A Close Look at the Neglected Poetry of Isabella Gardner

“If there is a theme with which I am particularly concerned,” Isabella Gardner declared, “it is the contemporary failure of love.”1 Critics from John Logan2 to Karl Malkoff3 have frequently quoted or paraphrased this statement. Paul Carroll wrote that “of all the poets of the generation [of 1962] Isabella Gardner is best at exploring the mystery, ugliness, pain and sexuality of human relationships.”4 In spite of Caroll’s and other critics’ focus on the sexual, Gardner’s concern was much more encompassing: she immediately qualified her statement about love’s failure with the following: “I don’t mean romantic love or sexual passion, but the love which is the specific and particular recognition of one human being by another – the response by eye and voice and touch of two solitudes. The democracy of universal vulnerability.” This response is, indeed, a major theme running through Gardner’s work, and is passionately articulated in poems such as “That ‘Craning of the Neck,’”5 where, as in the following lines, the “I” yearns for eye-to-eye contact with a great blue heron:

Hardly a poem out of the approximately one hundred included in The Collected Poems does not express yearning. The Rilke quotation: “Love consists in this: that two solitudes protect and touch, and greet each other,” Gardner’s frontispiece to West of Childhood, the collection she dedicated “To Allen” [Tate], her fourth and final husband, repeats the theme – she used it again as an epigraph for “The Fellowship with Essence: an Afterward.” Influenced as she was by the writings of Martin Buber, it is not at all surprising that she chose Rilke’s words, which are in harmony with Buber’s philosophy as set forth in I and Thou. Indeed, the title of the opening poem, “That ‘Craning of the Neck,’” as well as the frontispiece to Birthdays from the Ocean came from Buber: “Believe in the simple magic of life, in service in the universe, and the meaning of that waiting, that alertness, that ‘craning of the neck’ in creatures will dawn on you.” Her citations from Buber point to – and even elucidate –the major theme of her poetry: “The primary word is I-Thou. The primary word I-Thou can only be spoken with the whole being. The primary word I-it can never be spoken with the whole being. Martin Buber.”6

“That ‘Craning of the Neck’” embodies Gardner’s longing for sensory contact with “the other.” The first two lines, “Birthdays from the ocean one desert april noon, / I rode through the untouching and no-odored air,” set the tone of isolation and longing. The speaker is removed by both time and space from the ocean, in an alien, desert environment where even the air does not respond to her senses. The third line, “astride an English saddle on a western mare,” reveals that she apparently has no physical contact even with her horse; and the mismatch of “English saddle” and “western mare,” reinforce the first line’s contrast of “ocean” and “desert.” More sensory deprivation follows with “tow-colored grass,” “dune- / less sand,” and “tideless water.” The emblematic creature whose eye-to-eye contact she is seeking is a “great blue heron,” who to her regret, successfully foils her attempts. The heron, itself, seems out of place in “a stream strange in that dried / country.” Tension and poignancy arise here, as in other of her perceptive nature poems, due to the fact that Gardneris able to capture the essential character or “spirit” of the animals in question through the language and imagery of her poems while her speakers find it difficult or impossible to make this essential contact in the poems’ narratives. Employing primarily twelve-syllable lines, but including two of thirteen-syllables, and one of ten or eleven, (depending on how the reader pronounces “ponderous” in the twenty-fifth line) Gardner allows the poem to breathe when needed. The motion of the large, elusive bird is beautifully described in the heptameter line, “unloosed unwilling wings, heaved from water into air,” the caesura before “heaved” emphasizing the tremendous effort of the heron’s escape. The image of the “weathervane” lends focused visual detail to the following lines.

