Marianne Boruchfrom Heavy Lifting
"Sundays too my father got up early...." So Robert Hayden begins his well-known poem, "Those Winter Sundays" with something remembered, pretty large and already underway. Sundays too, he says, as if we know about the other days, the boy, this son listening from a nearby room, from half-dream perhaps to his father's daily ritual in "the blueblack cold" as he fires up the stove to heat the house. Already underway: you can hear that lift in the cool assertion about this supposed day of rest--"Sundays too"--no commas for the natural pauses after "Sundays" and "too," the of course, of course of statement pushing here, this heavy thing, habit, made lighter by its seemingly automatic again-and-again, day-after-day. We are stopped, nevertheless, by the emphatic semi-inversion, a press downward on the wing--flying directly now into the wind for greater lift--with that structural decision to put the day first, in that clipped near-shorthand way, a trochee here, the poem launched on that initial no-doubt-about-it heavy stress. After all, it's not "On Sundays, my father got up early," the graceful rise of a more iambic beginning, and definitely not the prosaic get-the-job-done "My father got up early on Sundays." This is fierce. There's strain in the phrasing--"Sundays too"--a resistance that releases, one line later, the lingering, triple-weighted "blueblack cold," this "blueblack" suddenly older than anything we've thought about for a while, the two words flush against each other, as a kenning works, right of out of Beowulf, its "cold" flooding father, son, the memory itself.
It's the final two lines of this poem that show its true mettle though one can't praise enough how this steady unsonnet sonnet moves toward that closure, accounting for the father's pre-dawn labors--his cracked and aching hands, his polishing of shoes--but never sentimentally. From the start, the harder truths--including the boy who speaks "indifferently" to this father--are not airbrushed out.
I'd wake to hear the wild splintering, breaking.And so on, to the well-known ending of this poem that takes those hard truths and weighs them so hopelessly--"What did I know, what did I know/Of love's austere and lonely offices?"--lines often recited, committed to memory, and for good reason; they stand by themselves. And maybe it's natural that we'd cherish and roar them out loud, then and now. I'm remembering again, years ago in Indianapolis, a car making its way through snowy streets, a handful of us in there, caught up like this. Out of nowhere, those words. And again, just this summer, in a friend's kitchen two states away, those lines in the air. They keep doing that, coming back. And maybe not why--that's a matter for more private places--but how exactly?
When the rooms were warm, he'd call
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house....
The given, bony rise in any question--the open, wondering built-in aerial view offered by that particular sentence structure--immediately gives these lines their initial internal power, and the repetition too, so by its second utterance--"What did I know, what did I know..." --all is rattled and urgent, secret really, this speaker fully unto himself now. No longer directly hearing, we are suddenly secret ourselves, just overhearing. And what do we catch there, past lament? He stares again into that lost flash of childhood: "...what did I know/Of love's austere and lonely offices?" One word, or two. So a poem starts, and finishes. Austere has to have one of the most violently beautiful effects in English, distant and vulnerable at once, public and hidden, held upright by enormous pressure, inside and out. And here, its sound--its iambic lift--the second syllable stressed, adds a brief and expansive counter-rhythm. We hear in that both contraction and expansion.
But it's offices here that compels, and is brilliant, a word going straight into ancient practice. I remember a young priest in my childhood parish at dawn, reading the matins from his Divine Office, walking the streets as he read, never looking up as we biked by to early Mass. Something vast, nearly incomprehensible looms up in that word. In Hayden's poem, it brings humility--what's been done and done again; one merely partakes of that. But nobility's there too--ditto, done and done, this time into tradition and so heavy, we no longer even know how to weigh it. The power of a single word can be staggering. And finding it, trying to figure out why it works--really why other choices do not--can take a long time and is the writer's most essential, brain-fracturing job. After all, a poem is a box to put things in, and with that comes the task of taking things out, then it's all over again, putting the radiant things, however dark they are, back in. Which is to say, in my friend's kitchen this summer, we gratefully remembered the poem, singing out those last two lines. And offices--I blurted out as any Catholic would, even one as long-lapsed as I am--that's great in there, isn't it? Offices! I mean, what if--god, here's a terrible thought--what if he had written promises instead? "...love's austere and lonely promises"? And my friend, her face suddenly screwed up in that funny gag-me way, her index finger already miming that half-way-down-the-throat thing.
