Metrical Inventions: Zukofsky and Merwin

Author(s): Albert Cook

Source: College Literature , Oct., 1997, Vol. 24, No. 3, Diversity and American Poetries
(Oct., 1997), pp. 70-83
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25112329

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 Metrical Inventions:
Zukofsky And Merwin
ALBERT COOK

Abroad
Cook is Professor Emeri and various metrical inven
audible in the new poetry all ar
tus at Brown University.
us, if we listen for it, expanding
His writings include 20 the preliminary calibrations of
beyond
and "formal" verse, though genera
books of criticism, eight
should keep in mind strictures tha
books of poetry, and
already old when Jacques Maritain cit
a generation ago from Jean Cocteau sti
translations from the
eration earlier. "These mysterious rule
Greek and Russian.
'free and contingent' rules of free ve
Cocteau puts it, are with regard to
rules of versification what ten games o
played at once are with regard to a ga
dominoes."1 The rhythmic lead of Wh
picked up not only throughout the wo
such as Claudel and Mayakovsky but ex
in American practice by Pound and Wi
and then by Olson and Creeley, and th
newer poets, has powerfully develop
mutated for a century and a half (Coo
jections"; "After Olson").
In considering the richness of the
cal dimensions of poetic production
the past two decades or so, it would b
tractedly diversionary to access the
micro-analyses of recent writers on m
like Derek Attridge and Paul Kiparsky,
(what I am not offering), a comprehens
vey, should ignore their strictures at it
We remain in a situation where on t
hand complex given patterns in the p
available as models inimitable in our p
but available as criterial markers?th
phonies of Pindar, of Welsh and Old
metrics, of the troubadours. Yet we d
available the alliteration of Anglo-Sax

70

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ry as an alternate English possibility. The Saxon alliteration across half-lines is
both imitable and variously imitated, as the thought-rhyme of Hebrew poetry
with its accompanying sound patterns really is not (except for translation).2
Both of these conventions offer the analogy of metrical modules that allow for
a considerable range of syllabic variation within a metric unit, as opposed to
those built on the accentual-syllabic meters of French and Italian dominant in
the Renaissance and most fully exemplified by the poetry of the 1590's, most
notably that of Spenser. This poetry sets up a metrical tradition that does not
admit of intralineal variation through extrametrical syllables.
Even a less than comprehensive overview of recent powerful inventions
should listen to the transmutations of the line achieved by many poets?
Michael Anania's modulations of a Williams base, the fluid very long lines of
Gerald Burns and Mei-mei Bersenbrugge, the careful stepped-triads of Mary
Oliver, Jorie Graham's polyphonization of ruminative speech through inter
mittent italics, the more structured self-interrupting ruminations of Denise
Riley, Leslie Scalapino's suspensive sweep of sentences through a pages-long
variation of repetitions, the shorter-breathed anaphoras of Anne Waldman, to
mention just a few. Robert Creeley continues to apply the pressures of cur
tailing syntax on the short line; John Ashbery has recourse not only to the
phantom-polyphony of the two-track As We Know but to such various verbal
ly playful but metrically conventional forms as sonnet, sestina, and pantoum.
Instead of surveying all these here, I should like to look at the implications of
the use of word-boundary, which amounts to a kind of caesura, in the work of
Louis Zukofsky, and at W. S. Merwin's continued inventions as he manipulates
caesura, enjambment, line-echo, and terminal rhyme.
2.
For nearly fifteen years at the crest of his career Louis Zukofsky used pre
vailingly a line which conformed to the rule that it would consist of exactly five
words, an explicit boundary that has considerable metrical consequences. He
uses this device for the "A"s after 1963 (except for "A"-24, an anthology of his
phrases set to music in a five-track polyphony by Celia Zukofsky), and also for
all of 80 Flowers, and for the final "Gamut." In such a style the regularity of the
five words to a line means that the mind is counting them, along with the voice,
and so there is a thought-caesura, as well as a small sound-caesura, between one
word and another. They are arrested, in sound as in sense, and they are also lib
erated for an attention to the order of the words, to ordonnance.
In the uniform five-word-to-a-line rule the words are as though suspended
above the natural flow of a spoken sentence, superordinating a metrical fix
over and above, and to some degree against, the modernist rule that words be
given in a spoken natural order. The five-word rule provides a form for mim
ing the artificed order that was especially accessible in the inflected language
of the Latin poets Zukofsky composed on. Especially Horace (whom he does
not "translate") and Mallarme achieve a suspensive metrical surface largely

