Into the Ashen Night

 

by Brett Rutherford

I know we said we’d never —

but for a moment today

we passed a foot apart

on the angry pavement,

sun in your eyes,

the snow in mine.

The edges of our shadows touched,

an overlap of gray penumbras.

Late slant of sun upon my desk,

the lamp turned on, beam-glance

from the glass framed portrait

I have not brought myself

to hide away or burn —

too many shadows! I want to write.

My shadow dips down to page

with its own pen.

I hesitate.

It gets there first,

mocks my writing

with almost invisible ink,

my fountain-pen aslant

with most peculiar penmanship

in a nearly-forgotten tongue:

Ne sors pas dans la nuit cendrée,

sous l'ombre de la lune —

évite ce lieu hanté

où un fantôme ressuscité

chante pour lui-même!

Dans son sang-froid,

la rouille rouge

et une corrosion noire

coulent.

Son œil cyclopéen

aspire tout sur lui-même,

son iris

un abîme d'onyx...

Oh, the horrors that the heart withholds!

* * *

Translation:

O go not forth into the ashen night,

beneath the shadow of the moon —

avoid that haunted place

where a risen ghost sings to itself!

In its cold blood, red rust

and black corruption flow.

Its Cyclopean eye

draws all into itself,

its iris an abyss of onyx...

— Revised 2026. Originally titled, “Contact.”

The Ten-Letter Sign

95 Hope Street, Providence RI

by Brett Rutherford

A man who loved books, and who
assumed that others loved them too,
was inclined, in a town so rich
as Providence, to open a shop,
on Hope Street no less! What street
could be more auspicious?

With pride he marched down
to the sign-maker’s emporium
and ordered his name inscribed
in gilded and calligraphic
letters: J. J. COUTANCHE,

and then, in ten bright red
hand-carven woodblocks,
to be nailed above the window:
B O O K S E L L E R.

It was 1902. Streets teemed
with merchants and salesmen,
workers and well-dressed men
hurrying downtown and back.

Newspapers all folded up
they carried, for lack of better
things to occupy their time.
He would see to that.

He had Dickens by the boxcar,
Shakespeare in every mode
from pocket-plays to massive
collections of all the dramas.

From the French, there was
de Maupassant, so droll and moderne.
From the Russian, the latest
novels, from London, fine
bindings in leather rows,
their marbled edges butterflies.

Although he opened early,
stayed late, only a few
impoverished old ladies came.
Seeing his prices,
    they did not come again.

Gradually he came to see
that much of the day-time traffic
was Irish men and women
headed for mass at Saint Joseph’s
directly across the street.
At noontime, men hurtled by,
on their way to saloons
and boxing matches.
No books in their lunch pails!

After five years of this,
Coutanche developed
the most profound contempt
for the people of Providence.
If only he had gone to Boston.

And then, hearing the bells
that rang when his cash-register
did not, watching smug priests
and the resplendent funerals
one after another, 

it dawn upon him
     to change his profession.
He who had once sewn books
would now sew flesh. He who
had rubbed his hands along
the ribs of a leather binding

would now caress the cheeks
of the freshly-dead. The glue
that repaired and made books
whole when they were damaged,
would now be formaldehyde.

He read up on his new
profession. He would learn
as he went; no need
to take lessons or earn
a certificate. Ready at last

to start his new trade,
he laddered up his storefront,
removing the letters
B O O K S E L L
and had the sign-maker’s
emporium make up and paint
in the same block style
U N D E R T A K

His bargain-basement room
with all its penny discards
and damaged bindings
would now house coffins.

The Irish were not particular.
They needed Granny buried
cheaply and lickedy-split.
The priests, for a commission,
would send the grieving
relatives to his door.

He could not make them read,
but, damn, he would
bind them up handsomely
in shiny black caskets!

 

October Is Coming! (Anniversarius 16)

 

by Brett Rutherford

1

Listen! There is a sudden pause
between my words and the surrounding
silences: no breeze, no hum
of street lamps, no tread of tire —
even the birds have missed a beat.
It is the first self-conscious tinge
of maple leaf red, the first
night-chill of the season.
It is the caesura of equinox —
it whispers a prophecy:
October is coming.

It will not be like any other October.
You will be torn from the things that bind you.
You will follow a strange wind northward.
You will tread the edge of glaciers
  and blush with the iron tinge of destiny.
You will come to earth in a strange place
where you will be known as a leaf from an alien tree
    and be feared for it,
where you will seek the tongue-touch of another
    rasping exile — and find it.