Because "promises" is awful for about a half dozen reasons. Which, of course, makes at least that number of ways to prove "offices" so remarkable here. But it's not a matter of meter really, since both words are dactyls, three syllables whose first comes down hard before moving forward unstressed, first emphatic then that suggestion of falling, "a descent" Paul Fussell calls it, the critic who has written with such smart crankiness about these things. This downward move is especially dramatic against the rising shape--and hopeful, one might read that--of the line's earlier words, austere itself and "love's"--no--Of love's, both iambic moves, stepping lightly up, into the stressed second syllable. Or if you hear a spondee there--two equal beats, Of love's--it only deepens the gravity, those two beats stretching time, Fussell's claim for that particular rhythm, suggesting weariness, he says, or fullness. But the words promises or offices are metrically similar; the difference in their power must lie elsewhere, maybe in what a pilot considers, the four elements that keep any plane going: lift and weight, thrust and drag. So the airborne wish, sometimes for thousands of miles.
Mileage--and certainly altitude--in a poem is harder to gauge though one can start any first line in Seattle and land in Chicago or Philadelphia, most likely the same day. And--considering metrics again--the downward press, that first syllable's trochaic/dactylic hit that colors the very end and beginning of this poem, lifting and darkening in near equal amounts. Drag, though, is an aerodynamic force that resists the object as it moves through a fluid, which both air and water are, and which, I'd argue for a long time, thought is too--a fluid, a near viscous dream. To land in any of these, one needs drag, which is to say, the plane routinely drops down its lumbering wheels not only to soften the impact but simply to add a needed baseline trouble, to get heavier and bigger at closure, thus to slow this last possible moment of the journey.
Words themselves drag behind them plenty of history, numerous other identities brought to the mix. And poets worry everything from the start. So back to promises vs. offices. At first glance, the former has, well, promise. Anyone might promise a lot or a little: to pick up ice cream and avocadoes at Payless, to stop the mail for a few days, to make dinner, to keep a secret, to stay married. But the word can feel coy, even precious, especially following any reference to love, as it would in Hayden's poem if we forced our bad revision. A shaky choice--promises--and pretty much predictable, evoking the classic June-wedding froth or worse, that pink icing turning petulant ala but you made a promise, says Tiffany to Chad (or Ryan or Trevor), wringing her hands in Days of Our Lives or The Guiding Light (my mother's favorite, but perhaps long off the air). So melodrama is more than a suggestion of danger. With certain words, like fraught, it's fraught with it, too willfully weighted, too much drag, I suppose, and not enough thrust to keep going, however right and graceful it is to hesitate here at the end of Hayden's poem where threat is genuine. Because there's already so much falling buried in those key words and--double whammy--closure itself supplies a natural big bang and weight written right into the contract of the "meter making argument" that Emerson claimed a decent poem always has to be. In short, word choice is a tricky business. Such endless shifting Orville Wright needed at first, his body this way and that, to fly that delicate vessel! One needs drag, but not too much; thrust, but of a certain kind. It must surprise, however small that messing now with the angle of the wing to bring it all down, and in. Where it continues its haunting.
Offices then--because at heart, that word hasn't quite the heavy-handed personal confinement that "promises" does, ticking off and getting (look-at-me!) credit for its duty-bound minutes and hours. Instead, "offices" goes back and back, past counting, almost courtly in its historical reserve, and will go on without, even in spite of us, thank you very much--though not so very much. That's the lonely part, in part (lonely, yet another word with a first syllable stress in this line, its second syllable unstressed, just a shade or two going under, so Fussell might declare it all the more dark, the descent even steeper). Thus this poem, this huge shuttering machine is tiny, intricate--only 14 lines!--coming to a sudden, howbeit still moving stop.
Marianne Boruch's recent books include Poems: New and Selected (Oberlin, 2004) and a collection of essays on poetry, In the Blue Pharmacy (Trinity, 2005). She teaches in the MFA program at Purdue University.