Weathervanes, of course, don’t fly, but their stiff, mechanical changes of direction with the wind, evoke the heron’s “unwilling wings” and “splayed, pain- / ful motion.” The air, previously “untouching,” now touches the “fishful water,” a fact given added poignancy by the speaker’s admission several lines later that “We [she and the heron] were both fishing.” “Fishful,” itself, is a strange and evocative neologism. Standing halfway between “wishful” and “fitful,” it embodies both and evokes the biblical creation story as well as the story of Jesus’ disciples being unable to draw their nets because of the “multitude of fishes.”7

One critic, even while praising Gardner’s work, calling The Collected Poems “an essential work,” and Gardner “a superbly accomplished artist,” stated that there are “no large claims for or by this poetry.”8 I strongly disagree. What could be a larger claim than the “touching of solitudes,” which is, after all, the primary function of life from the personal to the political, the function of language, and, therefore, the function of poetry? It is nothing less than “the democracy of universal vulnerability.” According to Buber, “the eyes of an animal have the capacity of a great language. Independent, without any need of the assistance of sounds and gestures, most eloquent when they rest entirely in their glance….”9 The desire for this “language,” or “touching of solitudes” is strongly articulated in the passage, “I / only wanted to stare myself into him to try / and thou him till we recognized and became each / other.” Believing that the I-Thou relationship, even if successful, was too tenuous to sustain for any length of time, Buber wrote: “This, however, is the sublime melancholy of our lot that every You must become an It in our world”.10 The failure to make this eye-to-eye “language” contact with the heron is encapsulated in the poem’s final lines:

As John Logan pointed out, Gardner mitigated this last statement in “Southwest of True North,” in lines where the speaker sings, “I rut, and roost, and rot, and sing, / occasionally on the wing.”11 She reversed it strongly in “my dear now-love is my true / love and we fly we fly…” from “Of Flesh and Bone,”12 and has altered it in other poems where a tenuous relationship is even temporarily successful, as in “The Moth Happened,”13 about an encounter with “a palpable moth quivering on the path,” which the speaker addresses as “you Moth.” Alliterating with “path,” “palpable” suggests “palpitating;” and the poem is as fragile and “quivering” as the moth itself. The second line’s wavering “I say it, she, he, happened,” sets the tone, and the poem proceeds to a brief moment of contact: “There you were on / the back of my hand,” and culminates in the moth’s “flight / into the hawthorns and away from noise and light.” “Belle” Gardner’s self-banishment toward the end of her life14 was like the moth’s effervescent flight “away from noise and light,” flying away as inevitably as the heron and, in effect, becoming both an exile and recluse.

The longing for unobtainable eye-to-eye contact is painfully apparent in Gardner’s oft-quoted lines, “and yet were you, like Lazarus to rise, / you would look everywhere but in my eyes,”15 from “To Thoreau on Rereading Walden.” Sometimes eye-to-eye contact is available only from one’s self, as in the final couplet from “Conversation at Midnight with Oscar Williams,”16 “I smiled, wooing the dialectic terror. / But later, goose-fleshed, stared into my mirror.” “Of Flesh and Bone” and “On Looking in the Looking Glass” are two other poems where, as Logan pointed out, “the vision of death is had in connection with a mirror.”17 The “I” in “Of Flesh and Bone” is being released to death, the ultimate “IT,” and, at the same time becoming that “IT.” The speaker’s “horror” is “that I shall not close my eyes when its eyes stare out of mine in every mirror.” Gardner’s little autobiographical poem, “The Sloth,”18 one of her perceptive animal poems, has much in common with these “mirror” poems. On the surface, her sloth, a small, hunted animal “doomed to the trees, ‘good food for many,’” anticipates Wislawa Szymborska’s autobiographical tarsier “miraculously saved from further alterations, / since I’m no one’s idea of a treat.”19 The sloth, however, looking “askingly into my [the poet’s] face,” and “hanging inexorably upside down / under branches in the zoo or in the subway under town,” presents the kind of image one would receive from a camera obscura, reversed as in a mirror, but upside down rather than from left to right. And, when we look into another person’s or an animal’s eyes, just as when we look into a mirror, it is possible to see ourselves reflected, though greatly diminished, in the eye’s pupil. We, in effect, may see ourselves within our own eyes and within the eyes of “the other.”

