On Phoenix Wings: Lucille Clifton's Romantic Renewals

Abstract

This essay offers readings of four of Lucille Clifton's poems in order to examine her references and allusions to the work of the "big six" British Romantic poets. It proposes that she transforms the writing of these historical authors to serve her own artistic and political ends. In her poems, voices across centuries, continents, races, and genders mingle methodically through a poetics of collaboration that both acknowledges and revises the poetry of these canonical white male poets for contemporary times and for diverse audiences.

"I crave a book of criticism on Lucille Clifton's work that scours it for the meanings therein and the stone-eyed intellect on display"

—Toni Morrison, "Foreword: Lucille Clifton"¹

"I would like to make a case for [Lucille Clifton] as a crossroads figure in contemporary American poetry; a poet so varied in subject matter, tone, and style that one finds in her work traces and auguries of past and future voices."

—Dean Rader, Los Angeles Review of Books. November 2020²

In her introduction to the collected poems of lucille clifton, 1965–2010, Toni Morrison characterizes Lucille Clifton's poetry as an "unadorned" verse style marked by the force of its emotion as much as its erudition.³ Contending that Clifton is more than the "big mama/big sister of racial reassurance and self-empowerment," Morrison proposes that at the helm of her deceptively simple poetry is an "astute, profound intellect."⁴ Indeed, Clifton's condensed, incisive language invites multiple interpretive possibilities, while pushing well beyond what readers and auditors encounter at the surface level. Her distinctive lines of entirely lowercase lettering are replete with learned references and allusions to history, classical mythology, the Bible, and several authors and poems. Among these overt and covert references are those dedicated specifically to the writings of canonical white male poets from the British Romantic period, including William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Keats.

Although Clifton refers infrequently to the work of these authors, the connections she draws are striking. This essay considers Clifton's relationship with her Romantic antecedents, a subject that has gone neglected in both Romantic-era and contemporary poetry studies. It explores the role and value of this European tradition in the hands of a poet who typically represents the concerns of the Black female subject, while also reflecting on what Clifton's blatant and encoded references signify for the legacy of the Romantic poets themselves.⁵ Through a reading of four poems, which were published at various points throughout her prolific career, I propose that Clifton carefully adapts the writing of these earlier authors in order to serve her own artistic and even political ends. In her work, voices across continents, centuries, races, and gender mingle methodically through a collaborative poetics of renewal that, while acknowledging the promise of this canonical verse, revises it for contemporary times and diverse audiences.

I begin with the only poem by Clifton that is explicitly titled after a Romantic author:

blake

saw them glittering in the trees,their quills erect among the leaves,angels everywhere. we need new wordsfor what this is, this hunger entering ourloneliness like birds, stunning our eyes into raysof hope. we need the flutter that can saveus, something that will swirl across the faceof what we have become and bring us grace.back north, i sit again in my own homedreaming of blake, searching the branchesfor just one poem.⁶

In her meditation, Clifton recognizes a poetic ancestor whose extraordinary sense of perception was seemingly capable of penetrating through mortal and sublunary limits. Blake did see angels in trees; he also saw God beside a window, allegedly conversed with Old Testament figures such as Ezekiel, and had notable visits from King Solomon, Satan, and Merlin the Magician. He translated his ideas into visual poems whose treatment of subjects of revolution and social justice provided Clifton with a clearly compelling source of inspiration. Clifton apparently had reminiscent powers; she "is comfortable and knowing about the dead," Morrison informs us, prior to relating a story about Clifton's direct dialogues with her own deceased mother.⁷

Yet Clifton's "blake" is not entirely panegyric, since implicit in these lines is that neither Blake nor his visionary poetry can "save / us." According to her, we still need a poetic language that reconceives the Blakean imagination for today. Through bird metaphors of mobility, Clifton proposes rather that such "new words," which arrive through the deprivation of sustenance ("hunger") and companionship ("loneliness"), can exhort us toward Blakean ideals of hope and action; these movements include sudden yet graceful flutters and swirls as much as distant migratory journeys southward to warm climates. The poem suggests that, if north is our default position (in a metaphorical avian sense), we must strive to relocate toward those meridian "rays / of hope." The irony of these lines, of course, is that Clifton achieves such innovative art through both the poem "blake" and the poet Blake, even while claiming to be bereft of such artistic faculties. She places herself in a poetic genealogy through a text that demonstrates Blakean ideas and theories in practice—"we impose on one another," for instance, Blake writes in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, just before he underscores that "opposition is true friendship."⁸ Clifton's collaboration with her predecessor has produced the anticipated "new words": a self-conscious poetry that responds directly to the demands necessitated by our historical juncture and the aspirational movement "down south."

