"The Heirloom" by Michael Donaghy

Text of poem here.

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Midlife by Matthew Buckley Smith

-The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse by Christopher Childers

-Khosrow and Shirin by Dick Davis

-In Ghostlight by Ryan Wilson

-A Gaze Hound That Hunteth By The Eye by Penelope Pelizzon

-The Nature of Things Fragile by Peter Vertacnik

-My poem Tlaloc on E-Verse Radio

-SLEERICKETS and Versecraft do tragedy, Part I and Part II

-Thank you for your sharp ears, Dan Brown! 

-The Metaphysical vogue

-Starting with the man in the mirror

-Letting the sunshine in

-The (grindcore noises) DUMPSTER OF DEATH

Transcript

Versecraft 5-9: “The Heirloom” by Michael Donaghy

Welcome back to Versecraft, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you so much for your patience regarding last week’s cancellation. I had a delightful visit with my good friend and excellent poet Dick Davis, and on Thursday I turned 29 years old and entered my last year of youth—a day upon which, as is my tradition, I took MDMA in a beautiful cemetery, where I pondered the notion that hope, not desire, is the root of all suffering, and considered whether the self-conscious sophistication of the Hellenistic poets calls Schiller’s distinction between Naïve and Sentimental poetry into question. 

2024 has just begun, my friends, and I am thrilled that I can already say that it’s going to be a banner year for poetry—so many good books have either just come out or are about to come out. As you may have heard on Sleerickets, after nine years, Matthew Buckley Smith’s long-awaited second book, Midlife, has finally been released. Given the logistical travails this book has faced over the past couple of years, this is incredible news. It is also incredible news because Matthew is an incredible poet, and I would say that a million times even if I didn’t have the honor of being his friend. The man writes killer works of art, and if his first book proved that point, his second, which I had the privilege of reading several months ago, seals it for the ages. No one writing today has a finer sense of lyric polish, and he is also, as no less an authority than Shane McCrae has pointed out, one of the greatest if not the greatest practitioner of the dramatic monologue writing today. I implore you to buy his book, the link to which you can find in the show notes. 

Now, if I continue to praise my friends, I repeat that it is not because of any nepotism, but rather because I have deliberately sought out extremely talented people to be my friends. Two of the best verse translators alive— Christopher Childers and the aforementioned Dick Davis—are both coming out with their magna opera this year. In Chris’s case, it is an epic project an entire decade in the making: the Penguin anthology of Greek and Latin lyric verse, which spans from Archilochus to Martial, is about 900 pages long, is copiously annotated, and transforms each of the hundreds of poems into accurate, beautiful, metrically dazzling poems in English. This is a staggering achievement, and it is no exaggeration to say that it is one of the major events in 21st century poetic history. I have read up to Pindar in my copy, and I cannot recommend this translation enough. It will be authoritative for many decades to come, and it will hopefully delight readers for as long as poetry is read. 

Dick, meanwhile, who is, as far as translation goes, the John Dryden of the 21st century, and who has pretty much single-handedly introduced the Anglophone world to the canon of classic Persian literature, is soon releasing the first ever translation of Nezami’s epic Persian metaphysical poem, Khosrow and Shirin, translated, as always, into gorgeous heroic couplets. According to Dick, this is his greatest translation yet, and that is saying something. No long poem in Persian is so linguistically rich and complex, and the fact that Dick has been able to transform it into a beautiful poem in English is awe-inspiring. 

The glorious thing is, I’m not even done naming great books. I promise I won’t drone on too much longer, but I must also mention that Ryan Wilson, Penelope Pelizzon, and Peter Vertacnik are all releasing new collections in the next couple months. Insanity! These are all extremely talented writers, and this is an embarrassment of riches. But as Lavar Burton says, you don’t have to take my word for it—buy their books, and you’ll see exactly the caliber of poet I’m talking about. Links abound in the show notes. 

