Poetry Review: The Beautiful Precision of Poet David Ferry

David Ferry’s voice is quiet but never shirks. It admits directly and indirectly that the world is a perplexing place.

Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations by David Ferry. The University of Chicago Press, $18.
On This Side of the River: Selected Poems by David Ferry. The Waywiser Press, £12.99.

By Marcia Karp

Q: What is the sound of one man singing? A: The thing itself, his song.

Poet David Ferry at the National Book Awards, 2012

Unless, that is, he is unlucky in his editor. Thomas Wyatt’s good luck was that he was 15 years dead when, in 1557, he was the star of Richard Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes. Tottel not only compiled the miscellany, but he did what other times have come to call regularizing or polishing. He made a volume that still, today, has its say in the study and enjoyment of English poetry. Yet, like etymology in relation to usage, what early poets did can hold too much sway when questions are asked about the possibilities of the language and what poets do with it, unless their priority is leavened with knowledge about how we have been given their work.

In her inquiry into anthologies, Tradition and the Individual Poem (2001), literary scholar Anne Ferry joins the discussion about Wyatt’s poem, known today as “They Flee from Me,” and what Tottel was up to when he edited it. Here are lines three through seven, with original spellings; asterisks mark the lines Tottel set his hand to.

I have sene theim gentill, tame, and meke
That nowe are wyld and do not remembre
That sometyme they put theimself in daunger
To take bred at my hand; and nowe they raunge
Besely seking with a continuell chaunge.

[from Wyatt’s holograph manuscript, ll. 3-7]

Once haue I seen them gentle, tame, and meke, *
That now are wild, and do not once remember *
That sometyme they haue put them selues in danger, *
To take bread at my hand, and now they range,
Busily sekyng in continuall change. *

[from Tottel, #52, ll. 3-7]

Ferry notes that Wyatt’s own first line (They fle from me that sometyme did me seke) “could be and probably was counted as iambic pentameter.” Hers is a way to talk about meter that takes into account what poets know: ears and mouths will vary as to how stress, an element of both sound and sense in English, is deployed in a given phrase or sentence. Not always, but often throughout the centuries of English poetry, there has been a fashion that favors this particular pattern and syllable count and will hear it whenever it is possible to. Tottel wanted to hear it, and when he didn’t, made sure others would. Even if you think he was wrong to make his changes, you have to admire how deftly he achieved his aim.

Ferry has thought about more than just the metronomic mania that guided Tottel. She makes a case for Tottel’s having turned a poem of sorrow into one that pleads a case against the lover. Here are the opening lines of the final stanza, as each version was formatted:

It was no dreme: I lay brode waking.
But all is torned thorough my gentilnes
Into a straunge fasshion of forsaking;

[Wyatt]

to

    It was no dreame: for I lay broade awakyng. *
But all is turnde now through my gentlenesse *
Into a bitter fashion of forsakyng: *

[Tottel]

The logical for in the first of these lines, and the now of the second, are part of a forensic trail Tottel lays throughout the poem. What he egregiously does is steal the tone of the poem. Straunge turned into bitter? No longer is the speaker bewildered by the lover’s inconstancy. He’s just pissed.

Poets who hear for themselves, though meter be important to them, follow music and sense, not fingers that must tally a quota or subjects that don’t matter to them. Wyatt was one, and Anne Ferry’s husband, David, is another one man who sings to his own scrupulous tunes. David Ferry has had two books published in fall 2012: Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations, winner of the National Book Award, and On This Side of the River: Selected Poems, his first British volume. He is lucky in his editors, and they in him.

Many writers play their own Tottel and willingly conform their poems to the tune and temper of the times. Listen instead to “That Now Are Wild and Do Not Remember,” a new poem that is in both of David Ferry’s new volumes. He uses Wyatt’s poem to get at another sort of forsaking by a beloved woman. The wildness of Wyatt’s lover, some have thought her Anne Boleyn, is that of a creature returning from a period of tameness. What is forgotten are the moments of trust that once allowed closeness to the forsaken speaker of the poem.

