PRACTICAL CRITICISM
PROSE PASSAGES
I
I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest
demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.
Fivescore years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand
today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great
beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of
withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.
But one hundred years later, the Negro is still not free; one hundred years later,
the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains
of discrimination; one hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty
in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity; one hundred years later, the Negro is
still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his
own land.
II
The status of the author is not what it was. Society, as people say, takes a dimmer view
of him than it used to do. Possibly authors themselves are not what they were. It is an
argument easy to use, and we often meet it. But it misses the point even if we are now
nothing but so many scribbling midgets. If there arose among us a young novelist who
was a greater genius than the Dickens of the early Victorian period, he could never
triumphantly capture the country as Dickens did. He would face too much competition,
not merely from other books but from TV, radio, films.
III
Strange to say, technology, although of course the product of man, tends to develop by
its own laws and principles, and these are very different from those of human nature or
of living nature in general. Nature always, so to speak, knows where and when to stop.
Greater even than the mystery of natural growth is the mystery of the natural cessation
of growth. There is measure in all natural things, in their size, speed, or violence. As a
result, the system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, selfadjusting and self-cleansing. Not so with technology, or perhaps I should say, not so
with man dominated by technology and specialization. Technology recognizes no selflimiting principle – in terms, for instance, of size, speed, or violence. It therefore does
not possess the virtues of being self-balancing, self-adjusting, and self-cleansing. In the
subtle system of nature, technology, and in particular the super-technology of the
modern world, acts like a foreign body, and there are now numerous signs of rejection.
IV
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by
now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only
the question When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman
writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which
alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony
and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the barest of all things is
to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his
1
workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal
truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honour and pity
and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so he labors under a curse.
V
Here is an old man on the bed of death, harassed with helpless friends and waiting
relatives. What a terrible sight it is, this thin frame with loosened and cracking flesh,
this toothless mouth on a bloodless face, this tongue that can’t speak, these eyes that
can’t see! To this pass youth has come, after all its hopes and trials; to this pass middle
age after all its torment and its toil. To this pass health, strength and joyous rivalry; this
arm once struck great blows and fought for victory in virile games. To this pass
knowledge, science, wisdom. For seventy years this man with pain and effort gathered
knowledge; his brain became the storehouse of varied experience, the centre of a
thousand subtleties of thought and deed, his heart through suffering learned gentleness
as his mind learned understanding; seventy years he grew from animal into man
capable of seeking truth and creating beauty. But death is upon him, poisoning him,
choking him, congealing his blood, gripping his heart, bursting his brain, rattling in his
throat. Death wins.
VI
To live alone as I have lived, a man should have the confidence of God, the tranquil
faith of a monastic saint, the stern impregnability of Gibraltar. Lacking these, there are
times when anything, everything, all or nothing, the most trivial incidents, the most
casual words, can in an instant strip me of my armour, palsy my hand, constrict my
heart with frozen horror, and fill my bowels with the gray substance of shuddering
impotence. Sometimes it is nothing but a shadow passing on the sun; sometimes nothing
but the torrid milky light of August, or the naked, sprawling ugliness and squalid
decencies of streets in Brooklyn fading in the watery vistas of that milky light and
evoking the intolerable misery of countless drab and nameless lives.
VII
Just before Michigan Avenue reached the Hilton, the marchers were halted by the
police. It was a long halt. Perhaps thirty minutes. Time for people who had been
walking on the sidewalk to join the march, proceed for a few steps, halt with the others,
get bored and leave it. Time for someone in command of the hundreds of police in the
neighborhood to communicate with his headquarters, explain the problem; time for the
dilemma to be relayed, alternatives examined, and orders sent back to attack and
disperse the crowd. If so, a trap was first set. The mules were allowed to cross Balbo
Avenue, then were separated by a line of police from the marchers, who now, several
thousand compressed in this one place, filled the intersection of Michigan Avenue and
Balbo. There, clammed by the police on three sides, and cut off from the wagons of the
poor people’s March, there, right beneath the windows of the Hilton which looked
down on the Grand Park and Michigan Avenue, the stationery march was abruptly
attacked. They attacked with tear gas, with mace and with clubs, they attacked like a
chain saw cutting wood, the teeth of the saw the edge of their clubs, they attacked like a
scythe through grass, lines of twenty and thirty policemen striking out in an arc, their
clubs beating, demonstrators fleeing. Seen from overhead from the nineteenth floor, it
was like a wind blowing dust, or the edge of the waves riding foam on the shore.
2
POEMS
I
Woman’s song
O move in me, my darling,
For now the sun must rise;
The sun that will draw open
The lids upon your eyes.
O wake in me, my darling
The knife of day is bright
To cut the thread that binds you
Within the flesh of night.
Today I lose you to find you
Whom yet my blood would keep –
Would weave and sing around you –
The spells and songs of sleep.
None but I shall know you
As none but I have known;
Yet there’s a death and a maiden
Who wait for you alone,
So move in me, my darling,
Whose debt I cannot pay,
Pain and the dark must claim you,
And passion and the day.
II
Richard Cory
Whenever Richard Cory went downtown
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown
Clean favoured and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed
And he was always human when he talked:
But still he fluttered pulses when he said
“Good Morning” and glittered when he walked.
