The Greatest English Lyric? — A New Reading
of Joe E. Skilmer's "Therese"
by
John Frederick
Nims
Genuine revolutions in literary taste and theory occur on an average
only once every seven generations; therefore it is a source of satisfaction
to have myself piloted what may be the most shattering reappraisal in our
literature. I am referring — as the world of letters now knows well
—
to the discovery (made about the time that flying saucers began to be widely
observed here and abroad) of that core of inner is-ness in the
poetry of the long misread, long underrated Joburt Eggson Skilmer, or Joe
E. Skilmer as he himself signed his poems. Slighted by serious readers for
what seemed the facility of his technique and the pious banality of his
thought — especially as shown in the poem known as "Trees"
—
Skilmer was in reality the perpetrator of an existentialist hoax on a public
that prided itself on knowing what was genuine.
For years, many of us had been dissatisfied with the reading generally
accorded this remarkable poem — the kind of official reading that
provoked academic guffaws in a thousand classrooms. "There is more here
than meets thee, eye," I would murmur to myself, teased by a host of
ambiguities, of velleities that never quite came clear. It was a question of
tone. Perhaps my first breakthrough came when I heard Professor Wrugson
O. Muttson reading a line from Pound's "The River-Merchant's Wife: A
Letter":
A fourteen I married my Lord you.
Muttson read the line as if it expressed wifely devotion. But it was obvious
to me, as to any especially sensitive reader, that Pound intended the line to
be heavily ironic, and that the "tone" might better be represented by
something like
At fourteen I married (my Lord!) you?
My trouble had been that I was ventriloquizing, putting my own
voice into the poem, instead of letting it
read itself to me. Do
not read poems — this became my principle — be read to by
them.
This approach led to a number of discoveries, of which possibly the most
earth-shaking was my article proving that Hamlet's famous soliloquy is not
about suicide at all but about his meteorological and alchemical experiments
with a numbers of test tubes (the "retorts" he is famous for), of which the
tube lettered "E" seemed the most promising if the most vexatious:
Tube "E" or not tube "E" — that is the quest, chum.
Weather? 'Tis no blur in the mind . . .
But this reading, now officially adopted in the best textual editions, is too
well known to need further quotation. I have also found my method of
"deep reading" fruitful in the perusal of several thousand lines of
Paradise Lost, and I suspect that our whole literature will
have
to be reread in the light of it. However: it was on the basis of this strict
principle that I returned to Skilmer's great love poem to Therese Murk of
Peoria. Called simply "Therese", or "T'rese", it had too long been thought
of as having something to do with "trees" ! The misconception arose from
Skilmer's supreme irony; he had all too successfully "achieved an overlay",
as he liked to say when speaking of the technique of poetry. That is, by a
triumph of art he had given a shallow surface glaze, a pretty spindrift, to
the profound abysses of the poem — a glaze so
trompe-l'oeil
that many were never able to see beneath it. What the public had been
doing was reading only the "overlay" instead
of what he called the "substruct", and what they settled for was something
miserably like this:
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is pressed
Upon the earth's sweet flowing breast.
Upon whose bosom snow has lain,
And intimately lives with rain.
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray.
A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
Sheer banality! (And how far short of Skilmer's own noble definition of a
poem as "a shimmering spitball flung into the great catcher's-mitt of
eternity.") But the poem's
innerness, which my researches
have
arrived at, is another thing entirely. What I mean to do here is demonstrate
the "substruct", unit by unit, explicating where I can, though it is doubtful
that any reader, or group of readers, will ever arrive at an adequate notion
of the riches hidden in this most wonderful of poems.
1.
I think? That I shall never, see!
Up, owe 'em love. Leah's a tree.
Probably not since John Donne's "For Godsake hold your tongue, and let
me love" has a poem opened with such explosive élan.
"
I
think?" he rages; and in that fury is a ringing refusal to see life merely in
terms of the "cogitations" that have amazed lesser poets. Here the whole
Eliotic tradition of intellectualized verse is swept cleanly away forever
—
an achievement the more remarkable inasmuch as that tradition had not yet
come into being. But few poets have had antennae so sensitive, been so
unfailing a Tiresias (Therese? Ah yes!) in divining the yet-to-come. Crass
indeed is the reader who fails to sense, in the proemial words, the poet's
curling lip,
[1] or who fails to note the
hoot of scorn in the derisive "see" that concludes the line with a vulgarity
ah how
voulu! Almost blatant, this effect; and yet, beneath
the
brassy fanfare, what delicate counterpoint of grammatical woodwinds in the
antiphony of declarative mood to
interrogative, an antiphony that becomes harangue when we feel it in terms
of the inner dialogue, the colloquy of a soul tormented by an age when all
values have turned moot. Yet, as always in Skilmer, violence tempered with
amenity: instead of the scowling "will" of resolution, only the disclaiming
modesty of that simple "shall".
