To Himself
Dreams and systems; humble wishes;
myths that sustain because venerable;
even a walk along the promenade
might do, undertaken regularly.
The sea uprears and then falls back,
turns itself emerald, as though auditioning
to be a paradigm, another helpful,
dainty stepper with no power
to explicate or recommend.
So why not fill the time available
as these tall pines have done,
and with no more intent than they?
In fact, dream not, wish not, obviously
believe not. Abandon even the promenade.
As the sea turns itself, strive to imagine
nothing that would stir or stand.
JEFFREY WAINWRIGHT
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To Himself is the final poem in Jeffrey Wainwright’s most recent collection, What Must Happen. Significantly, it follows a longer, three-part sequence, The Immortals, acting almost as a little coda. The immortals, Jupiter, Venus and Apollo respectively, are given vigorous contemporary manifestations, but they are not left stripped of a few remnants of earlier glory. They are still associated with what the final poem describes as “myths that sustain because venerable”.
Earlier in the collection, and perhaps closer in its philosophical approach to nature, another sequence, These Things, concludes: “All I see is time and what might be like and like, / the watch-winding cicadas for instance. / I fear these things are no more than they appear to be”. That poem’s epigraph from Emily Dickinson, “But Nature is a stranger yet”, is reawakened in To Himself, too, with its concluding vision of phenomena held in a stasis beyond growth and change.
The resistance to transcendence is imaginatively bracing. If the wave in stanza 2 is not “auditioning / to be a paradigm,” can language fill the gap with the image of what might have been? Perhaps there is a kind of poet who, ideally, would rather be without the ultimate reducibility of phenomena to language.
The opening stanza begins with a pleasing mix of abstraction before narrowing its sights to the stroll along the promenade: this, too, might become “venerable” if “undertaken regularly”, ritualised, and thus freighted with modest tradition. Despite the promenade and the perambulation, the description of the sea and pines could signal ekphrasis, with a pictorial source. As in a classical Chinese painting, the systematised, stylised sea “uprears” and leads the eye to the casually sky-filling pines. The grammatical shorthand of the first stanza also reflects an impressionistic technique, brushstrokes which suggest rather than define connection.
When the sea is described as “another helpful / dainty stepper”, none of the epithets are expected. Shallow, regular, inshore waves are evoked, a low horizon suited to the anti-sublime, but the poem continues to pursue an argument with their symmetrical ambitions. A break between stanzas 2 and 3 wrong-foots any reader who might have started to complain, “what do you mean, the sea has no power?” What the sea lacks, we discover, is the “power // to explicate or recommend”. The speaker might be in search of systems, as at the beginning of the poem, or even the fulfilment of dreams and wishes, but the lesson is to go beyond these natural movements of the human mind. Imitation of nature is insufficient, although the eye still remains admiring, or not un-admiring.
Inversion hardens the negative form of the injunctions of the last stanza: “In fact, dream not, wish not, obviously / believe not.” But the final warning against belief may be ambiguous. The lack of a comma after the “obviously” of that first line may shift the direction of the adverb’s meaning. The speaker could be simply pointing out that he’s saying the obvious. Alternatively, the instruction might hinge on the quality of the belief, or its subject. Believe nothing obvious, or believe judiciously, might be its import.
The idea of “nothing that would stir or stand” is stonily compelling. It could represent ultimate bliss or pure extinction. The exhortation to “strive to imagine” such a condition suggests a spiritual exercise, for want of a better term, but, in the context, it’s a further manifestation of the intellectual scrupulousness that has distinguished Wainwright’s achievement throughout his career.