The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis [1 ed.] 9781613760093, 9781558498976

Citation preview

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved. The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

The Man Who Is and Is Not There

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved. The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

THE

M A N WH O I S A N D I S N OT TH E RE M

The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Andrew Stambuk

University of Massachusetts Press amherst and b ost o n

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011 by Andrew Stambuk A ll rights r eserv ed Printed in the United States of America LC 2011010044 ISBN 978-1-55849- 898-3 (paper); 897-6 (library cloth) Designed by Steve Dyer Set in Electra with Californian display by Westchester Book, Inc. Printed and bound by Thomson-Shore, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stambuk, Andrew, 1957– The man who is and is not there : the poetry and prose of Robert Francis / Andrew Stambuk. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-55849-898-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)— ISBN 978-1-55849-897-6 (library cloth : alk. paper) 1. Francis, Robert, 1901–1987—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PS3511.R237Z86 2011 811'.52—dc22 2011010044

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data are available.

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

To my parents,

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Uros and Blazenka Stambuk

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved. The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Contents

Acknowledgments   ix Works by Robert Francis   xi Introduction   1 1. A Cautious Distance   7 2. Inhabiting Juniper   26 3. Dwelling in Uncertainties and Straddling Extremes   49 4. Experiments with Form and the Poetry of Protest   73 5. Learning to Hover   99 6. The Teasing Paradox   119

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Epilogue   137 Notes   149 Works Cited   165 Index   171

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved. The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Acknowledgments

I owe a debt of gratitude to Suzanne Noguere, an accomplished poet and playwright and an admirer of Francis’s craft, who introduced me to his poetry. She has enriched my life through his work. Among colleagues and friends who offered guidance and wisdom, Denis Donoghue reminded me always to write in the ser vice of Francis’s poetry. Thanks go to members of the English Department at Hofstra University, Lee Zimmerman and John Bryant, whose careful reading of and thoughtful remarks on early drafts of chapters helped round them into shape. When this study was in its final stage, Patrick Deer’s generous conferencing proved invaluable to my discussion of Francis’s late poems. John Maynard’s detailed observations were instrumental in steering the book toward completion. For his close reading of early chapters I am grateful to Malcolm Spector. I also wish to single out Robert Shaw for his sensitive evaluation of the manuscript, which included recommendations that Francis’s prose be considered in a separate chapter. Special thanks go to my copyeditor, Mary Bellino, for her tactful suggestions and precise knowledge of the geography of Massachusetts. I have had the good fortune of receiving kind assistance from staff members at the Rauner Special Collections Library at Dartmouth College, and the Special Collections and University Archives at the W. E. B. Du Bois Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Their help in making the papers of Francis and Frost available to me is greatly appreciated. I should also like to thank Carol Betsch, managing editor at University of Massachusetts Press, for her patience in answering all of my questions about manuscript preparation. And

☙ ix

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Acknowledgments lastly, I owe much to my wife, whose encouragement has sustained me from the time I began this book.

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Portions of chapter 5 appeared as “Learning to Hover: Robert Frost, Robert Francis, and the Poetry of Detached Engagement,” Twentieth Century Literature 45.4 (Winter 1999), 534–52. I appreciate the willingness of its editor to release this material.

x ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Works by Robert Francis

Stand With Me Here (1936) Valhalla and Other Poems (1938) The Sound I Listened For (1944) We Fly Away (1948) The Face Against the Glass (1950) The Orb Weaver (1960) Come Out Into the Sun: Poems New and Selected (1965) The Satirical Rogue on Poetry (1968) The Trouble With Francis (1971) Frost: A Time to Talk: Conversations & Indiscretions Recorded by Robert Francis (1972) Like Ghosts of Eagles (1974) A Certain Distance (1976) Collected Poems, 1936–1976 (1976) Pot Shots at Poetry (1980) Butter Hill and Other Poems (1984) The Satirical Rogue on All Fronts (1984) The Trouble With God (1984) Travelling in Amherst: A Poet’s Journal, 1931–1954 (1986) Gusto, Thy Name Was Mrs. Hopkins: A Prose Rhapsody (1988) Late Fire, Late Snow: New and Uncollected Poems (1992) Clarification of God (undated)

☙ xi

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved. The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

The Man Who Is and Is Not There

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved. The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Introduction

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

T

his stu d y c e nt e r s on a c r it i ca l d i s cus s i o n o f t h e prose and poetry of the American writer Robert Francis. Intrigued by the elusiveness of his persona as he displays it in different genres— essays, fiction, autobiography—I tease out the correspondences, continuities, and parallels among these works to demonstrate that they offer several examples of distanced self-portraiture in prose and foreshadow the ways his poetry reveals and hides the self of the poet. Among the topics that inform my discussion of his writing are his affinities to precursors such as Emerson and Thoreau, his emphasis on the regional landscape as a source for poetry, his experimentation with and development of new poetic forms, his protests against the Vietnam War, his ecological sensibility reflected in critiques against human incursions into nature, his homoeroticism, and a comparison of his poetry with that of his friend and mentor Robert Frost. I incorporate aspects of these topics into my definition of “hovering” as a concept that describes Francis’s characteristic attitude, where his speaker or narrator is both subject and object, writing about himself while inhabiting the role of detached observer. Francis weaves his struggle for identity into the distanced self-portraits that appear in the long essay Gusto, Thy Name Was Mrs. Hopkins (1988), the novel We Fly Away (1948), the journal Travelling in Amherst, 1931–1954 (1986), and the autobiography The Trouble With Francis (1971). In these stylistically different prose works, the focus of chapter 1, he chronicles the psychological and financial difficulties he faced in his hard-won effort to declare himself a poet. The essay and novel concern the period after Francis left his parent’s home in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1932, where his father, a Baptist minister thinking of retiring, had moved the family years ☙ 1

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Introduction earlier from the eastern part of the state. Boarding with a series of older women for whom Francis performed chores to help pay his expenses— among them Mrs. Hopkins, from 1933 to 1935, and Mrs. Boynton and her housekeeper, who were the models for the central figures in the novel—he fulfilled a functionary role that permitted him to remain in the background as an observer of their lives. While he is not the ostensible subject of the essay and the novel, he selects anecdotes of what he saw the women do and heard them say that afford him opportunities for self- disclosure. Incidents emphasizing both their admirable qualities and their fussy idiosyncrasies provide a vehicle through which he expresses attitudes toward himself. What emerges is a portrait of Francis as a writer wrestling with self- doubt, who recognized that forging a literary reputation would require him to strike out on his own and hone his craft full-time rather than subsist on the small income derived from part-time odd jobs. The death of his father in 1940 paved the way for him to dedicate himself fully to writing. Francis used the $1,000 from his father’s life insurance to have a house built in a wooded area outside of Amherst; he named it Fort Juniper. Driven partly by his pecuniary circumstances and partly by his avid reading of Walden and Thoreau’s prescriptions for disciplined self-sufficiency, he followed a life of strict economy. The most candid passages in his journal and autobiography recount the crisis of confidence into which he was plunged when publishers routinely rejected his work from 1944 to 1960, causing him, in 1952, to retreat into isolation, streamline his existence further, and take a fresh look at his life and career. Once he accepted that he would have to live more frugally than ever to remain a poet, he reconciled himself to a contemplative life that freed him to write. Containing passages written after he arrived at this understanding, the autobiography and journal also reveal the playfully detached pose he adopts when he tries to satisfy readers wanting to know how he lived so thriftily. Francis’s inclination not to reveal too much about himself is evident in his poetry both early and late. Formal in structure, varied in tone, conversational in idiom, and mostly small in scope, Francis’s poems draw on his close scrutiny of the things and creatures indigenous to the New England countryside. Living for most of his career in Amherst, he was influenced during its incipient stages by Robert Frost, who took Francis under his wing after they met in 1933 and served as a guide to the younger, then unpublished poet. Indeed, some of Francis’s early published poems not only shared similarities with Frost’s in terms of their pastoral subject matter but 2 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Introduction also integrated his recommendations that unsatisfactory lines and words in a line be revised. While the handful of essays about Francis’s poetry have pointed out the resemblances between his limnings of humble life-forms in the local landscape and those of his older contemporary, my second chapter targets the transcendentalists’ philosophical influence on his writing in the poetry collections Stand With Me Here (1936), Valhalla and Other Poems (1938), and The Sound I Listened For (1944). His poems of agrarian life are attentive to the agricultural cycles of farm labor and fuse pastoral aesthetics with a delight in natural appearances that marks his kinship with Emerson and Thoreau, his New England literary ancestors. Combining Emerson’s call for visual receptivity with Thoreau’s habit of organizing his perception of pastoral scenes into pictorial compositions, Francis’s vivid descriptions of rural life are arranged according to the spatial relationships among different objects, and they reflect the effects of perspective on light and color. But these scenes of farm labor sometimes seem to be little more than pictures of rural realities and nature seen from a painterly distance, in which the emphasis on descriptive details effaces the presence of the poet. I contrast these poems to others in which his perception of nature is based on the discovery rather than the organization of visual relationships among its visible forms to illustrate how this mode of relational perception leads him to see nature emblematically and so apprehend affinities between the human and the natural. To see in this way is to perceive nature’s objects as metaphors for human conduct, a frame of mind that harkens backs to the Stoic precept of turning to nature for instruction. After drawing lines of connection between Francis and his literary forebears, in the next chapter I place his writing in the context of contemporaries, the confessional poets and Beats. Out of step with the public disclosure of private suffering contained in their work, Francis’s poetry, I argue, is dark in its own way. Although he is reluctant to trumpet his personal misery, he is willing to show us moments of doubt associated with his frequently discouraging pursuit of literary recognition and periods of creative drought when he questioned his ability to continue as a writer. The threat this doubt poses to his psyche is at its most ominous in some of the poems collected in The Face Against the Glass (1950), which posit a tension between his desire for unselfconsciousness and the death of self that this desire betokens. Poems about the graceful fluencies of athletic performance that appear in The Orb Weaver (1960) offer a striking contrast to those in ☙ 3

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Introduction which Francis reveals his troubled side; they also reinforce the different ways in which his work on the whole alternates between self-disclosure and camouflage. As in his pictorial scenes of life on the land and his descriptions of local flora and fauna, the poet effaces himself by assuming the role of an admiring observer, watching from the sidelines while capturing the nimble movements of a base-stealer, the midair leap of a high jumper, or the surge of two wrestlers springing toward each other. Dramatizing motion through action verbs and introducing variety through flexible rhythms and metrical irregularity, his careful notation of physical exertion underscores that he conceives of poetry as a performance in which his verse mimes the dexterity of skilled athletic agility. The reticence and self-concealment that characterize Francis’s poetry and define its contrast to the work of his contemporaries does not mean his writing is far removed from their attitudes and concerns. In fact, it is formally inventive and politically charged. Chapter 4 is devoted to a discussion of his formal experiments in Come Out Into the Sun (1965), which features several poems that employ a procedure he calls “word-count,” where the units that determine line length are not syllables but a fixed number of words per line. After experimenting with a seven-word line in 1961, he wrote poems containing five and three-word lines, discovering in all three cases that the rhythm changed according to the line length and subject matter. In this chapter I also explore innovations in Like Ghosts of Eagles (1974), such as the techniques of “fragmented surface,” poems composed of short phrases and words grammatically unconnected to one another, and a variation on “word- count,” the “silent poem,” whose lines contain a set number of paired, mostly single-syllable nouns linked without a hyphen. By omitting transitions and connections between words and phrases, he subverts conventional sentence structure, emancipates language from grammar and syntax, and focuses on words as aural and sensory rather than as expository only. In Like Ghosts of Eagles, Francis introduces these techniques into antiwar poems that decry the killing in Vietnam and lyrics that convey an ecological sensibility critical of progress—the drive to subdue and develop untrammeled nature by exerting technological dominance over it. In spite of his experimentations with form and his effort to move beyond the pastoral preoccupations of his earlier work, Francis’s poetry, as I mentioned earlier, has been regarded critically as similar to Frost’s in style and content. In chapter 5, I compare their poetry, showing that both poets 4 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Introduction read meaning in nature, see its forms as emblems of moral values, and thus follow the theoretical lead of Emerson and Thoreau, whose writings in “Nature” and Walden draw on the Stoic idea that nature is a source of ethical principles. I also demonstrate that both poets compare favorably in their readiness to probe nature’s dark design and explore a corresponding experiential darkness—a psychological loneliness that Richard Poirier defines in Frost’s poems as “a state of nothingness or a condition of vacancy” (Renewal of Literature 204). Yet at the same time, Frost and Francis are wary of entering into the darkness they describe, although they differ in the stances they take up in relation to this condition. Where Frost evokes this state of mind in order that he may resist it, disguising his wariness behind a mask of tough-minded defiance, Francis adopts a posture of detachment, which is paradoxically an engagement, in that he is receptive rather than resistant to the loneliness he confronts. In his contemplation of this condition, Francis presents a consciousness that is divided from itself. When he assumes this posture, the poet becomes simultaneously an observer and the observed, detached yet involved in the act of watching himself, “hovering” between dislocation and engagement. I then segue from the idea of “hovering” and its association with Francis’s reticent attitude to early and later poems, including several contained in Late Fire, Late Snow, published posthumously in 1992, that tell of his effort to speak indirectly of his homosexuality in an era when the rigid conception of identity reflected the norms of a matrimonial culture that prohibited an overt expression of same-sex desire. Some of the poems serve as examples of distanced self-portraiture, illustrating how Francis screens himself behind a variety of disguises and encoded rituals, such as cruising, that both communicate his meaning to readers in the know and protect him from opprobrium and judgment. Others feature his admiration of male subjects seen from a hidden remove. In poems that depict scenes of young men and boys bathing, he sublimates homoerotic desire through aestheticization, transforming the male body into an objet d’art, in effect erasing it. I link this pattern of sublimation to his prose portraits of male subjects in A Certain Distance (1976), which include his descriptions of youths he observed while living in Rome (1957) and Florence (1967). In a number of the portraits, he compares their androgynous beauty to figures depicted in works of art produced during the Italian Renaissance and the Baroque era. That he relies on indirection, resorts to encoded modes of social intercourse, and submerges the erotic when he focuses on exclusively male subjects ☙ 5

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Introduction

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

indicates that oppressive cultural injunctions and intolerant attitudes toward homosexuals conspired to compel Francis to veil his self-disclosure and his desire. Finally, the epilogue presents an overview of Francis’s elusive persona as displayed in his prose and poetry. The many masks and voices he assumes in prose enable him to adopt various tones and moods that make the challenge of knowing how to read him more difficult. Just as the different personas he inhabits in a variety of prose genres highlight the problem of pinning him down, Francis’s poetry is not easy to characterize. Philosophically, it approaches the transcendentalists and their Romantic predecessors, reflecting their penchant for perceiving natural objects less for what they are than for the values they represent, while rejecting the romantictranscendentalist notion of a world imbued with spiritual meaning. Formally, it blends craftsmanship with Imagist principles of concise expression and direct treatment of the thing seen. In his best writing Francis merges these influences in short meditative poems that give objective form to the flux of subjective life in concrete images whose physical immediacy expresses that inner realm where art and reverie intersect. The motif of his open-ended meditations about how he presents himself in his poetry, also evident in his prose, is clear in the poem “Identity,” from his first book. Bemused in tone, it shows Francis, Janus-faced, stepping outside of himself, engaging in an act of self-examination: This human footprint stamped in the moist sand Where the mountain trail crosses the mountain brook Halts me as something hard to understand. I look at it with half-incredulous look. Can this step pointing up the other way Be one that I made here when I passed by? This step detached and old as yesterday — Can it be mine, my step? Can it be I? (4)1 In asking unanswered questions, Francis discloses as he inquires. The questions call attention not only to his uncertainty but also to the poet’s trademark willingness to assess his past in terms of the present.

6 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

1

❧

A Cautious Distance

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

E

lu siven e ss is a h al l m ar k o f R o b e r t Fr a n ci s , a t r a i t that also inhabits the poetry and prose he carefully crafted. In a valedictory issue of the Painted Bride Quarterly (1988) devoted to critical discussion of the poet and his work, Robert Bradley speaks of a late Francis poem composed entirely of compound nouns: “The details Francis attends to are here, but paradoxically, he is invisible” (75). To David Graham, a contributor to the same issue, Francis, if not quite invisible, is a bystander, reserved and wary, through whom “everyone and everything is seen from a cautious distance” (81). To Mary Fell, this wariness is a form of selfprotection designed to guard against intrusions into his personal life: “About the true nature of his relationships with others and their effect on him we learn very little.” Echoing Graham, she writes, “There is always . . . a certain distance” (72).1 While Francis’s reluctance to write or disclose too much about himself applies to both his poetry and his prose, it is particularly acute in his novel We Fly Away (1948) and the journal Travelling in Amherst, 1931–1954 (1986), which chronicle, in part, his lengthy struggle to establish an identity as a poet, and in his autobiography, The Trouble With Francis (1971) and the essay Gusto, Thy Name Was Mrs. Hopkins (1988), which look back on that struggle. Given the personal nature of these works, he reveals only what he wants us to know about himself by engaging in distanced self-portraiture. At times, as in the novel and essay, Francis occupies, to quote from Mrs. Hopkins, the role of “a minor functionary in a fiction” (17), in which he becomes an observer of and actor in the lives of women whose remarks and behavior offer him opportunities for self-examination and self-disclosure. At other times he adopts different attitudes and voices, ☙ 7

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter one as in his autobiography and journal, on the one hand, documenting with lighthearted exactitude the demands of living frugally, on the other, reflecting with candor on the toll years of publishing failure took on his confidence. Important examples of Francis’s self-portraits in prose, these works pave the way for his poems, which drew considerable praise from contemporaries, that reveal and conceal the self of the poet. Born in Upland, Pennsylvania, in 1901, Francis was a member of one of the most fertile generations in what is considered a golden age in the history of American poetry. His contemporaries included William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, Stanley Kunitz, Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell. As a poet he matured very slowly; in fact, Francis did not write poems until he was an undergraduate at Harvard from 1919 to 1923. His only other creative outlet at this time was the violin, which he began to study in high school in West Medford, Massachusetts, where his father moved the family in 1911 before relocating to the Amherst area and finding himself asked to become pastor of a Congregational Church in 1926. After living in the parsonage with his parents for over six years, and supporting himself by giving violin lessons, he left home in 1932 and moved to the center of Amherst. Francis, who received a master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1926, had actually come to Amherst to take a teaching job at the high school, only to discover that he was not suited for this career. Confident he could survive on his own and become a writer, he tried his hand at poetry and prose while he lived with a series of older women, for whom he worked part-time. During an eight-year span, besides adding to the journal that he began in 1931, Francis published two books of poetry, Stand With Me Here (1936) and Valhalla and Other Poems (1938). In 1937, he rented a rundown house in Cushman, a village within the town of Amherst located a short distance from where he would eventually settle for the rest of his life. After he had his own home built in 1940 with insurance money from his father’s death, Francis saw his third book of poems published, The Sound I Listened For (1944), followed by the appearance of his novel four years later. But the independence and success he had achieved as an artist was overshadowed by the pain of rejection slips, the despair of publishing droughts, and the anguish of fallow periods—bouts of adversity and disappointment during which his self-confidence plummeted, making it difficult to declare himself a poet. To understand the slow course of his career, it is cru-

8 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

A Cautious Distance cial to look at what Francis had to overcome, much of which is revealed in his prose. Examining his writings from the perspective of when he lived the experiences he later chronicled, rather than by publication date, allows us to see how Francis’s work became more self-revelatory with age. By tracing Francis’s experiences, beginning with his time in the households of Mrs. Hopkins and her husband from 1933 to 1935, and Mrs. Boynton (renamed Bemis in the novel) and her housekeeper from 1935 to 1936, and concluding with the poet’s journal and autobiography, we can see his lack of selfassurance, his late maturation into manhood, and the extent to which publishers’ rejection notices damaged his psyche and caused him to withdraw into isolation. Another theme running through the journal and autobiography is the resolve Francis demonstrated when he decided to go on being a poet, a determination that demanded he redouble his efforts to live economically. Of the works under consideration here, the essay and the novel draw on the period after he left his parent’s house and moved from one rented room to another, earning just enough money to get by while trying to forge a reputation as a writer. The full title of the essay, Gusto, Thy Name Was Mrs. Hopkins: A Prose Rhapsody, signals Francis’s affection for his subject.2 Focused on the two years and two months he spent in the household of Mrs. Arthur John Hopkins, the wife of a senior professor of chemistry at Amherst College, the essay is a warm reminiscence of the things he saw her do and heard her say, arranged in “scenes” (7) designed to emphasize her dramatic flair and knack for turning “the raw material of the day into theater, into art” (27). Francis is cast in a series of subordinate roles—gardener, chauffeur, and handyman around the house—which he discharges in exchange for room and board. The winter and summer rugs he carries up to and down from the attic, marking the change of seasons, the screens he fits together enclosing the porch in late spring, and the six woodentubbed grapefruit trees he moves between the drawing room and the front walk during the warm and cold halves of the year become props in a drama whose leading lady is Mrs. Hopkins, with Francis watching, like a stagehand, from the wings.3 Further minimizing the poet’s presence, Mrs. Hopkins is seen against the small community of Amherst, which allows her to appear as a great figure within it in her many capacities: confidante of college deans, consultant to the chief of police, friend of writers, and the

☙ 9

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter one host of “a festival that came each year at the threshold of summer” on “Baccalaureate Sunday,” when “she was ‘at home’ to the faculty and their wives, the president and deans, and to those distinguished guests who would the following day be receiving honorary degrees” (30). On one such Sunday, Francis reports, Mrs. Hopkins “performed what probably will always be the most celebrated event of her life” as she stood in a receiving line to greet the college’s president, Arthur Stanley Pease. Reaching the head of the line, she stepped out of new, “less than comfortable” slippers and “proclaimed the fact” to him; however much the other women in line might have wanted to take off their shoes, they “knew that Mrs. Hopkins would expect them to observe the proprieties” (31). Compact and colorful, the anecdote presents Mrs. Hopkins as a thoroughly individualized character, the matriarch of a family that encompassed “Amherst College and the Town of Amherst and much more” (26). If this anecdote displays something of her temerity and “self-assurance among the proprieties and improprieties” (32), it accents, by contrast, qualities Francis as a writer did not have. Indeed, before he moved into the Hopkinses’ home on June 12, 1933, she had taken an interest in Francis, at whose request she read an essay he had written in 1931, which she then sent on her own accord to Lewis Mumford for his opinion in January 1932. Aware of Francis’s literary aspirations, she also took the initiative to introduce him to Robert Frost (who had been living in Amherst for six years) in January 1933, a time when Francis “felt [himself ] so little the poet,” he would write in his autobiography, he “didn’t want to be called one” (202).4 “That I had lived over six years in the town of Amherst without meeting Frost,” Francis concedes, “is evidence of several things: my obscurity, my timidity, my caution, and my pride” (201). In this respect, Francis’s anecdotes of Mrs. Hopkins are a means of selfdisclosure, providing a vehicle through which he portrays himself in relation to her. Consider, for example, the glimpse he furnishes of his landlady in her study, “her acknowledged base of operations,” ensconced in a chair padded with pillows, the table nearby crowded with books, matches, ashtray, cigarettes, coffee cups, telephone, and directory: “She would call A for a piece of information. If A couldn’t give it, she would insist that A tell her who could. She would then call B, and this might lead to the calling of C. She never stopped til she had what she wanted, leaving her a little grim and flushed, but victorious!” Francis’s remark that “nothing was better for me than this inescapable demonstration of persistence, perseverance 10 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

A Cautious Distance and triumph,” which concludes, “God knows I needed it” (11), underscores the instructive role of Mrs. Hopkins in his life, seen through the ironically humorous detachment of an older narrator looking back on his young self. His addition of a conclusion drives home the point that his purpose here is to examine and evaluate, thus availing himself of insights that could only be gained by dispassionate observation. The poet’s affectionate admiration for Mrs. Hopkins’s doggedness does not prevent him from candid retrospection, or from acknowledging his own deficiencies. In sum, Francis portrays himself as a relatively tentative young man lacking Mrs. Hopkins’s “dragon-like intensity” (27). When she was not performing as host, following leads in the hunt for information, or arranging meetings between fledgling writers and famous poets, Mrs. Hopkins indulged her passion for acquiring and accumulating antiques. Consisting of displays of pressed glass so extensive they occupied an upstairs bedroom, overflowed into the hallway, and then inched down the front stairs “in the form of a glacier” (24) before coming to rest in the study, her collection offers Francis evidence of “an economy of abundance” and an occasion for self-revelation. “My background had not been one of abundance,” he says. “Not that my family had ever been poor. . . . We lived on the principle that what we really needed, we would have” (13–14). Extending this contrast, Francis then juxtaposes his standards of value— utility, frugality, and simplicity—to those of Mrs. Hopkins, which, like her abundant store of pressed glass, are embodied by her “vast compost pile” that is “a symbol of richness” (13), her refrigerator that is stocked with dairy “until it would hold no more” (8), and her two sets of rugs that have “their semi-annual movement” (12): “As for the compost, if I had had a pile of my own, its size would have been proportionate to its use. If I had had a refrigerator, one bottle of milk at a time would have been enough. And as for the rugs, winter and summer rugs, I suspect I wouldn’t have had any at all” (14). The older narrator who looks back in this passage avails himself of the opportunity to poke some fun at Mrs. Hopkins, whose excesses and eccentricities are treated with the same humorous indulgence that characterizes the example of candid self-retrospection that I mentioned earlier. In this way Francis fuses plainspoken self- disclosure with restrained playfulness. Mixed in with these self-portraits is one that is part of an anecdote in which Francis is an actor in the drama he describes: Mrs. Hopkins’s supervision of his education into manhood. More than an observer of the scene, ☙ 11

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter one he emerges as a kind of measuring rod for the young Francis, one aspect of whose education is being induced by Mrs. Hopkins “to start smoking cigarettes.” The climactic moment occurs when, after he returns home from a drive during which he told her he had stopped smoking because it “proved a bother,” she slaps him.5 “Outwardly I accepted her rebuke like a gentleman,” he recalls. “Inwardly I was exultant, exhilarated.” Francis’s account indicates that, uncertain as he was about himself to have started smoking to begin with, he realizes that he cannot conform to Mrs. Hopkins’s idea of who she wants him to be. His rejection of the “means she took to make a man of [him]” (17) reveals that he thinks for himself, foretelling an independence of spirit that would blossom fully at Fort Juniper, the small house on the outskirts of Amherst where he began living in 1940, cultivating a simple life of strict economy, like a latter-day Thoreau.6 By not allowing Mrs. Hopkins to mold him in her image, he partakes in an act of identity formation that paradoxically—and perhaps unintentionally—achieves what she had hoped. As Francis relates in his autobiography, “She had bidden me be a man and had helped me to become a little more of one than I had been” (207). While the ostensible subject of Francis’s loosely structured narrative is Mrs. Hopkins, who is known mainly through incidents selected to emphasize her traits, idiosyncrasies, and values, its anecdotes draw close to autobiography when they express the author’s attitude toward himself. On such occasions he is self-aware, engaged in assessing his past in terms of his present. Now amused by his youthful impressionability and caution, now thrilled by the fortitude and independence in a character-building moment, Francis’s self-disclosures add texture to his reminiscence of Mrs. Hopkins. More consistently autobiographical by comparison, We Fly Away is a linear narrative of the nine months—from September 1935 to May 1936—he lived with “a very old New England lady and her somewhat less old but equally New England housekeeper” (Trouble With Francis 78). He portrays himself in the figure of Robert, a thirty-five-year- old poet trying to make ends meet both financially and artistically. Like Francis, who “had been late in leaving home,” as Richard Gillman notes in his introduction to Travelling in Amherst (ix), Robert is a late bloomer, “slow in coming into a man’s estate” (We Fly Away 14), having neither a steady income nor time to dedicate himself fully to writing. Similar to the arrangement that Francis had with Mrs. Hopkins, from whose house he moved in with Mrs. Boynton (now Mrs. Bemis) and Mrs. Kellogg (now Mrs. Teal), Robert performs chores to 12 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

A Cautious Distance help him pay for living expenses, and uses his spare time to prepare his manuscript of poems for publication. Though Francis admits in his autobiography, “I did change the facts a little here and there”—one being that  “Robert’s poems were rejected by the publishers whereas mine were accepted”—he testifies to the overall authenticity of his narrative: “Whoever wishes a true picture of my life with Mrs. Boynton and Mrs. Kellogg will find it there” (208).7 As he had done with the picture of his life under Mrs. Hopkins’s roof, Francis centers his narrative on what he recalls his landlady and her housekeeper did and said, thereby relegating Robert to the role of a secondary character. Passages throughout the book show that the women “were both fussy if in somewhat different ways” (Trouble With Francis 78). For example, Francis’s narrator explains that the reason Robert ate his supper early was that he knew that Mrs. Teal preferred washing her own dishes last and then wiping the kitchen sink dry, by which she conveyed at once her hope “that no one would let any water run in it till morning” and “the official close of her day’s labor” (We Fly Away 19). In another instance of the restraints imposed on Robert by the equally predictable behavior of Mrs. Bemis, the narrative illustrates how conscious he was that his landlady, whose “ideal” of tending the furnace “was more heat from less fuel” (83), counted his shovelfuls of coal whenever he went into the cellar to inspect the fire. And on evenings when Robert returned late and the house was dark, he understood that not only might his footsteps “register on Mrs. Teal’s sensitive ears,” but “any sound could waken Mrs. Bemis, summoning her from sleep and bed to confront him accusingly with, ‘Pray, what does this mean?’ ” (70). Narrow and fussy in the extreme, the women are sharply drawn characters; Robert, by contrast, tries to stay out of their way, or treads on eggshells in their presence. But the narrative has a protagonist in Robert, who changes as a result of experience. Toward the end of the novel, with spring in the air, he receives a letter from a publisher whose rejection of his poems causes him to feel disappointed over how wrong he had been to put all of his “foolish hopes” into the book (135), and to realize “how unfree he had been, how shut up in an old house with old women and old thoughts.” Stinging as it is, Robert’s realization is also liberating: he admits to himself that the “book had been an excuse and justification for every sort of laziness and procrastination” (138) keeping him from striking out on his own. He makes up his mind to leave Mrs. Bemis, move into “an old tumble-down house” outside of Amherst, ☙ 13

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter one and be a full-time writer. “I’ll have to do all my own work and I won’t have anything modern to do it with,” Robert explains to her. “I won’t be particularly comfortable, especially in winter. But I’ll be free. I’ll be free to write and study” (155). Just before departing, he helps Mrs. Bemis bring down an American flag from the attic on Memorial Day morning, which he ties to the front porch railing until it waves over the steps leading away from the house. Walking out the door for the last time, Robert’s departure, then, is a declaration of independence, a proclamation, to use Richard Gillman’s words, of “the poet in progress” (vii), the process of his maturation imaged in his awareness of a “grapevine” hanging over the porch that “was coming into bloom with its little greenish, inconspicuous flowers” (We Fly Away 156). In some ways, Robert’s resolution to support himself by writing parallels Francis’s decision to chance living on his own terms and find out whether he could make a go of it as a writer. When he returned to Fort Juniper in May 1945, after having served in the armed forces as a noncombatant for a little over three years, he began working on We Fly Away in the hope that writing full-time would be more rewarding than subsisting on the small income he derived from teaching and performing chores. “But if it turned out otherwise,” he reasoned in his autobiography, “I could go hungry in a good cause” (77). While working on the book, however, Francis was going through a publishing dry spell that plunged him into a crisis of confidence so shattering he would, at his low point in 1952, withdraw into isolation. Things got so bad that, after the publication by Macmillan of his third volume of poems in 1944, he paid a local printer to issue his next collection in 1950. “My new poems were not being accepted,” he acknowledged, “even by magazines that had published me in the past” (Trouble With Francis 83). With his career in stasis, Francis, in short, writes his own story under Robert’s to summon the resources of his will at this crucial psychological juncture. Because he knew all too well that repeated rejection could wear away self-confidence, Francis not only incorporates Robert’s disappointment at being turned down by a publisher into the plot but also his determination to forbear it, finding in his protagonist’s resolve the perseverance and fortitude to continue “enduring poverty and obscurity for the sake of his poetry” (We Fly Away 105). Robert is an aspirational character onto whom Francis projects qualities he hopes will see him through a prolonged period of self- doubt and uncertainty.

14 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

A Cautious Distance Less apparent than autobiographical parallels between author and protagonist are similarities between Francis’s poetry and passages in the narrative. Take, for instance, his description of Robert in his bedroom on a winter Sunday morning, overhearing and seeing Mrs. Bemis popping corn in the kitchen below through the register cut into the floor above her stove. Wrapped in a comforter as flakes fall continuously outside his window, Robert becomes aware of a “white fragrance” rising from the kitchen “to match the white world around him” (88). This recalls “White Sunday Morning,” a poem from his third book, whose speaker gazes at “falling snow” from his bedroom window, overhears an old woman “in the kitchen down below,” and, “thanks to the little register,” watches her popping corn at the stove, its “fragrance” rising “like pure spirit” (146). Francis’s poem “Shadows,” in the same collection, is also the source of a passage that describes how Robert remembered his childhood fear of “tree shadows” at night when he stepped into the “wide black shadow” of an elm. Where Robert as a boy “leaped tree shadows from a kind of shadowy fear” (26), Francis’s speaker in the poem, recalling how he avoided “night shadows” as an adolescent, “leaped them like a runner leaping hurdles” (140). The narrative also contains images that appear in poems included in The Orb Weaver (1960). Francis’s description of a mouse sniffing at a beam of light as if it were “celestial cheese” (66) anticipates the lines that begin the second stanza of “Come Out Into the Sun” (205). His portrait of Mrs. Bemis paring an apple in the kitchen before bedtime “in one long, perfect, unbroken spiral” (100) is the inspiration behind the figure in “Apple Peeler,” an “old man” for whom poetry writing has become a stunt: “Why the unbroken spiral, Virtuoso, / Like a trick sonnet in one long, versatile sentence?” (196).8 In another parallel between his prose and poetry, We Fly Away reflects Francis’s ability to integrate different sense modalities into observations of nature. The narrative charts the progression from summer to fall to winter to spring, recording subtle changes that take place during the transitions between seasons. A late September afternoon at the approach of dusk sets the sounds of insects that “hummed and trilled” against the sensation of “a new note of coolness outdoors”; the evening air stirs, “moving maple branches” whose “leaf-shadow” is cast on a white house by the “flicker of light” from a street lamp behind the trees. With autumn the undercurrent to summer, he renders the flow of the old year “moving slowly” (20). Or take Francis’s painterly description of a spring day in the New England

☙ 15

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter one countryside. In the background, trees “in new full leaf” stand alongside those “still in bud or half out,” their mix of “greens and near-greens of foliage on the hillslope in the glowing mid-afternoon sunlight” offsetting “a horse-drawn cart” in the foreground, which crosses a bridge by “a stream that foamed and roared over rocks,” its “driver sitting solid and impassive, the reins loose in his hand,” the clip-clop of “hoofs on wood and the rumble of wheels” merging “with the churn of water” (137). The examples illustrate his attentiveness to sounds, movement, and the interplay of light and color. These sense modalities also appear in “Onion Fields” and “Hay,” poems from his first book, in which, as I will point out in the next chapter, his perception of outer appearances is organized like a pictorial composition. Francis’s descriptions in poetry and prose are, however, at times impersonal. He directs his vigilance to detail and heightened sensual acuity outward, aestheticizing nature from a distance, sometimes aspiring to little more than an accurate depiction of appearances. Balancing light and dark, background and foreground, his scenic pictures of nature in its material aspects do not always express a subjective and poetic response to things seen. So, while the novel is, as he puts it in his autobiography, “mostly not fiction at all” (208), and thus heavily autobiographical, it reveals how Francis effaces himself in passages devoted to natural description, where he is unable or reluctant to probe below the representational surface of reality. Similar to his autobiographical novel, Travelling in Amherst, consisting of excerpts from the poet’s journals, offers readers a candid portrait of what Richard Gillman describes as the “truest Francis” (vii). Arranged chronologically, the journal is episodic in form and conversational in manner, resembling a diary whose entries sometimes appear on consecutive days, sometimes on scattered days throughout a two-week period or a single month, and sometimes with intervals as extensive as years between them.9 Spread over two decades, the sporadic entries show that Francis wrote only when he felt provoked to expand an idea, express a mood, record an achievement, or mark an important event in his life. But it is not clear whether Francis kept adding to his journal because he intended to publish it, not an unimportant consideration in a discussion about self-presentation. On the one hand, he might have intended the journal for private use, perhaps as a source for material in his writing, but only later recognized its publication potential and continued to expand it, particularly after the appearance of his books of poetry in 1936 and 1938. On the other hand, his 16 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

A Cautious Distance abandonment of the journal—the last entry is dated June 28, 1954—does not necessarily indicate that he intended to publish it at some point and had simply given up, especially since, as early as 1953, his poetry, by his own account, “[was] definitely on the upswing” with publishers (Trouble With Francis 84). He might just as easily have preserved the manuscript and decided to put more of his work before the public as circumstances dictated (which its appearance in 1986, the year before he died, suggests). According to Gillman, “when Francis discussed this Journal with [him], he said he had continued it until he decided he was ‘saying enough about [himself ] in other ways’ ” (xvii). Whether he originally intended to publish the journal or resolved to do so late in his career, Francis clearly regarded it as an outlet for direct self-expression (in contrast to the indirect communication characteristic of poetry). Overall, the journal provides additional evidence of his vacillating selfconfidence. In an excerpt from an entry dated March 13, 1932, for instance, after the Virginia Quarterly Review informed him that it had accepted two of his sonnets for publication, Francis tempers the “considerable assurance” he derived from this news with a frank admission: “I am too calloused and sodden by years of failure to get much sheer happiness from the event” (10). That the weight of failure adversely shaped his self-perception is also evident in a passage in the entry for October 25, 1933: “Not quite, not quite have I yet learned that I am a poet. It is a fact that I must learn over many times before I have truly grasped it. It is so much to believe. When people call me a poet, I turn the remark aside like a bad joke, instead of suffering the designation” (28). The fact that Francis kept 641 letters of rejection over a ten-year span dating back to 1925 suggests how inured he had become to failure. Though he enjoyed success after the publication of two books of poetry, the second of which won the Shelley Memorial Award in 1938 and drew praise from Frost (who served at this time as his mentor),10 he continued to wrestle with self-confidence, particularly during his impasse with publishers from 1944 to 1960. In an excerpt from his journal recorded on August 3, 1952, Francis confided that “up till almost the present day I have preferred to be known as a writer (prose and poetry) rather than simply a poet,” a self- definition rooted in his inability to establish a name for himself and stitch together more than a threadbare living from poetry: “I am poor, I am unpublished, I am obscure. If I devote myself to what is most important (to me and to others) to do, my poverty and obscurity will not greatly trouble me, will not perhaps seem like failure at ☙ 17

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter one all” (74; emphasis added). The misgivings he expresses about devoting himself fully to poetry stem partly from feelings of defeat that intensified over the course of living through years of neglect when publishers regularly rejected his poems after 1944. “Perhaps it was partly because I didn’t feel I belonged in the poetry world or that I deserved recognition,” he added in an interview occasioned by his eighty-third birthday. “After all, I was slow in beginning to be a poet” (qtd. in Gillman, “Best Neglected Poet”). Francis felt he did not merit acclaim or a place of fellowship in the world of poetry; this explains his preference for solitude over social contact in passages of his journal. The entry dated July 22, 1931, reveals that, besides providing optimal conditions for thinking and writing, solitude offers him an alternative to what David Graham calls “a vision of normal social life” (83): “Why do I enjoy plentiful solitude? Because it brings me greater harmony with myself and my environment than does any sort of social life, and because in solitude my mind is more active on a contemplative and creative plane than when I am with people” (5– 6). (His view that solitude fosters harmony between self and surroundings can be traced back to Thoreau, who writes, in the chapter of Walden titled “Solitude,” that it is “wholesome to be alone” [91], especially “in the midst of Nature,” among whose particulars one is “made aware of the presence of something kindred” to himself [88–89]). Francis affirms the importance of solitude, for he confesses feeling “justified in saying no to a few picnics” to “indulge it” (50). In 1952 he retreated into isolation as his opportunities with publishers dimmed. If it served as a means of avoiding people and the embarrassing contingencies that might arise from questions about his career, in isolation Francis saw the chance of personal renewal and spiritual refreshment: “A year ago I was in hiding,” he began the entry dated April 7, 1953. “Having been rebuffed in every creative effort, I wanted most of all to withdraw into myself for clarification and renewed strength. So I had my telephone disconnected, and, night after night, made myself incommunicado and invisible in my bedroom, where, luxuriating in complete spiritual and physical solitude, I read and wrote and thought” (83–84). He emerged from his self-imposed exile in the summer of 1953 with the conviction that, as he put it, “I was a poet,” that poetry “was my most central, intense and inwardly rewarding experience,” and “there was really nothing else for me to do but go on being a poet” (qtd. in Gillman, “Best Neglected Poet”). Comfortable, at last, in his own skin, Francis concludes the journal with sentences

18 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

A Cautious Distance conveying advice directed as much to fellow poets as to himself: “Nothing can cure a poet’s malaise except to write new poems. He can’t live emotionally on his past” (96). His autobiography recounts that, in the years preceding his withdrawal into isolation, Francis wrestled with social self-consciousness following his registration for the draft in February 1942. After surviving several months of basic training, and after receiving an honorable discharge from the army early in 1943, Francis, “still under the control of the local draft board” for the remainder of the war (44), was required to work, first as a hired man on chicken-and-apple farms in Amherst, and later as a teacher at a boys’ boarding school in upstate New York, where, in each situation, he found himself “at the bottom of the scale” (51). Granted permission in September 1944 to teach at Mount Holyoke College, he was, once again, on the lowest rung, bringing up “the tail end of the academic procession,” in rank “only an instructor and not a Ph. D” (52–53). By May 1945, the close of the school year marked the end of the war in Europe and Francis’s tenure in the army: “My country was now in a position to permit me to go on with my own life—in short, to forget me” (54). One senses an underlying resentment toward a government that not only limited his freedom while he served but also exiled him to oblivion when he had fulfilled his duty. Francis’s sense of being forgotten was, no doubt, amplified during the years in which he was all but banished from the memory of publishers on whom he had counted in the past. It must have seemed to him, at this time, that his life and work were oddly aligned, “the obscurity of the one,” as David Young said in his review of Francis’s autobiography, “contributing to the neglect of the other” (“Out of the Shadow” 29). How is it, then, that he did not succumb to bitterness or sink permanently into a state of inert resignation and surrender to failure? How did he resist feeling that he deserved to be unknown, poor, and unpublished? The Trouble With Francis allows readers to follow the process by which, recognizing what he could control in the effort toward publication and accepting what he could not, he arrived at an understanding of himself: to remain a poet meant that he would have to cultivate living “solvently and happily” on little (218), spend even less, and content himself with the compensatory rewards of independence and contemplation that such a life afforded. In developing the story of his hard-won struggle to achieve happiness, Francis employs an unchronological design that begins in the autumn of 1940 with the completion of