The second line, opening with courage and defiance, can but deepen
the stated theme. "Up!" (cf. the Italian "Su! coraggio!") as the poet,
confronting the inenarrable chaos of his world, lifts himself from that
slough of despond by the Muses' very bootstrap. Don't give
love away, he exhorts himself; don't wanton away so rare a substance on
the all and sundry. Owe them love; do not pay when payment
is
despised. How much terser these moving words than such romantic
maundering as
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
"Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away. . ."
But — oh marvel of art — again the tight-lipped acerbity is
softened
by one of the loveliest transitions in all poetry. After the corrosive cynicism
of the opening, the gentle evocation of Biblical womanhood fuses, as in
Dante, with the mythology of the ancient world, in a line that sums up the
fugacity of all things mortal. "Leah's a tree" indeed; Leah has
become a tree, has escaped from the aggressor's pursuit,
from
the weary wheel of being. When Skilmer says "Leah" he is of course
thinking of Daphne — the names have three letters (if no more) in
common; our poet works by preference in that hallowed
three,
perhaps more meaningfully here than elsewhere, since in his sturdy
American dialect
Therese and
threes would
have
been pronounced alike. It is no accident that the number of lines in the
poem (12) is easily divisible by three, with none left over. Characteristic
too of Skilmer's esemplastic knack is this grafting of image onto image; it
is
wholly natural that in thinking of the Ovidian Daphne he should conceive
of her
a lo divino — see her not as some mincing
pagan, but
aureate in the scriptural halo that Dante too looped like lassoes of tinsel
round her.
2.
A tree — who's hung? Greymouth is pressed
Upon the earth-Swede, Flo Ingbrest.
A tree is indeed a tree, embodies as nothing else the very essence of the
arboreal. An image of the world's green beauty — but no less an
emblem
of its horror. Skilmer's panoramic imagination sees the tree as a
death-image, a very gallows with its dismal fruit. Painstaking Dantists ("In
our age," the poet dourly quipped, "there are no painless Dantists") may
well see here the influence of Dante's Wood of the Suicides.
We have learned little about Flo Ingbrest — Florence C.
Ingbrest
of 1222 Stitt St., Des Moines. Her very address is known only because it
was found tattooed on the left hip of a sailor washed ashore at Tampa after
the great hurricance of '23. It is clear that Miss Ingbrest meant much to the
poet, who saw in this simple Swedish girl a power participating so fully in
the chthonic matriarchal atavism of the dark earth itself that he calls her
simply his "earth-Swede". Her earthy affections,
however, were soon alienated by the vague and sinister figure the poet calls
Greymouth, a misty shape ominous as any of the ghosts that slink nameless
through the early Eliot. Though much research has been done on the
unknown Greymouth, little has been ascertained. Dr. Woggs Clurth, basing
his argument soundly on the morpheme "rey" in Greymouth, has proposed
that he was really Watson King of Canton, the affable rapist; Dr. Phemister
Slurk, dispensing with what he derides as "evidence", has suggested that he
represents Warren G. Harding, an Ohio politico of the '20's. Cavillings all:
Greymouth, whosoever he may have "been" in the world we think of as
real, now, through Skilmer's artistry, exists forever in the purlieus of the
Muse — slinking, loose-lipped, drivelling, livid with his nameless
vice.
3.
Upon whose boozin's (no!) has lain
Anne D'Intagh Mittley — lives wi' Thrane.
In the third stanza, sometimes insensitively printed as the fifth, the tragedy
grows blacker yet. After Florence C. Ingbrest and a handful of casual
flames, the poet sought solace with the Mittley sisters of Boston.
