An explication du texte of Gregg Glory's poem
"For Tenor Semblance, Who's Dead"
By Daniel Weeks
"What things real are there but imponderable thoughts?"
—-Ahab There was Tenor in his party grave, sharing All of the same old sick jokes with himself. 1 He says, "What is there besides imagining? These four occasional walls will not bring Spring or sorrow to any unsuffering thing. It is the will that wanes, in summer dark, After clogged stars have scraped the sky and left A newer dark for some cold singer's questioning. Rusted apples gathered, honey melons dusky gold, Cherries rosing in the tinted sun, what was invented If not these things? Shall my hand remain Unfloured by its own effort? A pointed oar Plunges and plunges in a white war and remains An oar. The mind is not so meager; it becomes, Once its rent raiment roars, in polychromes Above chalk waters that it held and gave, That of which it sang and did not hear, because Too busy singing in undivided, tensile mystery." 2 If, on the wings of sparrows, men's feet shall flesh Who shall fly, in contrapuntal destiny, In waltz time, alone, beneath The unceasing testament of the waves? Tenor Semblance in his water-wings, bulbing At his back, held his breath and dived, at 4, Into the tossing terror of a tame sea. Once caught among the coral's shadowing, he saw The flash and error of dying fish in that dim maze. Their antlered looks and opalescent eyes Placed a holy horror in his slalom breast Racing, among more mobile lights, out of death's Abrupt shade. He knew of earth by this buried paradise. He told his parents of the sharking waves and sea. Alone, His executed gestures in scarred sunset seemed The switch-back hesitancy of leaves. 3 It was his mother's going, her poignant death, Like still water, that made him hear Curlicues of God's named trumpet, world. A French horn paddles in his ear; Finches mocked the minister at her wake, his frown Emitted solo labyrinths, corona icicles of sound. Tenor Semblance, leaving, knew his feet were tambourines, clashing in the grass. And when he whispered, it was with sorrow That he could not sing himself a barrow. In her twinking time upon this mortal orb, In laundered air, tender sequences Of love and love, flashed from her bright center Like perpetual suns that sang and knew their tune. It was because of her he sought A personal, vocal dew. 4 Semblance swelled in his soft decor. Like an awkward Alice, he used his vital eye To distill a separate scenery in the dwindled grass. Little thunder smoked the mountaintops. Gnats as vultures bulked silence on their prey. But a swung censor, sacred scenting, never lends Its incense to these more airy tendencies. Neither garland of flowers, in a stiff ring, Nor any distincter bloom was worn. Victim in winter, he tried to say The measureless landscape he became: Desolate branches, details of packed snow, Paired tracks of deer, or south-seeking geese Dispassionate as the sky. There comes A crowd of moths, an abrupt lamp flapping In discontinuous circles as he speaks. 5 But should we sacrifice infinite finesse for that Snowblind and last, fatal profundity? Sonless Semblance once, with gagging glands, Turned abrogated Pa; the wincing world Trickled from his groin. He clawed out an eye And dived, lost in a reef, resulting in a sky Made blue, by harshest imagination, by Exclusionary rules. Was it a mincing butcher's Cleaver thumb, his abusement of a One, Chopping up the single digit we pretend? False finesse? The sky was blue; he claimed To be the author, and his grave Was dug in blue clay; bluets brushed the edge. His mineral bones are scavenged by worms that die. Thus we see, beyond cut division or misty ending, Death is daughter to imagination's venting. 6 A man is image and is sound, Imagining sounds; a blare of being Scribbled like a cloud, pinched nothingness Palely resembling himself, in a mirror; Unalterable shadow, that falls As seasons fall, in whitest trumpeting. Thus was Tenor in his dirty grave, In severest evening, uttering A few, essential words. In his halter, Dawdling day undid the staunching fist Of night, and materbirds like mandolins Twanged his very song. They were his toys, who, Hautboy accountant, made of his breast Final register. A second heaven, set Beside the first, is best, when we forget Ourselves in what our wish of death becomes. --Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
Any elegiac poem is a meditation about the meaning and purpose of human life, and "For Tenor Semblance, Who's Dead" by Gregg Glory is no exception to this rule. The end of any human life leaves us naturally to wonder whether that life was to any purpose and, if so, what the purpose would have been.
