ANTHONY HECHT (1923-2004)

One of the leading poets of his generation, Anthony Hecht was born in New
York City in 1923. Though a self-described mediocre student, he nonetheless
counted his first three years at Bard College some of the happiest of his life. His
college career was interrupted, however, when he was drafted into the army to
serve in World War II. As an infantryman, he fought in Germany, France, and
Czechoslovakia. His division also helped liberate Flossenbürg concentration camp.
Ordered to collect evidence from the French prisoners, the experience marked him
for the rest of his life. Hecht returned to the United States and finished his degree
at Kenyon College where he studied under John Crowe Ransom. At Kenyon he
also formed friendships with poets like Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Allen
Tate, and Randall Jarrell. Hecht’s first book, A Summoning of Stones (1954)
displays great technical skill, but for some critics, the style seems mannered and
dated. Donald Davie wrote in Shenandoah that “the poems are full of erudite and
cosmopolitan references, epigraphs from Moliere and so on; and the diction is
recherche, opulent, laced with the sort of wit that costs nothing. Here and there too
the poet knowingly invites what some reviewers have duly responded with, the
modish epithet ‘Baroque.’ But … the right word is the much less fashionable
‘Victorian.’”
Hecht is known for his masterful use of traditional forms and linguistic control.
Extraordinarily erudite, his verse often features allusions to French literature,
Greek myth and tragedy, and English poets and poetry stretching from Wallace
Stevens to John Donne. Hecht, who died in 2004, was often described as a
“traditionalist.” George P. Elliott contended in the Times Literary Supplement that
“Hecht’s voice is his own, but his language, more amply than that of any living
poet writing in English, derives from, adds to, is part of the great tradition.”

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Though his early work was often slighted as ornate or Baroque, his Pulitzer Prize-
winning collection The Hard Hours (1967) is generally seen as his breakthrough
volume. In that book, Hecht begins to use his experiences as a soldier in Europe
during World War II. The often unsettling and horrific insights into the darkness of
human nature told in limpid, flowing verse that characterize the poems in the
collection would become Hecht’s trademark. According to Dana Gioia: “Hecht
exemplifies the paradox of great art. … He found a way to take his tragic sense of
life and make it so beautiful that we have to pay attention to its painful truth.”
The Hard Hours broke with many of the mannerisms that marked A
Summoning of Stones. According to Laurence Lieberman in the Yale Review, “In
contrast with the ornate style of many of Hecht’s earlier poems, the new work is
characterized by starkly undecorative—and unpretentious—writing.” Hecht’s
mature style was evident in poems like “More Light! More Light!” one of his most
famous poems and, some argue, the finest poem in English to address the
Holocaust. The poem opens with the burning of a Christian heretic in the Tower of
London, but swiftly moves to “outside a German wood,” recounting a horrific
event of the Holocaust in an attempt to capture how “barbarism dehumanizes its
victims,” according to poet Edward Hirsch. Also described as a depiction of the
“end of Humanism,” Hecht’s poem is one of his most frequently anthologized and
discussed. Other poems that treat the Holocaust and Jewish trauma, such as “Rites
and Ceremonies,” as well as lighter verses such as Hecht’s response to Matthew
Arnold, “The Dover Bitch,” have become standards in the 20th-century canon.
Hecht’s next collections, Millions of Strange Shadows (1977) and The Venetian
Vespers (1979), return in some ways to the high style and diction of his first.
According to Steven Madoff in the Nation, Hecht is much like Wallace Stevens in
his interest in music “as a medium and transcendent force,” and he is especially
influenced by “the melodic intricacy of expression, and the expansive discourse
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that is propelled through its argument as much by the perfection of the words’
sound as by the thesis that they construct” in Stevens’s writing. Unfortunately, said
Madoff, “the complexity of this marriage [of sound and meaning] makes for a
certain inscrutability.” The Venetian Vespers, whose title Hecht admitted was his
favorite, continues to demonstrate the smoothness of Hecht’s line, and his ability to
jump registers, write metrically and adhere to complicated rhyme schemes without
ever abandoning a conversational, easy tone. As Michael Dirda noted in his
Washington Post Book World recommendation, “there is never a jarring line, never
a word out of place; everything fits together with the inevitable rightness of the
classical poet.” Though known for such formal, intense poetry of great moral and
ethical scope, Hecht also engaged seriously with light verse. With John Hollander,
he invented a humorous form known as the double dactyl, which is similar to the
limerick but significantly more difficult to write. Hecht and Hollander edited an
anthology of double dactyls called Jiggery-Pokery: A Compendium of Double
Dactyls in 1967.
Double Dactyl: A form of light verse invented and promoted by Paul Pascal,
Anthony Hecht, and John Hollander. The dactyl is a metrical foot consisting
of one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables. The double
dactyl consists of two quatrains, each with three double-dactyl lines followed
by a shorter dactyl-spondee pair (two stressed syllables). The two spondees
rhyme. Additionally, the first line must be a nonsense phrase, the second line a
proper or place name, and one other line, usually the sixth, a single double-
dactylic word that has never been used before in any other double dactyl. For
example:
Hickafreed Snickafreed
John Chapman Appleseed
Traveled and scattered small
Seeds on his route.
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Now we feel gratitude
Unquantifiable
Eating this perfectly
Portable fruit.
Hecht’s final books, Flight among the Tombs (1998) and The Darkness and the
Light (2001), take weighty subjects such as death, war, and the dark sides of love
as their central themes. Flight among the Tombs also contains elegies to Hecht’s
fellow poets Joseph Brodsky and James Merrill. Poetry contributor John Taylor
found that in Flight among the Tombs, “Hecht’s formal mastery is of the highest
order. Priceless lessons can be learned: the way a skillful poet manipulates a
variety of traditional forms (including the ever-tricky villanelle), the naturalness of
his meters and rhymes, his bold displays of consonance … his concision, his
descriptive powers.” While The Darkness and the Light was often described as
formally “less perfect” than earlier work, William Logan found that the
imperfection made the poems more emotionally accessible. “The moody
valedictory poems of The Darkness and the Light are more ravaged and humane
than any Hecht has written,” remarked Logan. Logan saw a “loosening of control”
that “has made Hecht a warmer, more sympathetic poet.”
Villanelle: A villanelle is a poem of nineteen lines, and which follows a strict
form that consists of five tercets (three-line stanzas) followed by one quatrain
(four-line stanza). The first and the third lines of the first stanza repeat
alternately in the following stanzas. These 2 refrain lines form the final
couplet in the quatrain. Villanelles use a specific rhyme scheme of ABA for
their tercets, and ABAA for the quatrain.
Hecht was also a noted critic. His volumes of literary criticism are highly
regarded. Obbligati (1986) contains critical essays on the poetry of Elizabeth
Bishop, Robert Lowell, and Emily Dickinson, as well interpretations of William
Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. A proponent of close reading and

