"Last Rites" by Ernest Hilbert

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Ernest Hilbert! 

-Robinson revisited 

-Sorry Matthew, it looks like I actually have the more controversial podcast. 

-You can listen to the Comedy Central Roast of Versecraft here. 

-The paradox of relativism

-How (evaluative) Lit Crit works 

-Ernest's Heavy Metal poem 

-Buy Ernest's new book here 

-The Hilbertian sonnet

-A New Formalist style 

-The horror of logistics

-Late Summertime Blues

-The Myth of Icarus

-The Poetics of Grammar

-The blessing and curse of the forbidden fruit

-The last rites of "Last Rites"

-Make lasting memories, then let them go. 

Text of poem:

Last Rites

I’ve known beauty almost impossible                                    

to believe, nearly always lost amid                                         

all the usual distractions. Deadlines loom.                 

Taxes come due. Birthdays pass. Debts double.                     

But once a bright and late summer sun filled             

the air, angling astonishingly through a room                        

filled with music, some old heart-aching song,                      

and there was my son, not yet two years, coming      

across the floor toward me with arms outspread,                   

his face big with a smile, and he was so strong                      

and new, unworried blue eyes, becoming                               

ever giddier, unbalanced, lunging ahead,                               

hoping to fly in that warm light with his father,                     

to hug me as if for very life, and I wished I could                  

stay there always lifting him, laughing, and such                  

light linger as if we’re still together,                           

and I will tell you it hurt it was so good,                                

and I know I’ve had that. I had that much. 

Transcript

Versecraft Episode 3-3: “Last Rites” by Ernest Hilbert 

Today’s poet is a bookseller, a metalhead, a cat-lover, and has worked at a place called Versecraft—and that poet is not me. He’s another poet who fits those descriptors by the name of Ernest Hilbert. Ernest is a devoted fan of the show, and a wonderful poet, and I’m honored to be able to discuss his work with you today. 

Before we get into that though, I’d like to thank all of you as always for listening, and for your great feedback on last week’s Robinson episode. Matthew wrote to me to point out a couple of possible allusions that I missed. I mentioned when discussing the leaf imagery that when Robinson described reading words on leaves, he was playing on the fact that “leaf” can refer both to a tree leaf and to a leaf of paper. Matthew reminded me too that in Virgil’s Aeneid, the Sibyl of Cumae, who stood at the mouth of the underworld, was said to literally write her prophecies on oak leaves. In Book VI of the Aeneid, Aeneas implores the sibyl: “but now commit no verses to the leaves.” Given not only this similarity of imagery, but the catabasis—the passing into the underworld— both in Virgil and Robinson’s poem, I think this is a highly striking parallel. Matthew also observed that the line “there is not a dawn in eastern skies” could be a bitter echo of Romeo’s line at Juliet’s window: “What light through yonder window breaks? It is the East, and Juliet is the sun.” This would also fit very well, considering that Luke’s own beloved is dead, and that Romeo and Juliet are perhaps the most famous love-driven suicides in all of literature. I try to be thorough, but I can’t catch everything, so thank so much Matthew for your friendship and your erudition. 

As a reminder, you too, dear listener, can write to me at my new email, versecraftpodcast@gmail.com if you’d like to give me any feedback on the show. I would also urge you, if you like this episode, to consider leaving me a tip or becoming a member of Versecraft, which you can do at my link in the show notes. Any and all contributions you’d care to make are highly appreciated, and that includes just taking a moment to tell someone you know about the show whom you think might like it. Let’s get this verse out into the universe. 

