Paul Farley – In the Pop-up Planetarium: A Birthday Poem by Anthony Hecht

Somewhere off to the side of certain poems, hanging in the air above them ‘like a little hovering ghost’, I can still tune into the vibe and atmosphere of the night classes run by Michael Donaghy which I attended thirty years ago. Excitement and anticipation, a vague institutional smell of phenol and floor polish, mixed with paper and toner ink; a bare seminar room; a door slamming somewhere and a big laugh echoing along a corridor.

He had this briefcase, an old leather thing with a brass clasp (thinking back now, I can’t recall ever seeing him with it elsewhere) which he’d click open and produce… poems. But I used to half expect a stethoscope. Or a microscope. Every week we were invited to bring along copies of a poem we’d written—but there was always an encounter with other poems that Michael would bring in for us to look at. Lesson one: other poems were our surest guides. Over that first term, it began to feel like he was pitching up a portable planetarium in Clerkenwell. Anthony Hecht’s ‘A Birthday Poem’ shone brightly in it.  

Hecht—who died a few weeks after Michael, in the autumn of 2004—wrote this beautiful poem to his second wife. It opens with three similes for ‘a loose community of midges’ seen swarming in flight on a summer’s day, and alights, twelve stanzas later, on a grace note; the beloved’s face, its features imprinted more deeply and meaningfully for the speaker ‘than any book’. Along the way, it adjusts its focus—in a long, poem-length pull from ‘we’ to ‘I’, together with a shifting from stanza to stanza. Starting with those midges, it moves between perspectives and framings, squinting at art and its illusions, Time (with a big T) and history (through grim battlefield optics), before that face, ‘both as I know it now’ and in a childhood photograph, and the constancy of ‘a gladness without stint’.  

Reading it today I can recognise why Michael held ‘A Birthday Poem’ in such high regard. Its poise and elegance, its formal patterning, light and shade, head and heart, the Wunderkammer it builds out of paintings and snapshots and poetry. Its thinking about art, history, looking, and the time-defeating persistence of love. I even wonder if the poem’s eventual address to its eventual imagined listener—‘O my most dear’—finds a chime with the opening line in Michael’s first collection: ‘Dearest, note how these two are alike…’

I won’t lie, at the time I remember finding the poem challenging, although I had a foothold. Mantegna’s crucifixion scene and Holbein’s ‘Ambassadors’ I knew from having only recently been—it’s startling for me to think now—an art student; in fact, the Holbein I knew well, having spent hours keeping warm in the National Gallery, always intrigued by that painting you stood to one side of, with its secret skull ‘easter egg’, tilting obliquely towards mortality ‘as if one range slyly obscured the other’. And even I could sense the lineaments of Hecht’s poem, its braid of thought and feeling, its movement from historical, scholarly sweep into a more intimate scale. The pivoting effect of that eighth stanza, the sudden gear shift into the first person, was a ratcheting up that I felt as keenly on first reading as I feel it now. And Michael was showing us how to read in a big circle, in the light of other poems.

This pop-up planetarium displayed many constellations. I remember Tony Harrison’s ‘Timer’ and Tess Gallagher’s ‘Black Silk’ coming into alignment one evening, thematically very similar, brilliant objects (and object poems) taking formally different approaches. Or Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Crusoe in England’, and that passage where Crusoe, marooned at home and bored shitless, looks at the knife on the mantelpiece that once ‘reeked of meaning, like a crucifix’; I recall this being shown to us in conjunction with Borges’ dagger resting in a drawer, ‘dreaming over and over its simple tiger’s dream’. Note how these two are alike.

Some of the poets (if not always the poems) were familiar to me. Browning. Keats. Larkin. Many were not. I can still hear Michael reading one of Paul Muldoon’s astonishing poems from Quoof and filling the little post-poem vacuum with an appreciative ‘wild, isn’t it?’. Reading Sharon Olds for the first time in Michael’s class (‘My Father Snoring’) or C. K. Williams (‘My Mother’s Lips’) was like discovering new worlds. Each week, we got to look at and listen to poems talking to one another across time and space. Solar systems. Lunar influences. Rilke’s panther and Ted Hughes’ jaguar. Eliot’s starless ‘Journey of the Magi’ itself becoming the guide for a poem Michael was writing.