What is so enigmatic about Gregg Glory's memorial poem is that it is not clear that Tenor Semblance is really dead.
So the poem is a remembrance of a fictional person who is said to have died. To add to the complexity, we might remark further that the death is a figurative death of a fictional person. Moreover, this death is figurative in two ways. First, a fictional person cannot really be said to have died. And second, even were Tenor Semblance a real person, the poem indicates that he has not really died, that it is only his past sense of himself that has died, almost as if he had shed a chrysalis. We get a hint of this in the second of two epigraphs, which tells us that although Tenor is "in his party grave," he is still "sharing the same old sick jokes with himself." To share jokes one must be conscious and to be conscious, as Descartes and Locke have held, is to exist. Since Tenor is sharing the jokes with himself, he is doubly conscious, existing both as subject and object.
The first epigram, from Moby Dick, gives us in sum the import or tenor of the poem:
"What things real are there but imponderable thoughts?"
Our real existence then, according to this question, may be only our thought of ourself, our self-consciousness and perhaps the thoughts of others about us.
The poem is divided into six stanzas, the first of which consists of a long quote from Tenor Semblance, in which he notes that the four walls of his grave "will not bring /Spring or sorrow to any unsuffering thing." The grave can only bring spring or sorrow, then, to something that suffers, to something that is alive and can contemplate the meaning of death. Tenor Semblance seems more than prepared to undertake such a contemplation, so we must conclude that he is very much alive, though in his grave.
Tenor begins his musings with a question that echoes the first epigraph. "What is there besides imagining?" This naturally leads to the question of whether the physical universe itself has any independent existence or whether it too is a mere dependency, solipsistically, of the mind, a thing captured only in the imagination of the perceiver, without whom it could scarcely, as an unsuffering thing, be said to exist at all.
Rusted apples gathered, honey melons dusky gold, Cherries rosing in the tinted sun, what was invented If not these things?
The question remains as to who invented them, the individual consciousness or some greater consciousness on whom the existence of all things is dependent.
Tenor, having watched the light of the stars scrape the sky on their nightly passage to oblivion, is left, like many another cold singer, questioning in the dark. He is prompted to ask, "Shall my hand remain/Unfloured by its own effort?" In other words, won't the effort of questioning, of living the examined life, in itself, not provide some meaning, even if all the questions lead to further uncertainty.
...won't the effort of questioning, of living the examined life, in itself, not provide some meaning...
And yet this initial "self," which is floured by its experiences, is thus far "undivided." It is merely subjective, an observer of the exterior world, taking in images and singing of them without really hearing its own song. It is not yet "self-conscious" and because it does not know itself as divided into subject and object, into perceiver and perceived, internal and external, it does not yet truly know itself at all and remains wrapped in "tensile mystery." It cannot yet ask, as Tenor is now asking, what this experience means. This might be a clue to the nature of the death now prompting memorial.
We learn in stanza two that Tenor took his first tenuous step toward self-consciousness when "he held his breath and dived, at 4,/Into the tossing terror of a tame sea." Here he encounters "The flash and error of dying fish," which "placed a holy horror in his slalomed breast." In a panic, he raced "out of death's/Abrupt shade." Contemplating this experience later "in scarred sunset," he sees "his executed gestures," his panicked swimming strokes, which "seemed the switch-backed hesitancy of leaves." These gestures are executed in a double sense. Tenor performed them but they also are figuratively killed; they belong to the past and are resurrected in retrospect.
These gestures are executed in a double sense. They are resurrected in retrospect
It is another death, his mother's, that brings Tenor to full self-consciousness. This death is literal and therefore more profound and shaping than the figurative death Tenor experienced in the sea. It is also more terrifying than the death of fish whose going cannot compare to the death of a self-conscious, meaning-making human being. It is his mother's "poignant death" that allows him to hear for the first time "Curlicues of God's named trumpet." This trumpet is the world itself, which by making us aware of death in its every sound and scene brings us to meaning. Tenor, at the funeral, becomes aware of "A French horn paddling in his ear." This paddle or oar is now drawing him toward a new understanding, toward a new self, but it is also quietly killing the old, undivided self.
Tenor Semblance, leaving, knew his feet Were tambourines, clashing in the grass. And when he whispered, it was with sorrow That he could not sing himself a barrow.