Now time for a bit of juicy podcasting drama. In high school I did receive the superlative “Mr. Drama,” so I guess I’m living up to that name. Let me reiterate first of all that I’ve received so much effusively positive feedback about the show, especially recently, and I can’t express adequate gratitude for all your kind words— they really do give me existential nourishment and make me feel that what I’m doing here on Versecraft is making a positive difference in people’s lives, so thank you so much. However, if you absolutely HATE my show, boy do I have the podcast for you. There is a podcaster out in the world named Matt Wall, and to say that his feathers were ruffled by my meter and rhyme episodes would be a severe understatement. His feathers were so ruffled in fact that he released an episode of his own podcast, The “I Hate Matt Wall” podcast, entitled “The Case Against Versecraft,” where, for forty-five minutes, he expresses heartfelt indignation about the first six minutes of my first Meter and Rhyme episode. I invite you to listen to it if only because it may serve as a kind of exercise. Versecraft, after all, is a podcast about textual analysis, and I invite you to listen and see if you can identify the myriad misinterpretations of the text, mistaken assumptions, equivocations, and unsupported, dogmatic assertions that Matt makes in the course of this episode, as well as basic blunders which include, but are not limited to, creating talking points out of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl in a conversation about the cultural climate of the 1920’s, as well as asserting that there is such a thing as a formal poetry mafia. One can only dream. 

As a man of an anarchist bent, Matt is particularly disturbed by the idea that anyone could believe that art, and the quality of art, is not purely subjective. This is symptomatic of what is perhaps the chief intellectual irony of the relativist, Post-Modern world: people believe that a belief in the subjectivity of values is an objective value, a dogma beyond reproach. The self-defeating paradox and hypocrisy of this attitude, to say nothing of the appalling moral ramifications, is evident, but it is so deeply entrenched in some people that they often fail to recognize its absurdity. 

Matt demands that I reveal who is entitled to be the judge of artistic quality, to which I must respond that we can all strive to be judges, but only the most thorough and sound arguments will succeed as acceptable judgements. Person A and person B may disagree about the value of a work of poetry, but that doesn’t mean we can throw up our hands, say art is subjective, and call it a day— let Person A and Person B make their respective cases for their positions, and we will see who is more convincing, even if we have to trace the argument back through personal history, psychology, ethics, and metaphysics, all the way to fundamental axioms. Even if the parties do not ultimately find common ground, they will have at least learned precisely why they don’t agree, and the process will have revealed much to them about the poem, themselves, and their interlocutors, and given them a deeper understanding of the human nature which they share. Rinse and repeat, and you have the glorious project that is literary criticism on your hands, a project that is not so much about creating a science out of art as refining our artistic philosophies and analytical faculties to be as wise, discerning, and comprehensive as possible—an asymptotic pursuit perhaps, but a noble one. We are all here to help each other get closer to the truth.

Which is why, ultimately, I have to thank Matt Wall, not only for providing me some free publicity, but for making his criticisms known; criticisms which, while far from convincing, enable me to learn more about why my opposition thinks the way they do. I also have to say Matt, if you’re listening to this: judging from what I know of you elsewhere, I think you’re a really nice guy. Honestly, I think if we weren’t talking about art, we would probably get along just fine. Furthermore, I admire the passion you have for your art, a passion which, believe it or not, formalist drone that I am, I share as well. I understand if you feel hurt by some of the things I’ve said, and I find the fact that they have been hurtful to be sincerely regrettable. It’s been a long process to make my rhetoric less snide, and I’m still learning. You have to understand however that I am fighting for what I believe is right, and if that means slaughtering some sacred cows, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. 

Alright, goodbye to all that. Let’s get in to what we’re actually here to talk about, the poetry. 

As I mentioned at the head of this episode, Ernest Hilbert is a poet with whom I share much in common. For both of us, Heavy Metal has been a key part of our spiritual and artistic development, and I’d like to introduce you to him through the following poem, which is not our featured poem for today, but which I think marvelously sums up the experience of being at a metal show. It goes like this: 

Judgement

Bonnie’s Roxx, Atco, New Jersey, 1990

O, our expressions grim, so serious!

And menacing, as if we’re benching weights

or gravely working at a car’s engine.

We strive to seem mysterious

and sometimes truly entered altered states,

burned up with rude bolts of adrenaline.

The drums command the stage like big black guns

upon a fortress. Dwarfed by Marshall stacks,

we swing our greasy hair like myrmidons

thrashing at rival columns. Ten hot suns

assembled above make steam of sweat, axe

and archery, broadsword, emblem, and bronze

armor. We swarm in smoke, crude ghosts, chthonic,

striving, one solstice, to make ourselves mythic. 