"blake" presents the type of ambivalent relationship Clifton chooses to sustain with her Romantic forebears. These writers have spurred her to dream and write poetry, while bequeathing her not only with a model of hope during times of crisis but also with a methodology of collaboration with poetic ancestors. Nevertheless, she must rearticulate their verse and voices in the name of modern relevance. As mediator between two disparate worlds, then, Clifton refashions the poetry of the Romantic canon on her own bold terms, as the following famous poem, "won't you celebrate with me," also demonstrates:

won't you celebrate with mewhat i have shaped intoa kind of life? i had no model.born in babylonboth nonwhite and womanwhat did i see to be except myself?i made it uphere on this bridge betweenstarshine and clay,my one hand holding tightmy other hand; come celebratewith me that everydaysomething has tried to kill meand has failed.⁹

Here Clifton channels the Blakean imagination once again by tracking her personal creation myth. However, in her different circumstance, she attends to the hardship and labor that her particular identity has required. As a "nonwhite" person and a woman, the speaker praises the work of having to be self-made. She has had "no model," a burden that has involved creating and recreating poetic traditions. Like "blake," the poem must reframe the artistic sources upon which it draws. According to Robin Ekiss, "won't you celebrate with me" is a modern sonnet (of 14 atypical line lengths) that adopts the confident lyric enunciation of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," which itself extended the legacy of the Romantic tradition in the United States; the speaker also alludes to the sixth line of Keats's sonnet, "On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again": "betwixt damnation and impassioned clay."¹⁰ Yet Clifton has obviously changed her specific poetic sources in strategic fashion. As the Whitman style of rhetoric acquires at first an unassuming presentation of self, the Keatsian reference is turned on its head upside down and lacerated through the poem's enjambment: "on this bridge between / starshine and clay." These refigurations declare the speaker's own creative and assertive powers in the face of dire consequences: the threats against her own life. The manifesto is a statement on survival as much as a commemoration of the supernatural strength she discovers and proclaims from her position on the "bridge" between the heavens and the earth (rather than between earth and hell, as Keats would have it). As Ekiss maintains, "Clifton's spiritual ('starshine') and worldly ('clay') understanding is now, literally, in her own hands: 'my one hand holding tight / my other hand.'"¹¹ The speaker evinces her aesthetic prowess in ways that include molding the "clay" of her predecessor poets according to her personal wishes, even if she was not intended as a future reader of this Romantic white male tradition.

Clifton's allusion to Keats is especially significant, since he himself drew on his own poetic forerunners—in both his particular sonnet about King Lear and elsewhere—in order to reimagine them. The most salient among these influences is the work of William Shakespeare, of course, the "fruit" that provokes Keats's ambivalence:

O golden-tongued Romance with serene lute!Fair plumed Syren! Queen of far away!Leave melodizing on this wintry day,Shut up thine olden pages, and be mute:Adieu! for once again the fierce dispute,Betwixt damnation and impassion'd clayMust I burn through; once more humbly assayThe bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit.Chief Poet! and ye clouds of Albion,Begetters of our deep eternal theme,When through the old oak forest I am gone,Let me not wander in a barren dream,But when I am consumed in the fire,Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire.¹²

In his poem, Keats produces an adapted English or Shakespearean sonnet in order to contend that he can ultimately out-master the master. Unlike Lear, who loses himself and his mind upon the heath in "the old oak forest," the Keatsian speaker is driven and destined to be reborn like the phoenix, developing into a powerful poet himself from the ashes of his literary antecedents. So, too, is Clifton refashioning herself. As Ekiss has suggested, one of her poem's sources is Psalm 137 from the Old Testament, but "unlike the ancient Israelites exiled to Babylon, Clifton's speaker was 'born in Babylon,' with no memory of a homeland."¹³ The obscurity of her origins thus grants her creative liberties; she is tethered to nothing. Despite her ambiguous roots and displacement, the speaker concludes with authority and confidence because of the freedom that makes her deliberate choice of sources all the more meaningful. She is not entirely self-made, but that is part of the poem's allusive point: Clifton's lines commemorate rather the speaker's knack for remaking and being remade on phoenix wings to soar, like Keats, "at [her] desire."

