The Always Coming On

      Greg Perry over at Grapez has been doing some intriguing ruminating on Bob Dylan and Archibald MacLeish of late, and this prompted me to dig out my own scuffed copy of MacLeish's Collected Poems again. MacLeish, to my mind, was always a better poet than many tended to suggest, though I suspect, like so many good writers were by Shakespeare and Spenser in the Renaissance, he was dwarfed by the fact of being born in age in which so many towering figures were also writing. One of MacLeish's most famous poems is also one of his best, though it seldom seems to be taught in courses anymore. The poem's sense of enjambement is excellent, and it manages to be both acrobatic and lyrical, writing a kind of dizzying despair with great control and dexterity; the center sections of the poem seem almost to hyperventilate, the rhythm's so adrenalized. But then there are those wonderfully simple, wondrously restorative stanzas at the start and the finish, deep breaths, recompositions of the heart.

You, Andrew Marvell

And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth's noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night:

To feel creep up the curving east
The earthy chill of dusk and slow
Upon those under lands the vast
And ever climbing shadow grow

And strange at Ecbatan the trees
Take leaf by leaf the evening strange
The flooding dark about their knees
The mountains over Persia change

And now at Kermanshah
Dark empty and withered grass
And through the twilight now the late
Few travelers in the westward pass

And Baghdad darken and the bridge
Across the silent river gone
And through Arabia the edge
Of evening widen and steal on

And deepen on Palmyra's street
The wheel rut in the ruined stone
And Lebanon fade out and Crete
High through the clouds and overblown

And over Sicily the air
Still flashing with the landward gulls
And loom and slowly disappear
The sails above the shadowy hulls

And Spain go under and the shore
Of Africa the gilded sand
And evening vanish and no more
The low pale light across that land

Nor now the long light of the sea:

And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on...

(1930)

There's a Stevensian quality to the bracket ends of the poem, but the interior is almost staggeringly breathless, as if the world itself is a hurry of things to be observed in decline and decay. It's a terrific poem, romantic in its despair, and despairing in its romanticism. Wonderful. Sooner or later I'll have to post a few other MacLeish pieces, when I'm feeling slightly less indolent than I am right now. It's early morning now: the shadow of light comes on....