Researchers have shown that there were two: Daisy (or "Diz") Mittley, and
her much younger sister Anne D'Intagh. It was the younger the poet loved,
but again the romance was blighted by a conniving interloper, this time the
wealthy Thaddeus Thrane of Glasgow, whose nationality is slyly derided in
the dialectal "wi'" for "with". The butt of frequent barbs in the Skilmer
corpus, he is here dismissed with a contemptuous phrase. Though his
beloved Anne lived "wi'" Thrane at the time the poem was written, Skilmer
seems less troubled by this passing infidelity than by her amour with
Greymouth — for Greymouth is the true antecedent of "whose". We
now
learn that he was a heavy drinker — and immediately the mysterious
soubriquet is clear. Extensive research has established
that
gris is the common French word for
grey.
But
gris also means
drunk. Greymouth then is
unmasked
as Drunk Mouth. Indeed, so great a guzzler was Greymouth that the loyal
Miss Mittley was said, by a witty metonomy (or synecdoche)
[2] to have lain not on his bosom but
(with
a pun that anticipates Joyce by several weeks) on his "boozin's". One
almost hesitates to mention that "bosoms" too has its questionable
advocates.
[3] Be that as it may, one
wonders if in all literature the tragedy of four lives has been so
harrowingly adumbrated? All one can conjure up for comparison is Dante's
Siena me fè; disfecemi Maremma.
But Dante, with his five and a half words for one life, is long-winded
compared with Skilmer, who averages a mere three words per head, or
even less, if one counts the "wi'" as fractional diction. In this grisly
aperçu, so true of all humanity, the resources of typography too are
put
to unexampled use, with the two-letter "no" followed by an exclamation
mark that is like a spine straight with moral indignation, and enclosed in the
semicircularity of parentheses, like lips rounded in incredulous refusal. But
the "no" is uncompromisingly jostled by the assertive
has,
with
its harsh aspirate, distorted from honest Roman type into italics, set askew
from the vertical: even the letters, means the poet, have
lost their
aplomb before the moral horror. (A textual note: there are those,
and
their name is legion,
[4] who read
"Hugh Inta Mittley" in the second line. But nothing in Skilmer's emotional
history gives countenance to a suppositious
passion for Anne's little brother Hugh, then three years and some months
old.)
4.
A tree that looks it! — Gawd! Auld, eh?
And Liffs hurl eavey alms, tout prêts.
And so it goes. The world-weariness, the melancholy, Skilmer in the depths
of his Hamlet mood, or what he himself ruefully called, in the bad German
he had learned from "certain ladies" in Milwaukee, "meines Hamletische
Gesauerpusskeit". Does even Hamlet, whom so many have called the
"Danish Skilmer", have a line so weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable as "A
tree that
looks it"? — in which the poet accepts the
humble
monotony of things as they are in their weary
haecceitas, the
sad fact that they are only what they are, and so fully
look
what
they are, instead of embodying the splendor of their Platonic archetypes.
"The interminable pyramical napkin," broods E. E. Cummings —
but
how sesquipedalian this in comparison with Skilmer's demotic oomph. And
from time immemorial this nauseating sameness — old indeed, and
more
than old. Probably there is no more plangent understatement in the language
than Skilmer's simple but despairing "auld". For the poet,
unable to tear his ravaged heart from thoughts of Thrane, glumly
Scotticizes: "Auld, eh?" he spits out, thereby more keenly
identifying Thrane with all he most distrusts in reality. Cosmic gloom
induces wide-ranging speculations: the bard's restless mind hovers around
the anthropology he loved so deeply, and from what sad strata of the past
he must have disinterred his pregnant and touching lines about the Liffs. A
Liff, as we know now, is the baseborn son of a Riff father and a Lett
mother.
[*] But even a Liff, born who
knows where in semi-savagery, may hurl the alms of charity (as the miserly
Thrane never did), alms that shelter us like eaves from the cold and
rook-delighting heaven, alms that are always ready,
tout
prêts, to relieve us. In his polyglot technique, Skilmer, as so
often, again anticipates the practice of Ezra Pound, his foremost epigone:
he uses the French words to imply that even the barbarous Liffs have
achieved a measure of urbanity, as compared with certain uncivilized Scots
he could mention. The touch of Gallic vivacity brightens, but all too
briefly, the poem's Stygian verge. (Again, a textual note: some read "A
tree that looks
two", and explain it as referring to the illusory
nature of perceived reality. Rubbish!
[5]).
5.
A tree . . . that Mayan summer! 'Ware
Honesta Robbins! Henna hair!
