Ultimate Distillations
Recollected Poems 1951 to 2004
Daryl Hine
Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 2007
255 pages, $19.00
Paul Verlaine, no slouch when it came to eloquence, advised aspiring poets to “take eloquence and wring its neck! (prends l’éloquence et tords-lui son cou!).” Verlaine never followed his own advice, nor has Daryl Hine, Francophile though he may be. In fact, for decades now, Hine has been grooming and caressing that mellifluous throat and has managed to coax out of it some of the most sumptuous, accomplished and beautiful poems of the past half-century. He knows that eloquence is a skittish and wily critter, a swan with attitude, and that, tempted as it is to take wing, it needs the resistance of the subtlest of tethers. He keeps a firm, lightly threatening grip on that slippery neck.
It’s a common misapprehension to categorize Hine as a “formalist.” True, there seems to be no form or genre, from sonnet and sestina, canzone and couplet, to elegy and aubade, anagram and abecedary, of which he’s not a master. His poems don’t just rhyme; they take unabashed pleasure in rhyming: perfect, slant- and off-rhyme, even rime riche, are expertly deployed. And his lines scan; he not only handles quantitative measures such as Sapphics as expertly as he wields iambs and trochees, dactyls and spondees, but all his many feet are light on their toes. As if this weren’t enough, in poem after poem Hine wields virtually every figure of classical rhetoric, from antanaclasis to zeugma, and does so with mischievous gusto; he is of course a trained classicist, steeped in Greek and Latin poetry, with six books of superb verse translation to his credit. If Hine isn’t a formalist, who is?
In his brief and rather teasing introduction to Recollected Poems, Hine comments on “the formalism with which I have often been taxed,” and rejects it. He is right to do so. As he says:
I have written, simply (or perhaps not always so simply) in the only way I can, and though I have attempted other modes – there are a few, a very few examples of free verse in this collection – I have always returned to the metred and rhymed forms with which I am most comfortable and which themselves have provided as much inspiration and support as any content or occasion.
This is lightly put but in fact, Hine’s devotion to rhyme and metre seems to arise from a much deeper impulse than a love of form for its own sake; he acknowledges that he has “seldom been able to begin a poem until [he] knew what shape it would take.” The word “shape” is significant; it has palpable physical connotations: a poem as it emerges has a shape to the eye, a sound-shape in the ear, a shaped cadence along the fingertips. This is quite different from fitting a theme to a predetermined form, as a true formalist might do. Still, I suspect that here Hine is not only being modest but a bit disingenuous. For, on the evidence of these poems, Hine is a poet in whom an almost irresistible exuberance of language brims to the utmost; a fierce jollity, a luxuriance in the elemental stuff of words, propels his verse. At certain moments, in reading him, one has the startled sense that language has arrived at a kind of impasse which only a quick scintillation of wit – in the form of a sly rhyme, a subtle pun or an extravagant rhetorical flourish – can grace, if not elude. As a result, Hine’s poems, unlike the brittle pirouettes of the formalist, seem to take shape, in all their glistening eloquence, hot from some secret forge.
Described thus, Hine’s poetry may sound grandiose. Grand it certainly is, though not in predictable ways. He combines high finish with a colloquial tone; the voice of his poems is precise and yet almost matter-of-fact; and the various formal devices he employs create a deceptively confidential, and confiding, effect. In certain of his poems, we seem to be eavesdropping on unusually intricate conversations which lead us not to intimate disclosures about the speaker, as would be the case with most poets, but to a far wider and yet more focused perspective, opening onto an unsuspected world transfigured by words. From his earliest poem included here, “Lines on a Platonic Friendship” of 1951, to his more recent work of 2004, Hine has looked outward for his subjects; he is the least confessional of poets. In “The Visit,” a longish poem from 1967, he puts the matter crisply:
Poets must have something else to write of
Than their own tragic thoughts and epic feelings.
This outward gaze is reflected in the arrangement of Recollected Poems. The book – which has been handsomely produced, from the typeface and the layout of the pages to the delicate frontispiece, a woodblock print by Helen Edmonds – is divided thematically into four big sections; first, poems on art, then on love, followed by poems which evoke specific places and finally, poems on particular moments in time. Below each poem Hine gives the year(s) of composition. This method of arrangement has somewhat startling results. For while a few of the earliest poems betray a certain stiltedness, almost all are equally accomplished; indeed, it would be hard to guess, without the dates provided, which are early and which late. To judge from the work “recollected” here, Hine seems to have sprung fully formed from Apollo’s head. There are few hesitations and almost no false starts. Even more impressive, his sheer technical virtuosity aside, Hine’s distinctive voice is recognizable from the first. In “Osiris Dismembered” of 1957, one of many poems on mythological themes, the twenty-six year old poet could write:
By the sweetness of your death preserved
As honeybees in amber seem to live,
Porous as honeycomb or sieve,
You lie now recollected in this carved
Sarcophagus your divinity deserved.
