University of Virginia Library

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":

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 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: 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: 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.

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 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 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.

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 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.

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.

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

With deft economy, Skilmer laments the timelessness of his plight by using the archaic "'Ware' for "Beware".

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.

Notes