Classical allusions are enough to drive a
good man to drink a dozen soda pops and belch until the sun comes again to the
garden of night with a rosy fingered dawn. That is to say that a smart
allusion might, just might make a poem
snappy and perhaps provide a deeper echo of
response after an attentive reader finishes a third or fourth reading.
But you need to choose your references smartly, and be smarter about where you position them. Otherwise it becomes comic
opera, over dramatic, crucified by self-importance.
Xenia
Most days that summer
your old dog came up,
in the searing heat, with a failing heart,
from your place, the half-mile uphill to mine―
up the steep rise,
past the pastured goats, on
the buggy trail that swerves through blueberries.
As you pointed out,
The Odyssey
is full of tears, everyone weeping
to find and lose and find each other again.
Spent, he struggled
the last two hundred yards,
ears low, chest heaving. Hearing
the jangling of his tags I knew the gods
had chosen me to
praise him for his journey,
offer food and water, a place to sleep.
I would admit that it's not an uncommon to have the
incidentally tragic in your life to remind you of something that you read years
before, but you have to ask the question as to why the poets needs to bring it
up at all. It becomes an offhand way of name dropping the title of a canonical
text into a poem that attempts the small significance of a dog growing old and
eventually passing on. Perhaps there is no credible way of writing about
something this minute without coming across as pretentious, sentimental or
pompous. Becker does us a service by avoiding a deep wade through the bristling
thicket of obtuse reference, but even this light toe-in-the -water approach, to
mix metaphors, is off putting for the reason I object to poets habitually
referencing that they are poets, poetry in general, or titles from their
private library. It has them thinking about what they've read rather than
ponder an experience they are having and, for me, that is a tendency that
entirely misses the point of this kind of small commemoration.
The prospect of reading someone who is self-critical enough
to doubt that they are genuinely generous and giving with their fellow citizens
and creatures is seductive enough as is, as this kind of reflection can indeed
go to the general notion of the alienated individual in communities that are
becoming increasingly fragmented, complex; one comes to wonder whether the
virtues or those about them seem to have are genuine and without affect, or if
they're mostly performative, ie, good manners and thoughtfulness put forth
merely as a means of easing through a day with the least social friction. This
reflection, though, is very expressible without the insertion of The Odyssey or the use of an obscure
word for the title. I venture to say that what Becker's poem accomplishes is
not clarity, the isolation of a fleeting sensation in original, fresh language,
or revealing a world view different from the reader's own. It comes across as
rote behavior seen in far too many poets who cannot step outside their conceit
that they bear the title of "poet" or worse, "intellectual"
and refrain from making their subject matter dreadfully , boringly entombed in
literary reference. I would be impressed if someone could ponder this
self-doubting in a way that makes you think of someone actually in the world,
pausing due to a strong and almost overwhelming rush of feeling that defy book
marking. Becker had the reference to the Odyssey at the ready prior to this
poem being written, and this, in effect, makes this poem dishonest.
The basic problem is the sheer absurdity of this enhanced
recollection--someone feeling the pain of self-recrimination because they
didn't accord an old dog the same dignity as a friend or relative who, quite
suddenly, ascends to nuanced and footnoted heights of existential despair.
Becker manages to serve the stereotypes of poets as people who are so
improbably sensitive to the capriciousness of existence that their sadness
exceeds mere suffering and instead becomes epic. This is the poet immobilized
by their grand response to situations, feeling deeper, harder, more elegantly
than do non-poets; this makes the poem practically useless as a vehicle to jolt
a reader into thinking about experience in another way.
On the same subject, Michael Collier takes the same tale in
his poem “Argos” and smartly deals with the story itself; the tale is made
fresh,lively, without being subjugated to the service of a trivial whimsy.
If you think Odysseus
too strong and brave to cry,
that the god-loved,
god-protected hero
when he returned to
Ithaka disguised, intent to check up on
his wife
and candidly apprize
the condition of his kingdom,
steeled himself
resolutely against surprise
and came into his land
cold-hearted, clear-eyed,
ready for revenge –
then you read Homer as I did,
too fast, knowing
you’d be tested for plot
and major happenings,
skimming forward to the massacre,
the shambles
engineered with Telemakhos
by turning beggar and
taking up the challenge of the bow.
Reading this way you
probably missed the tear
Odysseus shed for his
decrepit dog, Argos,
who’s nothing but a
bag of bones asleep atop
a refuse pile outside
the palace gates. The dog is not
a god in earthly
clothes, but in its own disguise
of death and
destitution, is more like Ithaka itself.
And if you returned
home after twenty years
you might weep for the
hunting dog
you long ago
abandoned, rising from the garbage
of its bed, its
instinct of recognition still intact,
enough will to wag its
tail, lift its head, but little more.
Years ago you had the
chance to read that page more closely
but instead you raced
ahead, like Odysseus, cocksure
with your plan. Now
the past is what you study,
where guile and speed give over to grief so you might
stop,
and desiring to weep, weep more deeply.
I much prefer the Collier poem, and thanks for posting it
here for contrast. It works wonderfully, it flows, it achieves a wallop in a
flowing, unpretentious language due to, I believe, Collier's decision to deal
with the tale and it's moral ambiguity directly, in a contemporary tongue.
Rather than treat the tale as a gratuitous texture to some small event that
cannot sustain the allusion, Collier's narrative world is whole and
integregated. He assumes the logic of the standard tale and provides it a
lightly applied modern dimension of articulated alienation, in scale, never
dwarfing the dynamics with a blundering reference to other literary adventures;
the tale and its already problematic contents are left intact.