Ferry's Wildman

We like to think that poems have marvelous—even transcendent—staying power, resiliency, durability; that a good poem will remain available to good readers when other cultural productions have become, in time, either unreachable (unable to be experienced as when they were first presented) or irrelevant (too closely tied to their original cultural conditions). We who love poetry may delude ourselves to some extent about the lastingness of poems, but if so it has been a salubrious delusion, and we take particular pleasure in rediscoveries—finding value in poems that influential readers neglected to admire 30 or 60 or a hundred years ago—and also in our own delayed appreciations—as when we for some reason one day see the value of a poem that our eyes passed over unexcitedly years or decades ago.

Such a delayed appreciation happened for me recently reading a poem by David Ferry. It appeared under the title "Dives" in Dwelling Places (University of Chicago Press, 1993). However, my rereading of the poem was in his volume of Selected Poems published in 2012 by Waywiser Press, On This Side of the River, and in that book the poem's title is "Lazarus." I will refer to the poem as "Lazarus" for reasons I'll explain at the end of this essay.

"Lazarus" is, I will say, a poem about choosing how to be, about wondering where in the world to find a model for one's own approach to life. We all watch for such models every day, naturally; one reason why we observe other people—friends, colleagues, strangers—with flarings of avid attention is that we are wondering (consciously, or half-consciously, or unconsciously)—like Wordsworth encountering the leech-gatherer—Should I live like that?

(Within the category of model-seeking poems, there's the great tradition of poems about animals, considering whether an animal's behavior or attitude can and should be emulated. Frost's oven bird, Marianne Moore's frigate pelican, Lawrence's tortoises and elephants, Bishop's pink dog, Lowell's skunk … Such poems are troubled by the suspicion that our human complexity of mind-spirit-body will refuse to abide by the impressively unified modus vivendi of an animal. The same doubt is even less ignorable when the model being observed is botanical rather than zoological. The beautiful pathos of Whitman's "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing" comes from Whitman's sadly candid avowal that he can't emulate the tree's admirable self-sufficiency.)

Ferry's "Lazarus" opened up for me when I realized it could be read as a worried meditation on how to be—in which the poet considers not one but three (or four—see discussion of the middle stanza, below) possible models for spiritual emulation. This reading, I see now, may be obvious, but I had missed it, a missing influenced by a characteristic quality of studied calm in Ferry's style.

Ferry's poems are often fascinated by a certain specific reality that is felt to hold the key to a revelation. The desired revelation, however, resists the poem's probing; there is an inveterate withholding by the world of truths that could be spiritually helpful. Ferry's response to this cosmic reticence is not to demand, or rage, or cry out in yearning or despair, but rather to circle in on the observed thing with fiercely controlled patience, a refusal to hurry—not as if epiphany is to be expected, but as if some provisional easing of mind may result from steady unshrinking contemplation of what has prompted the poem.

The specific disturbing reality that prompts "Lazarus" is an apparently crazy homeless man in the poet's neighborhood. Is the man indeed crazy, or just penniless, isolated, distressed? He has withdrawn from all social proprieties. Ferry calls him "the dogheaded wildman." Each of the poem's three 11-line stanzas begins with the same image of the wildman sleeping in a shady alley near the poet's home. The poem makes no attempt to generate a narrative about the derelict, nor about the poet's response to him...