☙ 19

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter one Fort Juniper, a “time when his distinctive tendencies” expressed themselves “in his decision to live alone in the country” (Young 29). His comments in The Trouble With Francis on his thinking behind the order of poems in Come Out Into the Sun (1965) could apply as well to the design of his autobiography: “I wanted the reader to face at the outset the poet I then was, not the poet I had been twenty or thirty years before. And I wanted the present more fully represented than the past” (127). By starting with the middle of his life, during which he suffered but rebounded from dejection, and reserving, until later, his account of carrying into adolescence the burden of insecurity from a fear-plagued childhood, he portrays himself as someone who overcomes adversity with perseverance. Some time after he reached the conclusion that there was nothing else for him to do but go on being a poet, Francis took a fresh look at his life and its relation to his career. He saw himself girded “behind three concentric strategic lines,” the outermost involving decisions of publishers about his work, the next concerning his poetry and the creative process, and the last having to do with living; he determined that the third was the most important since it not only nourished the second, which nurtured the first, but constituted that part of his life over which he had maximum control. “I might fail to publish poetry, I might even fail in writing it,” he explained, “but nothing—if I passionately desired it—could make me fail in living it” (84). Since he lived his life in art, and since the qualities of his poetry—its lean form, modest scale, and economy of expression—reflected that life, the sustainability of their interdependence demanded that he streamline his existence even further. Long before he emerged from isolation, he practiced thrift and resourcefulness with Thoreauvian fervor: he adopted vegetarianism for “ethical” and “economic” reasons (91), eliminating fish, fowl, and meat from his diet in favor of the appetizing, inexpensive soybean; grew lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, and herbs in his small garden; ground corn, wheat, and soybean into flour for baking bread; and brewed sweet wine from clovers, dandelions, and elderblow blossoms. Having already learned to do without a telephone, Francis continued to cut costs by donating his car to a neighbor in 1952, and walking “to and from town three and a half miles distant” (85). In 1953, he decided to serve as his own barber. As for clothing, he bought second-hand items, accepted hand-medowns from friends, and did his own mending. He also went without things he needed until he could afford them, such as the compact refrigerator he procured in 1960, perfectly fitted to his small kitchen, “taking up no 20 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

A Cautious Distance unnecessary space and consuming no unnecessary electricity” (216). Far more than a money-saving measure, his practice of resourceful thrift and disciplined austerity reduced his need for possessions, freeing him to do what he most wanted: read, think, and write poetry. Francis’s ability to live solvently, coupled with his devotion of life to art, “impress us all the more,” as Robert B. Shaw says of the autobiography, “when he backtracks . . . to tell us of his childhood and early youth” (104). These were anxiety-ridden years during which fear set him apart as a misfit among boys and shame scarred his development. Reflecting on the influence of his parents, for example, Francis discloses that while both “were equally important” in his life, it was his mother’s traits, temperament, and “timidity” he inherited: “I was so much like her that I seemed not to be like my father at all” (152). He recalled how terrified he was as a child of “loud noises,” of “baseball games” and the threat of being hit, of “boys running and yelling” around him in the playground (145). No less formative than fear in his development was the guilt Francis associated with sex at an early and psychologically vulnerable age. He was only five when he experienced his “first erotic gropings” with a four-year- old girl that took place at her house in a closet as they played hide-and-seek. “There in the dark,” he mused, “I discovered the pleasure of exploring her body with my hands, partly undressing her to do so.” When the children were discovered by the girl’s mother, he was “denounced and disgraced,” overwhelmed by feelings that stayed with him for the rest of his life: “I never forgot my guilt and never again was similarly guilty” (140). From this moment on, until much later into adulthood, sex and guilt were firmly and inextricably linked. The fear and shame that negatively shaped Francis’s childhood deepened when he realized that he was “drawn erotically” to males in adolescence (211). Given his pious family background and religious upbringing, at least notionally, as a Baptist, it is credible to suppose that, once he became aware of these feelings, he must have felt alarmed. Careful to conceal his orientation from others, his rationale for erotic disinterest in high school—“a diversion of desire toward other objects” (168)—implies a nascent recognition of the risks inherent in making his preference known, among which would have been public condemnation and ridicule. Francis acted on his feelings in 1958 after he befriended “an Italian in his midthirties” (211), with whom he sustained an affectionate nine-year relationship “by means of many letters” and “brief reunions” (212), the first of which took place in 1961 when he visited Ireland en route to Italy, the others in ☙ 21

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter one 1967 when he lived in Florence, thanks to the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship. But Francis did not tell friends at home; aware of the cultural taboo against homosexuality, he reckoned that it “would have been upsetting to many of them” (210). His concern about what friends might think suggests that he feared being judged, which likely prevented him from revealing his sexuality sooner than he did. That he had finally reached the point of publicly declaring his homosexuality “without embarrassment or guilt” (213) dramatizes the candor and courage underlying his self-acceptance. Besides offering Francis the occasion for frank self- disclosure, his autobiography shows that he is capable of adopting different personas and investing his narrative with different tones. When, for example, he ventures to satisfy readers wanting to know how he was able to live on so little money, Francis yokes the serious to the humorous. In the course of explaining that the necessity of economizing required he itemize expenditures “under about fifteen categories,” record them daily, and then total the amounts at the end of each week, he wonders, “Am I a poet or a shopkeeper?” (217). Self- deprecating in tone, Francis’s humor counters any suspicion readers might harbor that he was proud of his thrift, which, he emphasizes, marks his difference from Thoreau, “who boasted of his financial accomplishments in the first chapter of Walden.” But Francis qualifies the contrast he invokes, suggesting that Thoreau had good reason to be proud, having “had a much bigger story to tell than I, since he had a much smaller budget to live on” (221). By emphasizing the significance of Thoreau’s two-year enterprise in self-sufficiency and thrift, even though frugality was for Francis a lifetime vocation, he deflects attention from himself with a characteristic blend of humility and reserve. When he turns to the subject of having to spell out his financial situation to others, namely, solicitors representing cultural institutions, academic finance committees, and philanthropic organizations, the target as well as the tone of his humor change. In a statement Francis drafted in response to those who would appeal to him for donations—in which he includes an account of his income and description of his self-sufficient mode of existence—he interlaces his comments about “good causes” being too dependent on money with irony, as in the case of a solicitation to contribute to a $5,000,000 endowment for the Harvard Divinity School that he received from the university’s president.11 After quoting the president, whose letter explained that “need” for the endowment had to do partly 22 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

A Cautious Distance with “world conditions” and partly with “the realization of moral laxity at home,” Francis lays bare the rhetoric of a marketing strategy that implies that lassitude of body and spirit can be abolished by charitable donations: “There you have it: moral laxity in one hand and five million dollars in the other.” As if to anticipate the judgment of readers who will conclude that he is merely expressing a cynical distrust of appeals that evoke worthy causes to elicit financial pledges, Francis blunts his trenchant skepticism with deadpan understatement: “So far as I know, the Christian religion made its way in the early days without benefit of modern promotional methods” (219). Beneath his coy sense of humor coils an entanglement of meaning, including his opposition to charity that is impersonal, induced by playing on the conscience of the giver, or performed to gratify the ego. The ease with which Francis segues from one mood to another adds a psychological component to his autobiography, leading to questions about his intent. In the foregoing examples, when he assumes a different tone, frequently resorting to humor to make a serious point, he seems more interested in the nuances of reticence and restraint than expressive self-disclosure. At times, for instance, he enjoys bemusing readers, as when he frames his remarks that he could have been more “adventurous with food” around what he remembers having said to a woman who heard he ate thistles: “I had to admit that I did not eat thistles, had never eaten a thistle, had never even thought about eating thistles, had never dreamed of them. What may I not have been missing in the way of vitamins, minerals, trace elements, and above all roughage?” (101). Is Francis merely engaging in a humorous tit-for-tat, responding to an outlandish rumor with a joke of his own? Is he mocking himself as a modern disciple of Thoreauvian self-sufficiency, concerned that, by not including thistles in his diet, he may be missing out on essential nutritional benefits? Or is he elaborating on his remarks until they become ludicrous in order to undermine those who might dismiss him as eccentric and thus fail to appreciate the practical value of vegetarianism? In other words, his playfulness imposes a certain detachment, making his meaning difficult to pinpoint. Sometimes Francis skillfully conceals his innermost thoughts and motives, as in the sketch he offers of his complicated attitude toward Frost. Developed over nearly thirty years, their friendship was never the same after the older poet’s visit to Fort Juniper in October 1956, during which Francis showed him a copy of The Faber Book of Modern American Verse, a recently published anthology containing three of his poems, one of which, ☙ 23

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter one “Apple Peeler,” Frost thought slighted him by its reference to an “old man” who produces uninspired “trick” poetry (Collected Poems 196), like a onesentence sonnet (a veiled allusion, he believed, to his sonnet “The Silken Tent”).12 Once it became clear to Francis that Frost “was under the impression” the poem was about him, he told Frost it “did not refer to him,” though he acknowledged “The Silken Tent” had crossed his mind. Presenting this episode as an instance of Frost falling “into the very error” for which “he took other people to task,” namely, “reading into a poem what was not there and failing to see what was” (88), Francis follows it with another example that also calls the poet’s reliability implicitly into question. Consider his coda to Frost’s remark “that he had never lifted a finger to advance his career” (which Francis recalls he heard “on the evening of December 10, 1950”). “After Frost’s death when his letters to Louis Untermeyer were published I discovered a Frost I had never known,” Francis writes. “What I had taken him to mean by not having lifted a finger was evidently not what he meant” (89).13 By placing his imputation that Frost had misread “Apple Peeler” alongside his realization that he had ostensibly misunderstood what Frost meant, Francis’s point seems to be that intention or meaning is at best difficult to ascertain. Again, however, he tends toward concealment, refusing to clarify whether his aim is simply to demonstrate that interpretation is subjective, or to discredit Frost’s suspicions about the poem and present himself as credible (rather than vindictive or rivalrous). It may seem paradoxical that, in telling the story of his life, Francis’s transparency ebbs and flows. He refrains from disclosing his feelings and intentions but is candid about the anxiety of being frightened during childhood, the loneliness of feeling forgotten, and the pain of coming to terms with his homosexuality in adulthood. But if we consider his autobiography in relation to his early prose, Francis’s restraint is not surprising; indeed, it contains material from earlier prose characterized by his ability to adopt different voices and tones. For example, he transposes verbatim the statement he drafted to solicitors from his journal, where it appeared in the entry for July 5, 1953. Not always offering a word-for-word transposition, he sometimes condenses passages from his early prose for incorporation into his autobiography. In his description of Mrs. Hopkins’s collection of pressed glass, he retains the humor of the memoir, comparing its vastness to a “glacier that overflowed into the hallway, down the front stairs, and came finally to rest in a large front room as a sort of terminal moraine ” (Trouble With Francis 207). Though his writing lacks the tang of its counterpart, 24 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

A Cautious Distance

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

principally because the portrait of Mrs. Hopkins is not set against disclosures about his background and its shaping influence on his standards of value, this example, like the one preceding it, features Francis’s peculiar brand of levity. At once mischievous and reserved, it draws attention to his subject, not himself, thereby underscoring the mixture of reticence and candor that on the whole defines the quality of his prose in the autobiography, and, for that matter, his earlier work. In the following chapters I will explore how his poetry, like his prose, wavers between camouflage and selfdisclosure. Expressing this frisson in lyrics that trace an arc from locodescriptive pictures consisting of celebrations of agrarian life and renderings of familiar natural appearances to experiments with form encompassing covert disclosures of his homosexuality and denunciations against the Vietnam War and environmental degradation, Francis’s poetry speaks to contemporary concerns about homophobia, global despoliation, and human suffering inflicted by war.

☙ 25

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

2

❧

Inhabiting Juniper

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

B

etw een 1 9 31 and 1 9 8 7 R ob e r t Fr a n ci s w r o t e s e v e n volumes of poetry and two books of essays on poetry, in addition to a reminiscence of Robert Frost and prose works in different genres. Apart from critical essays devoted to individual lyrics, and in spite of thoughtful reviews of the Collected Poems (1976), only one comprehensive study of his poetry has been undertaken.1 The reason lies not only in his preference for solitude and his avoidance of self-promotion but also in his dedication to living along Thoreauvian lines. In Travelling in Amherst he declared: “Whenever a man cuts himself off partially or wholly from his fellows and simplifies his mode of life in order to have more of life and to become better acquainted with himself, he is following Thoreau” (4).2 Howard Nelson observes that Francis “has taken Thoreau more literally than most of the rest of us have dared, not only appreciating some of his attitudes, but taking up the practical challenge of achieving independence and integrity through simplicity as well” (2). He followed the principles of simplicity and renunciation, and his poetry has little overt social content, focusing instead on the steady relationship between self and world. Francis put Thoreau’s prescriptions for living into practice when he decided to move out of Amherst center and live on his own. The years leading up to his departure, during which he earned a marginal wage, shaped his realization that he would be happier in natural surroundings living a simpler life devoted to pursuits of the mind. In July 1937, he rented a secluded old house on the outskirts of the town that did not have electricity or running water, but gave him the opportunity to be “resourceful and independent” (Trouble With Francis 8). Three years later, he moved into Fort 26 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Inhabiting Juniper Juniper, where he lived the rest of his life. Like Thoreau’s habitation at the edge of the Concord woods, a mile or so from the village, the modest cottage whose construction he oversaw was located in Cushman, a village in the northeast corner of Amherst, and situated on “a small pasture knoll, partly wooded, between the road and a ravine leading down to brook level” (27).3 In his autobiography he described the “strict economy” he adopted at Fort Juniper (218), a disciplined life of austere self-sufficiency predicated on making “full use of everything I possessed” and disposing of “everything I didn’t need” (29). To this end, he prepared his meals from food gathered wild or grown in his garden and made do without modern conveniences. The literalness with which he followed Thoreau’s ideal of living frugally is evident in the pains he took to provide detailed accounts of his expenditures for housing (“Fort Juniper was built for $1230.43”), food, clothing, and property taxes (216). “I have not only kept the accounts,” he tells us, “I have kept the account books” (217). Francis’s reasons for adopting simplicity were aesthetic as well as economic. The combination links him to Thoreau and Emerson. Besides providing time to write, his Spartan lifestyle brought him nearer to what Emerson in “Nature” called “the common influences” of nature which the poet should delight in (234). Throughout his early work, Francis’s careful descriptions of natural appearances reflect both Emerson’s dictum and Thoreau’s remark in his journal: “I omit the unusual . . . & describe the common. This has the greatest charm—and is the true theme of poetry” (Writings 2: 428). For instance, in “Blue Winter,” from Valhalla and Other Poems (1938), Francis depicts a midwinter landscape, registering the eye’s receptivity to nature’s familiar appearances: Winter uses all the blues there are. One shade of blue for water, one for ice. Another blue for shadows over snow. The clear or cloudy sky uses blue twice— Both different blues. And hills row after row Are colored blue according to how far. You know the bluejay’s double-blue device Shows best when there are no green leaves to show. And Sirius is a winterbluegreen star. (48) In recording his response to the sensational impulses of distance and color, Francis brings visual acuity and a delight in nature’s dappled beauty ☙ 27

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter two into high visibility. He evokes the textured surface of a landscape painting, his eye sauntering from foreground shades of blue to different ones in the distance. This clarity of vision finds equivalence in his lucid diction. In language that is colloquial and stripped of ornament, he adapts everyday speech to the formal constraints of rhythm and meter, breaking it across the iambic line to provide a feeling of reality freshly apprehended. Together with Francis’s keen perception of color, his diction conveys a sense of the luminosity of things seen. His eye moves upward and outward, integrates what it sees, and locates perspective in a distant point on the horizon—“a winterbluegreen star.” His evocation of natural beauty underscores a perceptual sensitivity and vigilance to detail intrinsic to his early writing. Francis’s poetry is deeply rooted in a close observation of the things, creatures, and people of rural New England.4 The titles of his poems in his early collections—Stand With Me Here (1936), Valhalla and Other Poems (1938), and The Sound I Listened For (1944)—are indicative: “Onion Fields,” “Hay,” “Sheep,” “Spicebush and Witch-Hazel,” “Juniper.” One cannot read his poems without forming pictures of natural objects and country life that exhibit his sharp awareness of the realities of farm toil— planting, weeding, and haying. His poetry implicitly illuminates the role perception plays in his picturesque descriptions; it represents a blend of pastoral aesthetics and visual piety, both marks of his affinity with Emerson and Thoreau. In his poems of agrarian life, Francis displays a penchant for seeing landscape as composition. He frequently organizes his descriptions according to the spatial relationships and color gradations in a painting; the interplay between perspective and distance draws him closer to Thoreau, whose writing about landscape reflects an interest in aesthetics. Francis’s painterly compositions of pastoral life in the New England countryside gradually led him toward a more particularized perception of nature based on the discovery (rather than the organization) of visual relationships among the things and creatures of the world. The observable likeness between different natural objects that he describes in some of his poems dramatizes a unity underlying the variety and flux of the universe. Coextensive with Francis’s more particularized rendering of natural facts is his habit of perceiving nature emblematically as a metaphor for human conduct, a mode of seeing that derives from and is mediated through his reading of the transcendentalists. In the process of making and discovering visual relations among nature’s diverse forms, Francis 28 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Inhabiting Juniper affirms the interrelatedness of things in nature and the harmony between self and world. Francis’s kinship with Emerson is striking in his early work. In Travelling in Amherst, he hails Emerson as “my master” and The Heart of Emerson’s Journals as the book that “unfailingly recalls me to myself” (50). Several passages in the poet’s journal convey a delight in the perception of natural appearances inspired by his reading of Emerson. In an excerpt dated May 9, 1932, written after reading Phillips Russell’s Emerson, the Wisest American, Francis’s sensitive response to natural stimuli combines with exact observation to create a scene bathed in color and light: “I sat by my window in my bedroom, thinking into the twilight. A sprig of golden currant made the air about me redolent. The peepers in the marsh made the outdoors silvery. The new moon and the evening planet were in conjunction above the apple tree” (13).5 The entry might describe a painting or a photograph. Framed by the window, Francis’s close-up view of a sprig of currant is set against a twilight landscape of marsh and apple tree illuminated by moonlight. Complementing the visual detail is a heightened acuity to sound and smell. This fidelity of attention not only accentuates that various elements of his being are in communion with one another but also forecasts his skillful integration of different sense modalities into his early poems. For example, in “Onion Fields,” from Stand With Me Here, Francis’s careful scrutiny of a rural landscape builds toward a newness of perception and sensation. At the start, he introduces the image of the onion fields as a visual “sea” that “flows level to the sky.” As the poem develops, his imaginative vision completely replaces his literal, observing eyesight: Far inland from the sea the onion fields Flow as the sea flows level to the sky. Something blue of the sea is in their green. Something bright of the sun on little waves Of water is in the ripple of their leaves. Stand with me here awhile until the white Kerchiefs of the weeding women are whitecaps And the long red barns boats—until there are Only boats and whitecaps and white clouds And a blue-green sea off to the blue of sky. Wind from the onion fields is welcomer ☙ 29

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Chapter two

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Than any sweetness. We stand and breathe as we stand On a shore and breathe the saltness of the sea. (8) Francis incorporates the surface play of color and light into the poem’s central image, emphasizing the “blue of the sea” in the green of the fields and the “bright of the sun” in the “ripple of their leaves.” Combining these visual effects, the poet invests the landscape with vitality and dynamism. He then sustains the image with a description of the women’s kerchiefs as “whitecaps” and barns as “boats.” Next follows a total illusion of seascape, arranged into horizontal planes of color. The blue-green sea, whitecaps, and boats stretch out to the horizon against a blue sky. He completes the imaginative transformation as he shifts sense modalities, comparing “wind from the onion fields” with “the saltness of the sea.” His use of syntax and rhythmical language captures the fluid process of perception itself. This is especially true of the middle section (lines 6–10). This section contains the poem’s longest sentence, whose clauses, in spite of the intervening dash, are coordinated by the repetition of “until.” Its sweeping, headlong movement results partly from the use of connectives, which link the images of “boats and whitecaps and white clouds / And a blue-green sea,” and partly from the high concentration of assonance (“awhile” / “white”), consonance (“barns” / “boats”), and alliteration (“weeding women” / “whitecaps”), which pushes the poem forward at a rhythmically steadier pace. The sum effect of these lines, fortified by a heavy use of monosyllables, is that of a continuously unfolding moment of awareness. An equally significant theme is the interdependence of things seen. As in “Blue Winter,” where different shades of blue in water, ice, hills, bird, and star emphasize the interrelatedness of different natural forms, the onion fields reveal resemblances between rippling green leaves of the fields and the sea, and the “white / Kerchiefs of the weeding women” and windtossed “whitecaps.” The poems forge a balance between individuality and relatedness in which things seen are both discrete objects and part of a dynamic moment of perceived unity. “Onion Fields” recalls a passage from the section titled “Beauty” in Emerson’s “Nature.” Here Emerson describes the aesthetic transformation of nature, seen from a hilltop view, by the inspired creative imagination: “I see the spectacle of morning from the hilltop over against my house, from daybreak to sunrise. . . . The long slender bars of cloud float like fishes in the sea of crimson light. From the earth, as a shore, I look out into that 30 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Inhabiting Juniper silent sea. I seem to partake its rapid transformations; the active enchantment reaches my dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning wind” (27). Like Francis, he renders a moment in which the interrelatedness of things is perceived. Both also achieve an exhilarating union with nature that is a state of the senses. In each case, the observer participates; his body shares in the proceedings of the world—breathing in scents from the onion fields, dilating with the morning wind. The rural landscape, therefore, serves as a conduit of imaginative perception that produces a bond between the observer and nature. In this sense, some of Francis’s early poems draw, to borrow Leo Marx’s phrase, on Emerson’s “romantic pastoralism.” This phrase refers not just to Emerson’s preference for a natural landscape as opposed to an urban environment, but a mode of consciousness. The latter, derived from what Marx calls Kant’s “dualistic theory of mind,” involves the contrast of lower and higher modes of perception: Understanding and Reason. While the first “gathers and arranges sense perceptions,” the second mode, which requires “rural scenes for its proper nurture,” is “spontaneous, imaginative, mythopoeic,” and “leaps beyond the evidence of the senses to make analogies and form larger patterns of order” (233). But where the natural world is finally rendered transparent for Emerson by the workings of Reason, becoming a symbol of the divine presence inhering in nature, Francis’s perception remains firmly focused on the concrete and particular. Rather than see through nature to make contact with the Oversoul, he views discrete features of the landscape in visual relation to one another, which the imaginative perception then transforms and organizes into a composition. The process by which Francis transforms perception provides evidence of his affinity with Thoreau, whose writings fuse Emerson’s call for visual receptivity with an interest in landscape aesthetics grounded in Gilpin and Ruskin. According to Lawrence Buell, the books Thoreau read on aesthetics—from which he learned how to describe the effects of perspective and distance on color—nourished an inclination he exhibited “throughout his adult life . . . to see land as landscape” (131). His reading reinforced a predilection to see different features of the landscape within a pictorial framework, characterized by gradual variations in light and color.6 As a result, Buell points out, several entries in Thoreau’s journal show how he subjects “mundane objects to aesthetic transformation by using distance and perspective to defamiliarize and then order them” (132). The similarity between the ways Thoreau sees “land as landscape” and Francis transforms ☙ 31

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Chapter two objects into a composition (as in “Onion Fields”) demonstrates that for both the process entails organizing perception according to a painterly aesthetic.7 “Hay” is another poem from Stand With Me Here in which the pastoral landscape becomes a focal point for the transforming imagination. But in this instance Francis’s creative perception competes with his will to acknowledge the hardships of farm life. His description of the toil of New England haymen at harvest opens in medias res, and evokes the sounds of the movement of hayricks as they return from the fields: All afternoon the hayricks have rolled by With creaking wheels and the occasional swish Of low tree-branches brushing against their sides. The men up in the hay are silent. Sun And the scent of hay and the swaying of the ricks Have taken away all their desire for talking.

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

The music here accords with the languid pause from work that the lines describe. Francis’s poem lulls first with liquids and then with sibilance that help to soften the strident realities of agrarian life. Soft sounds yield, however, to the harder k sounds at the end of this section, and their reiteration emphasizes the harshness of farm labor: They have lost count of the loads already in. They cannot count—they do not try to count The loads to come. More hay lies cut and ready To be loaded than even the longest afternoon Can harvest. The contrast is sharp. The slow “swaying of the ricks” filled with hay is set against the urgency of men having to load more “than even the longest afternoon” will allow. In the next section Francis links the haymen up in the ricks with the ancient world of myth. Superimposed against a background of clouds, they become aesthetic objects, transformed by the poet into statuesque “New England Neptunes”: Silent as bronze and color of bronze To the hips, the haymen ride to the barn in waves Of hay—New England Neptunes, each with his trident. 32 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Inhabiting Juniper Along the beaches of the sky the cloud-surf Mounts, masses—cloud heaped on cloud. The earth Is heaped with hay.

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

The merger of present and mythical past results in a broader vision of the physical landscape. A sweeping horizontal perspective displaces the more narrowly focused perception at the start, as if it were an outward sign of the poet’s heightened awareness. Francis’s description is a glorification of the harvest, a celebration of the abundance of the earth, with man and nature, suffused in the light of summer, assuming a harmonious and mutually dependent equipoise. In the final lines, Francis plunges us back into the flow of time. The setting is early evening, “the sun still high at suppertime.” As he notices ricks “returning to the field,” his thoughts turn to “Some farmer who will not trust a fair sky / Overnight,” another reminder of the exigencies of time and the hard realities of farm toil. But, rather than confront the realities, Francis deflects them with an imagined landscape in which “a chiaroscuro effect of scene and feeling” prevails,8 and a “goldening moon” softens the harshness of human labor: And when the sun is down And the highest cloud pales and the evening coolness Creeps up from the lowlands bringing the evening Scent of hay and the sound of a dog barking, There still will be, far down the field, figures Moving dimly under the goldening moon. Tonight the moon will light the last load in. (9; emphasis added) With the onset of nightfall, the haymen all but disappear “far down the field” subsumed within an overriding pictorial vision. Francis further diminishes their presence by using perspective, reducing them to shadowy nondescript “figures,” which in turn allows him to emphasize particular features within the landscape—fragrance, sound, and the effects of distance and light on perception. This diminishing of human figures dramatizes his privileging of the central aesthetic values of symmetry and harmony, as the poem ends with day and night, shadow and substance, light and dark, held in delicate balance. While Francis’s aestheticization avoids to some extent the harsh realities of farm life, it also demonstrates that the way he achieves harmony is ☙ 33

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Chapter two visual as well as verbal. The importance of visual relations in his early landscape descriptions is reiterated in some of his later poems, where he recognizes the similar appearances of different natural forms. In this, Francis moves close to Thoreau, whose journal contains passages in which, as H. Daniel Peck says, he “links objects of distinctly different classes (animals and plants, for example) according to some visual aspect, such as common color or background.” “Sheep,” from Valhalla and Other Poems, is reminiscent, indeed, of a passage from Thoreau’s journal, dated January 18, 1859, which “describes a rock that ‘looked like a seal or walrus’ ” (61). Francis’s observation of the likenesses between sheep “against the stony hill” and the weather-gray rocks into which they blend draw on similarities of color, texture, and roundness: From where I stand the sheep stand still As stones against the stony hill. The stones are gray And so are they. And both are weatherworn and round, Leading the eye back to the ground. Two mingled flocks— The sheep, the rocks.

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

And still no sheep stirs from its place Or lifts its Babylonian face. (40) The poem follows the movement of Francis’s eye as it perceives and then compares the sheep and rocks. In the first eight lines, the eye meanders from one object to the other, each observed likeness gradually building toward the poet’s perception of the forms as “mingled flocks” (line 7). At this point, the weight of the poem comes to rest on “flocks,” which denatures the sheep and abruptly alters the premise on which the poem has been constructed. Divested of their animal physicality, the sheep no longer exist in relation to the rocks. This merger between objects of “different classes” has a formal dimension as well. Francis divides the fast-paced lines into alternating tetrameter and dimeter couplets and invests the poem with a structural symmetry that he reinforces in the second line of the fourth couplet. The caesura splits the line in two, the one-to- one

34 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Inhabiting Juniper correspondence between the objects enhanced by the parallel syntax in each half of the line, “The sheep, the rocks.” In the tetrameter couplet that concludes the poem, however, the word “Babylonian” disrupts the strict and steady march of monosyllables. The anapestic last foot interrupts the iambic pattern in the final line to express in rhythmic terms the surprising effect of the word. As Richard Wilbur writes, “The word asks us first and most importantly to combine sheep and stone by recalling Babylonian and Assyrian sculpture,” principally, “those famous Assyrian bas-reliefs which represent men and animals in profile, and have a stylization of the hirsute which renders the sheep an ideal and frequent subject.” “Finally,” he goes on, “the poem asks us to think of how long—in the lands which the Bible mentions, and in others, and in unrecorded times and places—the sheep have been with us” (25). Given the vaguely Biblical resonance of Francis’s diction and the merger between sheep and stone, it is possible to see these animals as embodiments of survival and endurance. Francis thus works from very different assumptions about the visual relation between objects in this poem than in his earlier work. Where the imaginative perception shapes and organizes nature’s relations in Francis’s landscape descriptions, the eye in “Sheep” discovers them in the configurations of nature itself. Put another way, Francis does not so much compose or create relations as find them in the things and creatures of the world. To discover likenesses between different natural forms is, as Peck observes, “to confirm the relation between the small and the large, the near and the far, the familiar and the unfamiliar . . . and ultimately to dramatize the harmony of the cosmos” (62). The shift in perception from discovering affinities between different objects to apprehending nature’s deeper coherence is an expansion of the transcendental precept of perceiving the universal in the particular. “Each particle is a microcosm,” Emerson pronounces in “Nature,” “and faithfully renders the likeness of the world” (40). Francis illustrates this notion in “Spicebush and Witch-Hazel,” from The Sound I Listened For, which is more particularized in its presentation of detail than the previous poem: Spicebush almost the first dark twig to flower In April woods, witch-hazel last of all— Six months from flower of spring to flower of fall—

☙ 35

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Chapter two

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

The alpha and omega if you please. Yet how alike in color, setting, form: Both blossoms yellow to confirm the sun, Both borne on bushes that are nearly trees, Both close to twig though not to keep them warm. Only the learned might elucidate Why one blooms early and one blooms so late. Only the wise could tell the wiser one. (139) The symmetry between shrubs whose flowers mark the interval from the beginning of spring to the end of fall is the product of minute scrutiny and relational perception. Rather than describe the visual likenesses between the objects themselves, as in the previous poem, he links their affinities to other forms in nature with which they share an appearance and thereby demonstrates the harmony of the cosmos. Each shrub strives to produce in flower an incarnation of the light that gave it birth; each flower appears on a bush that has the likeness of a tree. In a word, nature’s forms partake of the whole of nature and so reveal in miniature the intricate symmetry of the organic universe. Francis’s discovery of resemblances between different natural objects does not result, however, in the flowering of natural facts into spiritual truth (as it often does for the transcendentalists). He prefers to dwell on the physical reality of the world rather than postulate a realm beyond appearances. As the final lines of the poem suggest, he will leave it to the “learned” and “wise” to “elucidate” why each flower blooms when it does. This adherence to the reality of facts for dramatizing an ordered universe is central to “Coming and Going” in The Sound I Listened For, where Francis charts the seasons according to sights and sounds that mark their appearance. The two six-line verse-units mirror the progression from spring and summer to fall and winter; they describe a vital, organic world whose twelve-month cycle reflects nature’s capacity for renewal and change. Syntactic coordination abounds as present participles at the end of each line imply the physical vigor of nature in the process of working itself out to fulfillment: The crows are cawing, The cocks are crowing, The roads are thawing,

36 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Inhabiting Juniper The boys are bumming, The winds are blowing, The year is coming.

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

The jays are jawing, The cows are lowing, The trees are turning, The saws are sawing, The fires are burning, The year is going. (148) The rhythmic pattern of the poem illustrates that nature is a process. The regularity of the two-stress beat in each line suggests the inexorable passage of time from season to season. Furthermore, the repetition of falling rhythms, as in “thawing” / “blowing” and “turning” / “burning,” imitates prosodically nature’s cycles of rejuvenation and diminution. This rhythmic signature, coupled with the poem’s symmetrical structure and syntactical sameness, expresses on a formal level the constancy of the natural order. In other poems from his early volumes, Francis ventures beyond the physical likenesses he perceives among different natural forms to detect correspondences between the human and the natural. Just as Thoreau in the “Spring” chapter of Walden sees how “forms which thawing sand and clay assume” (203) resemble the “liver and lungs” and “ball of the finger” (204–5), Francis in “Pitch Pine,” from Stand With Me Here, perceives how “Small tufts of needles here and there” on the tree “Bristle from the bark like hair / On a man’s knuckle, in his ear.” He likewise regards the extent to which the intrinsic qualities of natural objects give instruction to man. The tree, by virtue of its ability to subsist on “any land” with “plenty of stone” and “plenty of sand” (13), becomes a symbol of resourcefulness. This interrelatedness of man and nature thus establishes a basis for human conduct. Here Francis approaches Emerson, who in “Nature” apprehends a correspondence between the human and the natural arising from his rapturous experience of feeling at one with the world in the woods and fields: “Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both” (24). In “Flower and Bee,” which appears in The Sound I Listened For, he follows Emerson and derives an “ethic” from the “reciprocity” he observes between nature’s forms:

☙ 37

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Chapter two

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

For the bee takes from the flower What the flower wants to give, And the bee gives to the flower What the flower takes to live. (156) For Francis, nature is an instructive text “so pervaded with human life,” as Emerson comments in “Nature,” “that there is something of humanity in all and in every particular” (49). As Robert D. Richardson Jr. argues in his biography of Emerson, and as I show in a later chapter, the perception that the intrinsic qualities of natural objects give instruction to man comes from classical Stoicism, a philosophical tradition that emphasizes turning to nature for answers to the question of how life should be lived.9 Behind the symbolic correspondences between natural phenomena and human conduct is the premise that, to quote Richardson, “there is only one law for human beings and for nature” (233). In a word, Stoicism teaches that the study of nature provides a way for man to know himself. Closely connected to the kinship that exists between human beings and nature is the relationship between states of mind and natural objects, which is reflected in Emerson’s observation in “Nature” that “Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind” (32). In “The American Scholar,” for instance, Emerson emphasizes the mind’s capacity to perceive that “remote things cohere and flower from one stem,” that they “are not foreign, but have a law which is also a law of the human mind” (65– 66). This notion that mind and nature emanate from one source underlies Emerson’s ontology that nature is a metaphor for the mind. Francis, too, recognizes equivalences between visible things and states of mind in some of his poems. Writing in “Clouds” that “We rest in them our minds, our moods, our wills” (32), the poet discovers analogues in natural objects for thought and emotion. Created by vapor above the earth’s surface, the clouds, evanescent in nature, are appropriate symbols of the sense impressions and feelings of human beings. Similarly, in “New England Mind,” from Valhalla and Other Poems, he recognizes that natural objects are manifestations of the mind emerging and revealing itself through them. At the same time that it expresses the influence of the regional landscape on his imagination and the conduct of his life, the poem celebrates an interpenetration of mind and nature in which his “outer world and inner make a pair.” The mind extends outward, so to speak, perceiving itself in the natural world, partaking in its 38 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Inhabiting Juniper life-forming processes that generate both natural appearances and the poem inspired by them. Put simply, nature is a symbol of the creative force operating through the imagination and expressed in tangible form through the poem: My mind matches this understated land. Outside the pencilled tree, the wind-carved drift, Indoors the constant fire, the careful thrift Are facts that I accept and understand. I have brought in red berries and green boughs— Berries of black alder, boughs of pine. They and the sunlight on them, both are mine. I need no florist flowers in my house. Having lived here the years that are my best, I call it home. I am content to stay. I have no bird’s desire to fly away. I envy neither north, east, south, nor west.

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

My outer world and inner make a pair. But would the two be always of a kind? Another latitude, another mind? Or would I be New England anywhere? (49) Just as nature fashions art out of raw materials in the landscape and gives contour to the “pencilled tree” and “wind-carved drift,” the imagination imitates the form-shaping forces behind the appearances of nature. The poem serves as a correlative through which the mind displays the objective character of natural appearances in order to know itself and the phenomenal world of which it is a part. In the same way Francis takes possession of nature, bringing into his house “red berries and green boughs,” the fruit of “black alder,” and “boughs of pine,” the mind, through sense perception, reaches out to possess the appearances it sees, including “the sunlight on them,” bridging the distance between perceiver and perceived, underscoring the interpenetration of inner and outer worlds. “But would the two,” Francis wonders, “be always of a kind?” While the distinction he makes between outer and inner worlds—recalling Frost’s “outer” and “inner weather” (231)10—implies that mind and nature are independent of each other, the interchange Francis describes occurs in a ☙ 39

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Chapter two geographically specific locale. If the interpenetration of mind and matter results in a deeper knowledge of the self, the poem, as its title suggests, emphasizes the importance of place in this dynamic. It postulates that mind is part of the world in which perception takes place, at once circumscribed by and inseparable from the regional New England environment. Far more geographically specific than the previous poem, “Juniper,” from The Sound I Listened For, describes how awareness of place fosters a discipline of attention that leads to knowledge of the self. The title comes from the common pasture juniper after which he named his house, from whose windows he could see the evergreen. Living at Fort Juniper permitted him, as he writes in his autobiography, “to look at it closely” for years and appreciate “its beauty of form and its subtlety of color” (31). In the poem’s last lines, his attention to such particulars becomes an act of inhabitation. Prefaced by a pious scrutiny of its brilliant colors—“tarnished bronze / And copper, violet of tarnished silver”—Francis depicts a charged interchange between self and nature, an experience in which he enters the juniper, its presence aglow within him:

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

I see those colors now, and far, far more Than color. I see all that we have in common Here where we live together on this hill. And what I hope for is for more in common. Here is my faith, my vision, my burning bush. It will burn on and never be consumed. It will be here long after I have gone, Long after the last farmer sleeps. And since I speak for it, its silence speaks for me. (126) By surrendering to silence and allowing the juniper to speak for him, he emphasizes the nonverbal quality of this interchange; in effect, his secularization of religious allusion—the “burning bush”—describes a special moment of vivid perception that expresses a subjectively felt awareness of dwelling in the world. That he fits the opening outward to silence to the less constrained form of blank verse instead of a sonnet is appropriate since the formal demands of a closed form would be at odds with the surrender of self toward which the poem gradually builds. Occurring in a specific place (“on this hill”), Francis’s identification with nature results from the uncluttered conditions that his life at Fort 40 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Inhabiting Juniper Juniper made possible. Part of his hope in having the house built amid natural surroundings, as I have suggested, was to enrich his contemplative experience by simplifying his life in accordance with Thoreau’s economic and philosophic principles. If his retreat into semirural seclusion offered what he called in his autobiography “a blend of outer and inner worlds, of observation and contemplation” (17), it gave him the chance to experience nature directly and reduce perception to its simplest terms. It compelled Francis to cultivate simplified conditions that allowed him to observe nature with “deliberateness” (the term comes from Buell), perceive its deeper significance, and appreciate the meaning derived from an unfettered contemplation of its particulars. Buell’s definition of “deliberateness” as “the intensely pondered contemplation of [natural] images” stresses just this effect of the simple life on perception. Once “the conditions of life have been simplified,” he writes, images “take on a magical resonance beyond their normal importance,” leaving us free “to appreciate how much more matters than what normally seems to matter” (153). Considered from this perspective, “Juniper” describes Francis’s enriched contemplative experience of nature hallowed by his vocation to live simply and free from the burdens of possessions. To the last, Francis writes out of a deep connection with the land. His poetry, in its description of agricultural patterns of farm life, its discovery of likeness among the things and creatures of the world, its apprehension of macrocosmic significance in particulars and correspondences between humans and nature, emphasizes how the influence of the pastoral landscape on imagination creates a sense of place. As well as specifying and describing localities around Fort Juniper, Francis’s early poems present the primary experience of his direct response to nature, behind which lies not only a faith in written language to communicate perception but also the notion that the object or thing seen, if rendered with precision, can express an interpenetration of self and world. By turning his perception of the world into realized experience, he affirms his relationship to place and to plant and animal life, one that culminates, as “Juniper” illustrates, in rapt silence and a sense of solidarity with nature. But, by comparison to Hopkins, Francis perceives things at a distance, as if they were destined to become a picture. Where the diction that Hopkins employs enters the thing seen and expresses some inner quality, as in his use of adjectives, participles, and nouns that suggest horse images in “The Windhover,” Francis is more straightforward. In “Sheep,” for instance, we see the scene but do ☙ 41

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Chapter two

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

not experience it. Without the intrusion of the word “Babylonian,” the poem is not as interesting. He does not, in this case, penetrate the surface of things. Francis’s gravitation toward a simplified lifestyle in the 1930s led him to contemplate the differences between rural and town life. In “Valhalla,” the lengthy narrative poem from his second book that he began in 1934 and completed around the time he moved into the old house in 1937, Francis works out the contrast between these two worlds, the one represented by pastoral life (in the agrarian sense), the other by life in the village.11 The poem presents the story of a family whose patriarch, John, dedicates himself to forging a life on the land. The Vermont farm he inhabits with his wife, Edith, and their three children is a “self-contained” world (116), nestled on a hill that overlooks the village below. Other characters include old Sylvester and his wife, Ruth, village neighbors who help on the farm during the harvest, and Dr. Moor, the local country physician who cautions John about the perils of isolating his family. To develop the contrast at the heart of the poem, Francis idealizes life in the countryside, celebrating, with a mixture of nostalgia and longing, the simple pleasures and solid satisfactions of self-sufficient rural life. But he questions this nostalgic view of pastoral life by exposing the delusion of John’s thinking that he and his family can isolate themselves from a larger human community. That no one remains to run the farm at the end suggests the failure of John’s enterprise and perhaps the poet’s anxiety about the outcome of his own effort to be self-reliant and live independently.12 In the first of the poem’s six sections, Francis portrays the small- scale family farm as a “self- contained” world of abundance and natural fecundity. The soil and the life it supports nurture and sustain the inhabitants of Valhalla. From “the generous udders of Audhumbla,” the white Ayrshire, flows the warm milk that “mothered them all” (54). Her “cream” tops the “golden pudding” made from pumpkins grown in the garden (56). The “inside of apple seeds,” furnished by fruit cultivated in the orchard, flavors freshly baked bread, dark “with butternuts and hickories / Seasoned a year from old Valhalla trees” (54–55). The poet links his picture of a bountiful pastoral domain with a vision of the children as carefree in their play, running in the wind “through the cornfield / Where pale-bright tassels and leaves of the cornshocks tossed” (50). By depicting Valhalla so abundantly fruitful of necessities for the sustenance and 42 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Inhabiting Juniper joyful preservation of life, Francis presents a world complete in itself, an oasis of pastoral plenty. In the next section, however, he dramatizes the near fatal consequences of John’s decision to isolate his family on the hill when Leif is suddenly struck down with appendicitis and brought by wagon to the village to be operated on. After the operation, Dr. Moor reminds John, “It’s luck we have a surgeon in Vermont / As good as any other in New England. / Luck that we found him home when we needed him.” “It was pure luck,” he adds, “the morning was October, / Not January with the hill in snow.” Moor then takes the occasion of Leif’s sudden illness to counsel John to confront the dangers of his family’s isolation: “Wouldn’t say half the year be almost as good / Or better than the whole year on your hill?” (66). Though the doctor later tells him that “People are dangerous, / I grant you,” they “are not so dangerous after all / As none.” John defends the life he has created for his family on the hill. “Bones are broken at every altitude,” he counters, “And people die in cities every day.” “One can hide from danger and think that he is safe,” John contends, “Or one can live a life that’s worth the danger / That’s bound to be” (67). Since danger, from John’s perspective, is an inherent condition of existence, he is willing to imperil his family to live in rural seclusion. In fact, he confesses to Moor that he is “guilty” on “two counts”: “First, I expose my children to needless danger. / Second, I shield them from desirable danger” (67). While John’s remarks allow us to understand that his justification for endangering his children is to protect their innocence from the corrupting influence of life beyond Valhalla, they amplify the contrast between two worlds that informs the poem. Heightening this contrast, the beginning of section 3, which follows the dialogue between John and Dr. Moor, provides a glimpse of the simple, unadulterated pleasures of life in the countryside. Young Leif, who has recently celebrated his twelfth birthday and recovered from appendicitis, scampers over “the first green grass” of the hills on the farm, where the “rue anemones were white / In the open woods and in the pasture bluets.” Running after are his mother, Edith, and his sisters, Eden and Johanna. John walks behind, playing on his hornpipe: A slow and triple tune, a sarabande The old world would have called it. In the new It had no name. Edith was barefoot now ☙ 43

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Chapter two

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

With the children, and they began to dance a dance That she had taught them in other springs, she Herself untaught, unless the moving of clouds Across the sky and the swaying of tall grasses And long watching them had been her teachers. (69) Francis invokes the conventions of the pastoral tradition—oaten pipes, the beauty of woods and pasture, and the felicity of country life—to reveal the charm of rural simplicity. Here Edith and the children embody the landscape and a way of life that is in harmony, like their dance, with the natural rhythms of “the moving of clouds” and “the swaying of tall grasses” on the hills. All are barefoot, and an aura of freedom attaches to them, evoking a bygone world of mirth and pleasure. Even in scenes detailing the harsher aspects of life on the land, such as the description of farm chores in section 3, Francis idealizes his subject matter. In his portrayal of John, Leif, and Sylvester at work in the fields, he deemphasizes the hardship of farm toil (as in “Hay”) through aestheticization. Leif, for example, cocks “the windrows for his father to lift / And carry Atlas-like above his head” (72). “Over the rough ground,” Sylvester then guides the loaded hayrick, swaying and dipping “like a galleon,” while “great clouds” gather “over his head and over the hills” to form “a surf along the wide beach of the sky” (73). This widening of the description to encompass a soothing vista of the horizon deflects attention from the realities of rural life. Set against a backdrop of “clouds whose whiteness makes the blue sky bluer” and “hay ripe for the harvest” (77), the image of farm labor rendered here accentuates instead landscape bounty and natural beauty. As idealized as these glimpses of farm life are, John’s children nonetheless begin to yearn for the world outside Valhalla. His oldest daughter, Eden, who is seventeen, develops an attraction for a young man her age from the village soon after Leif’s recovery from appendicitis. As the relationship ripens, she muses, at one point, “I’d love to live in the village. / Neighbors passing by all day, and at night / Their windows blossoming like buttercups” (70). Leif becomes aware of their attraction in section 4 when he spies them together in a grove consummating their love—a spot located, significantly enough, where “the woodroad forked, one leading to the farm, / The other down the hill” (88). He waits in hiding behind some trees until Eden is gone before confronting her lover, Judd, and avenging himself on him for ravishing his sister: 44 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Inhabiting Juniper

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Hearing a sound, Judd turned and saw him coming. He stood his ground. Leif stopped. No question spoken. The one word, Snake! Then fists. The trees closed in. Two worlds. One would be saved, the other lost. (89) In this struggle, Francis dramatizes the collision between the rural world and the outer world. With the boy’s defeat begins the ineluctable movement that is to separate Eden from her family and the hitherto intact elysium of Valhalla. She and Leif grow apart following his fight with Judd. As Francis represents it, a sense of estrangement comes to define their relationship: “Together in a room they had a way / Of seeing everything except each other” (90). When Eden later discovers that she is pregnant, she resolves to leave Valhalla and live with Judd in the village. Her departure not only confirms Judd as victor—“the fighter who has fought and won”— but it severs ties, in that she never returns to the farm. “Acknowledging defeat,” John is forced to admit that Valhalla is not “the only place to live” (93– 94). Eden’s departure helps prepare John for the day in section 5 when Leif, now eighteen, tells him “the time has come for me to go” (97). After losing his daughter to Judd, John recognizes the importance of allowing Leif to explore “parts of the world that can’t be seen / From here.” So he arranges to have Leif’s uncle, a ship’s captain, take him on board for a time with the hope that he will return to the farm when he is ready. “Go when it’s time and come when it’s time,” John tells him. “If you’re back in time for haying, good. / If not, we’ll manage a summer without you somehow” (98). Leif, however, fails to return home. He goes from ship to ship working odd jobs and finally drowns at sea (a death presaged when, after fighting Judd, he crawled to a pool, saw his reflection and looked “into the eyes of death” [90]). The news of Leif’s death overwhelms Edith, who dies shortly thereafter, leaving John and Johanna (sixteen at the time) to run the farm. Unlike Eden and Leif, Johanna is steady in her devotion to Valhalla. She takes up the slack after Leif’s death and helps her father with the chores, doing most of the things that her brother once did. If in the past she “had hayed a little” for fun “because Leif let her take his fork for a while,” Johanna now “worked till dinner” and “all the afternoon” (99). The increased workload and isolation of farm life preclude her from having social interaction as she is “often alone” for “most of the day,” either “in the house or near the house” (110). When John asks her why she stays (section ☙ 45

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Chapter two 6), she replies, “Why have I loved it if I was not to live here / Always, always? Why are you my father / If I am not to love you, if I must leave you?” (109). In choosing to remain, Johanna accepts the legacy that her siblings have refused, the fateful consequence of which Francis suggests in a scene leading up to her reply, as she and John pause in their stroll to talk before An old-stone almost prehistoric place With stones in the cellar hole and in the well, Stones that had been a wall, and one a grave. They stopped as if it were a destination.

