The Double Dream of Spring Read online

  The Double Dream of Spring

  Poems

  John Ashbery

  Contents

  Publisher’s Note

  The Task

  Spring Day

  Plainness in Diversity

  Soonest Mended

  Summer

  It Was Raining in the Capital

  Variations, Calypso and Fugue on a Theme of Ella Wheeler Wilcox

  Song

  Decoy

  Evening in the Country

  For John Clare

  French Poems

  The Double Dream of Spring

  Rural Objects

  Years of Indiscretion

  Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape

  Sunrise in Suburbia

  Definition of Blue

  Parergon

  The Hod Carrier

  An Outing

  Some Words

  Young Man with Letter

  Clouds

  The Bungalows

  The Chateau Hardware

  Sortes Vergilianae

  Fragment

  About the Author

  Publisher’s Note

  Long before they were ever written down, poems were organized in lines. Since the invention of the printing press, readers have become increasingly conscious of looking at poems, rather than hearing them, but the function of the poetic line remains primarily sonic. Whether a poem is written in meter or in free verse, the lines introduce some kind of pattern into the ongoing syntax of the poem’s sentences; the lines make us experience those sentences differently. Reading a prose poem, we feel the strategic absence of line.

  But precisely because we’ve become so used to looking at poems, the function of line can be hard to describe. As James Longenbach writes in The Art of the Poetic Line, “Line has no identity except in relation to other elements in the poem, especially the syntax of the poem’s sentences. It is not an abstract concept, and its qualities cannot be described generally or schematically. It cannot be associated reliably with the way we speak or breathe. Nor can its function be understood merely from its visual appearance on the page.” Printed books altered our relationship to poetry by allowing us to see the lines more readily. What new challenges do electronic reading devices pose?

  In a printed book, the width of the page and the size of the type are fixed. Usually, because the page is wide enough and the type small enough, a line of poetry fits comfortably on the page: What you see is what you’re supposed to hear as a unit of sound. Sometimes, however, a long line may exceed the width of the page; the line continues, indented just below the beginning of the line. Readers of printed books have become accustomed to this convention, even if it may on some occasions seem ambiguous—particularly when some of the lines of a poem are already indented from the left-hand margin of the page.

  But unlike a printed book, which is stable, an ebook is a shape-shifter. Electronic type may be reflowed across a galaxy of applications and interfaces, across a variety of screens, from phone to tablet to computer. And because the reader of an ebook is empowered to change the size of the type, a poem’s original lineation may seem to be altered in many different ways. As the size of the type increases, the likelihood of any given line running over increases.

  Our typesetting standard for poetry is designed to register that when a line of poetry exceeds the width of the screen, the resulting run-over line should be indented, as it might be in a printed book. Take a look at John Ashbery’s “Disclaimer” as it appears in two different type sizes.

  Each of these versions of the poem has the same number of lines: the number that Ashbery intended. But if you look at the second, third, and fifth lines of the second stanza in the right-hand version of “Disclaimer,” you’ll see the automatic indent; in the fifth line, for instance, the word ahead drops down and is indented. The automatic indent not only makes poems easier to read electronically; it also helps to retain the rhythmic shape of the line—the unit of sound—as the poet intended it. And to preserve the integrity of the line, words are never broken or hyphenated when the line must run over. Reading “Disclaimer” on the screen, you can be sure that the phrase “you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn ahead” is a complete line, while the phrase “you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn” is not.

  Open Road has adopted an electronic typesetting standard for poetry that ensures the clearest possible marking of both line breaks and stanza breaks, while at the same time handling the built-in function for resizing and reflowing text that all ereading devices possess. The first step is the appropriate semantic markup of the text, in which the formal elements distinguishing a poem, including lines, stanzas, and degrees of indentation, are tagged. Next, a style sheet that reads these tags must be designed, so that the formal elements of the poems are always displayed consistently. For instance, the style sheet reads the tags marking lines that the author himself has indented; should that indented line exceed the character capacity of a screen, the run-over part of the line will be indented further, and all such runovers will look the same. This combination of appropriate coding choices and style sheets makes it easy to display poems with complex indentations, no matter if the lines are metered or free, end-stopped or enjambed.

  Ultimately, there may be no way to account for every single variation in the way in which the lines of a poem are disposed visually on an electronic reading device, just as rare variations may challenge the conventions of the printed page, but with rigorous quality assessment and scrupulous proofreading, nearly every poem can be set electronically in accordance with its author’s intention. And in some regards, electronic typesetting increases our capacity to transcribe a poem accurately: In a printed book, there may be no way to distinguish a stanza break from a page break, but with an ereader, one has only to resize the text in question to discover if a break at the bottom of a page is intentional or accidental.

