And then I want to write a poem which
has two versions, "Prelude to an Evening."
I won't read the first version, which has eight stanzas.
They are four-line stanzas with four
stresses in each line and no final rhyme
at the ends of lines, unrhymed.
And I had a mean streak going.
Well, I think no poet is a saint.
Well, he's needed not a complete poet if he is.
And I think a poet never hesitates
to deal with an ugly subject, provided there's
something good about it.
And so this was a mean poem about a man returning home
to his wife and rehearsing the speech
that he wanted to make to her when she would ask him
to go and babysit with his children, their own children,
and teach them the names of the French kings,
because they were studying a little French.
Well, but he was like Edgar Allan Poe,
or like the man in the doomed house which which fell,
the House of Usher, who liked horrors.
And he wanted to die with great pomp and horror.
But he wanted to have a loving woman accompany
his last vigils.
And so he hears that sort of a man.
And a young lady, a brilliant young lady
who had been one of my graduate students at Vanderbilt,
teaching now in a college herself,
she was on the board of one of those little magazines that
call themselves an explicator.
A French word, "explication de texte."
They straighten you out, tell you what,
give the paraphrase, you know, which is forbidden
by some of the critics.
But an honest critic, he has to do the best he can,
tell his readers if there's some strangeness in the work.
So he commits to the policy of the paraphrases continually.
And so the query was that she was answering,
what's the matter with that fellow?
How could he say such things?
And she replied, oh, it's very simple, he's just a big brute,
and he's not going to sit with any babies,
even if they're his own babies.
And I felt greatly relieved when I read that.
That was about five years ago, four or five years ago.
And you see, I had reached an age,
I think I must have been at least as old as Chaucer was
when he had to recant from some of the heretical things he
had said in his poems.
And so I said, I'll just do a little recanting,
and I'm going to have a happy ending in that poem.
And then any poet is delighted to reprint again,
because he always sees how he can touch up certain lines
and put some new beauties in.
And so the eight lines of the eight stanzas
grew into 13, with the second stanza, one of the new ones,
and then after the ninth stanza, four more new ones
in which the recantation occurs and the happy ending happens.
I'll read you only the complete poem.
"Prelude to an Evening."
Do not enforce the tired wolf, dragging his infected wound
homeward to sit tonight with the warm children,
saying the pretty kings of France.
You are my scholar, then languish,
expire with each day's terror and next week's doom
till we are twice espoused in love and ruin,
and grave but smiling as the heavens fall.
The images of the invaded mind were monstrous only
in the dreams of your most brief enchanted headful.
Suppose a miracle of confusion, that dreamed
and undreamt become each other and mix
the night and day of your soul.
Though it never mattered your twice crying from mouth
unbeautied against the pillow, to avert the gun
of the same old soldier.
If quickly cry cock-crow or bell,
breaking the improbable black spell,
annihilated the poor phantom.
And now to confirm our strange supposal,
your monsters wait upon sunniest mornings.
You and your pain peignoir commend the heaped oranges,
gold on the platter, the cheeky and children,
but freeze at the turbulence under the floor
where unclean spirits yawn and thrash.
The day long clock will strike your fears.
The heels detonating the stair's cavern.
Freshening the water in the blue bowls for the buck berries
with not all your love.
You listen for a low, lost wind to awaken the warning
whisper of our sentinel pine.
Finally, evening.
Hear me denouncing our equal and conniving furies.
You making those, but they lack conviction,
smoothing the heads of the hungry children.
And that was the ending of the old poem.
Now, four more stanzas.
I would have what's magnificent at my coming,
two souls, tight clasps, and the swamp of horrors.
Oh, you shall be handsome and brave at fearing.
Now, my step quickens and meets a huge no.
Who's no was it?
Like the horse policeman's clapping on stage
in the name of the law.
That was me, forbidding tricks at homecoming,
at the moment of coming to its white threshold.
I went to the nations of disorder
to be quit of the memory of good and evil.
There even your image was disfigured, then
the boulevards rocked.
They said, go back.
Here I am.
And to balk my ruffian, I bite the tongue,
rehearsing all that treason.
Then creep in my wounds to the sovereign flair of the room
where you shine on the good children.
The idea of the sovereign flair, the king is a sovereign,
and his touch heals any wound.
So I had a little double meaning there.
Well, I felt relieved after that recantation.