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

They never saw their house a cellar hole, Johanna said, with trees growing out of it And people, strangers, sitting on the stones. They never saw us here. Perhaps, said John, We see ourselves too clearly and the world Not clearly enough. (108– 9) What John sees, of course, is the collapse of Valhalla into ruin, its destruction figured in an “old-stone” farm dwelling reduced to a “cellar hole” and reclaimed by nature, “with trees growing out of it.” As if in fulfillment of this destiny, John soon dies from a heart attack, and Johanna tries to operate and live on the farm alone. The house itself, like the lifeless ruins, becomes a kind of tomb, “whose rooms were empty all day long / Of everything but furniture and echoes, / Whose closets held old clothes owned by the dead” (112). Analogous to the stony remains that mark a former homestead, it is a vestige of the human past, a symbol of the death of family and the failure of John’s ideal. In the years after her father’s death, Johanna’s health falters, which not only thwarts her effort to carry on with farm work but also adumbrates the onset of a fatal illness. Alarmed by her tired appearance and diminished stamina, she visits a doctor who discovers that she has a terminal, inoperable cancer. The physician advises her that she should decide whether to seek medical attention at a hospital or remain on the farm. “And I would leave my home where I was born,” Johanna responds, “For the sake of a few more months, an extra year / Or two of something neither life nor death / In a hospital?” (117–18). Rather than receive palliative treatment, she builds up the nerve to kill herself, choosing an early autumn afternoon. 46 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Inhabiting Juniper With her father’s pistol in hand, she walks up through the pasture to a forest clearing and comes upon a “boulder” (112) that designates her parents’ graves. (Here the boulder is cognate with the “old-stone” remains that mark a former dwelling.) Lifting her hand, Johanna firmly “pressed the thing against her heart and fired” (122), an act defined by Francis as “obedience, / Not to her father’s word or anything / He ever dreamed would come, but to his life.” The poet thus has us understand her act of ending life on her own terms as consonant with the principle of self-determination that guided John’s life (“The clean sharp end as he himself would have it” [121]). The phrasing (“She pressed the thing against her heart”) also implies that behind this obedience to principle is a fierce attachment to place, which, as her reasons for remaining at Valhalla affirm, is as deep as her love for him. The narrative of the poem is, finally, instructive and self-reflexive. The loss of family and farm shows the consequences of John’s thinking that he and his family could exist apart from the human community. The effect of detachment on the children, in particular, is to magnify their isolation. While John “wanted his life and the life of his family to be as good as possible,” Francis observed when talking about “Valhalla” in an interview, “he more or less cut them off from the world” (qtd. in Cubbage 176). In the case of Eden and Leif, the isolation of farm life drives them to leave, whetting their desire to experience the world beyond Valhalla. Johanna’s dedication to her father is, on the other hand, so complete that she continues to live alone on the hill after his death. In this sense, her devotion to his pastoral ideal of independence and individualism resembles Francis’s adherence to similar principles. If, from this point of view, Johanna is the poet’s doppelgänger, then her story reflects his anxiety about the cost of living a Thoreauvian life. In fact, in a journal entry dated July 3, 1931, he frets that “living on a mountain . . . may be semi-suicide, a giving up, a closing one’s eyes” to the world (4), and so expresses alarm that isolating oneself may be annihilating. A chronicle of what Donald Hall calls “the end of a family that lived in a cherished place” (121), “Valhalla” is the lone example among Francis’s collections of poetry of an extended narrative poem. As in Frost’s longer blank verse eclogues and dialogues, here Francis uses a relaxed conversational idiom, which Hall says “ ‘sounds like’ Frost” (120). And yet, for the most part, “Valhalla” suggests that Francis (in contrast to Frost) has difficulty conveying what motivates his characters. John and Johanna, for instance, ☙ 47

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter two are not fully developed, psychologically complex figures but caricatures that represent viewpoints or attitudes. He is the advocate for living a life of secluded self-sufficiency; she is the devotee of that ideal. Perhaps because of this difficulty, Francis relies heavily on contrivances—Leif’s drowning, John’s heart attack, Johanna’s illness—rather than dialogue to drive the poem to its tragic conclusion. By contrast, in Frost’s narrative poems, dialogue reveals character, advances the plot, and generates conflict. Take the dramatic situation in “Home Burial,” which unfolds during the course of a conversation on the stairs in the home of a couple, whose conflicting responses to their child’s death bring out the communication problems that have eroded the marriage relationship. As he confronts his wife to “speak of his own child that’s dead,” the husband is reminded by her how callous he was when, after having dug the baby’s grave, he came into the house to “talk about [his] everyday concerns.” “Three foggy mornings and one rainy day,” she recalls that he said, “Will rot the best birch fence a man can build” (57–58). Frost compels us to consider whether the husband’s attitude is insensitive, or whether it is the response of a task- oriented sensibility that denies pain its capacity of disrupting sanity-preserving chores. To quote Francis in A Time to Talk, “the man who wrote the poem could understand and express the wife as well as the husband” (92). It comes as no surprise, then, that, limited by the narrowness of his life and its circumstances, Francis made “Valhalla” his one attempt at narrative and focused in later books on writing short lyric poems. With the publication of his fourth volume, he moves beyond pastoralism, though he is still very much a nature poet, and explores the darkest period of his career when he struggled to make a living and rejection slips eroded his selfconfidence, causing him to withdraw into a “psychic shell” (Trouble With Francis 83) and question his vocation as a poet.

48 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

3

❧

Dwelling in Uncertainties and Straddling Extremes

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

A

s the t it l e of h is f ou r t h b o o k s ug g e s t s , The Face Against the Glass (1950) presents Francis as an observer, alone and cut off. Indeed, it was written during what the poet called “a period of crisis,” when he often spent evenings in his house hiding from people. After 1944, the nearly complete rejection of his work by publishers and the feelings of failure it summoned caused him to withdraw, turn inward, and doubt seriously his ability to continue as a poet.1 “I wanted to crawl into a corner out of sight,” he recalled in his autobiography, “partly because I had no heart for being with people and partly because I wanted to brood on some basic questions” (83). It is curious, therefore, that, writing around the time of the Beats and confessional poets, Francis refuses to address his personal life and thereby exploit the acute anxiety born of his shattered confidence. This is not to say that he avoids showing us his troubled side or keeps hidden what vexes him. Rather, his poetry is a reminder that the immediate sensation and emotion we prize in some of our poets need not preclude the quieter dramatization of feeling, emphasized by understatement and indirection, which Francis claims as his own. Critical commentaries on his work, however, rebuked Francis for refusing to report on his suffering and to document the turmoil in his life, a complaint that appears to have its origins in the vogue for confessional poetry. Robert Lowell and his followers, whose work marked a distinction between—in Claude Levi-Strauss’s terms—“raw” and “cooked” poetry, took it for granted that good writing ought to approach autobiography and ☙ 49

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter three consist of a naked disclosure of private misery. Some critics saw in Francis’s controlled, mannered reluctance to write about personal suffering a failure of nerve that, worse yet, suggested the irrelevance of his work to contemporary life. Norman Friedman first sounded this view of Francis’s poetry in a critique of The Orb Weaver (1960)—a volume that included half a dozen poems from The Face Against the Glass—that appeared in the Chicago Review (1967). Friedman praised Francis’s technical skill and delicacy of insight but regretted that his writing contained “no rage for order, no torment within to resolve, no sense of the emptiness of life, no turbulent relations with other people” (69). Dudley Fitts made a similar point in the New York Times Book Review in April 1966. He implied that while there was much to admire about Francis’s “quiet competence” in clothing his “delight in natural beauty” with precision “in patterned language,” the poet’s style failed to arouse passion. “Everything seems to be here except the one element that I could not possibly document,” he averred, “the fire” of unrestraint “that finally seals a poem” (46–47). Francis was partly responsible for helping to engender a critical consensus that made him seem out of step with contemporary poetic taste. In “Poetry and the Human Condition,” a short essay written late in his career and published in the Painted Bride Quarterly (1988), he set himself apart from “confessional poets” who, he felt, pandered to “a prevailing mood” that saw life as a source of anguish, and whose dramatized real subject is the temper of the poet. “Confession and especially confession of suffering are so common,” Francis wrote, “that a poet who doesn’t suffer or who doesn’t write primarily about his suffering is thought to be no poet at all but only a writer of verse” (58). Not surprisingly, The Face Against the Glass avoids mention of his personal discouragements and persistent selfdoubt, distinguishing it from the work of confessional poets popular at the time. Alternating between celebration and meditation, its mostly pastoral offerings contrast sharply with Lowell’s painful poems of private history in Lord Weary’s Castle (1946) and Theodore Roethke’s Freudian forays into the unconscious in The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948).2 But Francis is dark in ways that his critics do not suggest. He is willing at times to face anxieties of the psyche and disturbances of the spirit. Some of the best poems in this collection show his capacity for dwelling in uncertainties and straddling extremes, which he explores as a tension between his desire for unselfconscious oblivion and the death of self he knows this desire represents. Francis’s frequent refusal to resolve the paradox at the heart of 50 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Dwelling in Uncertainties and Straddling Extremes

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

his poems speaks to a species of artistic courage that consists of holding oppositions in equipoise.3 Characteristic, too, is Francis’s fidelity to accepted forms, whose surface composure provides a counterpoint to the tension that lurks beneath some of his poems in this volume. In his carefully structured sonnets and tercets, there is a proportionality of thought and form that stands in marked contrast to the free-verse explorations of his contemporaries. Though shapely, his poems are also flexible. His verse is often unrhymed and his rhythm irregular, with stress frequently shifting within the line. His observations of nature are usually direct and rendered in fresh combinations of language. Compound words (“seek-no-further,” “sharp- cut,” “whitecurled”) cohabit in his poems with Latinate derivatives (“Intoning,” “cumulus,” “indolent”) to produce a richly textured music that flows with conversational ease. Consider, for instance, “Remind Me of Apples,” among the finest poems in this book, whose quiet unfolding in two seven-line stanzas conceals the anxiety that underlies it. Francis reckons with time, mortality, and the dark psychological hold that an awareness of death has on him. The poem opens in a dramatic context, with the speaker sitting, perhaps, by a window on a hot summer’s day; he hears a cicada singing and meditates on it, investing its sounds with a gloomy, emblematic significance: When the cicada celebrates the heat, Intoning that tomorrow and today Are only yesterday with the same dust To dust on plantain and on roadside yarrow— Remind me, someone, of the apples coming, Cold in the dew of deep October grass, A prophecy of snow in their white flesh. A dash emphatically divides the lines into two parts that establish, in David Walker’s phrase, a “seasonal opposition” of summer and fall (“Francis Reading” 29). In addition to this general opposition, there are particular contrasts. Francis’s introduction of the cicada’s song evokes a dark complexity of feeling underscored when the tone abruptly shifts from the buoyant “celebrates” to the grimmer “Intoning.” The change in mood prepares us for the speaker’s sober reflection “that tomorrow and today” drag on with a kind of monotonous inevitability no different from “yesterday” (long o sounds insist on this meaning). As Walker notes, the lines ☙ 51

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Chapter three “echo” Macbeth’s chant (29)—“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow”— whose world has turned to ashes, all roads lighting the “way to dusty death” (5.5.19, 23). Suddenly, as if to rescue the mind from surrender to fatigue and ennui, Francis enacts an imaginative leap and summons from memory an image of harvest apples (a metaphor, perhaps, for hope of creative or personal fulfillment) that opposes the heat and dust of summer. To heighten the contrast, accents fall on the words “Cold” and “dew.” But if the vision of “apples coming” offers him relief from extremes, it is also a reminder of the imminent end of the year: “A prophecy of snow in their white flesh.” These lines offer overlapping meanings, including a statement about the ability of memory to anticipate and counter intimations of mortality. The seasonal opposition recurs in the opening lines of the second stanza, but only indirectly. The speaker’s reference to the “dog days” of summer— the aural correlative of which is growling thunder—implies the coming of fall and harvest apples. In contrast to the first stanza, he loses “the memory of apples” and the hope of fulfillment it offers:

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

In the long haze of dog days, or by night When thunder growls and prowls but will not go Or come, I lose the memory of apples. Name me the names, the goldens, russets, sweets, Pippin and blue pearmain and seek-no-further And the lost apples on forgotten farms And the wild pasture apples of no name. (178) Then again, as Walker points out, he does not quite “lose” memory either (30). In the poem’s last lines, the list of “names” suggests that memory is not so much lost as submerged in some sparsely settled place in the psyche. Ranging from the familiar (“goldens”) to the exotic (“blue pearmain”) and mysterious (“seek-no-further”), the list follows the movement of a trolling nighttime mind drifting into and melding with reverie and dream, where particularizing names dissolve into undifferentiation (“apples of no name”). The cadences of Francis’s poetry add to this sense. Caesuras that initially slow the pace at which we read these lines give way to an unbroken utterance marked by a steady stream of connectives that blurs the boundaries between forgetfulness and dream. Syntax is a revelation of the properties of a mind fading from consciousness. Since the trancelike state into which the speaker ventures is continuous with the 52 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Dwelling in Uncertainties and Straddling Extremes particularized world that the list of “names” evokes, something in him is never really lost—just tucked away. In Walker’s words, he “stores up apples by naming them” and, in effect, provides for his “future need” (30). Though it does not enter into the half-awake realm of dream, “Museum Birds” also presents the speaker engaged in a state of reverie, musing on the relationship between the timeless representation of life he describes while looking into a glass display case featuring birds “balancing lightly on green twigs” and the time-ridden world that all flesh-and-blood creatures share. His portrait of the birds in suspended animation, a condition undisturbed by “life’s fever and death’s dissolution,” illustrates how his poetic imagination draws on a voice from the past. The last line, indeed, echoes a poem founded, like this one, on the contrast between the ideal and the actual—Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: These birds that do not fly, though poised to fly, Or having flown, have just this moment lighted, The wings unfolded still, over the eggs That, though they will not ever hatch, are safe From hawks and snakes and owls, weasels and squirrels—

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

These birds, feathered as life, yet having escaped At once life’s fever and death’s dissolution, Untouched by frost, sleet, snow, rain, wind, heat, hail, Warrings of many kinds, old age, disease, The threat of hunger, the perils of migration— These birds, balancing lightly on green twigs That never will be anything but green, Guarded by glass from dust, Time’s fingerprint— Ah happy twigs, ah happy, happy birds. (171) Like the pictures of life depicted on the urn, the birds inhabit a world within the display case that is inviolable. Though Francis’s description of the birds in their haven is static—they do not fly, their eggs will never hatch, they light on twigs that will always be green—it seems, in its ideality, superior to the mutable natural world. “Safe” behind the glass, the birds escape drastic climatic changes, the misery of hunger, the rages of illness, and “old age,” in short, all the vicissitudes and vagrancies of life that result in suffering and death. With a combination of longing and melancholy resignation, the speaker implicitly reflects in the Keatsian last ☙ 53

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter three line on the difference between the feverish existence he shares with all living things and the changeless felicity of the scene behind the glass. Put another way, he yearns to inhabit the ideal world he describes and be, like the birds, forever free of the debilitations of time. He wants to escape from the realities that govern the inexorable process of death. To long for an existence unmarred by “Time’s fingerprint” is to desire at the same time a deathlike permanency (arising here in the lines about eggs that “will not ever hatch” and twigs that “never will be anything but green”). And yet, the speaker acknowledges the artificiality of the ideal he describes. Throughout the poem, he maintains an awareness that the scene he is musing on is but a scene, though his response to its representational limitations is less fierce than Keats’s judgment of the pictures that cover the urn (“Cold Pastoral!” [208]). The birds, he realizes, are “feathered as life,” their “wings unfolded still” (the adverb meaning both “motionless” and “continually”), as if to say that he cannot think of them as other than representations of actual life. His concluding utterance concentrates the tension of the previous thirteen lines between the desirability of entering the unchanging happiness of a static world and the reality that such felicity is a rueful delusion. The poem provides an opportunity to discuss how Francis alters the sonnet form and introduces variation into the meter that reinforces the sense of the words. It has a fourfold 5-5-3-1 construction in which a dash appears after the last word in each of the first three sets of lines to mark a syntactic separation between sections. Linked by anaphora, the first three sections follow a fairly continuous development, reflecting the poet’s wishful belief that the timeless realm inhabited by the birds is far above the natural world of cyclic change, with its predatory dangers, seasonal extremes, and calamities of many types. While the poem is essentially iambic pentametric, jolting variations in the meter insistently underline the meaning. Line 8, for example, has no weak syllables after the second foot; repeated accents emphasize the harsh climatic extremes that the birds escape in their domain. There are other comparable effects elsewhere. Successively accented syllables within the poem’s next-to-last line (“Time’s fin/ger-print”) slow its pace. Such an effect helps establish a sense of closure, achieved in the last line, in which an iambic beat reemerges and the poet, restrained by his time-bound existence, laments his exclusion from the timeless ideal represented inside the glass encased display.

54 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Dwelling in Uncertainties and Straddling Extremes The paradox underlying this conflict-ridden wish to escape “life’s fever and death’s dissolution” is that it expresses a desire for unconsciousness, the alternative to which is to remain conscious and alone, like the poet, who looks in at the enclosed scene. Something like this opposition, as Lee Zimmerman demonstrates in his study of Galway Kinnell’s work, coils at the heart of modern poetry. Zimmerman explores how Kinnell projects his yearning for unconsciousness beyond himself into the external world and longs for the same kind of obliviousness as that had by animals, musing on his “distance from them,” or wishing “to live with them or be them or be like them” (110). Like Kinnell, Francis mines this paradox. Centering on the desirability of achieving an imaginative oneness with nature, he charts his relationship to various forms of animal life, whose sensuous existence offers a seductive alternative to his own time-bound condition. As Tony Tanner frames the issue, it means finding the unselfconsciousness of animals “enviable” (32).4 At one extreme are poems that, in Zimmerman’s words, “define a gulf between humans and . . . the animal world” (112). Indeed, Francis rues his separation from nature in the opening lines of one his poems: “Enviable, not envious, the little worm / Whose apple is his world and equally his home, / Who at his feasting hears no hint of doom.” Not vexed by mortal harassments and unable, like humans, to anticipate future “doom” (and death), the worm “envies no one.” In the last line, he acknowledges the attractiveness of retreating into oblivion when he writes that while “I envy no one, I could envy him” (219). At the other extreme reside poems that convey his “unadulterated yearning” for the “purity of animal life” (Zimmerman 111). In “Eagle Soaring,” the bird captivates Francis; the poet meditates on “the perfection of his calligraphy” and “complete undistraction.” Though he does not imaginatively join with the bird, he keeps his eyes fastened on it, wishing he could be, as he says in the last line, like the eagle, “Obedient to nothing but the pure act of seeing” (219; emphasis added). Between these extremes are poems that, as Zimmerman puts it, “combine elements of each or are more overtly ambivalent” (113) about the attractiveness of the vital purity that animal life embodies. “Demonstration,” for example, begins with Francis’s speaker admiring a hawk’s effortless mastery of wind currents that lifts it high into the midday sky. Like the creature that Ted Hughes heralds in “Hawk Roosting” for its grandeur (“I sit in the top of the wood”) and aggressive rapacity (“I kill

☙ 55

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Chapter three where I please because it is all mine” [26]), the bird that Francis describes is lauded for its graceful majesty, predatory existence, and ruthless instinct to live:5 With what economy, what indolent control The hawk lies on the delicate air, looking below. He does not climb—watch him—he does not need to climb. The same invisible shaft that lifts the cumulus Lifts him, lifts him to any altitude he wills. Never his wings, only his scream, disturbs noon stillness. Days of the sharp-cut cloud, mid- day, he demonstrates Over and ever again the spiral. On smooth blue ice Impeccable the figure-skater carves his curves.

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Oh, how to separate (inseparable in the bird) His altitude from his incessant livelihood: His higher mathematics, his hunger on the ground. (168) The first tercet establishes a tone of rapture that extends into the second section: the speaker is awestruck by the absence of any discernible exertion on the hawk’s part to soar skyward. Lying “on” the air, the bird achieves its supreme mastery over the wind by paradoxically surrendering itself to nature to be acted on by “the same invisible shaft that lifts the cumulus” (emphasis added). The verb used to describe this action, emphasized in the next line through repetition, suggests that Francis’s speaker feels inspired by watching the hawk “lift” himself “to any altitude he wills.” Even his “scream,” which “disturbs noon stillness,” reinforces, by contrast, the otherwise quiet effortlessness of the creature’s airborne “climb” that provokes the tone of awe and admiration in the opening lines. The hawk becomes for the speaker, as John Elder writes of the bird in Robinson Jeffers’s “Hurt Hawks,” an “emblem” of both “nature’s spirit” and his own “ambition for a spirit beyond humanity” (Imagining the Earth 13). In the next stanza he presents an image of the hawk that combines precision and grace. As it soars in flight, the speaker transforms the bird into a “figure-skater,” its long and gliding sweep tracing “Over and ever again” a “spiral” pattern against the blue of sky. This part of the poem is an allusion to Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Windhover.”6 Though it is stripped of Catholic doctrine, “Demonstration” shares with Hopkins’s poem the quality 56 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Dwelling in Uncertainties and Straddling Extremes of animating nature to reveal the individual essence and inexhaustible life of an object. Francis enriches the identification of hawk and skater through the interplay of sounds. Voiceless stops (“sharp- cut”), sibilance (“smooth,” “ice”), and closely clustered hard k sounds (“Impeccable,” “carves,” “curves”) are interwoven to evoke the sound of a skater’s blade etching an arc on the ice’s surface. The interlocking sound patterns not only enliven the comparison but also deemphasize the creature’s desperate existence. In the final section, however, the tone of admiration modulates into one more openly at odds with it as the speaker acknowledges the raptor’s animal physicality. In recognizing that the graceful pattern the bird traces in the sky also inscribes an instinctual and predatory purpose, he reveals a pointed awareness of the creature’s “incessant livelihood” and rapacious capacity for violence. The skater that “carves” in flight “sharp-cut” turns into the blue sky is at the same time the predator that rips open a body with razorlike talons and devours the flesh of its prey. In the end, the purity (“higher mathematics”) and barbarity (“hunger on the ground”) of animal life are balanced. Francis’s ambivalent attitude toward the hawk in some ways corresponds to the split between Whitman and Thoreau,7 both of whom he included in his autobiography among “the American writers who meant the most to [him]” (223). They are drawn, like Francis, to the vitality of animal life, seeing in its sensuality aspects of themselves. But Whitman is unconflicted about his animal nature. Saying he “could turn and live with animals,” he discovers in them “tokens of [himself ]” (“Song of Myself” 52– 53). Whitman accepted this aspect of his nature because, as Denis Donoghue holds in Connoisseurs of Chaos, he was not troubled by the separation of the Me (soul) from the not-Me (body); he disposed of this philosophical dualism by declaring that the “me-myself” was simply the sum of the “not me” it contained (27). In contrast to Whitman, whose equations are designed to make everything equal, Thoreau, like Francis, is torn between purity and physicality. In the “Higher Laws” chapter of Walden, for example, he hails the divine more than the corporal. Although he expresses “reverence” for his “savage” lower instincts, says he “loves the wild not less than the good,” and likes to spend his day “more as the animals do,” he believes these instincts must be controlled to develop the “higher” spiritual faculties (140–41). “A command over our passions, and over the external senses of the body,” he writes, is “declared by the Ved to be indispensable in ☙ 57

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter three the mind’s approximation to God” (147).8 The “gross feeder,” Thoreau warns, is man “in the larva state” (144). If the attraction to the unconscious sensuality of animal life draws Francis close to Whitman and Thoreau, his keen sense of the dark implications of this kinship bonds him with Thoreau. This desire to be like or with animals, as Zimmerman explains when he quotes Kinnell, is “suicidal,” involving withdrawal into sensuality and a willingness “to be some other thing” (120). Francis reflects something like this quandary in the last lines of “Demonstration,” where his speaker is vexed and left wondering “how to separate” that which is “inseparable in the bird.” The Face Against the Glass is not, however, a volume containing poems that only express the grim uncertainty deriving from Francis’s willingness to dwell in extremes. It features poems in which he looks at a thing one way then turns it over in his mind to see it in a different light, crystallized, for example, in his description of a poisonous mushroom in “The Amanita.” Francis combines botanical observation and minute detail, marking with accuracy how this “breathing wax” organism conceals death in “the flesh white, cream, and crocus” color of its “finger-slender neck,” “virginal gills,” and “fungal face.” Flecked with “blemishes” of red, the amanita “all but blushes as if the thing concealed / Were not a poison coolly but a few drops / Or reminiscences of un-cool blood.” The paradox in all this punning is that the fungus, feeding on death and “rotting humus,” nourishes an “esoteric ironic beauty” (170). Francis follows a similar procedure in “Encounter,” but this time with poison ivy. On the one hand, he is an avid naturalist,, warning of the pain felt by those who have “touched” or “brushed” its “smooth,” green, “unblemished leaf.” “Strangers to it,” Francis says, “who on an autumn road” have “gathered it barehanded and brought it home / For color, seldom gathered it again.” Others, who have tried to extricate it “ever so cautiously with gloves” when they found “it grew too near their homes,” learned “that something from the vine fastened / Upon their flesh and burned, and in a year . . . was there again.” On the other hand, he is a cheerful philosopher drawing on the knowledge that there is nothing in nature that does not have indwelling contrarieties of its own. He is buoyed that his “neighbor’s cow” can eat “with joy” the “salad of its leaves” and turn them into “sweet milk that [he] will drink tomorrow” (166– 67). That Francis is a balanced poet in both art and sensibility can also be seen in The Orb Weaver.9 The collection retains his customary skill of 58 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Dwelling in Uncertainties and Straddling Extremes working within traditional forms and revising metrical patterns to his own ends. Most of the poems, like the preceding ones, unfold gradually to reveal their meaning. This process applies in particular to poems in the first section of the volume that deal with athletic performance and the comparisons Francis sees between art and physical skills. The lively sense of grace and poise shown in the agility of wrestlers “tingling / To spring” at each other (194), or in the controlled edginess of a base-stealer “Running a scattering of steps sidewise” (189), becomes, as Anthony Hecht writes of Richard Wilbur’s poetry, “an extension of the dexterity the verse itself performs” (126). Beyond his delight in the vitality and energy of the athlete, Francis’s interest lies, to quote Norman Friedman, in “the hovering balance that any exhibition of skill must sustain between opposing forces” (69). He translates this blending of style and subject into a metaphor for the creative activity of the mind, where skilled athletic exertion is, in Hecht’s words, “a condition of the imagination: a dissolving of one realm of reality into another” (127). This merger is nowhere more strikingly clear than in “Pitcher,” one of several short poems about baseball. Francis uses the confrontation between pitcher and batter as a metaphor for the relationship between poet and reader. Through this conceit, he demonstrates that the poet communicates obliquely and “hits the mark” by not hitting it directly, that he strives for originality of thought and variety of expression:

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

His art is eccentricity, his aim How not to hit the mark he seems to aim at, His passion how to avoid the obvious, His technique how to vary the avoidance. The others throw to be comprehended. He Throws to be a moment misunderstood. Yet not too much. Not errant, arrant, wild, But every seeming aberration willed. Not to, yet still, still to communicate Making the batter understand too late. (189) With the skill of a pitcher who subtly changes the speed of his pitches, Francis delivers couplets of varying lengths to the reader. He starts with a change of pace, mixing a decasyllabic line with a hendecasyllabic. ☙ 59

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter three Following a couplet composed of two hendecasyllabics, he alters line lengths again in the third couplet. Francis reverses the order he uses at the outset so that the longer line now precedes the shorter one, after which couplet the poem rounds off with two more in decasyllabics. He introduces other slight variations into the poem that are equally unobtrusive. There are certain instances when Francis modifies the prevailing measure, iambic pentameter, as in line 3, with an elision in “to avoid”: “His pas/sion how/ to a-void/the ob/vi- ous.” Further changing the pace at which he delivers lines to the reader, lines 5 and 7 are split by caesuras. Like a hurler who throws off a batter’s timing by offering an assortment of deceptive pitches, he disrupts the rhythm that the reader has come to expect while reading the poem. Francis keeps him unsure and on guard until his meaning is understood “too late.” The poem’s dexterous off-rhyming provides another example of the way he uses variety. As Richard Abcarian notes, except for the last couplet, the line endings do not rhyme, although they come close (48). The first concludes with “aim / aim at,” words that have similar vowel sounds. The consonance of words in the next couplet combines with the association of “avoid” in the first line and “avoidance” in the second to produce sounds that clang and chime. The harmony of the third couplet derives from the poet’s use of internal rhyme (“be comprehended. He / Throws to be”). Reinforcing this music is the repetition of long o sounds (“throw,” “throws,” “moment”). The fourth couplet, initiated by the wordplay of “errant, arrant,” features identical consonants before and after different vowel sounds (“willed” / “wild”), which reinforce the notion that in pitching the evasion of a regular pattern keeps the batter guessing. If for pitchers the rewards of being “a moment misunderstood” and understood “too late” consist in the batter striking out, for poets the advantages of being misunderstood include a creative engagement with the poem that requires the reader’s concentration and imagination, resulting in a depth of comprehension and appreciation that an excessive explicitness cannot provoke. Or, in the words of Abcarian, “to be a moment misunderstood causes the sort of thoughtful tension that produces, finally, a richness and texture of understanding that a too quick and easy apprehension can never produce” (48). A good reader will know not to make snap judgments about what the poet is tossing at him. A similar interaction occurs in “Catch,” a companion piece to “Pitcher,” where Francis’s picture of two boys playing a game of catch becomes a symbol for the poet’s art. 60 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Dwelling in Uncertainties and Straddling Extremes Here he uses words that echo in sound but vary in sense, interweaving them into lines of different lengths, as in the foregoing poem, resorting to “everything tricky, risky, nonchalant” to fool the reader and throw him off balance:

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Two boys uncoached are tossing a poem together, Overhand, underhand, backhand, sleight of hand, every hand, Teasing with attitudes, latitudes, interludes, altitudes, High, make him fly off the ground for it, low, make him stoop, Make him scoop it up, make him as-almost-as-possible miss it, Fast, let him sting from it, now, now fool him slowly, Anything, everything tricky, risky, nonchalant, Anything under the sun to outwit the prosy, Over the tree and the long sweet cadence down, Over his head, make him scramble to pick up the meaning, And now, like a posy, a pretty one plump in his hands. (205) Augmented by the interplay of consonant and vowel sounds (“Overhand, underhand, backhand” / “latitudes, interludes, altitudes”), Francis’s description emphasizes the body in motion. It also consists of verbs that imply action and vigor—“fly,” “stoop,” “scoop,” “scramble”—contained in one sentence disrupted by pauses within and between lines, which convey the sense of a toss caught, held, and returned. As a metaphor for the interaction between poet and reader, “Catch” suggests that the poet’s aim is not that the reader should miss his point but go back, read the poem over, and “scramble to pick up the meaning.” Francis camouflages his intent to make the reader “almost- as-possible miss it,” combining surface playfulness and verbal “sleight of hand” for a surprise effect that is achieved with the unfolding of the poem’s meaning, “like a posy,” in the reader’s hands. Conversely, the reader, knowing the poet will try to “fool him,” must always be alert, like the boy at the receiving end of a catch. Attentive to the collaborative effect of tone and wit, he will refrain from locking himself into a par ticular response because he recognizes that anything is possible. Beyond contributing to the poem’s metaphor, the presence of action verbs in “Catch” underscores that Francis is a poet who (to use Hecht’s words) delights in the “visualization of motion” (129). In “Base Stealer,” another poem that suggests analogically the relation of baseball to poetry, he celebrates the skill of a base runner extending his lead from one base ☙ 61

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Chapter three and making his way ner vously toward the next, “bouncing,” “skipping,” and “running” a series “of steps sidewise”:

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Poised between going on and back, pulled Both ways taut like a tightrope walker, Fingertips pointing the opposites, Now bouncing tiptoe like a dropped ball Or a kid skipping rope, come on, come on, Running a scattering of steps sidewise, How he teeters, skitters, tingles, teases, Taunts them, hovers like an ecstatic bird, He’s only flirting, crowd him, crowd him, Delicate, delicate, delicate, delicate—now! (189) The stealer, “like a tightrope walker,” cannot afford a lapse in concentration or misstep. His lead is a back-and-forth scuttle, balletic and nimble, a mixture of stealth and bravado. He disguises his advance from the base by pulling his upper body toward it in a direction opposite to that of his lower body. A kinetic quality defines his movements: at one moment he “hovers” on tiptoes, the next he “taunts” and scampers ahead a few steps. The verbs evoking his daredevil dexterity in line 7—“teeters, skitters, tingles, teases”— set up a buzz of distraction with their insistent z sounds, not unlike the effect that an excessively fidgety runner has on a pitcher whose attention is split between him and the pitch homeward. These verbs consort with others in the poem to describe a process of cagey fearlessness that culminates in the runner’s dash to the next base. “Base Stealer” is also about poetic performance. Francis’s shading of “skipping” into “scattering” and “skitters” is at once the effect of music and language’s rich store of verbs. Matching form to action, he mimes the stealer’s progress by lengthening certain lines; for instance, the last line, the longest in the poem, is a heptameter. Here Francis conveys rhythmically the runner’s scurrying “between going on and back” from one base to the next. As Robert Wallace puts it, the line “leans [dactyllically] backward” until the last foot, when it suddenly lunges forward, like the base stealer, whose lead has been extended to its limit: “Delicate, delicate, delicate, delicate—now!” (18). And off he goes! The exertion and energy described in Francis’s baseball poems offer a symbol for the creative imagination itself. In each case, the operations of the mind correspond to the visualization of action—the pitch of a ball, the 62 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Dwelling in Uncertainties and Straddling Extremes leap for a catch, the spring of a base runner. It is fitting that baseball serves as a subject for the display of this feature in his writing since much of the game involves a battle of wits, with the “action” resulting from one opponent having outguessed the other, whether it is a pitcher throwing the ball at an unexpected velocity to a spot where the batter least expects, or a runner stealing because he believes the pitcher does not think he will try to advance and risk being called out at the next base. Through flexible rhythms and metrical variations, Francis renders in these poems the chess game intrinsic to baseball’s mute drama. Another sports poem that shows the imagination at work matching form to action and meaning is “Excellence.” Francis uses hexameter to record the effort that a jumper must expend to leap “perhaps an inch / Above the runner-up,” a metrical line length of ancient epic. While alliteration in the opening line accentuates the sharp contrast between “millimeters” and “miles” as units of measurement, the one “extra” foot (versus the norm) is perfectly suited to the meaning:

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Excellence is millimeters and not miles. From poor to good is great. From good to best is small. From almost best to best sometimes not measurable. The man who leaps the highest leaps perhaps an inch Above the runner-up. How glorious that inch And that split-second longer in the air before the fall. (148) Building on this contrast, line 2 consists of syntactically parallel statements split by a caesura that suggests how vast the gulf is between “poor” and “best.” Line 3, however, encourages us to consider how the poem opposes the suggestive meanings of the word “excellence.” The distinction that the poet makes between “almost best” and “best” challenges our association of “excellence” with respect to an athletic performance that is superior to an excessive measure or eminent degree to others (the word derives from the Latin root excellere, “to rise above others”). The repeated stress on the word “inch” in lines 4 and 5 emphasizes just how fine the margin sometimes is that separates victor from “runner up.” Francis then reinforces this meaning in the last line. Containing seven stressed beats, the heptameter creates by its extended length “that split-second longer in the air before the fall” that confers victory. The poem, therefore, enacts a doubling of intentions, one having to do with the extra effort that allows the jumper to stay aloft long enough to be the best, the other with the ☙ 63

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Chapter three poet’s dedication to poetry and to the making of poems. In light of Robert Wallace’s comment that “Excellence” is about poetry “due to the word ‘meters’ buried in ‘millimeters’ ” (18), it stands alongside Francis’s baseball poems in a group that belongs to a species of modern verse about the art of writing poetry. But this cluster represents only one aspect of the versatility Francis displays in his sports poems. Some of them move beyond the analogies they draw between art and athletic skills to confront life and provide us with insights into experience. For instance, in “Swimmer,” a poem divided into two seven-line sections, Francis uses the conceit of comparing a swimmer to a lover in order to offer both a lesson in staying afloat and a warning about the consequences of getting in too far over one’s head:10

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

I Observe how he negotiates his way With trust and the least violence, making The stranger friend, the enemy ally. The depth that could destroy gently supports him. With water he defends himself from water. Danger he leans on, rests in. The drowning sea Is all he has between himself and drowning. II What lover ever lay more mutually With his beloved, his always-reaching arms Stroking in smooth and powerful caresses? Some drown in love as in dark water, and some By love are strongly held as the green sea Now holds the swimmer. Indolently he turns To float.—The swimmer floats, the lover sleeps. (184) To develop the comparison, the first section presents the swimmer as skilled in the art of compromise. The verb “negotiates” in line 1 suggests that craft is involved in the practice of this art. Maneuvering through the water requires that the swimmer surrender to an alien element and put his life at risk. Trust and fear thus coexist in a tension of opposites—the “Danger he leans on, rests in.” At the same time, he reconciles this tension. He uses nature to defy nature and makes “The stranger friend.” “With water he defends himself from water” by means of an efficient and powerful 64 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Dwelling in Uncertainties and Straddling Extremes stroke that allows him to navigate “his way” with “the least violence,” as well as keep the “drowning sea” between “himself and drowning.” In David Graham’s words, the swimmer “must . . . have faith” that the depth, “properly negotiated, will not destroy” (91). He faces “death not by ignoring it, in other words, but by swimming in it” (92). While the question opening the second section invokes a comparison that equates the swimmer’s smooth strokes with a lover’s “caresses,” the lines that follow deepen this comparison by elaborating on the risks swimmer and lover take in common. Just as the swimmer must surrender to the alien depth, the lover must open himself up to an “other.” If for the swimmer the danger of immersion into the depth is death, for the lover the peril that attends union with the beloved is also potentially annihilating: the loss of self. A genuine attachment to a loved one threatens the integrity of independent being in its insistence on accommodation to another outside the self. The risk of too complete a surrender of autonomy, suggested by the image of drowning “in dark water,” is the relinquishing of individuality—defining the self in terms of another. But love does not need to be incompatible with independence. Just as the sea “holds” the swimmer, who at once rests in and on the water, love that grows out of “mutual” trust can offer sensual fulfillment as well as foster autonomy. Indeed, the verbs used in the comparison of swimmer and lover at the end of the poem, “floats” and “sleeps,” describe activities that have exclusive, experientially sensual dimensions. For all of his writing about various athletes whose feats are metaphors for risk-taking, Francis is sometimes cautious about taking chances. (As I point out in a later chapter, his wariness about risk-taking pertains as much to his private life as to his poetry.) At times, Francis’s poems rely heavily on explanation rather than depend on imagery to express meaning. For instance, in “Two Wrestlers,” as Friedman points out, Francis “says too much and implies too little” (70); he is too explicit in working out its conceit that the figures, staring “face to face” and moving “grace / To grace,” are mirror images of each other. “If this is trickery, the trick is smooth / In truth,” he writes, “One wrestler challenging—oh how unsafe— / Himself” (194). Francis’s reliance on directness over suggestiveness implies that he suffers from a deficiency of insight and passionate involvement. In fact, his sports poems often present him as an appreciative observer of athletic grace and strength. For the most part, he is objective and detached, and his tone is reportorial, qualities that emphasize his disinclination to inhabit, blend with, and otherwise dramatize the lives of others. ☙ 65

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Chapter three Francis is a far more compelling poet when he avoids explanation and prefers suggestion to statement, as he does in the second and third sections of the book. “Blue Jay,” for example, is an eight-line poem about his deceased father that is an emotional mixture of tender recollection darkened by loss. It introduces the bird image at once, which stirs memories of his father: So bandit-eyed, so undovelike a bird to be my pastoral father’s favorite— skulker and blusterer whose every arrival is a raid.

