Amy Clampitt: Thefts, Tributes, Glosses, Afterthoughts

COMMENTS 383 AMY CLAMPITT Thefts, Tributes, Glosses, Afterthoughts Allusion being one of the games people play, victory is of course going to be in favor of the echo so quickly glancing, the acknowledgment so subtle (as in the work of Wallace Stevens and, after him, John Ashbery) that it takes a scholar's resources to ferret out a quarter of what's there. Skills hitherto unheard of are thus called forth, such as one would be a churl not to admire. The opposite of such adroitness is something not always, or easily, distinguishable from mere mindless borrowing though from my own experience I cannot doubt that the distinction is to be made. I once launched a description of a hurricane with a resounding . 'Turning and turning round, / the winds arrive ...' Something like that. A kindly editor drew my attention to the presence I'd failed to discern, of William Butler Yeats doing my work for me. If 'Turning and turning' had not been an opening line of his, the fault would have been less egregious, perhaps. Anyhow, I revised my opening to 'Wheeling, the careening / winds arrive ...' That this is more exact, and thus an improvement, seems to me to make the case. If one is to borrow - and I suppose that is what T.S. Eliot meant when he commended stealing, as perpetrated by mature poets, above the mere imitation engaged in by the rest - one had better at least know what one is doing. Arguably, some of what looks like borrowing (or theft) may be no more than coincidence. Another thing altogether is the unmistakably outright homage, as in the sestet of a once famous sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay: Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree, Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one, Yet knows the boughs more silent than before ... How many other poets, I wonder, have paid such homage to Shakespeare 's 'That time of year thou mayst in me behold'? Stevens is one of them.* To my ear, the very derivativeness of the gesture, the deference in it, becomes a source of pleasure. Not everyone is going to agree with this, I suppose. In some quarters there is a tendency to sneer at any such recognition of the recognizable, as there is to carp at references so obscure as to have seemed to require a footnote. I speak from scathed experience. To be distinguished from the open tribute is what amounts to a gloss, arising from the impulse to engage in a sort of conversation with the II- I've done it myself at least once. 384 AMY CLAMPITT work of a predecessor. For me just lately, and more than once, the en- . gagement has been with the poems of Robert Frost, and in particular with these lines from 'The Oven Bird': He says the early petal-fall is past When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers On sunny days a moment overcast; And comes that other fall we name the fall.... All this would have been somewhere in my mind when I wrote, a year or so back, of that petal-fall as 'a look illusory / of orchards, but a reminder also / and no less of falling snow.' But the making of connections didn't stop there. A recent poem, with more southerly regions in prospect, begins this way: There comes, in certain latitudes, a season no one would call the fall, when the year-old foliage of live oaks, green once but now a nondescript dun or ocher, goes innumerably twiddling and twirling down ... After several years of not being able to think of how to put this more or less nondescript phenomenon into a poem, I'd come upon it at last by way of deliberate allusion - which even seeped, etymologically, into the label, the poem itself being entitled 'Nondescript.' Often, of course, allusion is the merest, airiest afterthought. A recent observation of the falling-in-spring· of certain kinds of foliage having been in Italy, I found myself going on in the same poem to speak of 'this process that's less / an advent than it is a wandering vaguely / nel mezzo del cammin...