Mary Ruefle’s Selected
Poems sit on the shelf of my bedside table, and every once and a while, I
pick it up, flip to a random page, and read a poem. I like to approach poetry
in such a way, to meet it on my own terms, when I have the time to think
through the lines, to read it once or twice, maybe identify an allusion or two.
Meeting poetry on my own terms allows it to engage me on its terms: at the
deepest level, in the most unexpected ways.
But I digress.
When I flipped open Ruefle’s Selected Poems yesterday, I found myself engaging, not just Ruefle,
but also James Joyce. Before me sat “Toward the Correction of Youthful
Ignorance.” Before me sat, like a Russian nesting-doll, the pith of “The Dead.”
As I gazed at the gas-lit faces of Ruefle’s first stanza, I gazed at Gabriel
and Gretta driving along the quay in a snowfall. I gazed past their faces. I
saw the Morkans sisters in their eyes. I saw Bartell D’Arcy. I saw Freddy
Malins and Miss Ivors. They all jaunted across the page, passing puddings and
carved meats, dancing and drinking, debating the merits of the continent and
the homeland. I simultaneously saw the past and future in Gabriel’s mind, heard
the tapping of rocks on a rain soaked window, and saw the outline of a Michael Furey
walking home to take his final bed.
Then the young men thumped out of the classroom,
swaggering and offering their juvenile condemnation of the work that they
either could not understand, or did not want to understand. For what young man
wants to worry about his own mortality?
Lurking in Ruefle’s poem, lurking around the turn of the
next stanza, the stench of death reaches out toward us; it reaches out to tell
us that though we are young, we are not immortal. Ruefle guides readers past
the yellowing corpses of dead or dying mothers, past her speaker’s hate of
Christmas dinners, and into her speaker’s past. She tells the reader about the
accident, not the accident itself, but the accident as her speaker witnessed
it. Her speaker, as a young girl, wandering down to the highway, where she saw
the windshield cracked, the blood still on the seat, and saw a beauty in it
that she did not describe to anyone. She tells us that she did not think she
would live to see her youth gone.
Then she shifts again, and like the young men, her
speaker is sauntering. Her speaker has grown into one who will not look upon
death and find it beautiful, who won’t fear it, who despises the thought that
there could be love in the world. The speaker accepts the world’s beauty, but
she denies it love.
But it is not the declaration against love that Ruefle
leaves the reader with at the conclusion of the poem. The reader is left with
one further image, of daughters keeping diaries with “descriptions of boys in
the dark.” Again, the poem concludes with Joyce, with Gretta’s love, as a young
girl, for the young man who is now dead, a love that she has kept locked and
hidden away. There is love in this world.
Despite her speaker’s declaration that “there’s no love
in this world,” Ruefle seems to be telling readers otherwise. She has connected
her speaker to the boys at the beginning of the poem through the word saunter.
She seems to treat the boys as if they are merely young and ignorant, when they
say that lasting love, love worth dying for, is puerile. Love is lasting; love
is worth dying for. To admit to love is to admit to the possibility of
something more valuable than living. Michael Furey, Gretta’s young lover whose
death was precipitated by his love for her, tells us this. The young men
inhabiting the poem have yet to accept the benefits of love, just as the
speaker, seems unable to accept love in this world. Ruefle, however, is
encouraging readers that love is in the world, and it is worth the loss of
mortal life.
JCM
16 December 2012
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