I said, 'A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.'
—Yeats, "Adam's Curse"
Even if not a tour de force,
a poem's tacitly a wager,—
a bet with certain risk assumed
(albeit ensuring it may be caught)
putting the cart before the horse
when that’s what the sibylline muse
assigns to your ordainèd course—
a morceau de bravoure,* in sh inort.
Yeats’ gong-tormented Byzantine sea,
the Emperor in Roth's Radetzky
March,†
e.g., are blatant clues in Sherlock's sport.
Deciduous history's poetry's not.‡
And as to the formal causes of art . . .
Well, there's this horse before the cart.
* Cf. Charles Dantzig, Dictionnaire égoïste de la littérature française (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2005), s.vv. Morceau de bravoure, tour de force, originalité.
† Joseph Roth’s novel Radetzkymarsch (Radetzky March), tracking the decline and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was published in 1932.
‡ "As if all history were deciduous," Anthony Hecht exclaims in "A Birthday Poem."
Saturday, February 15, 2025
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