  Our goal in bringing out poetry in fully reflowable digital editions is to honor the sanctity of line and stanza as meticulously as possible—to allow readers to feel assured that the way the lines appear on the screen is an accurate embodiment of the way the author wants the lines to sound. Ever since poems began to be written down, the manner in which they ought to be written down has seemed equivocal; ambiguities have always resulted. By taking advantage of the technologies available in our time, our goal is to deliver the most satisfying reading experience possible.

  The Task

  They are preparing to begin again:

  Problems, new pennant up the flagpole

  In a predicated romance.

  About the time the sun begins to cut laterally across

  The western hemisphere with its shadows, its carnival echoes,

  The fugitive lands crowd under separate names.

  It is the blankness that follows gaiety, and Everyman must depart

  Out there into stranded night, for his destiny

  Is to return unfruitful out of the lightness

  That passing time evokes. It was only

  Cloud-castles, adept to seize the past

  And possess it, through hurting. And the way is clear

  Now for linear acting into that time

  In whose corrosive mass he first discovered how to breathe.

  Just look at the filth you’ve made,

  See what you’ve done.

  Yet if these are regrets they stir only lightly

  The children playing after supper,

  Promise of the pillow and so much in the night to come.

  I plan to stay here a little while

  For these are moments only, moments of insight,

  And there are reaches to be attained,

  A last lev
el of anxiety that melts

  In becoming, like miles under the pilgrim’s feet.

  Spring Day

  The immense hope, and forbearance

  Trailing out of night, to sidewalks of the day

  Like air breathed into a paper city, exhaled

  As night returns bringing doubts

  That swarm around the sleeper’s head

  But are fended off with clubs and knives, so that morning

  Installs again in cold hope

  The air that was yesterday, is what you are,

  In so many phases the head slips from the hand.

  The tears ride freely, laughs or sobs:

  What do they matter? There is free giving and taking;

  The giant body relaxed as though beside a stream

  Wakens to the force of it and has to recognize

  The secret sweetness before it turns into life—

  Sucked out of many exchanges, torn from the womb,

  Disinterred before completely dead—and heaves

  Its mountain-broad chest. “They were long in coming,

  Those others, and mattered so little that it slowed them

  To almost nothing. They were presumed dead,

  Their names honorably grafted on the landscape

  To be a memory to men. Until today

  We have been living in their shell.

  Now we break forth like a river breaking through a dam,

  Pausing over the puzzled, frightened plain,

  And our further progress shall be terrible,

  Turning fresh knives in the wounds

  In that gulf of recreation, that bare canvas

  As matter-of-fact as the traffic and the day’s noise.”

  The mountain stopped shaking; its body

  Arched into its own contradiction, its enjoyment,

  As far from us lights were put out, memories of boys and girls

  Who walked here before the great change,

  Before the air mirrored us,

  Taking the opposite shape of our effort,

  Its inseparable comment and corollary

  But casting us farther and farther out.

  Wha—what happened? You are with

  The orange tree, so that its summer produce

  Can go back to where we got it wrong, then drip gently

  Into history, if it wants to. A page turned; we were

  Just now floundering in the wind of its colossal death.

  And whether it is Thursday, or the day is stormy,

  With thunder and rain, or the birds attack each other,

  We have rolled into another dream.

  No use charging the barriers of that other:

  It no longer exists. But you,

  Gracious and growing thing, with those leaves like stars,

  We shall soon give all our attention to you.

  Plainness in Diversity

  Silly girls your heads full of boys

  There is a last sample of talk on the outer side

  Your stand at last lifts to dumb evening

  It is reflected in the steep blue sides of the crater,

  So much water shall wash over these our breaths

  Yet shall remain unwashed at the end. The fine

  Branches of the fir tree catch at it, ebbing.

  Not on our planet is the destiny

  That can make you one.

  To be placed on the side of some mountain

  Is the truer story, with the breath only

  Coming in patches at first, and then the little spurt

  The way a steam engine starts up eventually.

  The sagas purposely ignore how better off it was next day,

  The feeling in between the chapters, like fins.

  There is so much they must say, and it is important

  About all the swimming motions, and the way the hands

  Came up out of the ocean with original fronds,

  The famous arrow, the girls who came at dawn

  To pay a visit to the young child, and how, when he grew up to be a man

  The same restive ceremony replaced the limited years between,

  Only now he was old, and forced to begin the journey to the sun.

