Song of the Line by Jack G. Gilbert, with engravings by Henryk
Fantazos (Durham, NC: Horse & Buggy Press, 2007)

DAVID MIDDLETON is poet-in-residence at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, LA and poetry editor for Modern Age. His latest collection of verse is The Habitual Peacefulness of Gruchy: Poems After Pictures by Jean-François Millet (LSU Press, 2005).

In 1980, Dr. Jack Gilbert, professor of
English at Louisiana State University in
Baton Rouge, retired at 46 to pursue, as
the dust jacket puts it, “a simpler life building,
gardening, baking bread” and raising
old-fashioned roses on a farm in North
Carolina where he and his wife “designed
and built themselves the house and outbuildings
of their farm.” The poems in the
present collection—called “[1]aconic and
odd” by Annie Dillard in her introduction
but perhaps better described as playfully
wise and whimsically insightful—
are the flowering of nearly thirty years
of both seeking and making what Horace
and Martial called the good life. Most
of the poems are brief, written mainly in
free verse but with the occasional use of
rhyme and are complemented by engravings
much like the poems in their fanciful
spirit. Some poems are straightforward and
easy to understand on first reading; others
are intriguingly oblique and puzzling
but nonetheless enticing and often worth a
second look. Gilbert’s themes include love
and friendship, happiness (not a subject
often found in modern verse), an agrarian
view of social and political matters, nature,
speculations about philosophy and art, and
praise of the good life that he has now
spent nearly three decades trying to realize
on a North Carolina farm.

In “beatus ille” Gilbert characterizes
himself as “old,” “stubborn, chronic old,” (not
young) / “rural” (no public water, sewer,
pavement) / “occupationally challenged” (poet,
unknown) / “subsistence farmer” (grows peas
and arugula)[.]” Such humor, which fills
these poems, is defined in “New Yorker
in Dixie: Talk about Humor”: “we laugh
/ when the mind is humored / into little
ecstasies, / at a puzzle solved, / a prophecy
fulfilled, / a connection seen, a pun, /
pleasure in a point of knowing, / in discovery,
in playing doctor.” This blend of
wit and wisdom yields poetry that at its best
is deeply humane, as in “Still Life,” which
contains the title of the collection in lines
about the beauty of the lineaments of the
human face: “There is a lovely face élan,
that’s so, / but a vibrant stillness too, / the
liveliness of blood and wit / in a song / of
the line.”

A fulfilling love both in this world
and beyond is the subject of “Haunting”:
“When our ghosts are introduced to one
another / wafted on soft air of jasmine /
we’ll touch wings, touch wings, touch
wings / and bounce like Spring Azure
butterfl ies / quick to stop into oneness /
and disappear the while[.]” A marriage of
“mellow autumn with green spring” is the
theme of “Life Class.” The poet delights
in his beloved: “And not just at the start
/ you were in every way desirable / to
talk and eat and sleep with / to see and
touch and kiss.” And though time has now
“scraped away the Botticelli / for a fl at
place / to sketch a minimal winter” their
spirits remain “silvery ripe, forms we see
and know.”

Such happiness for Gilbert is found not
only in love but in life as a whole: “The
world is full of mercies / and tempered
winds / and helping hands” (“The World
Is Full of Mercies”). One way to happiness
is to live without fear. Thus, the poet,
imaginatively standing before his own
grave, muses on two epitaphs: “Contemplating
the dirt upon my grave / that had
somehow itself / contrived to be inscribed
/ ‘This is not work to be envied.’ / Odd,
for I had expected, / ‘Fear is no way to
live'” (“Lines on the Earth”). The best
approach is to go on the journey with
“heart full head strong / to live it though
/ with fellow travailleurs / in friendship”
(“Best”). Those who fear to open themselves
up to real human relationships in
this “raw world of body parts” are left with
only virtual relationships by way of computers
“where all that moves in sex / will
be an eyelid” (“Sugarplums”).

