"The End Of The Weekend" by Anthony Hecht

Text of poem here

 Mea culpa: When I said "fearful," I meant "fearsome"

L'esprit d'escalier: "Above the boneyard burn its golden eyes" has a similar euphony to Donne's famous: "A bracelet of bright hair about the bone."
 

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Anthony Hecht's new Collected Poems, edited by Philip Hoy

-David Yezzi's new biography of Hecht, Late Romance

-The caprice of the canon

-Frost, Hawthorne, and Puritan allegory

-"Dramatic" line breaks

-Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath

-The diction of the male gaze

-The Sleerickets episodes (Part 1 and Part 2) with myself, Matthew, and Alice on Hecht's essay, "The Pathetic Fallacy."

-Sextod

-Sin as the mother of death (see Paradise Lost)

-Sex as prayer

-The connotations of magnesium

-Leda and the Swan by W.B. Yeats

-A Barred Owl by Richard Wilbur

-The symbology of owls

-What fell beast is this?

-Edificiary chakras

-Hughes the murderous crow

Transcript

Versecraft 5-3: “The End Of The Weekend” by Anthony Hecht 

Versecraftsmen and craftswomen, I have a question for you— what do writers of so-called free verse and the goddess Persephone have in common? They both leave behind Demeter. Anyway, welcome to Versecraft. Today’s episode is one that some of you have probably been expecting me to do for some time, because today’s poet, alongside Richard Wilbur, W.H. Auden, Philip Larkin, and Robert Frost, has been one of the greatest influences upon contemporary writers of metrical poetry, a veritable cornerstone of the New Formalist edifice. On top of this, he is arguably the greatest Jewish-American poet to date. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. 

As always, if you appreciate what I do here on Versecraft, please consider leaving a tip or buying a handsome shirt from my merch store, the links to which you can find in the show notes. Otherwise, if you have thirty seconds, please just take a moment to rate the show on Apple or Spotify or simply tell someone you know about the show. Thank you so much. If you’re new to the show, thank you so much for checking it out, and I hope you enjoy. 

Our poet for today is of course the great Anthony Hecht. If you’ve read the Wall Street Journal, The Times Literary Supplement, The Hudson Review, The National Review, or the Washington Post in the last couple weeks, you may have seen his name floating around. That is because, in honor of the centennial of his birth, two major works of Hechtiana have just come out— namely, the first comprehensive, single-volume edition of his collected poems, including several never before published, edited by the founder of Waywiser Press and the Anthony Hecht Prize, Philip Hoy, and also the first and probably forever definitive biography of Hecht, entitled Late Romance, written by poet and former Versecraft feature David Yezzi. Both of these works are magisterial achievements of scholarship, and essential reading for anyone concerned with the great poetry of the later 20th century. Please see the links in the show notes for further details. 

The publication of these two works, and the buzz surrounding them, allow us to witness before our eyes the activity of a fascinating, borderline occult process which happens more and more rarely in poetry: the process of canonization. Now, in the third decade of the 21st century, we are acquiring the hindsight to decide who the great poets of the second half of the 20th century are. Who the most influential poets are is much easier to discern: for better or worse, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Larkin, and John Ashbery will be remembered forever. Whether a poet’s work can survive based on artistic merit rather than historical importance however is a harder question to answer, and made even harder by the fact that judgements are never final. Percy Shelley was worshipped a hundred years after his death in a way that we, yet another hundred years removed, cannot fully appreciate. Conversely, the Renaissance poet John Donne means far more to us than he would have meant to the Regency society of Shelley’s day. Such protean difficulties notwithstanding, it remains one of the central tasks of the critic to sort out the wheat from the chaff, despite any vapid postmodern protests to the contrary. To dare to evaluate works of art is not an exercise in pretentious gatekeeping, but a service to the commonweal: we find the wheat so that we may provide the best intellectual nutrition for our society. 

To get back to our man, if Anthony Hecht is being nominated for the title of significant poet based not on the number of teenagers and dissertations he has inspired but on the actual quality of his poems, I make this episode to cast a vote in his favor, as well as to spread awareness of the lovely books aforementioned. 