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engagement with the text itself, Hecht’s critical work on the poetry of W.H.
Auden, The Hidden Law (1993), originates less from a “critical orthodoxy than
from the admiration of a working poet,” noted Sidney Burris in the Southern
Review. Hecht’s other volumes of prose include On the Laws of the Poetic Art
(1995), which contains six lectures Hecht gave at the National Gallery of Art in
1992 as part of that institution’s Andrew Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, and
Melodies Unheard: Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry (2003), the last work he
published before his death in 2004. Hailed as groundbreaking from nearly all
corners, the book contains essays that elucidate a lifetime of reading and thinking
about literature and poetry. Wide-ranging and extremely learned, the essays,
according to poet Mark Strand, “are models of civility, candor, and grace.”
Encompassing almost all of the English literary tradition, Hecht’s essays also treat
formal concerns such as the implications of the sestina and the structure of the
sonnet. Strand went on: “I know of no other poet, certainly none of Anthony
Hecht’s stature, who sheds as much light on the intricacies and hidden designs of
poems and who does it with such style.”
Sestina: A sestina consists of six stanzas of six unrhyming lines followed by a
three-line-stanza. The lines are almost always of regular length and are
usually in iambic pentameter – an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed
one (iambic) and with lines of ten syllables, five of them stressed (pentameter).
A longtime professor of poetry at the University of Rochester, Hecht also taught
at institutions such as Georgetown, Yale, Harvard, and Smith College. He served
as poet laureate from 1982 to 1984, and won many of America’s most prestigious
poetry awards, including the Bollingen Prize, the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, the
Wallace Stevens Award, and the Frost Medal. His collected poems were published
in two volumes, Early Collected Poems (1993) and Later Collected Poems (2005).
His death was marked by a great outpouring of tributes and eulogies. In the New
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York Times, David Yezzi offered this praise: “It was Hecht’s gift to see into the
darker recesses of our complex lives and conjure to his command the exact words
to describe what he found there. Hecht remained skeptical about whether pain and
contemplation can ultimately redeem us, yet his ravishing poems extend hope to
his readers that they can.”

The End of the Weekend

A dying firelight slides along the quirt
Of the cast iron cowboy where he leans
Against my father's books. The lariat
Whirls into darkness. My girl in skin tight jeans
Fingers a page of Captain Marriat
Inviting insolent shadows to her shirt.

We rise together to the second floor.

Outside, across the lake, an endless wind
Whips against the headstones of the dead and wails
In the trees for all who have and have not sinned.
She rubs against me and I feel her nails.
Although we are alone, I lock the door.

The eventual shapes of all our formless prayers:

This dark, this cabin of loose imaginings,
Wind, lip, lake, everything awaits
The slow unloosening of her underthings
And then the noise. Something is dropped. It grates
against the attic beams. I climb the stairs
Armed with a belt.

