Richard Eberhart, American visionary poet of death - Praise to the cry that I cannot understand

I’ve been enjoying the poetry of Richard Eberhart recently.  “Once considered one of the most prominent American poets of the 20th century…” says his bio at the Poetry Foundation, the eventual, likely not so distant fate of almost all of the prominent American poets.  He was a great poet of death; his two famous anthology pieces, “The Groundhog” (1934) and “The Fury of Aerial Bombardment” (1945) are death poems, the latter large-scale moving to the personal, the former small but moving towards the cosmic:

I stood there in the whirling summer,

My hand capped a withered heart,

And thought of China and of Greece,

Of Alexander in his tent;

Of Montaigne in his tower,

Of Saint Theresa in her wild lament.

I suppose people with an interest in American poetry still know these two.

And bones bleaching in the sunlight

Beautiful as architecture…

They are memorable poems.

I read, in this pass, Eberhart’s second, and third books – the first was mostly renounced – Reading the Spirit (1937, home of “The Groundhog”) and Burr Oaks (1947, home of “The Fury of Aerial Bombardment”), as well as a pair of tiny but career-spanning collections, New and Selected Poems: 1930-1990 (1990) and Maine Poems (1989).  Jay Parini, selecting the Selected, says Eberhart “printed too many poems that stand up badly to his best work,” and it is clear enough from those earlier books that Eberhart would often write multiple poems with similar conceits and rather than picking the best one just include them all.  These little, late books do not suffer from that problem.

Eberhart is essentially a nature poet, a Blakean visionary unafraid to begin from a naïve premise, as in “Gnat on My Paper,” about what the title says:

Small creature, gnat on my paper,

Too slight to be given a thought,

 

I salute you as the evanescent,

I play with you in my depth.

Small to big, big to small.  Eberhart looks into a nest, into the eye of a juvenile sea-hawk:

To make the mind exult

At the eye of a sea-hawk,

A blaze of grandeur, permanence of the impersonal.  (from “Sea-Hawk”)

Maybe that is why he is “once prominent.”  For a while, the general mood of poetry readers has leaned more towards the personal.  Let’s look at another bird, a loon – a lot of birds in these poems:

Perfect cry, ununderstandable essence

Of sound from aeons ago, a shriek,

Strange, palpable, ebullient, wavering,

A cry that I cannot understand.

Praise to the cry that I cannot understand.  (from “A Loon Call”)

There are plenty of people, too.  Leafing through The Maine Poems I see clam diggers, sailors, fishermen, farmers, a fence-builder – “Bad neighbors make good fencers” (from “Spite Fence”).  Oh no, here are the people who bury Leo, a beloved Pekingese, in two poems, the tragic “Summer Incident” and the pathetic “Dog Days,” another variation, one of many on “The Groundhog”:

They laid him in, blanket and all, placed a crude wooden marker,

Silence, not a dry eye among the group of homo sapiens.

They were witnesses to starkness, the cruelty of nature,

Aware of their own deaths, come as they may.  (from “Summer Incident”)

For all of his innocent, open-eyed, visionary feeling, Eberhart does have a sense of humor.  One of his poems should be the Maine state anthem:

But when you return to ancient New England

The first question asked on Main Street,

With breathless expectations, is,

Are you going to Maine?

 

Are you going to Maine, oh,

Are you going to Maine?

And I say, yes, we are going to Maine,

And they say, When?  (from “Going to Maine”)

I’m not sure when this poem was written, but it is till accurate.  Somebody set it to music.  The Mountain Goats song of that title is not the same song, although it shares a sensibility.