Then another one along that line I'll
tell you about in a minute.
But I'd like to read "The Groundhog," which
I think I owe you.
For years, I couldn't read this poem.
I had a horrible nervous state for many, many years worrying
whether this would be the only poem of mine that would ever
be known.
And so I got off it.
But then years later, I came back onto it.
And actually this poem was written with--
at the same time that three other poems were written.
And it may interest you to know that when
I wrote these four poems--
Well I guess they put this in the paper this morning
or maybe you read it in the paper.
Maybe I'm just repeating.
But I'll say it anyway.
That when I wrote these four poems
I really thought they were all about alike,
my innocence, my passion, my desire for truth,
whatever it is, whatever it is.
I wouldn't know.
The mystery of poetry was the same about all four.
And yet as the years went on, one of them
became what I call a mountain-- a mountain peak poem, this one.
The next one was called in a hard intellectual light, which
you'd might call a plateau poem.
And the other two didn't even get into a little magazine
let alone a book or anthologies.
So what do you make of that?
That in a sense the poet doesn't know what he's doing.
Well I mean you have to be awfully brainy.
And you have to be terribly alive when you're writing.
But I mean the fate of a poem is something
out of the hands of the poet.
I really believe this.
This poem for instance was written
in a terrific state of--
a marvelous state of total knowledge
of feeling of power or of ability in about 15 minutes.
And I never had to change a word or maybe only one.
These things they bother me to this day.
And in about in a whole lifetime of writing, about half a dozen
of my poems have been given to me
in this way, which is really spiritual, mystical,
or whatever.
It's very strange.
As if the personality, the whole being,
this heavy body that we have was a light and airy vein.
And that you were used by a spirit far beyond you.
That the personality is simply a wind vane blown
upon by some higher power.
Well I don't want to press that too far.
But anyway here's the poem.
"In June, amid the golden fields,
I saw a Groundhog lying dead.
Dead lay he.
My senses shook.
And mind outshot our naked frailty.
There lowly in the vigorous summer
his form began its senseless change,
and made my senses waver dim seeing nature ferocious in him.
Inspecting close his maggots' might
and seething cauldron of his being,
half with loathing, half with a strange love,
I poked him with an angry stick.
The fever arose, became a flame and vigor circumscribed
the skies, immense energy in the sun, and through my frame
a sunless trembling.
My stick had done nor good nor harm.
Then stood I silent in the day watching the object, as before,
and kept my reverence for knowledge trying for control
to be still, to quell the passion of the blood.
Until I had bent down on my knees
praying for joy in the sight of decay.
And so I left.
And I returned in autumn strict of eye,
to see the sap gone out of the groundhog,
but the bony sodden hulk remained.
But the year had lost its meaning,
and in intellectual chains I lost both love and loathing,
mured up in the wall of wisdom.
Another summer took the fields again massive and burning,
full of life, but when I chanced upon the spot
there was only a little hair left,
and bones bleaching in the sunlight
beautiful as architecture.
I watched them like a geometer, and cut a walking stick
from a birch.
It has been three years, now.
There is no sign of the groundhog.
I stood there in the whirling summer,
my hand capped a withered heart, and thought
of China and of Greece, of Alexander in his tent,
of Montaigne in his tower, of Saint Theresa
in her wild lament."
I'll give you a footnote on Montaigne in his tower.
I used to bicycle around France as a student and Montaigne's
farm is still there.
And he has a tower where he worked.
And there are chalk markings on the rafters
still with his sayings.
So you can take it as a metaphor or as a reality.
You easily see that in my scheme of things the ruler of men
is on the lowest plane or the warrior, the great Alexander,
is lowest.
The philosopher is next.
The highest type of mankind is the saint
or the religious person.
Well now there's for some old ones.
I want to give you one more.
And this is a poem--
Oh by the way, you know when I read that one about if I could
only live at the pitch of this nature of madness or something?
That's really-- that's the idea of the divine madness
of the Greeks, which wasn't total madness.
But it was drunkenness of spirit or being totally alive
is what they believed in.
That's from which all of their art sprang.
And just to take a minute, I'd like
to read you the greatest thing ever said about creative act.
It is by Plato in the Ion.
And this is what he had to say.
"For all good poets, epic as well as lyric,
compose their beautiful poems not by art but because they
are inspired and possessed.
And as the Corybantian revellers when they dance
are not in their right mind, so the lyric poets
are not in their right mind when they are composing
their beautiful strains.
But when falling under the power of music and meter
they are inspired and possessed, like Bacchic maidens who
draw milk and honey from the rivers
when they are under the influence of Dionysus,
but not when they are in their right mind.
And the soul of the lyric poet does the same
as they themselves say.
For they tell us that they bring songs from honeyed fountains,
culling them out of the gardens and dells of the Muses.
They, like the bees, winging their way from flower
to flower.
And this is true."
And remember the next sentence for the rest of your lives.
"For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing,
and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired
and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him.
When he has not attained to this state,
he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles."
Well I read this passage with the greatest belief
for many years.
And yet it's only a little while ago
that I thought that this isn't the total truth after all.
That all Plato was talking about is the lyric poem.
Because how could this be true of Chaucer?
It couldn't be.
It couldn't apply to Chaucer.
It couldn't apply to Shakespeare's plays.
It couldn't apply to the long poem,
like Milton's Paradise Lost.
So I think what he is saying about this near madness
is the divine ecstasy is only for lyric poetry.