In the next two poems that I wish to discuss, Clifton continues her artistic adaptations through even more subtle yet equally "visceral" (to borrow Morrison's term) references, which include those found in the following verse benediction:¹⁴

blessing the boats                        (at St. Mary's)may the tidethat is entering even nowthe lip of our understandingcarry you outbeyond the face of fearmay you kissthe wind then turn from itcertain that it willlove your back        may youopen your eyes to waterwater waving foreverand may you in your innocencesail through this to that¹⁵

These lines are really moving, and I mean that in both the thematic and poignant senses. While observing a scene of boats from the water's edge, which has "moved" Clifton to her poetic occasion about movement, she employs the rhetoric of blessing and "prayer," the term she uses to categorize "blessing the boats" in the collection in which the poem originally appeared, to secularize and universalize the poem's statement of fortitude.¹⁶ Perhaps most evidently, her text adapts the lines from the well-recognized Irish blessing, which is itself an English translation from the original Irish Gaelic:

May the road rise up to meet you.May the wind be always at your back.May the sun shine warm upon your face;the rains fall soft upon your fields and until we meet again,may God hold you in the palm of His hand.¹⁷

Clifton's version is not about God's protection; nor is the poem reliant upon any other religiously-grounded forces. Instead, her well-wishes are based on the spiritual strength of human sympathy and its representation through poetic utterance. The beneficent "tide" is permitted entrance into—and indeed enabled by—"the lip of our understanding," a meeting point for common ground and speech. This power of unity and language for and by the multitude is thus summoned as the poem's weapon against adversity. The speaker imagines a harrowing maritime journey from which her blessed and "innocent" addressee(s) will eventually return not simply unscathed but emboldened. At the poem's conclusion, the good "tide" bears good tidings: it has carried its community through and beyond a peril so grim that its voyagers must have proceeded with eyes shut. Following the precarious yet triumphant voyage "through this to that," eyes ultimately reopen to the calming and serene image of "water / water waving forever" all around.

To this reader, the poem's narrative about going "beyond the face of fear" operates as a twist on Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." The repeated use of "water" is particularly evocative of the phrase, "water, water every where / Nor any drop to drink" from Coleridge's poem.¹⁸ To recall the scene from "The Rime," the eponymous character is at an abject point in his own sea journey. The mariner is isolated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean after all of his fellow sailors—200 of them—have died. He is both hungry and thirsty with no water to drink, despite the obvious irony of there being (salt) water "every where." Perhaps even more obvious is that Clifton selects a genre for her poem that evokes "The Rime"'s own conclusion, the point at which the mariner must perpetually atone for his presumed transgression by sharing his traumatic tale and speaking out a moral on loving all beings across the animal world. In Clifton's hands, the final affirmative message and themes of sympathy and blessing (e.g., the mariner blessing the water snakes) from "The Rime" transform into a benediction of and for all peoples. Hers is a hymn about collective endurance and empowerment, as it concludes with the serenity and comfort of surrounding water as a signal not of thirst and desolation but of having survived and thrived after a common terrifying experience. This reading is made all the more salient through scholarly readings of "The Rime" as an allegory of the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade.¹⁹ For Clifton, "blessing the boats" is a proclamation of the victory over a life-threatening journey as much as the historical ills of cruelty and oppression. In these lines, the taints of history are reversed: the enslaved and oppressed have returned home to their states of innocence. All the while, the poem achieves its celebrated triumph through the help of good natural forces, which includes the consequence of conspiring tides and—through a possible invocation of William Wordsworth's The Prelude—the power of correspondent breezes.

