11. The Mid to Late Twentieth-Century Poets

A. Patrick Kavanagh

Patrick Kavanagh was raised as a devout Catholic. His family frequented the parish church of Saint Mary in Inniskeen, a small village in County Monaghan, Ireland.

Fig. 48: Patrick Kavanagh Centre, former Catholic St. Mary’s church, Inniskeen, Ireland. Photograph from Wikimedia, 2009, CC BY-SA 1.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kavanaghcentre.jpg

The Irishman, who was born in 1904 and died in 1967, grew up to be a devotee of the Virgin himself. His favorite prayer was the Marian hymn “Hail Queen of Heaven, the Ocean Star,” by Father John Lingard. Not surprisingly, Kavanagh often referred to the Mother of God in his poetry.

In 1959 the poet composed “Our Lady’s Tumbler.” How he became exposed to the medieval tale remains an open question, but the vocabulary of his piece hints that he had read and borrowed from the translation by Eugene Mason, first printed in 1910. In any case, Kavanagh appropriates the story or rather its leading character to suit his personal circumstances. To be more precise, he assumes that his readers already know the narrative and have no need of a recapitulation: the title of his own poem and the repetition of the same phrase in the final line are the only references he makes.

In “Our Lady’s Tumbler” Kavanagh expresses thankfulness for his physical recovery and poetic rebirth after surgery he underwent in 1955 to remove a cancerous lung and rib. In his gratitude he celebrates the joys of life. In particular, he concentrates upon the beauties and pleasures that the canals of Dublin had to offer in spring and summer. Whereas earlier in his career the poet sometimes cast the Irish city as a hellish place, he now portrays it as a locus of redemption.

Elsewhere in his oeuvre Kavanagh wrote poems that are called his Grand Canal sonnets, though this is not one of them. The lyric comprises ten couplets of iambic tetrameters. The main body consists of sixteen lines. An envoi of four more, with a summary and dedication, caps the composition—and directs the reader’s attention to the devotion that the entertainer in the thirteenth-century French displayed to the Mother of God.

For all his attachment to the story of “Our Lady’s Tumbler,” Kavanagh in general rejected what he called “tales of French-hot miracles,” such as the fervor associated with the cult of Mary in Lourdes, France. More broadly, he disapproved of the Romanization that from his vantage point was eroding the defining character of Irish Catholicism. Instead, he advocated his own practice of seeking out the miraculous in the quotidian, meaning the mundanities of daily life, especially in his native Ireland. In that spirit, he seemed to have no reluctance in overlooking any intrinsic Frenchness of “Our Lady’s Tumbler” and instead to regard with favor the wonder of a nameless performer who gave expression to his piety through physical performance and thereby elicited approval from the Virgin.

“Our Lady’s Tumbler”

B. W. H. Auden

W. H. Auden was born English in 1907 but naturalized American in 1946, more than a quarter of a century before his death in 1973.

Fig. 49: W. H. Auden, age 60. Photograph by Jill Krementz, 1967.

However we pigeonhole him in nationality, he rates among the major poets of the twentieth century. He was drawn to the Middle Ages, especially poetry of early medieval England and Iceland that contained themes of Germanic mythology and heroism. But his interests in literature also ran to Middle English, Old French, and Medieval Latin. In 1971 he wrote an “Ode to the Medieval Poets” that singles out by name four who left their marks in Middle English and Scots as well as the “anons” who remain nameless to us.

In 1958 Auden produced the narration for the performance with music of the Play of Daniel, a Medieval Latin liturgical drama. Eleven years later, he returned to the Middle Ages and music. In this reprise he crafted “The Ballad of Barnaby” as the libretto for a musical performance put on by the pupils at a girls’ school in Connecticut, the now defunct Wykeham Rise School in Washington. The score was composed by Chuck Turner, a friend of his who taught music there.

Also in 1969, Auden’s lyrics for the ballad were printed on the sheet music. At roughly the same time, the text without musical notation graced the front of the New York Review of Books. As we have seen often before in other adaptations of the story, the piece was tied to the holiday season: this December number of the semi-monthly magazine was identified explicitly as the Christmas issue. To acknowledge the associations of ballad with oldentimes, the cover page was styled as a kind of updated broadside with six decorations by the American artist Edward Gorey. At the same time, the format pays tribute to the broadside ballad, a subgenre within the form. The same presentation was adopted, after Auden’s death, as a handout for the memorial service in St. John the Divine on October 3, 1973.

Fig. 50: W. H. Auden, The Ballad of Barnaby, illus. Edward Gorey. Pre-existing poem and artwork, distributed to complement the Memorial Service in St. John the Divine, New York City, Wednesday, October 3, 1973. All rights reserved.

