University of Virginia Library

6.

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 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 as 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:

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

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.