Something to cool you off for summer

Proust on Skates – Anthony Hecht

He stayed in bed, and at the beginning of October still wasn’t getting up till two in the afternoon. But he made a seventy-mile journey to Chamonix to join Albu [Louis Albufera] and Louisa [de Mournand, Albufera’s beautiful mistress] on a mule-back excursion to Montanvert, where they went skating.

Ronald Hayman
Proust: A Biography

The alpine forests, like huddled throngs of mourners,
Black, hooded, silent, resign themselves to wait
As long as may be required;
A low pneumonia mist covers the glaciers,
Spruces are bathed in a cold sweat, the late
Sun has long since expired,

Though barely risen, and the gray cast of the day
Is dark, unsentimental, and metallic.
Earth-stained and chimney-soiled
Snow upon path and post is here to stay,
Foundered in endless twilight, a poor relic
Of a once gladder world.

Sparse café patrons can observe a few
Skaters skimming the polished soapstone lake,
A platform for their skill
At crosscut, grapevine, loop and curlicue,
Engelmann’s Star, embroideries that partake
Of talent, coaching, drill,

While a few tandem lovers, hand in hand,
Perform their pas de deux along the edges,
Oblivious, unconcerned.
This is a stony, vapor-haunted land
Of granite dusk, of wind sieved by the hedges,
Their branches braced and thorned.

Escaped from the city’s politics and fribble,
Hither has come an odd party of three,
Braided by silken ties:
With holiday abandon, the young couple
Have retreated into the deep privacy
Of one another’s eyes,

While the third, who in different ways yet loves them both,
Finds himself now, as usual, all alone,
And lacing on his skates,
Steadies himself, cautiously issues forth
Into the midst of strangers and his own
Interior debates.

Sweatered and mufflered to protect the weak
And lacey branches of his bronchial tree
From the fine-particled threat
Of the moist air, he curves in an oblique
And gentle gradient, floating swift and free—
No danseur noble, and yet

He glides with a gaining confidence, inscribes
Tentative passages, thinks again, backtracks,
Comes to a minute point,
Then wheels about in widening sweeps and lobes,
Large Palmer cursives and smooth entrelacs,
Preoccupied, intent

On a subtle, long-drawn style and pliant script
Incised with twin steel blades and qualified
Perfectly to express,
With arms flung wide or gloved hands firmly gripped
Behind his back, attentively, clear-eyed,
A glancing happiness.

It will not last, that happiness; nothing lasts;
But will reduce in time to the clear brew
Of simmering memory
Nourished by shadowy gardens, music, guests,
Childhood affections, and, of Delft, a view
Steeped in a sip of tea.

Last week, my choice of “This Be The Verse” was an incredibly easy one. Larkin owns long leasehold on my poetic tastes, and his simplistically crude poem is one for the masses. My hope was that its shock value would gain this blog a readership of astronomical proportions. Unfortunately, I neglected to consider the paltry audience today’s poets fight for. If nobody reads the poems themselves, who’s going to read something someone has written about the poems?

Well, you, apparently. Perhaps you view this second visit to my humble e-bode as an unlucky return flight from a vacation, sat once again next to the same dunderhead whose company you suffered on your outbound journey. A little more sunburned, but all the more familiar, this neighbor swoops buzzard-like into conversation, with the tone of an old friend who doesn’t have many friends left. You simply sigh inside yourself, close your eyes, and wait for the first break in the conversation to slip the buds of your iPod into their waxy yet welcoming homes.

Or, perhaps you allow the crescent of a smile to lift the cynically weighted corners of your mouth. Perhaps you’ve added me to whatever the blog version is of your Fave Five. Perhaps you’re desperate for more. Somehow I find that unlikely. Yet it is my sincere wish that, having (re)stumbled upon this blog, you have already been charmed by the late Mr. Hecht’s florid poem. Twenty-five years have passed since Larkin’s advice to the younger generation. We have traversed a large ocean. But that is just the start of it. What this poem announces to me is that the time for sticking your tongue out has come and gone. Call it the sixties or the seventies, but it most certainly is not the nineties. Hecht, in this heartfelt imagining, cherishes the times of Larkin’s “fools in old-style hats and coats.” This is a celebration of what has come before, not an attack on it.

To read closely yet do so briefly, it is hard to dislike the word “fribble.” It succeeds because it sounds like a word that a young child has coined. The New Oxford American Dictionary assures me it is not. Childish or not, it is a world away from the rest of the vocabulary in this poem, which resounds with a solemn power. “Fribble” merely bursts like the saliva-bubble of a toddler at the dinner table.

Hecht arranges these words in complex fashion. Take the extensive participial phrase that opens the seventh stanza: it occupies three and a half lines. The main subject and verb of the first independent clause in the complex sentence are “he” and “curves” respectively. The pronoun “he” is modified by a pair of past participles that open the stanza, the second of which I am almost certain Hecht has morphed from the noun “muffler.” If there is another use of “muffler” as a verb, I’d love to hear about it (HINT: leave a comment). Embedded within this participial phrase we have an infinitive phrase (starting with the infinitive “to protect”), the object of which (“branches”) is modified by a prepositional phrase (“of his bronchial tree”), followed by a pair prepositional phrases in series (“From the fine-particled threat” tells you more about “to protect” and “Of the moist air” tells you more about “threat”. But none of that really matters. Let the poem roll over you. Just read it aloud. Soak it up.

I remember very little of the grammatical structure or specific vocabulary of this poem when I first heard it. Shortly before his death in October 2004, Hecht gave a reading in Calhoun College. It was early in my freshman year at Yale, which would place it in late 2003. Before then, I had never heard of Anthony Hecht. I think I was willingly dragged by a friend. We filed into a room of burgundies and chocolates, ornate rugs and overstuffed leather chairs. The crowd forced us cross-legged onto the floor, from where I looked up at the poet with a great deal of admiration.

Everything about him fit the part. While I had no clue that he was a distinguished poet, he looked and sounded exactly like one. His patient manner put everyone in the room at ease, despite the cramped conditions. When he announced the title of the poem he was about to read – “Proust on Skates” – I was immediately hooked. Here was someone who had not only read Proust, but written a poem about him. As a naïve English major, reading Proust was the holy grail of pretension, the trump card of all literary bragging rights. It was slipped into a handful of Facebook profiles over the summer after freshman year. “Reading Proust.” It was like the not-so-secret handshake of a snobbish teenager. I still haven’t read a word of Proust, but I bought Hecht’s Collected Later Poems a few months after the reading, and turned to this poem first.

I didn’t read of Hecht’s death in an obituary column or anything. I just came across it online. Someone somewhere mentioned that he was dead. Both the poet and his reading at Yale, as the last stanza of this poem states, did not last. My experience was one of happiness, as Proust’s is in this poem. As I mentioned, I don’t remember what Hecht said at the reading, but it has “reduce[d] in time to the clear brew / Of simmering memory.”