Ballad, as a species of folk song, is commonly qualified as being popular and traditional. For centuries now, it has been seen as having arisen from the oral culture of western Europe and as having been handed down by illiterate or partly literate singers who eventually carried the genre to the New World, where with the passage of time it entered the realm of folk song. Though Auden’s poem is indisputably a literary ballad, he emphasized the oral and aural in the opening couplet. Despite choosing not to reuse many phrases, he repeated verbatim two whole lines that catalogue the four specific vaults that the tumbler performs in his routine. Metrically, he opted for four-line stanzas. In his quatrains the lines are four-stress, while the rhyme pattern is aabb.

“The Ballad of Barnaby” was a favorite of its author’s. In fact, after he died on September 29, 1973, copies of it were distributed at a two-hour memorial service conducted in his honor in New York City. In the poem, Auden blended elements of the thirteenth-century French version, with which he was acquainted through the translation by Philip H. Wicksteed, and Anatole France’s short story. As the title of Auden’s piece indicates, he appropriated the name of his protagonist from the nineteenth-century writer, but he made the leading character a tumbler and not a juggler, and likewise he drew from “Our Lady’s Tumbler” the names of specific vaults performed by the young acrobat.

Could Auden have been acquainted with Kavanagh’s “Our Lady’s Tumbler”? The two poets knew and were influenced by each other’s writings, presumably more Kavanagh by Auden than vice versa. Yet this particular composition by the Irishman was so little known, as indeed it remains to this day, that the odds seem slim. Auden’s interest in the medieval French is likelier to have been piqued by his reverence for Henry Adams, which centered upon The Education of Henry Adams but extended also to Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. The poet’s engagement with the American man of letters and historian surfaces repeatedly, above all in an essay entitled “The Virgin & the Dynamo.”

In the hands of the great twentieth-century poet, the tale becomes one of rejoicing in art and hoping for salvation. The joy and redemption dispel the ominousness, reminiscent of a late medieval French ballad by François Villon, of two ravens on a gallows-tree. The raptors discuss how the tumbler Barnaby is destined for hell, and indeed black demons come to seize his soul when he drops dead of heart failure.

To the end, Auden shows a light touch, with flashes of comedy. The last-mentioned owe in part to his preoccupation with the theory of the carnivalesque that the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin had adumbrated in two books, one on the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky and the other on the French writer François Rabelais. At the same time, it is tempting to read Auden’s death back into the poem and to wonder if while grappling with his mortality, he reflected on the deliverance he hoped to attain through his art.

“The Ballad of Barnaby”

(To Guitar accompaniment)

C. Virginia Nyhart

This poet, born in 1934, is a longtime resident of Massachusetts. Under the first name Nina, she published two books of poetry and coedited an anthology of contemporary poems that were selected and presented to encourage children’s writing. As the publications suggest, she split her career between writing poetry and teaching it across the whole pedagogic spectrum, from elementary school through college to adult education.

Like Kavanagh, Nyhart also composed a piece entitled “Our Lady’s Tumbler,” which appeared in 1973 in the Virginia Quarterly Review, a literary magazine that was founded in 1925. In it she retells the tale in nine skilfully crafted six-line stanzas. The lines vary in syllabic count, with the shortest placed at the beginnings and ends of stanzas and with the longest in the middle. These stanzas are unified by rhyme, near rhyme, and loose assonance in an abccba pattern. Last but not least, in their typography they are presented on the page so that their visual shape becomes part of their nature as concrete poetry: they form a pattern poem, as the reader will see.

The poem opens with the words “It was time to turn,” which set the stage for the wheeling of the tumbler’s gymnastics. Nyhart plays in various ways on the arches or bridges that gymnasts form with their bodies during their routines. Here the performer’s thoughts are presented in the first person. The gender of the acrobat is left indeterminate. At the start she or he, hitherto successful, trips during a performance and feels ashamed of this failure. After contemplating suicide, the performer takes the advice of a bridge that spans a river and resolves to enter Clairvaux. Inside the monastery the athlete feels inadequate and useless until seizing the initiative by tumbling (and tumbling down) once again, this time beneath “Our Lady’s arch.” A miracle, unseen even by the tumbler, ensues, but we are left uncertain as to whether anything happens outside the performer’s personal perceptions.

“Our Lady’s Tumbler,” with its richly subjective perspective, makes the narrative a true lyric. The poem assumes that its readers are already conversant with the gist of the medieval tale. Word-choice suggests that Nyhart may have consulted all three of the most frequently read and reprinted English prose translations of the thirteenth-century original, the decades-old ones by Philip H. Wicksteed, Isabel Butler, and Alice Kemp-Welch.

D. Turner Cassity

Turner Cassity, an American poet born in Mississippi in 1929, went on to receive his undergraduate degree there.

Fig. 51: Turner Cassity. Photograph, date and photographer unknown. Atlanta, GA, Emory University, Robert W. Woodruff Library. Image courtesy of Emory University Archives. All rights reserved.

