The curator, Johnny Horton, began by reading that poem by Auden that everyone keeps reading, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats." Everyone keeps going to this poem because it's terrific and has a couple of clear and useful lines ("For poetry makes nothing happen...") and because it ends with those rousing, rhyming stanzas. (The last one: "In the deserts of the heart/Let the healing fountain start,/In the prison of his days/Teach the free man how to praise.") Horton read the poem and then said, weirdly, "Well, we're still in a prison, and we're always in a prison, but I think what he's saying is that poetry makes it more bearable."
This was Horton's well-intentioned and feeble preamble to the Hecht poem he decided to read next, "Birdwatchers of America." It ends: "The air was clear. He seemed in ultimate peace/Except that he had no eyes. Rigid and bright/Upon the forehead, furred/With a light frost, crouched an outrageous bird." It's a startling poem, and awful there at the end--the unseemly bird, the crust of frost, the eye sockets. Horton looked hard at the poem, as if it had betrayed him, and then looked baffled, and then said, "I don't know. It's a prison. We're all in a prison. But it's not a bad-looking prison. It doesn't have to be."
I completely understand that the week leading up to the election was confusing. And I understand that some people think of poetry as a place to find consolation. But sometimes people find things in poems that are not there, which is what Horton was trying to do. Hecht's poem (like a lot of Hecht's poetry) is a confrontation with a dark end and an illustration of the gross way the living feed on the dead (not a bad political allegory these days). It is not an example of how poetry makes the unbearable world "bearable" or less "bad-looking." It is a great, gruesome poem. It was terrible to hear it tortured into a banality.
In fairness, Horton, like the rest of us, was bracing for the scariest and most torturous presidential election most of us have ever faced, and maybe that explains his tortured interpretation. His analysis exemplified how, as Auden put it, "The words of a dead man/Are modified in the living." I'm all for optimism, but I wouldn't go to Hecht to find it.
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No one won the contest recently announced in this column. The answer--and a new contest--will be announced soon.
