- Cold Pastoral
I’m on a cliff, staring straight down into tropics. This isn’t where I was. I step off, expecting to jolt back into my bed but my fall continues. I dissect the wind. Tom Petty plays in my left ear. In my right, a joke about shearing after summer. I stare down into the forest, now mere nettles multiplied by miles. Why doesn’t the UK use kilometres?
After my 19th UK rejection in a row I decide to write a poem I actually want to, but I very quickly discover I hate poetry. For my make-even, last-ditch 20th submission I pick a small classics-inclined magazine and figure I would read up on this Keats all my Nottinghamshire pals are fussing about and just rehash something I like under guise of homage.
First, I parse the idolatry. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” overshadows everything. Yesterday, one such Nottinghamshire pal commented on the mute iconicity of “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, particularly the final stanza with its talk of “marble men” and the urn enduring “in midst of other woe”. It seems like it’s saying beauty is “all [we] need to know”, and yet the joy of beauty in all its forms remains, for us mortals, dreadfully fleeting. Noted, I thought. We die. Or maybe the question has more to do with the needfulness of knowing. The ratio between how much you know vs how much you don’t need to know, but know anyway. After all, Keats is saying that unheard melodies are somehow sweeter than heard ones. It’s all very conceptual and I think this is it baby, people in the UK both love and hate this. Spirit ditties man, spirit ditties. I think about deaf things. Mexican mole lizards, Sylvan historians (supposedly), Beethoven, Beethoven cosplayers, my uncle in a few years, the published-sphere to my last 19 poems. Oh.
Depressingly, “Ode to Grecian Urn” contains many other mute lines, one in particular being:
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
I find myself drawn… dizzily… to this one. Dizzy in the throat, like how Adina feels when she stares at the poplars—green knives—for too long in the Herta Müller novel The Fox Was Ever The Hunter. I attend a Keats appreciation meeting at a cafe and talk about my throat dizziness. The group nods in encouragement. In my head, I see 19 editors nodding in encouragement. They explain to me that “cold” describes both an elemental everlasting and the throes of wintery desolation, or something like that. The urn is a still life, a reverberating mortality. Someone adds how this all ties in with Keats’ own life, that today we are all closer to mortality than we have ever been, and to Keats, anyone above 26 is closer to immortality than he ever was. Are you even 26, someone asks. I think maybe it’s easier to either be within the inner circle of a poet’s appreciation group or removed from it altogether, but never dawdling on the outer rim. Some roots rock ballad plays softly in the background as we sit facing each other. I don’t recognise it.
At home, I try dissecting other Keats poems and looking up other $50 honorarium opinions, but find myself returning continually to “Ode”. It seems its idolatry has parsed me. I think about “As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!”, its is-ness and isn’t-ness. Tangents like these are likely what gives Müller leave to say, seriously, that “what gets said is one thing, but what isn’t said has to be there as well.” I try to stay on this point, this line. The deadline for my 20th submission is in an hour. In the context of the poem, it’s a syntactical and tonal departure from its earlier stanzas, and yet best describes what was on that urn. With narrative finality it shakes off the old compacted snow of the poem’s blissfully static turns; yet it flash freezes the idyllic and declares it ideal. How sad, I think. I shut my laptop and tuck myself into an empty double, hoping the drabness doesn’t dip into my dreams. I think about the last 19 poems and how each one was trying to say something about a thing, but it seems the real trick is writing something that both says and doesn’t say something, that contains both reality and whatever’s behind it. Is it behind or beneath? Maybe it’s before. I rise. I dig up an old poem about check-in baggage, and click submit. I lie back in bed and try to unthink this double-sided sticky eternal cold-thawingly-pastoral. The left leg outside the blanket in June. The thankless shepherd. The lifeless life-giver.
I’m on a cliff, staring straight down into tropics. This isn’t where I was. I step off, expecting to jolt back into my bed but my fall continues. I dissect the wind. Tom Petty plays in my left ear. In my right, a joke about shearing after summer. I stare down into the forest, now mere nettles multiplied by miles. Why doesn’t the UK use kilometres? This isn’t where I was. The joke’s punchline is “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”. How does this line contribute in any way to any thing? Let us all do what we can to reduce the impact of this line in poetic ecology, my friend says. He then accuses me of plagiarism. This isn’t where I was. The nettles sway. The nettles swarm. The nettles are mealybugs in a bed the size of the East Midlands. I jolt but only my left leg wakes up. It is maddeningly hot, and the mealybugs are a billion air conditioners. The planet is cooled and cooked. Keats isn’t surprised. Isn’t this the truth of where we are, this garden state of things. Isn’t this where I was. Isn’t this the truest punchline.
