"Simple Autumnal" by Louise Bogan

Text of poem here

Topics mentioned in this episode include:

-Jungenstil, The Vienna Secession, The Belle Epoque

-Leonie Adams (see my episode on her here)

-The hard-hearted bravado of early 20th century American poetry by women

-The double twist of the hybrid sonnet

-Spondees and dactyls

-Theodore Roethke (see my episode on him here)

-"Ode On The Death Of Pius XII" by A.D. Hope

-See my episode on A.D. Hope here

-The bitterness of beauty to the grieving, and the beauty of grief.

-"The Wasteland" by T.S. Eliot (see my episode on Eliot here)

-"Sunday Morning" by Wallace Stevens (see my episode on Stevens here)

-Heraclitus and The Buddha

-To die, or to die into greater life? 

Transcript

Versecraft 5-1: “Simple Autumnal” by Louise Bogan

            Hey everyone, and welcome to Season 5 of Versecraft! It’s now been a year and some change since I started the show, and it’s been quite a journey. Not only have I gotten to immerse myself in literature and topics that I love, but I’ve gotten to know so many interesting people, and I’d like to thank you all so much for your passionate support for the show. I know compared to many podcasts Versecraft can seem a bit buttoned up, which is why I’m all the more touched by all the people who’ve gotten genuinely excited and enthusiastic about what I do here— it’s what makes the hours of writing and research worth it. 

            On that note of course, if you’d like to support or continue to support the work I’m doing here, please consider leaving me a rating on Apple Music, buying a Versecraft shirt, leaving me a tip on my Buy Me A Coffee page, or just using your considerable gift of gab to wax poetic about the show to your friends. A grateful shout-out is due to Zan Jacobus, Dan Brown, Robert Cullick, and Elizabeth McCrea for making contributions to the show in the past couple weeks. Thank you so much. 

            Today’s poet is a perfect example of someone who, like Donald Justice, Leonie Adams, Edgar Bowers, or any number of others, lived a quiet life during the mid-20th century, wrote understated but consistently distinguished poetry, was decently acknowledged and awarded during their own lifetime, yet has since lapsed into undeserved semi-obscurity. Bogan, who lived from 1897 to 1970, was born in Maine to poor working-class Irish-American stock. Despite her humble circumstances, she developed intellectual zeal at an early age, and with the help of a family friend was able to attend the Girl’s Latin School in Boston. She then enrolled at Boston University, but dropped out after her freshman year to move to New York and later Panama with her husband, where she determined to become a poet. At the age of 23 she went through a nasty divorce, and a year later her ex-husband died of pneumonia. Seeking spiritual and artistic direction, Bogan moved to Vienna, where she lived and wrote in isolation for three years. 

I’m particularly touched by this detail, because I also spent some formative time in Vienna when I was around the same age, albeit only for a couple months. It was there that I truly fell in love not only with European travel, which has been a defining activity of my twenties, but visual art as a medium. Beyond being the undisputed heart of European Classical music, Vienna is also a city of museums. It was there, being exposed to the baroque splendor of Imperial Austria, and the ravishing beauty of Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Otto Wagner, Hans Makart, Ernst Fuchs, the Jungenstil and the Vienna Secession, that the study and appreciation of architecture, painting, sculpture, and decorative arts opened up to me, particularly the Art Nouveau and Symbolism of the Belle Epoque, which, along with Greco-Roman art, remains my favorite to this day. 

            But I digress. After her stint in Vienna, Bogan, like me, returned to New York, and, like me, became a bookseller. Her first two books were released to critical acclaim, and shortly thereafter she became the poetry editor of The New Yorker, a position she held for almost forty years, and where she established a reputation as not only a fine poet but an incisive critic, and became, alongside Laura Riding, perhaps the most prominent female American literary critic of her era. In 1945, she also became the first female Poet Laureate of the United States. 

            Like her sometime rival Leonie Adams, Bogan otherwise lived a fairly stable, successful, and uneventful life, save for a brief affair with another writer—in her case, the as-yet unknown Theodore Roethke in 1935. Decorated and respected, she died in her Manhattan home at the age of 72.

