From Keats through Kolbert: I’m Still Writing Poetry

“I now accept that Keats’s words are not ‘immortal’—no one will read sonnets (nor read anything) when the last Homo sapiens is gone. No sentient being will recall what language even was, when language disappears along with our species. But still, somehow, for the brief duration, I will write the occasional poem, and read (if no longer believe in) poetry. Till the end of my few days, beauty (if doomed) will still be truth, truth beauty—all I know on earth; all I need to know.”—Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

By Way of Being

By Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

PETIT TRIANON Florida—(Weekly Hubris)—4/25/2016—There could not be, I hazard, two sensibilities as disparate as my own and that of the late-18^th-century Romantic poet, John Keats.

Keats was a major poet of wonder and discovery, for whom beauty was truth, and truth, beauty. 

I am a very minor poet of 21^st-century horror and grief, for whom the fact of climate change or, less euphemistically, the coming, certain extinction of mankind on our planet, is the truth that dooms all beauty (as it dooms all those who conceived the concept).

Both Keats and I, however, have written Petrarchan sonnets.

In his time, formal versification was predictable. In my own era—the mid-20^th through, I hope, the mid-21^st century—writing sonnets (odes, villanelles, etc.) is not the done thing, and I expect I walk the Earth with the very last of the sonneteers.

Keats did not have the benefit of Google, but he got most of his facts straight when he wrote his Petrarchan paean to George Chapman, through whom the poet (and most English-speakers) first came to Homer.

And though Cortes (in line 11 of the sonnet) was not the first European to gaze upon the Pacific, the “watcher of the skies” (in lines 9 and 10) is the astronomer William Hercshel, discoverer of the planet Uranus in 1781. And yes, it was from a peak in Darien—in present-day Panama—that Vasco Núñez de Balboa set eyes on the great “Western” ocean.

Keats, alive in the era of discovery and global exploration, believed humankind’s future would be more and more filled with wonder. Reverence for science and exploration undergird his sonnet and, obviously, excited his (and his age’s) imagination, but the poem is first and foremost a celebration of intellectual discoveries made between boards, through the written word, and what new worlds were revealed to the Romantics through Chapman’s translation of Greece’s First Bard.

Keats’s sonnet is a fan’s ardent love letter—and oh, might we all merit such fans—to a translator, a “poet of multiple languages.”

At the age of ten, I myself was dropped into the realm of “steep-browed Homer,” and a “text”—Modern Greece—unglossed for me by either poet or classical scholar.

From California, I made my way east, a pint-sized Balboa, and swooped down from the friendly skies to explore Apollo’s isle, and myriad others.

I first looked into Homer . . . on the analog ground, and it was in Athens and on Hydra, in 1961 and 1962, that I was taught the rudiments of meter and rhyme by an expatriate American poet, and began to write and publish my own (very bad) verse.

My childhood comprised a time of wonder and hope and, in that, I resembled Keats.

My parents humored me, and brought out two vanity-pressed volumes of jejune juvenilia with my name on the covers. Bless my parents and my teachers, who stifled grins and encouraged my early, embarrassing efforts at writing in forms: One has to begin somewhere and, with poetry, it is best to begin early.

To write with attention to meter and rhyme, and in a language (English) largely inimical to all such attempts, presupposes a writer with the sort of equipment required to follow along. It is also best to have a pre-existing ear. Where Keats, and such Moderns as Auden and MacLeish, and such Contemporaries as A.E. Stallings and Glyn Maxwell, were given cradle-gifts in spades, I was told I’d have to work very, very hard indeed for the occasional successful couplet, quatrain, or sonnet.    

For a full half-century, I studied and played under Middle Earth’s sun, living in Greece for years, and then returning to it every autumn, every now and then moved to write in verse, always in English (even barely competent bi- and tri-lingual poets astonish me with their range).

Nothing has ever proved as satisfying to me as finishing a poem in a classic form, and yet no pleasure has been as rare in my life.

I can tell you from experience that it takes a sense of wonder and a massive suspension of disbelief to write poetry, especially formal, rhyming poetry. It’s the very hardest work there is in any language and, not only is the work thankless as respects its execution, in the end one has a handful of readers, at best, should the thing come out right and find a publisher.

Fast forward.

Several years ago—as many of my several readers know—I encountered the writings of Elizabeth Kolbert, and lost not only my faith in humankind but my hope and faith in, truly, anything at all. Very nearly, I’ve lost my sense of wonder, entirely. I’ve not been back to my beloved Greece since 2011, and this is the first break I’ve taken from my adopted land since 1961.

Homer’s light has gone out of my life.

The very last sonnet I wrote emerged, in a rush, several years ago, and it was a poem that comprises a fond homage to Keats, he of the undying sense of awe, and Kolbert, she of the hard-eyed glance forward—at the coming, final Deluge.

Looking at it now, I think my effort is fairly graceless and plodding. But hey, it does scan!

The poem was published in The South Carolina Review in the fall of 2014. It is somehow apt that the editors failed to inform me it had come out and managed to spell my name incorrectly (a result of the dreaded Spellcheck turning me into a Bavarian) in their Note.

No matter. Sonnets are written in silence, find their way into print with great difficulty, and draw no fan letters, at least in my experience.

Like all the very best of human endeavors in the arts, poetry is pretty much its own reward.

I now accept that Keats’s words are not ‘immortal’—no one will read sonnets (nor read anything) when the last homo sapiens is gone. No sentient being will recall what language even was, when language disappears along with our species. But still, somehow, for the brief duration, I will write the occasional poem, and read (if no longer believe in) poetry. Till the end of my few days, beauty (if doomed) will still be truth; truth beauty—all I know on earth; all I need to know.”

Elizabeth Kolbert closes her sobering book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, with these words: “Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy. The Sixth Extinction will continue to determine the course of life long after everything people have written and painted and built has been ground into dust and giant rats have—or have not—inherited the earth.”

One thing I can say for certain, and with great sadness, is that giant rats will neither be reading Keats nor writing Petrarchan sonnets.

My poem to Elizabeth Kolbert, and Keats’s sonnet, which inspired it:

“On First Looking into Kolbert’s Sixth Extinction”

By Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

Much have I mused upon this age of lead,
my carbon footprint mirrored by my pain,
a lobster in a gently warming pot of dread:
“I boil. Therefore, I am!” my soft refrain.

I boil—but slowly—with my ruddy head
    above the water, just: I’m hopeful (if insane);
like all my brethren, I was calmly led
here by the hierarchy of greed and gain . . .

. . . till I heard Kolbert chanting to awake the dead,
as though, beneath the wave, there must remain
breath, will, or agency to halt the spread
of our extinction (self-inflicted, vain).
We’ll bleed until we boil in what we’ve bled:
silent, beached, on Armageddon’s plain.

“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”

By John Keats

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortes when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

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