rot
Thought came to a halt
Oooooooooooooo it's Poetry's fault!
I’ve been wed forty-eight
Years and I state
Berry’s miserable, dreary dance
Is not my experi-ance
I’m all at a vari-ance
With this Wendell Berry-ance…
Who'd want a union
Where Death's the communion?
*
I admit that Berry’s poem might be taken as an attack on marriage, but I don’t think that’s what he intended.
As my doggerel says, I’ve been married for forty-eight years. I wrote the following poem on the occasion of our—Adelle’s and my—fortieth wedding anniversary, December 21, 2001. It was long enough ago that I am now beginning to feel that I should produce another poem. My fortieth-anniversary poem was not intended as a defense or celebration of marriage as such. It was written out of gratitude for the many individual acts of kindness done to me by a person to whom I have been close—and in fact married—for well over half my life.
FORTY TIMES FOR FORTY YEARS: AN ANNIVERSARY POEM FOR MY WIFE, ADELLE
forty lines, each line a speaking of her name
Forty years? what are they? dust
memories
“I think I’ll get married,” someone said
when I was young, “it’d be a cool way to spend a year”
It wasn’t, for her.
Forty years. Who is married that long
except someone’s parents?—
a couple cordial enough
but hardly real.
If I remember,
you are always there
except for my very earliest life
I have a friend
with no marital history
no history of “relationships”:
he remains in rapt wonder before his childhood
My own history
is a violent severance
of the child—
and then you
You held your hands out to me before I knew the need
Without knowing, you kept my imagination
clear and in the world
You gave me a son
who has grown
into a loving intelligent man
No one can tell my life
without telling yours
No one can say my name
without adding yours as well
What are the throbbing intricate ways of love?
We barely know, nor should we
It flings us here and there
It opens us.
In all this clamor,
in the rubble of my affections and my grief
I say your name, “Adelle”
and say it
forty times
for forty years. |
Jake Berry
New member
Username: Jakeberry
Post Number: 1
Registered: 02-2010
| | Posted on Saturday, February 06, 2010 - 03:05 am: |
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Considering the opening lines of Berry's poem it is easy to see why death might be preferable. Doesn't seem to be much happening in that particular marriage. All the more reason for an elegy I suppose. The elegy being the high point of the relationship and it appearing posthumously. By comparison both your responses show a mind more active and a life filled with enthusiasm, risk, joys, and a deep abiding intimacy. Life should be lived not endured. Beckett managed to put fire in cold endurance. I wonder, is Berry's poem supposed to be sufficient to the season (Valentine's Day)? I hope not. Perhaps it is a preparation by contrast for something more vital. |
Jack Foley
New member
Username: Foley
Post Number: 53
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Saturday, February 06, 2010 - 09:39 am: |
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Thanks, Jake. I suppose Berry's poem could be called a celebration of Death Day. As you say, doesn't seem to be much happening in that particular relationship. |
Melanie L Huber
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Username: Melanie_l_huber
Post Number: 106
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Sunday, February 07, 2010 - 12:01 am: |
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Oh, well, to be somewhat contrary-wise...(as is my general nature) I do see a whole lotta stuff going on in Berry's poem. I think a reader's view of death and dying being finite can color the reading in relation to souls, soul or unity of souls though marriage and then continuing on through death, or inspite of death might be another interpretation that the poem points towards...but it does require a suspension of belief in the finite to get there, to the infinite. (Also may be me pulling it there myself, but still...one would have to believe in that the concept of marriage as a unity that is timeless, elegy (to me) does not always mean a lamentation, sometimes it is a way of honoring that which was and which seems to have gone.)
Considering the topic of marriage and the divorce rates ect.ect...you could even stretch this to a social area...
or,
not.
Very much enjoyed Adelle's poem. |
Jack Foley
New member
Username: Foley
Post Number: 54
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Sunday, February 07, 2010 - 01:30 am: |
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I think I see your point, Mel. But I don't see how you get there from the Berry poem itself. Life is suffering ("They suffered as their faith required"); death is "consummation" ("Now their union is consummate"). The poem seems quite straightforward and, frankly, I think really simple-minded. There's no afterlife, no "heaven" in it: "the earth / is their communion." You may perhaps be writing a new poem based on Berry's--but I don't see how what you're saying applies to the one he wrote. It seems to me that Berry is dishonoring marriage--treating it as a time of suffering which is ameliorated only by death. Who would want to be in a situation like that! People's actual relationships are infinitely more complex than anything he allows for. Puritans, Puritans, Puritans! Bologna is a city in Italy; baloney is what Berry is giving us. Ezra Pound once summed up "Mr. Housman's Message" as "Oh, woe, woe, etc." Thus Berry, a lesser poet than A.E. Housman. --Glad you liked the poem I wrote to Adelle. |
Melanie L Huber
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Username: Melanie_l_huber
Post Number: 107
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Sunday, February 07, 2010 - 03:49 am: |
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Yes, likely. Could be me wishing for something other than what is so, or me putting a spin that isn't there, but for a few small points:
"..faithful to the good in each other/suffered as their faith required."