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Love made the bird no gentler nor him who loved less gentle. Still, still the wild blue feather brings my mild father. (198) At first, however, the speaker regards the bird suspiciously, vexed that so noisome and furtive a creature could be the “favorite” of such a man. His father’s fondness for it is all the more jarring in light of what the opening lines imply about his disposition, the scant details of which come by way of the contrast they draw between him and the blue jay. As is implied by the pun on “pastoral,” he was, David Young writes, “a lover of nature” and a country “minister of the church,” whose placid demeanor is vividly though briefly suggested by the bird’s “undovelike” bluster (“Francis and the Bluejay” 10). If in these lines his personality is subtly presented through wordplay and contrast, the last two lines describe it in terms of the clearer difference between the speaker’s attitude toward the blue jay and his father’s. Francis’s reaction to the creature is anything but loving; its “arrival” is likened to a “raid,” a word that pairs with “bird” at the end of the first line to conclude the stanza with an off rhyme that, as Young observes, “foreshadows the brilliant one” (10) at the conclusion of the poem. The opening lines of the next stanza repeat the note on which the previous section ends and more precisely define the type of person the poet’s father was. Comparative in form, they declare (in a much softer key) his dislike of the bird, made “no gentler” by the “love” his father had for it, and his affection for the man, who was “no less gentle” for having “loved” it. Underlying their bittersweet tone is the pang of personal loss and the comfort of nostalgic remembrance, which modulates in the last lines, where the 66 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Dwelling in Uncertainties and Straddling Extremes speaker is caught off guard, in Young’s words, by the “unlikely way in which things associate for [him]” (suggested by the repetition of “Still” [10]). The internal rhyme of “wild” and “mild” locks this meaning into place and reinforces the contrasting natures of bird and man. Clinching this “unlikely” kinship is the final pairing of “feather” and “father,” an off rhyme that concentrates feelings of pain and tenderness at the heart of the poem. The speaker’s complex emotional state is thus the product of a sudden disturbance aroused by the rude bluster of the bird’s music. Though different in spirit from “Blue Jay,” “Waxwings” also expresses an intimate particularity of feeling released without warning from somewhere within the speaker by the singing of birds. Its joyous tone, rhapsodic and restrained at the same time, is sustained throughout by images drawn from nature and apprehended with tranquil clarity, which reflect the satisfactions of companionship, the love of rural beauty, and the virtues of renunciation— pleasures that braid together Eastern philosophy and Thoreau’s Brahmin prescriptions for achieving contentment through simplicity: Four Tao philosophers as cedar waxwings chat on a February berrybush in sun, and I am one.

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Such merriment and such sobriety— the small wild fruit on the tall stalk— was this not always my true style? Above an elegance of snow, beneath a silk-blue sky a brotherhood of four birds. Can you mistake us? To sun, to feast, and to converse and all together—for this I have abandoned all my other lives. (188) But Francis avoids the supercilious tone that marks Thoreau’s contempt for the lives of quiet desperation that his readers lead. Preferring reticence to rhetoric, he invests the poem with an oriental quality whereby the philosophically abstruse and experientially ineffable are rendered objectively. The thoughts in themselves are not difficult, but the tone of the language invites contemplation. A charged state of awareness reveals itself in the fanciful opening description of four waxwings chatting with each other “on a ☙ 67

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter three February berrybush.” Besides suggesting his identification with the birds, his declaration that “I am one” projects a feeling of delight, which arises from the convivial atmosphere of the poem’s opening. Parallel in effect is the pleasure he finds in the simple charm of nature’s tiny, delicate precisions—“the small wild fruit on the tall stalk.” In the third stanza, whose concrete imagistic beauty adds to the poem’s Eastern character, the speaker’s feeling of union with the birds allows him to partake of their sodality and count himself among their “brotherhood.” Following his identification with them, he strives at the end to express the paradox of experiencing the fullness of being in giving things up and abandoning all his other lives for the joys of retirement, contemplation, and fellowship. At a linguistic level, “Waxwings” shows the delight Francis takes in rhythms, sounds, and suggestive resonances, expressive in themselves and as openings into the feelings they evoke, all of which are brought together in a mix of six-, five-, four-, and three-stress lines that give the poem its surface irregularity of form. Characteristic of the way he savors sounds is the internal rhyme of “February” / “berry,” the first of two examples of verbal harmony in the opening stanza (“sun” / “one” is the other) that complements the poet’s assertion of his harmony with nature in its final line. Francis’s intimate scrutiny of the natural world in the next stanza—concentrated in a fast-paced monosyllabic line of echoed long a’s and liquid l’s sandwiched between the rhythms of reflection and question—reinforces his oneness with it. This sense of becoming part of what he sees is deepened in the third stanza, in which he is virtually interchangeable with nature’s creatures, as his question to the reader suggests: “Can you mistake us?” The poem opens outward here onto a feeling of pure abandonment to beauty, imaged in the rich splendor of “a silk-blue sky” and the graceful covering of “an elegance of snow,” before leading into the last lines that express something like ecstasy in an Eastern spirit of renunciation. In contrast to this mood, the poems in the fourth and fifth sections of the book are darker. Interlaced with concomitant notes of fear, aging, and mortality—inescapable aspects of the human condition—their verse patterns become more regular, perhaps as a sign of Francis’s need to assert form against uncertainty. A consideration of “Three Darks Come Down Together” will illustrate. It begins dramatically, with the speaker bracing himself for the onset of winter, which is seen as an active and antagonistic force intent on destroying him (reminiscent of the snowstorm in Frost’s “Storm Fear”): 68 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Dwelling in Uncertainties and Straddling Extremes Three darks come down together, Three darks close in around me: Day dark, year dark, dark weather. They whisper and conspire, They search me and they sound me Hugging my private fire. Day done, year done, storm blowing, Three darknesses impound me With the dark of white snow snowing.

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Three darks gang up to end me, To browbeat and dumbfound me. Three future lights defend me. (203) A relentless march of ominous phrases fills the poem: “darks close in around me,” “dark weather,” “They whisper and conspire,” “storm blowing,” “darknesses impound me,” “the dark of white snow snowing,” “gang up to end me.” These phrases gather and accumulate, like snow piling into drifts during a blizzard, its whiteness associated with darkness (an irony Frost also draws on in many poems).11 Indeed, in this sense, “around me,” “sound me,” and “impound me” are rhymes that carry over from one stanza to the next. Complementing these mosaic rhymes, in which at least one and sometimes both of the rhyme sounds consist of two words, three are clustered together in the concluding lines. Like the falling rhythms in “together” / “weather” and “blowing” / “snowing,” they imitate the downward sweep of falling snow. The poem is thick with repetition of other sorts, including syntactically parallel sentences, abundant alliteration (the d’s in the opening lines), and, in the first three stanzas, the appearance of different kinds of feminine rhymes in a fairly consistent pattern. At the same time, the regularity of the rhyme scheme implies an uncertain balance between Francis’s need to maintain form in the face of confusion and the threat to his effort reflected in the poem’s last stanza. In spite of the bright note on which the stanza closes, the insistent mosaic rhymes call attention to themselves, as if the poet were too weary to vary line endings. If we also consider that the optimistic conclusion comes on too swiftly to be convincing, and resorts to suspicious sounding consolations from milder days and sunnier weather ahead, it might be argued that ☙ 69

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Chapter three the lines enact a surrender of the self to confusion. Like the submission that Frost’s world-weary speaker experiences in the last lines of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” reflected by the repetend, Francis’s writing at this central moment captures the mind caught in the grip of winter, submitting to encroaching darkness, night, and snow, with its capacity to cover up and erase distinctions. Nearly identical in form, “Cold,” which does not appear in Francis’s Collected Poems, is darker still, if only because he is more openly uncertain about whether he will be able to hold out against winter’s bitter onslaught—a freeze that he says is as cold as the “interstellar” spaces. Here he does not let hope or optimism eclipse a confrontation with fear. At the start, he seems startled by the brightness of the sky and the glint of the sun on ice, which brings out its “colors” of “mineral, shell, / And burning blue.” Right away the poem moves into new territory, a kind of North Pole of the spirit: Cold and the colors of cold: mineral, shell, And burning blue. The sky is on fire with blue And wind keeps ringing, ringing the fire bell. I am caught up into a chill as high As creaking glaciers and powder-plumed peaks And the absolutes of interstellar sky.

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Abstract, impersonal, metaphysical, pure, This dazzling art derides me. How should warm breath Dare to exist—exist, exalt, endure? Besides serving as a description of how cold it is, the image cluster of glaciers, peaks, and interstellar darkness suggest by their increasing remoteness a landscape of the mind in the face of voids. In the third stanza, when the poet pauses to reflect, he feels a deep sense of inadequacy that causes him to wonder how long “warm breath” might “dare to exist,” indeed, “endure” amid “this dazzling art” of cool abstraction. Hearing the “Hums in [his] ear” of “the old Ur-father of freeze / And burn,” he invests the uncertainty of his struggle to survive the ice-splintering cold with a quality of foreordained doom, as if to say the glacial weather presaged an earthending disaster, which leaves him, in the poem’s last lines, close to the zero point—helpless, alone, and chilled to the bone:

70 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Dwelling in Uncertainties and Straddling Extremes

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Under the glaring and sardonic sun, Behind the icicles and double glass I huddle, hoard, hold out, hold on, hold on. (61) As in the previous poem, nature is an adversarial presence, the “glaring and sardonic sun” fiercely illuminating the harsh conditions that the poet confronts. With a repetition of aspirate h sounds in “huddle,” “hoard,” and “hold,” he mimes the action of his breathing, each measured exhalation betraying his growing despair while dissipating as vapor in the icy air. But, as “hoard” implies, he is able to muster enough imaginative energy from his store of reserves to sustain rhythmical steadiness by pairing “sun” with “on,” thus ending the poem on a near rhyme which provides a look into the ways that the mind maintains its composure on the edge of confusion. A clear line of descent from Frost and a trace of indebtedness to Emily Dickinson, Francis’s Amherst ancestors, mark the other noteworthy poems in the last sections of the book. The poem that gives the volume its title, “The Orb Weaver,” is a frightening probe into a horrific truth of nature that converses with Frost’s “Design.” Like the dramatic scene in Frost’s sonnet, this one presents a grim tableau of a ghastly spider, “hanging among the fruits of summer,” and a lifeless grasshopper “in its windingsheet.” As he moves from precise observation to terrifying reflection to a large and abstract generalization about the ominous symbolic significance of a natural order in which the survival of one species depends on the destruction of another, Francis responds with contentious dread to evidence of a demonstrable malice in nature that evokes and extends Frost’s appalled reaction to the moth’s demise: “I have no quarrel with the spider / But with the mind or mood that made her / To thrive in nature and in man’s nature” (197; emphasis added). Francis draws closest to Dickinson in his description of extreme states of feeling, one of which might best be described as a sense of dislocation, nowhere more apparent than in his treatment of death in “Burial.” Imagining himself dead and his body borne aloft in a casket to the grave, he remains, like Dickinson, conscious of his separation from life and taunted by waning sensations of a world to which he can never return. Just as she hears the “breaths” of those around her death bed “gathering firm,” and the buzz of a corpse fly before losing consciousness in “I heard a Fly buzz- when I died” (poem 591), Francis detects the sounds of “Voices but not words” en route to “the hill / Of the

☙ 71

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Chapter three

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

blue breath [and] gray boulder” (201). Both poets’ emphasis on failing sensations suggests that death for them is not glorious immortality but isolation. Such gravity is balanced earlier in the volume by the gusto of his admiration for the poise of the skilled athlete, the oriental clarity of his description of the countryside, and the warmth of his affection for his father. Set against other poems in The Orb Weaver, the dark offerings in the volume’s closing sections help to complete the sensibility that takes shape over the entire book, as “The Amanita” and “Encounter” complement the somber undercurrent threading through The Face Against the Glass by emphasizing positive aspects of negative things. By exhibiting an extensive range and balance of sensibilities in these books, Francis’s work calls attention to the ways his poems interact, the small, quiet ones giving breadth and compass to those that, as he writes in the preface to the Collected Poems, grow “bolder and livelier” and do “a little flying along the way.”

72 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

4

❧

Experiments with Form and the Poetry of Protest

T Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

he poe m t h at pr o v ide d t h e t i t l e f o r Fr a n ci s ’s sixth volume appears in The Orb Weaver, offering a sharp contrast in mood to the work at the end of that collection. Inspired by his anticipation of the advent of spring, it begins with a directive to the reader to “Come out into the sun” (205), and concludes in a buoyant chant: Soon the small snake will slip her skin And the gray moth in an old ritual Unseal her silk cocoon. Come shed, shed now, your winter-varnished shell In the deep diathermy of high noon. The sun, the sun, come out into the sun, Into the sun, come out, come in. (206)

Francis’s fusion of seasonal and personal rebirth parallels what R. W. B. Lewis calls “Thoreau’s announcement of a spiritual molting season” (20) in the “Spring” chapter of Walden, imaged as “the sudden bursting into life of a winged insect long buried in an old table of apple-tree wood” (25). Applying this image to the innovative verse techniques he employs in his last two books, Francis, as Robert B. Shaw remarks in a review of Francis’s Collected Poems titled “Coming Out into the Sun,” had “undergone an ‘old ritual’ [of ] renewing himself,” emerging “from the chrysalis of his earlier work” (109). In Come Out Into the Sun (1965) and Like Ghosts of Eagles (1974), experiments in the visual and aural patterning of poems are ☙ 73

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter four prominent. Developing a technique he calls “word-count,” in which the units that determine line length are a fixed number of words in each line, he uses this device to explore how the rhythm of a poem changes, in his words, “according to the length of the line as well as according to the subject and the writer’s attitude.”1 A cardinal feature of this innovation, confined to poems on natural objects and creatures in Come Out Into the Sun, is the tension between compositional surface and representational reference. Francis’s subsequent formal explorations are forays into minimalism: his “fragmented surface” poems composed not of sentences but of short phrases grammatically unconnected to each other, and his improvisation on “word-count,” which he labels the “silent poem,” made up of a set number of compound nouns, mostly paired monosyllables, both of which range in mood from the satirical and elegiac to the vibrant and celebratory. In the later of these two volumes, he incorporates surface fragmentation into several antiwar poems that advocate dissent against the violence in Vietnam and an American policy of escalation that sends people to kill and be killed. In other poems, Francis parodies the military language of war and the way it avoids explicit references to death to imply that its effect is to obscure the horrors of war. He extends this tone of protest to poems that decry environmental degradation and the despoliation of nature by development and pollution. Francis’s poems in these books are as striking for their formal inventiveness as for their wide range in tone and subject matter. Of the forty- one new poems in Come Out Into the Sun (which also includes a selection of poems drawn from his previous volumes), eight observe the technique of “word-count,” where line lengths, as in a syllabic poem, are set at arbitrary limits, but the units counted are words rather than syllables. Francis comments on the effect of this device in an unpublished typescript titled “A Note on Word- Count”: “Like syllable-count (and unlike meter) word-count does nothing but determine line length. Rhythm is left to take care of itself.” He may have discovered this technique in his reading of William Carlos Williams, whose “well-known little poem about the red wheelbarrow is,” as he sees it, “word-count, whether or not so intended.” He might have learned of it from John Tagliabue, a professor at Bates College and the author of six books of poetry, who had written poems “in which each line contains precisely one word.”2 While he does not reveal when or where he first came across this technique, Francis found in it the challenge of gaining “formality without too contrived an effect”—an 74 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Experiments with Form and the Poetry of Protest inclination congenial to a temperament that reveled in hidden nuances. Having initially experimented with a seven-word line in the fall of 1961, and then with shorter five- and three-word lines, he noted that different line lengths produced significant changes in rhythm that could be correlated with a poem’s semantic content. Francis’s experiments seem modest and conservative in contrast to the work of his contemporaries. In E. E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, and Williams, we find poems whose visual appearance startles the reader by virtue of oddities of spelling or punctuation or line-stanza configuration. Francis was not compelled to employ such effects. His word-count poems, as in the case of “Icicles,” have a look of tailored elegance: Only a fierce Coupling begets them Fire and freezing Only from violent Yet gentle parents Their baroque beauty Under the sun Their life passes But wait awhile

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Under the moon They are finished Works of art Poems in print Yet pity them Only by wasting Away they grow And their death Is pure violence. (232) And yet, the slender shape of the poem is a kind of visual pun, in which the spatial arrangement of the words illustrates what is described. As Cummings scrambles letters down the page to imitate the motion of a grasshopper leaping into the air (“r-p- o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r”), and Williams disperses words and phrases to mime the action of wind blowing them scattershot ☙ 75

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter four (“The Wind Increases”),3 Francis groups compressed three-word lines into column-shaped tercets that represent the form of icicles tapered by the effects of “fire and freezing.” Complementing the poem’s visual appearance is its rejection of the conventions of punctuation that define sentence boundaries. Except for one period, Francis’s omission of punctuation keeps the poem moving fluidly down the page, mimicking the shift from ice to water, until the last line, when icicles (and poem) assume a final elongate shape. The poem is not only a mimetic representation of nature but also, as Donald W. Markos writes of the function of imagination in Williams’s poems, an imitation of “nature’s power to generate new forms” (115).4 The connection of “Icicles” to Emerson’s dictum of organic poetics in his essay “The Poet” is pertinent: “For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes the poem, —a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing” (225). At the heart of this formulation is the idea that the poetic process is analogous to natural process, manifest in Francis’s poem as a desire to liberate the form-shaping energies underlying nature’s forms. A generative force, the “fierce / Coupling” of natural phenomena that “begets” the growth of icicles provokes a creative urge in the poet. Francis fashions in words a creation of his own that reflects nature’s power to shape icicles into “finished / Works of art.” The poem “in print,” like the icicles emerging from opposing forces within nature, “violent / Yet gentle,” is the outgrowth of Francis’s struggle to give form to thought, “its shape,” as Francis writes in “Glass,” consisting of “nothing but the shape of what it holds” (167). A key characteristic of the poem’s form has to do with how it is constructed. Among its structural features is a high degree of visual patterning that calls attention to its appearance as an object—something the poet makes. Francis emphasized deliberate craftsmanship and the idea of a poem as a shaped object in an interview published several years after he experimented with word-count: “For me a poem is something made as well as something said, and from the making or forming comes much of the excitement for both poet and reader” (qtd. in Tetreault and Karcher 12). In addition to its shapely threeness, the poem includes slant rhymes of “Under” and “sun” and “are” and “art” and the internal rhyme of “Away” and “they.” This music consorts with the assonance of “gentle parents,” consonance of “wait awhile,” and alliteration of “baroque beauty,” confirming that

76 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Experiments with Form and the Poetry of Protest the poem is something made and said. As for tempo, the absence of punctuation and the enjambment between phrases in the same and different stanzas contribute to the poem’s headlong momentum. A consistent rhythm is also evident. Even though the accents vary in placement, the lines show a steady two-stress beat. Individual lines reveal still other patterns of rhythm. The first line in each stanza except for the second begins with a two-syllable word followed by one-syllable words. A trochaic foot is closed off with an iambic foot in all but two of these lines. This repetition of verse elements reinforces that the poem is carefully crafted. Another poem in which Francis correlates subject matter with line length is “Museum Vase.” As in “Icicles,” the poem’s visual appearance is its most salient formal characteristic: trim three-word lines are arranged in tercets. Appropriate to the subject, the condensed line-stanza format also focuses attention on the object itself, which suggests a quality that Markos attributes to Williams but applies equally to Francis—an “attitude” of “selflessness” (141): It contains nothing. We ask it To contain nothing.

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Having transcended use It is endlessly Content to be. Still it broods On old burdens— Wheat, oil, wine. (221) Francis’s bare presentation of the object helps establish this attitude. His declaration that the vase “contains nothing” affirms its separateness. “Having transcended use,” it stands alone, independent of its function. It is an object without reference beyond itself, possessing its own intrinsic particularity. “Content to be,” it is what it is. But the last lines quietly reverse the emphasis at the start, where the single image is viewed in abstract isolation. The vase asserts its distinction as an object connected to human endeavor and designed for storing the bounty of harvest labor: “Wheat, oil, wine.” The consanguinity the poem evokes between the object and the “burdens” it once carried, in effect, liberates it from the locus of its singularity.

☙ 77

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter four Supporting this attitude of single-minded attention on the isolated object and its relationship to human activity are spare lines designed to meet the demands of a short poem focused on one image. The paucity of elevated diction and absence of figures of speech indicate Francis’s concern with direct treatment of the thing perceived. To stress this sense of concentrated intensity on the object, each stanza ends with a full stop, the effect of which—augmented at the end by a heavy pause before the last line—is to arrest movement and emphasize the idea of fixity appropriate to the subject. The poem’s rhythm slows. Where the number of syllables per line in the first and second stanzas is 5-3-5 and 6-5-4, respectively, the final stanza has a middle line of four syllables sandwiched between the shorter first and third lines of three syllables each. By slowing the rhythm, Francis fosters a contemplative attitude in which the poetry of human struggle is discovered inhering in a small object. Francis’s use of declarative sentences throughout the poem provides no less subtle a means of fixing attention on the object. They are syntactically simple in structure. Indeed, the abrupt opening line, with its plain diction, is austere and certain. The declarative sentence in the next stanza, introduced by a participial phrase, affirms the independence of the thing seen. Both sentences assert the irreducible fact of the object itself. Adding to this impression of blunt factuality is the poem’s last sentence. The pronounced successive accents on “Wheat, oil, wine” invite closer scrutiny, linking the object and its function to nature’s fecundity. The appropriateness of stanza and line length to content in these poems shows Francis working to achieve both form and spontaneity. Even though the tidy look of neat tercets seems inconsistent with the irregular shape we might expect of poems provoked into being by spontaneous feeling, their stanza-line configurations imitate the subjects to some extent and affect the rhythm. For example, in “Icicles,” Francis’s use of enjambment in lines unbroken by punctuation imitates the processes of elongation and diminishment that the poem describes. Half the length of “Icicles,” “Museum Vase” has a compact form and halting rhythm suited to the static object on which it focuses. That he intended for readers to notice the appearance of the poem on the page is evident from his statement in his autobiography on another experiment with word-count, “Stellaria,” designed with five words to a line so “the eye could take in the fiveness” (127). An equal number of stanzas and lines per stanza (as in “Museum Vase”) emphasize its symmetrical structure; however, here even the physical 78 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Experiments with Form and the Poetry of Protest features of the subject itself, described with accurate notation in the opening lines, mirror this symmetry: Your five white, frost-white Petals and plum-purple stamens Stellaria, for a sharp eye For a fond eye— who But the botanist ever sees? (221) Lyrical phrases that spring from Francis’s attentiveness to the interplay between sounds are bound together as an integral unit. The insistent repetition of the hissing st, the initial frequency of the semivowel wh and the consonants l and r, and the high density of assonance and alliteration infuse the lines with melodious sounds. Besides its visual and aural harmonies, the poem has a symbolic significance. Francis goes beyond detailed description and discovers a correspondence between human life and nature in the flower’s properties that testifies to the power of the mind to perceive analogies and resemblances. Small in size and likely to “escape / Man’s notice” (221), the flower is an appropriate emblem of the precious human attribute of humility:

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Easier larger flowers than you I would not slander. Under The sun all are equal. And yet your very smallness Like modesty is a jewel. The unity of the human and the natural has its counterpart in the poem’s rhythm, developed in this stanza (and elsewhere) through Francis’s use of phrases and lines put together so that the second musically balances the first. A concord between outer and inner music marks the run- on line that introduces this stanza, which begins and ends with words whose falling rhythms and chiming er sounds echo those in “larger” and “flowers.” Balance is achieved in the last line because there are four syllables on each side of the slight midline caesura: “Like modesty is a jewel.” Both phrases have the same number of accented syllables, although they are irregularly placed. Francis also balances echoing sound combinations in the final stanza, where he writes of his preference for flowers “Far from a florist window / As you, starwort, are far” (222). Broken across three-beat lines, the first and last words of this phrase share a vowel sound that links them ☙ 79

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Chapter four to “starwort” and “are,” and the overall effect is to create a euphonious rhythmic unit. In contrast to the smooth localized rhythms that emerge from Francis’s formal experiments with lines of three and five words, metrical irregularity predominates in longer lines of seven words. The correlation between line length and content accounts for this irregularity. In his discussion of Williams’s poetry, Markos observes that short lines “seem right for small subjects” while longer lines are more suitable for narrative poems (64). This holds true for Francis’s work as well. Such is the case in his first wordcount poem, “Dolphin.” The comparison in its opening verses of ancient legends that depict the creatures guiding “a ship” or ridden by “a small boy bareback smiling” to stories of “real dolphins,” like “Opo of Opononi,” “who let Non-dolphin fellow bathers stroke his back,” suggests the mythologicalhistorical arc this poem traces. The resulting rhythm is, therefore, choppy and rough, befitting the subject he describes:

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

In weather foggy-shaggy in mid-Atlantic Watching their water-sports, tumbling, leap-frog Who could be wholly in the doldrums Doleful? A rough sea chuckles with dolphins And a smooth sea dimples. Delft blue. Delphinium-blue blooming with white morning-glories. The sea relaxes. They tickle the sea. (210) Though the modifier “leap-frog,” related by syntax to the preceding participle “tumbling,” suggests the vitality of the dolphins at play, and though the Hopkinsian cadence of the next-to-last line communicates a kinesthetic sense of rising and falling movement that approximates their acrobatics, variations in line length, from eight to ten to thirteen syllables, keep a fluid, wavelike rhythm from getting started. Around the time he was writing poems with a fixed number of words in each line, Francis modified the idea of word-count and began to combine lines of different lengths in the same stanza to achieve a fragmented appearance on the page. Perhaps because he composed almost exclusively on a typewriter, he discovered that he could space lines irregularly to fit a visual design.5 “Watching Gymnasts,” for example, although it is not a wordcount poem, consists of three stanzas of four lines, with each quatrain divided into two pairs of lines, one long and one short. Evenly indented on

80 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Experiments with Form and the Poetry of Protest the typewriter so that the second pair is pushed visually further to the right than the first, the lines appear disjointed in relation to each other: Competing not so much with one another As with perfection They follow follow as voices in a fugue A severe music. (216) What readers see on the page is not the result of random choices made for visual effect, but rather Francis’s thoughtful use of a technique intended to affect the poem’s rhythm. Consider “Old Men,” written in unrhymed couplets consisting of a long line of five words followed by a short line of two words. Accompanying the visual regularity of the stanza form is the rhythmic regularity of the long line– short line pattern. When the words of the title are incorporated into the poem, they partake of this rhythmic signature: Old Me n Weigh too much or weigh Too little, Settle into woodchucks or take A fancy

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

To be feather-weight birds. Very seldom However you catch one singing. As merchandise Old men go very cheap Marked down Marked down year after year After year. (231) The couplets offer an imagist glimpse into the pathos of aging. Francis’s tone derives from different aspects of the condition—psychological and physical—that the poem attempts to define by likening old men to animals. While burrow- dwelling woodchucks serve as metaphors for a sheltered life of withdrawal that elderly men often “settle into,” “feather-weight

☙ 81

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter four birds” suggest the age-related physical qualities of fragility and weight loss more common in older people. In an abrupt shift comparing them to “merchandise,” Francis appropriates the language of consumerism to suggest the sense of worthlessness that some older men may feel as they age. Like products that sell for higher prices when new or fresh, and over time are “Marked down” and “go very cheap,” the use-value of the elderly diminishes “year after year / After year.” The fact that the phrases contained in the short lines of the last three couplets are not vying with other words for available line space emphasizes their rhetorical importance in the final sentence—an implicit criticism of a market culture in whose scale of value self-worth is not intrinsic but commodified. The fragmented appearance of certain phrases in “Old Men” displays how Francis loosens form for emotional and rhetorical emphasis. The technique of combining lines of different lengths in the same stanza also nurtured his budding interest in the sound combinations produced by grouping words into discrete syntactic units. Indeed, in a typescript preserved among his papers he commented that “a fascination with words, single words or groups of words” united with his interest in word-count and was “the origin of a number of [his] recent poems.” 6 Two of these, included in Come Out Into the Sun, are “Hogwash” and “Condor.” As some of his other poems demonstrate, he tends to have a dual attitude toward language. Where the lines in “Dolphin” display a relish for glittering effects, such as compound coinages and their rollicking rhythms, the language in “Museum Vase” is simple and declarative. “Hogwash,” for instance, with five couplets consisting for the most part of seven words per line, is a good example of the joy he takes in words. The opening couplets pulse with playfulness that, while expressive of the way Francis combines sounds that echo one another, leads him into the danger of preciosity: The tongue that mothered such a metaphor Only the purest purist could despair of. Nobody ever called swill sweet but isn’t Hogwash a daisy in a field of daisies? (212–13) Delight here comes from his habit of surrendering to the play of nearby words, rooted in slight shifts in vowel and consonant sounds. By contrast, “Condor” is less flamboyant than “Hogwash.” Despite its straightforward language, the poem still betrays a hint of self-conscious cleverness: 82 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Experiments with Form and the Poetry of Protest How flawless and unvarying his candor Over the wide, over the high Andes The great condor So infinitely far from all dissembling. Is there a doubt? He dares, he dares the sun To watch him

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

And the sun watches. Watches, watches the condor Over the wide, over the high Andes With equal candor. (218) In describing his reaction to the condor, Francis is moved by the magnificence of the “great” bird, which soars above the Andes, the extraordinary quality of its wind-hovering motion “flawless and unvarying.” Its proximity to the sun suggests an aura of divinity, reinforcing the sense that the bird is on another plane of existence, “infinitely far” from his own. Coupled with the delicacy of his perceptions, his Latinate vocabulary threatens to turn bloodless (candor, defined as a “dazzling whiteness,” comes from the Latin word of the same spelling). Not only does Francis indulge in a play of words about the condor rather than maintain its importance throughout the poem, but the bird also seems remote and otherworldly. While Francis’s relish for language sometimes exposes his limitations as a poet, it also points to his strength of reveling in sound combinations and melody. In Like Ghosts of Eagles, he incorporates his celebration of words, as well as his earlier experiments with irregular spacing, into an even looser form of verse that he called “fragmented surface,” a technique that describes poems made up of short phrases and single words slightly or not at all connected to each other syntactically. Wider spaces between phrases and words in the same line at once serve to separate them from one another and add to the effect of looseness created by the omission of articles and pronouns. In “Blue Cornucopia,” a poem that rejoices in all the gradations and kinds of blue there are, these formal characteristics enable Francis to slow the pace of his perceptions: Pick any blue sky-blue cerulean azure cornflower periwinkle blue-eyed grass blue bowl bluebell pick lapis lazuli blue pool blue girl blue Chinese vase or pink-blue chicory alias ragged sailor ☙ 83

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Chapter four or sapphire bluebottle fly indigo bunting blue dragonfly or devil’s darning needle blue-green turquoise peacock blue spruce blue verging on violet the fringed gentian gray-blue blue bonfire smoke autumnal haze blue hill blueberry distance and darker blue storm-blue blue goose ink ocean ultramarine pick winter blue snow-shadows ice the blue star Vega. (241)

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

In certain respects, “Blue Cornucopia” is Whitmanesque in its celebration of detail. Extending out to gather in as many instances of blueness as it can reach, from sky to grass to spruce to star, the poem presents a list of several compound nouns and small syntactic units without comment, like Whitman, as if Francis wanted to exult in the rhythm and sound of words themselves. But because it eschews grammar and the ordering of perception into sentences, in contrast to Whitman’s syntactically coordinated long end-stopped line, Francis’s catalogue flows less fluidly. The lineation fractures syntactic units, splitting adjectives from nouns (“autumnal / haze”) and nouns from conjunctions (“distance / and darker blue”), causing the rhythm to slacken. Further slowing the tempo is the visual technique of spacing between words or groups of words, which establishes a deliberate pacing of language by isolating each item as a discrete unit so the sensuous interplay between its consonants and vowels can be lingered over and savored, as in the line blue bowl

bluebell

pick lapis lazuli

with its alliteration (b, l, p) and assonance (u, i, a). Surface fragmentation thus allows Francis to intensify our awareness of the melodic properties of words. While sharing Whitman’s celebratory tone, Francis’s use of language is starkly different. By breaking up each line into smaller discrete units, Francis subverts conventional sentence structure. The poet’s omission of transitions and connections between syntactic units frees him to concentrate on the interplay of sounds and to undermine, as Robert Bradley observes, “the conditioned expectation” of “communicating by syntax” (76). Implicit in his subversion of sentence structure is an attempt to liberate language from staleness in order to discover qualities in words obscured by literary 84 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Experiments with Form and the Poetry of Protest custom. Francis seems to have this notion in mind when, in Pot Shots at Poetry (1980), he wonders whether words “have secret energies waiting to be released like the energies within the atom” if only “they could escape their immemorial bondage to grammar and syntax and sentence structure and conventional human meaning” (156). While the liberation of words from “grammar and syntax and sentence structure” combines with a catalogue technique in “Blue Cornucopia,” “Silent Poem” breaks new ground. Foiling the process of syntactical interpretation in its abandonment of all parts of speech except for paired, mostly single-syllable nouns fitted together without hyphens, the poem is constructed on the connection between poetry and nature, words and things. Its six couplets of four words (divided by wide spaces) to a line came into being when Francis, as he recounts, “became so fond of the strong character of solid compounds (‘backroad,’ ‘stonewall,’ etc.) that I made a list purely for my pleasure.” Another example of word-count, it also grew out of his “thinking about the concept of silent poetry or silence in poetry,” which he felt could be gained “by simply presenting words without talking about them.” As it deflects attention away from its creator, “Silent Poem” achieves a kind of stylistic impersonality: backroad leafmold stonewall chipmunk underbrush grapevine woodchuck shadblow

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

woodsmoke cowbarn honeysuckle woodpile sawhorse bucksaw outhouse wellsweep backdoor flagstone bulkhead buttermilk candlestick ragrug firedog brownbread hilltop outcrop cowbell buttercup whetstone thunderstorm pitchfork steeplebush gristmill millstone cornmeal waterwheel watercress buckwheat firefly jewelweed gravestone groundpine windbreak bedrock weathercock snowfall starlight cockcrow (240) Consistent with the poem’s having begun as a list made “purely for pleasure,” each of its grammatically unrelated concrete objects seems held in suspension, particularized and valued for itself. At the same time, these ☙ 85

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter four “solid compounds,” as Francis called them, refuse to stay apart. The clusters of words begin to arrange themselves around one another by juxtaposition and association. As Francis explains it, each two-line grouping constitutes a fragment in “a patchwork quilt” that, when pieced together, adds up to form “a picture of old-time New England, a picture moving from wildwood to dwelling, outdoors and in, then out and up to pasture and down to millstream.”7 There is an association of images, words, and rhythms at work in each couplet. Except for an occasional anapest, the trochaic steadiness of the solid nouns establishes a cadence that is sustained throughout the poem. In the first group of eight words, for example, Francis shows that traces of human livelihoods may be read along a “backroad” dotted with weed shrubs and fruit-bearing vines of the region. A “stonewall” stalks through the woods, marking the boundaries of abandoned pastures bordered by a vestigial farming road now overgrown. Inhabiting land where sheep were once put to graze are creatures no larger than “chipmunk” and “woodchuck.” As the next couplet suggests, the road leads to a farm dwelling, whose natural character has been determined by its closeness to the woods. Among this group of words are several compounds—“cowbarn,” “woodpile,” “bucksaw,” “outhouse”—that invite a connection between wood that is sawed and used for building and wood that is cut and piled for burning. Their juxtaposition speaks indirectly of the benefits that human life derives from the wilderness surrounding it. Marking the transition from the back door to inside the farmhouse, the next group of nouns deepens this view of the benefits, to invoke Emerson in “Commodity,” human life owes to nature. The handiwork that transforms nature’s materials into shelter and fuel is the same as that which, in Alberta Turner’s words, transforms “wood, tallow and buttermilk to heat, light and nourishment” (20). Along with “ragrug” and “brownbread,” also the products of human hands, the concrete particulars in this couplet affirm the place of homely resourcefulness inside the boundaries of house and hearth. The poem shifts back outdoors in the next two lines and presents a picture of the land of a hill-farm, where belled cows are heard in the distance as they graze on buttercups and sparse vegetation hardy enough to grow in rugged terrain. Line 8 suggests the backbreaking human effort of living on the land and the grinding physical labor of harvesting fields along a woodland-and-meadow edge that fosters the growth of “steeplebush” (the many st sounds evoking a rasping blade being honed to sharpness). From wooded heights that buffer the pasture, the poem follows the tumble 86 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Experiments with Form and the Poetry of Protest of water into a millstream that powers “waterwheel” and “gristmill.” Driven by the life-giving flow of water that also sustains small herbaceous plants are the tools that turn the accomplishments of the harvest into food. Just as “watercress” and “jewelweed” take their place alongside this human encampment at the water’s edge, the final cluster of words suggests, as Turner interprets it, “that humans take their lasting and permanent place in the nature of things” (21): among “groundpine” and “windbreak,” under “gravestone” and “bedrock,” beneath “snowfall” and “starlight.” Despite its apparent fragmentation and looseness of form, “Silent Poem” has a sense of development. While the technique of isolating words in a line intensifies the particularity of each “solid compound” and gives it a life of its own, the words combine with one another and cohere to form “a picture” of a New England homestead. Francis would resort to surface fragmentation again in “Blood Stains,” an antiwar poem in which, as his autobiography reveals, he hoped “to strike a blow against the war that would be felt” (210). Asked about this and other poems in Like Ghosts of Eagles, and prompted by his opposition to the conflict being waged in Vietnam, he said in an interview that he wanted to write “something that would change people’s attitudes,” as well as complement the “public stand” he had taken from 1966 to 1973 when he assembled “regularly with a group of Sunday vigilers on Amherst Common from noon to 1:00 p.m. to mourn and protest the war in Southeast Asia” (qtd. in Tetreault and Karcher 20). In this hope, “Blood Stains” expresses the contamination of war on the poet and the spirit. Though it advocates no particular ideology, the poem, composed of short phrases and single words in the manner of “Blue Cornucopia,” is political in the best sense, not because it centers on the brutalities and terrors of war but because it confronts them in their universal reverberations, exploring dangers to the psyche in a moment when bloodshed taints everything: blood stains how to remove from cotton silk from all fine fabrics blood stains where did I read all I remember old stains harder than fresh old stains often indelible blood stains what did it say from glass shattered from metal memorial marble how to remove a clean soft cloth was it and plenty of tepid water also from paper ☙ 87

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Chapter four

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

headlines dispatches communiqués history white leaves green leaves from grass growing or dead from trees from flowers from sky from standing from running water blood stains (250) A chief virtue of the poem is that, while avoiding specific description of the horrors of war, it keeps Francis’s knowledge of them omnipresent in the form of indelible “blood stains.” The threat this knowledge poses to his psychic integrity takes shape as the poem unfolds and finds its force in the amplification and multitude of image and detail. After a contrast that plays the delicate and soft in the first stanza against the hard and abrasive in the next stanza, the things stained by blood proliferate in the last lines, inundating him from every direction, from newspapers, battlefield dispatches, pages of history, leaves, and grass (through which bodies of the war dead transpire), flooding in upon him, finally, “from standing from running water.” As the transcript of his mind, it is appropriate the poem should be syntactically disjointed, involving sharp juxtapositions, as well as disruptions of sentence structure and grammar. In going from the second to the third stanza, the disjunctive order of details inscribes how Francis’s growing sense of war’s pervasiveness, mirrored in images of “glass / shattered” and lives engraved on “memorial marble,” is interlaced with and eventually overwhelms his struggle to recall remedies for blotting out stains (an effort, in effect, to erase war from memory). The poem’s fragmentation is thus an aspect of the alienation of sensibility by war. A different aspect of this sensibility expresses itself in “The Goldfish Bowl,” which Francis wrote decades earlier, in the 1940s, after he joined the War Resisters League, adopted a pacifist stance, and signed a pledge to condemn war as a crime against humanity.8 It is significant because it provides an early example of Francis’s use of objective detail to reveal his psychic vulnerability in the wake of war. As in “Blood Stains,” a series of contrasts develops as the poem unfolds, setting the world of winter, where outside the “earth lies naked to the wind,” and into the night “a shivering newsboy is proclaiming doom,” against the world of summer, where inside it is “noontime,” and in a heated pool “young men” for whom war is not a condition of consciousness are at play. The speaker brings outer and inner worlds to bear on each other at the end when, with his reminder that it is “nineteen fortyone,” he augurs the inescapable fate awaiting the young of draft age soon to be inducted into the armed forces following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor: 88 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Experiments with Form and the Poetry of Protest The time is ten o’clock in nineteen forty- one. Somewhere a bell upon a tower begins to toll, While hour by hour the moon, its fat face warm with sun, Gloats like a patient cat above a goldfish bowl. (133)