Gardner’s poems ring (and sing) with authenticity because of the peculiar music of her language, her mastery of rhythm and sound that almost every critic and reviewer of her work has favorably responded to. Malkoff wrote that “she confronts her themes with a virtuosity of language;”20 and Louis McKee stated: “One is first struck by Gardner’s love of words, of sound … more than a few pieces seemingly are drawn from the power and ambiguity of the words alone.”21“Music” and “sound work” seem appropriate terms to discuss both the verbal and aural effects that Gardnerachieves in her incantatory poems. But, as Stanley Kunitz stated when writing of the “song lying under the surface” of his own poems, “The struggle is between incantation and sense. Incantation wants to take over. It really doesn’t need a language: all it needs is sounds. The sense has to struggle to assert itself, to mount the rhythm and become inseparable from it.”22 It is a testament to Gardner’s skill that, more often than not, her poems maintain this difficult balance between “incantation and sense,” music and meaning. Essentially, the music of her language first drew me to Gardner’s poetry. James Wright was also attracted by this quality. Along with his wife, Annie, Wright was a good friend of Gardner’s and kept up a correspondence with her for many years. In a letter to Gardner, dated Aug. 17, 1966, he stated, referring to Birthdays from the Ocean, “I continue to be amazed at the depth of feeling and music to be found behind and beneath each single word, even the simplest word.”23

“Lines to a Seagreen Lover” from Birthdays from the Ocean,24 is a compact gem which illustrates not only the spell Gardner is able to cast with sound and rhythm, but the craftsmanship which underlies her lines.

The four tercets move forward in stately, dance-like tetrameter; their unhurried, four-beat measures fit the poem’s backward-glancing, rueful tone, and the step-by-step progression through the first three stanzas of the remembered actions of the lovers (including walking, embracing, wading, wincing, shivering, staring, and crying,) as well as their unachieved actions -- dancing, swimming, and flying. What the lovers have not done together, of course, does not indicate that the “I” has not experienced them. Doesn’t “My lover never flew with me” imply that the speaker, herself, wants to or has flown? Interestingly, the two types of dances, “minuet” and “sarabande,” mentioned in the first stanza, while preserving the poem’s metrical pattern, are slow, dignified court dances, and, like a waltz, are set in triple time. This reference to three-beat rhythms, placed within the even-numbered symmetry of Gardner’s four-beat lines, creates a tension that evokes the speaker’s thwarted desire to “dance,” “swim,” and “fly” with her lover; and the dances’ triple beats are in harmony with Gardner’s three-line stanzas and their gentle a,b,b, a,c,c, a,a,a rhyme scheme. The soft sounds of the many repeated S’s, mimicking the sounds of the sea, suggest also the background drone of the universe and the white noise of the subconscious.

In the final stanza, there is a shift in tone and sound from the previous three. Here the speaker, rather than merely recounting what has and has not happened, directly expresses her desire for the first time in “I wish my love had lain with me,” “wish” echoing “waded” and “winced” in the second stanza. And the wish is not for love “on the sand beside the sea,” the setting of the first three stanzas, but “under my[italics mine] ailanthus tree.” “Ailanthus,” a strange and unpleasant sounding word, so different from any other in the poem, containing “ail” as in “ailment,” and echoing “lain” in the stanza’s first line, is sexually charged. The ailanthus, originating in China, and also called “tree of heaven,” is classified as both an ornamental and a pest. It has an unpleasant odor, bitter-tasting bark, and, reproducing both sexually and asexually, is difficult to weed out. The evocation by “tree” of branches and shelter, coupled with the mingled positive and negative aspects of “ailanthus,” strongly express the speaker’s desire for domesticity. The penultimate line, “Not on the sand beside the sea,” with its images of shape-shifting “sand” and formless, chaotic “sea,” serves by its contrast to heighten the poignancy of this cry for permanency. And the fact that the “tree” belongs to the speaker reveals that she wishes to draw her lover to her own place of love, on her own terms. “Ailanthus,” a thick and complex word in sound as well as meaning, adds a final dash of grit to the predominately sweet sound effects of the previous lines. As rough as tree bark, the multi-syllabic richness of “ailanthus” is coupled with the sharp, single-syllable “tree” to emphatically snap the poem closed.

The rhyme scheme also changes in this final stanza to a,a,a, making it technically a triplet rather than a tercet, hammering home its ruefulness and bitterness with the repetition of me/sea/tree, and tying three realms together with the personal “me,” the infinite “sea,” and the sheltering branches of the domestic “tree,” And Gardner has not only controlled a four-beat line in her compact poem, but has kept to a strict count of eight syllables per line. Her skillful combination of metrics with syllabics solidifies the poem, while appearing totally unforced. Carol Hebald wrote that Gardner’s technique is “modest enough to hide itself in the music.”25 And I would add that her technique is strong enough to sustain that music while not allowing its incantatory effects to overpower the poem’s meaning.

