Despair
by Anthony Hecht
(published in Selected Poems, edited by J. D. McClatchy, 2012, Alfred Knopf)
Sadness. The moist grey shawls of drifting sea-fog,
Salting scrub pine, drenching the cranberry bogs,
Erasing all but foreground, making a ghost
Of anyone who walks softly away;
And the faint, penitent psalmody of the ocean.
Gloom. It appears among the winter mountains
On rainy days. Or the tiled walls of the subway
In caged and aging light, in the steel scream
And echoing vault of the departing train,
The vacant platform, the yellow destitute silence.
But despair is another matter. Mid-afternoon
Washes the worn bank of a dry arroyo,
Its ocher crevices, unrelieved rusts,
Where a startled lizard pauses, nervous, exposed
To the full glare of relentless marigold sunshine.
What first drew me to poetry--and what delights all kids about poetry--was two things: the word play and the way it made me see ordinary things differently. These are still two important components of why I read and write poetry, and why I fall in love with poems on an almost daily basis.
Anthony Hecht's lovely poem above has the kind of language that makes me want to read it out loud. Look at that first line--the sounds slow down the mouth so that one's entire being feels the weight of the poem's theme. After that, we have true rhyme and slant rhyme, assonance and consonance, and so much alliteration. Just in the second line, the s's roll into n's, the er in cranberry slips into the er of Erasing in the next line, while bogs forces us back to line one's sea-fog. That word play continues throughout.
Then we get to view ordinary things--in this case, emotional states--in new ways. Hecht defines 3 states here: sadness, gloom, and despair--by placing each one in a different environment.
Sadness is watery: bogs, fog, and ocean.
Gloom starts as cold rain, but then becomes coldly urban: a an old subway station.
In each of these descriptions, we have people leaving. In sadness (stanza 1), the person leaving becomes a ghost. In gloom (stanza 2), a train (presumably with people) leaves the station vacant and silent.
"But despair is another matter." We are back in a natural setting, but we are dry. Beyond dry. Hot, rusting, nervous. Unlike sadness and gloom, despair cannot be hidden and one cannot hide from it; despair leaves one exposed to its relentless glare. A person in despair, like that lizard in the heat of the sun, is at the mercy of that feeling.
The ending is brilliant. If you were told you were going to read a poem in which the last two words are "marigold sunshine," I think that whatever you anticipated, despair would not be it. Marigold and sunshine are such happy words and happy things . . . until they become relentless. Think, too, how Hecht bookends this poem: sadness and sunshine. Both the two words and their meanings play off of one another here.
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