“To make ourselves mythic,” that is truly the crux of it. I also recently learned that Shane McCrae himself is a fan of Black Metal, so I hate to break it to you Matt: You don’t just have a formalist mafia, you have a metalhead formalist mafia on your hands. God help you. 

To get back to our main man Mr. Hilbert, he received his undergraduate at Rutgers, where my brother currently attends, and his Masters and PhD at Oxford, where I wish I had attended. Since then, he has been an editor, a critic, an antiquarian bookseller, a librettist, and a poetry blogger at his website, E-verse radio. He’s also been a professor, crazily enough, at a low-residence MFA program in Colorado entitled “The World of Versecraft,” which you have to believe me when I say I hadn’t heard of until I was doing research for this episode. He is also of course a poet, and is the author of seven books, the most recent of which, entitled Storm Swimmer, is coming out next month from UNT Press and is the winner of last year’s Vassar Miller Prize in poetry. I’ll put a link in the show notes where, if you like what you hear today, you can place a preorder for Ernest’s book. 

Perhaps Mr. Hilbert’s greatest claim to fame is that he is the inventor and popularizer of a new 21st century sonnet form, called, appropriately enough, the Hilbertian sonnet. This is a sonnet that consists of two sestets, rhymed ABCABC, DEFDEF, and concludes with a rhymed couplet. The poet Chris Childers has noted that the architecture of such a sonnet has the potential to shift the traditional sonnet’s emphasis on argument to an emphasis on imagery and voice, and while it is true that Hilbert himself uses his sonnets to this effect, to me the Hilbertian sonnet looks downright Hegelian: you have the potential to set up a perfectly balanced thesis and antithesis in the sestets, and then resolve them neatly in the synthesis of the concluding couplet. 

Just as noteworthy about this sonnet shape is the way it distances the rhymes from one another. In most rhyming poems, the rhyming lines either follow one after the other, or else are one line apart. In a Hilbertian sonnet, with the exception of the concluding couplet, the rhymes are all two lines apart. This small shift in distance makes a big difference in how we hear the rhymes—they register, but more faintly. This distance enables Hilbert to be as rigorous with his rhyme schemes as any Renaissance troubadour, but at the same time to cater to modern tastes, which prefer a less overtly musical, more rugged and conversational sound. Today’s poem is not a Hilbertian sonnet, but it does employ a similar shape and strategy: we have the ABCABC, DEFDEF sestets, but the concluding couplet has been replaced by another sestet, running GHIGHI. The poem goes like this:

Last Rites

I’ve known beauty almost impossible                                    

to believe, nearly always lost amid                                         

all the usual distractions. Deadlines loom.                 

Taxes come due. Birthdays pass. Debts double.                     

But once a bright and late summer sun filled             

the air, angling astonishingly through a room                        

filled with music, some old heart-aching song,                      

and there was my son, not yet two years, coming      

across the floor toward me with arms outspread,                   

his face big with a smile, and he was so strong                      

and new, unworried blue eyes, becoming                               

ever giddier, unbalanced, lunging ahead,                               

hoping to fly in that warm light with his father,                     

to hug me as if for very life, and I wished I could                  

stay there always lifting him, laughing, and such                  

light linger as if we’re still together,                           

and I will tell you it hurt it was so good,                                

and I know I’ve had that. I had that much.                 

            We’ve already spoken about the form, so let’s talk about the meter here. There is definitely enough accentual and syllabic regularity here to call this iambic pentameter, but it is an iambic pentameter that is always trying to see what it can get away with. Every line but one or two contains metrical substitutions, and two lines are not pentameter at all: lines 6 and 14 are hexameter. We see in this poem, as in Stallings’ poem from two weeks ago, the frequent use of anapestic substitutions, which is to say the sprinkling in of extra unaccented syllables, which characterizes the style known as loose iambic. Beyond this however, we have more drastic deviations, such as the stubbornly un-iambic line 4, where any hint of an iambic rhythm is foiled by the punchy punctuation, which necessitates trochaic and potentially even cretic and amphibrachic readings. In line two, we encounter a situation similar to one we found in Stallings’ poem, where in order for the line to be scanned iambically, the caesura marked by the comma in the second foot must be included as a silent unaccented syllable. Also like Stallings’ poem, we encounter one example of a tertius paeon, a four syllable foot with the accent on the third beat, at the end of line 13. 

