JOSEPH BRODSKY
465
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.
"Everything" that the Immanent Will "stirs and urges" presumably includes
time . Hence the Immanent Will's new billing: "Spinner of the Years." This is a
bit too personified for the abstract notion's abstract good, but we may put this
down
to
the ecclesiastical architect's inertia in Hardy. He comes uncomfortably
close here
to
equating the meaningless with the malevolent, whereas Schopen–
hauer pushes precisely the blind mechanistic - which is to say, nonhuman - na–
ture of that Will, whose presence is recognized by all forms of existence, both
animate and inanimate, through stress, conflict, tension, and, as in the case at
hand, through disaster.
This, in the final analysis, is what lies behind his poetry's quite ubiquitous
predilection for the dramatic anecdote. The nonhumanity of the ultimate truth
about the phenomenal world fires up his imagination the way female beauty
does many a Lothario's. A biological determinist, on the one hand, he eagerly, as
it were, embraces Schopenhauer's notion not only because it amounts in his
mind to the source of completely unpredictable and otherwise unaccountable
occurrences (unifying thus the "far and dissociate") but also, one suspects, to ac–
count for his own "indifference ."
You could bill him as a rational irrationalist, of course, but that would be a
mistake, since the concept of Immanent Will is not irrational. No, quite the
contrary. It is highly uncomfortable, not to say menacing, perhaps; but that is a
different matter altogether. Discomfort shouldn't be equated with irrationality
any more than rationality with comfort. Still, this is the wrong place for nit–
picking. One thing is clear: the Immanent Will for our poet has the status of
Supreme Entity, bordering on that of Prime Mover. Fittingly, then, it speaks in
monosyllables; fittingly, also, it says, "Now."
The most fitting word in this last stanza, however, is, of course,
"consummation," since the collision occurred at night. With "consummation"
we have the marital union trope seen, as it were, to the end. 'jars," with its allu–
sion to broken earthenware, is more this trope's residue than its enhancement. It
is a stunning verb here, making the two hemispheres, which the "maiden" voyage
of the
Titanic
was supposed to connect, into two clashing convex receptacles. It
looks as if it was precisely the notion of "maiden" that struck the chord of our
poet's "lyre" first.
VI
The question is why, and the answer arrives in the form of a cycle of poems
written by Mr. Hardy a year after "The Convergence of the Twain," the famous
