THE LONGEST POEM IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

3 7 R T H E L O N G E S T P O E M I N T H E E N G L I S H L A N G U A G E J A M E S L O N G E N B A C H In the London drawing room of Lady Cunard, on a Sunday afternoon in April 1916, a handful of invited guests gathered for the premiere of At the Hawk’s Well, a new play by W. B. Yeats. There was no scenery, no stage. The musicians’ faces were made to appear sunburned, as if they’d wandered into the room after a long journey. The actors wore masks. A square of blue cloth lay on the carpet, suggesting the well to which the play’s title refers but also refusing to be anything but cloth: it existed side by side with the French novels arranged on Lady Cunard’s Louis XV co√ee table. At the Hawk’s Well was the first of Yeats’s plays for dancers, plays modeled on the Japanese Noh plays adapted into English by Yeats’s friend Ezra Pound. Neither poet knew much about the traditions of Japanese theater, and neither did Michio Ito, the play’s dancer, who modeled his movements on Nijinsky’s. Yeats imagined that the original audience of the Noh plays would have appreciated the poems of Mallarmé, and his own play was organized more like a modern poem than what his audience was equipped to recognize as a play. For rather than dramatizing the inner world of its characters, the opaque language of At the 3 8 L O N G E N B A C H Y Hawk’s Well provokes an unexpected ecstasy in an unpropitious place. That place was not an elegant drawing room; that place was the mind. Night falls; The mountain-side grows dark; The withered leaves of the hazel Half choke the dry bed of the well; The guardian of the well is sitting Upon the old grey stone at its side, Worn out from raking its dry bed, Worn out from gathering up the leaves. Her heavy eyes Know nothing, or but look upon stone. Spoken by a musician at the beginning of the play, these rhythmically delicate lines are bound together by an image that initially bears little significance: the leaves are leaves – they fall into the well, they are raked, gathered, blown by the wind, heaped up; they rustle, they diminish. But as the image is repeated throughout the play, it becomes increasingly ominous, drenched with signi ficance. The play’s language accumulates coherence, but it never stops feeling disorientingly strange. ‘‘I but see / A hollow among stones half-full of leaves,’’ says the Young Man, but Yeats’s audience could see only a co√ee table and a square of blue cloth. Two days after its premiere, At the Hawk’s Well was played for charity in front of a larger audience, including Queen Alexandra, Princess Victoria, and the Duchess of Marlborough. The premiere had also been played for charity, but of a di√erent kind, for seated around the square of blue cloth were other artists – people who craved the experience of being alienated from themselves by something new and strange. Pound brought along his new friend T. S. Eliot, who found himself transformed. Having entered the drawing room as the author of ‘‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock ,’’ he emerged as the poet capable of writing The Waste Land, the poem Pound would call the longest in the English language. Today, a century after Eliot attended that production of Yeats’s play, no poem of the twentieth century has remained simultaneously so influential and so inimitable. L O N G E S T P O E M I N T H E E N G L I S H L A N G U A G E 3 9 R What did a short poem sound like to Eliot? Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? But though I have wept and fasted...