Rhina Espaillat writes the sonnet “How Like a Winter . . .” (And After All: Poems, 2018) in response to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 17:  “So Shakespeare describes absence. Yes—but no, since every winter ends, gentling to spring’s tentative yellows, then the green and blue and bolder tones of flowering summer. So has this winter passed, as do all things— except the final absence. Without you, for instance, all of time is cut in two— before and after—seasons all the same, despite the beckoning lushness of the new, the living, rich in fur and fins and wings, intent on resurrection. But they go, our absent loves, and leave us stranded here, parted from all the changes of the year as by an endless fall of pallid snow.”   Turning gentle into a verb is a nice touch. Shakespeare’s poem, known as the last of the “procreation” sonnets, follows. The speaker fears that if he celebrates the “heavenly touches” of the “Fair Youth,” his comeliness, future readers will assume he is exaggerating or lying:   “Who will believe my verse in time to come, If it were fill’d with your most high deserts? Though yet Heaven knows it is but as a tomb Which hides your life and shows not half your parts. If I could write the beauty of your eyes, And in fresh numbers number all your graces, The age to come would say, ‘This poet lies, Such heavenly touches ne’er touch’d earthly faces.’ So should my papers yellow’d with their age, Be scorn’d like old men of less truth than tongue, And your true rights be term’d a poet’s rage And stretched metre of an antique song:    But were some child of yours alive that time,    You should live twice,– in it and in my rhyme.”   Every writer asks, Will I be read in the future, after I am gone? How will I be read? Most writing, of course, is quickly forgotten, often during the writer’s lifetime. We remember Shakespeare’s “Fair Youth” though his identity remains uncertain – a nice irony, given Shakespeare’s stated intention. He lives on, but anonymously. The final two lines are stirring: “But were some child of yours alive that time, / You should live twice,– in it and in my rhyme.” All of us hope to live on through our children, if only in memory. Espaillat reminds me John Shade’s investigation into the afterlife, prompted by the death of his daughter Hazel, in the poem that lends its title to Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire:   “I'm reasonably sure that we survive And that my darling somewhere is alive . . .”   As Espaillat puts it, in regard to "the final absence": “But they go, / our absent loves, and leave us stranded here."

“One of the offices of poetry: to use shapely speech to express the radicals of existence in all their ambiguity.”  “Shapely speech” is nicely put. Guys I knew, when being polite, might describe a girl as “shapely.” You know what that means. It means pleasing. What about “the radicals of existence”? I don’t know what that means. “Radicals” intended etymologically, meaning “roots”? As in chemistry or politics? All of the above? A similar “office” applies to prose as well, though “office” sounds a little high-falutin’.     “To answer idiosyncratically, privately, to a public world given over to falsehood, fake facts, scuzzy rumor, casual murderousness, comedic denials, manic impromptu wind-tunnel ideologies. To answer palsied language with vital language, plasticity, gaiety of invention and fabulation, against opportunistic mendacity.”   The ethics of writing. As John Berryman puts it in his biography of Stephen Crane: “Crane was a writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.” An honest writer comes equipped with a bullshit detector that he applies first to himself, then others. Lies enter language through politics, fashion, self-aggrandizement and any effort to seek approval. The hardest part of writing is keeping it vital while remaining faithful to the truth.     “If poetry can’t, or chooses not to, reveal what it feels like to live as a sentient being in a perilous enchanted world, then maybe it can (and deserves to) die. Or that mission will be replaced by a spectacular dumb show loaded with content, whipped up drama, and ‘language.’ It will be a polymer mold of what once was primary material. What can replace the completeness and immediacy of feeling that the sounds of words whip up or lay down?”   W.S. Di Piero might be describing prose or poetry assembled by artificial intelligence. What I’ve read or seen of it, even when it’s a competent copy of a human creation, feels hollow, dead inside. Something is missing, something vital and as personal as DNA or the individual human sensibility. Something “sentient,” to use Di Piero’s word. Algorithms write like backward children eager to please teacher.   [The quoted passages, a single continuous entry, is drawn from Di Piero’s Mickey Rourke and the Bluebird of Happiness: A Poet’s Notebooks (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2017).]