Anthony Hecht, who lived from 1923 to 2004, was born in New York City, and grew up a parentally abused and academically unpromising student, reserved and self-conscious beside his dashing high school classmate, Jack Kerouac. At Bard College, he fell in love with poetry, and like everyone who falls in love with poetry, tendered ambitions of being a poet himself. Dismayed by such impractical nonsense, Hecht’s parents called for a doctor—Dr. Seuss that is, who happened to be a family friend, and asked for him to discourage their son from becoming a poet. Thankfully, no green eggs and hamming it up could sway our hero from his vocation. 

Unfortunately, the second World War did, at least for a while. Drafted at the tail of his collegiate studies, Hecht was shipped off to Germany, where he bore witness to horrors that nearly drove him to insanity and haunted him for the rest of his life. The worst of these came at the end of the war, when Hecht’s division was tasked with liberating the Flossenburg concentration camp. As a polyglot, Hecht was assigned the duty of interviewing the survivors about their experiences, which proved to be a revelation of the world’s monstrosity beyond anything he could imagine. As he later said: “the place, the suffering, the prisoners’ accounts were beyond comprehension. For years after I would wake up shrieking.” Despite a nervous breakdown two years later, Hecht would eventually learn to live with his PTSD, partly with the aid of psychoanalytic therapy, partly by channeling his experiences into unforgettable poetry. 

Upon returning to the states, Hecht swiftly enrolled at Kenyon College here in Ohio, where he studied under John Crowe Ransom. Ransom’s New Critical approach and taste for ironic, highly-wrought neo-courtier poetry had a major impact on Hecht, and this influence, combined with the influence of W.H. Auden, whom Hecht admired deeply and befriended on a trip to Italy, and Wallace Stevens, whose lush musicality Hecht idolized, led the young poet to develop an urbane, ornate, and affected poetic style which has sometimes been labeled baroque, antiquated, or even emotionally defensive. While Hecht’s first book, A Summoning of Stones, has been the one most criticized for this mannered quality, and his second book, The Hard Hours, embodies a dramatic and constructive movement away from it, Hecht never entirely gave up his sweet tooth for candied diction, swashbuckling wit, or aloof posturing. As a result, while his poems are often delectable to read and recite, to me at least they often seem to compromise substance for the sake of style, and to lack the cerebral gravitas of an Edgar Bowers or the grounded clarity of a Richard Wilbur. Despite his considerable accomplishment, one wonders what sort of poet he would have become had he studied at Stanford instead of Kenyon. 

Nevertheless, Hecht was a poet of remarkable range, and as prone as he was to writing florid description or witty double-dactyls, a form he invented with fellow poet John Hollander, he was also capable of harrowing, plain-spoken poems of moral reckoning, such as the Holocaust pieces “More Light, More Light!,” and “The Book of Yolek,” or piercing psycho-spiritual studies like “The Grapes,” “A Letter,” and “The Feast of Stephen,” and it is upon this sort of work that his reputation must ultimately rest. 

Following his stint at Kenyon, Hecht received a Master’s in English Literature from Columbia, and subsequently taught at a variety of colleges before settling down at the University of Rochester, where he would be a professor for nearly twenty years. In 1968 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his aforementioned second collection, The Hard Hours, and from 1982 to ’84 he was the Poet Laureate of the United States, a time period corresponding almost exactly to the breakout success of Iron Maiden. Like many notable poets of his era, Hecht had a turbulent inner life but eventually achieved a quiet outward one in the tweed-padded refuge of the academy. Until his death in 2004, he remained a sought-after lecturer, critic, and poetic sage, a debonair professorial persona complete with a pseudo-British accent that he maintained at almost all times. I am constrained by time to leave my little sketch at that, but for further details on this strange and fascinating man, please consult David’s book. 