Gardner established herself as a respected poet with the 1955 publication of her first book, Birthdays from the Ocean. According to Marian Janssen in “Postillion for Pegasus,” an essay about Gardner’s tenure as associate editor of Poetry, it was her “most famous book … on the whole, received rave reviews and sold out quickly.”26 John Logan wrote, that with “her first book, she shows herself the real thing, a conjurer, a soothsayer, in connivance with the good- or evil-musing angels,” and, in the same review, that she “is one of the new poets who allows us to hope that poetry may once again be noticed at least.”27 Karl Shapiro, reviewing her second book, The Looking Glass, stated: “If I had anything to do with it, I would nominate it for the Pulitzer prize.”28 Sylvia Plath, as well, seems to have had a high opinion of Gardner, for Paul Alexander writes in Rough Magic, that Plath listed in her journal “the poets whom she considered rivals,” Sappho, Emily Dickinson and others from history, and “from her own generation or of the one before: Edith Sitwell, Marianne Moore, May Swenson, Isabella Gardner (italics mine), and Adrienne Rich.”29

But Gardner fell out of favor in the 60’s when her work became “out of touch with poetic vogues.”30 In his review of Gardner’s Collected Poems, Louis McKee stated that she “seems to be a forgotten figure, one of those who has slipped out of public favor and the current anthologies through natural attrition.”31 Aside from the changes occurring during the late 50’s and 60’s that made formal poetry temporarily unfashionable, the fact that she published only four volumes during her life, as well as her reclusive life-style during her last years, may be contributing factors in her current neglect. Be that as it may, Gardner was the only woman among ten poets including Ashbery, Ginsberg, O’Hara and James Wright that Paul Carroll included in his book, The Poem in its Skin, published in 1968, and dealing with changes in poetry during the previous decade. She also continued to be represented in the distinguished anthology, Contemporary American Poetry, through its 6th edition appearing in 1996.

Gardner’s most quoted and written-about poem is surely “The Widow’s Yard.”32 Paul Carroll devotes an essay to it in The Poem in its Skin,33 where he compares the irony he perceives in it to Frost’s “Mending Wall.” The speaker in Gardner’s poem is outwardly comforting a young neighbor whose husband has died. She talks about the snails she observes in the widow’s yard; and the talk turns to the snails’ “perilous” mating habits:

The poem’s loose syllabic structure allows it to move forward fluidly, fitting the ostensible subject of snails; and the above description is so “extravagantly slow” and beautiful that it weds sound and subject indissolubly together. To the speaker’s surprise, the widow tells her that her husband “knew snails’ ways and his gar- / den had been Eden for them.” The poem’s tone suddenly turns dark in its last few lines with the revelation from the widow that the snails “at the first premonition of fall” seal the openings of their shells:

Caroll believed that, as the talk expanded, the snails became “the human animal, protected, perilous, and finally butchered.”34 I agree that this was certainly Gardner’s intent. Others such as John Logan who, in his review of The Looking Glass, calls the snails “figures of the poet herself,”35 have picked up on this, but no critic, to my knowledge, has discussed the parallel between the snail’s grim fate, and the ancient Greek story of the brazen bull created by Perillos for Phalairis, the tyrant of Agrigentum. Prisoners and slaves were roasted alive inside this bull, but due to a flute-like apparatus in the bull’s head, their cries were transformed into music for the king’s entertainment. The absence of this comparison in the criticism is surprising in light of the fact that Logan, in his poem, “To a Young Poet who Fled,”36 imbeds the story in the following lines:

Those little doors which sing” when the snails are “boiled” allude to “the human animal” in general and to the poet in particular. In “The Widow’s Yard,” Gardner’s extraordinary talent has again hidden a “large claim” under the surface of a quiet poem.

“Cockchafer,”37 another of Gardner’s amazingly perceptive animal poems, is unique in the sense that, on the surface, it seems to fly in the face of her stated objectives of reaching toward the other. Here, there is no unfulfilled longing for eye-to-eye contact that she presents in “That ‘Craning of the Neck,’” no disappointment in a fleeting relationship as seen in “The Moth Happened.” Its speaker determinedly slaughters flying beetles, making “Cockchafer,” on one level, an anti-nature poem, and, on another level, a political poem. In its black comedic tone, it presents the mentality a soldier must possess in order to make war. In this respect, “Cockchafer,” like “That ‘Craning of the Neck,’” illustrates Buber’s “sublime melancholy,” the necessity that “every You must become an It in our world.”