In explicating this
locus classicus of modern poetry, it is
necessary to bear in mind certain facts about the manuscripts — or
"menu-scraps", as Skilmer himself wryly called them. Always a victim of
poverty, the poet used to quill his sublimest ditties on the backs of labels
laboriously soaked off the bottles of whiskey on which he shrewdly spent
what little means the world afforded him. Thousands of these labels have
survived, mute testimony to the trembling fingers that treasured them
—
each bearing only a few words of that great cornucopia of song he willed
posterity. (There are also three labels from spaghetti cans, and one from a
small can of succotash.) A study of some hundreds of manuscripts shows
that Skilmer first wrote "A tree . . . that Aztec summer!" — a
reference
to the year he spent in Central America with an anthropological expedition.
An idyllic year, possibly the happiest of his life, when his natural warmth
and high spirits, so often thwarted
by dingy circumstance, overflowed with an almost boyish ebullience.
Arriving in early May, he had been married there three times by late June
— and each time happily. Hence the little idyll about the Aztec
summer,
found on the manuscript
Old Overholt 202 and certain others.
(The spaghetti labels have little authority.) But the definitive reading is to
be found on
Heaven Hill 714: not "Aztec" but "Mayan", a
word
which Skilmer pronounced with the long
a of
May.
"A tree . . . that Mayan summer!" — and there it is forever,
the
bright leaves bathed in a golden haze of old romance, lost histories. An
idyll, yes — but before long Skilmer's domestic bliss was shattered.
He
was followed to Yucatan by Mrs. Chloe P. Robbins of Ashtabula, a
steamfitter's widow. With her came her daughter, the 47-year-old Honesta
Lou, whom Skilmer called his "buxom nymph o' siren voice" — she
was
six feet two, her flaring red hair vivid with purple highlights. It is this
vision of somewhat menacing loveliness that is now evoked in lines that
recall Coleridge's
Beware, beware,
His flashing eyes! his floating hair!
With deft economy, Skilmer laments the timelessness of his plight by using
the archaic "'Ware' for "Beware".
6.
Po' Em's our maid. 'Bye, fools! Like me,
Butt only. Godkin may kertree!
Almost from the beginning, it was clear to a happy few that what seemed
"poem" was really "Po' Em", a poor Southern girl named Emma or Emily.
Her identity long eluded researchers, until Dr. Cecily P. Wunkhead, basing
her argument largely on blood tests, litmus paper, and
Old Crow
1066 (and rejecting the famous "succotash reading" as spurious)
proposed that the unknown Em was none other than Emily Dickinson. To
show that Emily is the mouthpiece not only for New England but for all
America Skilmer resorts to an amazingly simple device: he gives her a
southern voice: probably not since Praxilla has the ethos of
inner dynamic been so functionally aligned with dialectal specificity.
And why Emily Dickinson? Because she is the American Muse, ever
at our side to lend a helping hand with torch on high — a servant,
she,
of servants of the laurel. Po' Em's our maid, and with our
trust
in her we can afford to dismiss the vulgar many, as Skilmer does with
much
the same testy arrogance that Yeats and Jonson flaunted. Whereas Jonson
needed ten words or so in his
Far from the wolves' dark jaw, and the black asses' hoof . . .
Skilmer does it in two burning words, "'Bye, fools!" But immediately
compassion returns, and he remembers that the ordinary man, just as he,
is only a butt for the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. This might
have set a-moping a less resilient bard, but Skilmer recovers, to conclude
with a thundering diapason of
Jubel und Ruhm such as not
even
Beethoven has ever equalled: the magnificent "Godkin may kertree!"
Godkin: a little god, that least of the divinities in man, godkin
may — but how the gala vowel, long
a,
implies
lyric certainty in a word which, heard by the intellect alone, might seem to
allow for doubt.
May what? He may "kertree"! It is fitting
that
the pinnacle of Skilmer's sublimity should glitter in this final phrase of his
greatest poem. And how like him to achieve sublimity by means so simple!
Here he seizes from its lexical limbo the humble prefix
ker-,
as
in
kerplunk,
kerplop,
kerflooie.
A prefix
that
only once before in English had assumed nobility, in J. F.
Dudley-Andover's sublime translation of Dante's
E caddi come corpo morto cade
as
I plopped kerplunk, as corpses plop kerplunk.
Holding the precious
ker- in the jeweler's forceps of his wit,
Skilmer works it into a new thing entirely by fusing it with the unexpected
"tree": to "kertree", to burst into flower, into foliage, nay, into very tree
itself! One sees the creativity of the universe, the vital breath taking form
in a great efflorescence of green, a cosmic sneeze as if the whole sweet
growth of April and May, by some cinematic magic, were effected in an
instant.