The wildness in Ferry’s poem is embodied in the octave of his unrhymed sonnet. (Wyatt’s poem isn’t a sonnet, though it has a three-part structure—present, past, and puzzlement—like the Italian form, which he was first to write in English. His three seven-line stanzas make a sonnet and a half.)

That Now Are Wild and Do Not Remember

Where did you go to, when you went away?
It is as if you step by step were going
Someplace elsewhere into some other range
Of speaking, that I had no gift for speaking,
Knowing nothing of the language of that place
To which you went with naked foot at night
Into the wilderness there elsewhere in the bed,
Somewhere else in the house beyond my seeking.

The recognizable voice of a poet is made of many things. Some rather small. Precision is one of Ferry’s characteristics. To in the first line is not redundant, but, as you will see, plaintive in the speaker’s supposition that the beloved had direction in her leaving. Wyatt’s “and nowe they raunge” provides the pivot from what seems to be another place to dwell, which, at the start of the fourth line becomes another way of, another opening onto, speaking, which, then, in fact is a home, but one she is making without him.

Sentence shape is another of language’s possibilities, one that differs in time and place. Ferry’s syntax is one of his virtues; here, and throughout his work, his sentences resist the pull to settle into what would be adequate and familiar. They are lovely.

His formalities aren’t hidden, rather they are open secrets—there for those who will see them, not intrusive for those who won’t. What looks like three words “moving along in participial rhythm” (from “Down by the River,” which provides the title for The Other Side of the River)—speaking, knowing, nothing—are three words with their individual functions in the sentence. Because of the loss being suffered and the confusion of language, nothing sounds as if it could be a lost Anglo-Saxon verb or gerund, noth-ing, that renders obliteration of connection. Attend now to the prepositions: “Knowing nothing of the language of that place.” Those ofs of possession contrast his loss to what the wilderness has gained. Listen, too, to how the final cadence of that line is repeated:

Knowing nothing of the language of that place

  …

 there elsewhere in the bed,

The echo clinches the relation between the strange (both odd and bewildering) fashion she now follows and the simultaneous there and not-there of their closeness.

The return of the first line in “that place/ To which you went” is a return to the unanswered question, this time embodied.

Where did you go to, when you went away?

  …

     that place

To which you went with naked foot at night
Into the wilderness there elsewhere in the bed,
Somewhere else in the house beyond my seeking.

This is, isn’t it, one of the bravest intimacies in English poetry? An admission, not of failure, but the moment of sure loss that is not separable from the sexual romance that comes with Wyatt’s “naked foot.”

There is a thread of transforming pairs through these lines—Someplace elsewhere, there elsewhere, Somewhere else—that ends at the end of these lines. This is part of the art of the poem. Ferry says in an interview with WBUR in November, “I’ve been interested in poems but not so much for what the take home pay is, what you might sum up from them in moral or intellectual terms or whatever, but what’s in certain lines and how lines relate to other lines.” The attempt to name the strange country does not, though, stop completely. One of these words spills on its own into the rest of the poem, which tries to understand its customs and geography.

I have been so dislanguaged by what happened,
I cannot speak the words that somewhere you
Maybe were speaking to others where you went.
Maybe they talk together where they are,
Restlessly wandering along the shore,
Waiting for a way to cross the river.

First, the devastation of that first line, then the kindness of providing company for his beloved, of imagining her language has other speakers, and then an echo from the poem that precedes this one in both volumes. It is a section of the Aeneid, book 6, identified by reference to Virgil in Bewilderment and called “On the River Bank” in the British Selected. Aeneas can’t understand why there is a vast humanity vying for room in Charon’s ferry in order to finally make “the longed-for crossing.” The priestess tells him they are the unburied and so can’t rest. Dante, and via him, Eliot, too, are moved by this terrible scene. Knowledge of Hades’s ways permeated ancient literature and the culture it grew in. In order to allow her brother, Polyneices, his ride with Charon, Antigone sprinkles dust upon him and so is sealed by Creon into her fated tomb. The power of that riverbank renders here the terrible death-in-life of the beloved in Ferry’s poem.

