Seymour's poetry

Colin (colin@cpink.demon.co.uk)
Fri, 01 Oct 1999 08:25:29 +0100 

Back in July I drew the attention of the list to a suggestion by Adam
Gopnik, writing in the New Yorker, that Randall Jarrell might have been
a source for the poet Seymour.  No one had anything much to say about
it.

In portraying Seymour as a great poet JDS sets himself a big problem in
that, as a prose writer, he is not capable of writing sufficiently
impressive verse to 'quote' Seymour's poetry directly; instead he has to
resort to a few indirect descriptions of the poems with excuses why he
is not quoting them to the reader.

Lately I've been reading the collected poems of Wallace Stevens and I
was struck by how Seymouresque a few of the poems are.  I'm not
suggesting Stevens is a source for Seymour, just that some of his poems,
in particular 'Six Significant Landscapes', struck me very strongly as
the kind of poems I could imagine Seymour writing.

For example:

SIX SIGNIFICANT LANDSCAPES

I

An old man sits
In the shadow of a pine tree
In China.
He sees larkspur,
Blue and white,
At the edge of the shadow,
Move in the wind.
His beard moves in the wind.
The pine tree moves in the wind.
Thus water flows
Over weeds.

II

The night is of the color
Of a woman's arm:
Night, the female,
Obscure,
Fragrant and supple,
Conceals herself.
A pool shines,
Like a bracelet
Shaken in a dance.

III

I measure myself
Against a tall tree.
I find that I am much taller,
For I reach right up to the sun,
With my eye;
And I reach to the shore of the sea
With my ear.
Nevertheless, I dislike
The way the ants crawl
In and out of my shadow.

IV

When my dream was near the moon,
The white folds of its gown
Filled with yellow light.
The soles of its feet
Grew red.
Its hair filled
With certain blue crystallizations
>From stars,
Not far off.

V

Not all the knives of the lamp-posts,
Nor the chisels of the long streets,
Nor the mallets of the domes
And high towers,
Can carve
What one star can carve,
Shining through the grape-leaves.

VI

Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses -
As, for example, the ellipse of the half-
        moon -
Rationalists would wear sombreros.



-- 
Colin