which is using puritan language true, but look at that contruct for a second and the use of the word "faith," repeated.
Faith in a person or a thing isn't always a bad thing. It might in some cases seem like blindless following, or faith also might imply a belief in the goodness of something not clearly seen or often witnessed, a "hope" of something that isn't logical or empirical...in this case perhaps it might suggest that having "faith" in the "goodness" of a person within a relationship/or long term does mean suffering...but there is a balance here, if there is faith on both ends (Faith in the goodness of each other) the "each other" implies a mutual give and take and even if that goodness isn't always visable, there is the "faith" that they had in each other that it was there.
OR "faith" here may be as simple in meaning suffering marriage and each other for "religions" The "faith" of the church's sake, but I think there may be more to it. Maybe not...
Oh we know the ones we love are the ones we hurt and who hurt us the most, that's just life...there seems to me an undercurrent of acceptance going on here and not just a dis...
here also:
Now their union is consummate
in earth, and the earth
is their communion.
*The consumation of marriage into the earth, bodies returning to the soil and the use of the sexually suggestive word does not seem negative to me. Then after the marriage consumation with earth, earth becomes a "communion." (Note repeat of "earth" similar to repeat of "faith" above, (a rose is not always a rose, eh?) Purposely using language that often raises the hackles of agnostics or atheists...? Intentional, or not? I dunno...
I think the imagery is beautiful.
Maybe the author is suggesting that in the end marriage is just that dust to dust idea, you end up eating dirt no more no less, but I think it does depend upon how you read the intention behind those puritan words, your own view on death/life/relationships too which may lend themselves to negative assocations concerning religion/doctrine/how one assumes one is approaching the subject of marriage...
but considering them in the context of each sentence here and the meaning of the words and not the associations that they bring with them...well, it still doesn't seem so negative to me.
To commune and consumate a marriage in the earth/with the earth. This doesn't mean "dead" to me... If it was supposed to be negative, why not use the word dirt or mud or dust? Use of the repeated word "Earth" implies a larger thing, a "living" thing (at least to me.)
Then this:
They enter
the serene gravity of the rain,
the hill's passage to the sea.
After long striving, perfect ease.
Why "serene" gravity, why not some other negative connotation here? Is this to be read as irony? I don't think so, but maybe. The image of the earth/hill being washed to the sea...as from the beginning we came from the sea and so we return (with perfect ease) again, I'm not seeing this as a neg. thing. Cliched, maybe.
Trite and shallow? I don't know.
Yes, I am aware that you can certainly view the poem as a major dis on marriage, the imagery here could be implying that when the body decays there is nothing left of relationships, it's just all mud washing out to sea. OR you could see the sea as the symbol that it is most often used for in poetry...something lasting and immortal...and when the hill is washed away and becomes one with the sea, it is not a negative thing at all.
I'm just not so sure that's what the author intends...could be me twisting it. (However, not knowing the author or having read any other of his work, I can't really judge that accurately.)
Mel
(Message edited by Melanie_l_Huber on February 07, 2010)
(Message edited by Melanie_l_Huber on February 07, 2010) |
Jack Foley
New member
Username: Foley
Post Number: 55
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Sunday, February 07, 2010 - 12:07 pm: |
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Well, we'll disagree here.
Yes, there is a play on "faith" in "faithful"--not to mention "faithful" meaning "forsaking all others." Berry's lines
They enter
the serene gravity of the rain,
the hill's passage to the sea.