The opening comic but formal diction of “Desist Cockchafers,” sets the tone, and the poem moves directly into action, engaging its brilliant sound work to advance that action, as in “OUT! AVANTI! RAUS!” where English, Italian, and German combine to evoke the authoritative sounds of a military commander. Its speaker participates in a lop-sided battle with “Kamikaze Beetles of June,” and Gardner effectively resorts to capitalization, as in “Whirr” and “Whirrs,” or employs uppercase entirely as in the previously quoted “OUT! AVANTI! RAUS!” and in “CRUNCH,” “ERASE,” and “NOT,” where she emphasizes the frenetic noises of battle. The visually dramatic uppercase works better here than would softer-appearing italics to emphasize her words.

Immediate repetition of similar sounds is a device Gardner frequently and effectively uses. “Whack and you’re dead. Crack, you too. / Smack as you hit the floor…” contains both the emphasized repetition of “Crack/Whack/Smack,” and the subtle echo of “you too.” Her “CRUNCH / Crunch-crunch” is a triple repetition made more interesting and effective by the pause of a line-break after the first “CRUNCH,” the hyphenating of the last two, and by the diminishing sounds of each “crunch” as the uppercase disappears. More than a visual effect, this close attention to scoring sharpens our aural perception of the poem, in a sense giving “stage directions” for reading aloud, and is one more example of her subtle craftsmanship.

Gardner’s exaggeration of the sound effects and physical qualities of her ostensible subjects, recasts them in a humorous vein and, at the same time, partially veils the actual subjects -- love, sex, and death. “Cockchafer,” from its suggestive title through its “cocky crowd” and onwards to “cocky twitchers,” centers on the flying beetles and their “cousins,” “uncles,” and “aunts” who are, in June, out to make more of their kind. The only period of rest, perhaps a foretaste of death, occurs in the brief, centered line, “At last silence, and sleep,” after which the speaker wakes to “19 1/2 corpses. Some squished flat.” Her shoe is a military weapon, “beetle-scarred,” held in her “guerilla hand.” Given the lop-sided scale of the combat, “guerilla,” phonetically identical to “gorilla,” suggests King Kong battling beetle-like biplanes.

There is a controlled playfulness evident in the sound work of “Cockchafer.” A reader can relish the sensuous appeal of “squished,” “twitching,” “cocky twitchers CRUNCH / Crunch-crunch,” and laugh at the diction of “Desist” and “Ergo” directed at insects. This formality is humorous but fitting to the mock military nature of the combat; and the hard D and t of “Desist” and hard g of “Ergo” anticipate and echo sounds of crunching bodies. “ERASE” and “RAUS” achieve similar effects, and, even though “Erase” is English, one can almost feel the rolling R of German in both words. Gardner’s sound work presents, as in the onomatopoeia of “Crunch,” “Crack,” “Whirr,” “Whirrs,” “whirrers,” “whirring,” and “zizzing,” a “horrendous beetle-dom,” a mechanical vision that links nature with the machines of war. Gardner’s use of “Kamikaze” as an adjective modifying “Beetles” sets the stage for these war-like images, and its literal Japanese meaning of “divine wind” anticipates the “whirring” airplane sound effects to come. In this grim but humorous natural world, even the speaker’s head becomes dehumanized as an “air-port.” The poem’s final line, ending with “crashing in my head,” rather than “crashing on my head,” suggests that the “horrendous beetle-dom” may live on in their murderer’s memory. Because of Gardner’s sound effects and diction, the insects become a palpable presence which can be seen, heard, and felt. The language of “Cockchafer,” playful and sensuous, camouflages the poem’s dark core, which is our commonly shared mortality.

