FINDING A POEM
to sit on (Your bed; :
sweat beads stood out on your arms and fore–
head and you wheezed for breath,
for help, like some child caught beneath
its comfortable woolly blankets, drowning there.
your lungs caught and would not take the air.
Of all things, only we
have power to choose that !We should idie;
nothing else is free
in this world, to refuse it. Yet I,
who say this, could not raise
myself from bed how many days
to the thieving world. Child, I 'have another wife,
another child. We try to choose our life.
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This was, I thought, a better poem, more personal and so more
universal. But that, in all seriousness, seemed a minor matter. It seemed
more important that I had discovered what I needed to say. Looking
back at the earlier poem, I can see now that it was sentimental and in–
sincere. For, in the structure which it built (or jerrybuilt), it pretended
that my feelings of grief were very important; they were not. Of course
I had such feelings, but I had put them at the climactic point of my
poem, not because they were actually important climactic feelings in
my mind, but rather because I had carried those killdeers around with
me for so many years waiting for a poem to put them in, and because
the grief which they connoted seemed an obvious (because stereotyped)
climax for a poem.
I am left, then, with a very old-fashioned measure of a poem's
worth-the depth of its sincerity. And
it
seems to me that the poets of
our generation-those of us who have gone so far in criticism and
analysis that we cannot ever turn back and be innocent again, who have
such extensive resources for disguising ourselves from ourselves-that
our only hope as artists is to continually ask ourselves, "Am I writing
what I
really
think? Not what is acceptable; not what my favorite in–
tellectual would think in this situation; not what I wish I felt. Only
what I cannot help thinking." For I believe that the only reality which
a man can ever surely know is that self he cannot help being, though
he will only know that self through its interactions with the world
around it.
If
he pretties it up,
if
he changes its meaning,
if
he gives it
the voice of any borrowed authority,
if
in short he rejects this reality,
his
mind will
be
less than alive. So will his words.
