Celebration

Though the poems in this, Robert Pack's seventh book of poems, are the most finely crafted he has ever written, their informing spirit is much the same as it has always been. In a word, paradox. For Pack succeeds in being simultaneously a poet of renunciation and of affirmation. Few poets of our time have more acutely understood the essence of Auden's advice:

Follow, poet, follow rightTo the bottom of the night.With your unconstraining voiceStill persuade us to rejoice;With the farming of a verseMake a vineyard of the curse,Sing of human unsuccessIn a rapture of distress.

Pack adamantly renounces any Byronic striving after infinitude and, thereby, the themes of violence, anger, and the currently fashionable romantic preoccupation with pain. But having renounced, he turns to affirm the human quality which, in a recent essay, he has called "peaceful goodness,... the harmony of man with the conditions of his life, knowing what is within his power to change, and knowing as well what is merely in his power to accept. What every man must accept is his own history, his one life, his particular body, and finally his death.... For a little while his memory endures. For a little while, perhaps, his work endures. But within a finite span everything is lost. The human mind cannot avoid this thought ... The knowledge of final and absolute loss is inescapable."

It is precisely out of this knowledge of human finitude that Pack farms his verses and makes his unique poetic affirmation. The difficulty is immense: it requires, in his own words, "the affirming of limits and the renunciation of the desire for something beyond." But the artistic freedom thus gained is also immense: "the power of the affirming artist is the power to celebrate those limits, to see in finite human happiness not an image of deprivation, but of human fulfillment." Pack's poems speak in the accents of the chastened Candide: "Let us cultivate our garden."

Pack's particular garden happens to lie on a Middlebury, Vermont, hillside. For all its flowers, it often seems less a garden than a spiritual fortress from which, forever besieged by terror and that arch-enemy time, always acutely aware that nothing gold can stay, the poet celebrates his golden moments for their own sake, as if they were enough. From the every-day farm chore of building a stone wall he discovers that the labor alone suffices: "There is nothing further for you to desire." Pruning his fruit trees in March, he anticipates the voice of spring: "It is June. I have learned/to ask for nothing more./I have never/been happier than this." Or feeding birds in deep winter, he concludes, "this bright place/where I live [is] blessed only because I see/that it is here";

He celebrates his own inevitable aging, a theme which even Yeats had difficulty facing; the land to which he belongs but which belongs to him only for the moment; his ties to generations past and those to come. The red and yellow splashes of a New England autumn set him to singing a passionate "Epithalamium"

Red, red, I come to greet you, friends,so come with meto handle hallelujah voices, flamingyellow with this tree.In my heart's home I know white winter doom,I know red bliss.By heaven, someone should make weddingmusicfor all this!

He celebrates even the natural order which inexorably decrees that the next generation, his own children, must replace him. And he celebrates parenthood. "A happy art," he has written, "necessarily celebrates biological creation and mortality, it is an art in praise of parental acceptance and parental love, finding its power in what it serves." Pack's is a genuinely happy art. Out of the bottom of the night at the top of his hill his poems rejoice, and convincingly persuade us to rejoice, in the human paradox of fulfillment-in-unsuccess.

KEEPING WATCHBy Robert Pack '51Rutgers, 1976. 88 pp. $6.75.