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through word ordonnance. Horace and Mallarme "purify the language of the
tribe" by forcing words to remain unresolved through much of a run:
A la nue accablante tu
Basse de basalte et de laves
a meme les echos esclaves
Par une trompe sans vertu
(To the cloud, overwhelming, hushed
base of basalt and of lava
as far as the echoes slaves
to a trump without virtue)

Here the entire first quatrain of this sonnet has been offered, with its Hor
atian ordonnances suspended in such a way that so far the poem has not men
tioned the shipwreck and the abyss which are the poem's central image and
general subject.
To such a procedure Zukofsky adds the arbitrary constraint that every line
must consist of exactly five words. How wide the boundary of a given word
may be in itself is arbitrary, and the more so when Zukofsky allows com
pounds to count as one word. When the word, long or short, is the staple of
an unvarying regularity of presence, it forces its primacy on the ear. Here is
the last of the twenty five-line stanzas (each line having five words) which
begin "A"-22:
?so

no piper lead with nonsense

before its music don't, horse,
brag of faith too much?
fear thawed reach three-fingered cho
sweet treble hold lovely?initial
Time as governing music comes to t
the times of the year, in a poem that
AN ERA
ANYTIME
OF YEAR

These five words are split into a tri

ambiguously two. Given in capitals s
as the last line of the first stanza and
itself." The next reference to initia
greeting that can appear in the for
initial together/ rove into the blue in
been introduced by a refrain-like re
expanded unambiguously into two
The syntactic suspension of "so" t
preceding it has the effect of sprea
poem, but immediately to the musi
ble negative "no piper...nonsense."

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-still a third negative?what has preceded it forces us to read it as a negative
command, isolated without the punctuation which might precede it, though
punctuation follows, "before its music [,] don't, horse." In this strict sequence
"horse" is probably to be taken as the vocative of a negative command, "don't,
horse,/ brag." (It could also be a verb, "to horse [around].") Ironically either a
hyperbole or a denigration, the term itself spreads out toward the many ref
erences to horses through the entire length of "A," proximately to the "hear
ing iron horse scrape me" of stanza fifteen and the "tho horses rushed" of stan
za eleven, perhaps the most spectacular reference to horses being the long
one that begins "A"-15, calqued upon a sound-transposition of the Hebrew
text of the Book of Job.
The sound of music comes, these lines tell us, when fear is thawed, "fear
thawed reach three-fingered chord/ sweet treble-hold lovely?initial." "Reach"
like "lead" in line one is a subjunctive of wish merging into an imperative. The
mergers carry each of the individual words, the six monosyllables, the two
hyphenated trisyllables, and the one bisyllabic word "lovely," which in the sus
pended sequences of this ordonnance hangs between a quoted remark of the
speaker and a characterization correlative with "fear thawed." The slowing of
these suspensions freezes them into caesura-marked equivalence and licenses
such extensions of their sense. Again the suspension lasts right through. The
syntax of "initial" is left hanging between a characterization of the incipient
music and an analogue to the possibly printed initial on the possible valentine:
"Initial" can be either an adjective or a noun.* The effect here is of Latin poet
ry, and predominantly of Zukofsky's own Latin translations.
The whole of "A'-21 renders Plautus' Rudens in five-word lines (with
some interlude exceptions), teasing out of the sound of the Latin an extrava
gant equivalent of its sense in a spectacularly wrenched English syntax. The
forcing of an alien sound to yield a corresponding sense is analogous to the
forcing of meter to confine itself to word units: this is not syllabic or accen
tual poetry, but a meter governed by lexical boundaries. As Burton Hatlen says
of Zukofsky's "translations," "when the original and the translation are read in
conjunction ... a powerful energy begins to leap back and forth between the
two texts" (Hatlen 351).
"A"-21 is entirely calqued upon the Rudens, and it is offered in Zukofsky's
text complete with Act and Scene numbers. But the meters have all been sub
verted to the single five-word-to-a-line metric of Zukofsky, and thus the ongo
ing movement of speaking voices in the comedy has been arrested for the con
templation not only of the vanishing sound-echoes to the original but for the
forced dwelling word by word on their individual boundaries. Such a domi
nant pattern holds over the instancing colloquialisms, as in the whole speech
of Act I, Scene I, spoken by Sceparnio ("Scape") (Rudens, 83-88):
Prodigal immortals what a tempest
Neptune blew off last night
belching our roof up?wind?
I'll say wind, Euripides' Alcmena