Because every now and then, Michael would bring in something of his own that was being sharpened into focus, finding its feet, coming to life. I found this thrilling. I’m sure we all did. One student who’d been attending longer than I had told me about a brilliant poem he’d shown to the class that had ‘knucklewalked’ its way into her memory (and gone on to become ‘Caliban’s Books’). ‘Exile’s End’. ‘The Excuse’. A short poem about the past falling open anywhere, B minor, an old encyclopaedia, which grew into the magnificent ‘Black Ice and Rain’. I wish I’d kept copies of those drafts. But it was the generosity of his sharing them in the first place that’s proved indelible and durable. It was teaching by a kind of osmosis and example. We were receiving gifts.

Or maybe presents. Circling back to Hecht, ‘A Birthday Poem’ first appeared in Millions of Strange Shadows in 1977 (the book’s title, borrowed from Shakespeare’s sonnet 53, is nested in the penultimate stanza of this poem). The poem is even more precisely time-stamped: June 22, 1976. It’s strange to think how much further away we are now from those evenings in the early 1990s than those evenings were to this poem first seeing the light of day. And further by the second. That confluence ‘that bears all things away’ seems to roar in spate if I think of it like this. But we can also travel towards it, return to it, or at least to what Michael would call the illusion of the poem’s present moment.  

I learned how you never get to the end of some poems. I haven’t ‘finished’ reading ‘A Birthday Poem’. And going back to it again is always in part to read it for the first time, in a world where I hear the scraping of chairs and am part of that loose community of midges again, excited particles meeting in the charged atmosphere of a Monday night at the City University buildings just off St John Street, waiting for the door to swing open and Michael to breeze in carrying a battered briefcase and general air of wit and mischief. It fills me with gratitude. Many happy returns, Chief.

A Birthday Poem by Anthony Hecht

Like a small cloud, like a little hovering ghost
            Without substance or edges,
Like a crowd of numbered dots in a sick child’s puzzle,
      A loose community of midges
Sways in the carven shafts of noon that coast
Down through the summer trees in a golden dazzle.

Intent upon such tiny copter flights,
            The eye adjusts its focus
To those billowing about ten feet away,
      That hazy, woven hocus-pocus
Or shell-game of the air, whose casual sleights
Leave us unable certainly to say

What lies behind it, or what sets it off
            With fine diminishings,
The pale towns Mantegna chose to place
     Beyond the thieves and King of Kings:
Those domes, theatres and temples, clear enough
On that mid-afternoon of our disgrace.

And we know at once it would take an act of will
           Plus a firm, inquiring squint
To ignore those drunken motes and concentrate
     On the blurred, unfathomed background tint
Of deep sea-green Holbein employed to fill
The space behind his ministers of state,

As if one range slyly obscured the other.
           As, in the main, it does.
All of our Flemish distances disclose
      A clarity that never was:
Dwarf pilgrims in the green faubourgs of Mother
And Son, stunted cathedrals, shrunken cows.

It’s the same with Time. Looked at sub specie
            Aeternitatis, from
The snow-line of some Ararat of years,
     Scholars remark those kingdoms come
To nothing, to grief, without the least display
Of anything so underbred as tears,

And with their Zeiss binoculars descry
            Verduns and Waterloos,
The man-made mushroom’s deathly overplus,
      Caesars and heretics and Jews
Gone down in blood, without batting an eye,
As if all history were deciduous.

It’s when we come to shift the gears of tense
            That suddenly we note
A curious excitement of the heart
     And slight catch in the throat: —
When, for example, from the confluence
That bears all things away I set apart

The inexpressible lineaments of your face,
           Both as I know it now,
By heart, by sight, by reverent touch and study,
     And as it once was years ago,
Back in some inaccessible time and place,
Fixed in the vanished camera of somebody. You are four years old here in this photograph,
           You are turned out in style,
In a pair of bright red sneakers, a birthday gift.
     You are looking down at them with a smile