BOOKS
133
Thought and Feeling
TESSERAE AND OTHER POEMS. By
John Hollander.
Alfred A. Knopf.
$20.00$.
SELECTED POETRY. By
John Hollander.
Alfred A. Knopf. $27.50
In
these two volumes John Hollander looks before and after, pre–
senting in
Selected Poetry
his considered sense of his career and suggesting
in
Tesserae
some of the new turns his poetic interests are taking.
Together the two volul11es form an intense meditation on the power
and capacities of poetry as an act of thought and as an inquiry into the
ends and significance of feeling.
My pulse at midnight - something as if said,
As if
to
have the heart put to the head
The question no one, without lying, ca n
Answer affirmatively:
Are
YOII
dead?
Nobody could have written this stanza frol11 the title poem of
Tesserae
but John Hollander, and the delicate sadness one hears under its
restless wit, not belying the wit so much as sharpening it, is one of
Hollander's characteristic notes. One may take the remark that no one
can answer the question "Arc you dead?" with a "yes" as a kind of
philosopher's jest. The finicky coolness of"Answer affirmatively," in par–
ticular, treats its subject with a self-conscious intellectual distance one can
imagine some readers becoming impatient with: this scene of anxious
wakefulness seemed
to
have been set for something other than an aca–
demic conundrum. But isn't this clinging to an academic phrase part of
the pathos of the poem - the edgy defensiveness which marks out this
scene as something other than yet one more commonplace nocturnal
memento mori?
Hollander
wOllld
come at it this way, just as Shakespeare's
clown would with a joke ("Exit Burbage"). And beneath the philoso–
pher's jest is the realization that this scene represents in dramatic form the
real meaning of a central moment of philosophy, the Cartesian
cogito,
ergo
511111:
as long as I am in fear of death I must not be dead. When I
think this thought, the poet seems to say, I hold death before me, and I
hold it at bay, aware at once of its power over me, and the power I
momentarily hold over it.
Each
tessera,
a
Rlluaiyat
stanza whose four lines
(tessera,
like
mba'i,
derives from a word meaning "four") answer the four corners of those
ivory tiles the Romans used as a tally or as identification, can stand
alone, but each, also like tiles, can be seen in patterns with others. The
