"The Wall" by Donald Justice

Tech woes: There's some static at 10:36 where I say "end rhyme." Sorry!

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Wonderful exchanges with David, Robert , Quartez , Jack, Cameron , and Kevin.
-The Iowa Writer's Workshop
-Philip Levine's The Bread of Time
-Rhythmic modulations (a spondee it ain't!)
-This is the literary device. This is the moment. This is anaphora.
-Adam and Eve are unfazed by your divine glory.
-Proverbs 9:1
-False Utopias
-Poe's The Imp of the Perverse
-Felix Culpa Redux
-Virgil's Georgics
-Goated bible verse Isaiah 45:7
-Blake's The Tyger 
-The Chronic(what!)cles of Narnia
-Ersatz fruit would be a good band name
-Satan is the god of this world
-The burden and blessing of intelligence

Text of poem:

The Wall

for J.B. 

The wall surrounding them they never saw;

The angels, often. Angels were as common

As birds or butterflies, but looked more human.

As long as the wings were furled, they felt no awe.

Beasts, too, were friendly. They could find no flaw

In all of Eden: this was the first omen.

The second was the dream which woke the woman.

She dreamed she saw the lion sharpen his claw.

As for the fruit, it had no taste at all.

They had been warned of what was bound to happen.

They had been told of something called the world.

They had been told and told about the wall.

They saw it now; the gate was standing open.

As they advanced, the giant wings unfurled.

Transcript

Versecraft 3-8: “The Wall” by Donald Justice

            Welcome to this week’s show everyone! I’m honored to have you all here with me. As you may or may not know, when I’m not writing or writing about poetry I sunlight as a bookseller at Loganberry Books in Cleveland. As you can well imagine, there are several delightful perks to working in a bookstore: constant access and exposure to literature, the ability to curate displays and recommend titles that you love, engagement and event-planning with local writers, free books, and so much more. However, far and away the best thing about being a bookseller, the thing which I look forward to with all the uncertain anticipation of a prospector gold panning in the Yukon, is getting the opportunity to talk at length with someone who’s passionate about some of the same things that I am. Such beautiful exchanges usually only happen every so often, but in the past week or so I’ve had the blessing of four such interactions. 

            The first was with a delightfully enthusiastic young man about my age whom I sincerely regret not obtaining more contact information from, but I believe his name was David, and he’s an enthusiast of 18th century poetry. Getting to geek out with someone about figures like William Cowper, Thomas Gray, and Edward Young was such an unexpected treat, and David, if you’re listening, first of all I deeply apologize if your name isn’t David, and secondly, please know what a pleasure it was to make your acquaintance. Please email me at versecraftpodcast@gmail.com and let’s keep in touch! 

            The second person I ran into, which was just a mind-blowing stroke of luck, was the poet, critic, Edinboro University professor, and director of the Robert Frost Society Robert Bernard Hass, not to be confused with the Californian poet Robert Hass. Bob and I had a fantastic chat about the landscape of contemporary formal poetry, the fraught politics of poetry conferences, and the excellence of Edwin Arlington Robinson. Bob has quickly become an enthusiastic listener of the show, and was kind enough to immediately sign up to be a member of Versecraft. Thank you so much Robert, and it was so wonderful to meet you. Please keep in touch, and I hope you enjoy this and all past and future episodes of the show. 

            If you too, dear listener, would like to help support Versecraft, please consider doing so at my link in the show notes, where you can either leave me a one-time tip or sign up to be a member of the show. Remember, the more of you sign up, the more time I’m able to devote to the promotion of poetry rather than the promotion of my pay check. In these times when English departments are being disbanded and the prospect of a stable academic position in the humanities grows bleaker and more unrealistic for my generation by the day, the grassroots contributions of listeners like you help to ensure that the sort of literary discussions that take place on this show can have a viable life beyond the academy. Thank you so much. For those of you unable to give right now, please try and take a moment this week to let a friend know about the show. Let’s get this verse out into the universe. 