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 mess of stucco and shingles
with glorious light and windows.
Pro di immortales, tempestatem quoiusmodi
Neptunus nobis nocte hac misit proxuma.
Detexit ventus villam?quid verbis opus?
Non ventus fuit, verum Alcumena Euripidi:
Ita omnis de tecto deturbavit tegulas?
Inlustriorem fecit fenestrasque indidit.
(By the immortal gods, what sort of a storm
Neptune has sent right down on us this night!
It has uncovered the farm?what need of words?
It wasn't a wind but a real Alcmene of Euripides.
So it's rattled all the tiles off the roof?
and made it fuller of light, and added windows.)

This adds the five-word line boundary to the standard sound-transposition of

Zukofsky's Catullus translations, as in poem IV:
Facile as can be the boat you see, my guests, says?
it was the fastest of a navy for its run,
nothing quite like it floating which had been a tree
that it could not outstrip, either its oars plying,
?if the course sped?soaring, no slack of canvas.
Phasellus ille quern videtis, hospites,
ait fuisse navium celerrimus
neque ullius natantis impetum trabis
nequisse praeterire, sive palmulis
opus foret volare sive linteo.
(This little yacht, friends, that you are looking at
says it was the speediest of ships,
nor was she unable to run past the rush
of any hull afloat, whether she used
her oars for flying or her sail.)

It should be noted that, as in all Zukofsky's transposition-translations, the prin

ciple of a repetition in the sound of the English of the sound of the Latin is
only partial. Here Zukofsky's English picks up "Phasellus ille," and "quern"
comes out as "can," but it has no mimetic sound correspondence for "videtis
hospites," and so on through. In such only partial transpositions the poet
advertises the playfulness with which he ducks into and out of sound corre
spondence. Sound correspondence is an initial rule but not a final one. It is a
grace note or obligato. Or again, the opening of Poem LXVIII (a collaboration
with Celia Zukofsky) offers closer but not total correspondence:
Could how mean, fortune consuming you oppresses your care, your
kind script would look lachrymose, mists in this little letter?
now fragmented ejecting spume man the waves of Kore was in this?
sob, lave what mortalities lean on me?restitute him,
Quod mihi fortuna casuque oppressus acerbo

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 conscriptum hoc lacrimis mittis epistolium,
naufragum ut eiectum spumantibus aequoris undis
sublevem et a mortis limine restituam,

(That you are oppressed by fortune and bitter chance

you send me this letter written with tears
That I raise up and restore from the threshold of death
a shipwrecked man cast up by the foaming waves of the sea])

The word "how" that comes second in the first line of Zukofsky's rendering is
not called for by either the sound or the sense of the Latin. It does serve, how
ever, vigorously to establish the suspensive feature of the ordonnance here. It
sets the syntax into a puzzle, thus providing a strut for an English line that is
even longer than Catullus' own elegiac distichs, but comparably braided. Look
ing back from such translations,4 into the long final word-boundary sections of
"A," one can imagine that Zukofsky used Catullus much the way his master
Pound used Propertius, as a means of metrical discovery. The suspension of
word-ordonnance suggested by the inflected nature of Latin as handled by
skilled poets like Catullus, forces its way to the fore once there has been intro
duced the principle of using sound-imitation as the primary vehicle of transla
tion, instead of sense-transposition, which has been of course the initial goal. A
similar insistence on ordonnance can be allowed to remain as a strong, audible
reminder of the primacy of the poem's progression over the speaking voice
that it projects and encapsulates. Such a suspension dominates 80 Flowers:
#75 THYME
Takes time where wild the
thyme: blows poor tom's a
cold relentless-vest muffler jacket coat
one bluegreen eye ate his
hope sevenyear fanned eyesack disrailing
birds-tread hie rose tree-budding fire
moon's flight twice sun's spider-manor-borne
littler letter words-justice thyme righting