Though Hilbert is looser with his lines than Stallings, the similarity of musical strategies between the two, which also includes a shared taste for slant rhyme, helps us begin to formulate an idea of an early 21st century formalist style: a style which is both highly conscious of formal constraints yet also highly conscious—arguably self-conscious— about maintaining a rough-edged, conversational tone. Hilbert takes this loose conversational tone much farther than Stallings however, for apart from the greater roughness of his lines, and the greater distance of his rhymes from one another, he also enjambs nearly half the lines in this poem, whereas Stallings’ poem had eschewed enjambment entirely. Through the combined strategies of frequent metrical variation, slant rhyming, distance between rhymes, and enjambment, Hilbert strives to make the musicality of his lines as unobtrusive as possible. 

I mentioned that there’s only one or two lines in this poem that are perfect iambic pentameter lines: the first and most unmistakable one lies in the very middle of the poem, line 9, where Hilbert says that his son came “across the floor toward me with arms outspread.” Some people might argue that the phrase “toward me” is a trochee, and the emphases on both words are similar, but when in doubt, I appeal to the hierarchy of the parts of speech: “me” is a noun, whereas “toward” is a mere preposition, so “me” should receive the accent. This line marks the introduction of the son into the scene of the poem, and Hilbert brilliantly uses this first and perhaps only instance of a pure iambic line to sonically indicate the beautiful purity and innocence of his son, as well as the swift movement of the son towards his father. In line 12, by contrast, Hilbert’s line mimics the increasingly unbalanced lunging of the child with contrasting triplet motions, a dactyl in the second foot and an anapest in the fifth foot. 

The other possible line of pure iambic pentameter is, fittingly, the very last one. Whether it counts depends on whether you read the second foot as a trochee or an iamb, and I think there’s grounds to read it either way. In either case however, the line reads smoother than most, and gives a melodious sense of finality to this wistful, poignant poem. 

Let’s now go back and read the first sestet again:

I’ve known beauty almost impossible                                    

to believe, nearly always lost amid                                         

all the usual distractions. Deadlines loom.                 

Taxes come due. Birthdays pass. Debts double.                     

But once a bright and late summer sun filled             

the air, angling astonishingly through a room

            As poets have always loved to do, and for good, healthful reasons, Hilbert has taken for his ostensible subject the revelation of transcendent beauty in the quotidian grind of life’s logistics. He says that this beauty is “almost impossible to believe.” He could mean this in two senses: either that it is hard to believe that such beauty could in fact exist, and he is incredulous to see that it does, or more subtly, that the message that the revelation of beauty has to communicate to him is difficult to believe, either because it is so alien and fantastical or because it is too good to be true. 

Hilbert defers what this beauty is in order make the context vivid for his readers: he enumerates a litany of life’s frustrations, as well as begins to set the scene for the upcoming revelation. There is more here however than mere description. Let’s consider the items on the list he offers us: “Deadlines loom.” An ominous phrase. “Loom” brings out further the suggestion of death in the word “deadline.” “Taxes come due.” In conjunction with the word “deadline” we can’t help but think of Ben Franklin’s famous phrase: “in this world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes.” Again then, death is emphasized. “Birthdays pass.” Aging, and therefore looming death, is emphasized once again. “Debts double” breaks this pattern somewhat, but it only adds to the oppressiveness. In every detail, there is anxiety of what is to come: the upcoming deadline, the taxes that must be paid, the birthdays which lead closer to death, the debts that must be satisfied. The so-called “usual distractions” of life are not the harmless annoyances they appear to be, but instruments of dread, and as if that weren’t bad enough, they are also, in their routine sameness, the reason why life seems to pass so swiftly before our eyes, as well as the barrier that keeps us from appreciating the beauty around us. Any time that beauty can break through the tyranny of the everyday is a triumph of existential proportions. 