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

A faint echo of Donne’s meditation on the tolling of a bell that signals death touches the second line, providing a means for the speaker to objectify his awareness of mortality (intensified no doubt by the sense of danger in the air). Temporal allusions add to the depressive atmosphere of impending peril, the last of which is an image of the moon in its final phase. Having absorbed the fears of his age living under tensions of a looming global crisis, Francis lays open an inscape of helplessness in these lines that paves the way for his poems of the 1970s that explore damage done by war to the individual psyche. When it is not provoked by the blight of war and life in its shadow, Francis’s protest against the Vietnam War is born of anger and disgust. His vitriol finds vivid expression in “The Righteous,” which he described as “a bitter, however quiet, satire against those godly church-going people who support any war our country is engaged in” (qtd. in Tetreault and Karcher 21). In sentences fused together in one unbroken stream, Francis abruptly juxtaposes the worship of Christ’s resurrection on “Easter morning” and the bombing of Vietnam to underscore how the ambience of war makes spirituality impossible: After the saturation bombing divine worship after the fragmentation shells the organ prelude the robed choir after defoliation Easter morning the white gloves the white lilies after the napalm Father Son and Holy Ghost Amen. (248) Francis’s technique affords barbed but effective irony that focuses on the gap between the destructiveness of war and the devotion of followers whose observance of religious holidays seems cut off from the reality of America’s massive deployment of chemical weapons in Vietnam and the civilian casualties resulting from indiscriminate bombing and shelling. Heightening this juxtaposition is the arrangement of the poem into four sentence fragments, which contain a subordinate clause followed by a clause consisting of nouns modified by adjectives. Despite the absence of ☙ 89

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter four punctuation, the grammatical juncture between clauses not only sharpens the contrast between warfare and worship but also establishes a marked pause between sentence fragments that gives the poem an overall effect of rhythmic stability. Part of Francis’s antagonism toward war here also grows from the awareness that war furnishes an occasion for the abuse of language. Drawing on both Pentagon jargon and biochemical nomenclature, Francis echoes the Latinate, noun-heavy, abstract political and military language about war that cloaks the reality of violence, destruction, and death. The term “defoliation,” which refers to the action by which trees lose or shed their leaves, applied in Vietnam to the destruction of vegetation that was induced by spraying tons of herbicide on mangrove forests as part of a military strategy to deny guerilla forces cover and sanctuary. This word, commonly used to describe a natural process, obfuscates reality—that millions of acres of coastal forest were obliterated and an ecosystem upon which indigenous people depended for their sustenance was destroyed. Even references to “napalm,” used frequently in civilian areas against the Viet Cong, and “saturation bombing,” also called “protective reaction strikes,” directed at the enemy in retaliation for attacks on American troops, do not adequately account for the appalling number of casualties that bordered on the genocide of a native population infiltrated by rebel fighters.9 By invoking political and military rhetoric, Francis points as much to the desensitization of language as to the hypocrisy of “godly” churchgoers who approved of a war in which, arguably, it was the wish of the United States military to legitimize Department of Defense spending and use Vietnam as a testing ground for new weaponry. This conflict between the rhetoric of war and the reality of the war experience is also the focus of “Light Casualties,” a poem whose title is a phrase drawn from television sound bites and newspaper headlines. Used principally to refer to the number of fatalities sustained by soldiers in the battlefield or as a by-product of any military action, the title phrase minimizes the tragedy of death. “Light” implies that death is somehow tolerable because it occurs on a small scale. But one imagines that those “casualties” might not be “light” from the point of view of those being killed or coping with loss: Did the guns whisper when they spoke That day? Did death tiptoe his business? And afterwards in another world 90 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Experiments with Form and the Poetry of Protest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Did mourners put on light mourning, Casual as rain, as snow, as leaves? Did a few tears fall? (249) If the way we talk about war shapes our widespread thinking about it, Francis’s protest strikes at how accustomed we have become to the daily tides of language and horror that the mainstream media bring into our lives. Such language reflects that we have grown beyond shock or outrage, and have learned to experience the destruction and carnage associated with war as an acceptable commonplace, finding nothing beyond our tolerances.10 Looking back on his antiwar poems, Francis felt that they failed, as he put it, “to have any appreciable weight in turning the tide against war.” But he did take solace in knowing that his writing, as well as his participation in peaceful public dissent against America’s actions, added bulk to the protest effort, which, as the war dragged on into the 1970s, included pacifist religious and lay groups, like the Quakers, who contributed money and manpower to the increasing number of anti-Vietnam demonstrations. Indeed, an excerpt from “Chimaphila, 1972” might be read, in Francis’s words, as “a tiny trickle of protest that fed into the stream of other vigils and other types of protest, a stream that ultimately became a mighty river” (qtd. in Tetreault and Karcher 20). Set over against “those July days / Noisy with the Democratic Convention / And all the other noises,” its celebration of the “quiet blooming” of “a nodding flower” that he noticed while strolling through woods is a metaphor for the growing momentum of the peace movement, whose pacifist philosophy stood at the heart of moderate protests opposed to the draft and supportive of troop withdrawal: A hundred blossoms and more I counted Gathered in Quaker meeting, a hundred Where in former years perhaps a dozen. (238) Moderate though it was, the strength of the antiwar protest to which Francis added his voice was in its perceptions of America’s faults. Dissent raised serious questions about the integrity of the government; it showed that the war was being lost, and that perhaps it ought to be lost because it was being waged for the wrong reasons. While the perception of the war as immoral was the movement’s main contribution, Americans had been ☙ 91

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter four made acutely aware that if the outcry of the body politic was loud enough, the government could be made to alter course. An offshoot of the conscienceraising tenor of the times, the concept of “ecology,” roughly defined as the study of the links among all forms of life on earth, gained currency and swelled into a burgeoning movement that offered rallying points for bringing Americans together to express their concerns about problems much closer at hand than peace in Vietnam. Coinciding with an upswing in America’s economic prosperity, this growing ecological consciousness covered several emerging worries about air and water pollution caused by the booming expansion of industry during and after the war, the consumption and depletion of natural resources, the degradation of facets of the environment, and the endangerment and slaughter of various animal species. Francis’s poetry evokes some of these concerns at the same time that it challenges one of the basic tenets of capitalism: that maximum economic growth and progress could be achieved by exploiting nature to serve the needs of an increasingly mechanized and technologically oriented civilization. In “The Bulldozer,” for example, the poet inveighs against the naturedominating development of untrammeled land accomplished with the help of machines. Underlying his frisky wordplay describing machinery that “Bulls by day / And dozes by night” rumbles a disapproval of human incursions into nature: “Would that the bulldozer / Dozed all the time / Would that the bulldozer / Would rust in peace” (245). His critique of the frontier- conquering drive to transform and subdue nature by exerting technological control over it reflects a humility that does not assume that nature exists for human purposes. As “The Bulldozer” suggests, some of Francis’s poetry is inspired by a modern ecological sensibility—one shaped in response to environmental degradation during the twentieth century. At other times, his writing envisions nature as a multi-cellular organism, a conception that responds to post-Darwinian ecological thought, according to which the earth is a highly organized ecosystem analogous to a single, complex, living creature.11 Francis brings this conception to bear on a poem in which he represents the perspective of nature itself and identifies the earth with “a great cow,” whose “digestion” is unaffected despite changes wrought on the land by different kinds of human intervention. Compatible with the concerns of the mainstream American environmental movement, this nonhuman perspective underscores that nature, although vulnerable to our actions, has a life of its own. Formally, the poem is an integrated whole 92 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Experiments with Form and the Poetry of Protest composed of distinct but verbally interlinked stanzas in which the fragmentation of sentences and smaller syntactic units mirrors the movement of the verse, producing a measured pace that accords with the deliberate digestive processes it describes. Its title and opening line are one and the same, “A Health to Earth” and her magnificent digestion like a great cow she chews her cud nothing defeats her nothing escapes the owl ejects an indigestible pellet earth ejects nothing she who can masticate a mountain what is a little junk to her a little scrap like a great cow she chews it over she takes her time all man’s perdurable fabrications his structural steel, his factories, forts his moon machines she will in time

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

like a great summer-pasture cow digest in time assimilate it all to pure geology. (237–38) The specific placement of repeated words and phrases in the poem affects interpretations of its possible meanings. Appearing at approximately the beginning, middle, and end of the poem, the phrase “like a great cow” not only serves as a kind of organizational motif, but it also reinforces an organismic view of nature that Francis uses as a vehicle for philosophical commentary to deplore by juxtaposition the wasteful exploitation of the environment for things fabricated. Whereas “earth ejects nothing,” like a cow that consumes nature’s raw materials, transforming them into byproducts that help sustain the lives of other species, civilization-centered development of land into “factories” and structures forged from steel involves the depletion of natural resources. In contrast to the placement of this phrase in an independent clause in the first stanza, it receives separational emphasis elsewhere in enjambed lines, as when it is isolated in the third stanza, and when the compound “summer-pasture” is inserted in the last ☙ 93

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Chapter four

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

stanza between words (“great / cow”) that are pronounced as a spondee—an effect that slows down the line, establishes a sense of closure, and mimics the deliberate quality of the cow’s chewing. Another important thematic word in the poem is “time,” repeated as part of a phrase (“in time”) in the closing lines. With language that is elevated, even on the verge of being archaic, Francis, as if to emphasize the gravity of his declaration, offers here a reminder to man that his “perdurable fabrications,” his “junk” and “scrap,” will become “in time” excrescent to the indifferent processes of nature. Informing this interpretation is a vision in which an anthropocentric world picture will be replaced by an organic world picture—“pure geology.” But the poem could also be read in the opposite sense: that “in time” no crimes against nature will matter. In both of these interpretations, the health of the earth, the poem seems to say, resides in its capacity for self-renewal. While “A Health to Earth” shows Francis’s voice raised in celebration of nature and against technologically oriented civilization, “Like Ghosts of Eagles” is infused with a preservationist spirit that arises from his reverence for connections between Native Americans and the land, which were disrupted when settlement of the continent resulted in the exploitation and destruction of the native population. It is shaped by a cherishing of the music of river names that survived the decimation of the indigenous inhabitants who gave them a kind of monumentality. Remnants from the nation’s past, the names are bound up with loss—rendered by Francis’s incantatory cadences—and surface throughout the poem like conjured presences: The Indians have mostly gone but not before they named the rivers the rivers flow on and the names of the rivers flow with them Susquehanna Shenandoah The rivers are now polluted plundered but not the names of the rivers cool and inviolate as ever pure as on the morning of creation Tennessee Tombigbee If the rivers themselves should ever perish I think the names will somehow somewhere hover 94 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Experiments with Form and the Poetry of Protest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

like ghosts of eagles those mighty whisperers Missouri Mississippi (237) Paradoxically, in inscribing loss, Francis achieves a recovery: through his act of naming, whose precedent goes back to Adam in the Bible, he preserves the names from oblivion. Though history has overtaken most Native Americans, though the rivers have been subjected to environmental damage and depredation, the names remain, “inviolate as ever / pure as on the morning of creation.” They memorialize the continent’s original settlers and their capacity to make poetry out of their native terrain. “Susquehanna” derives from the Onondaga word for “great island river.” “Tombigbee” means “river of coffins,” so named because, during Hernando de Soto’s expedition into Mississippi, the local Choctaws and Chickasaws came into contact with the explorers and contracted diseases that killed them in great numbers. “Missouri” is named for the Indians who lived along the river and translates into the words “canoe haven.” Full of the submerged history of the nation, the river names are thus monuments to the past. Francis allows the places to which the names refer, as well as the inhabitants who immortalized them, to live in the poem, even “If the rivers themselves should ever perish.” This poem displays the “verbal savor” that David Graham says is “characteristic of Francis” (82) in “That Dark Other Mountain,” from The Sound I Listened For. Here Francis lists the names of mountains that he remembers having climbed and raced down with his father, whose skill at descending “with quick steps” or “legs braced” the slopes of “Black, Iron, Eagle, Doublehead, Chocorua, / Wildcat and Carter Dome” (129) evokes his death. As in this poem, in “Like Ghosts of Eagles” he relishes the way in which the sounds of names combine and resonate. Through the assonance of terminal long a sounds in “Susquehanna Shenandoah,” the alliteration of hard-edged t’s in “Tennessee Tombigbee” that flow into rhymed last syllables, and the nasals of “Missouri” and “Mississippi” that shade into sibilant sounds evocative of surging water, Francis creates poetry whose lyricism consists in its fusion of consonants and vowels. In drawing attention to the Native American origins of river names, the poem layers geography with history, people with place, and poetry with the primitive. This layering takes the form of stanza long sentences, unbroken by punctuation, that pile clause against clause. Thought winds in ☙ 95

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Chapter four each stanza from line to line and concludes with names that take us halfway across the continent, from the heartland of Pennsylvania and the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia to Tennessee, Alabama, and the western plains. Adumbrating the semantic content, the lineation does something syntactically riverlike too. Stanzas begin with phrases that branch into shorter or longer ones, each growing out of the one before. The absence of punctuation adds to the sense of movement that becomes a reinforcing factor to Francis’s association of flowing rivers with the flow of time. Isolated in separate lines at the end of each stanza, the river names, “like ghosts of eagles,” are expressions of a spirit of place—one that can connect us to the spirit of the nation we inhabit and an intimacy with the environment from which we have been historically alienated. Critical of the pollution and exploitation that have brought ruin to the land, Francis challenges the myth of progress through the industrial and technological development associated with civilization. He has also written about ecological relationships in communities that include plant life, animals, and human beings. “Water Poem” presents an ecological vision in which the health and stability of a community that is integrated with nature depend on the respect of humans for nonhuman life. The problem it outlines is the threat we pose to nature in the form of violent and careless acts against fowl and flower alike:

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Waterflowers have no need to fear The waterfowler since waterflowers And fowlers live in different watery worlds. Only waterfowl have a need to fear The waterfowler whereas waterflowers Only need to fear the fouling of waters. Waterfowlers need a stamp to shoot At waterfowl but waterflowers need No stamp to shoot, no stamp at all at all. (254) The insistent alliteration of w and f sounds, and mix of liquid and short o sounds in “fowler,” “flower” and “fowl” emphasize that the justification of the poem resides as much in its sound and word combinations as in its vision that human and nonhuman nature are interdependent. Enlarging the meaning of the poem as well as adding to its music is Francis’s trademark

96 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Experiments with Form and the Poetry of Protest fondness for wordplay and the effect that results when the same or similar sounding words are allowed by their mere proximity to interact with each other. Shifting the position of a single consonant allows him to engage in a play of nearby words that produces a turn in meaning with “waterflower” and “waterfowler”; the latter he pulls apart, its component nouns becoming the basis for a pun in the middle stanza that warns of the ecological impact of pollution, “the fouling of waters,” on plant life. In lines dense with sound patterns, he buries distinct grammatical units with a recognizable cadence. Though these snatches of verse have slightly different rhythmic configurations, “have no need to fear,” “have a need to fear,” “Only need to fear,” “need a stamp to shoot,” and “need / No stamp to shoot” all contain five syllables. Besides offsetting more sensuously rhythmical units marked by wordplay, these quickly paced short utterances endow the poem with metrical regularity. Just as the interplay between phonetically related words and units of verse with a distinct cadence inform the music of the poem, the poetry mediates and heightens our awareness of the earth as an ecosystem in which the intricate interdependencies of plants, animals, and waters are altered by human intervention. What happens when pollution fouls waters has an impact on the habitat of waterflowers; and what happens when hunters inflict losses on waterfowl has consequences on the long-term population viability of a species. The poem thus reminds us that in the complex balance between nonhuman and human nature vital to the preservation of a wetland ecosystem, it is our destructive behavior that needs to be regulated if we are to partake fully in a quality of life concomitant with this expanded sense of the earth as a community. Francis’s ecological sensibility was an outgrowth of his Thoreauvian dedication to simple living in harmonious coexistence with nature, his individualism and self-reliance, and his commitment to local community. (What John Elder said of Frost’s poetry could also be said of Francis’s—that allusions in it to flora and fauna are “never merely decorative or incidental” but evoke “a particular living community” [“Robert Frost, the New England Environment, and the Discourse of Objects” 319].) His principled political stands against militarism and materialism were an extension of his distrust of industrial sprawl, urbanization, and the ideologies of technologically driven corporate America, for which profit, not preservation, was the bottom line. If some of his poetry disposes us to think of a living community as

☙ 97

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Chapter four consisting of interdependent individuals and groups, “The Mountain” offers a model for relations between humans and nature characterized by reciprocity rather than exploitation, by cooperation rather than competition:

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

The Mountain does not move the mountain is not moved it rises yet in rising rests and there are moments when its unimaginable weight is weightless as a cloud it does not come to me nor do I need to go to it I only need that it should be should loom always the mountain is and I am I and now a cloud like a white butterfly above a flower. (237) Presenting the poem as if an experience that comes to him in a meditative flow, Francis forges identity in the creative tension between self and world. The open-ended, fluid punctuation suggests that the sentences are overlapping and permeable, qualities that convey the simultaneous process of association and identification taking place as the poem unfolds. He transforms a static relationship between nonhuman and human nature— “the mountain is and I am I”—into a dynamic collaboration that reflects an intersection of life and landscape. The figure for this interaction, “a white butterfly above a flower,” is deeply metaphorical, a symbol of detached engagement involving not only a partnership but also separate and independent entities. In the next chapter, I show that this metaphor recurs in Francis’s poetry in ways that define how his writing departs from Frost’s, about whose guiding influence and encouragement he reminisces in A Time to Talk (1972). The study concludes with an analysis of poems, composed early and late in his career, that tell of his effort to speak indirectly of his homosexuality. Like the discussion of his political and ecological concerns and his interest in new forms, this chapter is devoted to an exposition of Francis as a poet whose sensibilities, often drowned out by boisterous contemporary voices, require our attentiveness to the effects of self-effacement and clarity of observation that help give his poems their reticence.

98 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

5

❧

Learning to Hover

I

n Robert Fr an c is’ s r e m in isc e n ce o f R o b e r t Fr o s t, A Time to Talk, the entry dated April 4, 1932, contains a poem published the day before in a newspaper in nearby Springfield. Francis wrote the poem to commemorate Frost’s arrival at Amherst. Here are its final stanzas:

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Best of all—you’ve heard?—he comes to stay. This is his home now. He is here for good. To leave us now would be running away. (I too would stay forever if I could.) While he stays, life that breathless fugitive, Will stay. While he lives, some things here won’t die. And we, breathing his air, may learn to live Close to the earth, like him, and near the sky. An exuberant example of Francis’s early verse (not published in any of his poetry collections), the lyric, “Robert Frost in Amherst,” was, in his words, “the first pop gun fired in my private campaign to establish a significant relation with this most significant man in town” (48–49). The following January, Francis met Frost in his home on Sunset Avenue in Amherst; thereafter blossomed a relationship in which the younger poet found in Frost a mentor. In fact, he recalled, when he made Frost’s acquaintance, he “was still unpublished in book form, a young poet looking for guidance. So Frost took the role of mentor, and much that he said had to do with my own poems and my problems as a poet” (45).1 ☙ 99

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Chapter five As he wrote in The Trouble With Francis, the publication of his second book, Valhalla and Other Poems, in 1938 “made no stir anywhere” (21). But if the book failed to excite critical notice, it brought “some quiet rewards” (21), one of which was a letter from Robert Frost: “I am swept off my feet by the goodness of your poems this time. Ten or a dozen of them are my idea of perfection. A new poet swims into my ken. I can refrain from strong praise no longer. You are achieving what you live for. . . . You have not only the feeling of a true lyric poet, but the variety of a man with a mind” (19). Francis’s mention of Frost’s letter is important because Frost’s praise was a formal recognition of his poetry. The letter also provided evidence of Frost’s influence on Francis: note that his praise of Francis’s poems is reserved for those that are “[his] idea of perfection” (19). Not surprisingly, then, there is a sort of Frost static everywhere in this collection. Compare a passage from Francis’s “Valhalla”— The valley sees the pasture on the hill. Below the pasture and above are woods Up to the wooded peak up to the sky. The valley sees the darkness of evergreens Waiting above the pasture to come down As other evergreens have come or wait To come to darken pastures on other hills. (83)

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

—to an excerpt from Frost’s poem “The Mountain”: The mountain stood there to be pointed at. Pasture ran up the side a little way, And then there was a wall of trees with trunks; After that only tops of trees, and cliffs Imperfectly concealed among the leaves. (46) As David Graham observes, the echoes of Frost in Francis’s early poems helped shape a critical view that Francis was a “minor lyricist perpetually standing in Frost’s broad shadow” (83). Indeed, reviews of Francis’s early volumes focused on the thematic resemblance of his writing to Frost’s. For instance, Louis Untermeyer wrote that the poems in Francis’s third book, The Sound I Listened For, illustrate what he calls Francis’s “gift for seeing minutiae which are anything but trivial,” and adds, “In this he reminds the reader of his more illustrious forerunners, especially of one whose background is contiguous. It is nothing against Robert Francis that he 100 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Learning to Hover often resembles Robert Frost.” And although Untermeyer admires Francis’s lyrics for the way in which “they blend observation with imagination,” he concludes, finally, that “we know who wrote them first.” Untermeyer’s praise of Francis’s perceptiveness provides a critical foundation for a comparison of Frost’s and Francis’s poetry. Like Frost, Francis perceives nature emblematically; he reads meaning in the things and creatures of the world. He also approaches Frost in translating his perception of nature’s moral significance into a code of conduct. While this way of seeing derives from Emerson, Thoreau, and the influence on them of classical Stoicism,2 Francis and Frost depart from their literary forebears in their willingness to explore nature’s dark design, and move even further from them in their readiness to probe a corresponding experiential darkness, which expresses itself as psychological loneliness. But both poets exhibit wariness at entering into the darkness they describe, differing in the stances they take up in relation to it. In Frost’s case, this state of mind is defined by Richard Poirier as “a sense of ‘nothingness’ or a condition of vacancy” (Renewal of Literature 204), which he argues Frost contrives in order that he may resist it. When Frost adopts a posture of resistance, he becomes his own ideal version of himself. He extends his self-idealization from the poems to the fictions he creates about how easily he composed them. In Francis’s case, the stance he takes up in the face of loneliness is one of detachment, a detachment that is paradoxically an engagement in that he displays (to borrow Poirier’s phrase) a “contemplative receptivity” (Renewal of Literature 211) rather than a resistance to his “vacant” condition.3 Ironically, Francis adopted this stance on the advice of Frost, whose words are invoked in the poem “For the Ghost of Robert Frost” (published in Painted Bride Quarterly in 1988). Here, Francis pictures detached engagement as the hovering of a hummingbird over a flower, defining, in the process, an important way in which he has outgrown Frost: “You’ve got to learn to hover,” He said. The way a hummingbird Hovers over a flower, the way The flower’s fragrance hovers over it. Not to move on, not to Keep jumping like a ner vous grasshopper But to hover there until you Have gathered all that is there ☙ 101

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Chapter five

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

For you or anyone to gather. “You’ve got to learn to hover.” The motif of detachment persists throughout Francis’s career, but early on reveals itself amid stylistic echoes of Frost. For example, in “Blue Winter,” from Valhalla and Other Poems, his painterly description of a landscape that recedes into the distance and converges at a starry point in the horizon showcases, as Francis records in A Time to Talk, what Frost calls Francis’s “ability to fit sentences and lines together” (56). In its concision of expression, its use of conversational language, its shifting of stresses in a line for flexibility and variety, and its blending of sounds (as in “shade” into “shadows” [48]), his poem bears a strong affinity with Frost’s writing. In fact, when Frost showed the lyric to Untermeyer, hoping to persuade him to publish Francis’s poetry, Untermeyer replied that Francis’s “lyric style, casual yet compact, reminded me so much of Robert’s that, until I learned better, I thought my leg was being pulled and that Robert Francis was an alter ego Robert Frost had invented by slightly altering his last name” (qtd. in Frost, Letters 269). As “Blue Winter” illustrates, Francis’s colloquial idiom and “casual yet compact” style are directed toward a clear perception of nature. To understand the role that perception plays in Francis’s work is to explore the ways in which his poetry most importantly resembles Frost’s. Untermeyer’s observation that Francis shares Frost’s “gift for seeing minutiae which are anything but trivial” suggests that Francis displays in his poems a penchant for perceiving nature “less for itself and more for what it represents” (Mulder 554). While the natural appearances Francis describes reflect a perception decidedly pastoral as far as their literal preoccupations are concerned, his poems, like Frost’s, translate nature’s forms into emblems of moral values. The things and creatures of the world become metaphors for human conduct. Consider, for instance, another passage from “Valhalla,” in which spruce trees serve as an image of endurance: The dark trees on the peak, the pointed spruces, Seem to those who see them always the same— Dark in summer, dark in winter, dark And undisturbed from year to year by fall Or wind or rain or frost or snow or spring. They keep the peak, holding and held by rock, Holding and fed by soil once tree and rock. So they endure. (86) 102 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Learning to Hover Similarly, in Frost’s “Blueberries,” the thriving of these fruits in a pasture ravaged by fire is, as the speaker suggests, evidence of their perseverance and hardiness:

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

There may not have been the ghost of a sign Of them anywhere under the shade of the pine, But get the pine out of the way, you may burn The pasture all over until not a fern Or grass-blade is left, not to mention a stick, And presto, they’re up all around you as thick And hard to explain as a conjuror’s trick. (62) The idea of perceiving commonplace natural forms as metaphors for conduct can be traced back to Emerson and Thoreau, in particular to works such as “Nature” and Walden. Emerson set forth the notion of a radical correspondence between human beings and nature—what he termed “an occult relation”—in which the “laws of moral nature answer to those of matter as face to face in a glass” (Selections 24, 35). Or, as he puts it later in “Nature,” “every natural process is a version of a moral sentence” (39). Echoing Emerson, Thoreau writes in his journal, “the perception of beauty is a moral test” (Writings 10: 126). As Richardson explains in Henry Thoreau, Thoreau and Emerson turned to nature as a source for values and “trustworthy moral principles” from which to develop a basis for ethical conduct, working out in their writings the “meaning of the Stoic idea that the laws ruling nature rule men as well” (189, 191).4 To the extent that Frost and Francis perceive moral values in nature, they follow the philosophical lead of their transcendental ancestors. Take, for example, Frost’s poems that celebrate the virtue of letting nature take its course, a stance that correlates, as he once remarked to Francis, with his laissez-faire inclination to “let the world come as it would, only giving it now and then ‘a kick and a touch’ ” (qtd. in A Time to Talk 19).5 To illustrate Frost’s inclination, Francis cites two of his poems in A Time to Talk. He summarizes the argument of “In Time of Cloudburst”: “You wait a geological age for your eroded farm to sink out of sight and for a new farm of rich alluvial soil to rise from the sea. If you protest that this is too long a time, Frost might reply that this is what will actually happen, whether you wait or not” (94). In “Something for Hope,” a versified form of Christ’s parable of the good seed and the weeds (Matthew 13.25–30), the political implication of the doctrine of laissez-faire is explicit. Frost preaches ☙ 103

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Chapter five patience if a rocky meadow becomes overgrown with weeds that have “crowded out the edible grass.” Instead of plowing out the weeds, he advises us to do nothing at all. Wait for the trees to “put on their wooden rings,” Frost writes, and come in on their own. Once they are mature, Then cut down the trees when lumber grown, And there’s your pristine earth all freed From lovely blooming but wasteful weed And ready again for the grass to own. A cycle we’ll say of a hundred years. Thus foresight does it and laissez faire. A virtue in which we all may share Unless a government interferes.

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Patience and looking away ahead, And leaving some things to take their course. Hope may not nourish a cow or horse, But spes alit agricolam ’tis said. (339–40) Perhaps less obvious than the way in which Frost’s poetics reflect his conservative politics is the attitude toward nature that his inclination implies. To let nature take its course and allow things to grow as they please is to assume a passive attitude, one which, at least in these poems, presupposes that nature’s processes are benign. This inclination thus constitutes one aspect of Frost’s doubleness in that it contrasts with the stance of resistance I discuss later in this chapter. This doctrine is also explicit in what Frost has to say concerning his career, art, and method of poetic composition. About his own success, Frost said to Francis in 1950, “he had never lifted his finger to advance his career, but that everything had come to him” (qtd. in A Time to Talk 7). This statement and, as we will see, other statements about his life and work prove to be disingenuous. In fact, nearly two years later, as Francis notes in A Time to Talk, Frost conceded that when he traveled to England in 1912, intent on finding a publisher for A Boy’s Will, he “owed something” of his early success to a review of the book written by Ezra Pound, “who liked to promote new writers, but didn’t like them to surpass him later on” (16). As in his career, Frost’s laissez-faire approach is reflected in his theory for writing poetry. In A Time to Talk, Francis contrasts his own habit of revising his poems with Frost’s insistence “that a poem not only should 104 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Learning to Hover but must be written in a single free-flowing run” (11). “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove,” he wrote in “The Figure a Poem Makes,” “the poem must ride on its own melting” (Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays 778). In his writing, especially in the longer blank-verse poems, eclogues, and dialogues, Frost’s “custom of composing in a free flow” (A Time to Talk 97) is skillfully fitted to open poetic forms that accommodate the flexible iambic rhythms of common speech, and so provide the feel of language spontaneously uttered. Francis, too, celebrates the virtues represented by nature, but he lives the life in art that Frost only says he will live. A good example of Francis’s habit of seeing natural objects as metaphors for conduct is a short poem called “Mountain Blueberries.” Part exposition and part description, it takes as its starting point the poet’s response to the appearance of blueberries that he encounters during a solitary mountain walk. After the first stanza, in which he tries to account for his discovery of the berries in so remote a terrain, he uses description in the second stanza to suggest that they represent qualities rich in meaning, qualities similar to those hinted at in Frost’s “Blueberries”:

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

These blueberries belong to birds If they belong to anyone. Who could have planted them but birds Three thousand feet up toward the sun? They live on sunshine, dust of granite, A little rain, a little dew. In shape a miniature moon or planet, In color distant-mountain blue. (39) Writing about “Mountain Blueberries” in his essay “Two Poets Named Robert,” Donald Hall observes that it is “a poem about making do on little” (119). As it pertains to Francis’s own life, particularly the rigor with which he practiced frugality and self-sufficiency, the poem has a special significance. Reflecting a life based on the principles of strict economy, it is tightly structured, each shapely stanza consisting of four-beat lines that follow an abab rhyme scheme and feature the interplay of consonants and vowels. While plosive b sounds add force to the poem’s opening declaration, airy long e sounds in “These blueberries” are linked to two words in the last line of the first stanza, “Three thousand feet,” that echo these ☙ 105

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Chapter five vowels. The second stanza, in which syntactic parallelism abounds, is epigrammatic in concision: the lines confirm not only the berries’ hardy resilience in a rugged habitat but also the relation between near and far, between microcosm and macrocosm. “Mountain Blueberries” is thus a model of resourcefulness, combining brevity of structure with richness of meaning, while satisfying, as Francis writes in A Time to Talk, what Frost means by form: “proportion of thought and its proportioning in the poem” (55). If the transcendentalists’ essential influence on Frost and Francis was to encourage them to read meaning in natural objects, both poets part company with them in their focus on nature’s dark truths. Two such poems whose similar subject matter reflects this focus are Frost’s sonnet “The Oven Bird,” published in 1916, and Francis’s “The Wood Pewee,” published in Valhalla and Other Poems. But this similarity is less significant than the differences that divide Frost from Francis and here concern their tone and imagery. As in Frost’s sonnet, Francis translates the song of a New England wood bird into words, hearing in its midsummer tune a portent of autumn’s advent. Just as the ovenbird intones “that leaves are old” and “the highway dust is over all” (116), so the wood pewee sings of “the end of summer,” the encroachment of fall, and the waning of the year: .

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

In the shade of a tree in the heat of afternoon The wood pewee sings his portamento tune That summer is over-ripe and autumn is soon. He sings from a twig after flitting to catch a fly. And whether he sings September or July He sings of the end of summer and sings goodby. (41) A harsher quality characterizes Frost’s poem, one that is born from scattered images of dryness and diminishment that appear in it.6 The ovenbird’s reminder of the dwindling of flowers from spring to midsummer links nature’s diminution to the cycles of birth and death. He says the petals of “pear and cherry bloom” that once fell during brief vernal showers are now overlaid by the “highway dust” that covers “all” (“dust” is itself an intimation of mortality). In the face of seasonal desiccation and the inexorable coming on of autumn, with its withering leaves, the ovenbird knows, unlike “other birds,” not to sing a melodious and winsome tune. Or, as Frost puts it, “he knows in singing not to sing” (emphasis added). 106 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Learning to Hover By contrast, Francis stresses the lyrical beauty of the wood pewee’s song, most notably in the shading of vowel sounds in “tree,” “heat,” and “pewee,” and the choice of the Italian “portamento,” which emphasizes the shifting pitch of the bird’s lilting tune. Then, Francis plays on short i sounds to accentuate not only the music of the pewee’s tune but also the nimbleness of his movement, as the bird “sings from a twig after flitting to catch a fly.” Of course, Frost too strings sounds together for a lyrical effect (as in the chiming e sounds of “petal,” “pear,” and “cherry” in lines 6–7). It’s simply the case that Francis indulges here in a kind of preciousness that sacrifices naturalness of tone for musical effect, thereby tempering the terse and pedagogical conclusion of his poem. Unlike Francis, as David Graham notes, Frost “knows how in singing not to sing” (80).7 As a result, Francis’s poems, generally speaking, do not achieve the bleak axiomatic eloquence that is characteristic of Frost’s best lyrics. They rarely rise to the bitter pitch of “The Oven Bird,” whose song Frost ultimately “frames” in a “question” (“what to make of a diminished thing”), which is answered by the poem itself (the poem is what he “makes” in the face of diminishment).8 While he shares with Frost an awareness of diminished things, Francis sometimes forsakes the vital poetic possibilities that engaging it more deeply might produce. “Fall,” for instance, from Stand With Me Here, is a lyric full of loss-awareness and foreboding, which build up from the natural scene. Its central situation is that of a speaker, wary of winter’s onset, looking out on an empty pasture that once sustained farm life, lamenting “all tender things” gone: “the fawn-shy heifers,” “the little calf almost a fawn,” and “the black two-year cow.” As if in response to his anticipation of winter’s desolate reality, he imagines the “first snow,” its prospect sublimated into the image of “a frightened deer” racing across an open landscape, the pasture bars “lying in the grass.” Like the deer, which is a projection of his own psychological condition, he feels exposed, fearful, and utterly out in space: In that first snow a frightened deer, Swifter than snowfall, swift as fear, May pass here flying, flying. What if no fence could foil his speed? Spare him the leap, spare him one need Of leaping. Leave the bars lying. (15) ☙ 107

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter five If we read this “leap” as a response to feeling vulnerable, Francis’s speaker expresses an urge to fly from reality. In effect, he wants to repress fear of loss and loneliness of the spirit. Laced with notes of apprehension and sadness, the scene in nature elicits emotions too turbulent for him to control except through his displacement of them in the formal arrangement of the poem into tercets. But Francis is in his own way as bleak as Frost when he encounters unsettling evidence that implies that the natural world reflects an evil design. This terrifying vision is at the heart of his poem “The Orb Weaver” (1960), which, like Frost’s sonnet “Design” (1936), fastens on the image of a spider entangling its prey as suggestive of nature’s malevolence. Though Frost and Francis display a willingness to probe nature’s dark design for evidence of an appalling truth (distinguishing them from Thoreau and from the Emerson of Essays: First Series), they maintain a safe distance from the horror they describe. Each poem starts with a vivid description, followed by a series of reflections. As a consequence, a musing sensibility is established, which then moves toward horror and proceeds to confront it. Frost and Francis cope with the horror through figures of speech, as well as through the language of opinion and argument. The maleficent trinity of spider, moth, and flower is domesticated by its comparison to a kitchen “broth,” the murderous orb weaver by its similitude to “plumping” fruits at harvest.9 The sestet of “Design” and the last stanza of “The Orb Weaver” are attempts to comprehend and rationalize the reality each poem depicts. The poets, in sum, muster up all of their verbal resources to keep their awareness of terror and darkness at bay. The title of Frost’s sonnet invokes the classical argument of design to prove God’s existence, into which the poet introduces the nettlesome problem of natural evil.10 At stake in this argument is the question of whether what we respond to as natural evil—the destruction of one species by another—proves either that such predation is random and God does not exist, or that there is a malevolent maker. In this poem, the darkness and terror derive partly from the dramatic situation and precise description of the white trinity of spider, flower, and moth, and partly from Frost’s use of pointed irony, which implies that a ghastly design in nature lurks behind the spider’s and moth’s appearance inside an “innocent heal- all.” Frost reinforces the use of white with words in the octave such as “snow-drop,” which suggests purity, and “froth,” which implies something light and frivolous, heightening the irony and horror that the poem so vividly presents: 108 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Learning to Hover I found a dimpled spider, fat and white, On a white heal-all, holding up a moth Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth— Assorted characters of death and blight Mixed ready to begin the morning right, Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth— A snow- drop spider, a flower like a froth, And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

What had that flower to do with being white, The wayside blue and innocent heal-all? What brought the kindred spider to that height, Then steered the white moth thither in the night? What but design of darkness to appall?— If design govern in a thing so small. (275) To intensify the horror, Frost evokes a world of black magic as he likens the trinity to “the ingredients of a witches’ broth—” a concoction out of a conjurer’s cookbook. In the sestet, he poses the questions on which the argument hinges. The verbs “brought” and “steered” suggest that these “assorted characters” are the agents of an inscrutable maker, incapable on their own of voluntary movement. As the sonnet rounds off, the closing couplet offers choices. The evidence Frost has presented to prove that the world is governed by a fiendish sorcerer (the “design of darkness to appall”), an argument implicitly supported by the poem’s controlled rhyme scheme, is set against the disquieting possibility that evil in nature results from chance (“If design govern in a thing so small”). The subordinating conjunction complicates the argument that has been built up in the poem to this point. In refusing to provide unequivocal answers to the questions that the poem poses, Frost presents, in Stanley Burnshaw’s words, “less-than-final statements” that show he is “capable of being in uncertainties,” like Keats, of holding opposing assertions in creative tension “without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (303). Instead of resolving oppositions, he maintains order in the form of the poem to achieve “a momentary stay against confusion” (Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays 777). His ability to propose irreconcilable interpretations and stay his mind on them is an acknowledgment that there are mysteries that defy our apprehension. “It is not given to man to be omniscient,” he said in an interview (qtd. in Burnshaw ☙ 109

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Chapter five 287). For him, “the decision to stay,” Burnshaw says, “bespeaks acceptance of all that awaits in a huge and ruthless place that we shall never quite understand any more than what we are” (302). The poet’s reliance on form to contain confusion goes back to what he wrote in 1935 in a letter to the Amherst College student newspaper: “When in doubt there is always form for us to go on with” (qtd. in Burnshaw 295– 96). In a world without order, Frost creates order in the design the poem imposes. Where Frost’s sonnet proposes conflicting interpretations of the argument from design, Francis’s “The Orb Weaver” is unequivocal in its view that a fiendish creator is accountable for the predation the poem describes. Francis evokes the maker from whom darkness and destruction emanate by means of his description of the spider’s physical characteristics, his use of suggestive diction, and his image of predation as an emblem of horror (in these respects, “The Orb Weaver” is a true heir of Frost’s sonnet), all of which is interwoven in four tercets divided into two sections by an isolated seventh line, whose falling rhythms reflect the poem’s formal design: Here is the spinner, the orb weaver, Devised of jet, embossed with sulphur, Hanging among the fruits of summer, Hour after hour serenely sullen, Ripening as September ripens, Plumping like a grape or melon.