A long magnesium shaft

Of moonlight from the dormer cuts a path
Among the shattered skeletons of mice.
A great black presence beats its wings in wrath.
Above the boneyard burn its golden eyes.
Some small grey fur is pulsing in its grip.

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 This poem by Anthony Hecht is the story of two lovers who, at the end of a
weekend in a cabin by a lake, find their love-making interrupted by an imposing
presence in the attic. Like any good piece of writing, it operates at two levels: the
functional and the symbolic.
Functionally, there is a guy and his lady-friend; they go upstairs to have a good
time after a relaxing night reading by the fire. At this point, Hecht "zooms out" –
like he is so apt to do – and gives the reader a glimpse of the greater setting: the
cabin, the lake, and the graveyard that lies on the opposite shore. Back in the room,
as the speaker and his girlfriend are about to get naked, they are promptly
interrupted by a noise in the attic. The man, who is the speaker, heads up to
investigate, "armed with a belt," and comes face to face with an angry presence
that we can only assume to be an owl. The floor of the attic is littered with the
bones of small rodents, and the bird clutches a dying mouse in its talons.
Symbolically, we must take duality into account when analyzing the
significance of the speaker and his partner as well as their actions. The most
evident parallel is the floor of the attic – littered with mouse bones – and the
graveyard across the lake. In keeping with this parallel, we can zoom in on the
pulsing fur that the speaker notices in the last line. Aside from the bird, this
pulsing, living being is the only life that exists outside of the piles of bones, just
like the speaker and his mate are the only two people stirring and pulsing sexually
by this deserted lake with the cemetery. This way, we have linked the mice and the
men, the graveyard and the mouse bones, which leaves us with one swinging, loose
end: the bird.
The bird is symbolic of an over-arching presence that cannot be seen: God. This
is not the merciful and compassionate God of the New Testament; it is the harsh,

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angry God of the Old Testament who looks down upon those who break the
sanctity of the dead. And so, we can take this interruption of a carnal act to be the
work of a disapproving God.
Another possible interpretation is that the bird represents a feeling on the part of
the speaker that somehow leads to an interruption of their sexual encounter. In the
second and third stanzas, the writing goes from concrete to abstract, triggered by
the cemetery imagery. The speaker looks out across the lake and the cemetery, and
as his woman loosens her underthings, he shakes forth "loose imaginings" and
"formless prayers" in his mind. The wind whips against gravestones across the
lake; it sounds like a voice in the speaker's ear, and his ascension to the second
floor suddenly becomes much more complicated than the seductive scene that we
saw on the first. The action that solidifies this thought and symbolizes the
existence of a complicated internal state within the speaker is his locking of the
bedroom door. He looks to be afraid of something he cannot see.
And so, a noise in the attic brings the love making, which was about to begin, to
a stop. The attic could be heaven, or the speaker's mind The noise in the attic and
the presence of the bird in the last stanza can be taken as physical proof of a
change, or a hesitation on the part of the speaker. Just as the mice are subject to the
bird, the speaker and his lover are subject to God and their internal states, bringing
the poem to a close.
Although there are several words with religious connotations, such as wrath,
prayers, and sinned, there is more evidence in the text to support that speaker’s fear
is all he actually has to fear. In other words, he is letting his mind wander out of
the moment into the potential darkness of the future. God is not forsaking the
sexual act about to take place. The speaker simply cannot get his mind off the fact
that this happiness will not last forever. What lends immense support to this
interpretation is the title, “The End of the Weekend.” People are apt to spending
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Sunday worrying over the fact that they have to go back to work on Monday. The
speaker, similarly, is in the midst of what should be a most enjoyable moment
thinking about the after words. The situation could be a metaphor for the way we
live our lives, fearing what is to come.
The “great black presence,” presumably an owl, is a symbol of the ultimate and
inevitable destiny, death. The owl has symbolized death for centuries, and in a
way, human beings are all that mouse caught in the owl’s talons. The end is near; it
is only a matter of time.
Another point worth mentioning is that the speaker continually moves up. He
and his girl move from the first floor to the second, and then he alone advances to
the attic. Is this symbolic of growth – the first floor being youth, the second being
maturity, and the attic being death? There is mention of a cowboy and a novel
about sea adventures while the speaker is on the first floor; both of these are
youthful objects which stimulate one’s imagination. The second floor is where the
speaker and his girlfriend take shelter for the purpose of performing sexual acts.
The floor of the attic is portrayed as a bone yard.
The speaker did not advance to the attic out of necessity; he was just
investigating a noise that interrupted an intimate moment with his girl. He could
have ignored the noise and continued consummating the imminent sexual act.
Hecht is conveying the message that to acknowledge the reality of death is to die.
Not in the sense that if you don’t believe in your own mortality, you’re immortal,
but that to live life concerning yourself with its end is to be dead already.
The poem is made up of four sestets with the rhyme scheme of abcbca.