[6]
It is around this magical last line that scholarship itself tends oftenest
to kertree. "Godkin" in particular has stimulated the finest hermeneutic
acumen of our century to new Everests of perception. Professor Fiedler has
explored in depth the profound viscerality of "gutkin". The Cambridge
School has constructed a breath-taking new theory of the origin of tragedy
on the reading "goat-kin". It is hardly
surprising that "incentive psychologists" make much of "goadkin".
Professor Fitts, citing
γαδ- and
χυων, finds a fish-dog, or dogfish, allusion
that unfortunately cannot be discussed in these pages. Nor can the
suggestion of certain Welshmen, who urge an early form of
"gwiddcwyngh". Professor Rákóczi is more to the point in
reminding us of what careless readers might forget: "gyödzskin" is a
medieval South Hungarian gypsy cant word (though hardly the most
common) for a thickish wine made out of half-rotted artichokes: what vistas
open here! Only recently Nopançópi Hópail has
removed the
whole question from the field of linguistic speculation to that of
biographical allusion by proposing — how imaginatively! —
that
"godkin" is "Godkin": E. L. Godkin (1831-1902), who came to America
from Ireland when twenty-five, founded
The Nation, and was a disciple of the Bentham-Mill-Grote school of philosophy.
On the whole subject, however, no one commands more respect than
Professor Fredson Bowers, whose monumental fifty-volume edition of
Skilmer, The Fourteen Poems and Certain Fragments, is
promised for 1970 by the Southeastern Arkansas Junior Teachers' College
Press. As early as 1962 Professor Bowers wrote: "I wonder if you have
thoroughly considered the evidence of Old Crow 16? In this
version, possibly a trial, 'May' is capitalized and must therefore be taken
as the month.[7] If this is so, the
possibility obtains that the godkin referred to is the month of May, and
hence we can explain the diminutive. After all, in the month of vernal
growth there is something godlike in the creative surge of the sap and the
burgeoning of the chlorophyll. However, the syntax is then in question.
There is perhaps no need to associate 'godkin May' with the 'butt', even
though a month that pretends to be a little god might be a butt for
something. I think on the whole we are to take 'godkin May's' activities with approval, not with disapproval. If so, then I suggest that Skilmer, overcome with the
wonder of vegetable love and the rites of spring, finds that normal syntax
deserts him and is reduced to two paired but mutually discrete
exclamations. 'Godkin May!' or: Oh the wonder of it all! And then that
exclamation that sums up the plosive force of May, 'Kertree!'"
This is brilliantly reasoned and would seem to be the last word on the
subject — but Professor Bowers had not yet done with it. A few
years later he decided that the line had further subtleties, which he
explained, in bibliographical terms, as follows: "It could be read as a series
of ejaculations, rising to a climax. The lack of punctuation appropriate for
this reading is of course nothing unusual with Skilmer. That is: only Godkin
— the one God — He only. Then, in remembered ecstasy of
that
Mexican spring, May [and here Professor Bowers shows his grasp of
contemporary allusion] just busting out all over, like the bursting sap, the
springing leaf, in the ultimate mystical union with Nature, kertree! Thus
exclamation points should be placed after each unit. I suggest these are at
least alternate readings."
But perhaps these are matters beyond the power of man to determine.
However it may be, Godkin may indeed kertree — but it takes a poet
of
supreme insight to perceive this, a poet able to wrest language from dead
strata of the past and kerplunk it living in the midst of men. But explication
is no substitute for the poem. Here, for the first time presented in its
ur-textual splendor, is what many[*]
would consider the greatest lyric poem of our literature:
THERESE
By Joe E. Skilmer
I think? That I shall never, see!
Up, owe 'em love. Leah's a tree.
A tree — who's hung? Greymouth is pressed
Upon the earth-Swede, Flo Ingbrest.
Upon whose boozin's (no!) has lain
Anne D'Intagh Mittley — lives wi' Thrane.
A tree that looks it! — Gawd! Auld, eh?
And Liffs hurl eavey alms, tout prêts.
A tree . . . that Mayan summer! 'Ware
Honesta Robbins! Henna hair!
Po' Em's our maid. 'Bye, fools! Like me,
Butt only. Godkin may kertree!