Not for you the comfort of old trees,
    old branches, old roots — 
now at last the buoyant freedom of the nearly
    weightless,
the eyrie-view above pine-tops, eddied above
    rain troughs and lightning rods,
bird-free,

drifting ghostlike and invisible on graveyard mound,
grazing the cheeks of grievers, pausing
    upon the naked backs of lovers,
tracing the mysterious barricades between 
    the kingdoms of strays,
colliding with children in their chaotic play — 

Hearing at night with brittle ears the plaintive sea,
    the wearing away of shoreline,
the woeful throb of the requiem of whales,
the madrigal of feeding gulls, the thrust beat
    of the albatross in its pinioned flight,
the hideous slurring of squids,
the inexorable gnashing of the machinery of sharks —

Mute, passive, dumb as a dead leaf 
    you shall hear them all —

You shall move among the avalanche of first snow,
amazed at the shattering of perfect ice,
its joyous crystalline tone as it falls,
the utterly new dimension of its remaining,
endlessly crushed and compacted and moved,
singed to a fog and sublimed away
as if it had never been, while you
still lay like an old coat in a hamper —
grayer, crisper, more decrepit than ever.

And you suspect your lingering immortality —
a leaf, a brittle parchment that no one can read,
a shard, a skeleton of cellulose,
a thread, a string, a lichen roost, a bird-nest lining,
a witness of ever-advancing decay and assimilation,
by becoming nothing, becoming everything.

2

Yet this is such an insubstantial fate.
I can think of it now in the context 
    of this human frame,
hands to write it, lips to speak it
    as transcendental prophecy.
Not only the dead but the living
can pass to this realm beyond matter.
All who have lived or ever will are there already
but only one in a thousand suspects it.

Why, then, do I crave for touching,
for arm-enfolding tenderness on winter nights?
Why do I ache for the line of a slender neck,
a moist surrender, the firmness of flesh,
the drumbeat sonnet of another’s heart
loud in my ears, the harmony
of pacing my breath to another’s breath,
falling limbs entwined into a trusting sleep, 
or waking first and thanking the gods
for this wall of life between me and uncertainty?

I do not know, except that love
is the fluid of the Muses,
the enhancer of meaning, chariot of purpose,
that one plus one is not two
    but infinity,

that entropy, this modern malaise
    of the wasting leaf
is the false side of the coin of nature —
base metal welded to hidden gold.

3

Listen! October is coming!

It will not be like any other October.
You will be torn from your ease and comfort
by the one who loves you. You will follow
a strange wind northward, not as surrender
to an autumn urge, but as a warrior
for Spring. Glaciers will shudder back
at the green fringe of your beard. Your smile
will make strangers trust you, ask to know
what manner of tree sends youthful emigrants —
even the dry-leaf exiles will stir at your arrival.

You shall not pass the winter in random flight,
    nor cling to the steeples and chimney-tops.

Not for you the graveyard and its lying testaments,
not for you the vicarious touching of lovers and losers —

All shall know you and say of you:
Here is the one who loves and risks all.
You shall not heed the devious sea
and the night-call of Neptune’s ravenous hosts.
The owl, the raven, the whippoorwill,
    the squirrel, the cat, the sparrow
shall teach you the ways of their defiance of season,
their hidden thrust for continuance.

Boisterous, active, strident as a new tree
    you shall take root again,
defying the shadow master of winter,
    the devil of frost,
refusing to yield one leaf to the ache-long nights.

And you rejoice in your numbered mortality,
in love, at risk of happiness for a single embrace,
at risk of loss and denial, too —
but knowing it and caring not.

A love, an eye, a heart, a hand,
a witness to ever advancing hope,
one to the power of infinity —
one plus a fraction, approaching,
but never reaching, duality.

4

Which shall it be? This orient autumn
or this renascent spring? This painless slide
into the lush oblivion of ash, or wing beat
in Daedalus flight to a promised star?

I only know that October is coming.
It will not be like any other October.

 — September 1985, Providence, RI

Moving to Providence, 1985

by Brett Rutherford

This is Providence when it was still rather a hell-hole, but a very cheap place for writers to live. I moved there with my Siamese cat in 1985 and had eleven rooms in a Victorian house, for $450 a month. The unofficial state motto was "Mobsters and Lobsters" and the natives were exceedingly unfriendly. I lived there three years before I ever set foot in another person's house. I just found these poetic journal entries describing how awful it was, or seemed to be. For inexplicable reasons, I would spend almost half of my adult years in New England.

I have moved to Providence,

a writer’s paradise of low rents and large spaces.