One of Gardner’s finest poems is “When a Warlock Dies,”38 her moving elegy to Dylan Thomas. Written at a time when a multitude of elegies was appearing after the poet’s sudden, tragic death, it is actually an anti-elegy, an “inverted elegy,” in John Logan’s words.39 Sweeping upward in a crescendo of praise, it rises to the revelation that, to Thomas, elegies are superfluous. Its musical language and rich vocabulary exude the atmosphere of a wake, a farewell party for the dead, which she attends on her “Sunday-go-to-funeral broomstick (wreathed with mistletoe).” She is not only in the poem but has linked herself with Thomas, he being the warlock, and she being “an apprentice witch, a mere familiar of Familiars.” Here, Gardner’s use of lower and upper-case F’s (an example of her careful attention to the scoring of the poem) strengthens the tone of humility and awe in this “I and Thou” apprenticeship to the poetic tradition.

The poem is filled with a mixture of Christian and pagan imagery and symbols which Gardnerbalances and binds together with rhyme, alliteration, and the multi-layered richness of her vocabulary. In the long sentence comprising the first stanza, she ties together: “warlock/rout/lemans/demons/fallen angels/Familiars/bend/ brewing/elegiac potions/fruity runes/plummed/dead’s distinctive spells/mournful marketable meads/composted/rich remains.” The sentence, itself, is a compost of “rich remains.” Gardnerhas packed it with incantatory diction that performs on many levels, one example of which is the linking of “lemans” and “demons” through rhyme. This serves, on one level, to unite opposites, “leman” being a sweetheart, lover, or mistress, and “demon” usually thought of as an evil spirit, a supernatural being, or devil. Another meaning of “demon,” however, (especially as “daemon” or “daimon”) is “an attendant spirit; a genius,” a meaning it shares in part with “familiar,” one definition of which is “an attendant spirit, often taking animal form.”

The entire poem is a mine-field of rich diction linked by music. Still in the first stanza, we find “fruity runes / plummed with their dead’s distinctive spells.” Gardner’s use of the noun, plum, as a verb (a poetic device known as “anthimeria”) is aptly evocative. It reinforces the richness of “fruity runes,” while conjuring plumb, as in “to test alignment or depth.” This slight altering of spelling also enhances “runes” and “dead’s distinctive spells,” “runes” being not only characters from ancient alphabets but also magic charms, poems, and incantations, and “spells” evoking magic formulas, spelling, and periods of rest.

“Mournful marketable meads,” though tied together by the alliteration of its soft M’s, is livened with the hard K and T in “marketable,” and given humor by the use of that word. “Mead” can be read either as the drink made from fermented honey, which would tie it in with “the brewing of elegiac potions,” (as well as Thomas’s renowned bouts of drinking) or as a meadow, which is suggested by the “meads” being “composted of his rich remains.” (Gardner, I am sure, was well aware of both of these associations.) One of the many pleasures of her poetry is that it reverberates on so many different levels.

The longer, middle stanza of “When a Warlock Dies” continues the poem’s energetic music and diction. A string of scattered, alliterative W’s, “witch / wreathed / a’wake-ing / Wichita / Whales / wake / whistles,” help, through their echoes, to tie this stanza together. (The W in “wreathed” is more felt than heard – a faint, whistling expiration as the word begins to form.) The mingling of Christian and pagan images continues with “mistletoe.” Also called the golden bough, mistletoe was considered sacred by the Celts and, in particular, by their druids, and, coupled with “wreathed,” is evocative of Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” The middle stanza’s second sentence is:

In his review of Birthdays from the Ocean, John Logan calls this passage “one of the finest crescendos anyplace in modern verse.”40 Its string of hyphenated words begins with “deft-dirged,” referring to the witch-like skill and elegiac qualities of Thomas’s poetry, the “dirged” echoing “cortege” in the previous line. The reader is forced to pause at the clever line-break in the middle of “over-o- / ded.” Here, Gardner wrings meanings from the word that it would not have had in any other setting. We hear dead in “ded,” and an implication of an excess of O’s as well as too many odes; perhaps od’d (overdosed) is also suggested. (She employs a similar strategy in the previous sentence with “a’wake-ing.”) The energy of the passage builds in the litany of multi-syllabic bird images that follow, culminating in “Chanticleer,” and decelerating to a sudden stop with the one-syllabled “Hails.” Each bird is coupled by a hyphen to a quality that is associated with that bird, as in “heron-lonely,” and “hummingbird-pulsed.” “Heron-lonely” harks back to the book’s opening poem, “That ‘Craning of the Neck;’” and it is interesting that she includes the buzzard and the phoenix, two opposite but balancing images of death and rebirth. Indeed, all these bird images recall Thomas’s “The fire of birds in / the world’s turning wood,” from the Prologue to his Collected Poems.41 They are employed as modifiers for “Chanticleer” (Thomas) who, through his poetry, has “crowed his own Farewells and Hails.” The capitalization of F and H emphasizes this direct reference to “ave atque vale” from Catullus’ “101,”42 in which that poet, questioning the purpose of his own elegy, speaks “in vain” to his brother’s “unspeaking ashes.” Again Gardner uses balancing opposites, this time of Thomas’s own goodbyes and greetings, which make all elegies to him superfluous.