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

And in its winding-sheet the grasshopper. The art, the craftsmanship, the cunning, The patience, the self-control, the waiting, The sudden dart and the needled poison. I have no quarrel with the spider But with the mind or mood that made her To thrive in nature and in man’s nature. (197) Francis’s description implies that the spider is designed for its environment. The creature’s “jet” and “sulphur” tints, the latter “embossed” on its “plumping” body, like an adornment, blend in perfectly “among the fruits of summer.” With “jet,” Francis associates the spider with evil and emphasizes the sinister quality of its jewel-like beauty, in that the word refers both 110 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Learning to Hover to a color and to a variety of fossilized coal used to fashion personal ornaments. In line 2, the verb “devised” suggests there is a maker (who is vaguely referred to as a “mind or mood” in the last tercet), which intimates that the spider’s presence amid such thriving is the result of design rather than chance. His diction helps create the feeling that a fiendish mover is hovering ominously over this grim tableau of a “sullen” predator “ripening” alongside summer’s fruits. “Waiting” is the key hover word here. A close inspection of the last words in each line reveals that a design is built into the poem’s structure. The effect of falling rhythms, as in “weaver,” “sulphur,” “ripens,” and “melon,” is twofold. First, it suggests that the poem itself has a formal design, which supports the argument for an evil design that operates in such small degree in nature (this is also the case in Frost’s sonnet). Second, this rhythm sets up an expectation, so that we come to anticipate a falling off at the end of each line. Francis sustains this rhythm in the isolated line but manages to surprise us with the shocking image of the “grasshopper” wrapped in a “winding-sheet.” The concluding tercets, which are sunk deep in the language of opinion and argument, stand in striking relationship to the opening section and the isolated line. After the shock of line 7, Francis copes with the intractable through words that reveal his appreciation for the spider’s skills: its “art,” “craftsmanship,” “self-control,” and “patience.” The tone becomes incantatory, with the nouns accumulating one after another in a kind of verbal hold against horror. But rather than marvel at the spider’s natural predatory instincts, adaptability, and survival skills, Francis becomes engaged in a “quarrel” with its maker in the last lines, where he introduces the word “I” for the first time in the poem. He employs language that verges on standard rhetoric, as if to capture his effort to comprehend an appalled sense of reality in which evil flourishes “in nature and in man’s nature.” Behind these lines is the feeling that ruthless brutality is a condition of the natural order. Like the tone of the poem, the spider’s work is dark and foreboding, reflecting an indifferent physical universe in which creatures employ what Francis calls in Clarification of God—an essay that tackles the argument that nature is imbued with divine purpose—“devilish ingenuities” to destroy other species. Though he concedes that a case could be made by some “that if this scheme were not in force there would be an infinite overpopulation of all creatures,” it does not address “the ethics of the scheme” (7). Unable to account for the presence of natural evil in a world putatively created by a beneficent maker, Francis concludes, as he ☙ 111

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter five writes in his autobiography, “that the concept of an all-powerful, all-loving God is an elaborate fabrication, both ingenious and naïve, designed to convince human beings that the world they live in is not the world they live in” (235). And yet, like Frost, he is inconsistent in his attitude. If in “The Orb Weaver” he posits a universe of remorseless destruction, as Frost does in “Design,” Francis also sees nature as a source for conduct and ethical principles, whose value is all the greater, to quote from his autobiography, “precisely because they prove themselves valuable in human experience” (236). As his “spider” poem illustrates, Francis, like Frost, incorporates into his poetics a perception of nature that is quite different from the benign view he presents in many of his other poems. Earlier I ventured a brief description of Frost’s doubleness as involving contrasting stances toward nature, one correlating with his laissez-faire inclination to “let the world come as it would.” At this point, I want to consider, in relation to Francis, the other Frost who aggressively asserts his will in resistance to nature, particularly in poems when this stance conceals his characteristic wariness at entering into an experiential darkness. Recalling Richard Poirier’s definition of Frost’s state of mind as “a sense of ‘nothingness’ or a condition of vacancy,” this experience, in his words, manifests itself in poems that “tend again and again to break away from the condition of ‘barrenness’ by means of some abrupt, syntactically and formally signaled change of tone: ‘They cannot scare me with their empty spaces,’ or so he says in the last stanza of ‘Desert Places’ ” (204). It would appear that Frost evokes this emotional condition not so much to confront it as to shrug it off and flex some poetic muscle. When he takes up this posture, Frost becomes, according to Poirier, “a performing presence” (Renewal of Literature 205). In contrast, Francis adopts a stance of detached engagement in relation to his “vacancy.” Instead of striking a posture of intrepid resistance, he explores his condition by becoming at once an observer and the observed, which is to describe a kind of “hovering” between being both subject and object. As Poirier’s comments suggest, Frost’s posturing is a calculated maneuver. His remarks are pertinent to what is perhaps Frost’s best-known poem. In “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” Frost’s evocation of “barrenness” is a conscious tactic that extends to a strategy of self-idealization, whereby the poet, in shrugging off this condition and asserting his will, masks his characteristic wariness as tough-minded resistance. At the start, Frost stops his horse in a remote, hauntingly stark landscape on the “dark112 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Learning to Hover est evening of the year” between “woods and frozen lake.” The poet’s experiential condition is represented here by the darkness of the woods that he watches “fill up with snow.” The prospect of losing himself in their dense deepness is what he must resist, a prospect that is at once seductive (“lovely”) and terrible (“dark”):

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep. (207) As Poirier notes, Frost’s characteristic way of treating self-erasure is to imagine it “as a snowfall which obliterates signs of life” (Renewal of Literature 206). The poet resists the attraction of losing himself and being swept into oblivion, and thus never enters into the woods. He refuses to submit to nature and, in effect, resists a sort of laissez-faire inclination to go with the natural course of things. Instead, he doggedly asserts that he must get on with living, a realization signaled by the interjection of “But” in the line just before the repetend. The last two lines reinforce that he must be going and attend to the obligations of life. No less calculating than the posture Frost strikes is the account he related to his biographer, Lawrance Thompson, of the poem’s composition. As Thompson tells it, Frost had just completed a “rough draft” of “New Hampshire” at dawn in June 1922. After a short walk outside of his house in Vermont, Frost returned inside, “picked up his pen,” began to write a poem, and “seemed to hear the words, as though they were spoken to him, and he wrote them down as best he could, in his fatigue, even though they came so indistinctly at times that he was uncertain what he heard” (Years of Triumph 237). “In a short time,” Thompson writes, “and without too much trouble,” Frost composed the poem. Thompson acknowledges, however, that the poet “was extremely inconsistent in his various accounts of how he wrote ‘Stopping by Woods.’ ” Frost often “slipped into the posture of claiming that he wrote the entire poem ‘with one stroke of the pen,’ ” an account that friend and fellow poet John Ciardi reported Frost told him “time and again” (Years of Triumph 596– 97). At other times, Frost discussed “the difficulties confronted in the writing of it,” as he had in 1946 with Charles W. Cooper and John Holmes when his comments were published in their book Preface to Poetry. But more often than not, as Thompson notes, “thereafter he repeated his idealized version of the event.” Frost’s ☙ 113

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter five preferred account of the poem’s composition has a bearing on Poirier’s reading of his poems, for, like the tenacious, willful stance that Frost takes up in them, it implies that he consciously cultivated an “idealized version” of himself, which goes beyond the poems to the fictions he created about how they came into being. His personal ambition and private grief provided him with reasons for cultivating a self-idealized persona. This image helped shape the public’s perception of him as a tough-minded realist, one strikingly at odds with the poet who was insecure about his reputation, and with the man who was emotionally devastated by the calamities that befell his children. Frost’s competitive ambition compelled him to advance and guard the reputation he had won for himself when his early books received critical acclaim. On returning to America in 1915, for instance, Frost paid a visit to Henry Holt, the publisher of his second book, North of Boston, and forged a tie with Alfred Harcourt, his editor, whose knack for “arranging ‘helpful relationships,’ ” as Burnshaw puts it, allowed the poet “to make the acquaintance of various people” who might be useful to him later in his career (262).11 Thompson relates that Frost had Harcourt exert his influence to correct what Frost felt was Pound’s misleading impression in a critique of North of Boston that he had gone to England because “he felt snubbed by American editors” (Years of Triumph 56). For a man so very conscious of the public eye, “there was,” as Donald Hall recounts Frost’s own words, “room for only one at the top of the steeple” (Ancient Glittering Eyes 21). The poet’s idealized self-image also served as a guise to protect him from falling into the abyss of despair and suicide. What with the death of his firstborn child from cholera at age three, the institutionalization of the second oldest of his four daughters, the suicide of his son, and the loss of his youngest daughter after childbirth, Frost knew grief and despair. The darkness and the terror in his poems are real. In Hall’s opinion, “Robert Frost lived in terror of madness and suicide. . . . When he wrote the poems that told the terror, and that summoned intelligence to control the terror, he suffered in the writing” (25). Frost thus created a persona both for the sake of public approval and for warding off deep-seated, even suicidal, fears. Francis, on the other hand, doesn’t resort to self-idealized assertion. If Frost ostentatiously posits “a condition of vacancy” (Renewal of Literature 204) in his poems to resist it, Francis is more receptive than Frost to a detached contemplation of this condition. He explores the “vacancy” by inhabiting the role of outside observer. In “The Spy,” from The Face Against 114 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Learning to Hover the Glass, he presents this psychological condition in terms of a consciousness that is dislocated from itself. The poem describes the paradoxical situation of an unnamed man looking through the window into his “empty house . . . in the moonlight” after he has left it, “spying,” like Stevens’s snowman, “Upon the man who is and is not there”: To leave his empty house yet not to leave it But make himself a shadow at a window— Who is this prowler private in the moonlight? Then at another window and another, His face against the glass and peering in— What does he think he sees or wants to see? Soft as the milkweed floss the September night. White as the milkweed the untroubled moon Whose face, though far, is also at the window.

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Two faces, but the prowler peers in deeper Spying upon the empty chair, spying Upon the man who is and is not there. (169) David Graham suggests that the “man who ‘is and is not’ present is . . . the poet” (87). In his autobiography, Francis described the time in his life during which he was writing the poem as a “period of crisis”: “I wanted to shrink into my psychic shell. . . . Night after night, soon after supper, my house became dark and inhospitable. . . . In one sense I was very much at home and in another sense very much not at home” (83). (Among the crises he faced at this time were a rejection by Macmillan of The Face Against the Glass, and the financial burden he incurred when he decided to print the book at his own expense.) The profound isolation that defined his life during this emotionally trying period is imaged in the figure of a “prowler private in the moonlight” and in the “empty” house and chair. Standing as a kind of symbol of the observer’s state of mind, the vacant house into which he peers alludes to an emptiness seen from outside, which suggests an inner feeling of isolation. To this sense of isolation, Francis adds a tinge of anxiety as his description of a picturesque evening lighted by the moon’s “untroubled” face invites a comparison with the prowler’s spying in at the window. In relation to the face against the glass, the moon’s reflection is “far” from the prowler, ☙ 115

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter five a distance that intensifies his own loneliness. The glow of the September night, “soft as the milkweed floss,” and the pearly color of the moon, “white as the milkweed,” illuminate, by contrast, his condition of inward darkness. As the poem concludes and the moon and the prowler are directly compared, the “prowler peers in deeper” than the moon. “Spying upon the empty chair,” he cannot see, ultimately, through his inward darkness. Instead of demonstrating Frostian self-assertion and resistance to his condition, the speaker remains as he was at the beginning of the poem: dislocated and uncertain, at home and not at home, there and not there, in and out, detached yet paradoxically engaged in the act of watching himself, as if to see how he appears to the stranger on the other side of the glass. Hovering on the outside looking in, reflecting on his emotional condition, the prowler is not at all the “aged” figure in Frost’s “An Old Man’s Winter Night,” who responds to the “out-of-doors” that looks “darkly in at him” by making noise, by “clomping” in “empty rooms” and “beating on a box” (Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays 105–6), by resisting rather than exploring the darkness. Francis’s achievement here of hovering, being both subject and object, being detached from himself yet contemplatively receptive to his “vacancy,” defines the way he outgrows Frost’s influence. Francis had made it a project of sorts in his writing to retire from view and detach himself from his poems. “My aim is to get outside myself by means of my poems,” he once observed in an interview (qtd. in Tetreault and Karcher 12). “That is, I want to give birth to poems that will detach themselves from me and have a life of their own” (14). In his comments, Francis deemphasizes his presence in favor of the poem itself, a characteristic that Donald Hall noted in writing about Francis’s work in “Two Poets Named Robert”: “He’s invisible—one would not consider him confessional!—yet the imprint of an idiosyncratic vision gives [his] poems their textured particularity” (121). To return to “The Spy” for a moment, where the prowler-poet “make[s] himself a shadow at a window,” Francis, in this context, suggests a link between the self-effacement he aims for and the writing of poetry. The English word poet comes from the ancient Greek word for maker. For Francis, writing poetry is closely connected to the aim of detached engagement implied by this image of the prowler; his “making” is a shadowing of the self rather than an asserting of the will. It should come as no surprise that Francis found a metaphor for detached engagement in nature. The poem “Cypresses,” published in The 116 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Learning to Hover Orb Weaver (1960) but composed in 1957 during the year he spent in Italy as a fellow of the American Academy in Rome, entwines his habit of seeing natural forms as emblems of conduct with the Stoic turning to nature for instruction. In this case, he draws on the symbolic association of cypresses with mourning to emphasize the “dark” lesson they impart; the trees teach “birds . . . How to be shadows.” Like the birds, Francis is detached in darkness but engaged in singing: At noon they talk of evening and at evening Of night, but what they say at night Is a dark secret. Somebody long ago called them the Trees Of Death and they have never forgotten. The name enchants them. Always an attitude of solitude To point the paradox of standing Alone together.

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

How many years they have been teaching birds In little schools, by little skills, How to be shadows. (199) Francis’s choice of birds as the objects of nature’s instruction might seem curious at first, but a brief consideration of the source of the poem, as well as the particular context in which he used this image, or had seen it used by Frost, make readily apparent the reason for his choice. His own earlier use of the bird in “The Wood Pewee,” which echoed Frost’s “The Oven Bird,” and the fact that “Cypresses” owes its origins to the visits he paid to the graves of Shelley and Keats, shaded by “the tall cypresses of the Protestant Cemetery” in Rome (Trouble With Francis 114), are hints that he regarded the bird as an image of the poet. In the context of Francis’s aim to detach himself from his poems, the withdrawal of birds into trees to become “shadows” strikes a personal chord for him, one that is more resonant perhaps than his homage to poets for whom the birds are surrogates. This notion of withdrawal accords with Francis’s disposition against a poetry of idealized self-assertion. Writing about the confessional poetry of his contemporaries in The Satirical Rogue on Poetry, Francis’s reflections on their work reveal his own predilection for detachment: “What I suffer ☙ 117

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Chapter five

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

from in other people’s poetry is many things, according to poet and poem. But perhaps most of all from the too obtrusive presence of the poet himself” (39). Later in the same book he adds, “Much poetry today [1968] gives us the poet himself or herself in massive doses” (81). Coming from a man who took Thoreau literally and withdrew into near seclusion on the outskirts of Amherst, his reflections are consistent with the principles by which he lived. Francis’s predilection for detachment and his disinclination to write about himself explain why he avoids self-promotion in his poetry (in contrast to Frost) and takes up an idiosyncratic perspective as an onlooker of himself. From this perspective, he achieves a distance that allows him to explore, engage, and ultimately accept his “condition of vacancy” even though what is being “accepted” (as in “The Spy”) is defeat of a sort. It was, after all, Frost himself who gave Francis advice that he later transformed into the stance he takes up in his poems. Frost’s counsel initially appeared in an entry dated April 2, 1933, in A Time to Talk, and made its way into one of the last poems Francis wrote before he died in 1987. “For the Ghost of Robert Frost” is at once a personal anthem and a tribute to his mentor, for out of this advice Francis forges a metaphor for detached engagement that describes his rigorous way of life and the aim of his writing. Through the image of a hummingbird over a flower, he describes a moment of equipoise. At this point, poise and contemplation are in harmonious balance. As we have seen in his dark-spirited poems, Francis converts hovering to imaginative activity, detachment to receptivity (rather than resistance), and self-effacement (rather than self-assertion) to engagement. In the end, he took Frost’s advice to heart more than Frost ever did.

118 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

6

❧

The Teasing Paradox

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

R

obert Fr an c is onc e r e m ar k e d i n a n i n t e r v i e w that he was careful to keep his distance from people who “might interrupt my thought, misunderstand me, make me feel inferior, or even impose their wills on me” (qtd. in Tetreault and Karcher 9). It is thus surprising that in The Trouble With Francis so guarded a man would reveal his homosexuality in an era when it was regarded as perverse, criminal, and a form of mental illness. Risky at the time, his disclosure removed a barrier of protection against intrusion into his private life and threatened to expose him to calumny, if not judgment, a fear that was realized five years later when Francis read a truncated version of a poem Frost wrote to revile him in the final volume of Lawrance Thompson’s biography, Robert Frost: The Later Years (1976). It was also an extraordinary instance of courage, especially for a person worried about being misunderstood, since disdainful public attitudes toward homosexuals lingered at the time that he published The Trouble With Francis.1 Having now reached a point in his life where two roads diverged, Francis may have felt that his public disclosure satisfied a need to be honest with himself. He could not accept who he was if the alternative meant that he would continue to live in fearful secrecy. Indeed, the sense of protectiveness and fear of self-exposure that Francis had to overcome underlie the account he provides of his decision to conceal an affair with an Italian man he had befriended on a ship returning to America in 1958. Fifty-seven at the time, the poet had never had a homosexual experience because “chance and circumstance had for most of my life conspired with my timidity and my sense of decency to keep my passion from becoming overt” (Trouble With Francis 211). Francis attributed ☙ 119

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter six the difficulty of “making his friendship known” partly to living “in a New England town.” In spite of what he recognized was “a great change in recent years not only in the freedom to discuss sexual variations but in the willingness to accept them,” particularly in cities where “the homosexual [is] more and more taken for granted in art and entertainment and in life,” he confessed that he was “less concerned with what people in New York do and think than with the people on Market Hill Road.” Complicating the difficulty of living in a small town not hospitable to manifestations of homosexuality was what Francis called “the persistent identification of the homosexual with sordidness, brutality, and crime” (213). His awareness of a cultural conception of homosexuality as reprehensible, coupled with his “sense of decency,” persuaded him to seek the cover of sexual abstinence. Later, after having spent a year in Europe near his Italian friend in 1967, he returned to Amherst, where he “never got started on another affair” and “never found another such friend” (211). Though Francis “would have welcomed other similar friendships,” the “timidity” that kept him “bottled up for so many years continued to do so” (212). Besides serving as a realization of his fears and a justification for having kept his secret from becoming public, Francis’s knowledge that Frost had posthumously planted his vicious revenge in “On the Question of an Old Man’s Feeling” corroborated for him the condemnatory social attitude toward gay people.2 Frost’s homophobia consisted in ideologically pejorative definitions of homosexuality as emasculation, as a contravention of the norms of a matrimonial culture in which accepted sexual behavior was defined by the relationship between man and wife, and as a mental abnormality. His views were a holdover from the turn of the century, when same-sex affections, once “considered a ‘sin,’ ‘vice,’ and ‘crime,’ ” as Jonathan Katz observes, “began . . . to be reconceptualized and renamed ‘sexual perversions’—types of mental disease” (155).3 Though Francis never said what he thought of Frost’s vengeful poem, we can only imagine how painful he must have found it, especially given that Frost, “America’s national bard” (Thompson, Later Years 346), was the person to whom he had turned for encouragement and guidance early in his career. Francis’s need for concealment, brought closer to home by Frost’s harsh personal attack, underscored for him the problem of self-representation in his poetry. Living a closeted life, and writing in an era of apprehension when the rigid conception of identity excluded homosexuality, how was Francis to express his orientation in a heterosexual culture that pressured 120 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

The Teasing Paradox him to conform, that kept “[his] passion from becoming overt,” and so denied validity to his homosexual desire? In “Paradox,” a later example of word-count from the posthumous volume Late Fire, Late Snow: New and Uncollected Poems (1992), Francis hints at an answer to the question of how he will mask his self- disclosure:4 A raspberry often hides itself even while publicizing itself. Red deep red yes, but halfconcealed in leaves. What raspberry picker does not know the teasing paradox?

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

The same paradox that I myself (forgive me) am. (Late Fire 72) Just as the raspberry conspicuously conceals itself among leaves, the “I” of the poem, for which the raspberry becomes a figure in the last stanza, phonetically buries itself in the opening lines among echoing long i sounds in “hides,” “while,” and “publicizing.” Francis will thus veil his self- disclosure and publicize himself covertly, as implied here, through semi- concealment. In this regard, Alan Helms’s comment on Walt Whitman’s method of camouflaging his orientation is pertinent: “Unable to speak directly of his homosexuality,” the poet “must employ an elaborate system of disguises—hints, clues, and indirections—to convey his meaning” (63). Francis, like Whitman, reveals himself indirectly. He does so by suggesting rather than telling, by throwing readers off the target of his meaning, by contriving, as he puts it in “Pitcher,” “how not to hit the mark he seems to aim at” (189). According to Helms, “ ‘indirection’ has played an important role in American poetics.” For example, he notes that Frost and Dickinson “speak of its significance in their work” (63), the former in his definition of metaphor as “saying one thing in terms of another” (Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays 786), the latter in her directive, “Tell all the Truth but tell it ☙ 121

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter six slant— / Success in Circuit lies” (poem 1263). Taking their advice to heart, Francis learned how to say one thing and mean another, how to hit the mark of Truth obliquely, how, in short, to conceal himself. His homosexuality appears in his poems under various screens and disguises: in his allegiance to Thoreauvian principles, where his asceticism, his Spartan philosophy of getting by on little, is arguably a metaphor for erotic self-abnegation; in his quest for fellowship on a deserted street, a figure for the activity of cruising, where desire (to paraphrase Helms) is selectively revealed—and concealed—through eye contact (65);5 and, lastly, in his description of young men and boys bathing, where what is eroticized and subsequently sublimated is the image of their bodies, and where the detached perspective of an admiring, furtive observer is a device for the veiled presentation of homosexual desire. These forms of concealment dramatize the extent to which Francis repressed his identity, internalized the ideologically pejorative view of homosexuality, and saw himself as marginalized, an exile who experienced his homosexuality as deprivation, loneliness, frustration, and self-erasure. The published commentary to date on Francis’s poetry suggests that there is a case to be made for the critical value of fleshing out these patterns in his writing. Reviews of individual poems and volumes, as well as essays in Field (1981) and the Painted Bride Quarterly (1988), each of which devoted an entire issue to discussion of Francis’s work, indicate that his homosexuality has largely been overlooked. Only Robert B. Shaw, in his review of Late Fire, Late Snow, refers to Francis’s “troubled erotic experience” (41), though he limits his observations to one poem. Fuller consideration of Francis as a gay writer shows that the poet felt it necessary to conceal his homosexuality and disguise its representation long before the poems in his last book were written. In the particular instance of his description of cruising in section 1 of “Dark Sonnets,” published in 1936, Francis wrote one of the earliest twentieth-century American poems about the search for sex (Hart Crane’s “Possessions” having preceded it in 1923). Set against the background of a socially sanctioned homophobia confirmed by the medical definition of homosexuality as a mental disorder, the poem’s daring sharply contrasts with his sexual life, marked here and in other poems by inhibition and secrecy. In “Somehow,” for instance, from Late Fire, Late Snow, Francis disguises the poem’s homosexual content in his look back on what Shaw describes is “a life of strictly curbed appetites” (41). When read in the context 122 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

The Teasing Paradox of his autobiography, the poem evokes the Thoreauvian principles that he wrote about in The Trouble With Francis: his devotion to a life of “strict economy” (218) and his practice of an aesthetic of self-restraint grounded in resourcefulness and discipline. “Year after year,” Francis recalled, “I was to be torn between two economic and philosophic principles: to make full use of everything I possessed and to get rid of everything I didn’t need” (29). With the forthrightness of a confession or private disclosure, the poet ostensibly takes us into his confidence and fosters this ascetic self-image: Somehow over so many years I was fed not on food but on the aroma of food. Fragrance that whets the appetite halfsatisfied the appetite it whetted somehow. And when at last I had a few indubitable meals, I thought them feast and banquet Though actually they were only sumptuous crumbs, so much to revel in yet still so little.

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

And now again, these dwindling years I am reduced to fragrance only. (Late Fire 15) At the center of the poem is the mournful sense of a sensual life insufficiently experienced, of desire “whetted” but only “half-satisfied.” In this respect, “Somehow” converses with Francis’s autobiography. “For me to talk about food is to tell a good deal about myself,” the poet explains. “It is also a clew to other situations in my life where I find myself a minority of a minority, perhaps sometimes a minority of one” (91). Through a metaphor for sexual fulfillment, represented by his memory of having “had a few indubitable / meals,” he defines a life of erotic deprivation. He recognizes what he once “thought” were “feast / and banquet” for what they always were—“sumptuous crumbs.” Having been “reduced” in old age, “these dwindling years,” to “fragrance / only,” he is left to savor passion mostly within the imagination. If talking about food is an indirect means of self- disclosure, then the poem ☙ 123

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter six unhappily suggests that he never fully allowed himself to satisfy his sexual hunger. In a word, “Somehow” conceals its homosexual content to the point of nearly erasing it. The poem also conceals its technical achievement. Francis sets up chains of assonance, for instance, in the fourth stanza. The long o sounds in “though,” “only,” and “so,” suggesting tones of lament, are linked to alternating e and i sounds at the end of its second line, all of which he then follows through to their union in the two word third line. Visually, the poem is composed of stanzas consisting of a long first line, followed by progressively shorter second and third lines. Francis fits this visual pattern to the semantic content, the “dwindling” line length mirroring the “reduced” circumstances to which he had become accustomed. It is appropriate, then, that in a poem written from deprivation the final line inscribing this pattern contains one word—“only.” Francis’s internalization of cultural pressure toward concealment is displayed as well in his use of cruising as a form of disguise in the first of two poems collectively titled “Dark Sonnets” from Stand With Me Here. Cruising both reveals and conceals sexual identity in that mere eye contact and response are the means by which a stranger might secretly recognize the desires of another. Since it depends on visual recognition as a sign of fellowship, this activity, as Harold Beaver points out in his essay “Homosexual Signs,” is a semiotically distinct mode of encoded behavior within a different and dominant heterosexual culture. In his view, cruising is a phenomenon representative of the homosexual’s outsidership to institutionalized rituals of social intercourse: “Exclusion from the common code,” Beaver writes, drives the homosexual’s quest for tokens of kinship in “the momentary glimpse,” “the sporadic gesture,” and “the chance encounter” (105). This view can be brought to bear on Francis’s poem and its speaker’s search for signs that would establish his relation to another beyond the codes of an outside heterosexual world. But instead of a “glimpse” or “gesture” that would confer homosexual recognition, his search for fellowship concludes with “no touch, no word, no turning back”: A formless shadow from a far- off light. Then in the sand the sound of moving feet— And we have passed each other in the night On any sandy, dark, deserted street. Whether you turned your head trying to peer 124 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

The Teasing Paradox

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

At me, also a shadow and a sound, I cannot tell. Or whether out of fear You passed, then after passing looked around How can I say, I who could only see Against the night something a deeper black? This, this is the one dark certainty: There was no touch, no word, no turning back. One certainty: the sound of moving feet And shadows passing in a sandy street. (25) Approaching him “from a far- off light,” the unidentified other appears only as a “formless shadow.” Part of Francis’s strategy of covert self- disclosure, the avoidance of gender specificity permits him to suggest a homosexual encounter to readers in the know without arousing the suspicion of other readers that the poem contains gay meaning. As essential as this anonymity is to the protection of his sexual identity, it is also a basic feature of cruising. Knowledgeable readers will recognize anonymity as a motif of “the chance encounter” that can occur on any “dark, deserted street,” where strangers stride in search of fellowship, sex, and (perhaps) love. In the absence of kinship, however, Francis confronts an experiential void: he sees against the night’s darkness “a deeper black.” To the extent that his poem describes the unsettling psychic consequences of anonymity, it evokes Frost’s terza rima sonnet “Acquainted with the Night” (1928). As in Francis’s poem, Frost’s speaker plunges into a ghostly setting that mirrors a corresponding inner darkness. His solitary itinerant, like Francis’s shadowy wanderer, haunts deserted streets and looks down sad city lanes, his “plight,” as Richard Poirier writes in Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing, being that of “wandering off, losing the self, or belonging nowhere” (147). But where Francis’s protagonist searches for signs of kinship, Frost’s averts human contact and drops “[his] eyes” when passing by “the watchman on his beat,” a gesture he is “unwilling to explain” (Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays 234). In a poem whose terror derives from its speaker’s anxiety about walking off into darkness and “losing the self,” Frost’s aversion from contact suggests a repressed fear of being objectified, of being gazed at by another man. To return to Francis’s poem, its troubled speaker cannot breach the gulf separating self and other because he cannot “tell”—discern—whether or not the signs revealing his identity are received by the “formless” figure. ☙ 125

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Chapter six Passing each other under the cover of darkness, the two are “shadows,” a word intimating the negation (rather than the affirmation) of identity. The street thus becomes a site of thwarted sexuality and desire instead of a place of sex and love. The note of frustration and hopelessness on which the sonnet ends carries over into the second poem of the sequence, where the speaker tells of the anguish of homosexual isolation. The more obvious sexuality of this poem casts light on the first of the pair and his effort to veil his identity:

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

We are the lonely ones, the narrow-bedded. Our last “good nights” are interchanged below. Then up cold stairs alone—the odd, the unwedded. What do we know of night? What do we know? What do we know except that night is blindness, That on a bed one sleeps, or lies awake, That after too long waking sleep is kindness, That for the unsleeping, day will sometime break? Oh, we know more. We can tell you how wind sounded On windy nights, and how the writhing rain Hissed on the roof, mice gnawed, and something pounded Over our head—or under the counterpane. We are the lonely ones. When we are dead We’ll be well suited to a narrow bed. (25) The repetition of “We” tempers the effect somewhat, creating the sense of shared isolation that allows Francis’s speaker to claim a kind of phantom unity. In the first line, for example, with “narrow-bedded,” he describes this loneliness in terms of a lack of and longing for erotic companionship, the harshness of which is mitigated by virtue of its being shared. (The description is at the same time reminiscent of his “narrow” sexual life.) While Francis benefits from using first-person plural to speak more openly about himself than he might have otherwise, he still maintains a degree of protectiveness and detachment. His use of “odd” and “unwedded” indicates a self- definition based on a socially constructed sexual identity whose frame of reference is, to borrow Beaver’s terms, an “exclusively matrimonial culture” (103). That he measures his words to hint at yet stop just shy of selfdisclosure reflects his keen awareness of the oppressive cultural injunctions against an overt expression of homosexuality. He enumerates the effects of that oppression in the atmospheric details he provides in the poem. The 126 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

The Teasing Paradox “cold stairs,” the night that is “blindness,” and the “writhing rain” (with its connotation of a projected sexual movement) suggest at once loneliness, deprivation, anxiety, and sexual spasm, all of which culminates in a desolate image of the “bed” as grave that intensifies how deeply Francis despaired of achieving fellowship and love. But he gains something, too. In the dark solitude of his room, he unburdens himself to the reader; Francis speaks for those who cannot speak for themselves and achieves insight. He “can tell” what they “know” of the agony of homosexuality, of sleepless and lonely nights, of erotic craving and the bleak acceptance of an ungratified life as their destiny. The claim that he “can tell” is also a kind of covert self- exposure because it does not mean he will tell even though he is telling. In that solitude, thrown back on himself, he expresses with honesty and grim foreboding the painful isolation of the “odd” and “unwedded” from the rest of the world. Both sonnets show Francis partial to the colloquial, flexibly employing a homespun diction that is indistinguishable from prose in pentameter lines rigged together by a firmly controlled rhyme scheme. In the second quatrain of the first sonnet, this prosaic quality is evident where the thought, presented with simplicity, runs over into the next set of four lines, imitating the uncertainty that engulfs the speaker’s search for a sign of recognition. In the second sonnet, by contrast, the thought is contained within separate quatrains; the repetitions (“What do we know,” “That on,” “That after,” “That for”) do not suggest uncertainty but his resignation to loneliness. Undermining his diction, however, are oddities of syntax (“I who could only see / Against the night something a deeper black?”), designed to satisfy the rhyme scheme rather than capture a naturally spoken utterance, and tone (“We can tell you how wind sounded / On windy nights, and how the writhing rain / Hissed on the roof”), derived from overwrought description straining for melodramatic effect. In these isolated instances from each section, the result is poetry that is sometimes clumsy, turgid, or deficient in verbal music. If we view Francis in relation to Walt Whitman, we can appreciate how different his writing about cruising is from Whitman’s “Calamus” section of Leaves of Grass (1860). Whitman is clearly less restrained than Francis, resolving at the start of the section “to sing no songs to- day but those of manly / attachment” (“In Paths Untrodden” [97]).6 Where Francis shrouds the nature of the encounter with a stranger in secrecy, Whitman, in “City of ☙ 127

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter six Orgies,” conveys “the promiscuous sexuality” (Martin 74) between himself and those who respond to him with “frequent and swift / flash of eyes offering . . . love.” Where Francis withdraws from the street and suffers the agonizing loneliness that results from unfulfilled desire, Whitman takes delight in the fellowship of “continual lovers” whose eyes offer “response to [his] own” (107). One reason for this difference can be found in the public role Whitman adopted as the voice of America at a time of war. In his later prose, Whitman took pains to express lofty aspirations for brotherly love. In Democratic Vistas, he lauds “fervid comradeship” as a spiritual antidote for “our materialistic and vulgar American democracy” (Complete Prose Works 247). His remarks on the curative role he ascribes to comradeship cast a different light on his celebration of affection in “Calamus,” where, as he writes in “I Dream’d in a Dream,” “robust love” among men would bind America together, making it “invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth” (113). Whitman’s vision in this poem of the salutary effect of fellowship gave him an advantage (not available to Francis) of being able to cloak his homosexuality in a call for national unity. He could at once be less cautious about his orientation and divert attention away from it by subsuming the homoerotic within an ideological context, where comradeship among men becomes essential to the future survival of democracy and the American republic.7 And yet Whitman, like Francis, was fearful of his homosexuality being exposed. According to Katz, he had already been viciously lampooned in an 1860 postcard parody of “Song of Myself,” which depicted him “as a ‘weak and effeminate’ dry-goods salesman or ‘Counter-jumper,’ an occupation thought suitable for only the most effete of males” (315). In response to this ridicule, Whitman himself had suppressed and altered several passages in poems from the 1855 version of Leaves of Grass in later editions of the work. Leslie Fiedler, for example, mentions eight verses that Whitman deleted in “The Sleepers” because his description of sexual love between men would have compromised “his later public role as Prophet or Unofficial Laureate of America” (65).8 To the extent that Francis shares Whitman’s need to conceal his identity, his writing resembles Whitman’s in the way it veils homosexual desire. In the opening stanzas of “His Running My Running,” from Like Ghosts of Eagles, he approaches Whitman in his presentation of the eroticized, secretly glimpsed male body, his desire revealed to us from a hidden remove:

128 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

The Teasing Paradox Mid-autumn late autumn At dayfall in leaf-fall A runner comes running. How easy his striding How light his footfall His bare legs gleaming. Alone he emerges Emerges and passes Alone, sufficient. (261)

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Emphasizing the lone runner’s “bare” and “gleaming” legs, Francis tinges the description with a mixture of yearning and voyeuristic relish.9 His pleasure at watching the glistening male figure recalls that of the voyeurspinster in section 11 of Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” who furtively observes “twenty-eight young men” from “aft the blinds,” bathing and splashing “by the shore,” water streaming “all over their bodies.” Like her, Francis is isolated, gazing from an outpost of seclusion at the runner, who is unaware that he is being watched. As in Whitman’s poem, however, there is a shift from the speaker’s feelings of longing to identification with the men. But where the spinster imagines herself joining the bathers, whom she spies frolicking as their “white bellies bulge / to the sun,” and they “souse” one another with “spray” (34), Francis, in the last stanzas, projects his loneliness, intensified by the poem’s autumnal imagery and mood, onto the runner: Out of leaves falling Over leaves fallen A runner comes running Aware of no watcher His loneness my loneness His running my running. (261– 62) To quote David Graham, Francis “claims the runner’s ‘loneness’ as his own” (89). His “loneness” is thus a very different kind of identification, contrasting with Whitman’s buoyant celebration of male sexuality, which is expressed through the voice of a female persona. Contemporaneous with this poem and its distanced admiration of the male body is Francis’s chapbook consisting of prose sketches of young men

☙ 129

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter six and boys. Provoked by what he calls in the preface an “erotic impulse” that “may at times be so far transcended as to be quite lost sight of,” the portraits contained in A Certain Distance (1976) reflect Francis’s sensitivity to male beauty.10 As in the poem, a homoerotic subtext informs his description of male subjects. In one of the worksheets of sketches not included in the book, he depicts “a Roman youth” with “eyes like large jewells, lips ripe and voluptuous, [and] hair coiffeured as by a sculptor.” His celebration of androgynous beauty alerts us to a covert or submerged homosexuality that aestheticization of the boy might conceal from less discerning readers. Indeed, several sketches in the published version, some of which draw on subjects he observed while living in Rome (1957) and Florence (1967), follow a similar pattern. In “Vigiler,” Francis pictures a “lean, lithe youth,” whose shoulder-length “tow-colored hair” is covered by “a light straw hat, which gave him the air of Donatello’s David” (a bronze statue famous for its effeminate physique and head derived from the emperor Hadrian’s beloved Antinous, the great male beauty of the ancient world). “Two Phases” features the facial portrait of a thick-haired, dark-bearded, mustachioed young man “immobile in slumber,” his visage reminiscent of “the head of John the Baptist on a salver, as painted by, say, Caravaggio.” “Sebastian” invokes the eroticization of martyrdom. Like Guido Reni’s painting on which his portrait is based, Francis’s description of a “youth in loin cloth” with his hands “bound above his head” and tied to a tree, pierced by three arrows, gazing “upward in rapture,” elevates the figure to divine status and the homoerotic to the realm of religious ecstasy. In each instance, he sublimates homosexual feeling as art, grounding it in sexless aestheticism. Francis’s aesthetically presented prose portraits of youthful male beauty admired from afar converse with his poems, early and late, that depict scenes of young men and boys bathing. According to Robert K. Martin, such scenes were a genre of “homosexual literature and painting” (20) in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. As Timothy d’Arch Smith shows in Love in Earnest, the Uranian poets in England made them the subject of their writing and drew for inspiration on the paintings of Frederick Walker and Henry Scott Tuke.11 Centering on an erotic admiration of the male body, their poems contain a strong voyeuristic element. The speaker typically describes a bathing place, often situated in an isolated retreat, where boys and young men might be seen, as Smith puts it, “stripped for swimming” and “playing games” in the water (169). Similarly, Francis watches “more than a hundred sons of Adam” from a distance in “The Good Life,” 130 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

The Teasing Paradox from his third volume, both “small boys a sculptor might have done” and “slowly hammered men / From buff to bronze,” romping under a “tolerant sun,” plunging from rocks into a river—“a space the city cannot get”—and climbing up again (157). In “The Goldfish Bowl,” which appears in the same volume, his gaze is fastened on “a naked youth . . . poised to dive” into a pool filled with “young men,” who also “dive, emerge, and float a while, and fool” (133). While Francis expresses a gay sensibility in both poems through the description of exclusively male subjects at play in the water, these scenes appear in a context that is otherwise devoid of overt homosexual content. This sensibility also surfaces in “Divers,” from Late Fire, Late Snow. The poem’s homosexual content is set forth by indirect means: first, in the image of sequestered boys cavorting in the water in a secluded locale; second, in the voyeur-speaker who takes pleasure in looking at the youths; and last, in the description of the male body, which mingles eroticism with innocence. Indeed, the poet watches boys dive from a “tipping raft” into “black water,” their bodies “sleek and dripping” as the “stems” of “white water-lilies” (the flowers themselves invoking associations with purity and innocence):

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Where the white water-lilies float upon black water Boys sleek and dripping as the stems of water-lilies Run and dive shallow from their tipping raft, their aim Not to touch bottom when their white heels disappear. But give them a deep pool paved with white sand and pebbles Or cove of some blue mineral lake and watch them plunge Straight down until, breathless, until a muskrat head Bobs up and then a hand clutching the trophy sand. (Late Fire 12) At the same time, Francis’s erotically charged comparison of the boys and “stems of water-lilies” suggests an equivalence of the body and phallus. The adjectives “sleek” and “dripping” imply flesh that is smooth, youthful, and hairless, sanitized of physical signs of the “encroachment of adult status” (Smith 164). This image of the boys is thus a sublimation of the male body as an object of the poet’s eroticized fantasy. Watching them “plunge” headlong from the raft into the water, Francis submerges the sexuality of the scene, as well as his own libidinal desires, within an innocent context that describes the spontaneous frivolity and camaraderie of young boys bathing. ☙ 131

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter six Beneath “Divers” lies the difficulty Francis has conceiving the body as an object and site of homosexual longing. The displacement of the phallus by “stems” inscribes a disembodiment—a separation of desire from its locus in the body. As the poem unfolds, his emphasis shifts from the body as an object of longing to a place, a sort of all-male utopia, a homosexual “nowhere” protected from intrusion. Instead of a shallow, murky lily pond, he imagines a “deep pool” with “white sand,” or “some blue mineral lake” in a “cove” (emphasis added), as if to suggest an indeterminate retreat where it is safe to be gay. But even here, in this ideal setting, Francis deflects homosexual desire by edging toward eliminating the body as its locus. One of the youths who dives below comes up “a muskrat head,” transformed and desexualized, divested of his boyish likeness. In the end, he nearly erases the male body, making homosexuality invisible. No less invisible, perhaps, are the niceties of craftsmanship and elasticity of which his later poetry is capable. Francis’s placement of stresses per line assumes an organic form, its variability fitted to the speaking voice and the subject matter. Though the basic foot in the poem is of two syllables, some feet have three. Stresses and successive accents fall in both stanzas on phrases and words—“boys sleek,” “run,” “dive,” “straight down,” “bobs up”—that emphasize the action of divers plunging into and surging upward through water. The rich mix of liquids and bilabials throughout the poem imitates the action. While softer l-sounds suggest the liquefaction of their bodies, plosive p’s and b’s echo the splashy impact of the divers breaking the water’s surface. Like the rhythmic variability that is woven into each sentence-long stanza, syntax-splitting enjambment and paceslowing punctuation approximate natural speech patterns that lend the poem a conversational ease. From the same book but less successful as poetry is “The Long Shower,” which also focuses on the conflict between Francis’s homoerotic desire and his impulse to repress it. Similar to his prose sketch in “Heat Wave” of a male subject who allows an “assault” of cold water to shower over him “till his hair looks like the moss on a mossy stone in a waterfall,” the poem features his portrait of a “boy” who is transfigured by the “furious” force of “assaulting drops” while cooling himself off from the heat of a warm day. Its mix of long and short lines relying on gasps of thought combines with unpredictable line breaks fracturing grammatical and syntactic units to produce a ragged rhythm. Because they consist of different rhythmic con-

132 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

The Teasing Paradox figurations, the lines have a staccato cadence that causes the verse to lurch forward: In a loud solitude of assaulting drops He stands, veiled and unveiled, Dazzling and plain, To everything beyond his whirlwind world Oblivious and water- dazed While one hand gropes to force the furious rain. Cold, cold, cold, how it comes at him Like anger, like insult, flat in the face Or, better, some gusty Greek god’s masquerade. How he lets it come! And now, gently, a sleeper’s trying to swim, His arms lift to a half-embrace.

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Does he think old ocean spouts him endless water? He backs against the blast, Slowly, slowly takes on metal, turns Bronze warrior. Heat present conquered and heat past— What is there left to slay, boy, but heat future? (Late Fire 44) The erotic component of Francis’s description derives from evidence that the boy is naked, his body “unveiled.” As in “Divers” and “Heat Wave,” the youth undergoes a transformation by water that deflects the poem’s homosexual content. Imagining the water as a god in “masquerade,” Francis evokes something like the legends of Greek mythology. Transfigured by the god, the “water- dazed” boy “turns / Bronze warrior,” an image that summons to mind the heroized construction of ennobled virility depicted in classical sculpture. His body, in effect, becomes a statuesque nude, an idealized model of masculinity, an objet d’art rather than desire. But desire disrupts aestheticization in the middle stanza. Hidden beneath the description in the previous stanza of the boy fumbling to divert the flow of water is a vision of masturbation. With “one hand,” he “gropes to force the furious rain,” his orgasm signaled by Francis’s exclamation: “How he lets it come!” By sublimating the body through the language of art, the poet tries to suppress desire and the sensual response that the boy arouses in him.

