Zodiacs

Clive Hicks-Jenkins' Decoration for Book IX, The Thalians Choose Home

. . . six remaining children glimpse a sky
Where unfamiliar constellations rule
A dazzling zodiac - the Nine-tailed Cat,
The Throne of Fire, the Fount of Anguishing,
Un-mercy's Seat. I might go cruelly on . . .

     *     *     *

. . . Better to dream and say
That sparkling zodiac shows sympathy
For trial and weariness, presenting Hope
In Silver Feathers, Gabriel in Light,
The Mother's Arms, the Father's Sailing Boat,
The Seven Triumphant Against the Waste.

- Marly Youmans' Thaliad


The nod to Dickinson is entirely in place: the rhetorical move is pure Dickinson - fix your eye determinedly on your goal, and walk resolutely backwards. "I might go cruelly on," - and linger, that is, on the horrors of apocalypse - but instead, having given us the wrenching episode of "The Profane Madonna," we are going to swerve into innocent pastoral. The apophasis loads the innocence with unspoken nightmare, but it also tells us in so many words: this is the antidote for making up nightmare: we make up a lovely story about it. In the good zodiac there are still seven children, there are are still loving parents, and all is as it should be: and in fact we are about to meet the good, but faintly present and soon removed, father of the third covenant. All this is full of high theological doubt, also very reminiscent of Dickinson, and very canny about the narrator's implication in the story.

The broken covenant, and its restoration - the blind, profane madonna and her adopted son, determined to make a mother-and-child story regardless of what has to be ignored or fought to make it so: I took this to be the maybe best that could be done in the unredeemed world. To move to another, we need revelation. And we will get it; or at least Thalia will.

Thaliad: Upside Down From Us

Clive Hicks-Jenkins' Decoration for "Gabriel the Weeper"

We found a sourwood tree that had been killed

By something, but the leaves still drooped in place,

Though every one had faded into brown.

When we came closer, leaves burst into wings –

The tree was green, the death was butterflies,

Alive and pouring like a waterfall

But upside down from us.

So says Gabriel, the weeper, before they abandon him. His abandonment is one of the discomforts of this epic. The gloss tells us that deserting him “sealed the end of innocence” for the children: but you know, I don't trust that glossator for beans. What innocence, and how sealed? It feels less like a sin to me, in the narrative – no one more than briefly really tries on guilt or expiation for it – less, I say, like sin than like sacrifice: and if one is to look for the meaning of that sacrifice, it has to be in the difficulties, the contradictions the sourwood tree.

First of all, it's lost and falsely found:

… One day I walked

Up there With my father. I'm sure it was

The place. It could have been... It looks the same.

We are sure that it is not the place: Gabriel of course is simply desperate for any shred of anything like home. Home is gone forever, and Gabriel can't, or won't, still his grief.

The tree is not really dead. There is a sort of miracle that returns it to life: all its dead leaves fly up to heaven, and it's green and living after all. But brown butterflies are a far cry from, say, the brilliant butterflies that populate García Márquez's Soledad. These, coating the tree, giving it a deathly look, are more in the register of moths: and what might with a dab of color or two have been a joyful ressurection remains a disturbing inversion. Death and life may not be what they seem, but there's nothing reassuring about this upside-down waterfall. One thinks more of ashes rising. Gabriel, I think, had to be sacrificed in a more ugly sense, a sense that Homer's audience would have grasped at once: the gods aren't satisfied yet. The fire wants one more.

The deepest kinship of this epic, formal, emotional, and moral, is with the Aeneid. There comes a time, reading that poem, that an acute reader suddenly realizes that Augustus Caesar was sold a bill of goods, and that Virgil, despite all his show of politically correct patriotism, was not really sure that Rome should ever have been founded at all. A similar dismay and foreboding runs through the Thaliad: its beauty is wounded and dark, from beginning to end.

Thaliad

I've been reading Marly Youmans' epic Thaliad. Lovely, lucid blank verse: hardly ever a foot wrong. It's strange to read modern matter in so sure a classical voice: the effect is like the reflections of the sun, playing on the ceiling of a lakeside house. Where is the light coming from? What is it that is moving?

I hope readers will not be put off by a modern poem being called an epic. “Epic” has come to mean “gargantuan” or “undisciplined”: it's used of great sprawling things, and, particularly in modern poetry, of monstrously fleshy lyric poems stuffed with obscure allusions, and no narrative skeleton to hold them up: things like Pound's Cantos get called “epics.” It leaves us no name for the Thaliad, which really is an epic: a rapidly running, easy-to-follow narrative poem. Those who don't like poetry can ignore the fact that the right margin is ragged, and read it as a quick short utopian/dystopian novel.

In any case, my response to finishing this poem was – as I know it has been for others – to turn immediately to the front, and begin to read it again. Epic is always an attempt to find origins, isn't it?

Such time, such toil, requir'd the Roman name,
Such length of labor for so vast a frame.

But in this case it's the origin of something that's not there yet, of something made up. What does it mean, to undertake a retrospective on the future? Where does that phantom come from? Is the whole epic untimely ripp'd? I can't settle. I feel like Ran, patrolling against what he doesn't and can't know. But having finished, I turn at once to the beginning, to read it again, which is of course what one always does with a genuine epic. They begin in the middle of things because they understand that everything is in the middle of things: they're structured as a wheel, and its first revolution is only to orient ourselves. More anon, I'm sure. My first journey in Thalia's footsteps has been, of necessity, silent.