The poem I have chosen for today, “The End of The Weekend,” is one of the first of Hecht’s that I ever read, and it has always stuck with me. It is not a Holocaust poem, or anything even remotely close, yet it is still, in my opinion, one of the eeriest and most haunting works that he ever wrote. It comes from his second, Pulitzer-Prize winning book, The Hard Hours, and like many poems from that sophomore effort, it eschews his typical extravagance for a more plain-spoken intensity. The poem goes like this:

The End Of The Weekend

A dying firelight slides along the quirt

Of the cast iron cowboy where he leans

Against my father's books. The laryat

Whirls into darkness. My girl in skin tight jeans

Fingers a page of Captain Marriat

Inviting insolent shadows to her shirt.

We rise together to the second floor.

Outside, across the lake, an endless wind

Whips against the headstones of the dead and wails

In the trees for all who have and have not sinned.

She rubs against me and I feel her nails.

Although we are alone, I lock the door.

The eventual shapes of all our formless prayers:

This dark, this cabin of loose imaginings,

Wind, lip, lake, everything awaits

The slow unloosening of her underthings

And then the noise. Something is dropped. It grates

against the attic beams. I climb the stairs

Armed with a belt.

A long magnesium shaft

Of moonlight from the dormer cuts a path

Among the shattered skeletons of mice.

A great black presence beats its wings in wrath.

Above the boneyard burn its golden eyes.

Some small grey fur is pulsing in its grip.

The pen behind this poem would never be mistaken for Robert Frost’s, and yet this is a uniquely Frostian poem in Hecht’s oeuvre. It possesses several hallmarks of his style: a slightly elevated yet nevertheless colloquial register, an occasionally loose but still relatively consistent iambic line, and most notably, a Gothic setting with evocative and morally-charged natural symbolism. In this last respect, Hecht is also working in the tradition of Hawthorne, and though Hecht was a Jewish New Yorker, there is a foreboding Puritan energy which runs throughout this poem. 

In terms of the form, we find that this poem is roughly divided into four sestets which roughly rhyme ABCBCA—in other words, English quatrains enclosed by A rhymes, a scheme which gives each section a sense of definite closure, perhaps even confinement. I use the qualifier “roughly” in regard to the stanzas because the 19th line, which should ordinarily belong to the fourth stanza, is split between the third and fourth stanza. In splitting the pentameter this way, Hecht follows a common practice among dramatic poets like Shakespeare, who, while preserving iambic pentameter, sometimes split lines between characters. Hecht is also using this line break for a dramatic function: to create a sense of suspense between the ascent to the attic and the revelation of what’s within, the extra white space serving as a kind of momentary cliffhanger. 

We also observe that the split line and the last line of the poem, which should rhyme with one another, are left unrhymed. I suspect that Hecht did this in order to give the last line an additional sense of dissonance and shock. While we are used to seeing variation from a metrical norm for expressive purposes, here we also find variation from a rhyme scheme for expressive purposes. The more patterns a poem establishes, the more rule-breaking there is to play around with. 

As I mentioned, Hecht does allow himself some liberties in the meter, particularly, following Frost, anapestic substitutions. Three lines stand out as especially irregular. Line 4: “whirls into darkness. My girl in skintight jeans” begins with a trochaic substitution, and then could either contain a second foot amphibrachic substitution or a third foot anapestic substitution. I prefer the amphibrachic reading because it aligns more closely with the speech rhythm, specifically in regard to the caesural period after the word “darkness.” In line 9 we have: “whips against the headstones of the dead and wails,” which an acephalous line of hexameter. The extrametrical length of the line, combined with its punchy trochaic movement, may evoke for us the forceful whipping of the wind in question. Finally, in line 15, we have: “wind, lip, lake, everything awaits.” This is quite a difficult one. If we outlaw spondees, we could read it trochee-trochee-iamb-iamb, though this seems rather forced and assigns tetrameter to what sounds like a line of hexameter. Alternatively, we could read the first four syllables as two spondees, followed again by two iambs. This is a rare case where I prefer the spondaic reading, as it is faithful to the fact that we have what sound like six more or less equally strong accents in this line. 

As a final note, I would like to draw your attention to the rhythmic artistry of lines 16 and 17: in the former, the word “unloosening” corresponds to an anapestic substitution, a “loosening” of the meter; in the latter, The abrupt “something” which is dropped falls on trochaic substitution, a sudden dropping motion. 