The natives speak a dialect of broken English

conjugated with expletives. I have never heard

so many Fs and mother-F’s on a city bus.

They drive outdated cars, wide as bombers,

paint-scraped and dented,

leprous with rust-spot camouflage

turn corners with daring and macho screeches,

black trails of tires at every corner.

Boys at the corner loiter for cars, hand men
those little bags of powder they crave
as they furtively leave the off-ramp
for our disreputable neighborhood.
That the bags are full of baking powder
they will only learn later as even boys
know well the rules of cheat and sharp trading.

Eight of ten voters are Catholic,
virgins in little inverted bath-tubs adorn
the house fronts of the treeless side streets.
An old man tells me, “No trees. No birds.
No squirrels. No nuts. No leaves to rake.”

The heads of state and their families

control unmeasured tracts of property.

The governor’s name and picture adorn

each monolith and highway ramp.
Each sign must include “His Excellency”
before the current felon’s proper name.

The marble capitol is large enough

     to detain, if necessary,

     the entire electorate.

Well-known gangsters reside discreetly,

unperturbed by warrants or searches.
One tip-toes past the vending machine
storefront, the funeral home, the house
of the respected grandmother “of that name.”

Free enterprise is encouraged, narcotically.

Homes of the Anglo-rich are frequently burgled.

On a hill, the prestigious University

trains the sons of the rich

to assume their places of power.

The city is full of history, devoid of culture.

It drove out Poe, and tolerated Lovecraft
while watching him slant and starve.

It imports insults and toxic waste,

exports the simulacrum of itself:

cobblestones and shuttlecocks,

andirons and lightning rods and tassled shawls,

a horse, a red hen, a barrel of molasses

fresh from the Triangle trade.

The natives are known for aloofness,

their way of sidestepping foreigners.

Only family are invited to dinner.

Young men leave the state

to find a girl who isn't a cousin.

One must be introduced to a prostitute.

Despite all this, the artists come here.

Cheap is cheap. Besides, where else

can you find a Third World Country

without leaving New England?

Vanderbeck's Poem About Rhode Island Slime Mold

The following poem may be the only poem ever written about slime mold — if not the only, it is certainly the best. A few words of explanation should precede any reading of this remarkable "shaggy dog" poem. Rhode Island plays host to a large slime mold called fuligo, which grows around the roots and trunks of dead or dying trees. Although fuligo is believed to be stationary, there are other slime molds which display remarkable behavior: some can actually move from one place to another in quest of nourishment; others are capable of breaking up into thousands of smaller, mobile organisms, which can later rejoin to re-form the original slime mold. Fuligo is attractive in appearance at first, looking ever so much like a large loaf of French bread. Later, it bursts open, revealing yellow and purple patches, quite appalling. Pieter and I are both fascinated by this very Lovecraftian organism. Pieter's poem also plays on the re-division of life into three families: plants, fungi and animals. Some people resist this new classification, since they are convinced that anything alive must be either plant or animal. Biologists have now decided that fungi are so very, very different that they cannot be called plants at all. And slime molds may be something else yet again. Without further ado, here is Pieter's slime mold opus:

OF THE SAME MOLD

He sleeps uneasily —
really not at all.
One thing is on his mind.
It turns over and over.
He turns over and over.
He cannot get it off his mind.
He cannot go to sleep.
He must not.
Once again,
he opens his eyes.
It is still dark.
He looks at the clock.
It is three.
Only three.
He looks out the window
It is not there.
It was there.
He is worried.
He gets up,
throws back the covers,
slips on the slippers,
goes downstairs,
goes outside.

Then he sees it.
It is still there.
But it is not on the tree.
It has moved.
It is at the beginning of his front walk,
about to turn the right angle.
He calculates.
Five hours, five feet.
He can get in a night.
Nothing can happen.
He goes back in.
He must get to sleep.
This cannot go on.

Who would think?
What looks like an omelette turned inside-out,
yellow, white, brown , grey,
amorphous and variegated,
defying any term of description —
that.
Who would think?

He goes back in.
He must sleep.
The door is closed.
That will help.
He is on the second floor.
That is better.
His bedroom door is closed.
If necessary, he can stuff old undershirts beneath it.
Not now.
Not tonight.
He is sure.
The lights go out.
The night is dark.
Dawn. will be approaching,
but for now,
the stars are full out.

