Matins with a poem by A. Alvarez, first published in 1954-1955 issue of The Paris Review. A poem I’d never read before this morning, and so I run off my own nerve in this unresearched interpretation, a first impression of sorts.

The Vigil

“The spider love, which transubstantiates all.”—Donne.

You stand in the first dumbness of the snow
As finely, the gauze drop in pantomime,
All detail fades upon your startled face
And back to darkness line and colour flow.

The paralytic rapture of the bone
Has come; what rain on stone and age in us
Raddle the snow dispenses equally—
Years towards death in one short afternoon.

The mouth lifts at one corner, on the crown
Regally twists the hair against the white
Stark imposition of a nervous fit,
Aging in frozen tumult like a clown.

You mime stock-still your final comic pose:
Seduced by the earthy Widower of Spades
Slowly to dissolution and the blank
Tumbler’s lust for stature and repose.

Alvarez indicates his dialogue with John Donne’s poem, “Twickenham Garden,” in the epigraph, and so it seems fair to reproduce Donne’s poem in its entirety below, particularly since the images are part of what Alvarez mobilizes.

Donne’s speaker goes to the garden seeking a Season, “the Spring”, the end of winter’s silence and loneliness. There, among the verdant, that “balm” for the eyes, he betrays himself, for he (the speaker who is also the poet) brings the “spider Love, which transubstantiates all” into the Garden. And this bringing happens by seeing, by thinking figuratively, as it were, in this blur between poet and human where Donne’s “self-traitor” gets caught in the web that gives the serpent dominion.

Winter would be better than the “glory of this place”; the spondee of a “grave frost” would be preferable to the laughing trees and the flirtatious wind rustling the leaves. Frost, that evidence of being frozen-over, would indicate seriousness and make a grave of it visually. Donne’s eye invests completely in the images, if only to demonstrate perhaps the price of poetry: this offering of the mind completely to the imaginary and metaphorical.

In this Petrarchan garden, the poet’s relationship to mortality emerges from the tension of these two opposing states that he desires 1)to not suffer the pain of seeing and feeling 2) to not be done with Love, to not “leave loving”. He wants both, and the poem, in a sense, provides the solution.

The poem which is now inseparable from the poet implores as it creates. “Love, let me some senseless piece of this place be,” he/it says, “Make me a mandrake, so I may grow here, or a stone fountain weeping out my year.” It is this mandrake that Alvarez picks up in his “Vigil”, a Vigil that ends in the image of Icarus, “the blank / Tumbler”, a different statue that he brings to this garden. Part of me imagines Alvarez standing near a fountain statue of Icarus, drawing on his own grief at a deathbed vigil, where the hair on white pillow evokes Donne’s winter, that ice and frost—- but with a difference, for Alvarez’s frost is not a settled state, not a finish so much as a “frozen tumult like a clown”.

Donne’s brilliance comes in his consistent ruination of his own premises. For if it is the eyes that offer us the garden, it is also the eye that allows the serpent to seduce us, and the spider to transfix us with its transubstantiating web. All poetry is an exercise in the blasphemy of transubstantiation. But: “Alas! hearts do not in eyes shine, / Nor can you more judge women’s thoughts by tears, / Than by her shadow what she wears.” Woman, herself, is “perverse” and true to nothing, or true only to her being. To read her shadow is to miss the picture for Donne, and surely one of the most memorable finales in the Petrarchan mode:

O perverse sex, where none is true but she,
Who’s therefore true, because her truth kills me.

But I can’t help thinking that Paul Valery also touches the fronds of Donne’s garden in “Sketch of a Serpent”, which he dedicated to Henri Gheon. It is a poem I first encountered in the French of late teens, and again in the Romanian of my mid-twenties. A tiny sample, as spoken by the Serpent, himself in my translation:

“Eve,” I whispered, “Nothing is more
Uncertain than the divine word!
A living science cracks open
The enormity of this ripe fruit!
Ignore the ancient, pure Being
Who indicts the swift bite!
For if your mouth begins dreaming,
Thirsting and yearning for the sap,
That ever-present pleasure
Is melting eternity, Eve!”