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

A dying firelight slides along the quirt

Of the cast iron cowboy where he leans

Against my father's books. The laryat

Whirls into darkness. My girl in skin tight jeans

Fingers a page of Captain Marriat

Inviting insolent shadows to her shirt.

We rise together to the second floor.

Outside, across the lake, an endless wind

Whips against the headstones of the dead and wails

In the trees for all who have and have not sinned.

She rubs against me and I feel her nails.

Although we are alone, I lock the door.

The second word of this poem is “dying,” an initial hint that this poem, whatever its ostensible subject matter, will have the shadow of mortality hanging over it. The quirt mentioned in the first line is a small riding whip, and the cast iron cowboy introduces a sharp image of traditional masculinity which will also hang over the poem like a specter. The speaker describes the cowboy as leaning “against my father’s books.” As I mentioned earlier, Hecht was deeply involved in psychanalysis, and the Oedipal dynamic between fathers and sons described in Freud would have been intimately familiar to him. If the cowboy is a symbol of the speaker, which we will be given reason to believe further along in the poem, it is significant that it is “against his father’s books.” The speaker hereby suggests that he is a man of action, rebellious against received wisdom and bookishness. He seeks to assert his own masculine identity in the shadow of his father, in his father’s house, chiefly, as we will see, through the means of a clandestine sexual liaison.

It is worth noting at this point that this poem was inspired by a personal anecdote told to Hecht by the poet Ted Hughes, a fact which will attain greater significance once we come to the end of the poem. For now, we may merely observe that the macho persona which we will come to associate with the speaker aligns well with Hughes’s own rugged, adventurous, rakish sense of himself—indeed, one of the first poems that Hughes ever published as a teenager was called “Wild West.”

The lariat of the cowboy “whirls into darkness,” and if we once again identify the cowboy with the speaker, we may see much significance in the phrase. The speaker is chasing something—we don’t know what, but he is reaching out into the darkness to find it. 

The speaker then introduces his companion: “my girl in skin-tight jeans.” This initial description tells us much already—namely, that the speaker not only views the girl primarily as a sex-object, but feels a sense of ownership over her, a viewpoint which is further indicative of his own interpretation of masculinity. When he describes her as “fingering” a page of a book, we can see that he cannot help but interpret everything related to the girl in sexual terms. This extends even to the shadows which falls on her breasts, which he calls “insolent” because they subvert his own proper role as the sole caresser of, the sole owner of, her body. 

We should note here in passing that by ascribing insolence to the non-sentient shadows, the speaker is making use of the pathetic fallacy, one of Hecht’s favorite literary devices, which he sought to defend from John Ruskin’s criticisms in an essay that I discussed with Matthew on an episode of Sleerickets about a year ago, the link to which I’ll put in the show notes.

The girl is reading Captain Marriat, a regency era writer of nautical adventure stories. This tells us something important: namely, that not only does the speaker find value in fantasies of hypermasculinity, but the girl does too—this may help to partially explain her attraction to him. We may note that Ted Hughes’s wife, Sylvia Plath, once described him as: “a singer, storyteller, lion, and world-wanderer.” 

Having already established such a sexually charged atmosphere, when the speaker says that he and the girl “rise together to the second floor,” we already know what they are about. From here though, the speaker makes a startling digression: “Outside, across the lake, an endless wind/ Whips against the headstones of the dead and wails/ In the trees for all who have and have not sinned. There is a hallucinatory, almost Macbeth-like quality to this passage. Just as the speaker had previously projected insolence onto the shadows, so he now envisions the wind whipping through the darkness like the aforementioned cowboy, and wailing for the mortal lot of humankind. Why the speaker should be so preoccupied with death in this moment of horniness is intriguing and mysterious. Sex and death have of course always been closely associated in human art, juxtaposed or conflated as positive and negative forms of the loss of self in an alluring and strange other. Yet this particular instance seems to point less to mysticism than neuroticism. A clue lies in the phrase, “for all who have and have not sinned.” Sin, which in the Christian tradition is considered the mother of death, is clearly on the speaker’s mind, and it was perhaps this fact which led David Yezzi to declare that this is a poem about infidelity. 