It turns.
The walk awaits.
The porch steps.
The porch.
The front door.
The others know.
The ones inside.
They await the joining,
the ones in the walls,
the basement,
the attic,
the contingent from the garage,
they all know.
They await.
Moving quickly now,
(now that he is not up to measure it,)
it slides up the rough walk,
picking up its trail behind it.
It needs every one.
It crosses the cracks.
There is a twig.
It consumes it.
Pemmican.
Trail food,
No stopping on the campaign.

They are gathering.
They know the way under the door.
The garage contingent has entered the back.
They will meet at the stairs.
It will require cantilevering.
No problem.
The threshold has been crossed.
The rug is being attempted.
It is rough,
but it contains a cornucopia of dust mites, and their mites.
Snacks along the trail.
It will leave a swath.

Along the way it encounters various molds.
All colors.
All shapes.
But stationary.
The lower ones.
What to call them?
There is a name,
but it is not polite.
It eats them and goes on.
That’s evolution.
As it gains mass, it accelerates.
They are nearly all gathered by the stairway.
The basement contingent is eating too much along the way.
The night is going fast.
They do not want to put this off for another night.
This was to be the night.
There are other houses.
The city is big.
They can be big too.
It.
Whatever.

 

He snores.
It echoes down the stairway.
He sleeps fitfully.
He is having dreams.
Let him have his dreams.
No more measuring.
He won’t need measuring.
What an empire will be started.
It can go in all directions.
It is only a matter of yards or meters.
A ladder has been established.
The stairway is full of mites.
It is that white carpeted tread,
Valley of Shenandoah,
They’ll, it’ll, whatever’ll, be there in good shape.
One cannot live by tree bark alone.
One, many , whatever.

He snores.
His dreams are over.
The crack beneath the bedroom door is large.
The others are already in there.
They came up through the hot-air register grate,
joined by the ones from the attic.
What a bunch they are.
It is. Whatever.
Why express a thing that changes shape?
It will soon.
It may not get through the door.
It will not need to.
It will be the house.

Only feet now.
Not even yards.
The bed clothes are hanging down.
On all sides they are touching the floor.
They can use Greco-Roman tactlcs.
Classical maneuver.
Right by the book.

He is not snoring now.
He is in deep sleep.
The sky turns slaty blue out the window.
They, it, forms a ring.
A yellow ring.
Brown and grey join white.
Their lack of form is its strength.
No shape, no confrontation.
No consistency, no injury.
No firm entityship, no name.
But one.
They have been called it.
But the terms are not agreed upon.
Is it, they, a plant , an animal, both, neither?
What does it matter?
It, they, gather, gathers.
E Pluribus Unum, E Unibus Plurum.
Soon the house, and then the street,
the so-called neighborhood.
Neighborhood, indeed.

He snorts his last.
His arm hangs over the side.
They will not modify its tactics.
The classical way turns best.
Gather all.
Wait for the strike.
The ascent.
The occupation.
Then they, it, and he will be no different.
There will be reconciliation.
The marriage of Fuligo.

Water Sprite (Providence)

Who are you, Water Sprite of the Seekonk? Who made you, this full moon night of lilacs, like spring itself a-burst, made you leap from the bulrushes of the park lagoon, your bare shoulders wet from the limpid waters, your long hair sun-gold (bleached white in lunary light, but sun-gold nonetheless!)?

Who made you so irresistibly beautiful. your visage the sculpted dream of surrender, your eyes the blue of hyacinth, of lapus lazuli?

As I rode by on my bicycle at midnight, who made you run naked to greet me, then leap into a clutch of chameleon trees?

Who made your fleeing soundless, as your bare feet sought stealth of moss?

Who, as I followed, bicycle laid flat on the clover grass and forgotten, made shards of you dissolve, in dapple of moonlight, in fall of blossom, uncurling fern and peeping mushroom?

Who made your soft voice beckon me, leading me deeper in woods. Circling, to come at you above and behind the lagoon edge, I came confounded to a rock at the other edge of the pool?

Was it your voice that whispered, as ripples subsided from a sinking point:

Follow me if you dare. I can be yours: mad angel of your destiny. Chase me forever – but I will always elude you — always escape to the other surface of water, of mirrors. Yours and not yours at the same moment, I will run through your hands like mercury.

I wait. Nothing rises to the surface to breathe. No bubble breaks the glass sheen of mirrored water. The night sky no longer wavers. The moon above, and the moon reflected, are equally still.

I ride home slowly, inhale the languor of cherry, the braggart bloom of magnolia, the luxury of lilacs. Who could resist this moon, this Dionysian spring? It draws us, real and unreal, mortal and mythical, quickens the water to form you, draws your spirit to my substance, my solitude to your incompleteness.

