On Turning – Ten Decades of Poets Looking at Time and Life
Paul Cummins, May 2020
Birthdays are usually synonymous with celebrations, exchanging gifts, expressions of love and hope, “and many more,” and joy. They are also occasions, particularly for poets, for reflection: day-dreaming, regret, guilt, sorrow, nostalgia, pain, fears, and the like. Consequently, throughout history we find poets inspired, or perhaps compelled, to write poems on or about their birthdays. Some find occasions to celebrate other poets, family or friends on their birthdates. To illustrate, I have provided, at the end of this article, a mini-bibliography of 20th and 21st century poems. The list – over 100 poems – is by no means comprehensive but may whet the appetite of those inclined to go deeper into this world of poems “On Turning.”
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Delmore Schwartz, in his brilliant couplet, captures the essence of turning: “Time is the fire in which we learn / Time is the fire in which we burn.” And in most turning poems the unseen but unconquerable force is time. At each milestone, with each decade, the poets who write about ‘turning’ the next corner, write with an increasing sense of time the thief. Yet each offers a different ‘take’ on how to respond to our mortality. This is what makes these ‘turning poems’ so absorbing.
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There are, predictably, few poems about being five to fifteen years old but there are three we may consider. C.K. Williams looks back (“For Gail, When I was Five”) on childhood boy and girl meetings and sees his soul infused with laughter and the inevitability of tears. Billy Collins jumps five years ahead (“On Turning Ten”). He finds that looking back is difficult – seeing yourself at 10 – seeing fantasies at different ages but now from his adult perspective. He sees decline looking at an abandoned bicycle with “all the dark blue speed drained out of it,” realizing now, that at ten, sadness entered the scene with not just light “under my skin” but learning that now when I fall, “I bleed.”
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At fifteen, William Stafford (“Fifteen”) presents an age of anticipation, ready for life, uncertain, but eager to explore. In his poem, the young man finds a motorcycle lying on its side, the engine running, and he wants to ride it but the fallen owner appears, “blood on his hand … called me a good man and roared away …I stood there, fifteen.” Ready but not yet in the mix of things.
Chronologically, the next significant poem comes from Kenneth Koch (“To My Twenties”) and is one of the few poems of this decade that I was able to locate. The poem is, nevertheless, a Koch gem. He sees this time of life as almost a Locke-ian blank slate period when the person, in their twenties, is open to whatever they allow to happen. He asks himself, “Kenneth, do you have a minute? And he answers “Yes! I am in my twenties!/ I have plenty of time.” He sees this as a time “When everything was possible,” a time in which “I / Write a lot and am living all the time / And thinking about Living.” Yet, he realizes such fluidity is/was a rare gift and not likely to “ever come back.”
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Turning to turning thirty, we find a rich array of writers including John Woods, Katha Pollit, Philip Larkin, John Ciardi, Frank Bidart, Hans Magnus Enzenberger, Etheridge Knight, Daisy Fried, Lucille Clifton and Dylan Thomas. And it is Dylan Thomas’s two birthday poems that tower over all turning 30’s poems. His “Poem in October” (celebrating his thirtieth birthday) and “Poem on His Birthday (35)” are both classic Thomas poems of passion, eloquence, and stylistic density, imagistic richness, and romantic lyricism. These two poems along with his masterful “Fern Hill” represent Thomas at his best. Of the celebration of turning thirty (“Poem in October”), Thomas himself wrote to Vernon Watkins, “… It’s got, I think, a lovely slow lyrical movement.” And indeed it does.
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“It was my thirtieth year to heaven” and the poet provides an elegaic, sacramental unity of the child and the natural world. Looking back on his childhood, he feels blessed by the
“Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels.”
Five years later, in the “Poem on My Birthday,” we find the poet in a more complex frame of mind as he sees himself at 35 at “half his Bible span.” While he does still celebrate the pastoral innocence of childhood, like Dante, “midway in our life’s journey,” Thomas too finds himself “alone in a dark wood.” He sends a synopsis of the poem to a friend acknowledging “his death lurks for him, and for all, in the next lunatic war.” Sadly, 35 was not to be his midpoint in life; he went “into that good night” just after his (October) 39th birthday in December of 1953 at age 39.
Two other wonderful poets, Philip Larkin and Frank Bidart, look at turning thirty not so much with Dylan’s celebratory tones but with a sense of resignation. Larkin asks – “What have I done to be thirty-two?” – with a sense that the years have passed by uneventfully and “it isn’t fair.” Bidart opens “thirty-three, goodbye…” knowing that at this age (a group of cycling heroes who died early on):
Took on wives, children, accomplishments, all those
Predilections which also insisted on ending.
They could not tell themselves from what they had done.
They didn’t plan it that way.