            Despite her stability and success, Bogan’s poems evince a bitter and grief-ridden soul, perpetually aspiring toward Stoic resolve. This aspiration toward emotional hardness is perhaps the most consistent theme in her poetry, and its abundance not only gives us a clue as to her disposition, but also shows her very much of her time. Interestingly, Stoic grit and bravado was one of the most common themes for female poets in the first half of the 20th century: we see it everywhere not only in Bogan, but in Sara Teasdale, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Laura Riding, Elinor Wylie, and others. Here are some representative lines from Bogan:

From “Exhortation:”

“Give over seeking bastard joy

Nor cast for fortune’s side-long look.

Indifference can be your toy;

The bitter heart can be your book.

(Its lesson torment never shook).”

From “Knowledge:”

Now that I know

how passion warms little

of flesh in the mould,

and treasure is brittle—

I’ll lie here and learn

how, over their ground,

trees make a long shadow

and a light sound.

From “Second Song:”

I said out of sleeping:

passion, farewell.

Take from my keeping

bauble and shell,

black salt, black provender.

Tender your store

to a new pensioner,

to me no more. 

From “Come Break With Time:”

Take the rock’s speed

and earth’s heavy measure.

Let buried seed 

drain out time’s pleasure,

take time’s decrees.

Come, cruel ease. 

            Despite the impressive music of these lines, such repetitious exhortations toward renunciation can become monotonous. One suspects that the lady doth protest too much. Too often they give the impression of Stoic resolve as self-indulgent performance, not Stoic resolve as lived praxis. Nevertheless, taking bitterness, grief, and Stoic resolve as her perennial muses occasionally led Bogan to poetry of exquisite gravity and dignity, as in our poem for today, “Simple Autumnal.” Note how it manages to be a rich articulation of suffering and loss without being confessional whatsoever. It goes like this:

Simple Autumnal

The measured blood beats out the year’s delay.

The tearless eyes and heart, forbidden grief,

Watch the burned, restless, but abiding leaf,

The brighter branches arming the bright day.

The cone, the curving fruit should fall away,

The vine stem crumble, ripe grain know its sheaf.

Bonded to time, fires should have done, be brief,

But, serfs to sleep, they glitter and they stay.

Because not last nor first, grief in its prime

Wakes in the day, and hears of life’s intent.

Sorrow would break the seal stamped over time

And set the baskets where the bough is bent.

Full season’s come, yet filled trees keep the sky

And never scent the ground where they must lie.

We have three quatrains and a couplet, and the rhyme scheme runs ABBAABBA, CDCD, EE. So what does that give us? If you said a hybrid sonnet, you’d be correct. The main strength of a hybrid sonnet is that it offers the opportunity to make both an Italian turn after 8th line and an English turn after the 12th. Bogan avails herself of both these opportunities, moving from grief-tinged perception to a meditation upon grief in the ninth line, and then transitions to a final symbolic image in the concluding couplet. 

As far as versification goes, this poem makes for a great case study, because it makes substantial use of both metrical substitution and rhythmic variation. The overall trend is that Bogan inserts heavy iambs and trochaic substitutions to give the poem more accentual punch. Perhaps the heaviest line is the third: “Watch the burned, restless, but abiding leaf.” This line presents us with one of the very rare situations when I think it makes sense to interpret one of the feet as a spondee. WATCH the. Trochee. BURNED, REST. Spondee. less BUT. Iamb. aBIDE. Iamb. -ing LEAF. Iamb. The syllables “burn” and “rest” are both very strong, and are separated by a pause. If we were to illegalize spondees, we would be forced to scan the second foot as a very heavy iamb, and I think it’s a distortion of the sound of the poem to claim that the word “burned” is not an accent, and that this is not a six-accent line. The only way to make a six-accent line avoid the status of hexameter is to include a spondee in the scansion, which here I think is appropriate. 

By contrast, let’s look at the next line: “The brighter branches arming the bright day.” A big spondee aficionado might scan the last foot as a spondee: “bright day.” I however would scan it merely as a heavy iamb. There are two heavy syllables here, but “Day” is clearly heavier than “Bright”, and the momentum of the line encourages us to read it as perfectly iambic. Nevertheless, the heaviness of the foot, to say nothing of the triple alliteration of the b.r. sound, give this line a very percussive feel. We see a similar tactic at play in line 13: “Full season’s come, yet filled trees keep the sky.” Here we have a heavy iamb in both the first and the fourth foot, and again we have repetitive alliteration to give the line an Anglo-Saxon punch. 