The admission of hyphenated words to count as one word in this arbitrary

convention further underscores the primacy of the word-boundary to the met
ric, as does the access to italicization, with its necessary abrupt shift of voice,
three times in this poem. Two of these italics provide perfect redundancy;
they name the very flower that is the subject of the poem. The third, coming
between them, evokes what is a frequent reference in this book, the rose
which is the commonplace of poetry, reduced, as Gertrude Stein also reduced
it, by redundancy, "A Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose." Zukofsky both reduces it by
such flat nominalization, highlights it by italics, and composes it into a flori
legium with other flowers.5 Poems are made of words, Mallarme famously
said, and Zukofsky has here taken him at his word, with another arrangement
of the five-word lines than those offered by the thematic plays of "A." Here
each single poem concentrates on a flower, whose name is the word at the

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 top and occasionally in the poem, as twice here. Given the exclusivity of that
focus, the poet then composes an array of detail around the flower that might
be chaotic if it were not contained by the central reference to a single flower,
as well as by the five-word pattern.
The theme here begins with a common pun, "thyme/ Takes time," lead
ing in to that other poet-devotee of flower naming, William Shakespeare. The
arbitrary references range from the glister of a fantasy comedy, Midsummer
Night's Dream ("the wild thyme blows," II, ii, 249) to the dark moments of a
tragedy, the Edgar of King Lear disguised as Poor Tom ("Poor Tom's a-cold,"
III, iv, 143; 60, 82) and therefore wearing the inadequate garb to which all of
line 3 is given. The arbitrariness of the word-accretion allows for so consider
able a listing of what has nothing to do with flowers, because everything is on
a par once the five-word convention is allowed. What can also enter is the
most oblique of personal references, the account of Guy Davenport's Persian
cat with blue-green eye (109-10), seen as hunting the birds who may emblem
atically live in a flowering tree. Moreover, since "torn" is given in lower case,
one cannot exclude a compounding reference linking this cat to the wander
ing "Poor Tom" Edgar of King Lear. The cat's seven years in Davenport's
house are matched with seven years of Zukofsky's life. Seven years itself, of
course, is an emblematic number that occurs in King Lear in its glancing ref
erence to the fat years and the lean years of Pharaoh's dream in Exodus (V, iii,
24), but more directly in Poor Tom/ Edgar's reference to his cat-like foraging
for food, "But mice and rats, and such small deer,/ Have been Tom's food for
seven long year" (III, iv, 135-136).
All of this is a considerable departure from the tonic base to which many
of these flower poems conform, the details of flower description. There is
very little description of "thyme" in the poem before us; one finds more, for
example, in the last line or so of "#3 Mountain Laurel," brought in by way of
comparison, "Not-thyme's/ spur-flower clusters laurelled well." Thyme, like
rose, is often mentioned, from the first line of the first of the 80 Flowers on,
especially at the beginning: in the first fifteen poems, "thyme" occurs in num
bers 1,2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, and 15. It has quickly turned out that flower descrip
tion itself is only a beginning. The five-word convention, as in "Thyme," is
taken to license something like a Steinian obliquity of connection to the
flower mentioned, and the associations can be almost as random as they are
in Tender Buttons. The freedom of the words, in their initial connection, from
the obligations of natural syntactic order, lets them enter into a highly asso
ciative series. Only in the arbitrary voice fiat of the poet, and in the phenom
enological compact he is implicitly asserting, does Guy Davenport's cat have
anything to do with King Lear's Poor Tom, or with an Isaac D'Israeli buried
and resurrected, like the Finnegan of the Wake, in the two puzzling neolo
gisms "eyesack disrailing."6 In an arbitrary reading here, we may say that the
eye of the poet is a sack that as it gathers up individual flowers throws them
off the rails to enrich their purview of possible association.

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 Once the set theme is given, thyme, the voice is free to wander through
random relevant association because it is always being returned to the strict
control of the five-word count, where every word, from "the" to "spider
manor-borne" counts as one. The thematic recall to the frozen figures associ
ated with Isaac DTsraeli at the beginning of 80 Flowers allows both bringing
him in and distorting his name into a noun and a verb in absolute construc
tion, "eyesack disrailing." It is a random collocation that puts the "the" which
ends the first line here, and the "a" which ends the second, into a poem by a
poet whose first long effort was "Poem Beginning 'The'" and who then went
on to spend nearly half a century putting together "A."