As we move on into the Forties “not planning it that way” becomes more of a recurrent theme along with themes of self-doubt and other life uncertainties – time, of course, is always lurking in the shadows. Donald Justice writes:
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Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.
And Patrick Kavanaugh feels the pressure of being looked to in the role of “prophet and saviour,” as someone whose experience has taught you about life, “not just about persons – /which is futile anyway in the long run – but a concrete, / as it were, essence.” Elizabeth Bishop, writing on her birthday in her forties, looks at the sea as:
All the untidy activity continues,
Awful but cheerful.
For many poets, their fifties have been a time of coming to terms. Now, at fifty, there can be no doubt – the midway point has been passed; many things we ought to have done have not been done, and things we ought not to, have. Friends have met untimely deaths – even children have been lost – and time continues his unrelenting surveillance. Kenneth Rexroth writes (“Fifty”):
The old year ended in storms
The new year starts the same way
While Stephen Dunn offers (“Turning Fifty”) two visions of impending pain and how to respond as his wife wants “a drink – some music.” Perhaps the better response.
Patrick Kavanaugh (ten years later “Song At Fifty”) takes comfort in a “bankbook writ in verse.” Knowing friends and acquaintances miserable in marriages and occupations, he contents himself with his “lifetime without a trade.”
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“On my Fiftieth Birthday” Carl Dennis, as have many poets over the years, finds himself bound up with his father seeing, as many of us do, our father as we look into the mirror:
Now I’m as old as my father was
When less than a year was left him.
My father fretting over “something he’d left undone”: his son, however, writes:
And still his case isn’t closed
The evidence is still being gathered.
The evidence, always, still being gathered as long as we live.
In a similar hopeful vein, “A Minuet on Reaching the Age of Fifty,” George Santayana imagines Old Age inviting him to dance. While they dance, he reminisces over his life, youth, “Loves long dead,” sins, and the like, but along with his partner, Old Age, affirms
We’ll cheat the lapsing hour,
And close our eyes, still smiling, on the dance.
The next milestone, the Sixties, provokes poems of tough-minded confrontations with whatever the poet’s nemesis or anxieties may be. For Stephen Dunn (“Sixty”) it is the knowledge that “in my family the heart goes first / and hardly anybody makes it out of their fifties.” His response is to throw caution aside:
My sixtieth birthday is tomorrow.
Come play poker with me.
I want to be taken to the cleaners.
I’ve had it with all stingy-hearted sons of bitches.
A heart is to be spent.
James Schevill (“Masks in 1980 for Age 60”) announces his intention “to be serious sixty” and then offers a parade of masks he engaged “To create a fixed expression, immortal in time.” His poem explores a line from Octavio Paz which Schevill uses as his epigram: “We are condemned to inventing a mask for ourselves and afterward to discover that the mask is our true face.” Thus, Schevill asks “What good is a mask?” and answers himself: “To create a style.” His poem concluding, “To dance the solitary mask of the communal world.”
Auden, in honor of T. S. Eliot’s 60th, captures one of the challenges to Wisdom which poets seek and which he, Auden, beautifully articulates: The poet dealing with the ravages of time is,
… not speechless from shock but finding the right
Language for thirst and fear…
Amidst the various dark and dense sixties turnings poems, there is one particularly lyrical tribute by the American Paul Engle to his Oxford professor (1933-36): “Edmund Blunden on his Sixty-Fifth Birthday:
Soldier, teacher, scholar, man,
White-Flanneled cricketeer who ran
Wicket to wicket with his bat:
Should any life be more than that?
Blunden, a noted British poet in the years following World War I, receives a sequence celebration by his Rhodes Scholar, Engle. Writing some twenty-five years after their time together, Engle recaptures the courage of this young British writer sent off to the hellhole of trench warfare where “He hated most of all the shout for hate,” and from him Engle learned:
… how Friendship first began:
To be a friend, first be a man.
I learned all that a student can:
To be a poet, be a man.
Onward onto the Seventies and a virtual cornucopia of masterful poems: Milosz, Levitt, Schevill, Wheelock, Bidart, Dunn, Fuller, Richards, Hecht, Seidel, easily a book in itself, and certainly a wellspring of ideas and responses available to us all facing our mortality. Therefore, I will offer just a few lines from several of these writers, a sort of hors d’oeuvres to whet any reader’s appetite:
Shall not a man sing as the night comes on?
Nothing is quite fulfilled,
Nothing is lost;
But all is multiplied, the heart almost
Aches with its burden …
And learn at last
The dead are the only ones who never die.
– John Hall Wheelock
Outside the window is the world
Of glory unfurled
– Frederick Seidel
On this sad earth no time to grieve,
Love potions every spring and brewing.
– Czeslaw Milosz
The dramatis personae of our lives
Dwindle and wizen …
Of our forgetfulness. [Until] we find
It becomes strangely easy to forgive
– Anthony Hecht
The planet turns there without you, beautiful
… To love existence
Is to love what is indifferent to you…
What you will teach the stars is constant
rage at the constant prospect of not-being.