In line five, as he begins to describe the scene of his revelation, Hilbert makes clear the time of year: “a bright and late summer sun filled the air.” This may literally be true, but it is also symbolically significant: late summer is the turning point of the year when the things of nature begin to die, a process that carries through the autumn and concludes in winter. Hilbert himself is 53, and as such, may feel that he himself is reaching the end of the summer of his life. We are reminded of mortality yet again, and at this point, if we consult not only the images we have encountered but the mysteriously ominous title of this poem, “Last Rites” we begin to suspect that even if this poem never once mentions death outright, which it doesn’t, and even if the poem is beautifully uplifting, which it is, death is the ultimate theme, the undertow that propels the thought behind every word of this poem. 

If we jump ahead and recall that this poem is about the joy Hilbert takes in his young son, we can understand the particular flavor of his deathly anxiety— he’s old for a new father, and by the time his son begins a career of his own, he will be an elderly man. The quality time between parents and their children is always infinitely precious, but I’m sure that it seems even more pressingly precious when you know you don’t have the majority of your children’s lives to spend with them. In this context, the “late summer sun” may refer to Hilbert’s own son, the fruit of his late summer.  

The last item I’d like to draw your attention to in this stanza is, in the sixth line, the way the sun is described as “angling astonishingly through a room.” Astonishment may seem an extreme reaction to sunlight coming through a window, no matter how pretty, but if we continue our identification of the sun with Hilbert’s sense of his mortality, we see here that it is this death-consciousness which illuminates the scene before the speaker as a wondrous one. Wallace Stevens’ immortal line rings in our ears: “death is the mother of beauty.” We could also of course, as I mentioned earlier, read the sun as representing Hilbert’s own son, whose beauty, even more than the sun’s actual rays, lights up the room, and astonishes. 

The choice of the word “angling” is interesting too, because it can refer both to something that is coming in at an angle and to the act of fishing. The sun’s beams are coming in at an angle, but the sun, conceived as a stand-in for Hilbert, is also fishing for something, searching for something— what could it be, if not the beauty and meaning, represented by his shining son, that makes the usual distractions of life worthy of enduring? If we once again shift the roles, and see the sun as Hilbert’s son, we can quickly connect the image of fishing to the affection he desires from his father which is made evident in the next stanza. 

            Let’s now begin the poem again, and this time read all the way through the last two stanzas:

I’ve known beauty almost impossible                                    

to believe, nearly always lost amid                                         

all the usual distractions. Deadlines loom.                 

Taxes come due. Birthdays pass. Debts double.                     

But once a bright and late summer sun filled             

the air, angling astonishingly through a room                        

filled with music, some old heart-aching song,                      

and there was my son, not yet two years, coming      

across the floor toward me with arms outspread,                   

his face big with a smile, and he was so strong                      

and new, unworried blue eyes, becoming                               

ever giddier, unbalanced, lunging ahead,

hoping to fly in that warm light with his father,                     

to hug me as if for very life, and I wished I could                  

stay there always lifting him, laughing, and such                  

light linger as if we’re still together,                           

and I will tell you it hurt it was so good,                                

and I know I’ve had that. I had that much.     

            In the second stanza, we learn the beauty Hilbert has spoken of: the overwhelming experience of seeing his toddler son, blazing in the light of the late summer sun, surrounded by the music of “some old heart-aching song” joyously running towards him for a hug. Hilbert’s description of his son as “strong and new,” and possessing “unworried blue eyes” tells us just as much about Hilbert himself as about his son. He marvels at these attributes— strength, newness, lack of worry—because he no longer possesses them himself. His son serves as his shining foil.

            In the third and final sestet, we move from actions to aspirations: the son hopes “to fly in that warm light with his father, to hug him as if for very life.” Here we cannot help but be reminded of the story from Greek myth of Daedalus and Icarus, the father and son duo who flew on pairs of artificial wings to escape their imprisonment in the Minoan labyrinth. Famously of course, the young and impulsive Icarus flew too close to the sun, melted the wax that held the feathers of his wings together, and fell to his death in the sea. With this story in our minds, we might read the phrase “hug him as if for very life” as containing a disturbing note of peril, but we can also read it as an expression of gratitude—the son hugs his father in thanks for his life. 