3.
An enjambment rides over an expected (and actual) line-end pause, while
a caesura introduces a pause into the middle of a line where none need nec
essarily be expected. Both enjambment and caesura, then, highlight and some
what disturb the pause. In that they are alike. But the caesura begins by
emphasizing the pause, the enjambment by erasing it. Zukofsky's five-word
rule is like an obligatory small caesura after each word. W. S. Merwin, who
manipulates enjambments, has recourse, like many of his contemporaries, to
the mid-line break which combines the caesura (it breaks the line) and the
enjambment (it rides over through it).
As Edward Brunner says, "Tidal Lagoon' is an example of the way the
caesura and the line-break, in vying for authority, can provide a drama essen
tial to the poem":
From the edge of the bare reef in the afternoon
children who can't swim fling themselves forward calling
and disappear for a moment in the long mirror
that contains the reflections of the mountains (Merwin 36)7

In this four-line poem the mid-line break works, as does the five-word rule
of Zukofsky, to highlight the ordonnance of the words. The mid-line break after
"reef arrests the voice and the sense-attention even more than an enjambment
would because an enjambment is expected and the mid-line break is not. The
mid-line break creates an extra caesura that throws the emphasis on the possi
bility (here not fulfilled) of end-line enjambment, underscoring "afternoon."
The effect is to emphasize the eight words in the four lines that come at breaks,
and the more that six of these eight words are nouns. From the pauses on them
these nouns, and the two verbs "swim" and "calling" in their wake, take on a
sense of portent from the arrest of sound and sense attention on them, as
though they were keys to the mystery underlying the possibilities inherent in
rephrasing the description of a "tidal lagoon." The mystery includes the future
(children "fling themselves forward calling/and disappear for a moment"), an
ominous danger ("who can't swim"), and a hint of reassurance (it is only a
moment) while the speaker who has seen them disappear from the edge of the

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bare reef registers "the long mirror/ that contains the reflections of the moun
tains," a riddle-like gloss definition of the tidal lagoon.
Merwin himself speaks of these mid-line caesurae as "my broken back'
line, the two-part line." "The old pentameter and the caesura in the iambic
pentameter line is like the ghost of the old Middle English line asserting itself
all the time, saying I'm here all the time" (Folsom and Nelson 62). This allows
for enough arrest on the eight marked words to give emphasis on, and a con
sequent query about the prominence of, "reef," "afternoon," "swim" and so
on, without returning them to the absolute equivalence of Zukofsky's five
word convention or restoring them to the even flow of the modified blank
verse of these four lines.
Always metrically adaptive, Merwin has moved still further towards a kind
of syncopation from the split line he used in Opening the Hand. The particu
lar force of enjambment in Merwin's late poems is to gather up the speaking
voice into a more compressed flow of naturalness. The rhythms enforce the
sense the true world is being deictically evoked and named, as in "Dry
Ground" (The New Yorker 68):
Summer deepens and a root reaches for receding
water with a sense of waking long afterward
long after the main event whatever it was
has faded out like the sounds of a procession
like April like the age of dew like the beginning
the dry grass dying keeps making the sounds of rain
to hollow air while the wheat whitens in the cracked fields
and they keep taking the cows farther up into the woods
to dwindling pools under the oaks and even there
the brown leaves are closing their thin hands and falling
and out on the naked barrens where the light shakes
in a fever without a surface and the parched shriek
of the cicadas climbs with the sun the bats
cling to themselves in crevices out of the light
and under stone roofs those who live watching the grapes
like foxes stare out over the plowed white stones
and see in all the hueless blaze of the day nothing
but rows of withered arms holding up the green grapes
There is a hauntingly Biblical cast to the references here, as well as a reliance
on the Mediterranean vocabulary (Cook, Figural 117-21). The foxes and the
grapes come not only from La Fontaine but also from the Song of Songs, "Take
us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines, for our vines have tender
grapes" (2.15). The Biblical cast lengthens, subordinates, and somewhat qual
ifies the main thrust of the poem, especially in this passage, where mainly
fruitfulness is being celebrated. Coupled with such echoes, the stone roofs
include, without specific reference, the Holy Land. Even the oaks and the dew
find echoes for their function, as well as for their presence, in the Bible. And
the ominous withering here takes on a prophetic cast in its vivid depiction of
what could be taken as a normal description of autumn, without the