☙ 133

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter six From the poem’s penultimate line, it appears that Francis has “conquered” the “heat” of desire. Having displaced the homosexual with the mythological, he seemingly wards off erotic yearning and puts it at a safe distance. But as the question in the poem’s last line implies, desire reasserts itself. His sensual response to the boy gushes forth anew in anticipation of a “future” time when he will blossom into full maturity and become the man the poet is. Bursting with the erotic potential of youth, the warrior-boy embodies a prospect of burgeoning manhood that leaves Francis unable, finally, to “slay” desire. Francis’s homoerotic description of male subjects in “Divers” and “The Long Shower” makes the secret of his orientation far less dubious than in some of his other poems. If these poems too vividly betray their confessional character, they also record his inability to express his desire, which is reflected in his habit of writing the body out of them. His sublimation of the carnal not only demonstrates how profoundly inhibited he was from expressing his feelings but also what the true subject of his poetry is—the bottling up of desire. A repressed homosexuality is at the root of “High Diver,” from The Orb Weaver, but in contrast to the previous poems, Francis does not fully sublimate desire. In describing the transformations through which the diver passes before plunging into water, he uses images like those in the other poems but at the conclusion heterosexualizes the overall context in which they appear. The resulting ambiguity allows Francis to disguise yet still declare homosexual meaning within a “safe” heterosexual frame of reference. At the start, the diver “momentarily is sculpture,” his body an aesthetic object. Then, he is an “archer who himself is bow and arrow,” springing into the air for a dive, becoming, as “arrow” suggests, a displaced image of the phallus. Finally, he is an “upper-under-world-commuting hero”—the elision implies the diver’s near-simultaneous transition between worlds— whose “downward going” is a selfless and courageous exploit having an “air of sacrifice.” While Francis joins sculpture, the male body, and heroic action in a powerful expression of masculinity, he conveys the diver’s and poem’s “deep duplicity” through the implied sexuality of the last lines: How deep is his duplicity who in a flash Passes from resting bird to flying bird to fish, Who momentarily is sculpture, then all motion, Speed and splash, then climbs again to contemplation. 134 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

The Teasing Paradox He is the archer who himself is bow and arrow. He is the upper-under-world-commuting hero. His downward going has the air of sacrifice To some dark seaweed-bearded seagod face to face

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Or goddess. Rippling and responsive lies the water For him to contemplate, then powerfully to enter. (186) Heightening the poem’s sexual ambiguity at the close, Francis makes the diver’s “downward going” an inclusive offering to a “seagod . . . / Or goddess.” Here, “goddess” has the quality of an afterthought—as if he were belatedly mindful of having exposed his identity—conspicuously placed at the end of an enjambed line that shifts the poem’s frame of reference from homosexual to heterosexual. In other words, Francis diverts attention from the “bearded seagod” and heterosexualizes the erotic implications of the last lines. Still, the conspicuousness with which he shifts the poem to a heterosexual frame compels us to consider whether the diversion is at the same time a form of homosexual self- disclosure. If so, then Francis achieves the double advantage of being able to disguise the homosexual implications of the last lines within an acceptably heterosexual frame, and to offer a possibility that the poem contains gay meaning without fully avowing it. Francis’s prose sketches and poems of young men and boys underscore that his preoccupation with male beauty and sexuality persisted throughout most of his career. Even though he was open about his homosexuality in The Trouble With Francis, these examples, including those published after his disclosure, are consistent for having, in Shaw’s words, “a muffled, timid, late Victorian air about them” (41). The indirection Francis relied on to disguise his homosexuality (in spite of his disclosure) is, as my remarks have indicated, partly the result of cultural pressure and partly the result of the lack of a vocabulary. On the one hand, his screens and disguises are a response to a cultural-sexual ideology that equated homosexuality with crime, depravity, sordidness, and mental disease, the internalization of which shaped the content and manner of his self-representation. On the other hand, these covers reflect the difficulty he faced in finding suitable terms to express his orientation, since the limited vocabulary by which gays defined themselves in his day was either encoded or pejorative. In light of these considerations, it is understandable why Francis could not ☙ 135

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Chapter six find a more direct means of communicating and confronting his homosexuality in poetry and prose. As in his art, Francis’s predilection for concealment was mirrored in his life. He was essentially a loner, an isolato living on the outskirts of Amherst on Market Hill Road, his house screened in by “four common kinds of evergreen” (Collected Poems 125). In “Late Cricket,” from his last book, he presents what amounts to a self-portrait in the guise of an insect. “Concealed and alone,” the cricket sings a song of farewell to the year, reconciled, it would appear, like Francis, to a “celibate” life:

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

The celibate cricket Concealed and alone In his hermit cell Deep in a thicket Of grass by a stone In a field on a hill In numb November When breath blows chill And earth turns somber Still rings his bell “All’s well, all’s well” Till white bird December Has feathered and flown. (Late Fire 20) Based on his earlier comments about his life as a gay man in a New England town, Francis’s withdrawal into “his hermit cell” can be read both as an act of protection against intrusion and homosexual self-erasure. Settling for the kind of lonely existence personified in the “celibate” singer, Francis surrendered himself over the years to the outsidership he experienced as his homosexuality. But if the price he paid for that life required a repression of his desire and recognition of himself as an exile, he also gained a poetic mode (in the second of the “Dark Sonnets”) that dramatized the psychologically devastating consequences of homosexual isolation. In it, he expressed the anguish of an outcast minority and, in doing so, forged for himself a kinship through poetry rather than the flesh.

136 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Epilogue

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

R

obert Fr anc is was a pr ivat e ma n . D e s p i t e H av i n g written in various genres—eight books of poetry, a journal, a memoir of his talks with Frost, essays on poetry, and an autobiography—he was very careful not to reveal too much about himself. This characteristic reserve was fostered as much by self-consciousness as an avoidance of selfpromotion. Although his work drew high praise from Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, Richard Wilbur, and Donald Hall, he did not actively court their approval.1 The many acts of reticence—his inclination to withhold his feelings and details about his personal life, his reluctance to speak publicly about the influence of other poets on his verse—were signs of Francis’s preference for privacy and not the purposeful effort of an elusive writer guarding the integrity of his published work. In a poem he delivered to the Harvard University chapter of Phi Beta Kappa in June 1960, “The Black Hood,” Francis told of the subterfuge in which was engaged throughout his career: “In every poem by me on my shelf / Confidentially yours I hide myself” (215). Always wary, he consciously cultivated his concealment. In his writings, Francis’s reticence, his coy sense of humor, and the different personas and voices he assumes complement this characteristic reluctance to reveal his innermost thoughts while elevating the challenge of knowing how to read him. Delighting in camouflage, he was a man who wore many masks, and who sometimes shaped his persona to achieve a particular purpose. After the publication of The Face Against the Glass in 1950, he wrote pseudonymous letters to the editor of a local newspaper in an effort to spur friends to defend him in print and stir interest in the book. As he recounts in his autobiography, he assumes the disguise of a reader, Bob Churchill, commenting with mock disparagement on the unusual ☙ 137

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Epilogue range of subjects found in the book: “The subjects, for the most part, are most unpoetic: poison ivy, a poison mushroom, a preying spider, a predatory hawk. . . . Whether these are good poems—whether they are poems at all—is something that any one of the fifty- odd English teachers in Amherst is far better equipped to say than I am” (80–81). The Trouble With Francis also shows that he could be serious and humorous at the same time; in a letter addressed to Thoreau, which ostensibly reflects on the success of the Walden experiment, he argues for the nutritional virtues of the protein-rich soybean. He reasons that Thoreau would have remained in the woods “longer than two years and two months” had he not been “undeniably undernourished” (103). “Except for the fish you caught occasionally,” Francis writes, “and the dinners you were sometimes invited out to, and that one woodchuck that had been ravaging your beanfield, and a few chestnuts, I don’t see where you got any appreciable protein” (102). Had Thoreau cultivated the soybean in his bean field, he would have reaped the benefits of a food that “had the values of meat and fish, yet was easy to raise, easy to store, and easy to cook” (103). Francis reveals the serious intent of his humor at the end of the letter, where he reminds readers, “Nowhere in our country is [the soybean] widely used as food for man” (106). Through rhetorical questions he directs at Thoreau, he obliquely encourages readers not only to cultivate the soybean but also to integrate it as part of their diet. “If you ever visit us again, and your devotion to Hindu philosophy suggests that you may have it in mind, won’t you build another cabin in the woods beside a pond and live there at least two years and two months? Won’t you raise soybeans and eat them?” (107). If these examples show that Francis is expert at assuming an attitude of ironic detachment,, nowhere is he able to convey so many different moods and tones as when he adopts the persona of “the satirical rogue.” Speaking through this mouthpiece gave him liberty to mock literary pretension, deride himself, and satirize the aesthetic standards by which critics evaluate poetry. In The Satirical Rogue on Poetry, he debates the value assigned to poetry in which there is no distinction (to borrow Eliot’s phrase) “between the man who suffers and the mind which creates” (9): “One could argue that it is a chief virtue of poetry today to cause the reader to suffer. To make him accept his suffering and even to enjoy it. Only by prodding him, shocking him, and making him wince can a poet waken and revitalize his reader.” “If this is so,” Francis concludes, “then I can only say that I wish I could have enjoyed my suffering more” (40). Much of the reader’s enjoy138 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Epilogue ment here derives from the contrast between the candor of Francis’s argumentative assertions and the irony of his final remark, the effect of which is to disparage an attitude that prizes poetry marked by the palpable presence of the poet himself. Besides commenting on literary trends with wit and humor, Francis lampoons the absolutist jargon that critics use to differentiate between the goodness and badness of poems and poets; in the process, he pokes fun at the failure of critical reviewers to exercise discrimination when writing about them. “If somebody comes along and tries to tell you that there are many, many poems too good to be called bad and too bad to be called good,” Francis declares, “you can be sure he is quibbling, hedging, evading, unwilling honestly to face the responsibilities of judgment.” “But why split hairs?” he asks. “Have not the estimable authors of Understanding Poetry put the whole matter in a nutshell?” “Bad poems,” according to them, “are made by bad poets like Kilmer and good poems are made by good poets like Yeats, Shakespeare, Milton, etc.” (33– 34). In these excerpts from The Satirical Rogue, Francis’s ability to inhabit and move easily between different personas compels readers to question not only whether his intentions are earnest but also the critical standards by which poets are classified and their poetry is read. Small wonder that he is so elusive. If figuring out who Francis is proves difficult for some readers, so is the challenge of characterizing his poetry. While good poetry is difficult to characterize, it is his strength as a writer that as his poetry matured over the decades the nomenclature of literary classification does not fully describe it. At times in his writing he expresses, like Wordsworth and Emerson, a tone of romantic delight when he detects affinities between humans and nature. Taking as his subject the vegetation that grows in fields beyond “railroad and the highway pass,” in “Poverty Grass,” from The Sound I Listened For, he records the pleasure that attends his perception of a likeness between the grass, which “feathers out with fluff” as the wind blows it, and “a tow-haired sunburned boy.” “Rare is the passerby that knows it,” Francis goes on to remark, “Or knows the irony of its name” (141). At other times his poetry renders a charged moment of experiential awareness in which the external scene reflects his internal state. In “Gold,” from The Orb Weaver, the ordinary circumstance he presents—a sudden rain shower on a sunny fall day—becomes the occasion for a contemporary version of Wordsworth’s luminous moment. The appearances that he perceives seem radiant: “a whirl / Of yellow leaves, glitter of paper nuggets”; “puddles the ☙ 139

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Epilogue sun was winking at / And fountains saucy with goldfish, fantails, sunfish”; “bees all pollen and honey, wasps gold-banded”; “luminous birds, goldfinches and orioles . . . leaving some of their gold / Behind in near-gold, off-gold, ultra-golden / Beeches, birches, maples, apples.” But his phenomenal experience of occurrences in the natural scene is significant only in reference to itself. Rather than a revelation to the conscious mind of a transcendent other world, Francis’s moment of visual acuity is a secularized form of ecstatic experience—“And I died in a maple-fall a boy was raking / Nightward to burst all bonfire-gold together”—that vanishes “at last in a thin blue prayer of smoke” (183). While these poems are romantic in tone but not attitude (rejecting the belief that the divine inheres in nature and the human imagination), some of his other poems convey a kind of skeptical modernism. The outgrowth of a mechanistic conception of the cosmos shaped by the discoveries of twentieth-century science, which threw into question the notion that the natural order reflects a supernatural harmony and left human beings feeling estranged in an indifferent universe, this mood expresses itself in Francis’s writing in “The Spy,” “The Orb Weaver,” and “Astronomer.” In the latter poem, from Come Out Into the Sun, his speaker, during his “Nightly” survey of the stars, “goes out of his mind / To find / Beyond,” where he suspects “no comfort is” (218). However indifferent the cosmos, he remains undeterred in his resolve to confront its otherness and probe the heavens. In this, as I argued in an earlier chapter, Francis approaches Frost, who retains his curiosity about mysteries beyond our reach and understanding, those “furthest bodies,” he writes in “I Will Sing You One- O,” “To which man sends his / Speculation, / Beyond which God is” (Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays 202). Francis conveys another version of this modern condition of estrangement when he longs for the unselfconscious oblivion of animals to counter the existential isolation that derives from feeling alone in an alien universe. That he often favors fixed forms, neat stanzas, and metrical regularity in some of these poems shows he contains this condition by asserting form as a stay against solipsism and confusion. Even as Francis rejects the theological connotations of a romantic– transcendentalist view of nature and human imagination, of a world imbued with spirit, he recognizes that visible appearances contain meanings not always so readily apparent. “Nothing Is Far,” from The Sound I Listened For, mirrors this attitude. Presenting himself in the vatic role of poet

140 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Epilogue as prophet, he does not resort to language that expresses a sense of the divine in nature: Though I have never caught the word Of God from any calling bird, I hear all that the ancients heard.

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Though I have seen no deity Enter or leave a twilit tree, I see all that the seers see. Rather, he asserts nature’s objective existence and capacity to exert an influence on the mind: “A common stone can still reveal / Something not stone, not seen, yet real” (151). By letting “common” objects speak for themselves, the things and creatures of the world reveal special value “not seen” by the beholding eye. He thus reformulates the romantic enterprise of aggrandizing the familiar, striving for directness of expression to replace words that would make his experience of discovering the worth of natural objects seem antiquated. Instead of perceiving appearances as incarnations of the divine presence within, he posits a naturalistic aesthetic and reads nature for instructive value. In poems where Francis discovers correlatives for human conduct in nature’s objects, his writing is at odds with the modern view that verse, at least on a formal level, should not try to control nature but rather imitate its wildness through the use of open forms. And yet, as “Stellaria” illustrates, nature also contains highly ordered, complex symmetries. As my discussion of these poems in earlier chapters shows, he fits his preference for metrical regularity and stanza units to his precise scrutiny of nature’s particulars. Their formal characteristics do not merely provide what Francis calls an “element of resistance” (A Time to Talk 85) but complement a natural order in which the mind, by virtue of its ability to apprehend these symmetries, perceives itself a part. Francis explores this interpenetration of mind and nature further in Come Out Into the Sun and Like Ghost of Eagles. In his experiments with word-count, he arranges the poem’s lines on a page to illustrate the subject. He makes the meaning of the lines themselves reflect the visual appearance of the poem, as in “Icicles,” where the mind partakes in the shape-engendering processes that give form to natural objects. In his fragmented surface poems, like “Blue Cornucopia,” where spaces separate

☙ 141

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Epilogue words and phrases to create hesitations and enforce pauses between syntactic units, he renders the process of perception itself. The eye seizes upon and extends out to incorporate the sheer variety of natural appearances, establishing his intimacy with and distance from what he perceives. Experimenting with different forms allowed Francis to fuse his predilection for close notation of the particular with his later interest in the visual design of a poem, producing verse that modified the Imagist precept of recording an object as if it were being seen in the present tense. To the importance that the Imagists placed on clarity of detail, economy of expression, concreteness, and brevity of treatment when confronting the objective world, Francis introduced a minimalist quality, omitting articles, pronouns, and, at its most extreme in “Silent Poem,” all parts of speech except for compound nouns. A careful reading of Francis’s poetry in Late Fire, Late Snow indicates that he continued to embrace Imagist principles. Several poems that exhibit his commitment to a clear, objective description of the familiar also display his knack for capturing the intrinsic characteristics of the thing seen. In “Gray Squirrel,” Francis’s dexterous diction depicts the trapeze acrobatics of the animal’s aerial exploits: “He flies, he floats through boughs, he flashes, / . . . Like a plurality of squirrels.” Other lines render the split-second speed of the squirrel’s movement: “As rain runs silver down a tree / He runs straight up quicksilverly” (Late Fire 33). Such visual details have their source in the observations of an artist in plein-air or a naturalist in the field. “Bravura” weaves his fidelity to the thing seen with formal innovation. Centering on a rooster strutting before the speaker’s door, the poem is arranged in two columns of three-line stanzas that are read vertically down the page (rather than from left to right) and have the graphic quality of Oriental verse. Built into these stanza units are irregular patterns of stress and line length, with the number of words ranging from two to three to four per line. Unlike traditional metrical patterns, they disrupt the flow of syntax: tiptoe he pranced tiptoe strutted tiptoe danced and kept flexing each yellow claw like a race horse 142 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Epilogue

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

pawing to go race horse or male dancer (Late Fire 24) Compared to the middle stanza, where the image of the rooster “flexing” its claws invites a conceit that extends one line into the next stanza, the first verse is rhythmically less fluid. The repetition of “tiptoe” demands that each line be read as a discrete unit followed by a pause; its insistent trochaic beat plays against the variable placement of accented syllables in the next four lines, producing an uneven rhythm that imitates the rooster’s jerky head-pecking strides. In these poems, and others like them, such as “Surf,” where lines making up each of its three-line stanzas extend successively further across the page to suggest the tide, Francis’s writing lacks fire.2 While his late work strikes a balance between freedom and resistance by adopting prosodic forms flexible enough to accommodate idiomatic speech yet constrained enough to produce rhythms based on the arrangement and length of lines, they need to emit more heat, whether emotional or formal. Some of his best poems, however, do not resort to formal inventiveness although they possess characteristics that inform his writing during this experimental phase: clarity, directness, and concision of expression. Their excellence resides in Francis’s ability to express subjective reality—that inner realm where art and reverie meet—with physical immediacy. “Waxwings,” for instance, dramatizes an experience of self-transfiguration through which he discovers his relatedness to the world. He gives the visual impulse that serves as the poem’s starting point symbolic depth by identifying with birds perched on stalks of a berry bush (“I am one”). Francis develops this subjectively felt awareness of kinship when he declares himself part of their “brotherhood.” One with the waxwings, he occupies a middle ground. Beneath sky, above snow, but still tethered to the earth, Francis locates himself in the world and experiences an enlarged sense of self. As “brotherhood” implies, he is more related to life. Concentrating the ripe self-knowledge that accompanies this experience into the poem’s final utterance, he delivers a lifetime’s accumulated wisdom without condescension, its depth of insight leavened by restraint: “To sun, to feast, and to converse / and all together— for this / I have abandoned / all my other lives” (188). The artistry of “Waxwings” also lies in the range of tones it brings to bear on the process of the poet’s becoming part of what he sees and ☙ 143

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Epilogue absorbs. Its lines act out the progression from a fanciful atmosphere of muted gaiety to a sensitive apprehension of nature’s tranquil beauty to an unfolding realization that is at once blissful and serious, yet free of solemnity. This skill at balancing contradictory tones is a key feature in other examples of Francis’s best poetry. In “While I Slept,” from Stand With Me Here, a son’s poem addressed to a loved mother now dead, the entwined tonalities of helpless sorrow and tender recollection enable it to stay free of sentimentalism associated with an excursion into the lost world of childhood: While I slept, while I slept and the night grew colder She would come to my room, stepping softly And draw a blanket about my shoulder While I slept. While I slept, while I slept in the dark, still heat She would come to my bedside, stepping coolly And smooth the twisted, troubled sheet While I slept.

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Now she sleeps, sleeps under quiet rain While nights grow warm or nights grow colder. And I wake, and sleep, and wake again While she sleeps. (26) Divided into stanzas that move from past to present, the poem’s opening verse-unit is not occasioned by sorrow but warm remembrance. The diction includes reassuring resonances; a mother tends to the physical comfort of her child and treads “softly” into his room, covering him with a “blanket” as protection against the night’s cold. Memory here counters the sense of loss out of which the poem springs. But fond recollection gives way to “dark” and turbulent reminiscence in the second stanza. Its central image is that of a lovingly attentive parent responding to psychological distress, reflected in “the twisted, troubled sheet” of a child visited by nightmares. This verse-unit provides the poem’s crucial turn to the subject of death as it foreshadows the distress caused by loss against which there is no comfort or relief. As it shifts into present tense in the last stanza, the poem joins tender and melancholy feelings. At the same time as he images grief in the falling of “quiet rain” on his mother’s grave, Francis sustains an atmosphere of darkness, of sorrow unmitigated, finally, by either the sentimentality of recollection or the passage of time. Indeed, the striking contrast be144 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Epilogue tween the poet’s restlessness and his mother’s undisturbed sleep suggests that in the end he does not let consolations of immortality eclipse his confrontation with pain and death. Like “Waxwings,” the poem is a masterpiece of virtuosity that establishes a momentary equilibrium among diverse elements—in this case, recollections of childhood and the complexities of feeling these evoke—producing a charged state of awareness. Francis is also at his best when he strikes a balance between contradictory tones arising from states of awareness associated with unresolved feelings of pain. Consider “The Brass Candlestick,” a poem from his final book that explores the irrevocable grief of remembered loss that he has tried to cope with since his father’s death. It begins with a distant memory of a simple gesture when he “touched [his] father’s hand,” before moving deeply into desolate sorrow and the depressive sense of having to live bereft of that contact: Long ago I touched my father’s hand His father’s hand had touched.

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

I have done what I could, have shined The dented thin brass candlestick And burned, now and then, one white candle Against the thinness of the year, the long Evening, dimness, solstice, and dusk. And seen the flame in the still room shiver As in a ghost of wind, or moveless like The tear- drop evening star, and with the black Iron box-snuffers trimmed the charred wick And in the candle’s light have lived and breathed And still the old man would not come. (Late Fire 53) The note of anguished resignation (“I have done what I could”) that introduces the second verse-unit modulates into the poet’s grieved frustration (“And still the old man would not come”) that he cannot conjure physical comfort from memory. In contrast to “While I Slept,” where memory temporarily counters loss, here candle lighting, an act performed to honor the memory of his father, illuminates it. The dark, cold implications of temporal markers for the absence of light (“dusk”), the approach of winter (“solstice”), and the end of the year, when trees barren of leaves ☙ 145

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Epilogue appear thinner, become keen reminders of loss. No less a reminder, the flame of the candle serves as an image of the flame of life that once burned but now illumines an atmosphere of isolation darkened by absence of the loved parent. Emotion-charged words and images deepen Francis’s sensitized awareness of loss. “Shiver,” besides describing the flame wavering “in a ghost of wind,” suggests the chilled feeling of deprivation he associates with his father’s death; comparison of the candlelight’s shape to a “tear- drop evening star” projects the pathos of the poet’s grief-stricken spirit; and the wick “trimmed” of its “charred” remains is a potent symbol of light consumed and lonely evenings spent in lingering darkness. The isolated last line then encompasses all the preceding tones, holding disappointed expectancy, irretrievable loss, and haunted desolation in momentary stasis. As the brief discussion of these poems makes clear, the pain of human vulnerability is absorbed into some of Francis’s finest writing. In his best poems, he works his way out of inchoate moods and states of reverie to the clearest expressions of thought and feeling. Combining the interplay of conflicting tones with concrete images that give objective form to private awareness, the formal virtuosity of these poems enables him to militate against emotionalism that would detract from their clarity. The balance of tone, image, and expression of genuine feeling is a poetic feat requiring not only skill but also artistic fortitude, especially when he lays bare his vulnerable self. This willingness to reveal his troubled side constitutes a brand of courage that differs from Frost’s, whose poems, when they explore similar feelings, insist that he has strength or reserves enough in himself to master or control them. Francis’s emotions, on the other hand, can and do get the upper hand. To understand the reasons behind this difference is to be aware of how important it was for him to discover that he could be his own poetic father. Realizing he could neither match Frost’s insight into the human condition nor his stature as literary ambassador on national and international stages, he decided instead to be read on his terms even if it meant cultivating a smaller yet no less devoted following. After years of being wracked with self- doubt, a period of crisis he described as the darkest of his career, his acceptance of an offer from Wesleyan University Press in 1959 to publish The Orb Weaver was a vindication of his struggle to achieve artistic independence. Evidence that he had moved out from under Frost’s shadow could also be found in his later experiments with form, into which he introduced antiwar protests, eco-critical inqui146 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Epilogue

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

ries, and homosexual subtexts. As in some of these poems, his craft goes beyond technical skill alone to the heart of the associative processes of art. When he is at his finest, namely, in the short meditative poem, Francis relies on the language of lyric poetry and its partnership with sensation and feeling to overcome his wariness and convert the flux of subjective life into a state of impassioned alertness that, like all great art, is personal and universal. In forging this balance, Francis shows he is a poet of supreme mastery, whose best work is representative of the highest order of art.

☙ 147

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved. The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Notes

Introdu ctio n 1. Unless otherwise noted, all references to Francis’s poetry are from Collected Poems, 1936–1976.

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

1. A C au tio us Distanc e 1. In an essay on Robert Francis published in the New York Times Book Review on March 10, 1985, Richard Gillman quotes James Merrill, who introduced the older poet on the occasion of his being awarded the Academy of American Poets fellowship in 1984: “[He] would be a first-rate poet for his unostentatious craftsmanship alone, but the character that informs his work—at once humane and austere, open and retiring—places him on a somewhat less populated pedestal.” Cited in the same essay, Richard Wilbur comments, “In reading Francis, we seldom have a sense that a garrulous someone called ‘I’ is standing between us and selected phenomena, telling us how he feels about them and what they signify. . . . Because the poet effaces himself, because he writes so transparently, his formal felicities—though they have their effect—are not felt as part of the per formance.” In a different essay, “Two Poets Named Robert,” a passage from which David Graham quotes (81), and which I also quote later in the book, Donald Hall says that Francis is “invisible” in his poems (121). 2. Gordon Lawson McLennan, who oversaw publication of the manuscript, writes in an afterword to the book that Francis had read the essay to him at his home in 1977, after which he placed it in his hands and said, “It’s yours. Perhaps sometime you will publish it” (44). McLennan adds, “The text printed here is an edited version of Robert’s original manuscript, which was written prior to 1970” (47). 3. Francis moved out of the Hopkinses’ house several years before the house was uprooted “from its foundations, put on rollers and rolled away” so that Amherst College, which owned it, could build a theater on the site. “She must have rejoiced at the prospect of a theater in the neighborhood,” Francis wrote in ☙ 149

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Notes to Pages 10–15 Mrs. Hopkins. “Apparently the need to put it precisely where she herself had for so long been put, persuaded her” (33). 4. McLennan sets forth the account of Francis’s acquaintance with Mrs. Hopkins in the book’s afterword. Familiar with Francis for over a year prior to his move into the Hopkinses’ home, she encouraged him to go to the Belchertown State School, an asylum in a nearby town for people afflicted with mental diseases. Based on his experiences, Francis wrote an essay, “Two Days Among the FeebleMinded,” which she sent “to friends and acquaintances, and to Lewis Mumford, the distinguished editor and cultural historian” (43–44), who commended Francis’s writing talent to her in a letter dated January 20, 1932. One year later, Mrs. Hopkins introduced Francis to Frost on the evening of January 24, 1933. A description of the circumstances leading up to their meeting appears in his autobiography: “She told me she had an errand somewhere in town and asked me to chauffeur her. We drove to Sunset Avenue and stopped in front of a Victorian sort of house standing well back from the street. Leaving me behind, she went up to the door and disappeared. Within a few moments Robert Frost came out on the porch, peered down at me through the darkness, and beckoned me to come up and in” (201). 5. Just before this scene, Francis tells of “a face-to-face talk” with Mrs. Hopkins during which, as he puts it, “she had told me that my personality had slipped a cog somewhere,” “that I lacked the fear-inspiring element,” and “that I was too inexperienced to write with authority.” Glancing back on this conversation, Francis recalls its effect on his young self: “To be given so much truth about myself in one dose was a little overwhelming” (17). 6. Years before he moved into Fort Juniper, Francis “began learning how to economize,” according to Richard Gillman’s prefatory remarks to the poet’s journal. His departure from home was, Gillman observes, “helpful preparation for a life that would almost always be lived at a near-subsistence level”; furthermore, the poet recognized “that material possessions were not what he wanted for himself, but rather the power to think, write, read, to walk through woods and meadows when he wanted to—which also meant meeting people only when he chose” (xi). His values were influenced by Thoreau’s Walden, which Francis read so often that, as he says in his autobiography, he “lost track of the number of times” (105), and whose ideas he made reference to in his journal, as in the entry dated May 10, 1934: “Thoreau is right. If one has the good fortune to be poor, he should let nothing interfere with his full enjoyment of his poverty” (34). 7. Francis received notification that his poems were accepted for publication on April 8, 1936. In his journal entry for April 15, 1936, he wrote: “Last Friday, Good Friday, I had word from Macmillan that they would publish my book of poems, stand with me here. The date will probably be sometime in the fall. Thus I shall celebrate the tenth anniversary of my coming to Amherst” (46). 8. In addition to these parallels, the narrative consists of an exchange between Mrs. Teal and Mrs. Bemis that is a source for lines in a poem from his seventh volume, Like Ghosts of Eagles (1974). After asking Mrs. Teal “about a certain fu-

150 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Notes to Pages 16–24 neral,” Mrs. Bemis reflects on her own death when she remarks, “I wouldn’t be buried in anything but black silk” (35). Mrs. Bemis’s words appear in the first stanza of “Three Old Ladies and Three Spring Bulbs” (258). 9. Francis did not write in the journal from December 16, 1939, to February 15, 1942, and from April 4, 1946, to November 26, 1949, the largest gaps between entries. Other extensive intervals of a year or longer in duration include the periods from July 20, 1938, to November 1, 1939, and November 7, 1950, to August 3, 1952. Two gaps of less than a year are those between July 15, 1943, and June 17, 1944, and from June 17, 1944, to June 4, 1945, which coincide with Francis’s service in the armed forces. 10. Several passages in his reminiscence of Frost, A Time to Talk (1972), which contains a record of the conversations that Francis had with Frost in Amherst during the 1930s and 1950s, offer examples of the older poet’s generosity toward him in the form of encouragement and guidance when Francis was not yet published. The entry dated June 11, 1934, shows Frost consoling Francis after a “series of disappointments” with publishers by reminding the younger poet not to “regard his failure with publishers too seriously,” as he also “had to wait for publication” (64). In other entries, A Time to Talk presents Frost in his “varying roles as helper” to younger poets, as Stanley Burnshaw defines them in Robert Frost Himself (1986), one of which he identifies as “a sharp demand to revise ‘defective passages’ ” (267). The entries for December 18, 1933, and June 14, 1934, indicate that Frost’s suggestions that Francis revise a line or a word in a line led to changes in two of Francis’s poems—“Artist” and “Cloud in Woodcut”—that were published in Stand With Me Here. Frost also helped promote Francis’s work by sending poems “about to acquaintances” (A Time to Talk 55) with the aim of enlarging his readership. He wrote to Louis Untermeyer on one occasion and asked him to consider Francis’s poetry for publication. Quotes from Frost’s letter to Francis praising his work in Valhalla and Other Poems, and Untermeyer’s response to Frost containing his reaction to Francis’s poetry, appear in chapter 5. 11. In the course of enumerating his financial circumstances in this statement, the poet provides a strict account of his annual earnings: “My income for 1952 was $489.80. For the first six months of 1953 it has been $299.80 (to which gifts totaling $50 may be added).” “Though I live far below The American Standard of Living,” Francis continues, “I am not impoverished or pitiful. All bills (except the property tax) are paid to date. I own my small home. I am well nourished and adequately clothed.” Writing about his self-sufficiency, he notes, “I have no car,” and “I buy almost no new clothing. I do my own washing, ironing, and mending. I care for my house and prepare my own meals” (218). 12. A similar account of this episode is contained in A Time to Talk (36–38). As he had done in the reminiscence, he wrote in The Trouble With Francis that Frost thought “ ‘The Silken Tent’ was the only sonnet in one sentence in the English language.” To convince Frost that his reference to a one-sentence sonnet did not target him, Francis told him that the poet David Morton “had done it again and ☙ 151

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Notes to Pages 24–26 again” (88). Not persuaded, and without Francis’s knowledge, Frost retaliated by writing a poem titled “On the Question of an Old Man’s Feeling,” which condemned Francis’s homosexuality but did not appear in print until thirteen years after Frost’s death in 1963, when the younger poet most likely encountered a truncated version of it in the third volume of Lawrance Thompson’s biography, Robert Frost: The Later Years (1976). The lines of the Frost poem quoted here tell of Francis’s interest in the mating rituals of the praying mantis, at the end of which “the female drains the male of force,” then “eats [him] up for a second course.” According to Thompson, Frost used Francis’s interest in the biological functions of mantids to “show . . . what he thought of matrimony,” and to draw a link between their unnatural behavior and his homosexuality. If Frost’s preservation of the unpublished poem for his biographer—which Thompson characterized as “too harsh to show the offending author” (The Later Years 206)—indicates how maliciously vengeful he could be, it suggests that Frost may have nursed a guilty conscience. (Lines of the poem not quoted in The Later Years appear in the endnotes to chapter 6.) Two years after the publication of The Later Years, Francis defended himself in the New England Review. In “Frost as Apple Peeler,” he declared that he did not have hidden intentions when he wrote the poem because it was not about an old man but “a very old lady” (Mrs. Bemis), who “liked to eat an apple” each night before bedtime and “made the paring of it a sort of ritual” (32). In a different reading of this self- defense, George Monteiro argues that Francis’s declaration indicates that he is either “deliberately concealing his conscious intention long after the fact,” “not acknowledging that his poem says things that he did not intend,” or “denying to himself his and his poem’s true intentions” (“Goring the Ox” 35). 13. Burnshaw also expresses the view that Frost was unreliable when it came to statements he made about his refusal to do anything to advance his career. He juxtaposes a letter Frost wrote to Untermeyer in 1917, in which the poet tells his friend that it was his wife’s wish that neither she nor he “lift a hand to increase [his] reputation,” with an earlier missive to John Bartlett, which, to quote Burnshaw, shows “Frost’s concern with gaining readers” (261). “But really to arrive where I can stand on my legs as a poet and nothing else,” Frost vowed in November 1913, eight months after the publication of A Boy’s Will, “I must get outside that circle [of the critical few] to the general reader who buys books in their thousands” (qtd. in Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays 668).

2. Inhabiting Ju n ipe r 1. Matthew Babcock’s Private Fire: Robert Francis’s Ecopoetry and Prose focuses on Francis’s work from an ecological viewpoint. 2. Contained in the entry dated July 3, 1931, this passage, appearing so early in the journal, foreshadows the Thoreauvian life Francis would live at Fort Juniper, where, amid nature and without being disturbed, he was able to devote time to the work he wanted to do.

152 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Notes to Pages 27–31 3. Both Thoreau’s rustic cabin and Francis’s house occupy a middle landscape between nature and civilization, bordered or crossed by public thoroughfares and railroad tracks. Thoreau in Walden describes that the “Fitchburg Railroad touches the pond about a hundred rods south of where I dwell.” He writes that when he goes to the village, he walks “along its causeway” and is, “as it were, related to society by this link” (78). In his autobiography, Francis describes a walk from Fort Juniper on Market Hill Road into Cushman that took him south to Leverett Road, then westward to Pulpit Hill Road “across the single track of the Central Vermont Railroad” (61). 4. Francis’s papers include a list of the geographical locations of many poems that appear in his first three collections (Robert Francis Papers, box 11, series 3, folder 9). Of the poems mentioned later in this paragraph, all but two are set in or around Amherst. The list does not include the location for the poems “Sheep” and “Spicebush and Witch-Hazel.” 5. In the following excerpt from The Heart of Emerson’s Journals, his description of natural appearances on a September afternoon in the woods expands both horizontally and vertically (like the view rendered by Francis in the passage from his diary), incorporating different sense modalities into a fluid moment of sensual awareness: “The noise of the locust, the bee, and the pine; the light, the insect forms, butterflies, cankerworms hanging, balloon-spiders swinging, devils-needles cruising, chirping grasshoppers; the tints and forms of the leaves and trees . . . then the myriad asters, polygalas, and golden-rods, and through the bush the far pines, and overhead the eternal sky” (87). 6. Offering additional evidence of Thoreau’s habit of seeing land as scene, Sharon Cameron writes that he “uses the word ‘picture’ to describe nature seen from far away,” or “to indicate any natural composition” (110). His reading of Gilpin’s Art of Sketching Landscape between 1852 and 1854 not only helped shape his inclination for seeing nature pictorially but, according to Cameron, coincided with the period during which Thoreau began heavily revising and expanding Walden (114). From Gilpin’s discourses on the picturesque, which express a preference for the roughness in nature to the smoothness of nature found in art, Thoreau culled a sense for the changing colors of the landscape. He learned to see how colors in nature acquired different hues at different times and in different weather. Robert D. Richardson Jr. identifies Ruskin’s Elements of Drawing (1857) as the book that proved most useful to Thoreau’s late writing about landscape colors in “Autumnal Tints” (1858–59). He read Ruskin’s handbook in the hope of applying some of its exercises aimed at developing visual acuity to his own writing. Where Gilpin’s descriptions of the effects of light, distance, and weather on the changing colors of the landscape gave him “language for certain effects and appearances” (Henry Thoreau 264), Ruskin’s book called his attention to the processes by which the world presents itself to the eye as “patches of different colors variously shaded” (Ruskin 27). Several passages in “Autumnal Tints” reflect Ruskin’s view that colors in nature seen by the eye are gradated, especially where Thoreau blurs the outlines of the trees that he sees in favor of areas of pure color. In this ☙ 153

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Notes to Pages 32–42 sense, his late essay illustrates how skillfully he applies “the verbal equivalent of what Ruskin calls habit of hand” (Henry Thoreau 362) to his picture of nature’s dazzling hues. 7. Painterly allusions appear frequently in Francis’s poems. Throughout his work, he compares a variety of natural phenomena and scenes to the pictorial arts. In “Tomatoes,” he likens the “gaudy” fruit on a “sun-splashed sill” to a “still life,” one “so lifelike” that the “fruit becomes the painted picture of the fruit” (185). The landscape through which he traverses in “Evening Ride” stretches out before him “still and clear like a long mural” (150). In “Clairvoyance,” he returns to a hilltop spot layered over in his memory, where a “little house” once “stood among the trees,” and the “world was only a picture frame” (154). That Francis’s poems present the vision of a potential landscape painter is clear from comments contained in Robert Frost’s letter to Louis Untermeyer of February 13, 1936. Here he draws a contrast between his own poetry and Francis’s in the light of Untermeyer’s remarks in an earlier letter about the resemblance of Frost’s “lyric style” to Francis’s in “Blue Winter”: “But [his poem] has something mine never have. I’m never concerned with color that much. . . . Robert Francis was always more the aesthete than I would have wanted to be” (269–70). 8. I am indebted to Irving Howe for this phrase, which he employs to describe the mood evoked by the first verse of Thomas Hardy’s poem “An August Midnight” (179). 9. For the influence of Stoicism on Thoreau’s thought, see Richardson, Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. In his view, Thoreau’s “interest in individual reformation” (104) and autonomy was the original impulse behind his reading of famous Stoic writers: Cicero, Seneca, and Epictetus. The Stoics’ practical emphasis on turning to nature for morals also encouraged him to find support for the ethical life in a close observation of the things and creatures of the world. In fusing the Stoic aim of achieving autonomy with the practical ethical insights gained from turning to nature for morality, Thoreau, in Richardson’s words, “stands as the most attractive American example—as Emerson was the great proponent—of the ageless Stoic principle of self-trust, self-reverence, or selfreliance, as it is variously called” (191). 10. These words appear in the closing lines of Frost’s poem “Tree at My Window.” All subsequent references to his poetry and prose are from Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays. 11. According to his journal, Francis finished the poem, which “was written in the Hopkins’ house, at the Jones Library [in Amherst], at Mrs. Boynton’s, at Mrs. Newkirk’s [the last in the series of older women with whom he lived], at my parent’s house, and lastly, here in Cushman” (51–52) on July 28, 1937. 12. In my discussion of “Valhalla,” I was influenced by Peck’s observations in Thoreau’s Morning Work. He examines a section in Walden titled “Former Inhabitants” describing how Thoreau surveyed the area around Walden Pond and found ruins where human dwellings once stood. In the remnants of one par ticular ruin, Thoreau reads, as Peck remarks, “a parable” that shows “the costs of

154 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Notes to Pages 49–56 going it alone, of detaching oneself from the human community.” At the heart of this episode, Peck argues, is Thoreau’s “own story deep in its center” (144), behind which lies “the fear that [his] own act of habitation [at Walden] may fail” (141).

3. Dwellin g in Unc e r tain t ie s an d S traddl ing  E x t r e m e s 1. After Macmillan turned down the manuscript of The Face Against the Glass, Francis decided to publish the volume privately and inexpensively with an Amherst printer. To excite interest in a book that, as he wrote in The Trouble With Francis, “lacked the prestige of an official publisher” (79), he used a fictitious name and forwarded a review of the volume to the local paper, followed by a reply to the critique a few days later. The review and reply, like the book itself, went unnoticed. 2. In “Between the Porch and the Altar,” Lowell reveals the strained relationship with his mother, in whose overbearing image he perceives a “counterfeit / Body presented as an idol” (15). In “Cuttings (Later),” Roethke, the son of an owner of greenhouses, objectifies prerational modes of experience in the earthy darkness and slimy subterranean life of plants:

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing, In my veins, in my bones I feel it, — The small waters seeping upward, The tight grains parting at last. When sprouts break out, Slippery as fish, I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet. (35) 3. I wish to acknowledge Bruce Michelson, whose book Wilbur’s Poetry: Music in a  Scattering Time drew my attention to a quality Francis shares with Wilbur. Like Francis, who does not use poetry as an autobiographical vehicle, Wilbur, Michelson writes, “has refused an abject dive into his personal life.” Michelson adds that if Wilbur’s reluctance to delve into his private life casts “doubt on his artistic honesty,” it also reflects “a contemporary species of courage we are not used to seeing” (14). 4. Tanner demonstrates in The Reign of Wonder how the ideal of the child’s innocent eye informs the work of several American writers, from Emerson and Thoreau to Twain and Henry James to Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Marked by a visual stance of passive receptivity in which the world flows into the eye, this ideal is linked with the restoration of a sense of wonder that liberates perception from custom and directs it to the novelty of the quotidian. 5. A comparison of Hughes’s and Francis’s poems with Tennyson’s “The Eagle” shows the difference between Victorian and twentieth- century nature poetry. While their poems acknowledge the hawk’s rapacity, Tennyson’s “The Eagle” ☙ 155

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Notes to Pages 56–74 emphasizes the creature’s magnificence: he soars “Close to the sun in lonely lands”; the “wrinkled sea beneath him crawls”; he plunges earthward “like a thunderbolt” (42–43). 6. Hopkins’s speaker compares the kestrel’s motion to the gliding of “a skate’s heel [that] sweeps smooth on a bow-bend” (69). 7. Zimmerman makes a similar point about Kinnell’s relationship to Whitman and Thoreau. Like Thoreau, Kinnell “seems torn between purity and corporality.” But where Thoreau “often opts for transcendence,” Kinnell “aspires to the fullest acceptance of his bodily life” (107– 8), though his encounters with animals are not as confident and unconflicted as Whitman’s. 8. Thoreau quotes here from Raja Rammohun Roy’s Translations of . . . the Ved (1832). Earlier in the chapter he connects his conviction that sensual instincts must be controlled to the adoption of vegetarianism and temperance for the purpose of inspiring the higher nature in man: “I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind” (144). 9. My discussion of Francis’s poems follows his organization of the book into five sections. Wesleyan University Press published this volume in 1960. The section divisions were not retained in the Collected Poems. Of the new poems in The Orb Weaver, “Cold,” discussed later in this chapter, appears in the original edition published by Wesleyan (61) but not in the text of the Collected Poems. 10. My argument in this poem—that the metaphor it proposes between swimming and the dangers accompanying a love relationship—has affinities with David Graham’s in his essay “Millimeters and Not Miles.” But in contrast to my explication, which likens the peril of drowning to the risk of losing the self in the fusion of two beings into one, Graham argues “that no lover could hope to merge so fully with a mate as a swimmer can immerse in ‘the green sea’ ” since “for the lover, as for the swimmer, all contact is in a real sense only skin deep” (92). 11. Frost turns the association of whiteness with innocence and purity on its head in “Design,” where the malevolently white trinity of spider, flower, and moth evokes horror and funereal darkness. In “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” he links the falling of snow to self- obliteration, which takes the form of a kind of wish to lose himself in the dark interiority of the white- covered woods. Watching a snowfall once again in “Desert Places,” its “blanker whiteness” filling the darkening landscape with empty silence (269), Frost experiences terror and profound loneliness rather than serenity and repose.