Again, Gregg Glory gives us a double image of Tenor Semblance. He is "leaving" in two senses, simultaneously departing from his mother's funeral and from his old dead, undivided, merely subjective self.
He is no longer singing of the world in "full-throated ease"
In contemplating his mother's death, Tenor begins to understand the meaning of her life. He realizes, perhaps in a way that he did not before, that she had loved him, that "tender sequences/Of love and love flashed from her bright center." The repetition of the word "love" is significant because it shows that his mother's love was two-fold, both conscious and self-conscious. It was a spontaneous response to the world and to Tenor, and yet she was also conscious of herself as someone who loved. These sequences of love flashed from her bright center "like perpetual suns that sang and knew their tune." This is very different from what we encounter in the first stanza where Tenor remembers his early self as singing without even hearing his own song.
This example of his mother as a person acutely conscious of her place as a creative human being, whose creation is love, helps Tenor to become fully self-conscious.
It was because of her he sought A personal, vocal dew.
To realize himself fully, he must not only become aware of his dual nature, but must express that reality in a self-conscious song. His mother's poignant death, then, allows Tenor to give meaning, albeit a meaning tempered with immense sorrow, to his own life.
By this process a poet is born...
Perhaps he can save himself. Could a fresh eternal life spring like a green tendril from his "personal, vocal dew"? Tenor finds, though, that being conscious of one's own singing also makes one critical, and this can have a certain stultifying effect on creativity. He attempts, in violation of Coleridge's injunction, to impose his own sorrow on nature. "Victim in winter, he tried to say/The measureless landscape he became." But the images of nature and the language used to describe these things are inadequate to the task of capturing the true essence of a measureless thing. Tenor finds
Desolate branches, details of packed snow, Paired tracks of deer, or south-seeking geese Dispassionate as the sky.
He becomes all too aware, as had Giacomo Leopardi, that nature is impassive and does not care a whit about our suffering. It was in this way that the later Romantics like Keats and Leopardi moved away from the position of Wordsworth and Coleridge, who were only too ready to see in nature an unalloyed joy that could save us from human suffering and its attendant sorrow. Gregg Glory's poem continues that late Romantic tradition.
Stanza five begins with another question. But this time the question comes, not from Tenor Semblance, but from the speaker of the poem.
But should we sacrifice infinite finesse for that Snowblind and last, fatal profundity?
If we cannot find satisfaction nor solace in making all of nature sing back the song of the individual self, perhaps we can end our sorrow by dissolving the individual self in nature. In this way we kill the subjective perceiving self altogether. It no longer stands over against the natural world and judges it. It no longer imposes a meaning on the natural world and on itself, but becomes snowblind, so immersed in nature that it no longer has any subjective individual reality nor any perception either of itself or of nature. In this way its profundity in a Buddhist sense becomes fatal. The self is sacrificed as it unites with the Oneness of ultimate reality.
Now if one is going to sacrifice "infinite finesse" to total absorption in the One, how is one to accomplish this grand unification of all realities? The only way, it would seem, is to become the creative god of one's own universe. Tenor becomes "abrogated Pa," and "the wincing world trickles from his groin." All that is left is to unify himself with this newly created world. Tenor "claws out an eye," becoming blind to the possibility that the universe has an existence independent of himself, and dives right in. He finds himself suddenly "lost in a reef," objectified like the fish he saw undersea in his childhood. The sky is made blue in this self-created world "by/Exclusionary rules." And the first thing to be excluded is Tenor himself whose individuality is absorbed. He has become dispassionate and uncaring, too, like the rest of nature. He is now beyond suffering, but also non-existent because he is no longer conscious of his suffering, and he has not therefore realized his hope, to ring the changes of love and love as had his self-aware and creative mother. The poet's language becomes enigmatic now as he asks further questions about the direction Tenor has taken:
Was it a mincing butcher's Cleaver thumb, his abusement of a One, Chopping up the single digit we pretend? False finesse?
Are we fooling ourselves, the poet asks, when we assert that we have an individual subjective self that stands outside of nature? Is it "false finesse" to maintain that we are at once within nature and yet somehow outside of it, that we can oscillate between object and subject, between the external physical world as an independent reality and the internal world of our mind?