Finally, let’s talk about line 7: “Bonded to time, fires should have done, be brief.” Here we have one of those situations where regional dialect may influence the scansion. The question is: is “fire” two syllables or one? For most Americans, the answer is two, and even if we say we can elide it as one, it’s going to be hard to force ourselves to say it that way. If we hold our ground and say that it’s two, we end up with a line that not only has a trochaic substitution in the first foot, but a dactyl in the third foot. Another rarity, but I think that’s what we have. Bogan was known for her combination of metrical discipline with modernist flexibility, and this poem is evidence of it.

            Let’s now go back and read the octet of the poem again:

The measured blood beats out the year’s delay.

The tearless eyes and heart, forbidden grief,

Watch the burned, restless, but abiding leaf,

The brighter branches arming the bright day.

The cone, the curving fruit should fall away,

The vine stem crumble, ripe grain know its sheaf.

Bonded to time, fires should have done, be brief,

But, serfs to sleep, they glitter and they stay.

            In the first line we already have an intriguing contrast— “measured blood” suggests calm temperance, while the suggestion that the year is “delaying” suggests an impatience with nature. In the second line, we learn that the speaker is grieving, or would like to grieve, but is forbidden, either by personal or social pressures, to express or even acknowledge this grief, and the source of the moratorium is never revealed. The speaker is in a state of high tension— grief roils beneath the surface, and she would desperately like to be able to manifest it. However, she does not permit herself.

It is curious that Bogan phrased it “tearless eyes and heart” and not “heart and tearless eyes,” as the former construction suggests that the heart is also tearless, which is a rather odd and seemingly nonsensical thing to say. However, if we recall Bogan’s old lover Roethke, who used the pun on tearing and tearing so well in episode 2, we may suspect that something similar is happening here. The eyes are tearless, but the heart is tear-less—it remains unbroken. It is the untorn state of the heart which results in the tearlessness of the eyes. Thus what initially appears to be imprecise language is actually a linguistically playful and elegant statement. 

Going into line three, we then do have a minor grammatical inaccuracy: the subjects of the verb “watch” are “the tearless eyes and heart,” but of course one’s heart, neither in a literal nor figurative sense, has the capacity to observe. In any case, the speaker watches a “burned, restless, but abiding leaf” and we immediately understand by these adjectives that the speaker is projecting herself onto the leaf: she is burned by grief, restless to release it, and yet abides. The connection is moreover sonically cemented by the rhyme between “grief” and “leaf.” There is a slight whiff of the pathetic fallacy here, but the descriptions are mutually accurate enough to be justified. 

The fourth line, “the brighter branches arming the bright day,” is spectacular in its polyvalence. The leaves have changed from green to the brighter colors of Fall. This effect in turn makes the bright day seem brighter than it would otherwise be. The dying of the leaves makes the world more splendorous. To follow the implicit metaphor, the speaker thereby suggests that the presence of grief in the world makes life more beautiful. One of my favorite poems by the Australian poet A.D. Hope, “Ode On the Death of Pius the XII,” explores a similar idea with regard to autumn foliage and aging. 

Yet there is more. By saying that the branches “arm” the day, the speaker not only references the fact that branches are the figurative arms of a tree, but suggests that to her, brightness is a weapon, brightness is hostile. Given that the speaker is paralyzed by unrealized grief, this is understandable—the brightness and beauty is discordant with her emotions. T.S. Eliot’s famous line from The Wasteland, “April is the cruelest month” refers to a similar phenomenon, but I think Bogan does him one better: whereas Eliot was referring to the fact that the glorious renewal of Spring reminds us of our own inadequacy to triumph over our mortality and sorrows, Bogan is referring to the fact that it is difficult for us to accept, when we are the throes of grief, that death, dying, and grief actually do make the experience of life more profound. As Wallace Stevens said in Sunday Morning, “death is the mother of beauty.” 