And he was rich – yes richer than a king
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine w thought he was the very thing
To make us wish we were in his place.
So on we worked and waited for the light
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory one calm summer night
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
3
III
My Grandmother’s House
There is a house now far away where once
I received love. The woman died,
the house withdrew into silence, snakes moved
among books; I was then too young
to read, and my blood turned cold like the moon.
How often I think of going there,
to peer through blind eyes of windows or
just listen to the frozen air
or in wild despair, pick an armful of
darkness to bring it here to lie
behind my bedroom door like a brooding
dog… you cannot believe, darling,
can you, that I lived in such a house and
was proud and loved, I who have lost
my way and beg now at stranger’s doors
to receive love, at least in small change?
IV
To My Mother
Most near, most dear, most loved, and most far,
Under the huge window where I often found her
Sitting as huge as Asia, seismic with laughter,
Gin and chicken helpless in her Irish hand,
Irresistible as Rabelais but most tender for
The lame dogs and hurt birds that surround her,She is a procession no one can follow after
But be like a little dog following a brass band.
She will not glance up at the bomber or condescend
To drop her gin and scuttle to a cellar,
But lean on the mahogany table like a mountain
Whom only faith can move, and so I send
O all her faith and all my love to tell her
That she will move from mourning into morning.
V
Stop all the clocks
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
4
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
VI
Moving in Winter
Their life, collapsed like unplayed cards,
is carried piecemeal through the snow;
Headboard and footboard now, the bed
where she has lain desiring him
where overhead his sleep will build
its canopy to smother her once more;
their table, by four elbows worn
evening after evening while the wax runs down;
mirrors grey with reflecting them,
bureaus coffining from the cold
things that can shuffle in a drawer,
carpets rolled up around those echoes
which, shaken out, take wing and breed
new altercations, the old silences.
VII The Patriot
I am standing for peace and non-violence.
Why world is fighting fighting
Why all people of world
Are not following Mahatma Gandhi,
I am simply not understanding.
Ancient Indian Wisdom is 100% correct,
I should say even 200% correct,
But modern generation is neglectingToo much going for fashion and foreign thing.
Other day I'm reading newspaper
(Every day I'm reading Times of India
To improve my English Language)
How one goonda fellow
Threw stone at Indirabehn.
Must be student unrest fellow, I am thinking.
Friends, Romans, Countrymen, I am saying (to myself)
Lend me the ears.
Everything is coming Regeneration, Remuneration, Contraception.
Be patiently, brothers and sisters.
You want one glass lassi?
Very good for digestion.
With little salt, lovely drink,
Better than wine;
Not that I am ever tasting the wine.
5
I'm the total teetotaller, completely total,
But I say
Wine is for the drunkards only.
What you think of prospects of world peace?
Pakistan behaving like this,
China behaving like that,
It is making me really sad, I am telling you.
Really, most harassing me.
All men are brothers, no?
In India also
Gujaratis, Maharashtrians, Hindiwallahs
All brothers Though some are having funny habits.
Still, you tolerate me,
I tolerate you,
One day Ram Rajya is surely coming.
You are going?
But you will visit again
Any time, any day,
I am not believing in ceremony
Always I am enjoying your company.
VIII Digging
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
6
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.
IX
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.
The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.
With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.
X
Indian Women
In this triple-baked continent
women don't etch angry eyebrows
on mud walls.
Patiently they sit
like empty pitchers
on the mouth of the village well
7
pleating hope in each braid
of their mississippi-long hair
looking deep into the water's mirror
for the moisture in their eyes.
With zodiac doodlings on the sands
they guard their tattooed thighs
waiting for their men's return
till even the shadows
roll up their contours
and are gone
beyond the hills.
XI
Marriage
Lovers, when they marry, face
Eternity with touching grace.
Complacent at being fated
Never to be separated.
The bride is always pretty, the groom
A lucky man. The darkened room
Roars out the joy of flesh and blood.
The use of nakedness is good.
I went through this, believing all,
Our love denied the Primal Fall.
Wordless, we walked among the trees,
And felt immortal as the breeze.
However many times we came
Apart, we came together. The same
Thing over and over again.
Then suddenly the mark of Cain
Began to show on her and me.
Why should I ruin the mystery
By harping on the suffering rest,
Myself a frequent wedding guest?
XII
Reported Missing
Can you give me a precise description?
Said the policeman. Her lips, I told him,
Were soft. Could you give me, he said, pencil
Raised, a metaphor? Soft as an open mouth,
I said. Were there any noticeable
Peculiarities? he asked. Her hair hung
Heavily, I said. Any particular
Colour? he said. I told him I could recall
Little but its distinctive scent. What do
You mean, he asked, by distinctive? It had
8
The smell of woman's hair, I said. Where
Were you? he asked. Closer than I am to
Anyone at present, I said, level
With her mouth, level with her eyes. Her eyes?
He said, what about her eyes? There were two,
I said, both black. It has been established,
He said, that eyes cannot, outside common
Usage, be black; are you implying that
Violence was used? Only the gentle
Hammer blow of her kisses, the scent
Of her breath, the ... Quite, said the policeman,
Standing, but I regret that we know of
No one answering to that description.
9