Were you some runaway, an escapee from the nearby asylum? A teen boy in moon-madness, seized by a sudden urge to plunge naked into the willow-fringed water? Or were you truly spectral, Ariel’s cousin?

Shall I return to find you some other spring first-night? Or shall you seek me out, coalescing from rainstorm? Will you press through my window-screen, cooling my night-heat with your smooth pale skin? Will you caress me with the patient ardor of ocean, the murmur of brooks in my ear? Will I taste dew on your lips?  And will you one day, as we stand at lake’s edge, pull me downward, arms strong as river currents?

Weeks pass. I keep seeing you in others, but others are not you. No one possesses the lilac scent of your impossible hair. No sight matches the clear blue window of your eyes above me.

To the Arc of the Sublime (Anniversarius 27)

In nights beneath the stars,
    sometimes alone — sometimes
    with one I loved
         (in futile or secret urgency) —
I have outwaited
    the rise and fall of Scorpio,
         arc of its tail
              stinging the treetops.
I have traced the inconstant moon,
    the indecisive Venus;
    feel more assured
by the long, slow haul of Jupiter,
the patient tread of Pluto
    (whom they pursue
         in their frigid outer orbits
I cannot guess)

Such solitude,
    millennia between
         the fly-bys of comets,
perhaps is why
    they need so many moons,
why rings of ice
    encircle them like loyal cats.
It is lonely in space,
    far out
where the sun is merely
    a star among stars.

It is lonely in autumn.
    I sit in midnight woods.
A trio of raccoons, foraging,
    come up to me,
black mask eyes of the young ones
interrogating the first cold night,
    the unaccustomed noisiness
         of bone-rattle maple leaf
              beneath their paws.

How can I tell them
    these trees will soon be skeletons,
    the pond as hard as glass,
    the nut and berry harvest over?
These two are young —
    they would not believe me.
Their mother rears up protectively,
    smells me,    scents out
    the panic among the saplings,
    the smell of rust and tannin.

We share a long stillness,
    a moment when consciousness 
    is not a passive agency.
Our sight invades the countryside,
    embracing everything —
    sleepers in beds in a concrete tower-
    earthworms entwining in humus rot —
goes up and out through the limpid sky,
    streaming past moon —
         — moon’s lava’d seas —
out, out, to the arc of the sublime,
    tracing the edge of great Antares,
leaping to other galaxies unafraid.


(Let space expand as though the worlds
    still feared their neighbors!
Let miser stars implode,
    their dwarf hearts shriveling
         to cores of iron!)
We are the scourge of entropy.
    We sing the one great note
         through which new being
              comes out of nothingness.

Does it have meaning,
    this seed-shagged planet
        alive with eyes?
Is earth the crucible,
    sandbox of angry gods,
or is it the eye of all eyes,
    ear of all ears,
the nerve through which the universe
    acquires self-knowledge?

But these are weighty thoughts 
    for man and mammal!
We are but blood and minerals,
    upright for an instant,
    conscious for but a moment,
    a grainfall of cosmic hourglass.
Yet I am not ephemeral:
    I freeze time,
         relive moments
              chronicle the centuries
    re-speak Shakespeare,
         beat out the staves of Mozart,
              read the same books
              my forebears knew
         make of old words
              my wordy pyramid.


I am the one
    snapping the pictures of solar systems,
    sending myself
         an outside-in self-portrait.
I send my name and signature
    on bottles spinning past Uranus.
I am the one who asks, Is it worth it?
I who hear the X-ray wind reply, It is!
I am the one who would not stay in caves,
    I was discontent in the treetops.
I wanted to be bird and whale and rocket.

Ever, o ever more mortal now —
     — friends falling away like withered leaves —
still I find joy in this subliminal shrine of autumn.
My hand is full of fossil shells
    picked up from the lake shore rubble,
scallops enduring with the same rock faith
    (implicit minimum vocabulary):
I live, and the increase of my consciousness
    is the span of my life.


 — February 19, 1991, Providence, RI

The Place of Attics

What they say about New England and all the people confined to attics is really true. It is really true.

THE PLACE OF ATTICS

by Brett Rutherford

Hard-rock New England
is a world of attic-dwellers:
spinsters and hermits,
bloodlines of schizophrenia,
tight-shut clapboards,
paint-peeled shutters,
a baleful eye behind
a soiled lace curtain.

Who passed the picket-fence
and glanced into the parlor
as Lizzie Borden
wiped clean the ax-edge,
returned to her bed
with a migraine?