Gardner continues to strengthen the spell of her language with the glue of words such as “ink / drink / spunk,” and “Wichita to Wales.” Besides the obvious play of “Wichita,” sounding so much like “witch,” and which links the American Gardner to the Welsh Thomas, the noun, “spunk” has sexual connotations, one of its slang meanings being “ejaculated semen,” tying it in with the double meaning of both “wake” and “cock” in the following line.

Thomas’s villanelle to his father, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,”43 is evoked with “The homage of our elegies whistles against the night…,” a turning upside down of “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” for, instead of rage, Gardner gives us a faint, fearful whistling in the dark, another jab at superfluous elegies. This whistling is “against the night / that looms too close for comfort….” Here, “looms” has a double meaning also. The night not only comes into view as a massive, distorted image; it also, like a cloth maker’s loom, weaves strands together in a magic spell, just as Gardner has woven her own strands together to form a (multilayered) tapestry.

The final stanza, like the first, is a single sentence, with no let-up in the incantatory diction. It begins with “The roaring riming of this most mourned Merlin,” where we hear the “rage against the dying of the light” in “roaring riming,” and in which Gardner has employed her own “distinctive” spelling by choosing “rime” over rhyme, “rime” also meaning “frost,” suggesting the body grown cold in death. The three M’s of “most mourned Merlin” echo the “mournful marketable meads” in the first stanza, and serve to enhance the framing effect of the short first stanza and closing couplet. “Canticles” (songs or chants) sounds somewhat like a rooster’s crow, and echoes “Chanticleer,” which contains the word “chant.”

As in the first stanza, Gardner uses an anthimeria in the brilliant final line, “and Jerichos the walls of heaven with a surfing shout of love, and blasts of flowers.” “Jericho” of course reverberates with associations. In the biblical narrative of Joshua, the walls of the city fell before the shouts and trumpet blasts of the Israelites. The city of Jerichois one of the oldest known permanently inhabited cities in the world, and its name echoes the biblical connotations of “canticles” from the previous line. Only here it is the “walls of heaven,” rather than a city, that are flattened by the “roaring riming” of Thomas. Gardner brings other parallels to this narrative into her poem with “a surfing shout of love” with its soft S’s, soft L and one hard T in the onomatopoetic “shout.” The softness of “surfing,” coupled with the hard T of “shout,” suggests the rhythmic power of the ocean, and pays tribute to Thomas’s “bellowing ark” riding above the waves (xvi). The emotional curve, itself like a “wave” mounting higher and higher throughout the poem, climaxes in this stanza where the rich diction, alliterative passages, and imagery combine to create a surge of joyfulness which counteracts the gravity of a traditional elegy. Thomas’s poetry, his “bellowing ark,” has indeed risen above the waves.

The final image, “blasts of flowers,” juxtaposing the powerful with the frail in both sound and meaning, also performs on many levels. Again, as in “surfing shout of love,” there is the contrast of sound with the hard B and the soft F. “Blasts” evokes trumpets, explosions, and gusts of wind, but “flowers” makes a delicate sound, though it suggests the shapes of trumpets. What makes this image a perfect finale for Gardner’s poem, however, is its direct reference to “The Force That Through The Green Fuse Drives The Flower,”44 a Thomas poem that is a type of elegy or “farewell” to himself. In his poem the “blast” comes through the “green fuse” of the flower’s stem which burns toward death. In contrast to the downward pull of the Thomas poem’s ending, “How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm,” Gardner’s tribute to him is buoyed by the character of her diction and sound work. There is a definite ring of triumph in the “walls of heaven” being Jerichoed, and in the “surfing shout of love, and blasts of flowers.”