This is a strong hypothesis, and once one is aware that this is a poem written by Hecht and inspired by Hughes, adulterers both, it is hard not to entertain it, but it’s important to remember that the poem itself never confirms this. It is certainly possible to imagine that the speaker feels guilt simply for engaging in premarital sex or using his parent’s house as a love shack— or, more subtly, that he feels guilty in his self-awareness that he is using the girl for his own sexual pleasure, and perhaps emotionally manipulating her in the bargain. In any case, this feeling of guilt is so strong that “although we are alone, I lock the door.” The boy feels the girl’s nails as she rubs against him, suggesting not merely sexual but bestial desire, and foreshadowing the horrible prodigy to come. 

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

A dying firelight slides along the quirt

Of the cast iron cowboy where he leans

Against my father's books. The laryat

Whirls into darkness. My girl in skin tight jeans

Fingers a page of Captain Marriat

Inviting insolent shadows to her shirt.

We rise together to the second floor.

Outside, across the lake, an endless wind

Whips against the headstones of the dead and wails

In the trees for all who have and have not sinned.

She rubs against me and I feel her nails.

Although we are alone, I lock the door.

The eventual shapes of all our formless prayers:

This dark, this cabin of loose imaginings,

Wind, lip, lake, everything awaits

The slow unloosening of her underthings

And then the noise. Something is dropped. It grates

against the attic beams. I climb the stairs

Armed with a belt.

A long magnesium shaft

Of moonlight from the dormer cuts a path

Among the shattered skeletons of mice.

A great black presence beats its wings in wrath.

Above the boneyard burn its golden eyes.

Some small grey fur is pulsing in its grip.

            We might be tempted to read in the third stanza that the speaker is saying that the sexual tryst in the cabin is the answer to his and the girl’s formless prayers, the consummation of a vague desire long dreamed of. This is not actually what he is saying though—he is saying that the situation at hand is the shape of their prayers. Not without pathos, the speaker is admitting that this secretive sex is ultimately a means by which he and the girl both hope to find meaning and holiness in life. The prayers are “formless,” the imaginings “loose,” because the hapless kids do not really know what they are looking for—they are existentially lost, religiously adrift, and simply hope that what they are doing is a path toward happiness and truth. The desperation in this is doubly affecting if we interpret the couple as adulterers. 

For the third time now, the speaker commits the pathetic fallacy, imagining rather solipsistically that the entire landscape—the cabin, the wind, the lake—are all waiting with bated breath for the girl to take her clothes off. Unfortunately, this consummation devoutly to be wished is swiftly cut short. From above, there is the sound of something dropped which grates against the attic beams, and the couple fear an intruder. Some may see this as a stretch, but I appreciate the phrase “grates against the attic beams,” because for me it calls to mind the architectural columns of Ancient Athens, which are also “Attic beams.” Such beams in turn could easily be a metonym for Classical reason. This thing which grates against the Attic beams is something which disturbs the humanistic order—something strange, fearsome, and possibly supernatural. The speaker, called upon by his masculinity to investigate, heads up the stairs armed with his recently unloosened belt. The cowboy, sexual lasso in hand, is going up to wrassle with the darkness. 

The phrase “a long magnesium shaft of moonlight” is a good example of Hecht using his very broad vocabulary to be as precise as possible. It would be easy enough to call the moonbeam “silver,” but this would not only be cliché, it would be inaccurate. Moonbeams are not merely shiny, they glow with a pure white light, as does a rod of magnesium when it is heated. We should also note that at the time Hecht was writing, magnesium was heavily used in specifically German engineering, and had been particularly utilized in the construction of Nazi military planes. As a traumatized veteran of the war, this could easily have been something Hecht was aware of, and while the magnesium shaft may seem an innocent detail on the surface, for Hecht this phrase may have had a private connotation of evil. The word “shaft” of course continues the sexual innuendo running throughout the poem. 

