The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [139]
My second example is a sonnet by William Butler Yeats, an early poem that bears the indicative title “The Fascination of What’s Difficult.”
The fascination of what’s difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart. There’s something ails our colt
That must, as if it had not holy blood
Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,
Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt
As though it dragged road-metal. My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day’s war with every knave and dolt,
Theatre business, management of men.
I swear before the dawn comes round again
I’ll find the stable and pull out the bolt.
I said that the poem was a sonnet, but a count of the lines will come up one short for the traditional, canonical fourteen-line form. The rhyme scheme is unusual, too: abba cc adda ee a, which means that the poet has inserted two couplets (the verse form that, in the Shakespearean or English sonnet, is the emblem of closure) in the midst of the poem, producing a formal impossibility, a thirteen-line inside-out sonnet. The challenge of the first line, the fascination of what’s difficult, is triumphantly displayed and achieved. At the same time the argument of the poem seems to rue the dailiness of work (“the day’s war with every knave and dolt, / Theatre business, management of men”) in a way that might even be glancing, sidelong, at the quotidian life of that earlier poet-playwright after whom the English sonnet form is named.
The third example is also from a modern poet, Robert Graves, in a poem that speaks directly to the question of closure. The poem’s title is “Leaving the Rest Unsaid”:
Finis, apparent on an earlier page,
With fallen obelisk for colophon,
Must this be here repeated?
Death has been ruefully announced
And to die once is death enough,
Be sure, for any life-time.
Must the book end, as you would end it,
With testamentary appendices
And graveyard indices?
But, no, I will not lay me down
To let your tearful music mar
The decent mystery of my progress.
So now, my solemn ones, leaving the rest unsaid,
Rising in air as on a gander’s wing
At a careless comma,
Here the “life-time” and the book speak at once, or as one. The colophon, a typographical element placed at the end of a book or manuscript—sometimes in the form of a picture, sometimes an emblem—gives the title, the printer’s name, and the dates and places of printing. An obelisk is a four-sided pillar or column, a common image for a colophon. But an obelisk is also, in the history of printing, a diacritical mark sometimes known as a dagger († or ‡), used for marginal references, footnotes, and so on. The Indexer, the journal of the Society of Indexers, noted at one point that “Suffixing a name by an obelisk … indicates that the person is dead.”2 The word finis (Latin end) was also formerly placed at the end of a book and from the literary or printers’ use came to mean end of life, death.
First the book, then the life; first the finis, then the death. Graves, perfectly aware of his own resonant name, opts to end in the middle, with a “careless comma,”: how “careless” the comma is may be debatable, but in this poem about closure, literary, typographical, and mortal, we encounter what amounts to a diacritical revolt. By closing the poem with a comma as well as with the word comma the poet fulfills the promise of his title by refusing to complete the verse line. Which is the figure? Literature, or life? As posed here, the question is undecidable, and in fact the question of decision, conclusion, or judgment (from decider, to cut or cut off) is suspended, as it were, in midair.
“Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament,” wrote Paul de Man in an essay on autobiography, romanticism, epitaphs, and the poetry of Wordsworth. The phrase could be a somewhat fanciful but not entirely inaccurate replacement for the engraved motto Et in Arcadia ego on the shepherd’s tomb in a celebrated painting by Poussin. The