“Above the town of Frankfort, on the top of the steep bluff of the Kentucky River, is a burial-place where lie the bones of many heroes, sons the Commonwealth has lovingly gathered in one fold. It is a beautiful site for this simple Valhalla, with its wide outlook over the noble vale it crowns, to my eyes wondrously enriched by the sense of a people’s care for the fame of its illustrious dead.”  Each Memorial Day we walked to my grade school to watch the parade. Standing at the curb we waited for the marching bands, the dignitaries, pretty girls riding in convertibles, the veterans of three or four wars. The city handed out American flags on sticks and we waved them as the brass-heavy bands played “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” We followed the parade for half a mile to the Parma Heights Cemetery where my mother is buried. Prayers, solemn speeches, the firing of bolt-action rifles in a three-gun salute. I was a dim kid and understood nothing I was seeing. Americans have always gathered to honor their war dead, even today.   The passage above is taken from The Autobiography of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (1909). If Shaler (1841-1906) is remembered at all it is as a geologist and paleontologist. When the Civil War started, Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (1841-1906) was a student of the great Swiss-born zoologist Louis Agassiz in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard. A year away from graduating, Shaler resolved to continue his studies while preparing for war. He joined the university’s drill club, studied infantry tactics, read Jomini’s Traité de grande tactique and each weekend visited Fort Independence in Boston Harbor to learn about artillery.   After graduating summa cum laude in 1862, Shaler returned to his native Kentucky, where he was commissioned to raise the Fifth Kentucky Battery on the Union side, despite coming from a slave-owning family. He detested the Republican Party and many of his Kentucky friends had already joined the Confederate cause, but Shaler believed in the Union, which he called “a most useful convenience for uniting like states for protection and interchange.”   Shaler served for two years until illness forced his resignation. For almost forty years he taught at Harvard, and late in life wrote the poems collected in From Old Fields: Poems of the Civil War. Shaler’s wife published the book posthumously. In 2004, R.L. Barth edited and introduced The Selected Civil War Poems of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (Scienter Press). Bob is a poet, publisher, Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, and fellow Kentuckian. In his introduction he writes:   “Shaler was a Civil War combat veteran; he thought long and hard about combat, war, and soldiering; although a poetic amateur, he had certain poetic skills, chief among them narrative power, an ability to write fluid blank verse, and an eye for telling details, sharply perceived and rendered.”   Barth says Shaler’s best poems are “shrewdly observed and profoundly moving.” As the volume’s final selection, Bob includes “The Burial Place,” a poem that echoes the passage at the top taken from Shaler’s Autobiography. It begins:   “A hill-top that looked far above the throng Of brother hills, and into widening vales Wherein the brooks slip onward to the sea. A place for castle in old war-torn lands When might was master: here, the silent hold Where sleep the dead in earth that looks to sky For the brave trust in all that dwelleth there.”   Visiting the cemetery are an old man and a boy, “in ancient quest / Of place for one more grave . . .” The Civil War and its dead are alluded to obliquely:   “’T is not yet two-score years, yet ’t is as far As Trojan legend to the youth who hears How o’er this earth of peace tramped demon war, Treading its hills and vales with feet that scorched Their goodly life out; how of all that dwelt Out to the rim of sight, peace stayed alone With those who abided here in God’s strong arms, Unheeding Satan’s deeds.”   Shaler concludes his poem with a line as final as an epitaph: “’T is but the graves that stay.” As a coda, here is Bob’s “Meditations After Battle,” collected in Deeply Dug In (University of New Mexico Press, 2003). The first part is preceded by half of a Virgilian tag from Book I, line 462, of the Aeneid: “sunt lacrimae rerum . . .”:   “And all around, the dead! So many dead! So many ways to die it hurt the heart To look and feel sun burning overhead. We stacked the bodies on scorched grass, apart.”   Before the second part of the poem is the rest of Virgil’s line: “et mentem mortalia tangunt”:   “Death was the context and the only fact. Amidst the stench, I almost could believe There was a world of light where, if souls lacked Broken bodies awhile, they would retrieve Them, mended; where no one need longer grieve.”   The complete line from the Aeneid can be translated “There are tears for things and mortal things touch the mind.”