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omnipresent metrical modulation. But the heavy anaphora here and the con
stant access to enjambment, coupled with a determinative avoidance of end
stopped and syntactically discrete lines, work as the mid-line break does in
"Tidal Lagoon," to throw emphasis and query where the primacy of the locu
tions seems to exceed in figurative force the poem's similes. Three of these
are given in quick succession, "like April like the age of dew like the begin
ning." These similes are themselves in a momentary anaphora that is also a
parenthesis. The interaction between verse design and voice instance here
undergoes a fluidity in which enjambment and mid-line elision so often occur
that they seem versions of each other.
Merwin reaches another pitch of rhythmic method in "The Real World of
Manuel Cordoba" (Merwin, Travels 96-114). There the stanzas are heavily
rhymed, in fourteen-line units that make them a sort of equivalent to a sonnet
sequence. But the flow deconstructs the sonnet sequence, first of all in the
rhyme pattern, which is on the one hand the simplest of all: 14 times a. On
the other hand, though, these "rhymes" move freely towards near dissonance,
playing across masculine and feminine endings, rhyme and consonance, with
random indifference:
from the forest of the old man's

mind carefully
guiding him until he
believed almost that he
had followed his own way
into the only
place alive and when the
moon was right and again they
stood after dark in the empty
tower of trees where one by
one they drank from the bowl and lay
down he thought it was the same day
that he knew but he could see
through each of them an entry
to the forest and as he

turned he went on seeing

Here the sonnet has become such a pure sequence that its separable units have
been deconstructed into a narrative flow. The variation of rhymes breaks down
the flow as the enjambments do, and the strongest regularity governing the
sequence is its total recourse to enjambment or other syntactic overlap. No one
of the forty-two sonnet-length stanzas is in any way end-stopped; every single
one?except of course the first and the last?braids and trails into the next, as
happens in the one quoted. The separate sonnet pattern, then, stays sub
merged, the way the access to feminine or masculine endings stays free, with
in the rule of the single rhyme for every one of the fourteen lines each time.
This patterning makes the evanescent but lifetime experience of the nar
rator a subtext in sound to the actions he undergoes in the forest, a forest life

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beneath the trees when all he sees and tells of is the trees. Comparably intu
itive are the rhyme-consonance patterns of Merwin's long narrative poem
about his father, "Another Place," where the establishing similarity of the line
endings, trailing along in similar variation through a similarity of experience,
changes abruptly at the end of each five-line stanza to an unrhymed word,
exacting a total shift in sound that suggests a total shift in consciousness, from
the beginning of the poem (Merwin 115-25):
When years without number
like days of another summer
had turned into air there
once more was a street that had never
forgotten the eyes of its child
nor so long by then of course nor
so tall or dark anywhere
with the same store at the corner
sunk deeper into its odor
of bananas and ice cream.

In this remarkable tour-de-force, the one principle of echo all the way through
is the consonance with terminal "r." This total repetition estranges the more
markedly the terminal end-lines, the fifth line of each stanza, that are never
rhymed with them or with each other. So the words are allowed to reach for
their processive emphasis as they are lightly capped by the repetition that sug
gests the hidden dominance of the father, and then released into the non
rhyming word of the very end of each stanza, here "child" and "ice cream," a
transcendence of sound within the dominance of sound.

4.
"Poetry does not arise and exist in a vacuum. It is one of the arts?some
times individual, sometimes collective in origin?and reflects economic and
social status of peoples; their language habits arising out of everyday matter of
fact; the constructions which the intelligence and the emotions make over
and apart from the everyday after it has been understood and generally expe
rienced" (Zukofsky 99).
Louis Zukofsky, who built an elaborate reference to Marx into "A" as early
as the twenties and derives from a muted quasi-Marxist ambience, makes these
remarks as a comment on Hardy's "Lalage's coming." Described by Hardy as
"written to an old folk tune" the poem complexly encapsulates at least two
whole sets of social condition, Hardy's own in the late nineteenth century and
those of the "old" time from which the folk tune came. The son of Jewish
immigrants who forged his way early through Columbia and settled into an
urban academic career in a technical college, Zukofsky gathers into the voice
of his poem the tone he had found rhythmic equivalents for, to cover and inte
grate these experiences. As with all commanding writers, one could derive
much in the poems from the habitus that he responds to and builds in that
social circumstance. The circumspection of the sometimes excluded can be

