Rita Dove Gives Hayden a Lift

Submitted by Ted Burke Blog

“Hayden Leaves London” has more the feel of an historical novel rather than that of a poem, and a smart choice by Rita Dove to emphasise poetic prose instead of prosaic stanzas; the latitude allows a resemblance of an interior monologue, not unlike that we find in Faulkner or Woolf, that allows a lyric impressionism that still allows one to appreciate the circumstances, the world view, the growing resignation of the narrator. The language is the poem’s main attraction for me, and what Dove manages here is to sustain a balance between the sort of graceful diction and rounded articulation of phrases without slipping into parody; the habit of too many poets attempting to recreate someone speaking from an historically unverifiable idiom often enough becomes an exercise in stilted fancy. Dove’s composition is cleanly phrased, concise to the sort of personality she re-imagines for Haydn as she has him reflecting on what now seems to him to have been mere vainglory. The eagerness of youth to prove oneself superior, faster,up to steep and senseless challenges segues to an older personality wondering, on the off moment, on what happened to the time, what killed the passion, what was the result of the contesting? It’s a rumination of someone who doesn’t like the cause of their twilight dissipation.

What was I thinking? I am old enough to value,
now and then, an evening spent with starlight—
not one twittering fan or lacy dewlap obscuring
my sidelong glance—yet I came back

to these noisome vapors, this fog-scalded moon,
fat and smoking, in its lonely dominion.
The black Thames pushes on. I close my eyes
and feel it, a bass string plucked at intervals,
dragging our bilge out to the turgid sea—
a drone that thrums the blood, that agitates
for more and more. …

We are observing someone in some form of isolation, the noise of the city removed long enough for him to write some lines that fill in the details of a personality that has tired of his competition and feels alienated to his own gifts. There is the threat of this language slipping off into the syrupy rhetoric lesser scribes mistake for antiquated speech, the “fine writing” one is warned against in Elements of Style (an overly elaborate habit of writing that becomes conspicuous when a writer has little actual to say), but Rita Dove is a professional, in the very best sense of the word. What she writes approaches the baroque, but it’s toward an effect, a feeling: she has her Haydn speak of a “fog scalded moon, fat and smoking, in its dominion” and nearly at once I get the feeling of someone experiencing an abrupt intrusion of hard personal truth on a wistful musing; the typification of the moon is a perfect correlation to a narrator’s dour psychology.

This succeeds , I suspect, because she is smart enough to remain with the voice, the tone of the speaker, and the bitterness that comes to reveal itself as Haydn proceeds with his unraveling confession. There are no props nor gratuitous references to larger historical instances to set the period; you could say that the writing here is so sure and unforced that the period is unimportant to the elusive “getting” of the poem. The poem is that rare thing, an historical first person narrative that avoids pomp, glitter and bad drama. These are ruminations,I suspect, many of us have had, and it’s a tribute to Dove’s craft as a story teller that Haydn comes across as such a sympathetic , if grumpy character who allowed his giftst to get the better of him.

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