            The third person I spoke to this week was the charming and decorated local poet Quartez Harris. Quartez is a free verse poet, but expressed an enthusiastic interest in learning about how meter works, and it was a delight to go through a page of Mandelbaum’s Dante with him and scan some of the lines. It was great to meet you Quartez, and I hope you enjoy the show! 

            Finally, I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Jack Cooney, a professor of history and humanities at Ivy Tech Community College in Indianapolis. Jack and I had a spirited conversation about the joys of poetry and bookstores, Medieval sculpture and Hellenistic literature. I also learned afterward that he lives in a Victorian home with William Morris wallpaper, so in essence he’s a model to aspire to. If you’re listening Brian, I told Professor Cooney about your work, which I think he would really enjoy. As a pair of Indianans, maybe you can organize something together! 

            I’d also like to thank the poet Kevin McFadden for a very kind note he sent me about the show, as well as Cameron Clark, the wunderkind of Sleerickets, whom I’ve had several fascinating and illuminating conversations with over the past week. I’m truly privileged to be surrounded by so many cool folks—thank you so much for your enthusiasm, your insight, and your company. 

            Today’s featured poem is by the poet and legendary professor of poetry Donald Justice. Justice, who lived from 1925 to 2004, had a relatively quiet life, and is better known for the understated quality of his poetry and his outsized influence on his students than for any personal drama. As a young man, Justice studied several different places, including a brief stint at Stanford with Yvor Winters, but ultimately graduated with his PhD from the University of Iowa, and soon after began to teach poetry at the Iowa Writers Workshop, the first graduate creative writing program in the country, and the program which has always been considered the most prestigious literary MFA. As a longtime professor of poetry at this hallowed institution and elsewhere, Justice helped to usher many now famous poets to artistic maturity, including Rita Dove, James Tate, Ellen Bryan Voigt, Jorie Graham, and a poet previously covered on this podcast, Mark Jarman. Over the course of his life, while he never achieved much mainstream popularity, Justice did win many prestigious awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the 1980 Pulitzer Prize. 

By the time of his death at the age of 78, Justice had a reputation not only as a venerated poetic mentor, but one of the 20th century’s most eclectic poetic craftsmen, a man who worked in and mastered many forms of poetic composition but was never content to stick to one method for long. Like many poets of his generation, he moved from traditional forms in his early work to looser and more experimental techniques in his later work, going so far as to incorporate chance-based methods in his composition. 

Today’s poem comes from early in Justice’s career—in fact it was written while he was still a student. In his memoir, The Bread of Time, Philip Levine recalls being in a class with Justice taught by John Berryman. During one class, Berryman challenged his students to engage in a sonnet contest with one another, with himself as judge. As the story is told, Justice was the undisputed winner of that contest, and this was his prize-winning poem: 

The Wall

for J.B. 

The wall surrounding them they never saw;
 The angels, often. Angels were as common
 As birds or butterflies, but looked more human.
 As long as the wings were furled, they felt no awe.
 Beasts, too, were friendly. They could find no flaw
 In all of Eden: this was the first omen.
 The second was the dream which woke the woman.
 She dreamed she saw the lion sharpen his claw.
 As for the fruit, it had no taste at all.
 They had been warned of what was bound to happen.
 They had been told of something called the world.
 They had been told and told about the wall.
 They saw it now; the gate was standing open.
 As they advanced, the giant wings unfurled.

As befits a sonnet contest, this is a textbook Italian sonnet. Don’t worry, next season is going to feature a lot more diversity in the forms. This season has been the season of sonnets—in a couple weeks we’ll conclude this extended study and be going down some different paths. I hope you’ve found it as interesting as I have thus far to see how much thematic and stylistic diversity is possible within the sonnet form, and even at this point, we’ve only just scratched the surface. 

The scheme of this sonnet runs ABBAABBA in the octet, and a slightly easier CDECDE in the sestet. Metrically speaking, other than a couple anapestic substitutions, the poem is very regular, almost monotonously so. Even the rhythm modulates very little, and if we look for enjambment, we find little or none at all. This fastidious rigidity, this cautious attention to the independent integrity of each line, gives us, despite the excellence of this poem, a sense of Justice’s inexperience and lack of confidence at this stage in his career—he seems to be composing the sonnet very carefully, building it up line by line, adhering to orthodox rhythms which make the feet sound out clearly, making sure each line fulfills all the requirements of the sonnet. 

To my ear, line 5 sounds the most organic: “Beasts too, were friendly. They could find no flaw.” Here, as well as in line 2 by the way, we have the same rhythm we discussed at length in the Brooks poem last week—a caesura between the second and third foot breaks up a completely iambic line into a rhythm that sounds like: iamb, amphibrach, trochee, trochee, trochee. We also however have the added rhythmic interest of a very heavy first foot iamb: “Beasts too.” This is the kind of foot that some people might be tempted to scan as a spondee, a foot consisting of two accented beats. This would be incorrect however, for at least two reasons. The first is that if we accent both of these syllables, we end up with a line that has six accents, a variation on the alexandrine. In the context of the poem however, we neither hear the line as longer than its peers, nor do we any reason to think that Justice would have arbitrarily broken his metrical pattern in this one spot. The second reason is that, if we think about the meaning of the line, we can see that the word “too” is meant to receive especial emphasis, and thereby overtakes the word “beasts” as the dominant syllable in the foot. In the phrase “beasts too,” both words receive a good deal of stress, but the second word receives slightly more—as such, the foot can be scanned as an iamb, though it is a noticeably heavy iamb. This is an example of rhythmic modulation at work, and the way Justice plays with the rhythms in this line while maintaining a pristine iambic pentameter shows a deftness, sureness, and flexibility that he doesn’t exhibit to the same degree elsewhere in the poem. 

More interesting than meter and rhyme in this poem is the prominent use of another device which we haven’t encountered much of so far: what is called anaphora, the repetition of words or phrases at the beginnings of lines, sentences, or clauses in order to produce an emphatic, incantatory effect. Anaphora is often abused by young poets in an effort to sound poetic, and it is a technique which, following the example of Walt Whitman, many free verse poets in particular have attached themselves to as a way to give a patterned structure to otherwise formless lines. Here however, the anaphora is deployed hauntingly, quietly, and effectively. In the first four lines we have very slight examples: the first two lines begin with “the,” the third and fourth lines begin with “as.” Once we get to the sestet however, anaphora becomes just as much of an organizing force as end rhyme—indeed, we can view this stanza as organized both fore and aft, as structured by the first words as by the last words of the lines. We notice that the ninth and fourteenth lines both begin with “as,” forming an enclosed border around the sestet. The interior four lines of the sestet all begin with “they” followed by a verb, and the first three of these begin with “they had been.” This repetition is entirely appropriate for the content: through the structure of the verse, Justice is enacting the repetition of warnings which he describes. Furthermore, because of the biblical content and the fact that anaphora is commonly used on the pulpit, the repetition in this context gives the end of the poem the flavor of a fiery sermon. The technique here is powerful, tasteful, and justified. 

Let’s now begin the poem again, starting with the octet:

The wall surrounding them they never saw;
 The angels, often. Angels were as common
 As birds or butterflies, but looked more human.
 As long as the wings were furled, they felt no awe.
 Beasts, too, were friendly. They could find no flaw
 In all of Eden: this was the first omen.
 The second was the dream which woke the woman.
 She dreamed she saw the lion sharpen his claw.

            When we first begin this poem, we may feel a little lost—who are these people and why are they seeing angels? In line six however, at the mention of Eden, the setting snaps into place effortlessly: this is a version of the story of Adam and Eve. By retelling this story in a fresh way, a way which allows us to glean new or hidden insights from the narrative, Justice is writing in the spirit of the Rabbinical tradition of midrash, a method of creative, artistic interpretation whereby new details or alternative readings are added to a biblical text in order to illuminate the text’s hidden meanings. 

            We begin in this octet with an oddly jaded picture of our first parents: while we are told nothing of their mental states, we know that they view angels, the direct servants of God, as little more significant than birds or butterflies— Adam and Eve feel “no awe” at seeing them. This is important not only because it suggests a pair that takes the supernatural paradise of Eden for granted, but because it also reveals a certain dullness of perception: after all, to say nothing of angels, normal human beings view certain birds and even butterflies with awe all the time. That Adam and Eve do not possess this sensitivity to the wonder of life is concerning. 

However, it is also clear that the angels are very careful to keep up a certain appearance for Adam and Eve— they always keep their wings furled, meaning that they do not fly. To sacrifice something as basic as flight for the sake of keeping up an impression of harmlessness reveals a disturbing amount of guile, especially for an angel—what is the purpose of this anodyne façade? I’m reminded of Proverbs 9:10: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” Adam and Eve have no awe, they have no fear, and therefore they have no wisdom, no deep appreciation of life and life’s purpose. As in fictions like Brave New World, The Truman Show, or Logan’s Run, Justice paints a picture of a utopia that may in fact be a dystopia in disguise, a system which keeps its occupants complacent and free from critical thinking through pleasurable distractions— they are kept deliberately blind to reality, blind to the world beyond the wall. As a matter of fact, Justice even begins by saying that they never saw the wall—the very idea of their limitations is deliberately withheld from them. One could see the appeal of Satan’s liberating critiques in such a situation. 

Nevertheless, Justice hints that God has a subtler agenda up His cosmic sleeve. He says that the fact that Adam and Eve could “find no flaw in all of Eden” was “the first omen.” An omen is a sign that portends something momentous to come, and at this point we already suspect that the reference is to the fall of Adam and Eve through the eating of the forbidden fruit. But why would flawlessness be an omen of such a catastrophe? God created a flawless world, and yet, Justice says, the flawlessness of the world is an indication that Adam and Eve will forsake it. 

God, who is omniscient, knows this is true—God knows human nature, having created it, and knows that human beings, in their heart of hearts, desire a certain degree of conflict, and are bored to death by perfection. The psychological phenomenon identified by Edgar Allan Poe as the “imp of the perverse,” the irrational urge to do something wrong purely for the excitement of doing something wrong, is one of the ingredients in mankind from the beginning. Satan is not merely in the garden—Satan flows in the very blood of Man. 

Therefore, we can conclude that God and the angels fashion this charade of harmlessness for Adam and Eve not in order to keep them complacent, but precisely the opposite—to goad them into rebellion. To justify this subterfuge, we must return to the theological notion discussed in an earlier episode, the concept of felix culpa, or, “the fortunate fall,” the idea that the expulsion from paradise was actually a good thing, an intended thing, because it created a world in which it was necessary for God to become man in the form of Christ and redeem it, thereby creating an even more profound bond between humankind and God than would have existed otherwise. 

Justice however does not mention Jesus at all in this poem, and it is possible to read the felix culpa in a completely non-Christian light. In one of my favorite passages from The Georgics, Virgil says that “It was Zeus who put venom in the fangs of serpents.” Virgil describes how, once the Olympians overthrew the Titans, part of Zeus’s new administrative plan was to make life much harder for mankind, much more rugged and dangerous, not in order to punish them, but to spur them to creativity, progress, and excellence. We can see something similar happening in this poem, and we can also add to it the very Jewish insight from Proverbs that “the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.” In deliberately creating a circumstance in which Adam and Eve will make a grave mistake, God is giving them, and by extension humankind, the opportunity to bring themselves glory by creating a world for themselves. God furthermore must frame this opportunity as an error in order to justify revealing His wrath to Adam and Eve, which will not only give them greater insight into the nature of God, but will prompt them to awaken from their dull slumbers, cease to take their blessings for granted, and appreciate the world in a new, vivid, sacred way. The forbidden fruit may give them knowledge, but it is the subsequent punishment which gives them the even more valuable wisdom. This was God’s plan all along. Satan is merely a lackey. As God says in my favorite Bible verse of all, Isaiah 45:7, “I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil; I the Lord do all of these things.” 

In the final lines of the octet we read that the second omen was Eve’s dream of a lion sharpening its claws. On the most basic level, this is a sign that, once the spell of Eden is broken, the universal peace of nature will come to an end—no longer will the beasts live in harmony, but become predator and prey. We would do well to note here that the very existence of the lion is further evidence that God planned the fall all along—why design a creature built for savage predation unless it was known that savage predation would one day become the law of the land? As William Blake remarks of the tiger: “What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?” 

The lion specifically has other associations as well. Based on Genesis 49:9, where Jacob says, “Judah is a lion’s whelp,” the lion has come to be associated with the tribe of Judah, and by extension to all the Jewish people. If we read the lion as a symbol of the Jews, we can interpret this sharpening of claws as an allusion to the warfare and oppression that the Jews will have to face as a result of this fall from Eden. Alternatively, as we all know from The Chronicles of Narnia, the lion is often seen as a symbol of Christ as well. In Revelation 5:5, we read: “Behold, the lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David, hath prevailed to open the book, and to loose the seven seals thereof.” Here, the lion of Judah has been appropriated as an image of Christ in his wrath, the alter-ego of the merciful lamb of God. With this association in mind, we can read the lion sharpening his claws as a prefiguration of Christ, who must come down to fight for and redeem the world after paradise has been lost. 

Let’s now go back and read the poem again, this time all the way through: 

The wall surrounding them they never saw;
 The angels, often. Angels were as common
 As birds or butterflies, but looked more human.
 As long as the wings were furled, they felt no awe.
 Beasts, too, were friendly. They could find no flaw
 In all of Eden: this was the first omen.
 The second was the dream which woke the woman.
 She dreamed she saw the lion sharpen his claw.
 As for the fruit, it had no taste at all.
 They had been warned of what was bound to happen.
 They had been told of something called the world.
 They had been told and told about the wall.
 They saw it now; the gate was standing open.
 As they advanced, the giant wings unfurled.

As in a neoclassical tragedy, the climactic action itself happens offstage—once we get to the sestet, the entire temptation and eating of the fruit has already happened. Intriguingly, Justice says that the fruit “had no taste at all.” Justice seems to describe this momentous event as one of absolute neutrality, if not disappointment. One would expect, if not literal sweetness, at least figurative bitterness, but Justice does not even give us that.  To me, the description of the fruit as tasteless suggests that the fruit is fake, something non-edible. An ersatz fruit, a prop, which has no powers of its own, but is merely there to be a token of disobedience. The temptation was a scam—humans already had all the faculties they needed, they simply needed the experience of sinning. 

In the relentless volley of anaphora that we discussed earlier, Justice says, “They had been warned of what was bound to happen.” This suggests a sort of determinism, an inescapable fate, and helps to bolster our earlier suspicions that God had planned this all along. “They had been told of something called the world.” Here, world refers not merely to the physical world outside the walls of Eden, but to the Christian understanding of “the world” as a fallen realm, a den of temptations to materialism and debasement. In Second Corinthians 4:4, Satan is described as “the god of this world,” and Justice makes clear that Adam and Eve are now walking into Satan’s dominion. 

The last line of this poem is a truly breathtaking piece of poetry: “as they advanced, the giant wings unfurled.” Literally this means that as Adam and Eve were walking out of Eden, they caught the first glimpse of the angels in their true, terrifying glory. Figuratively, we can understand that, after eating from the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve are “advancing” mentally, and the more sophisticated their minds become, the more grand and terrifying reality appears to them. This is both our gift and our curse—we have sacrificed peace, we have sacrificed immortality, but we have gained the capacity for terror and beauty that is necessary to live a meaningful life. We have learned to view the angels with awe. 

Let’s now encounter this poem one last time, as an old friend:

The Wall

for J.B. 

The wall surrounding them they never saw;
 The angels, often. Angels were as common
 As birds or butterflies, but looked more human.
 As long as the wings were furled, they felt no awe.
 Beasts, too, were friendly. They could find no flaw
 In all of Eden: this was the first omen.
 The second was the dream which woke the woman.
 She dreamed she saw the lion sharpen his claw.
 As for the fruit, it had no taste at all.
 They had been warned of what was bound to happen.
 They had been told of something called the world.
 They had been told and told about the wall.
 They saw it now; the gate was standing open.
 As they advanced, the giant wings unfurled.