Over the decades that voice will develop new modulations, becoming more familiar in tone, even more conversational, but the distinctive accents will remain. If there is a certain gorgeousness of effect in some of the early poems, as in the excerpt I’ve quoted, that will be steadily purged and refined, to be replaced by a more supple and variable array of tones. As one example, consider the following excerpt from “A Visit,” a love poem which he wrote in 1967, ten years after “Osiris Dismembered”:
Mornings too intimate almost to record,
Rich and various as a paisley scarf:
You emerging towelled from the bedroom,
And us later, together in the shower, masked
In soap, slippery, lascivious as fish.
Too intimate, and yet I kept a record
Of what we did and how and when and where.
Friday you lay back upon the sofa,
Sunday I awoke within your arms,
Thursday you bestrode me like a statue,
And it is as if in all of our embraces,
The universal was made personal.
The confiding tone of such a passage – and indeed, of the whole poem – is achieved by the unobtrusive use of various rhetorical stratagems. The mornings may be “too intimate almost to record,” but record them he will (the device known as paralipsis, familiar from Marc Antony’s ironic speech in Julius Caesar); the comparison of those intimate mornings with a “rich and varied” paisley scarf forms a mischievous antithesis; the figure known as anaphora occurs in the listing of the days of the week, and hidden within those same lines is a variety of chiasmus, the criss-crossing figure of speech (“you/sofa, I/arms/, you/me”); nor should one overlook the impish allusion to Julius Caesar in the archaic verb “bestrode” (“He doth bestride the narrow world like a colossus . . .”). These are only the most salient of the devices Hine uses in a single brief stanza.
It may seem pedantic to analyze these lovely lines in such a way; and yet, the lightness, the naturalness of tone, exhibited here has been achieved only by means of considerable artifice. In another poem, Hine speaks pointedly of “the paradox of free verse.” It is a paradox because no verse is truly “free.” The almost indefinable range of tones in such a passage, at once affectionate and mocking, rueful and yearning, becomes possible only through deliberate calculation of effect. And this points to a deeper paradox: in poetry, as in the other arts, the more authentic the passion that moves the poet, the more artful are the means required to convey it. The aim, after all, is not “self-expression” but the recreation in words of an experience in which the “universal” is made “personal.” Beyond even this, as Hine remarks in his introduction, “Language mirrors language or thought (are not the two synonymous?) rather than physical phenomena.” The poem, once realized, possesses its own autonomy. When Hine composes a twenty-sonnet sequence on the arrondissements of Paris (or any of the many far-flung places from Yucatan to Montreal’s Côte de Liesse which have inspired his poems), he does so not merely to summon up an indelible time and place, but to offer a series of verbal quartiers which stand firmly on their own foundations. Such poems at their best are what he calls “ultimate distillations.”
As his poems and verse translations attest, Hine is what was once called a “learned poet” (doctus poeta) and that learning is on vivid display throughout Recollected Poems. This may prove daunting to some readers new to his work. Others will balk at his sometimes extravagant vocabulary; words such as “amphisbaenic” or “labarum” or “ithyphallic” (not what you imagine!) will send them “scurrying” to their dictionaries (why do they always “scurry” or even “scuttle?” A new word, rightly used, should be an occasion for festive processions). Still others, the sullen literary nationalists among us, will grumble over whether he is genuinely “Canadian.” (For the record, he was born in British Columbia but has lived most of his life in the U.S. and though he has retained his Canadian citizenship, refers somewhat wryly to his “virtually stateless condition.”) In the end, none of this matters in the least. Hine’s poetry is at once learned and lively, grave and witty, ceremonial and sprightly. His “A B.C. Diary,” recounting a family visit home, shows his considerable gift for satire, somehow managing to be at once comical and touching (the title, with its A B C D array, is pure Hinean hijinks). And he can be slyly self-satirical too, as in the opening stanzas of “Digression,” his Sapphic stanzas first composed in 1983 and revised almost twenty years later:
Inexcusably late, the florid season
Under a baldaquin of flimsy blossom
Yawns and stretches, no longer playing possum,
As to the garden
Green returns, a newly invented colour
Like a recently rediscovered stanza
In an archaic, strict syllabic metre
Oddly accented . . .
In his “rediscovered stanzas,” as throughout Recollected Poems, Hine succeeds at something which once was commonplace but has now become sadly rare: he writes poems which give pleasure to the reader. The pleasure is admirably complex; it lies as much in the bedazzled surfaces of the poems as in their sudden depths. And it is a communicable pleasure, arising not only from the poet’s manifest joy in his art, his almost gustatory delight in the savour of words, but from the sheer exuberance of language itself. In these beautiful poems, it is as though words, habitually mauled and misused, rejoiced at finding themselves for once so ultimately distilled.
Tags: Daryl Hine, Issue 76