4. Experim e n t s w it h For m and t h e Poetry of Pr ot e st 1. Francis’s comment and subsequent remarks on this technique are derived from his unpublished typescript “A Note on Word- Count,” which includes material

156 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Notes to Pages 74–76 on silent poetry and words as a source for poetry (Robert Francis Papers, box 11, series 3, folder 8). 2. Tagliabue taught at Bates (in Lewiston, Maine) from 1953 to 1989. After graduating from Columbia University in 1944 and prior to his appointment at Bates, he taught at the State College of Washington and Alfred University in New York, returned to school, earned a master’s degree in comparative literature, and won a series of Fulbright grants that took him from Italy to Japan to China and to Indonesia. It was during his travels that he first began to experiment with and publish poems containing one word per line, many of them originally appearing in literary journals and anthologies. Tagliabue’s first three books, A Japanese Journal (containing poems written between 1958 and 1965), The Buddha Uproar (1955–1969), and The Doorless Door (1958–1969), contain many examples of these poems. In fact, all but three selections in The Doorless Door follow this procedure. A considerably smaller number of one-word poems appear, by contrast, in his final volumes, The Great Day (1962– 83) and New Poems (1984– 97). 3. Wide spaces between the lines in Cummings’s poem suggest the open air through which the grasshopper springs (286): r-p- o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r who a)s w(e loo)k upnowgath PPEGORHRASS eringint(oaThe):l eA !p:

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Spaces between lines imbue Williams’s poem with a wind-blown quality (339): The harried earth is swept The trees The tulip’s bright tips sidle and toss— Loose your love to flow Blow! 4. My discussion of Francis’s experiments with word-count was informed by Markos’s book Ideas in Things: The Poems of William Carlos Williams, particularly his comments on what Williams had to say about the function of the poet, the role of imagination in writing poetry and the idea of poem as object. Markos argues

☙ 157

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Notes to Pages 80–90 that, for Williams, the poet’s objective was not to imitate nature, but “with his imagination” to become “co- creator” with nature, producing “a composition of his own” (116). In his discussion of the poem as an object, Markos notes that Williams carefully considered how a poem was “constructed” apart from its meaning (115). 5. In an interview, Francis revealed the central importance of composing on his typewriter during the creative process: “When the impulse for a poem comes, I jot down what I can on a piece of paper. No sooner done than I have ideas for changing and developing those first words. So a second sheet goes into my typewriter, then a third, and so on.” “The process,” Francis summarizes, “is a combination of addition, elimination, and ceaseless rearranging” (qtd. in Tetreault and Karcher 14–15). 6. This quotation is from Francis’s papers, which include remarks cited later in the chapter on the origin of “Silent Poem” and the intention behind its formal design (Robert Francis Papers, box 11, series 3, folder 8). 7. My reading intersects at points with Alberta Turner’s interpretation of “Silent Poem” in “Permitting Craft.” She writes that, after Francis made his list of paired single- syllable nouns, he “let their juxtaposition of concrete objects suggest meanings considerably more various and contradictory than they could have been if they were embedded in sentences that explicitly made some connections and excluded others” (20). She does not discuss the poem in relation to his other “fragmented surface” experiments with syntax and irregular spacing, however, nor does she link it to his modification and expansion of Imagist precepts, which include objectivity, brevity of treatment, and economy of expression, as I do in the epilogue. 8. In his autobiography, Francis remembers going on record against war when he was only a freshman in high school, writing “a crude boyish poem” that “maintained that all nations were to blame for the war then being fought and not Germany alone.” At the same time, however, he was conflicted because war “was always presented to [him] idealistically as a crusade, especially after America’s entry,” and because he began “in time to wonder if it were not [his] duty” to enlist. Still conflicted when he was at Harvard, Francis signed up for a month at Camp Devens, in central Massachusetts, in the Citizens Military Training program, “purely from a sense of duty” during the summer before his senior year. “A decade or so later Duty was pointing in the opposite direction” when he joined the War Resisters League and signed its pledge to oppose war of any kind (32). 9. Stanley Karnow observes that since 1970, when President Nixon “ordered B-52s and other U.S. aircraft to hit targets in North Vietnam,” the sorties “American bombers had been flying” were “so- called ‘protective reaction’ missions” authorized “under the pretext of accompanying reconnaissance airplanes” (643). As part of this strategy, Thomas Shachtman adds, “ground forces were inserted by helicopter” after “waves of B-52 bombers” were deployed “to soften up the enemy” and secure strongholds. Once combat troops had cleared every hamlet of Viet Cong guerillas, they removed villagers and “placed [them]

158 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Notes to Pages 91–101 into a giant refugee camp,” so that gigantic plows could “reduce an area the size of Rhode Island to rubble” in preparation for additional bombing “to destroy any tunnels the VC might have left intact.” Shachtman supplements his description of this strategy with the words of Vietnam veteran John Kerry, whose eyewitness testimony emphasizes the human cost of the American military’s massive bombardment and technological assault: “In Vietnam, the ‘greatest soldiers in the world,’ better armed and better equipped than the opposition, unleashed the power of the greatest technology in the world against thatch huts and mud paths. In the process we created a nation of refugees, bomb craters amputees, orphans, widows, and prostitutes, and we gave new meaning to the words of the Roman historian Tacitus, ‘Where they made a desert, they called it peace’ ” (174). 10. Writing in his autobiography about the “ills of all kinds that do come to our attention, however shocking they are at the moment,” Francis maintains that they also “bring with them the thought that this sort of thing has happened so often before.” “To the extent that newspapers, picture magazines, and television lessen our ignorance of [these ills],” he reasons, “to the same extent they increase our callousness” (228). 11. The Darwinian view of nature as irrational and wild led conservationists to adopt an anthropocentric philosophy that emphasized human dominion over nature. Biocentric in perspective, ecologists of the mid-twentieth century, like Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac (1948), posited the conception of nature, specifically the land, as a living thing.

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

5. L earning t o Ho v e r 1. On the evidence of Frost’s remarks to Francis in A Time to Talk, the older poet’s role as mentor took the form of balancing praise of Francis’s work with criticism. In the entry for June 13, 1934, Francis records how admiringly Frost spoke of his poem “Homeward,” which appears in Stand With Me Here, calling it “flawless” and saying “that anybody who didn’t approve of that poem didn’t know what poetry was.” Frost’s criticism of Francis’s sonnet “Kneel by your chair like an obedient child,” contained in the same entry, centers on the negative effects of redundancy that militates against a sustained poetry of musical complexity, namely, Francis’s “fondness for beginning sentences with ‘let’ and the feeling of the rhetorical and churchly that it gave, as in ‘Let us pray.’ ” In another passage from this entry, Frost comments on the “posing . . . literary quality” in the poem “Roots” (68), which he read when it first appeared in the New York Herald Tribune. During one of Frost’s subsequent visits to his house in November 1934, Francis showed him a new version of the poem in the Virginia Quarterly Review (October 1934), “and told him that its revised form [included among the poems in his first volume] was due wholly to his criticism last June” (72). 2. William Mulder writes that Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost read “nature and society as manuals of instruction,” with “facts flowering into truths of conduct . . . ☙ 159

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Notes to Pages 101–107 into ethics, a secular sermon.” Mulder differs from Robert D. Richardson Jr. in connecting the origins of this habit of perception to “a tradition which runs from the New England Primer through Poor Richard’s Almanac to Walden” (550). 3. I am indebted to David Graham for my use of his words, “detachment” and “engagement,” to describe the posture that Francis adopts when he confronts experiential darkness. Graham uses them in a different context in his reading of Francis’s poem “Boy Riding Forward Backward,” which, he argues, joins “detachment with engagement” in its “simultaneous celebration of and lament for a solitary life” (86). 4. For more on the impact of Greek Stoicism on Emerson’s perception of nature, see Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire. A key point of his discussion is that “Nature” “is a modern Stoic handbook” in which Emerson reconciles the Stoic insistence that the study of natural appearances teaches us how to live with the transcendental concept “that the mind common to the universe is disclosed to each individual through his or her own nature” (233–34). 5. Francis first published his thoughts about Frost’s “laissez-faire” inclination to “let things take their course” in “Robert Frost from His Green Mountain” (117). 6. George Monteiro also emphasizes the harsh quality of these images in his words on the poem: “Frost’s ovenbird reminds us dryly and matter- of-factly that spring’s luxuriance of flowers diminishes by midsummer in the ratio of ‘one to ten’ ” (Frost and the New England Renaissance 98). 7. This view of Francis’s preciousness, his contrast with Frost, and the reflection that he seldom attains Frost’s bitter lyricism underlie David Graham’s discussion of his poems. In A Time to Talk, Frost, indeed, “defined [Francis’s] greatest danger as preciousness” (69). The entry in which his warning appears, June 14, 1934, offers an example of this “danger” in his comments on “Cloud in Woodcut.” Calling Francis’s attention to the word “high” in the line “Teach your knife high compromise,” Frost “said the word sounded ‘throaty,’ ” sensing perhaps in his diction the obtrusiveness of the speaker’s relish for language. In its revised form in Stand With Me Here, Francis substituted “to” for “high,” a change that is rhythmically consistent with the rest of the poem, assuring that each line has four stressed syllables: Make a woodcut of a cloud. Polish the wood. Point the knife. But let your pointed knife be wise. Let your wilful cloud retain Evidence of woody grain. Teach your knife to compromise. Let your cloud be cloud—and wood. Grained in the art let there be life. (4) The change also helps Francis achieve a more natural sounding speech that breaks down the distinction between the artificial nature of poetic composition (for which carving is a metaphor) and the organic nature of reality.

160 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Notes to Pages 107–119 8. About “The Oven Bird,” Robert Pack writes: “The poem itself . . . is indeed what the poet has made. It is an order, a design, to set against uncertainty, to set against ‘the fall’ and against death” (12). 9. George Monteiro compares “Design” to Frost’s earlier version of the poem, titled “In White” (1912). One of the changes Frost made in the final version was to incorporate “the important metaphor of kitchen domesticity” into “the tableau of spider, moth, and ritual death which he has observed” (Frost and the New England Renaissance 36–37). 10. Jonathan Edwards, leader of New England’s religious revival in the 1740s, has in mind the “Argument from Design” in a 1723 document known as his “Spider letter,” in which his close description of spiders spinning their webs reflects an eighteenth-century belief in a benevolent God. Edwards remarks on “the exuberant goodness of the Creator who hath not only provided for all the necessities, but also for the pleasure and recreation of all sorts of creatures, even the insects” (5). 11. Burnshaw adds that, soon after Frost’s visit to Henry Holt in February 1915, Harcourt urged him to attend a meeting of the Poetry Society and a luncheon with members of the New Republic. Recognizing the benefits of Harcourt’s advice, Frost, weeks later, accepted a dinner party invitation at the home of “one of Boston’s cultural greats” (262), Ellery Sedgwick, editor of the Atlantic Monthly.

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

6. The Teasi n g Par ad o x 1. An example of the attitudes that prevailed for most of Francis’s adult life, the obituary of Joel Dorius printed in the New York Times on February 20, 2006, harkens to a period when homosexuality may have been accepted privately in certain circles but could have devastating legal or professional consequences if made public. Dorius was “one of three gay professors of literature caught in a pornography scandal and forced out by Smith College in 1960 only to be exonerated in a celebrated case of sexual McCarthyism.” Smith, located just a few miles from Amherst in Northampton, became the focus of negative national attention when Newton Arvin, a professor of American literature, had his home raided by state troopers, a local police officer, and a United States postal inspector, who confiscated boxes of magazines featuring pictures of men and journals that chronicled several “years of his closeted gay life.” The case, as Barry Werth noted in The Scarlet Professor, his account of Arvin’s central role in the scandal, intensified “the climate of fear” at Smith (206). Pressured to cooperate by the prosecution, Arvin, who was suspended by Smith after he was charged with possessing obscene material, provided the names of two gay colleagues, one of whom was Dorius, and their homes were subsequently raided. Arvin received a one-year suspended sentence in exchange for his cooperation. Permitted to retire from Smith at half-pay, he later suffered a breakdown, committed himself to a mental hospital, and died in 1963. In the same year, the Massachusetts Supreme Court overturned the convictions of Dorius and his colleagues after it determined that the raids were illegal. ☙ 161

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Notes to Pages 120–122 2. The poem’s opening lines, preserved in an original draft among his papers and reproduced courtesy of Dartmouth College Library, are the most virulent, taking the form of an ad hominem attack in which he condemns Francis’s homosexuality and conveys his “loathing” through epithets and derogatory stereotypes:

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

There was a critic in a poet’s clothing I entertained but with a certain loathing, One who had never gone to bed with life Not even in the person of a wife. To all appearances as good as gelt, (Or gelded is the other way it’s spelt) A mental case who never really felt, He yet set up to judge of the emotions (The most he had himself were Yankee notions) . . . 3. A term introduced into American newspapers, such as the New York Times, in the late 1920s but coined in 1869 by Dr. Karoly M. Benkert, who was writing in German, “homosexuality” was officially adopted by American doctors in the 1890s, as Katz writes, “for the purpose of distinguishing a par ticular, medically defined ‘perversion’ ” (154). American medical literature on “perversion” from the 1880s indicates that its treatment, since before the Civil War, included the incarceration of the afflicted in doctor-supervised mental institutions, though it was not until October 24, 1926, in the New York Times Book Review, that the equation of “homosexuality” with “types of mental disease” became the topic of public discourse and debate (428). This expansion of the term from a legally defined “crime” to a medically defined “perversion” required what Katz calls “the formulation of [a] homo/hetero polarity” that “posited the homosexual as bad twin of the good sex normal, as heretical relation of the pious hetero, as all the monstrous things the good hetero was not.” Besides demarcating a “reassuring boundary between sex evil and sex good,” this formulation also established a social-sexual ideology “in which the superiority of the numerical majority,’ the sexually ‘average,’ ‘the adjusted,’ the ‘conforming,’ and the ‘same’ became a smug assumption—a dictatorship of the ‘normal’ in which the repeated incantation of that word demeaned and differentiated” those whose preferences made them “exemplars of abnormality” (167). 4. Twenty-three of the fifty-six poems in his last book originally appeared in the Painted Bride Quarterly, including those discussed in this chapter, except for “The Long Shower.” Francis and his friend Henry Lyman gathered most of the poems for this collection in the months before Francis’s death. He wrote the majority after publication of Collected Poems; others, composed prior to its appearance, had not been included in his previous volumes. After Francis’s death, additional poems discovered among the poet’s papers were also selected for inclusion. 5. Robert K. Martin describes cruising in Whitman’s “Calamus” as a “ritual of eye contact,” which involves “visual recognition and response,” whereby homo-

162 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Notes to Pages 127–143 sexuals express their desire to a selected few “without being observed by others around” (74). 6. Unless otherwise noted, all parenthetical citations for Whitman’s works refer to Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, edited by Michael Moon. 7. Indeed, Whitman’s canonical status as America’s bard derives from a critical consensus of him as the voice of the nation, in which his homosexuality, if addressed at all, is either invisible or subordinate to his role as spokesman for the masses. In fact, Martin’s book was the first on Whitman to offer an extensive analysis of the homoerotic elements in the poems. 8. Among the expunged lines Fiedler mentions are the following erotically charged sentences:

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

The cloth laps a first sweet eating and drinking, Laps life-swelling yolks . . . laps ear of rose- corn, milky and just ripened: The white teeth stay, and the boss-tooth advances in darkness, And liquor is spilled on lips and bosoms by touching glasses, and the best liquor afterward. The intention behind Whitman’s excisions, in Fiedler’s view, was “to conceal from the reader [his] uneasy sexuality” (64). These suppressions, as Martin writes, were “but the most obvious of what must have been an enormously painful series of acts performed almost daily to conform to someone else’s version of normality” (7). 9. David Graham compares Francis’s writing to section 11 of Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” remarking on the way in which each work has “the same qualities of discreetly erotic yearning, furtive charm, and lonely integrity” (90). 10. All references to A Certain Distance are from Francis’s typescript pages and worksheets preserved in the Robert Francis Papers at the W. E. B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts Amherst. 11. Among this group of writers, John Moray Stuart-Young based one of his poems on Frederick Walker’s painting The Bathers (1867). Fellow writer Frederick Rolfe, inspired by Tuke’s The Bathers (1885), published his lyric “Ballade of Boys Bathing” in The Art Review (April 1890); it celebrates “Boys of the colour of ivory” who gather at a place “Under the sea- cliffs’ shadows” to dive from “Rocks rising high where the red clouds flare” (qtd. in Smith, Love in Earnest 170). Whitman kept up a correspondence of “almost twenty years” with the renowned Uranian John Addington Symonds, also a friend of Tuke’s; his admiration for Whitman Martin documents by citing Symonds’s many letters to the poet.

Epilogu e 1. Commenting on Come Out Into the Sun in 1965, Moore wrote that the book gave “a point to publishing, in a day of too many books” (638). 2. The arrangement of three-line units in “Surf” resembles the three-step triadic line that William Carlos Williams developed in the 1950s. At the time that he ☙ 163

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Note to Page 143

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

conceived of this technique, Williams had seen and admired similar forms of line arrangement in the poetry of Byron Vazakas, which he commented was like a “musical bar . . . not related to grammar but to time.” Williams remarks, “The clause, the sentence, and the paragraph are ignored,” in order that “the progression goes over into the next bar,” as required by “musical necessity,” and “capable of infinite modulation” (349). Like Williams’s three-step stanza units, Francis’s splitting of lines into steps in “Surf” defines the boundaries of the sentence, each with its own intrinsic musicality. Other poems appearing in Late Fire, Late Snow composed of three-line stanzas feature variations on this technique, including “The Mockery of Great Music” and “The Last Least King,” in which the lines become progressively shorter in length.

164 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Works Cited

Abcarian, Richard. Instructor’s Manual to Accompany “Literature: The Human Experience.” 4th ed. New York: St. Martin’s, 1986. Babcock, Matthew. Private Fire: Robert Francis’s Ecopoetry and Prose. Newark: U of Delaware P. Forthcoming. Beaver, Harold. “Homosexual Signs (In Memory of Roland Barthes).” Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 99–119. Bradley, Robert. “Redeeming Time.” Painted Bride Quarterly 35 (1988): 74–77. Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. Burnshaw, Stanley. Robert Frost Himself. New York: George Braziller, 1986. Cameron, Sharon. Writing Nature: Henry Thoreau’s Journal. New York: Oxford UP, 1985. Cubbage, Elinor P. “Robert Francis: A Critical Biography.” Master’s thesis. Eastern Connecticut State College, 1975. Cummings, E. E. Poems, 1923–1954. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1954. Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. R. W. Franklin. Reading Edition. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999. Donoghue, Denis. Connoisseurs of Chaos. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. Edwards, Jonathan. A Jonathan Edwards Reader. Ed. John E. Smith, Harry S. Stout, and Kenneth Minkema. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995. Elder, John. Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature. 2nd ed. Athens: University of Georgia P, 1996. ———. “Robert Frost, the New En gland Environment, and the Discourse of Objects.” Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism. Ed. Karla Ambruster and Kathleen R. Wallace. Virginia: UP of Virginia, 2001. 297– 324. Eliot, T. S. Selected Essays. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Stephen E. Whicher. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957. ———. The Heart of Emerson’s Journals. Ed. Bliss Perry. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926. Fell, Mary. “Francis at a Distance.” Painted Bride Quarterly 35 (1988): 69–72. ☙ 165

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Works Cited Fiedler, Leslie. “Walt Whitman: Portrait of the Artist as Middle-Aged Hero.” No! In Thunder: Essays on Myth and Literature. Boston: Beacon P, 1960. 61–75. Rpt. of introduction to Selections from Leaves of Grass. Ed. Richard Wilbur. New York: Dell, 1959. 7–22. Fitts, Dudley. “Quartet in Varying Keys.” New York Times Book Review 17 April 1966: 46. Francis, Robert. A Certain Distance. TS. Robert Francis Papers. Special Collections and University Archives, W. E. B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts Amherst. ———. “A Note on Word- Count.” Ms. 403. U of Massachusetts at Amherst Lib. ———. Clarification of God. [Amherst]: n.p., n.d. ———. Collected Poems, 1936–1976. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1976. ———. “For the Ghost of Robert Frost.” Painted Bride Quarterly 35 (1988): 20. ———. Frost: A Time to Talk; Conversations & Indiscretions Recorded by Robert Francis. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1972. ———. “Frost As Apple Peeler.” New England Review 1 (1978): 32–39. ———. Gusto, Thy Name Was Mrs. Hopkins: A Prose Rhapsody. Ed. Gordon Lawson McLennan. Toronto: Chartres Books, 1988. ———. Late Fire, Late Snow: New and Uncollected Poems. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1992. ———. Ms. 403. U of Massachusetts at Amherst Lib. ———. “Poetry and the Human Condition.” Painted Bride Quarterly 35 (1988): 58. ———. Pot Shots at Poetry. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1980. ———. Robert Francis Papers. MS 403. Special Collections and University Archives, W. E. B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts Amherst. ———. “Robert Frost from His Green Mountain.” Dalhousie Review 33.2 (1953): 117–27. ———. “Silent Poetry.” Ms. 403. U of Massachusetts at Amherst Lib. ———. The Orb Weaver. Connecticut: Wesleyan UP, 1960. ———. The Satirical Rogue on Poetry. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1968. ———. The Trouble With Francis. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1971. ———. Travelling in Amherst: A Poet’s Journal, 1931–1954. Boston: Rowan Tree P, 1986. ———. We Fly Away. New York: Swallow P, 1948. Friedman, Norman. “The Wesleyan Poets—IV: The In-Between Poets.” Chicago Review 19.3 (1967): 68– 90. Frost, Robert. Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays. Ed. Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1995. ———. “On the Question of an Old Man’s Feeling.” Ms. 001613. Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. ———. The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer. Ed. Louis Untermeyer. New York: Holt, 1963. Gillman, Richard. Introduction. Travelling in Amherst: A Poet’s Journal, 1931–1954. Boston: Rowan Tree P, 1986. vii–xvii.

166 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Works Cited ———. “The Robert Man Frost Called ‘The Best Neglected Poet.’ ” New York Times Book Review 10 March 1985: 32. Graham, David. “ ‘Millimeters and Not Miles’: The Excellence of Robert Francis.” Painted Bride Quarterly 35 (1988): 79– 93. Hall, Donald. Their Ancient Glittering Eyes. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1992. ———. “Two Poets Named Robert.” Ohio Review 18.3 (1977): 110–25. Hecht, Anthony. “The Motions of the Mind.” Richard Wilbur’s Creation. Ed. Wendy Salinger. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1983. 123–31. Helms, Alan. “ ‘Hints . . . Faint Clews and Indirections’: Whitman’s Homosexual Disguises.” Whitman: Here and Now. Ed. Joann P. Krieg. Connecticut: Greenwood P, 1985. 61– 67. Hopkins, Gerard Manley. The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. 4th ed. Ed. W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie. New York: Oxford UP, 1986. Howe, Irving. Thomas Hardy. New York: Macmillan, 1967. Hughes, Ted. Lupercal. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960. Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: The First Complete Account of Vietnam at War. New York: Penguin, 1987. Katz, Jonathan Ned. Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary. New York: Harper & Row, 1983. Keats, John. Selected Poems and Letters. Ed. Douglas Bush. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959. Lewis, R. W. B. The American Adam. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1955. Lowell, Robert. Selected Poems. Rev. ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. Markos, Donald W. Ideas in Things: The Poems of Williams Carlos Williams. London: Associated University Presses, 1994. Martin, Robert K. The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry. Austin: U of Texas P, 1979. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford UP, 1964. Michelson, Bruce. Wilbur’s Poetry: Music in a Scattering Time. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1991. Monteiro, George. “Goring the Ox: Robert Frost, Robert Francis and the Intentional Fallacy.” Robert Frost: The Man and the Poet. Ed. Earl J. Wilcox. 1981. Conway, AR: UCA Press, 1989. 31–37. ———. Robert Frost and the New England Renaissance. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1988. Moore, Marianne. The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore. Ed. Patricia C. Willis. New York: Viking, 1986. Mulder, William. “Seeing ‘New Englandly’: Planes of Perception in Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost.” New England Quarterly 52.4 (1979): 550–59. Nelson, Howard. “Moving Unnoticed: Notes on Robert Francis’s Poetry.” Hollins Critic 14.4 (1977): 1–12. “Obituary of Joel Dorius.” New York Times 20 February 2006, sec. B. ☙ 167

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Works Cited Pack, Robert. “Robert Frost’s Enigmatical Reserve: The Poet as Teacher and Preacher.” Modern Critical Interpretations of the Poetry of Robert Frost. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. 9–21. Peck, H. Daniel. Thoreau’s Morning Work: Memory and Perception in “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” the Journal, and “Walden.” New Haven: Yale UP, 1990. Poirier, Richard. Robert Frost: Work of Knowing. New York: Oxford UP, 1984. ———. The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections. New York: Random House, 1987. Richardson, Robert D. Jr. Emerson: The Mind on Fire. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. ———. Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986. Roethke, Theodore. The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. New York: AnchorDoubleday, 1975. Ruskin, John. The Elements of Drawing. New York: Dover, 1971. Shachtman, Thomas. Decade of Shocks: Dallas to Watergate, 1963–74. New York: Poseidon P, 1983. Shaw, Robert B. “Coming Out into the Sun.” Poetry 131.2 (1977): 106–10. ———. “Outside of Amherst.” Poetry 121.4 (1972): 102–5. ———. “Seers and Skeptics.” Poetry 163.1 (1993): 39–42. Smith, Timothy d’Arch. Love in Earnest. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970. Tagliabue, John. The Buddha Uproar. 2nd ed. Santa Cruz: Kayak, 1970. ———. The Doorless Door (Japan Poems). New York: Grossman, 1970. ———. A Japanese Journal. San Francisco: Kayak, 1966. Tanner, Tony. The Reign of Wonder: Naivety and Reality in American Literature. England: Cambridge UP, 1965. Tennyson, Alfred Lord. “The Eagle.” Victorian Poetry and Poetics. 2nd ed. Ed. Walter E. Houghton and G. Robert Stange. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1968. 42–43. Tetreault, Philip, and Kathy Sewalk Karcher. Francis on the Spot: An Interview with Robert Francis. Portage, PA: Tunnel P, 1976. Thompson, Lawrance. Robert Frost: The Later Years, 1938–1963. New York: Holt, 1976. ———. Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915–1938. New York: Holt, 1970. Thoreau, Henry David. The Writings of Henry David Thoreau. 20 vols. Walden edition. Ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906. ———. Walden and Resistance to Civil Government. 2nd ed. Ed. William Rossi. New York: Norton, 1996. Turner, Alberta. “Permitting Craft.” Field 25 (Fall 1981): 20–22. Untermeyer, Louis. “New Books in Review.” Yale Review 34 (1944–45): 345. Walker, David. “Robert Francis: A Birthday Celebration.” Field 25 (Fall 1981): 7. ———. “Francis Reading and Reading Francis.” Field 25 (Fall 1981): 29–30. Wallace, Robert. “The Excellence of ‘Excellence.’ ” Field 25 (Fall 1981): 16–18.

168 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Works Cited

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Werth, Barry. The Scarlet Professor: Newton Arvin: A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal. New York: Anchor Books, 2001. Whitman, Walt. Complete Prose Works. Philadelphia: David McKay, 1892. ———. Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. Ed. Michael Moon. New York: Norton, 2002. Wilbur, Richard. “Sheep.” Field 25 (Fall 1981): 24–26. Williams, William Carlos. Collected Poems. Volume I, 1909–1938. Ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan. New York: New Directions, 1986. ———. “Preface.” Quarterly Review of Literature 2.4 (1946): 346–49. Young, David. “Out of the Shadow.” New Republic 165.6–7 (1971): 28–30. ———. “Robert Francis and the Bluejay.” Field 25 (Fall 1981): 9–11. Zimmerman, Lee. Intricate and Simple Things: The Poetry of Galway Kinnell. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1987.

☙ 169

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved. The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Index

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Abcarian, Richard, 60 “The Amanita,” 58, 72 anthropocentrism, 94, 159n11 Antinous, 130 “Apple Peeler,” 15, 24 “Artist,” 151n10 Arvin, Newton, 161n1 “Astronomer,” 140 Babcock, Matthew, 152n1 Bartlett, John, 152n13 “Base Stealer,” 59, 61– 62 Beaver, Harold, 124, 126 Benkert, Dr. Karoly M., 162n3 biocentrism, 92, 159n11 “The Black Hood,” 137 “Blood Stains,” 87– 88 “Blue Cornucopia,” 83– 85, 87, 141–42 “Blue Jay,” 66– 67 “Blue Winter,” 27–28, 30, 102, 154n7 “Boy Riding Forward Backward,” 160n3 Boynton, Mrs. (Mrs. Bemis), 2, 9, 12–15, 150–51n8 Bradley, Robert, 7, 84 “The Brass Candlestick,” 145–46 “Bravura,” 142–43 Buell, Lawrence, 31, 41 “The Bulldozer,” 92 “Burial,” 71–72

Burnshaw, Stanley, 109–10, 114, 151n10, 152n13, 161n11 Cameron, Sharon, 153n6 Caravaggio, 130 “Catch,” 60– 61 A Certain Distance, 5, 129–30 “Chimaphila, 1972,” 91 Christ, 89, 103 Ciardi, John, 113 Cicero, 154n9 “Clairvoyance,” 154n7 Clarification of God, 111 “Cloud in Woodcut,” 151n10, 160n7 “Clouds,” 38 “Cold,” 70–71, 156n9 Come Out Into the Sun, 4, 73–74, 141 “Come Out Into the Sun,” 15, 73 “Coming and Going,” 36–37 “Condor,” 82– 83 Cooper, Charles W., 113 Crane, Hart, “Possessions,” 122 Cubbage, Elinor P., 47 Cummings, E. E., 75; “r-p- o-p-h-e-s-sa-g-r,” 75, 157n3 “Cypresses,” 116–17 “Dark Sonnets,” 122, 124–27, 136 Darwin, Charles, 159n11 “Demonstration,” 55–58

☙ 171

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Index detached engagement, 5, 98, 101, 112, 116–18, 160n3. See also hovering Dickinson, Emily, 71–72, 121; “I heard a Fly buzz when I died,” 71; “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant,” 121–22 “Divers,” 131–32, 133, 134 “Dolphin,” 80, 82 Donatello, 130 Donne, John, 89 Donoghue, Denis, 57 Dorius, Joel, 161n1

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

“Eagle Soaring,” 55 ecology, 92 Edwards, Jonathan, 161n10 Elder, John, 56, 97 Eliot, T. S., 138 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 3, 27–31, 38, 86, 103, 108, 139, 153n5, 154n9; “The American Scholar,” 38; The Heart of Emerson’s Journals, 29, 153n5; “Nature,” 5, 27, 30–31, 35, 37–38, 103; “The Poet,” 76 “Encounter,” 58, 72 “Enviable,” 55 Epictetus, 154n9 “Evening Ride,” 154n7 “Excellence,” 63– 64 The Face Against the Glass, 3, 49–51, 58, 72, 115, 137, 155n1 “Fall,” 107– 8 Fell, Mary, 7 Fiedler, Leslie, 128, 163n8 Field, 122 Fitts, Dudley, 50 “Flower and Bee,” 37–38 “For the Ghost of Robert Frost,” 101–2, 118 Fort Juniper, 2, 12, 14, 20, 23, 26–27, 40–41, 150n6, 152n2, 153n3 fragmented surface, 4, 74, 83, 141 Francis, Eben (Francis’s father), 1–2, 66– 67, 95, 145–46

Francis, Ida May (Francis’s mother), 21, 144–45 Friedman, Norman, 50, 59, 65 Frost, Robert, 4–5, 10, 17, 23–24, 47–48, 69, 71, 98, 99–118, 119–20, 121, 125, 137, 140, 146, 152n13; on career, 24, 104, 152n13; falling out with Francis, 23– 24, 151–52n12; laissez-faire attitude, 103–4, 112–13; mentor to Francis, 2–3, 98, 151n10, 159n1; poetry: “Acquainted with the Night,” 125; “Blueberries,” 103, 105; “Desert Places,” 112, 156n11; “Design,” 71, 108– 9, 112, 156n11; “Home Burial,” 48; “I Will Sing You One- O,” 140; “In Time of Cloudburst,” 103; “In White,” 161n9; “The Mountain,” 100; “New Hampshire,” 113; “An Old Man’s Winter Night,” 116; “On the Question of an Old Man’s Feeling,” 120, 152n12, 162n2; “The Oven Bird,” 106–7, 117; “The Silken Tent,” 24, 151n12; “Something for Hope,” 103–4; “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” 70, 112–13, 156n11; “Storm Fear,” 68; “Tree at My Window,” 39, 154n10; prose: “The Figure a Poem Makes,” 105; The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer, 102, 154n7 Frost: A Time to Talk, 48, 98– 99, 103–5, 106, 118, 141, 151n10, 159n1, 160n7 “Frost as Apple Peeler,” 152n12 Gillman, Richard, 12, 14, 16–17, 18, 149n1, 150n6, 156n10 Gilpin, William, 31, 153n6 “Glass,” 76 “Gold,” 139–40 “The Goldfish Bowl,” 88– 89, 131 “The Good Life,” 130–31 Gospel of Matthew, and Frost’s “Something for Hope,” 103 Graham, David, 7, 18, 65, 95, 100, 107, 115, 129, 156n10, 160n3, 163n9

172 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Index

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

“Gray Squirrel,” 142 Gusto, Thy Name Was Mrs. Hopkins, 1–2, 7–12 Hadrian, 130 Harcourt, Alfred, 114 Hardy, Thomas, 154n8 Hall, Donald, 47, 105, 114, 116, 137, 149n1 “Hay,” 16, 28, 32–33, 44 “A Health to Earth,” 92– 94 “Heat Wave,” 132, 133 Hecht, Anthony, 59, 61 Helms, Alan, 121–22 “High Diver,” 134–35 “His Running My Running,” 128–29 “Hogwash,” 82 Holmes, John, 113 Holt, Henry, 114 “Homeward,” 159n1 homosexuality, 5– 6, 21–22, 24, 119–36; cruising as a form of disguising, 122, 124–25, 127–28, 162– 63n5; medical views of, 162n3; and outcast status, 122, 124, 136 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 41; “The Windhover,” 41, 56–57, 156n6 Hopkins, Mrs. Arthur John, 2, 9–12, 24–25 hovering, 1, 5, 112, 116, 118. See also detached engagement Howe, Irving, 154n8 Hughes, Ted, “Hawk Roosting,” 55–56 “Icicles,” 75–78, 141 “Identity,” 6 Imagists, 6, 142 Jeffers, Robinson: “Hurt Hawks,” 56 “Juniper,” 28, 40–41 Kant, Immanuel, 31 Karcher, Kathy Sewalk. See Tetreault, Philip

Karnow, Stanley, 158n9 Katz, Jonathan, 120, 128, 162n3 Keats, John, 109, 117; “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 53–54 Kellogg, Mrs. (Mrs. Teal), 2, 9, 12–13, 150n8 Kerry, John, 159n9 Kinnel, Galway, 55, 58, 156n7 “Kneel by your chair like an obedient child,” 159n1 “The Last Least King,” 164n2 “Late Cricket,” 136 Late Fire, Late Snow, 5, 142, 162n4 Leopold, Aldo, 159n11 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 49 Lewis, R. W. B., 73 “Light Casualties,” 90– 91 Like Ghosts of Eagles, 4, 73–74, 83, 141 “Like Ghosts of Eagles,” 94– 96 “The Long Shower,” 132–34, 162n4 Lowell, Robert, 49–50; “Between the Porch and Altar,” 155n2; Lord Weary’s Castle, 50 Lyman, Henry, 162n4 Markos, Donald W., 76, 77, 80, 157–58n4 Martin, Robert K., 128, 130, 162– 63n5, 163n7 Marx, Leo, 31 McLennan, Gordon Lawson, 149n2, 150n4 Merrill, James, 149n1 Michelson, Bruce, 155n3 “The Mockery of Great Music,” 164n2 Monteiro, George, 152n12, 160n6, 161n9 Moore, Marianne, 75, 137, 163n1 Morton, David, 151n12 “The Mountain,” 98 “Mountain Blueberries,” 105– 6 ☙ 173

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Index Mulder, William, 102, 159– 60n2 Mumford, Lewis, 10, 150n4 “Museum Birds,” 53–55 “Museum Vase,” 77–78, 82 Nelson, Howard, 26 “New England Mind,” 38–40 Nixon, Richard M., 158n9 “A Note on Word- Count,” 74 “Nothing Is Far,” 140–41

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

“Old Men,” 81– 82 “Onion Fields,” 16, 28–32 The Orb Weaver, 3–4, 50, 58–59, 72, 146, 156n9 “The Orb Weaver,” 71, 108, 110–12, 140 Pack, Robert, 161n8 Painted Bride Quarterly, 7, 122, 162n4 “Paradox,” 121 Pearl Harbor, 88 Pease, Arthur Stanley, 10 Peck, H. Daniel, 34–35, 154–55n12 “Pitch Pine,” 37 “Pitcher,” 59– 60, 121 “Poetry and the Human Condition,” 50 Poirier, Richard, 5, 101, 112–14, 125 Pot Shots at Poetry, 85 Pound, Ezra, 104, 114 “Poverty Grass,” 139 “Remind Me of Apples,” 51–53 Reni, Guido, 130 Richardson, Robert D., Jr., 38, 103, 153–54n6, 154n9, 160n4 “The Righteous,” 89– 90 “Robert Frost from His Green Mountain,” 160n5 “Robert Frost in Amherst,” 99 Roethke, Theodore: “Cuttings (Later),” 155n2; The Lost Son and Other Poems, 50 Rolfe, Frederick: “Ballade of Boys Bathing,” 163n11

“Roots,” 159n1 Russell, Phillips, 29 Ruskin, John, 31, 153–54n6 The Satirical Rogue on Poetry, 117–18, 138–39 “Sebastian,” 130 Sedgwick, Ellery, 161n11 Seneca, 154n9 Shachtman, Thomas, 158–59n9 “Shadows,” 15 Shakespeare, William: Macbeth, 52 Shaw, Robert B., 21, 73, 122, 135 “Sheep,” 28, 34–35, 41–42, 153n4 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 117 “Silent Poem,” 85– 87, 142 silent poems, 4, 74 Smith, Timothy d’Arch, 130–31 solid compounds, 85– 86 “Somehow,” 122–24 Soto, Hernando de, 95 The Sound I Listened For, 3, 28 “Spicebush and Witch-Hazel,” 28, 35–36, 153n4 “The Spy,” 114–16, 118, 140 Stand With Me Here, 3, 28 “Stellaria,” 78– 80, 141 Stoicism, 3, 5, 38, 101, 103, 117, 154n9 Stuart-Young, John Moray, 163n11 “Surf,” 143, 163– 64n2 “Swimmer,” 64– 65 Symonds, John Addington, 163n11 Tacitus, 159n9 Tagliabue, John, 74, 157n2 Tanner, Tony, 55 Tennyson, Alfred: “The Eagle,” 155–56n5 Tetreault, Philip, 76, 87, 89, 91, 116, 119, 158n5 “That Dark Other Mountain,” 95 Thompson, Lawrance, 113–14, 119–20, 152n12

174 ❧

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Index Thoreau, Henry David, 3, 22, 26–28, 31–32, 34, 41, 57–58, 67, 103, 108, 118, 138, 150n6, 153–54n6, 154n9, 156n7; “Autumnal Tints,” 153–54n6; Walden, 2, 5, 18, 37, 57–58, 153n3, 154n12; The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, 27, 103 “Three Darks Come Down Together,” 68–70 “Three Old Ladies and Three Spring Bulbs,” 151n8 “Tomatoes,” 154n7 Travelling in Amherst, 1–2, 7– 9, 16–19, 26, 29, 47, 150n6, 154n11 The Trouble with Francis, 1–2, 7–10, 12–14, 17, 19–27, 40–41, 48–49, 57, 78, 87, 100, 111–12, 115, 117, 119–20, 123, 138, 151–52n12, 155n1, 158n8 Tuke, Henry Scott, 130 Turner, Alberta, 86– 87, 158n7 “Two Days Among the FeebleMinded,” 150n4 “Two Phases,” 130 “Two Wrestlers,” 59, 65

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Untermeyer, Louis, 24, 100–102, 151n10, 152n13, 154n7 Uranians, 130 “Valhalla,” 42–48, 100, 102 Valhalla and Other Poems, 3, 28, 100 Vazakas, Byron, 164n2

Vietnam War, 1, 4, 25, 74, 87, 89– 91 “Vigiler,” 130 Walker, David, 51–53 Walker, Frederick, 130 Wallace, Robert, 62, 64 “Watching Gymnasts,” 80– 81 “Water Poem,” 86– 97 “Waxwings,” 67– 68, 143–44, 145 We Fly Away, 1–2, 7– 9, 12–16 “While I Slept,” 144–45 “White Sunday Morning,” 15 Whitman, Walt, 57–58, 84, 121, 127–29, 156n7, 163n7, 163n11; “Calamus,” 127– 28; “City of Orgies,” 127– 28; Democratic Vistas, 128; “I Dream’d in a Dream,” 128; “In Paths Untrodden,” 127; “The Sleepers,” 128, 163n8; “Song of Myself,” 57, 128–29 Wilbur, Richard, 35, 137, 149n1 Williams, William Carlos, 74–77, 163– 64n2; triadic line, 163– 64n2; “The Wind Increases,” 75–76, 157n3 “The Wood Pewee,” 106–7, 117 word- count, 4, 74, 75, 85, 121, 141. See also “Silent Poem”; silent poems Wordsworth, William, 139 Worth, Barry, 161n1 Young, David, 19–20, 66– 67 Zimmerman, Lee, 55, 58, 156n7

☙ 175

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved. The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Andrew Stam b u k was born in Torrance, California. He holds advanced degrees from the University of Chicago and New York University. He lives in New York City with his wife and daughter and teaches in the Department of English at Hofstra University.

The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest

Copyright © 2011. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved. The Man Who Is and Is Not There : The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. ProQuest