The more acquainted one becomes with Gardner’s poetry, the sadder it is to contemplate that she is not widely anthologized, read, or taught today. Changing poetic fashions during the late 50’s and 60’s explain a part of it. A poet whose work was ranging the formal gamut from rhymed iambics and strict and loose syllabics to the sonnet, “Little Rock Arkansas 1957,”45 the villanelle, “Who Spilled The Salt,”46 and the terza rima, “Salt,”47 would, to some critics of the time, appear old-fashioned. Her relatively small output, cut short by ill health and self-confinement in her later years, may be a factor as well; but when has quantity ever equaled quality?

As previously mentioned, “Belle” Gardner was a good friend of James Wright whose early iambic and rhymed poetry would evolve into freer open forms in his later books. The period’s ambiguous and vacillating attitudes toward form can be illustrated by two of Wright’s own statements during that time. In “From a Letter,” dated 1967, and published in the anthology, Naked Poetry,48 he writes: “For myself, I have never written in syllabics, which sound to me even more tedious than the rhymed iambics which no fashionable poet would be caught dead writing these days.” Yet, in Donald Hall’s essay, “Lament for a Maker,” which introduces Wright’s Above the River: The Complete Poems, Hall relates that, in a letter of 1959, Wright, “working away from iambic, which for a while seemed glib or complacent … asked me [Hall] for instructions in making syllabics, which had been my own first alternative metric.”49 The winds of poetic fashion continue to blow. Today’s climate appears welcoming to both traditional and open forms; and Gardner’s poetry is worthy of a wider audience. Modest and monumental at the same time, it deserves a permanent place in our literary pantheon.

Gardner attended Wright’s funeral service in the spring of 1980, just a little over a year before her own passing in July of 1981. Her poem, “Writing Poetry,” which was undedicated in her 1961 collection, The Looking Glass, and in 1965’s West of Childhood, contained the dedication, “for James Wright,” when it was published in That was Then, New and Selected Poems in 1980.50 In 1982, when the New York State Arts Council posthumously honored her with its first Walt Whitman Citation of Merit for poetry,51 Herbert Mitgang, reporting the event for the New York Times, presented the following lines from that poem to illustrate what he called Gardner’s “view of poetry as a serious, even fatal occupation.”52

These are the opening and closing lines of “Writing Poetry,” and serve as a frame for a host of revelations. We find that some of the “chips” are “counterfeit,” that “winning one chip often means the forfeit / of another.” We also learn:

But in the end, it is “the gamblers wearing their own hides who shoot / the moon rocketing on unprotected feet to outer space….” Gardner obviously knew the “game” from inside out, and had no doubts about the seriousness of her calling. No poet can “pocket the moon,” if by that is meant cornering its light for one’s self, light which is, after all, only borrowed. A pocketed moon would reflect no light at all. But, if we interpret this as capturing a subject’s essence with music, passion, and craft, she has accomplished the feat in poem after poem with her own “distinctive spells.”

Gardner’s view of the serious and precarious nature of the poet’s “occupation” is also revealed in “This Room is Full of Clocks,”53 a poem which mourns the passage of time and the death of friends including Thomas, Cummings, Roethke, and MacNeice. It begins with the poet writing “at a desk that is mine / these mornings thanks to the kindness of a stranger.” Below the straight-forwardness of these lines lies the suggestion that the poet is handed the gift of a poetic tradition from forbears she has never met. And, given the autobiographical nature of many of her poems, it is not a stretch to see an evocation here of John van Druten’s comedic play, Bell, Book and Candle,54 about witchcraft in mid-twentieth-century New York, in which the heroine temporarily suffers ill effects from using her magic without restraint. After all, “Belle” Gardner has described herself as an “apprentice witch” astride a “sunday-go-to-funeral broomstick.” Playful yet serious self-references such as these abound in her incantatory poems, and, unlike the heroine of Bell, Book and Candle, Gardner never gives up her “distinctive spells.” “This Room is Full of Clocks” concludes with lines that are a type of poetic credo and, perhaps, a compact, one-sentence biography of the poet, herself: