The Paris Assessment – Primrose for X

London buses shifting. Licensed underneath CCO 2.0, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 

William Blake as soon as wrote to a good friend that he conversed with the Religious Solar on Primrose Hill. At the moment his phrases saying as a lot are carved on the stone curb atop the grassy knoll the place the Druid Order has gathered for the Autumn Equinox because the poet’s occasions, and immediately nonetheless do. For the Druids, the primrose wards off evil and holds the keys to heaven (in German the cowslip primrose is appropriately known as Himmelschlüsselchen). For herbalists it’s a sedative, ache reliever, and salve. It retains despair at bay. The primrose is the flower of youth, love, lust and sweetness, rebirth and poetry. Consuming one can manifest fairies. In Albion it’s among the many first blooms of spring. The “rathe Primrose” is the opening flower Milton notes to strew upon the “laureate hearse” of Lycidas.

“Primrose for X” opens with Fanny Howe “monitoring Blake on Primrose Hill” and twelve quatrains later ends together with her on a high-speed prepare that “raced away from London / and Blake’s theophanies.” What she finds within the lyric interim are not any golden pillars of Jerusalem or superstar units. No St. Paul’s Cathedral, Shard, or Wharf spotlight the skyline as they do for guests in aid on the metallic panoramic signal at 66.7 meters excessive. Right here the “unsteady skyline” is “like a graph that measures / markets, snails and heartbeats”—one in every of many situations in Fanny Howe’s poetry of her in-dwelling similization of the world round us, as if these comparative truths at all times existed as air to breathe. Meanings break away with snails and “shucked” on the finish of the road that contrasts the mind with the “slippery” coronary heart that additionally slips throughout the stanza. And the way the important coronary heart monitor beats with the little line’s cadence “How am I nonetheless right here / at each thump?”—the query posed to herself or Thou of her personal life’s longevity answered by the regular pulse of spirit-touched coronary heart, together with doubt’s silence.

“Each phrase should come from my acts direct,” Howe writes of poetry’s not possible activity in “Philophany,” an earlier poem in her most up-to-date assortment, Love and I. “Primrose for X” comes towards the top of the guide earlier than two last poetic sequences. The location of particular person poem-to-poem sequences by means of the entire takes on the form of neumatic notation, rhythm pitched to like’s life. Right here strains transfer inside snail-paced thought, the measure of consideration the place, as Buber describes it, “love involves cross.” Right here strains transfer in a spark with the stressed “I,” who finds the X topics of affection’s present among the many poor immigrant girls in Victoria, impoverished youngsters, “drugged and soiled and crushed” boys of Kentish City, and the victims of a father’s violence, half-allegorized by a machete. Catherine Sophia Boucher Blake belongs right here, too, within the hidden imaginative and prescient—she who discovered the secrets and techniques and follow of her husband’s illuminations and signed the Parish Register as bride with an “X.”

Blake beloved quatrains as a lot because the fourteen-syllable line. “Primrose for X” is just one of three poems in Love and I written in constant quatrains, and the longest of the three. Its symmetry doesn’t observe any set metrical or syllabic sample just like the iambic tetrameter of Blake’s “London.” As a substitute every quatrain’s brief line-to-line syllabic variation counters the general symmetry, unsteady rhythm certain to beating picture and thought and the wants of the center. Just one stanza consists fully of trimetric strains, within the alien description of the “boys hunched,” as if to intensify the nightmarish fairy-tale high quality of “What’s created by people / is sort of at all times alien.”

The phantoms of the final stanza emerge out of the violent “grievous years” because the poet speeds away within the darkness towards the unseen Channel and the youngsters of The First Church. Phantoms or theophanies. The ninth-century Irish theologian and poet John Scotus Eriugena outlined the latter in his Periphyseon as “divine radiance,” “self-manifestation of God,” “traces of the Fact,” “clouds of heaven,” “brightness,” “divine manifestations … which take their names from the everlasting causes of which they’re the photographs.” Man-made causes—“machete or his father’s hand”—or everlasting causes. That “each seen and invisible creature might be known as a theophany, that’s, a divine apparition.” These are the indecipherable types of love Howe’s phrases monitor and produce into not possible gentle—her poetry philophanies.

—Jeffrey Yang

I used to be monitoring Blake on Primrose Hill
one damp summer time evening.
Bundles of white chestnut flared
underneath the streetlights.

London’s unsteady skyline
was not a reassuring one
however like a graph that measures
markets, snails and heartbeats.

When one mind was weary
one coronary heart was not.
The mind might be shucked
when all of the air is gone however the coronary heart

is slippery and wishes a contact of
spirit to nourish it.
How am I nonetheless right here
at each thump?

The center has its wants
and emotions sewn like threads
into branches and seasons
that we pencil as bushes.

The Irish girls with brass-capped hair
and tight mouths
and a Muslim girl with 5 ladies and one boy
are all sadly clad at Victoria.

In poverty some screaming brats
are fats, and a few are starved
into silence on their father’s laps.
No father may be worse than that.

What’s created by people
is sort of at all times alien.
The hissing buses and trains
in Kentish City, boys hunched

in bunches on the lock
drugged and soiled and crushed
their eyes like lizards veiled
and blind in retreat whereas

a person with a machete
lower a fellow down, blood
throughout his fingers. Proud
of being a killing form of man.

Machete or his father’s hand: which one
triggered this crime?
The aughts have been grievous years
for boys and males.

Crowds of phantoms coated
Kent’s fields because the Eurostar
raced away from London
and Blake’s theophanies.

Fanny Howe is the writer of greater than twenty books of poetry and prose. She grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and studied at Stanford College.

Jeffrey Yang is the writer of the poetry collections Line and Gentle; Hey, Marfa; Vanishing-Line; and An Aquarium.

A shorter model of Yang’s piece on Fanny Howe’s “Primrose for X” will seem within the forthcoming anthology Raised by Wolves: Fifty Poets on Fifty Poems, which shall be printed in January 2024 by Graywolf Press. “Primrose for X” is reprinted from Love and I with permission of Graywolf Press.