SONNET 129
These sad fragments, so like the papyri of Sappho preserved in the
hot dry sands of Oxyrrhynchus (in Egypt), were recovered, tattered and
charred, from a box of hot dry sand at Luxor (in South Dakota), which had
been kept near a woodstove in the railroad station for the use of brakemen.
Typed out by Skilmer, the poem is indubitably his, since it bears in his own
handwriting the inscription "My fav[o]rite poem." A writer as careful with
words as our poet would hardly write "my" if he meant the exact opposite:
"someone else's". Even these poor scraps were preserved only by a lucky
chance. Run through a meatgrinder (luckily coarse) with the daily
hamburger, the mélange was promptly bolted by a small coonhound
named Harold, whose stomach as promptly rejected the unwonted fare,
depositing it unceremoniously on the warm sand by the stove, where the
pieces were buried from sight as the sands shifted in drafts from the
opening door. Fortunately, the very next day a head-on
collision killed sixty-six passengers and tore up a half mile of track. The
spur line was not thought worth repairing; the station was closed, and only
an occasional vagrant would stoke up the stove that kept warm the fostering
sand. The papyroids are somewhat stained by tobacco juice.
Discovered by an amateur thrill-seeker in 1953, they were entrusted
to Professor Koch-Schurr for restoration. Schooled in the methods of J. M.
Edmonds (who from a ten-word fragment of Sappho was unfailingly able
to reconstruct the lost original, many times as long), Professor Koch-Schurr
set to work. He immediately perceived that the key lay in such words as
"expense", "trust", — and, for the poet's attitude — "blame".
The
poem, he concluded, was therefore an attack on an
economic system. "Spirit[s]", in Skilmer's vocabulary, almost surely meant
the kind of spirits he knew best. Working from this slim basis of certainty,
Professor Koch-Schurr succeeded in restoring the poem to what most
scholars will agree is essentially what Skilmer wrote. Here, then, given for
the first time to a waiting world, is one of the bard's most significant
masterpieces
exactly as he may have written it — a
very
fundament of the mighty corpus!
SONNET 129
The expense of spirits is a crying shame!
Is lust for lucre (money, man!). 'Twould bust
'Is personal nest-egg was 'e Croesus! — blame
Savings & Loans that back the liquor trust.
Enjoyed no sox, sax, sex, soup, soap or sup?
Past reach of average man, the price-tags soar;
Parade on high like bloomy larks. Up up
On purple-fringèd wing, red debits roar.
Ma[d in pursuit and in possession so,][*]
Hairy as haystacks, and in quest of grails?
Stand on the roof and proposition Flo?
(What have the little lambs behind: heads? tails?)
All this the worried man can murmur: sell
To shun going broke. Being broke's like heaven? Like hell.
CUTTY SARK 711 (Dover Sole)
Cutty Sark 711 (fondly called "The Emperor Manuscript") gives us
the only known "fair copy" of a Skilmer poem. This precious document,
the glory of the British Museum, bears some of the characteristic
watermarks found on many of the poet's papers: they are circular and about
four centimeters across (roughly the size of a standard "jigger" or "shot
glass"). Many things about this touching relic, so rich in humanity, suggest
that something fierier than mere quill of mortal has been here set down. It
is little wonder that a leading critic of Belleville (Illinois) has called it "a
very Sinai of the spirit".
The text of Dover Sole has been extensively studied.
Apparently one of the poet's earliest works, it shows a thorough familiarity
with the achievements of English poetry up to, and perhaps beyond, his
time. Academic critics, insensitive to the workings of inspiration and true
creativity, have dismissed it as "derivative" and even "sheer
pastiche"!
Almost heartbreaking in their ruined beauty are Skilmer's jottings
around the margin — mere luminous inklings of a dawn no sooner
bloomed than blasted. Of the haunting "Time is a toadstool on the nose of
love", I.A. Leavis-Beehynde has written, "If this is not the finest metaphor
in recent European literature, I just don't know what." And surely no poet
has ever so summed up the spirit of the American desert, its unpeopled
multi-scorpioned mirage-bemused vastitudes, the lone charisma of its sandy
avatars, as has our poet in his
Once more at dawn I drive
The weary cattle of my soul to the mudhole of your eyes.
The numerals and occult code-names on "The Emperor" would seem to be
part of a system the secretive poet devised to record his rhythmical
inventions. Instead of just saying
ta-dum,
da-dum.
Notes