Alright, now to give myself some sugar, and then I swear I’ll move on. As always, if you enjoy this episode, please do consider donating to the show or buying a shirt from the merch store. Every dollar spent goes toward supporting the arts— that is, me. If you can’t donate right now, please just tell one friend you know and love about the show. If we all started spreading Versecraft instead of Covid, the world would be an infinitely better place. Also, I have a new poem up on Ernie Hilbert’s E-Verse radio, and two new episodes on  the Sleerickets Secret Show where I talk to Matthew and Cameron about tragic drama, Jeremy Strong, and psychedelics, so you can check those out too! All of these things can be found, say it with me: in the show notes. 

Alright, I’m done with my filthy promotion tactics, but I still have one more thing to say before we begin. I mentioned before that I have great taste in friends. My friends are so brilliant, in fact, that they are able to detect, against all odds, those extremely rare occasions when I make a mistake. So it was that Dan Brown, master epigrammatist and former feature on this show, wrote in to tell me that I had prosodically fumbled a line in my Don Paterson episode, and so I did. In line 8 of Phantom V, “There is something vast and distant and enthroned” I said both that there was a first foot anapest and that the line is hexameter. This is of course nonsense. I said this silly thing because I had conflated two possible readings of the line: either as a line of acephalous hexameter or else as a line of pentameter with a first foot anapest. I sincerely apologize for any confusion— if this is your first time listening, I promise this doesn’t usually happen, although that Roethke line from episode 2 haunts me to this day. I want Versecraft to provide readings you can trust, so I am always happy to be corrected if I am careless enough to drop the ball. Thank you, Dan. 

Now let’s move on to the main course, shall we? Our entrée for today is, fittingly enough, the poet who was the subject of the last episode’s elegy—the prodigiously talented but tragically short-lived Michael Donaghy. 

Michael Donaghy, who lived from 1954 to 2004, followed the T.S. Eliot approach of being born in the United States but ultimately becoming a poet of the British Isles. Raised by first generation Irish parents in the Bronx, his heart was never far from his origins, and after completing his undergraduate at Fordham, he founded a Celtic music ensemble, (Sow-ruh) Samradh Music, during his postgraduate studies at the University of Chicago, where he also served as an editor of The Chicago Review. Like Paterson, and like the troubadours of old, Donaghy’s artistic aspirations were always finely balanced between his musicianship, which included skill at the tin whistle, bodhran, and flute, and his poetry. After meeting his future wife Maddy Paxman, the couple moved to London together, where Donaghy began to pursue his poetry career in earnest, joining the famous London Poetry Workshop, where he first met Paterson among many other notable poets of the time. At 26, he released his first collection, Shibboleth, to wide acclaim, and, like Paterson, would go on to win the Faber, Whitbread, and Forward prizes for his subsequent work. Once his name had been well-established, he was able to acquire posts teaching at City University London and Birkbeck College, in addition to writing frequently for large publications such Poetry and The New Yorker. 

This prosperous trajectory ended abruptly when, at age 50, Donaghy was killed by a spontaneous brain hemorrhage. His death sent shockwaves throughout the British poetry community and the formal poetry community at large, who had seen in his elegant, intelligent, finely-crafted verse one of the shining lights of the age. Now, twenty years later, his work is still being shared and celebrated, studied and loved, with no sign of diminished enthusiasm. Good poetry has a way of sticking around, and with justice and a bit of luck, Donaghy’s art will continue to be read for many years to come. 

In the early 20th century, after T.S. Eliot had made metaphysical poetry cool again, it became fashionable to try to identify modern poets who might qualify as neo-metaphysical poets. Everyone from Eliot himself, to Elinor Wylie, to Louise Bogan, to Theodore Roethke was called metaphysical at some point or another, with varying degrees of justice. Michael Donaghy has also been called metaphysical, yet in his case, the adjective is eminently accurate. Like the original metaphysical poets, who are some of his acknowledged inspirations, Donaghy frequently writes poems which depend upon elaborate and witty extended metaphors, conceits, in order get at some insight about human life. Perhaps my favorite instance of this is today’s poem, a moving and understated piece entitled, “The Heirloom.” It goes like this:

The Heirloom

Now its silver paint is flaking off,

that full-length antique beveled mirror

wants to be clear water in a trough,

still, astringent water in November.

It worked for sixty years, day and night

becoming this room and its passing faces.

Holding it now against the light

I see the sun shine through in places.

It wants to be the window that it was,

invisible as pleasure or pain,

framing whatever the day may cause—

the moon, a face, rain. 

I’ll prop it up against the skip

so I can watch the clouds race by.

Though I can’t see myself in it

it teaches me a way to die. 

Consisting of four alternating rhyming quatrains, with a sharp conceptual twist in the final two lines, this poem both looks and functions like a slightly extended English sonnet. Moreover, if we count the syllables in this poem, we wind up with 139, just one shy of the standard 140 of a fully masculine sonnet. The reason why we have more lines than a sonnet but fewer syllables is because of the shortness of the lines themselves. The poem takes many metrical liberties, but overall we can say that its baseline is iambic tetrameter. There are so many interesting variations in this poem that it may behoove us to simply go through them from top to bottom. 

In the first quatrain, we start with a line of acephalous iambic pentameter. Donaghy will also use iambic pentameter for the first lines of the second and third quatrains, before breaking this pattern in the final quatrain. In the second line, we have feminine iambic tetrameter, with a very heavy second foot: “length AN,” for flavor. In the third line, we have acephalous tetrameter, and here we see Donaghy availing himself of a trick I’ve mentioned a couple times before. When an acephalous line follows a feminine line, there is no break in the rhythm, as the acephalous line effectively “borrows” its missing first syllable from the extrasyllabic end of the feminine line. The fourth line is both acephalous and feminine tetrameter. An iambic line which is both acephalous and feminine is enharmonic with a pure trochaic line of the same length of meter, but we scan it as iambic in order to be consistent with the overall rhythmic scheme of the poem. 

In the second quatrain, we start off with the fifth line, a broken-backed line of iambic pentameter. It is “broken-backed” because we are missing the unaccented syllable of the fourth foot, thereby creating an atypical pause in the middle of the line. If we were to scan the line literally, we would end up with three iambs followed by a cretic. In line six, we have two back-to-back anapestic substitutions in the second and third feet, plus a feminine ending: “becoming this room and its passing faces.” Line 7 is regular save for a first foot trochee, and line 8 is regular save that it is feminine. By oscillating between greater and lesser degrees of variation, Donaghy is able to maintain the iambic tetrameter pulse in the reader’s ear despite his many departures from it. 

In the third quatrain, line 9 begins strong with perfect iambic pentameter. In line 10 the iambs continue, but end the tetrameter naughtily with a concluding anapest. In line 11, we have both a first foot trochaic substitution and a third foot anapestic substitution. In line 12, we have our sole line of iambic trimeter, made even more strange by the omission of the first beat of the third foot, creating a bacchius rhythm. 

In the fourth and final quatrain, Donaghy’s foray into variation pay off dramatically when he reverts to perfect pure iambic tetrameter throughout, a noticeable tightening of the music which ends the poem strongly and conclusively. We see here how even departures from form can, in the right context, provide a thoroughly formal and musical effect in the long run when employed conscientiously. 

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

Now its silver paint is flaking off,

that full-length antique beveled mirror

wants to be clear water in a trough,

still, astringent water in November.

It worked for sixty years, day and night

becoming this room and its passing faces.

Holding it now against the light

I see the sun shine through in places.

An heirloom is an object that is passed down within a family from generation to generation, and here we learn immediately what the heirloom in question is: a “full-length, antique, beveled mirror.” The silver coating of the mirror is flaking off, revealing the glass beneath, resulting in the mirror that is becoming less reflective and more transparent over time. As we will quickly begin to suspect, Donaghy views this movement from reflectivity to receptivity as a “reflection,” no pun intended, of the human experience of aging. Donaghy does not state this connection outright until the end of the poem, but we receive suggestions of it through a consistent and tactical use of the pathetic fallacy. Donaghy states that the mirror “wants to be clear water in a trough.” This is untrue of course, but this comment and others which follow form a sketch of the mirror as a sentient, sort of human character, thus creating an implicit parallel between the mirror’s condition and our own. 

Within this pathetic fallacy there is also a suppressed metaphor. Literally the mirror is becoming more window-like, but Donaghy instead says that the mirror wants to be “clear water in a trough.” A drinking trough for farm animals is much the same shape as a full-length mirror laid on its side, and so the clear water that fills it will also be mirror-shaped, as well as framed by the trough and transparent, looking much like what the mirror will become. This imaginative comparison acquires greater semantic force in the next line: it is not just any clear water, but “still, astringent water in November.” Here, Donaghy specifies that this is water on the brink of freezing, the year on the brink of Winter. This hibernal, liminal, transformative imagery, combined with the mention of silver in the first line, subliminally reinforce the connection between the aging mirror and the aging human on the brink of death. 

In the second quatrain, we immediately get our second dose of the pathetic fallacy: “it worked for sixty years, day and night/becoming this room and its passing faces.” If we did not know that the subject of “it” was a mirror, we could easily imagine that this description referred to an elderly man or woman, one who was bound by professional and social pressures to be restless, confined, and deferential toward others, as, to a certain extent, many of us are. Now, however, holding the mirror against the light, Donaghy says, “I see the sun shine through in places.” Figuratively speaking, Donaghy seems to say, when an aging person’s life is viewed in the light of a grander perspective, certain aspects and events in that life can be seen as brilliant, beautiful, and providential, intimating a presence beyond themselves. Taken another way, it may be that as we age, the less we are bound to reflect back the world we live in, the less we are bound to our egos, and we become more amenable to letting nature and truth act through us. When we recall that this is a full-length mirror, we realize that, were we to stand in front of it, we would see ourselves deteriorating in the same manner as the mirror— flecks of our bodies becoming transparencies through which the world around us can pass through. As the mirror breaks down, as we break down, the image of the self breaks down back into an image of nature. 

Let’s now go back and read the whole poem once again:

Now its silver paint is flaking off,

that full-length antique beveled mirror

wants to be clear water in a trough,

still, astringent water in November.

It worked for sixty years, day and night

becoming this room and its passing faces.

Holding it now against the light

I see the sun shine through in places.

It wants to be the window that it was,

invisible as pleasure or pain,

framing whatever the day may cause—

the moon, a face, rain. 

I’ll prop it up against the skip

so I can watch the clouds race by.

Though I can’t see myself in it

it teaches me a way to die.

In the third quatrain, we begin once again with pathetic fallacy: “It wants to be the window that it was.” Tired of imitation, of mimesis, the mirror seeks to be a lens for true reality—not something that is seen, but something through which things are seen—

 “whatever the day may cause.” Its desire to be “invisible as pleasure or pain” suggests the soul’s desire to transcend a physical body and become entirely mental, a desire which increases as the body breaks down, becoming hostile, painful, imprisoning. Having spent decades claustrophobically reflecting a room and its inhabitants, the mirror desires to open itself to the outside world as a window—to have moonbeams pass through it, rain fall upon it, and if a face is shown, to have it be a true face, and not a reversed reflection. Truth and liberation are both achieved through the abandoning of oneself to the larger causes of the world. 

            Donaghy says that he’ll prop the now unusable mirror up against the skip—British slang for a dumpster— and watch the clouds race by, a suggestion of the acceptance of the  passage of time. He then rather humorously says that he “can’t see himself” in the mirror—which may literally be true, but of course he’s been figuratively seeing himself in the mirror for the entire poem. He then ends with the utterance which brings to the surface all the suggestiveness which has been roiling beneath the poem up to this point: the mirror teaches him “a way to die,” a way to reckon with his mortality. 

To age gracefully is to shed, along with one’s bodily strength and vigor, the glossy sheen of the ego’s self-imaging. Just as the mirror, the archetypal symbol of vanity, peels away to become a transparent window, so too may the self learn to use its disintegration as a chance to turn its consciousness to the wider world— an opportunity to let the sunlight, the infinite being beyond ourselves, shine through us, before the inevitable dumpster of death. 

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

The Heirloom

Now its silver paint is flaking off,

that full-length antique beveled mirror

wants to be clear water in a trough,

still, astringent water in November.

It worked for sixty years, day and night

becoming this room and its passing faces.

Holding it now against the light

I see the sun shine through in places.

It wants to be the window that it was,

invisible as pleasure or pain,

framing whatever the day may cause—

the moon, a face, rain. 

I’ll prop it up against the skip

so I can watch the clouds race by.

Though I can’t see myself in it

it teaches me a way to die.