– Frank Bidart
And, finally, Roy Fuller deals with the trials of aging in “Vita Brevis, Ars Longa,” a poem asking:
And doesn’t there come yet an inkling that
Something continues after we are gone,
More than the healthy world we leave behind?
Certainly all of us who write hope so.
The Eighties and Nineties offer a rich array of Turnings from Richard Wilbur to Alan Dugan to R.S. Thomas, and Richard Howard and Pattiann Rogers. I have combined the 80’s and 90’s since not too many poets keep on going effectively during these decades. After reading Anthony Hecht’s brilliant “Sarabande on Attaining the Age of Seventy-Seven,” it seems appropriate to look at Richard Wilbur’s “An Eightieth Birthday Ballade for Anthony Hecht.” Employing the traditionalism of a strict ballade form, Wilbur praises in Hecht the same qualities for which he himself has been praised.
Who is the man whose poems dare
Describe man’s inhumanities,
And count our deadly sins, and bare
Such truths and cause the blood to freeze.
Finding your voice and staying with it despite criticisms of changing tastes among critics has and always will be the hallmark of poets such as Hecht and Wilbur who were brilliant up to their very ends. [Anthony Hecht died in 2004; Richard Wilbur in 2017.]
As if on cue, Richard Howard (“85 Off and On”) asks, “When, my dears, is the right age to die?” After listing a ‘who’s who’ of 20th Century poets now deceased, Howard concludes, “you see? Doing anything, even / writing poems, is something/ We all must be alive for …” He believes it unlikely that he will live to 95 (as of the date of this essay, May, 2020, he is 90 and half way there). Howard concludes his poem:
It’s unlikely I (or anyone)
Will be celebrating his or her
Ninety-fifth birthday. Or would even
Want to. That’s why it occurred to me
For reasons designated above –
This is the proper occasion to write
My eighty-fifth birthday poem now.
Although, as Howard states, few of us make it to ninety, James Schevill takes a brief imaginative flight to visit “Huck Finn at Ninety, Dying in a Chicago Boarding House Room” who has been, “cut off from everyone” and saying to himself:
I sink back, a whiskey case,
Fondling the button I found –
“Make Love – Not War” –
In the park on the ground.
I’ve got the button, button –
Let me sleep in the gleam
Of that old raft floating down river
Through the frontier dream.
Sadly, Huck’s fate, as Howard imagines it, was to be absorbed by exactly what he sought to avoid. At the end of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck announces his intention of “lighting out for the territory ahead of the rest fore they can ‘sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” Still, even in his dingy boarding-house final abode, Huck – via Richard Howard – dreams of a world that makes not war, but makes love.
(Parenthetically, I cannot resist urging readers to also look at Huck’s fate as conceived by one of our great 20th-21st Century fiction writers, Robert Coover, whose 2017 novel Huck Out West takes Huck and Tom Sawyer out west from the eve of the Civil War to 1876. T.C. Boyle writes of the novel, “Coover is in fine antic form here – truly, Huck never had it so good.”)
One poet who did make it to ninety was Gerald Stern for whom Stanley Plumly wrote a tribute, “For Gerald Stern At Ninety Two” (2019). Plumy offered a poignant recollection of Stern’s 80th birthday party where he, Galway Kinnell, Stern and others on the spur of the moment, recited as best they could recall Dylan Thomas’s “In My Craft or Sullen Art” prompting Plumly to write:
And I have to say I wept, and still
Weep when I think about that moment that I can
Hardly even speak of now at a distance of some
Dozen years – time, “in the mercy of his means,”
Refusing to let go of the “secret heart” of poetry.
Stanley Plumly died in April of 2019 whereas Gerald Stern at this writing (May, 2020) has now reached 95. Both poets saw and see one of the responsibilities of old age to be celebrating “Where daylight / May or may not be ending” and, “refusing to let go of the ‘secret heart’ of poetry.”
Let’s make it an even ten decades by concluding with Zbigniew Herbert’s tribute “To Henryk Elzenberg on the Centennial of his birth” – age 100. Elzenberg had been Herbert’s philosophy teacher (in the 1950’s) who Herbert credits with changing his life:
I’d have been a silly boy to the end of my life
Searching
Stifled taciturn ashamed of my own existence.
Yet, again, we encounter the theme of continuity, of one writer-poet-teacher passing on wisdom to the next generation, with all hoping that such wisdom will be cumulative. Herbert’s tribute is both simple and profound, a perfect way, I believe, to conclude this communique:
The times we lived in were truly a tale told by an idiot
Full of sound and cruelty
Your severe gentleness delicate strength
Taught me to weather the world like a thinking stone
Patient indifferent and tender all at once.