From his first book, On the Way to the Island (1960, Wesleyan University Press), to these, Ferry never publishes a frivolous poem. Because his work has always been mature, it is not necessary to use the unspoken apology that chronological arrangement can supply. While On This Side of the River is a Selected volume, it organizes the poems (including translations) into sections that share a feeling or subject or sound, as if it were a volume without reference to previous ones. Not quite a Complete Poems, at 248 pages it is thorough in including large or complete selections of all Ferry’s books—On the Way to the Island; the Chicago Press volumes, Strangers (1983), Dwelling Places (1993), Of No County I Know (1999, new and selected) and Bewilderment; Gilgamesh (1992); and his Farrar, Straus and Giroux translations, Horace’s Odes (1997) and Epistles (2001), Virgil’s Eclogues (1999) and Georgics (2005). Dates of first publication follow each poem in the table of contents. By referring to these, a reader can, but is not forced to, consider the poems under the aspect of time or see how Ferry’s volumes have all been notable for their coherence. Like other Waywiser volumes, the paperback is solid and nice in the hand. It is a generous introduction to a real poet, with an organization that makes good sense.

Bewilderment is a smaller book, 128 pages, and one with a different purpose. Most of the poems are new, although some will be familiar to those who have heard Ferry read in the past few years, along with translations from the FSG volumes, and beautiful ones from the Aeneid, which will also be published by them. There is a section in which accomplished and moving poems by Arthur Gold are replied to in poems by Ferry that take the shape of literary criticism, translation, and comment—what Christopher Ricks calls “subsequent creation.” They are the right way to respond to the work of a friend. Ferry brings in, too, some poems from the 1960 volume. This is unusual in a collection of new poems, but the poems suit their neighbors and, again, unless you notice the acknowledgements, you won’t be able to tell which are the early poems.

The title is perfect. Bewilderment. Yeats wrote that “Literature is always personal, always one man’s vision of the world, one man’s experience.” The voice in these poems is a sober one, even when describing the arrogance a man might find in a bottle. Voice is unfashionable in some quarters that nevertheless will not stop talking about why it is so. But voice is just what Yeats describes; it is both what is important to the writer and how he understands it in words. Ferry’s voice is quiet but never shirks. It admits directly and indirectly that the world is a perplexing place. In “Coffee Lips,” one of several poems written over many years about suppers for street people, the guest wonders, “If I ask you a question will you give me a truthful answer?”. This same guilelessness is the voice of Bewilderment. Though it is a voice arising from one man, singing as he will, a strength of the poems is that Ferry has heard that others—Aeneas, Rilke’s cripple, Mr. Wrenn with his “trivial pug,” himself in a bar’s mirror—are bewildered, too. Even more so than in the longer volume, the arrangement of poems and the division into sections enhance the parts and the whole. What a book.

3 Comments

  1. joann green breuer on January 15, 2013 at 7:23 am

    david ferry was my freshman engish poetry professor at wellesley college. fifty years later i am still quoting him, and trying, as best i can, to engage in written words with the sensitivity and sensibility which he invited his students to experience.

  2. Daniel Bosch on January 15, 2013 at 10:30 am

    Thank you, Marcia, for gathering here the Tottel and the Wyatt and both Ferrys, and for laying them out so clearly, so that we can imagine some of the dynamics that brought David’s poems into being.

  3. Jim McCue on November 14, 2023 at 12:17 pm

    A fine and imaginatively consonant investigation of what goes on “inside the lines”, as he liked to put it.

Leave a Comment





Recent Posts