The Genesis of Venice in Anthony Hecht's "Venetian Vespers"

"Where to begin" wonders the disturbed, wandering speaker early on in Anthony Hecht's celebrated dramatic monologue, "The Venetian Vespers." The question will be repeated halfway through this poem of more than eight-hundred lines, a poem divided into six sections or, better yet, six parts or movements, to begin to conjure up the poem's musical affiliation; but a poem also too long, too dark, and too zealously belated to fit comfortably into the genre of "tourist poetry" that Robert Von Hallberg has identified as one important legacy of post-World War II American imperialism. Even more to the point, "Vespers" has managed the nearly unique feat of garnering high praise from two critics unlikely to agree on almost anything: Harold Bloom and Christopher Ricks. Ricks noted in the New York Times in 1979 that the title poem, and several other long poems in The Venetian Vespers, "confirm Hecht as a poet of the widest apprehensions and comprehension, and this without the gigantism that so haunts American poetic ambition." Bloom, no stranger to the windy heights of American gigantism, likewise viewed the poem as a crowning achievement. Introducing Hecht at a 1994 poetry reading sponsored by the American Academy in Rome, Bloom singled out the poem's "Shakespearian" fusion of "high passion [and] furious warmth" as among the poetic qualities that, in his view, led Hecht to surpass his early mentor, in this case no less a poet than W. H. Auden.

The poem tells the story of an aging American expatriate living in Venice. Haunted by recollections of the War and a sullied family genealogy, he seeks to empty the self, with its accumulated burdens, into the immediacy of a deeply realized visual presence of which Venice offers so many opportunities. Here is one such visionary moment, taken in this case from the third movement. It is a moment, too, that every visitor to Venice has experienced, although few have phrased it better—when, upon entering St. Mark's Cathedral, the eye begins to adjust to the dim surroundings:

                                          GraduallyGlories reveal themselves, grave mysteriesOf the faith cast off their shadows, assume their formsAgainst a heaven of coined and sequined light,A splatter of gilt cobblestones, flung grainsOr crumbs of brilliance, the vast open fieldsOf the sky turned intimate and friendly. PatinesAnd laminae, a vermeil shimmeringOf fish-scaled, cataphracted golden plates.Here are the saints and angels brought togetherIn studied reveries of happiness.Enormous wings of seraphim upholdThe crowning domes where the convened apostlesReceive their fiery tongues from the GodheadDescended to them as a floating dove,Patriarch and collateral ancestorOf the pigeons out in the Square. Into those choirsOf lacquered Thrones, enameled ArchangelsAnd medaled Principalities rise upA cool plantation of columns, marble shaftsBearing their lifted pathways, viaductsAnd catwalks through the middle realms of heaven.Even as God descended into the massAnd thick of us, so is He borne aloftAs promise and precursor to us all,Ascending in the central dome's vast hiveOf honeyed luminosity.

As Hecht noted many years later in a 2003 letter to Norman Williams, the dramatic present tense so evident here and throughout the poem is used "as a way of conveying the speaker's attempt to escape from past and future by concentrating on the immediate present"—in this case with the language carrying the speaker's and reader's thoughts upward into the magnificent image of "the central dome's vast hive / Of honeyed luminosity."

As an extended ekphrasis placed near the poem's center, we might also rightly and readily say, "Ruskin revived and improved." On the back of a note card, Hecht had jotted down a few of the crucial lines from The Stones of Venice that serve as his point of departure here, but composed, it should be noted, in blank verse and to the copious tune of a painterly Milton ("enameled Archangels / and medaled Principalities"). The passage is brightly alert to the radiating glint of surfaces but not...