The communal voyage of "blessing the boats" has led to a culminating portrayal of Black Messianism in "john," a poem found in a volume beside other works with titles of biblical names ("adam and eve," "cain," "moses," "solomon," and "mary"):

john

somebody coming in blacknesslike a starand the world be a great bushon his headand his eyes be firein the cityand his mouth be true as time

he be calling the people brothereven in the prisoneven in the jail

i'm just only a baptist preachersomebody bigger than me comingin blackness like a star²⁰

By now it should come as no surprise that Clifton's poem, which is based on John the Baptist and his prophecies of Jesus Christ, can be anything but a replicated Bible story. In these lines, the speaker or preacher uses vernacular speech to envision a coming Messianic age "in blackness." Clifton magnifies the gravity and weight of this future scene by alluding to the Old Testament account of God's appearance to Moses as a burning bush of wisdom through which the Israelites could be guided back toward righteousness. The combined Biblical references to the Torah and Book of Revelation help create a radical apocalyptic vision that appears to be a depiction not of Christ necessarily but rather of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—who, as the poem suggests, was a Baptist minister who was also imprisoned. Like Moses, Dr. King spoke truth to power and people through both his words and deeds of peaceful assembly and resistance, and the poem's message is appropriately rooted in both community and hope.

"john" lends itself to a broader reading. Given Clifton's quintessential tendency toward defamiliarization and reorientation, an interpretation of the poem through a view of another "john" (Keats) would not be altogether far reaching. This analysis would be most compelling via the poetry of Percy Shelley, whose own writings on civil disobedience and passive resistance in such poems as The Mask of Anarchy inspired the teachings and philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi, who in turn influenced Dr. King. Shelley's elegy, Adonais (1821), employs the exact phrase "like a star"—which appears twice in Clifton's poem and occupies the entirety of her second line—in dedication to Keats's memory in the elegy's penultimate line:

        The soul of Adonais, like a star,Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.²¹

In Adonais, Shelley has fittingly stellified a writer who famously explored the luxuries of belonging far away in the world of immortality. In "john," Clifton upends this expectation by invoking the Keatsian tribute through language that not only captures but also inverts the Shelleyan elegiac mode. Through grounding and revitalizing Shelley's original poem, she envisions the second coming of Christ as a Black age of prosperity, which is anticipated through the use of demotic speech and casual address by first name. Rooted in classic mythology and the writings of Shelley's own poetic ancestors (including John Milton and Edmund Spenser), a poem about a neglected visionary author who died well before his prime (Adonais) is transformed into a biblically-inspired commemoration of the return to earth of Dr. King, a visionary activist who also died too young.²² What results is a generative cross-racial, cross-temporal node through the tradition of an ancient genre of tribute. Such expansions by Clifton permit—among other things—the discovery of alternative forms of Keatsian "beauty and truth," which could include scenes from a Birmingham jail as much as the surface of an obscure Grecian urn. Clifton invites us to fly at our own desires, too.

Clifton's poetry is always "more than her," as Dean Rader has suggested, and part of this expansiveness involves the skillful collaboration that emphasizes and enables both movement and action: like a bird flying south in winter through this to that, up to the heavens, and back down to earth.²³ Behind the foregoing exercise of crossing the borders of race and time in "john," in which Clifton broadens the contours of Keatsian and Shelleyan visions through her own extensive imagination, is the guiding light that she shines upon so many directions. After all, "Lucille is," in Morrison's words, "another word for light, which is the soul of 'enlightenment.' And she knew it."²⁴ We can imagine Clifton's coming age "in blackness" as a socially-just vision where persons such as Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and countless other unarmed Black individuals brutally killed by police are all alive, safe, and well. Clifton's poetry, including its emphasis on collaboration and renewal, helps us to envision that better world.

The Romantic poets have found in Clifton an ally who both reinforces and refashions their legacy for the modern ages according to a notion that resonated and found expression with them. We can conjure, commune, and collaborate with the dead white poets in order to soar like a phoenix reborn from the ashes of our literary forerunners. In setting such examples herself, Clifton makes a case for the dialectical promise of poetry's past, present, and future by heeding some further advice from her predecessors. This includes catalyzing the beauty that emerges from two mutually-imposing forces, seizing the aesthetic and political possibilities of such fructifying opposition, and renewing the riches in those rifts already laden with ore.