Who idled in Salem
at the old spice shop
as Hester Prynne,
a half-moon frowning
upon her scarlet letter
took basket to market,
and who, averting her gaze,
passed by what locked door
to eavesdrop on Arthur Dimmesdale
self-flogging, his blood beads
spelling the eternal A?
In Adams Fall, We Sinnèd All.

What batly belfry, bell-less
shadowed the wily minister
and his impish daughters,
as they bent pins for the witch-trial —
the spitting pins
they plan to blame on the innocent hag
whose farm and lands they covet?

From what high steeples
does what avenger look down
as the merchant’s gold plate,
the fine furnishings,
the pastoral landscapes,
swell three floors high,
on gold from selling
rum to the Negroes,
molasses to the distillers,
slaves to the sugar planters? 

What starry owl repines
beneath a rotting gable
to survey with unblinking eye
as the miser millionaire
shuffles by, slow-paced
in phlegmy wheeze,
walking a mile in old shoes
to find the cheapest chowder?

Does any widow’s watch
stand guard at night
as trucks roll by,
as slit-eyed criminals
dump toxic waste
behind the schoolyard,
or a barge tips oily sludge
into the harbor?

Up on that mansard height
of City Hall, does even one
of those peregrine falcons
take count of a dollar’s passage
from crack-smoke car-seat 
to bicycle boy,
to the convenience store,
to basement warehouse,
to the unseen drug lord? 

No Athens, Providence:
madhouse-state capital. 
The roads are blocked. 
Hotel rooms lock from the outside in. 
Thieves smirk on the doorsteps; 
they boast of useless crimes, 
confess to hasty interments. 
A tree-squirrel once heard one say
to his baseball-capped brother:  
“I’m just going to rob and rob
      until someone stops me.”

Nothing on high does anything.
The steeples jab Heaven’s eye.
Monotonous, the bells ring on.
Men climb church walls on moonless nights
to steal the lightning rods,
the copper strips from roof to ground.
They’d scrape the gold-leaf halos
from off the painted saints if they could.
The sombre, brown, cathedral ceiling
looks like a never-cleaned toilet bowl.
Hordes hunch in rain each spring,
kneel in a shrine for guidance,
while priests’ hands inch unseen
toward the choirboys’ backsides.
Our Lady among the crawling rats,
tear-streaked in verdigris,
blesses all in diapason tone.

My neighbor, from rooftop eyrie
shouts out from his blackened windows:
“You’re all going to die! All of you!
You’re all going to die.” Another night:
“I want a brain! I want a brain!”
he howls till squad cars’ arrival,
then hurls his television to shards
on the sidewalk below.

On just my block, one attic dweller,
a landlady’s schizophrenic son, hacks
endlessly in smoker’s cough, tubercular;
another houses twin infants mongoloid;
another, a white-haired granny who thrusts
her head out, Medusa locks and all,
to scream at any long-haired man who passes.

I did not live in an attic there, the gods
be thanked, but I wrote in one.

[Revised and expanded May 2019]

SUBJECTS: attics, New England, Rhode Island, Hester Prynne, Lizzie Borden, Providence, insanity, Salem

Sarah Helen Whitman As Poet and Critic, Part 6 (Final)

Sarah Helen Whitman As Poet and Critic, Part 6 (Final)

by Brett Rutherford

Whitman As Literary Personality

By the 1830s, Whitman had already settled into the eccentric style of dress and speech that a friend, Sarah S. Jacobs, describes thus: "deep-set eyes that gazed over and beyond, but never at you ...her movements were very rapid, and she seemed to flutter like a bird. … Her spell was on you from the moment she appeared… when she spoke, her empire was assured. She was wise, she was witty … her quick, generous sympathy, her sweet, unworldly nature, her ready recognition of whatever feeble talent, or inferior worth another person possessed"  She had also been blessed with, "a succession of adorers." Of her style, Ticknor tells us further, "[S]he loved silken draperies, lace scarves and floating veils … always shod in dainty slippers … [she] always carried a fan to shield her eyes from glare. Her rooms were always dimly lit."(??)
The latter-day figure of Isadora Duncan comes to mind in this description, not surprisingly. Sarah Helen identified with Athena, so it was only natural that she should don the goddess' helmet for an occasional party. Poe biographers have made sport of Helen's appearance, describing how friends trailed her on the street, retrieving for her the various scarves and parts of her costume that always seemed to be falling off. Helen's pagan garb was pretty daring in a very conventional city.
Although, with the publication of the non-Poe articles in this volume, as well as the publication of Whitman's poems, and some of her letters, we can now perceive her as a keen observer of letters and politics and a friend of artists, suffragists, spiritualists, poets and musicians. She was keen in her enthusiasms, yet reticent to lend her name to outlandish ideas and claims. Despite this, the prevailing impression of her is that of Poe's literary widow, as exemplified by this passage from Thomas Wentworth Higginson:

I like best to think of Poe as associated with his gifted betrothed, Sarah Helen Whitman, whom I saw sometimes in her later years. She had outlived her early friends and loves and hopes, and perhaps her literary fame, such as it was; she had certainly outlived her recognized toes with Poe, and all but his memory. There she dwelt in her little suite of rooms, bearing youth still in her heart and her voice, and on her hair also, and in her dress. Her dimly-lighted parlor was always decked, here and there, with scarlet; and she sat, robed in white, her back always to the light, with a discreetly-tinted shadow over her still thoughtful and noble face. She seemed a person embalmed while still alive; it was as if she might swell forever there, prolonging into an indefinite future the tradition of a poet's love; and when we remembered that she had been Poe's betrothed, that his kisses had touched her lips, that she still believed in him and was his defender, all criticism might well, for her sake, be disarmed, and her saintly life atone for his stormy and sad career.

For many years, Whitman's parlor was home for "The Phalanstery," a circle of artists, writers and musicians who were the Bohemia of Providence. Enlivening this circle of friends were the many visitors, from literary lions to dilettantes, who craved admission into this charmed circle in an otherwise drab and disapproving city. No literary person in Providence, then or since, has achieved a similar esteem and centrality.
After Mrs. Power's death in 1858, Helen and her sister purchased another house, which was moved in the 20th century from its original location on Benevolent Street to 140 Power Street. The home was Sarah Helen's literary salon, séance parlor and sanitarium for her sister. Susan Anna Power — who seems to have drifted, like her forebear Jemima Wilkinson, into religious mania — lived until December 8, 1877. Sarah Helen Whitman fell ill shortly after her sister's death, and was moved to the home of friends on Bowen Street, where she died June 27, 1878. Providence had lost its Muse.
*** ***
Break Every Bond: Sarah Helen Whitman In Providence, will be available in late 2018.
Picture: St John's Churchyard, behind Sarah Helen Whitman's home of the 1840s.

Subjects: Sarah Helen Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Providence

Sarah Helen Whitman As Poet And Critic, Part 3

Sarah Helen Whitman As Poet And Critic, Part 3

by Brett Rutherford

Her Published Criticism

Poe's most recent biographer, Kenneth Silverman, was one of the first scholars to acknowledge that Helen was a formidable intellectual match for Poe. Unlike the mostly dilettante female poets Poe knew in New York, Silverman observes, "Sarah Helen Whitman was a woman with sophisticated philosophical and literary interests — after her friend Margaret Fuller, perhaps the leading female literary critic in America" (Silverman 347).
Although she had no opportunity for formal education other than a brief period at a Quaker school on Long Island, Whitman was a well-read classicist, and her critical articles put her squarely in the league of the Harvard-trained Boston writers and reviewers. She knew Virgil and other Latin authors. She read Shelley and the Romantics, and she translated German supernatural ballads, as well as Goethe, and, from the French, Victor Hugo. Her many correspondents included Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Stephane Mallarmé and other British and continental writers, as well as domestic writers and editors.
Noelle Baker, who prepared the first critical edition of Whitman's critical articles, characterizes her subject thus: "[S]he should be studied with such established critics as William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Frederic Henry Hedge and Edgar Allan Poe. Whitman explicates transcontinental idealism within the context of American considerations of immorality, pre-Darwinian evolution theory, German Naturphilosophen, and the occult in her essays on Emerson, Alcott, Goethe, Shelley and Poe. She argued that these writers utilize literature, science and philosophy to recover individual spirituality in a time of inadequate traditional theology and doctrinal malaise. Almost invariably, Whitman defends her subjects from American critics who consider the byproducts of this secular faith irreligious or immoral" (Baker, iii).
Susan P. Conrad says that Whitman's essays "rank with those of Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Peabody as the most important literary criticism produced by women — and men — in the period [1830-1860]" (Conrad, 223).
Choosing "Break every bond" as her motto (Baker 12), Whitman intentionally chose some of the most controversial literary figures to write about. She defended Shelley's atheism, refused to throw out Byron's poetry even if he did have an affair with his half-sister, and championed the writing of Goethe even if Werther and Faust did seem to approve of seduction, vice, suicide, and bargains with the Devil. As Baker is quick to note, Whitman beat a trail-blazing path to Goethe's writing: "Whitman read German, and with Margaret Fuller produced the only American women's published analyses of German language and literature at a time when even most male critics read the Germans through Coleridge and Carlyle" (Baker, 3).
In her last years, Mrs. Whitman admired Swinburne's poetry, and in her correspondence with Mallarmé she offered the French poet advice on translating "The Raven" (Lloyd 103). She became "one of the most important mediators Mallarmé found between himself and Poe" (Lloyd 104). The French poet advised Whitman on her own translation of his "Tomb of Edgar Poe" (Ticknor 268-270).
Baker calls Whitman's criticism "a minor woman writer's programmatic attempt to publish a deviant, male-gendered authorial identity," but Baker seems to make too much of Whitman's pseudonymous publications. Her somewhat labored commentary about Whitman's attempts to "pass" as a male critic seem off the mark to me on three counts: first, criticism of the period tended to be highly intellectualized and almost genderless. Critics did not write as men or as women but as critics. Second, two of Whitman's key essays were published with the female pseudonym "Egeria," and most of Whitman's articles were circulated in manuscript among the literati and her identity was well known.
The name "Egeria" comes from Roman history. This is the name given to the prophetess (or, some say, consort) of the Roman king Numa Pompilius, the great Roman lawgiver. Since Whitman was the wife of a young Boston lawyer at the time, "Egeria" was a suitable name for the wife and muse of a young man who might hope some day to be a judge or lawmaker. Both articles by-lined "Egeria" appeared early in her widowhood, and this may have added to her reticence.
This raises yet again the question of the extent to which Whitman's literary fame was stifled or limited by her gender. The male writers and editors who encountered Whitman, from the Harvard circle, the Transcendentalist circle, and from New York, implored her to submit articles and poems for publication. According to Baker, Orestes Bronson "offered her an equal share in the profits of his Boston Quarterly Review if she would contribute an article to each number."
The discouragement that Whitman received from family and Providence society seems to have been mostly of female origin. In fact, men are not mentioned much at all in the family history, except when a male is required for legal purposes, such as arranging property transfers. Ticknor, Whitman's first biographer, alludes to family pressures that discouraged Whitman in her early years. Two of the original documents are at the John Hay library at Brown University — two letters from an older cousin who had been a "second mother" to Whitman during her stays on Long Island. Here we can see, first-hand, the kind of admonishment that Whitman had to endure in her teens, precisely when her passion for poetry was reaching its apex:

I am still as much your mother as ever. How do your studies come on? Do you go to school or not? if not, I hope that you study at home. Do not neglect this important facet of your life. It is now the springtime with you, my dear, and recollect that if you attend more to its enjoyments than its cares; if intent only on its flowers and birds, its fragrance and its harmony, you neglect the toilsome preparation and … your summer will be without fruit and your winter dreary indeed.
Of this be certain, that the only earthly foundation for permanent satisfaction is the utilization of the intellectual and moral faculties. Devote yourself, in the first place, to God, read his book, pray unto him and endeavor to increase in his knowledge. This, my child, is the only safe refuge in affliction, the only firm support in prosperity as well as in adversity, the only course of temporal as well as eternal happiness.
In the next place, cultivate a taste for solid and substantial knowledge; this only will tend to make you the sort of character I wish you to be. Poetry and novels, delightful as they may be to a youthful mind, are not only nugatory, they are not only void of all useful instruction, but they positively contaminate, and they occupy the time that ought to be devoted to better things (Marsh, Ms 204, HA1388).

Two months later, Whitman's cousin reinforces her argument in another letter:

I hear from your own account that you read too much poetry, dear Sarah. Indulged in to excess it becomes almost if not quite as pernicious as novels. Any kind of reading which tends to excite the fancy and raise up visions of romantic feelings unknown to this world is dangerous, except occasionally as a relaxation (Marsh, MS 204, HA1387).

This is probably the kind of regurgitated sermonizing that young Sarah Helen would have heard from her mother and the social circle of genteel old families into which she was born. Rebellion had its price, but the young poet was clearly drawn to the rebels' side. She exulted when her father, in his seventies, took up arms in the Dorr War and was briefly jailed. She chose a "conventional" husband, but her mother may not have known that John Winslow Whitman was actually a freethinker who had scandalized his class at Brown by giving a commencement address titled "The Atheist."

-- to be continued --

SUBJECTS: antebellum literature, Providence, Sarah Helen Whitman