By creating the sky in a solipsistic way, by at the least claiming "to be the author" of the universe, Tenor, as we have seen, had to kill the subjective, individual self. This new death, in which everything is absorbed into the blue of the sky, including the blue clay in which Tenor's grave is dug and the bluets that brush its edge, leads to a new self-consciousness and new birth as it were.
If everything is one thing, then everything is also nothing and is therefore meaningless.
In the final stanza, the poet accepts the double nature of self. The self is objective: an "image" and a "sound." But is also subjective. It imagines sounds. Indeed, it imagines itself. The tenuous nature of the self is expressed in a series of metaphors. It is "a blare of being/Scribbled like a cloud, pinched nothingness/Palely resembling himself, in a mirror." At last we come again upon Tenor still stuck in his party grave. But perhaps, in sharing all the old jokes with himself, he is a wiser Tenor. Nature, symbolized by "materbirds," a reflection back on Tenor's mother, now twangs "his very song." Yet, these songs are also tallied as a reflection of himself in his own breast, which becomes something like an accountant's "Final register." The last three lines of the poem amount to a summation of the contemplative journey we have been through:
A second heaven, set Beside the first, is best when we forget Ourselves in what our wish of death becomes.
It would do the poem an injustice to try to impose just one meaning on these lines, but a potential reading might be something on this order: The first heaven is the world of physical nature, something with independent existence. The second heaven is the world seen as solipsistically created out of the individual imagination. To think too much about our place in the universe would lead the self to annihilation, subsuming the self totally in either the material world or the world made from the tissue of thought. It might be best then to "forget ourselves in what our wish of death becomes." Our "wish" is all we have of the future, and it therefore shapes the future for us and allows us to become individual. Of course, rationally, we also know that our ultimate future is death. But it is the wish that writes our personal sentence until the last full stop. It is better then to dwell on the wish, the life, the future self we are creating, than to think overmuch about the universe as being or nonbeing. In this way, aware of the two paths, we can preserve our "infinite finesse," a self without the limits of any one heaven, because we give ourselves fully to neither.
"For Tenor Semblance" is a questing poem, and as such might be profitably compared to "Ode to a Nightingale." Both poems seek to reconcile the dual nature of the self, the objective and subjective worlds, and to find a way to escape the sorrow that knowledge of impending death must bring to every human heart. Neither succeeds in evading sorrow. Keats and Tenor each remain a suffering thing, but the poems give meaning to that suffering. In this way, the process of thinking about death helps to flour the hand with its own effort, and the poem, in each case, becomes a symbol of the poet's "only absolute self," the self the poem creates, though as we shall see, this is a bit problematic in the case of "For Tenor Semblance"
The great distinction between "Ode to A Nightingale" and "For Tenor Semblance, Who's Dead" is the stance of the poet toward the poem. Keats's approach is direct. He is speaking about himself, which is evident from the first three words of the poem, "My heart aches . . ." Thus we can say that the poem as a product of the poet's imagination, creating as it does a new reality that influences the physical world, represents directly the poet's "only absolute self."
In the case of Tenor Semblance, the poet stands a step or two removed. Even the poet's own name, Gregg Glory, is a subterfuge, a fictional self that need not take full responsibility for the creation of an absolute self.
Even the poet's own name, Gregg Glory, is a subterfuge
Gregg Glory's strategem in employing a fictional character has its advantages in a Plotinian sense. By driving Tenor Semblance, like Red Hanrahan, to his fictive grave, the poet can observe in a dispassionate way the difficulties of the poetic quest without becoming too personally involved. To be directly in the poem as Keats is might taint the control element in the experiment, resulting in some avoidance of delicate topics. And yet, something too is lost. Perhaps this is because Tenor in the poem is wholly objective. He is created like a hypostasis out of the Plotinian One of the poet's imagination, and this very creation allows the poet to learn a great deal about himself, which he then shares with the reader. But because Tenor remains, in this larger sense, wholly objective, he never turns to confront his creator, the poet. His meaning is all by example. There is no real dialogue between the creator and his creation. This is not a flaw in the poem. The poem does achieve its high purpose and for this reason remains an exceptional work of art. But one senses that an opportunity has been missed, one that, if grasped, would have taken the poem a step beyond Keats's ode in terms of complexity. A sequel, therefore, may be in order.