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interpreted to play a role, along with the careful, precise, almost Talmudic
attention to the letter of rhythmic and other detail. But then it is the voice of
the achieved poet who has made these bones live.
Compensation may play a role here, too; why else is this urban poet so
focused not only on his eighty flowers, but on the ninety trees that were to
follow them? His dwelling on the flowers gets the further testimony of a ref
erence included in "A," "would praise when 80/ flowers the new lives' des
cant/ thought's rarer air, act, story" ("A"-22, 538-539). As Lionel Trilling
reminds us in an introduction to Isaac Babel, Yiddish is a language with a high
ly impoverished botanical vocabulary; it is the language of poor urbanites, the
language of the very milieu out of which Zukofsky came (9-37).8 The poetry
of the English literature he deeply studied and early taught may have played a
role, too, in leading him to flowers, and the slowness of the "new lives" of
retirement, when he concentrated on the project of attending to and writing
about flowers. Who is to say that Shakespeare's own abundant reference to
flowers does not reveal a nostalgia for the country landscape from which he
came and to which he early retired, a landscape that offered far more flowers,
surely, than even the London of his era could have displayed.
W. S. Merwin's mother was a gardener, he tells us in his writings, and so
memory as well as the literary tradition he shares with Zukofsky, will have
merged with vision in the life of this careful cultivator of species of palm trees
in the garden he tends. His attention here can be construed as growing out of,
and informing, his attention to the sound-emphases he has created for locat
ing the cycle of growing things in an inclusive vision-mystery evocation. So
too Merwin's Buddhist interests and his activities on behalf of global ecology
can be derived as transposed from the devotion of a father who was a Protes
tant minister. He has spent much of a lifetime on other shores in great cities
but also in the depth of landscapes that throw over them the shadows he has
found the voice to delineate.

ENDNOTES
1 Maritain citing Cocteau. It is noteworthy that most of Cocteau's own poetry was
written in conventional alexandrines.
2 The phrase "thought-rhyme" refers conventionally to the rule for Hebrew poet
ry that the ideas/ words in one half of a Hebrew verse are expected to repeat with vari
ation in the second half. So, for example, in the first verse of Psalm 19, "The heavens
declare the glory of God;/ And the firmament showeth his handiwork," the subject, the
verb, and the predicate of the first line are all repeated with variation in the second.
For discussions of such practice see Cook, The Root; The Burden.
3 In his interpretation of this segment, Barry Ahearn makes much of the use of
individual letters as initials.
4 Or looking ahead; the version of Catullus LXVIII was first published in 1964.
5 For this, and large arrays of other detail, see Leggott.
6 The reference here, as pointed out by Michele Leggott (388) in connection to the
fact that roses sometimes look like fire, is to Disraeli. This multi-volume anthology of
literature went through many editions through most of the nineteenth century in both

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England and America, and it was widely distributed in public libraries. It is not unlikely
that the precocious student of English literature, Louis Zukofsky, would have perused it
in the second decade of this century. Moreover, the editor's career instances the accul
turation from Judaism to Christianity, since he had his son and subsequent editor,
Queen Victoria's famous prime minister, baptized as an Anglican, though he remained
of Jewish faith himself. Comparably, his contemporary Francis Palgrave, editor of The
Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Poems in the English Language [a type to
which Zukofsky's own collection, A Test of Poetry, somewhat conforms] was the son
of another writer who, born to a Jewish stockbroker, Meyer Cohen, took on his mar
riage the name "Palgrave" from his wife's family. Zukofsky encapsulates such accultur
ative moves; born in a Yiddish-speaking household, he won a prize for reading Shake
speare while still in grammar school?and of course deeply retained his Jewish roots.
7 The caesurae in this poem are discussed by Brunner, "The Variable." As Brunner
says generally, "In each line, what happens after the caesura is in keeping with what
happened before it; but what happens after the line-break is unexpected. The caesura
is more neutral, reflecting whatever occurs in the line, while the line-break is disruptive,
actively redirecting the poem's movement" (279). See also Brunner, "The Broken."
8 "Maurice Samuel remarks in The World of Sholom Aleichem that in the Yiddish
vocabulary of the Jews of eastern Europe there are but two flower names (rose, violet)
and no names for wild birds" (24). Some impoverishment may obtain for Yiddish in this
regard even though Uriel Weinreich's Yiddish-English Dictionary does not fully bear
out this extreme characterization. Of Zukofsky's eighty flowers, Weinreich lists Yiddish
words for raspberry, geranium, chicory, dandelion, tulip, lilac, lily, clover, hyacinth, nar
cissus, thyme, and daisy, as well as other flowers like daffodil that are not among Zukof
sky's eighty. These names may be traced to the life of the rural shtetl rather than to the
urban environment of most of Zukofsky's life. Yiddish was Zukofsky's first language, and
for the detail of his early relation to that tradition as a poet see Schimmel.

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