  Soonest Mended

  Barely tolerated, living on the margin

  In our technological society, we were always having to be rescued

  On the brink of destruction, like heroines in Orlando Furioso

  Before it was time to start all over again.

  There would be thunder in the bushes, a rustling of coils,

  And Angelica, in the Ingres painting, was considering

  The colorful but small monster near her toe, as though wondering whether forgetting

  The whole thing might not, in the end, be the only solution.

  And then there always came a time when

  Happy Hooligan in his rusted green automobile

  Came plowing down the course, just to make sure everything was O.K.,

  Only by that time we were in another chapter and confused

  About how to receive this latest piece of information.

  Was it information? Weren’t we rather acting this out

  For someone else’s benefit, thoughts in a mind

  With room enough and to spare for our little problems (so they began to seem),

  Our daily quandary about food and the rent and bills to be paid?

  To reduce all this to a small variant,

  To step free at last, minuscule on the gigantic plateau—

  This was our ambition: to be small and clear and free.

  Alas, the summer’s energy wanes quickly,

  A moment and it is gone. And no longer

  May we make the necessary arrangements, simple as they are.

  Our star was brighter perhaps when it had water in it.

  Now there is no question even of that, but only

  Of holding on to the hard earth so as not to get thrown off,

  With an occasional dream, a vision: a robin flies across

  The upper corner of the window, you brush your hair away

  And cannot quite see, or a wound will flash

  Against the sweet faces of the others, something like:

  This is what you wanted to hear, so why

  Did you think of listening to something else? We are all talkers

  It is true, but underneath the talk lies

  The moving and not wanting to be moved, the loose

  Meaning, untidy and simple like a threshing floor.

  These then were some hazards of the course,

  Yet though we knew the course was hazards and nothing else

  It was still a shock when, almost a quarter of a century later,

  The clarity of the rules dawned on you for the first time.

  They were the players, and we who had struggled at the game

  Were merely spectators, though subject to its vicissitudes

  And moving with it out of the tearful stadium, borne on shoulders, at last.

  Night after night this message returns, repeated

  In the flickering bulbs of the sky, raised past us, taken away from us,

  Yet ours over and over until the end that is past truth,

  The being of our sentences, in the climate that fostered them,

  Not ours to own, like a book, but to be with, and sometimes

  To be without, alone and desperate.

  But the fantasy makes it ours, a kind offence-sitting

  Raised to the level of an esthetic ideal. These were moments, years,

  Solid with reality, faces, namable events, kisses, heroic acts,

  But like the friendly beginning of a geometrical progression

  Not too reassuring, as though meaning could be cast aside some day

  When it had been outgrown. Better, you said, to stay cowering

  Like this in the early lessons, since the promise of learning

  Is a delusion, and I agreed, adding that

  Tomorrow
would alter the sense of what had already been learned,

  That the learning process is extended in this way, so that from this standpoint

  None of us ever graduates from college,

  For time is an emulsion, and probably thinking not to grow up

  Is the brightest kind of maturity for us, right now at any rate.

  And you see, both of us were right, though nothing

  Has somehow come to nothing; the avatars

  Of our conforming to the rules and living

  Around the home have made—well, in a sense, “good citizens” of us,

  Brushing the teeth and all that, and learning to accept

  The charity of the hard moments as they are doled out,

  For this is action, this not being sure, this careless

  Preparing, sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow,

  Making ready to forget, and always coming back

  To the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago.

  Summer

  There is that sound like the wind

  Forgetting in the branches that means something

  Nobody can translate. And there is the sobering “later on,”

  When you consider what a thing meant, and put it down.

  For the time being the shadow is ample

  And hardly seen, divided among the twigs of a tree,

  The trees of a forest, just as life is divided up

  Between you and me, and among all the others out there.

  And the thinning-out phase follows

  The period of reflection. And suddenly, to be dying

  Is not a little or mean or cheap thing,

  Only wearying, the heat unbearable,

  And also the little mindless constructions put upon

  Our fantasies of what we did: summer, the ball of pine needles,

  The loose fates serving our acts, with token smiles,

  Carrying out their instructions too accurately—

  Too late to cancel them now—and winter, the twitter

  Of cold stars at the pane, that describes with broad gestures

  This state of being that is not so big after all.

  Summer involves going down as a steep flight of steps

  To a narrow ledge over the water. Is this it, then,

  This iron comfort, these reasonable taboos,