This courage to live and love without
fear is seen in one of Gilbert’s most evocative
nature lyrics, “The Limbs of Winter.”
A season usually symbolic of loss
and death, here winter brings out admirable
qualities in trees and, by analogy, in
human beings as well: “The limbs of winter
sing / to those who listen, / not the
whistle of the cold / not the snap and rattle
/ of the twigs that sweep and break. / The
lullaby comes / from the rippling sinews
of / the swaying of the boughs and trunks,
/ baritone affi rmation / of the stoutness /
in upstanding.” The ineluctable qualities
of things in themselves are evoked in “A
Rose”: “A rose knows no ambivalence, /
its scent and blossom lure all in, / its thorns
and prickles ward them off, / its roots and
tendrils hold all tight / and suck them dry.
/ A rose knows no ambivalence.” Yet such
a balance of scent and thorn is far from the
poet’s encounter with a poisonous snake
whose swallowing of a fish leaves him
feeling nervously cautious: “I backed away
/ neglectful of courtesy / and glad / that
dragons / never were” (“Caitiff”).

This realistic view of nature is rooted
in Gilbert’s agrarian way of life. In fact,
some of his most powerful poems make
up a critique of modernity from an agrarian
perspective. “Mezzo Stato” regrets the
transformation of the prairie from a realm
of ancient peace into a place where cars
now speed on by toward some destination,
some “frantic angularity,” that “these
contrivances screaming seek, / welded and
bolted and strapped together, / metal and
rubber and mammal.” The poem ends with
a variation on Dante: “[how] could I have
guessed / birth had undone so many?”
Gilbert is even more explicit about the
madness of traffic in “Our Daily Execution,”
a poem that laments the hundred
people killed each day on highways and
our passive complicity therein: “Heaviest
on us weighs / injudicial slaughter.” In “A
Rattlesnake History of Texas,” the rattlesnakes
speak of how for centuries their
dead bodies and those of other native animals
built up a soil that European settlers
have not properly cared for: “Their gear
made a purpose not to rot / is covering
Texas. / Soon there will be no dirt.” This
careless attitude toward nature and history
also informs “Way,” a poem about modern
planners changing road names and making
straight roads out of ones whose twists and
turns tell the history of the settling of the
land: “They are changing the roads of the
county. // Sispippiwa and Halt’s Brothel
and Billy Mountain / are roads where people
went / . . . / Duck Pond, Miller’s Fault,
Prison Farm Road[.]” Such living history
in names and roads must now give way to
the purely practical: “‘Roads run wrong’
say our leaders / who have studied at the
right places / and who go each year / to do
planetary planning in Hawaii.”

These agrarian poems are closely related
to other poems that range widely among
philosophical questions including ones
concerning crafts and art. “Under” asks
what sort of person we should seek after a
“wild century” of colossal waste caused by
one or another embodiment of Nietzsche’s
Over-Man. The answer is suggested both
by the title and in these lines: “A modest
ideal person, / adequate to human life, /
with the vitamin virtues / courage and
temperance and thrift[.]” The pre-Socratic
philosopher Euprotes is approved for his
belief that wisdom is not wholly cerebral.
He was “the song-and-dance philosopher
/ [who] held [that] the motions of the
dance / free the mind to sing in laughter
/ where wisdom has its only moments”
(“Euprotes”). This rooting of wisdom in
the common things of life also informs two
brief poems on Thearion, a minor character
in Plato’s Gorgias. In “Thearion the
Baker,” the baker praises wisdom which
comes from practicing a craft: “They have
a peek at my craft, / these bakers of ideas
/ but they don’t stay put for the hard parts.
/ They wander away erratic and distrait /
that truth may turn out to be / something
someone already said, / or something to
them / excruciatingly simple, / like /
‘Keep the working surface clean’ / or / ‘It
is good to eat.'” Contemporary bakers of
ideas include modern language theorists
whose views leave us a world in which any
serious artist guided by their ideas would
be at a loss: “No servant and no mastery
/ postmodern Michelangelo / is alien to
scaffolding / by dint / of being ceilingless”
(“The Under Art”).

The good life Gilbert lives is found
and made in loving appreciation of simple
everyday activities and in practicing traditional
virtues and common decencies.
In “The Sweetness of Aunties,” the poet
commends in his aunts “the cockles of
the heart” which are “muscle-glands of
kindliness” exercised in “making cookies
and listening, / telling stories and talking
nonsense, / and teaching things like pulling
up your socks.” A world full of such
aunties, such bakers as Thearion, such
Under-Men as called for in “Under,” and
such philosophers as Euprotes would be, as
the poem on aunts has it, a place of “good
humor and good living.” What Surrey
celebrated in his famous translation of
Martial’s epigram on the good life—”The
fruitful ground, the quiet mind”—Jack
Gilbert first has lived and now has shared
with us in verse.