The moonlight from the dormer, the attic windows, illuminates a room filled with the shattered skeletons of mice, where a “great black presence beats its wings in wrath.” This presence, which literally is almost certainly an owl, is described in unmistakably numinous, symbolic terms—it is a “presence,” not an animal, great and wrathful with beating black wings like a demon incarnate. We also recall W.B. Yeats’ poem “Leda And The Swan,” in which Zeus, in cygnus form, is also introduced with a “sudden blow, with “great wings beating.” In both cases, the bird is a spiritual being, a terrifying omen. The creature’s golden eyes burn above the boneyard of mice, and “some small gray fur is pulsing in its grip.” Note how, despite the terrifying context, the last line contains yet more sexual innuendo. It would be a surprise if Hecht’s friend Richard Wilbur did not have this magnificent image in mind when writing his much later poem, “A Barred Owl,” in which “some small thing in a claw” is “borne up to some dark branch and eaten raw.”

What is so wonderful about this sinister tableau of the owl clutching a mouse is how rich it is for interpretation. To begin with, owls are already an ambivalently viewed creature—the Greeks associated them with wisdom because of their forward-facing, human looking eyes, while the Romans were more likely to fear them as harbingers of death. Due to their nocturnal habits, owls were viewed by Medieval artists as servants or embodiments of Satan, as can be seen in many of the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. So what does this owl represent? Is it a reminder of inescapable death? Is it Satan, holding the lustful, adulterous soul of the speaker between its talons? Is it the speaker’s conscience, warning him of the ruin that will come upon him if he does not change his ways? Perhaps it is the speaker himself, self-recognized for the sexual predator that he is, holding the vulnerable heart of either the girl he is with or the girl he is cheating on. Any and all of these could be the case. Whatever the entity is, its revelation is something more important and sublime than any casual rolling around in the sheets could be. Innocence has been lost, the end of the weekend has come. 

A few weeks ago on my To My Artist Friends episodes, my friend Cameron brought up the idea of a house serving as an extension or projection of the body or soul. This is a poem in which that idea tracks very nicely: The poem begins on the first story with an atmosphere of lust, mirroring the nether regions of the body. The couple then ascend to the second level, where their aspirations and fears come to the fore; this is the region of the heart. At last, the narrator ascends to the attic, his own psyche, and must face the spiritual terror he finds there. 

Finally, there is one more thing to consider. It is unclear whether Hecht intended the speaker of this poem to be a stand-in for himself, for Hughes, for both, or neither. If however we read this poem as a reflection of Hughes, it acquires yet another layer of haunting resonance. Throughout his career, Hughes was associated with birds of prey— his breakout first collection was entitled The Hawk In the Rain, and the book for which he has become most known is entitled Crow, a collection that he was working on when Hecht published The Hard Hours— the collection from which “The End of the Weekend” is taken— in 1967. It is significant that a mere four years earlier, Sylvia Plath had committed suicide, with much speculation that she did so due to Hughes’s abuse and infidelity. With this in mind, it is easy to read the “black presence” as Ted Hughes, the unfaithful old crow, holding the fragile life of Sylvia Plath in his hands. 

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

The End Of The Weekend

A dying firelight slides along the quirt

Of the cast iron cowboy where he leans

Against my father's books. The laryat

Whirls into darkness. My girl in skin tight jeans

Fingers a page of Captain Marriat

Inviting insolent shadows to her shirt.

We rise together to the second floor.

Outside, across the lake, an endless wind

Whips against the headstones of the dead and wails

In the trees for all who have and have not sinned.

She rubs against me and I feel her nails.

Although we are alone, I lock the door.

The eventual shapes of all our formless prayers:

This dark, this cabin of loose imaginings,

Wind, lip, lake, everything awaits

The slow unloosening of her underthings

And then the noise. Something is dropped. It grates

against the attic beams. I climb the stairs

Armed with a belt.

A long magnesium shaft

Of moonlight from the dormer cuts a path

Among the shattered skeletons of mice.

A great black presence beats its wings in wrath.

Above the boneyard burn its golden eyes.

Some small grey fur is pulsing in its grip.