After long striving, perfect ease.
are certainly an attempt at "beauty." But I'm not so sure that their beauty isn't a somewhat false beauty. I don't think they're ironic, but they are perhaps, in a way, sentimental. I am deeply distrustful of someone calling death or oblivion "consummation" or "perfect ease." (Who is speaking this poem anyway? God? Hamlet is perhaps somewhere behind this: "'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished--to die, to sleep.") In any case, isn't there at least a hint of unintended comedy in those "beautiful." perhaps overly "elevated" lines? I think Berry's poem utterly disappears (enters oblivion!) if you compare it to Dylan Thomas's "A Refusal to Mourn" with its marvelous concluding line--swiped by Thomas from Saint Paul--"After the first death, there is no other." But if you want to like the poem--please do. I'm not with you on this one, though. Write the poem that seems to be forming in your own mind! |
Melanie L Huber
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Username: Melanie_l_huber
Post Number: 109
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Sunday, February 07, 2010 - 12:21 pm: |
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I don't "Like" or "dislike" this poem, it doesn't really gong the gong or reveal anything new to me, I was just giving another take as I am never comfortable dismissing any poem/poet without first delving to see what is or isn't there. Even then, as writing is a lonely isolating experience and we poets are something of an endangered species I often tend to try to find something of quality to take in from whatever I read. Could be me assigning more meaning then is there, but...ah well. |
Jack Foley
New member
Username: Foley
Post Number: 56
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Sunday, February 07, 2010 - 02:24 pm: |
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Remember, I said "If you want to like it--please do." Personally, I think it's a sad excuse for thinking about relationships. I mean: Jeez, hasn't this guy ever seen Nick and Nora Charles? Even their dog Asta did better than his suffering lovers. But, as I've said in previous goes, poetry--like any art--is radically free. Look what Hitler did to Nietzsche. But Nietzsche was there to be mis or interpreted. An old mentor of mine, the late Paul de Man, has a book called Blindness and Insight. His thesis is that every insight carries with it a corresponding blindness, something that the author can't see. Of course, this notion could be used--and this perhaps has to do with de Man's own blindness--as a justification for criticism as such: the critic works in the area of the author's blindness, sheds light upon that darkness. But then the critic is an author too--and so is blind too.
I'm not so sure, by the way, that poets are an "endangered species." There are zillions and zillions of them. Come out here to California sometime and visit. As basic understanding of linguistic constructions declines--grad students handed my professor son papers that contained these sentences: "She fell in love with him and fathered a child": "They were depressed because they could not consume a child"--good poets (you're one!) may be an endangered species. |
Melanie L Huber
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Username: Melanie_l_huber
Post Number: 111
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Sunday, February 07, 2010 - 06:04 pm: |
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I guess it depends on how you wanna define poet and poetry, as it isn't defined or definable you could claim anything and everything is poetry. Yet if anything and everything is, then good possibility nothing is. I think Man's take on criticism is probably the best I've considered, although I think it lacks something in the area of kindness and also don't know that I believe everyone is blind out there. "Good" poets, if there is such a thing, I'd like to believe are not blind but bring an awareness beyond self and sight. Right here on this very board I think there are several illuminating poets who fit that, there's an insight and what I'll call out-sight..And there are many here and out there who I would say are much much better poets than I. |
Jack Foley
New member
Username: Foley
Post Number: 57
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Sunday, February 07, 2010 - 06:40 pm: |
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A loose or fuzzy definition usually does just fine for things. A "strict" definition often leaves relevant things out. No one is saying that everything/nothing is poetry. But if you try to define poetry "strictly," things keep slipping away. (I said something like that in my first column.) De Man didn't say that critics or poets (or anyone) were blind as such. He was saying that the condition of awareness was that you were also blind, unaware of certain things. He was saying that the awareness itself carried with it its own blindness. It's an interesting possibility--whether "true" or not in every case is another question. He is saying paradoxically that one is "blinded" by awareness. You might take a look at the book. I think it's still available. |
Melanie L Huber
New member
Username: Melanie_l_huber
Post Number: 113
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Sunday, February 07, 2010 - 08:37 pm: |
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"He was saying that the condition of awareness was that you were also blind, unaware of certain things. He was saying that the awareness itself carried with it its own blindness."
Mr. Foley.