On summer mornings in the mid-nineteen-sixties, I would follow the path behind our house through a growth of poplars and sassafras to the place where the white oaks and tulip trees took over. The path ended at the top of the hill where we went sledding in winter. Most mornings in that small clearing, weather permitting, I would find a Mourning Cloak, the most beautiful of butterflies, warming itself in what Nabokov in Ada calls a “dapple of drifting sunlight.” I was then collecting butterflies, which meant killing one with a pinch to the thorax, a practice that shames me today. Yet, as an adolescent, I fancied a fraternal bond with that Mourning Cloak. It was always the same individual in my imagination, not a generic “specimen.”  In England, the Mourning Cloak (Nymphalis antiopa) is called the Camberwell Beauty, and Nigel Andrew recalls his first encounter:   “As a boy, I used to dream of seeing a Camberwell Beauty (from time to time I still do), but I had to wait until many years later, when, on a visit to Canada, I had my own ‘grand surprise’ [a folk name for the butterfly in England]. . . . The beautiful creature was understandably torpid, and very nearly—wonder of wonders—walked onto my outstretched finger: four feet were on before it changed its mind and, summoning it energy, flew off.”   Anyone ever enchanted by the sight of a butterfly, whether a lepidopterist or casual amateur, is likely to have such memories. The insect’s beauty is intensified by its gratuitousness. Nige offers all the solid evolutionary evidence for their aesthetic excess but remains true to the title of his new book, The Butterfly: Flights of Enchantment (Saraband). Nige is a veteran of the Golden Age of Blogging, and a rare blogger who can write. His book combines memoir, field guide and philosophical meditation. He even argues that observing butterflies is good for you, a goad to mindfulness. His subtitle is intended literally. More than any other animals, even birds, butterflies inspire wonder. Nige reviews the history of butterfly/human relations in England, which started with indifference, turned into a popular hobby, proceeded to obsessive collecting that vastly reduced the populations of some species, and finally evolved into serious science coupled with delight. He writes:   “Even in this time of rapid scientific advance, enlightenment could not be wholly disentangled from enchantment. If pure scientific curiosity drove the specialists’ activities, the allure of butterflies for most people was more emotionally grounded and more strongly aesthetic."     As a gifted reader, Nige laces his text with allusions to, among others, John Clare, Kingsley Amis, Darwin, Sigfried Sassoon, Simone Weil (!), Sir Thomas Browne, Kay Ryan, Walt Whitman and, most often, the lepidopterist/novelist Nabokov. His most surprising find is a passage by Joseph Conrad from the preface to The Shadow-Line (1916), used as an epigraph to the book:   “The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is; marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state.” Reading The Butterfly is pure pleasure. You need not be a biologist or nature mystic to enjoy it. “To get involved in watching butterflies,” he writes in a late chapter, “The Mindful Present: Seeing and Being,” “is to enter a new world, one that is rich, vibrant, abundant with life and color and energy—and in which we figure only as marginal, fleeting presences, potential threats but on no other interest. This parallel world goes o, with or without us.”   Nige’s first book, another paean to England and its traditions, was The Mother of Beauty (Thorntree Press, 2019), devoted to the country’s church monuments.

“And I very much like your love of pleasure, and your humour and malice: it is so delightful to live in a world that is full of pictures, and incidental divertissements, and amiable absurdities. Why shouldn’t things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together.”  Any sensibility able to produce such admirable thoughts I diagnose as sane. The writer is George Santayana in a May 24, 1918, letter to Logan Pearsall Smith. The Spaniard has just read Smith’s Trivia (1917). The book’s preface, in its entirety, gives a fair taste of the contents:   “‘You must beware of thinking too much about Style,’ said my kindly adviser, ‘or you will become like those fastidious people who polish and polish until there is nothing left.’   “‘Then there really are such people?’ I asked, lost in the thought of how much I should like to meet them. But the well-informed lady could give me no precise information about them.   “I often hear of them in this tantalizing manner, and perhaps one day I shall get to know them. They sound delightful.”   As was Smith, who joins that small coterie of “minor” writers often more essential to me than some of the majors: Walter Savage Landor, Charles Montagu Doughty, Max Beerbohm, Maurice Baring, Walter de la Mare. Each qualifies as a sui generis thinker and stylist. Each ranks pleasure high among his responsibilities to readers. Life is too fleeting to squander it on, say, Noam Chomsky and Joyce Carol Oates.   I first learned of Smith (1865-1946), an American-born English essayist and critic, through his correspondence with Henry James. Later I read his best-known work, All Trivia (1933), which collects four earlier volumes published between 1902 and 1933 and includes this announcement across from the copyright page:   “These pieces of moral prose have been written, dear Reader, by a large Carnivorous Mammal, belonging to that sub-order of the Animal Kingdom which includes also the Orang-outang, the tusked Gorilla, and the gentle Chimpanzee.”   To speak of “best-known” in regard to anything Smith ever wrote recalls Dr. Johnson’s observation that a second marriage is “a triumph of hope over experience.” In our day, Smith and other “minor” (a patronizing word that shouldn’t be used qualitatively) writers of the past are stubbornly unfashionable, not forgotten but unknown, like those cold little planets said to be lurking beyond the orbit of Pluto. There’s a poignancy in their fate. They worked hard and often honorably. They can still give us pleasure if we make the effort to recover them. Of course, all writers are fated to slip into oblivion – if they are fortunate, only after they are dead. Santayana writes of Trivia, which had been called “immoral” by the poet Robert Bridges, then poet laureate of the United Kingdom:    “[I]]t is not immoral at all unless you take it to be complete and ultimate, which of course is the last thing you would think of pretending. Your point is to be incomplete, fugitive, incidental.”   Precisely the qualities in which Smith reveled. He prized precisely who he was and wrote like no other writer, as in “Humiliation”:   “‘My own view is,’ I began, but no one listened. At the next pause, ‘I always say,’ I remarked, but again the loud talk went on. Someone told a story. When the laughter had ended, ‘I often think—'; but looking round the table I could catch no friendly or attentive eye. It was humiliating, but more humiliating the thought that Sophocles and Goethe would have always commanded attention, while the lack of it would not have troubled Spinoza or Abraham Lincoln.”   [Aaron James produced a fine appreciation of Smith “the Belletrist” in The Lamp.]