            In the second quatrain, the speaker expresses her impatience with the dying autumn: “fires should have done, be brief.” The cone and the fruit should go ahead and fall, the vine should crumble, the wheat should be reaped. Once again however, she is projecting. In symbolic terms, the speaker, stricken with grief, yearns for death. She is tired of being burned out, lingering on the branch of the tree of life. It may be worth noting that Bogan was only about my age when she published this poem. The conflation between Fall’s fiery color, actual fire, and the fire of time which burns away all things reminds us of Heraclitus, the Pre-Socratic philosopher who famously declared that the world is made of fire, which is to say the world is made of change. We may also think of the Buddha, who expressed a parallel idea in “The Fire Sermon.” 

Bogan finds herself in the position of hating the flames of time for consuming the one she loves and for burning her with grief, yet at the same time she yearns for cosmic fire as a deliverance from grief. She longs for a combustion that will not come. Instead, she and the lingering paraphernalia of Autumn are “serfs to sleep,” who “glitter and stay.” Unwilling or unable to fully wake up to or process her grief, the speaker thus prolongs her suffering. 

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

The measured blood beats out the year’s delay.

The tearless eyes and heart, forbidden grief,

Watch the burned, restless, but abiding leaf,

The brighter branches arming the bright day.

The cone, the curving fruit should fall away,

The vine stem crumble, ripe grain know its sheaf.

Bonded to time, fires should have done, be brief,

But, serfs to sleep, they glitter and they stay.

Because not last nor first, grief in its prime

Wakes in the day, and hears of life’s intent.

Sorrow would break the seal stamped over time

And set the baskets where the bough is bent.

Full season’s come, yet filled trees keep the sky

And never scent the ground where they must lie.

            Grief in its prime is grief that has neither the numbness of initial denial nor the comfort of eventual acceptance—it is the clear-eyed, raw confrontation with devastating loss. Such grief does not merely visit us in the meditative darkness of our beds, but assaults us throughout the day, framing all of experience through the lens of suffering. Under the sway of such grief, we cannot help but “hear of life’s intent”— the protocol of our telomeres to eventually deteriorate, and kill us. Note that Bogan says that it is grief itself which wakes and hears—the speaker has utterly identified themselves with their feeling. The speaker goes on to describe mortality like a message that is sealed in an envelope. Impatient with the world, sorrow, the speaker, would like to rip off the seal and confront mortality head-on. She could mean this in at least two ways: either that she wishes to die herself, or that she wishes to be able to accept and comprehend the full force of mortality while alive. 

In the 12th line, what is meant by “set the baskets where the bough is bent?” Perhaps that the speaker, who identifies herself with the moribund, lingering products of Autumn, wishes to drop, like a fruit, into the basket of death, a pomegranate for the lord Hades. And yet gathering fruit in a basket seems to be an almost necessarily positive image. If we read the lingering leaves and fruits not necessarily as the speaker herself, but her feeling of grief, we might read this impatience for dropping as an impatience to reach the stage of grief where she can fully accept her loss and retrieve her grief as a fruit ripe for appreciation, even if it is, as it must be, a bitter crop. 

            In the concluding couplet, the speaker returns to her impatience, declaring that the trees are in some sense naïve to keep up their foliage, that they do so because they are unaware of the fact that they will die. The speaker thus implicitly chastises herself for holding on to life or grief despite her knowledge of mortality. In the end, we can read her as someone desperate for death, or else desperate to embrace the wisdom of the death, and build a new life accordingly. 

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

Simple Autumnal

The measured blood beats out the year’s delay.

The tearless eyes and heart, forbidden grief,

Watch the burned, restless, but abiding leaf,

The brighter branches arming the bright day.

The cone, the curving fruit should fall away,

The vine stem crumble, ripe grain know its sheaf.

Bonded to time, fires should have done, be brief,

But, serfs to sleep, they glitter and they stay.

Because not last nor first, grief in its prime

Wakes in the day, and hears of life’s intent.

Sorrow would break the seal stamped over time

And set the baskets where the bough is bent.

Full season’s come, yet filled trees keep the sky

And never scent the ground where they must lie.