That just makes no sense. "The condition of awareness means you are unaware of certain things"
what-what?
 |
Jack Foley
New member
Username: Foley
Post Number: 58
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Monday, February 08, 2010 - 12:27 am: |
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Ms. Huber:
If you allow for the fact that mental activity takes place in multiple contexts simultaneously, then it "makes sense" that something can be both enlightening and endarkening--depending on which of the various contexts it functions in. I know some political types--many of them very bright. They are terrific at criticizing what is outside them, seeing where the United States is unjust, unfair, and they are able to articulate the reasons behind this. At the same time, this intense scrutiny of the world is not matched by a scrutiny of themselves, of their own motives, their own "inner" world. They can see very clearly the faults of the world around them, but to do so they need the illusion of their own, absolute, personal moral rectitude--which closes them off from self-understanding. These people sometimes treat their own families very badly. Their insights--which are real--depend on a kind of blindness, which is real too. William Mandel would be a good example of this kind of person. I’ve known children of some of these old Lefties who have stories to tell!
Further: as you read criticism, mine or anyone's, you might ask what questions am I not asking. Are there contexts I'm ignoring in order to say what I am saying? By definition, I can't tell you what these contexts are, since I am the illuminator, and thus am blind.
Here is a passage from a long poem of mine, "Villanelle":
(she, angrily) Aren’t “most” men not in touch with their feelings?
(he, answering) I’m not one of them & I know plenty of men who aren’t. You tell me I’m an exception, but I don’t think so. I was aware of the Men Shouldn’t Show Their Feelings, They Should Be Tough, Men Should Do This, Men Should Do That kind of thing as I grew up. I thought it was silly because it didn’t seem to apply. No thoughtful person—and there were & are plenty of thoughtful persons—needed to take it seriously.
To put it another way: The myth of the “rough tough” male was over & it was perfectly clear that it was over. Even John Wayne was always “feeling things”—compassion for buddies in war films, love, etc. It perhaps had been one (not the only) way of being male in our culture but, really, nobody seemed to believe in it anymore.
What seems to be happening now is that we are taking this stick figure, knocking it over, & congratulating ourselves at our bravery in doing so. Why should we do that? Well, at one point the stick figure of the Tough Man might have been taken (with qualifications) as the Norm, the image of what a man should be. By my time it was no problem for me to knock it over. But if I knocked that over what else might I knock over? What other stick figures were there just waiting for an inquiring mind to knock them over—in the realm of religion, for example, or in social relations?
That, I think, was the real question. How could the Status Quo deal with that?
Well, says the Status Quo, let’s make a big deal about getting beyond the myth of the Tough Man. Nobody believes in it anyway so we aren’t losing anything. Let’s congratulate men on not becoming the stick figure (which they weren’t in much danger of doing anyway). We’ll make such a nice fuss about that that they won’t ask other, more difficult questions. Let’s keep men asleep. Remember that the Tough Man not only didn’t feel, he didn’t think. He went along with the way things were. What we need is a new image of man which will do the same thing. We’ll create the aware man, the man in touch with his feelings. Only we’ll make certain that he isn’t too aware...That way we can make a great pretense of change without having to change anything at all, without having to lose a thing.
(And what, she said, about Arnold Schwarzenegger??)
What happens to his carefully contrived and, I think, fairly convincing argument when she brings up the "tough man" Arnold Schwarzenegger? Did he need to forget about Schwarzenegger in order to say what he says? Is he wrong? Or perhaps right but not totally right--and she is able to see immediately the weakness in his statement. |
Mary-Marcia Casoly
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Username: Casoly
Post Number: 4
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Tuesday, February 09, 2010 - 03:02 pm: |
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I've been thinking of Wendell Berry's poem this morning while doing the dishes, taking out the trash, worrying about what to get for upcoming birthday presents. It occurs to me that the little elegy is not so interested in the messy stuff of relationships. All that's gone, and his poem is like the nice comforting things we say after an old couple has died; we don't want to think of the times when pans may have threatened the air, the sharp words, an begrudging silence or even the sudden ridiculous hug and kiss. The poem wants to bid them goodbye, that human life, to hurry on and get to the important relationship of earth and sea. Wendell Berry gives short shrift to the human endeavor, suffered only as faith required, and kept to the good but what of the bad in each other?
Jack's poem tackles the confusing human interaction, the clamor and ring and stammer of couples being singular, enmeshed, separated, reunited, something new comes of them, something changes because of them, is perilously intricate.
As to Jack's doggerel response I agree: why celebrate a marriage as a state of coma, what of all the elaborate variances in that life. Why put so much emphasis on not the life lived, but on "serene gravity." |
Jack Foley
New member
Username: Foley
Post Number: 60
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Tuesday, February 09, 2010 - 03:12 pm: |
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Yes, and somewhere in that word "gravity" is the word "grave." Thanks, Mary-Marcia. |
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