Melodies Unheard Hecht, Anthony Published by Johns Hopkins University Press Hecht, Anthony. Melodies Unheard: Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry . Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Project MUSE. doi:10.1353/book.72310. https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/72310 [ Access provided at 1 Oct 2021 19:20 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. HOPKINS OPEN PUBLISHING ENCORE EDITIONS Anthony Hecht Melodies Unheard Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry Open access edition supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. © 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press Published 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. CC BY-NC-ND ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-3738-5 (open access) ISBN-10: 1-4214-3738-4 (open access) ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-3736-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-4214-3736-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-3737-8 (electronic) ISBN-10: 1-4214-3737-6 (electronic) This page supersedes the copyright page included in the original publication of this work. Melodies Unheard : & John T. Irwin General Editor Melodies Unheard Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry The Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore & London © The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The Johns Hopkins University Press North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland - www.press.jhu.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hecht, Anthony, – Melodies unheard : essays on poetry and religion / Anthony Hecht. p. cm.—(Johns Hopkins, poetry and fiction) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN --- (alk. paper) . American poetry—History and criticism. English poetry—History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series. PS .H .—dc A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Pages – constitute a continuation of the copyright page. To Christopher Ricks Sams writes that one section of the Humoreske [by Robert Schumann] is written on three staves instead of two in order to set off the melody on a separate staff of its own. But Sams never mentions that the third staff is not intended to be played at all. There is one staff for the right hand, one for the left, and a third between them for an inaudible music: in her edition, Clara Schumann firmly marked this staff “not to be performed.” The melody (marked “Inner voice”) is only to be imagined. What the listener hears is an accompaniment which is clearly nothing more than that, but which appears to echo and respond to an absent melody. — , Romantic Poets, Critics, and Other Madmen ... sweet instruments hung up in cases, that keep their sounds to themselves. —Timon of Athens I.ii.‒ Rose-cheekt Lawra, come, Sing thou smoothly with thy beawties Silent musick, either other Sweetely gracing. — Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter, . — Contents Introduction Shakespeare and the Sonnet The Sonnet: Ruminations on Form, Sex, and History Sidney and the Sestina On Henry Noel’s “Gaze Not on Swans” Technique in Housman On Hopkins’ “The Wreck of the Deutschland” Uncle Tom’s Shantih Paralipomena to The Hidden Law On Robert Frost’s “The Wood-Pile” Two Poems by Elizabeth Bishop Richard Wilbur: An Introduction Yehuda Amichai Charles Simic Seamus Heaney’s Prose Moby-Dick St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians On Rhyme The Music of Forms Melodies Unheard Introduction Now in my eighty-first year, I have at long last learned a few things about Nmyself that have gone with profit into the assembly of these essays and to the writing of them one by one. For many years I did regular book reviews, assigned by editors of literary journals, almost always about the work of my fellow poets and contemporaries. I didn’t always admire everything I was asked to review, and I composed a few acidulous comments on some of these, couched, as I thought, in amusing or outright funny terms. I was probably able to half-absolve myself from the charge of cruelty on the grounds that I had been ordered to deal with works I didn’t like and, in my own mind at least, to foist the blame, or some part of it, onto the editors I was hired to oblige. I could have eased my conscience (if I’d felt the need) by citing John Ruskin, who observed that “very bad pictures may be divided into two principal classes—those which are weak and passively bad, and which are to be pitied and passed by; and those which are energetically or actively bad, and which demand severe reprobation.”1 It’s just barely possible that such a distinction might be made about bad poetry, though in our days I think it would be harder. Poetry that is “energetically or actively bad” these days would be the kind seeking to be revolutionary, breaking all rules, de- fiant of normal canons of taste or morals, shocking, sensational, outraged and outrageous. The obvious problem is that very good poetry has been composed in this spirit; as has, alas, a lot of wretched poetry that is deriva- tive, tedious, shrill, and without redeeming artistic value. And this, of course, is only one of the ways in which poetry can be bad. Long years of examining the work of other poets have taught me that not a few poets, under the pretext of freeing themselves from the bondage of prosodic and . Tim Hilton, John Ruskin: The Early Years (), . Melodies Unheard formal considerations, have found in such manumission a convenient way to avoid the very obvious risks entailed by submission to form and meter: unskilled attempts are instantly to be detected, and on these grounds alone it is literally safer to play the poetic role of independent radical. (One such radical has recently affirmed that anyone who observes formal constraints is unambiguously a fascist.) But the problem is far more complicated than any simple form-versus- freedom opposition. Poets can be bad, as they can be good, in any num- ber of ways, and both the metered and meterless can exhibit emotional in- discipline, smug self-satisfaction, indolence of mind, and every kind of flaccidity. Too often such poems fail the way a joke badly told will fail: the teller sits back grinning in foolish triumph and still more foolish expecta- tion of uproarious laughter, only to be greeted by embarrassed silence. And what does he do then? Why, he cheerfully seeks out the sort of audi- ence who will share his special sense of humor, dismissing as dull-witted all those who failed to approve of his jest. He is sure to find a few more dull-witted than he, who will commend his skills be they never so little. By now I have largely, almost entirely, put behind me that militant sort of “severe reprobation” Ruskin found it a moral imperative to administer; and I’ve done so with a sense of shame I was too young to feel at the time of commission but which has grown with maturity and resembles the same belated regret Ruskin felt for his early vituperations. It was Auden who first taught me that inferior poetic talents will fall by the wayside quite naturally in the course of time and that they need no vigorous dis- missal or noisy exposure of their unworthiness.2 I confess that this is not always easy to believe. It is especially difficult when I see poetic gifts of a very high order passed by and neglected while other poets, who are no more than unclothed emperors, are widely honored for their fine tailoring and natty style. It’s easy to become annoyed when a poet of unchecked sentimentality or mindless elation passes himself off as an heir of Blake. The unformulated urge to be “original” is easily satisfied with whatever passes for the “unconventional,” which latter term all too easily becomes, with time, conventional itself. I know a writer who, as the author of sen- sational prose, looks for that same immediate shock effect in poetry, seek- . “Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.” W. H. Au- den, “Reading,” in The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (), . Introduction ing flash and scandal, which is taken for novelty and intrepidity. Think only, for example, of those two artists who, in , so troubled the Na- tional Endowment for the Arts, beleaguered as it was by that stern guardian of national morality, Patrick Buchanan. One of these was a “per- formance artist” whose skill it was to cover her naked body with chocolate while encouraging her audience to believe it was feces. The second was a photographer who took a notorious picture called “Piss-Christ.” It pre- sented a glass beaker in which a crucifix was submerged in a clear yellow fluid which might easily have been white grape juice but which the artist asserted was his own urine. What seems to me curious about this is that neither artist would succeed in procuring their desired effect of shocking the public without their own personal testimony to validate their deliber- ate vulgarity; in neither case could this have been determined without such certification. And this alone calls both “art works” into question. It was soon after they met that Diaghilev issued to Cocteau the artistic injunction: étonne-moi.