            In the next line, we understand that the peril suggested is not anything imminent, but merely speaks to the father’s fears that he will not always be there for his son. He says, “I wished I could stay there always lifting him.” He can’t do this of course, and thinks on the fact that at some point, he will have to let his son go, to fly or to fall. 

            In line sixteen, we encounter the potentially confusing phrasing of: “as if we’re still together.” The “we” obviously refers to father and son, but is this an inclusive or exclusive “we?” Whom is the speaker actually talking to? The true addressee of this poem only becomes evident in the next line: “and I will tell you it hurt it was so good.” Here, the future tense makes all the difference— if Hilbert had said, “and I tell you it hurt it was so good” we would simply assume that he’s addressing the anonymous reader. Instead however, he says “and I will tell you it hurt it was so good.” Whomever Hilbert is speaking to, he is describing how he will speak to them again in the future. It is at this point we realize that he is in in fact addressing his son, and that that the “we” of the first line was an inclusive we. With a chill, we finally realize the meaning of the title of the poem—Hilbert is speaking to a hypothetical future version of his son, the version of his son who will watch over him on his deathbed, either attending or administering his “last rites,” the blessings made over the dying. In Christianity, such rites involve confession, and we can read this poem as a kind of last confession, not of any sins, but of the salvific power that Hilbert’s son has had in his life, the way in which the love and beauty he experienced of his son redeemed the entire world for him. This contextualization also helps us to make better sense of line sixteen. We might have asked: why are the father and son not still together? The answer of course is that Hilbert, in this hypothetical vision, has one foot in the grave, and will soon depart from his son forever. 

            “It hurt it was so good.” We can read this admission in two ways. Firstly, and most obviously, any sensation of sufficient intensity can feel almost like pain. Secondly however, and more profoundly, Hilbert may be experiencing the fact that “joy is on the borderland of sorrow,” as Chaucer put it. Human beings are both blessed and cursed by our powers of foresight, and it is often true that when we become aware that we are intensely happy, our next thought is of how we will not always be this happy, and furthermore, that we will not always be around to experience happiness at all. 

            In the last line, Hilbert does another trick with grammatical tense: “and I know I’ve had that. I had that much.” By switching from the present perfect— “have had”— to the past tense— “had”— Hilbert sneakily marks the transition from life to death. On his imagined death bed, taking stock of his life, he consoles himself for all of life’s disappointments with the knowledge that he has had “beauty almost impossible to believe” in the experience of raising and loving his son, an experience epitomized by the vivid memory of extreme joy described in this poem. As he lets go of his consciousness, his “have had” becomes the final, relinquishing “had.” Even those gorgeous moments that are burned into our minds for a lifetime, those memories the pursuit of which make life worth living, even these will, at our death, vanish in an instant. To die a good death, it is not enough to be satisfied that one has had the experience of such beauties—one must let go completely, and be satisfied that they were once had by someone at all. 

            With all that we’ve learned and explored, let’s read through this poem one last time, as an old friend:

Last Rites

I’ve known beauty almost impossible                                    

to believe, nearly always lost amid                                         

all the usual distractions. Deadlines loom.                 

Taxes come due. Birthdays pass. Debts double.                     

But once a bright and late summer sun filled             

the air, angling astonishingly through a room                        

filled with music, some old heart-aching song,                      

and there was my son, not yet two years, coming      

across the floor toward me with arms outspread,                   

his face big with a smile, and he was so strong                      

and new, unworried blue eyes, becoming                               

ever giddier, unbalanced, lunging ahead,                               

hoping to fly in that warm light with his father,                     

to hug me as if for very life, and I wished I could                  

stay there always lifting him, laughing, and such                  

light linger as if we’re still together,                           

and I will tell you it hurt it was so good,                                

and I know I’ve had that. I had that much.