Following college, he left the South for a long while. For a start he earned master’s degrees, one on each coast, first in 1952 from Stanford in English and later in 1956 from Columbia in library science. After being drafted into the US Army, he spent a stretch from 1952 to 1954 in Puerto Rico. Between 1956 and 1962 he worked as a librarian not only in his native state but also in South Africa. Thereafter he moved to Georgia to serve in the same profession at Emory University from 1962 to 1991. He remained in Atlanta until dying there at the age of 80 in 2009.

From the 1960s on, Cassity published voluminously, as a playwright and short-story writer but especially as a poet. “Our Lady’s Juggler,” first printed in 1976, comprises three quatrains with abab rhyme. Where did he encounter the story? As a well-read poet, he would have likely been familiar with “The Ballad of Barnaby.” His choice of meter may even echo Auden’s. He could have come across Kavenagh’s poem, Nyhart’s, or both, though the likelihood is markedly lower. In any event, he departs from all of these possible predecessors in assuming the leading character to be a juggler, as in the literary lineage leading back to Anatole France and less remotely to R. O. Blechman, rather than a tumbler, as in the medieval poem. Furthermore, he does not feel obliged in his poem to retell the tale but rather takes as a given that his own readers will already know its basics. Like Nyhart’s “Our Lady’s Tumbler,” his “Our Lady’s Juggler” is in the first person, from the standpoint of the protagonist. In the process, the Virgin and her power are paradoxically effaced.

“Our Lady’s Juggler”

E. Virginia Hamilton Adair

Though not published until 1998, “The Chapel at Mountain State Mental Hospital” was probably drafted three or even four decades earlier. At the very least its core idea became crystalized back then. Its author was Virginia Hamilton Adair, who lived from 1913 to 2004. Her career as a poet follows an unusual progression. In the 1930s she was educated at prestigious US women’s colleges, with a B.A. degree from Mount Holyoke in 1933 and a M.A. from Radcliffe in 1936. In the 1940s she earned modest recognition from poems that were published in such major magazines as The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The Saturday Review.

After this promising start, she brought virtually nothing into print until reaching the ripe age of eighty-three years, when her first book, entitled Ants on the Melon, became an unlikely bestseller, and she found herself suddenly, though briefly, a media darling. The year was 1996, and the tale of her late-life success gained poignancy from the circumstance that not long before, she had lost her sight from glaucoma. From the hoopla that ensued after publication, the press spotted an opportunity too tempting to forgo. A second collection of poetry by the blind octogenarian was put together from her unpublished oeuvre and printed in 1998. Largely devoted to religious themes, the collection failed to secure the warm welcome that its predecessor had received: Adair’s fifteen minutes of fame had evaporated two years prior.

The sequel contains a piece that responds to the tale of “Our Lady’s Tumbler.” The poem is set in a chapel, not in a medieval monastery or cathedral in France, but in an imaginary mental hospital somewhere in what was then the present-day United States. The central figure in the cast of characters is named Jean, but do not be deceived into conflating this woman with the jongleur in Massenet’s opera. Though the names may be homographs, they are not homophones. The pronoun used a few seconds ago says it all: this is a female /ˈdʒiːn/ rather than a male /ʒɒ̃/.

Nothing is revealed about the previous life of this Jean, such as what profession she once practiced or even if she ever had one. She makes her mark by doing a cartwheel in a chapel during a service—and while wearing no underclothing. Though she creates the impression of being feebleminded, in the end this dancer alone transcends the dichotomies between body and soul as well as between human and divine, like a fool of God. Through the impact of her physical moves, she brings her viewers closer to religious revelation than do the words of the man preaching, which go unreported and roundly ignored. The situation calls to mind “The Hasidic Jewish Tale of ‘The Little Whistle’” (see Part 1, Chapter 12, above).

When did Adair write “The Chapel at Mountain State Mental Hospital”? From 1950 to 1953 she worked as a bibliotherapist at Eastern State Hospital, a facility devoted to mental healthcare in Williamsburg, Virginia. Those years may well have given her the germ of her idea. Perhaps she even composed the verse during that spell. Alternatively, she could have come back to the topic at a later date. In any event, the poem is more redolent of mid-century modern than of the waning twentieth century. Nothing gives the impression that she was responding to any modern poet, and indeed she may have drafted her piece long before Kavanagh, Auden, Nyhart, and Cassity produced theirs.

“The Chapel at Mountain State Mental Hospital” is not religious, if by the adjective is meant either Christianity in general or Roman Catholicism in particular. Adair eventually became a committed Zen Buddhist. The poem describes a congregation, supplemented by a bird, that has assembled for a service, but through a flurry of negatives it downplays formal religion. The first stanza informs us that the chapel contains no stained glass, no relics, no tomb, no brass, and no incense. Granted, reference is made later to the pulpit, opening prayer, hymn, sermon, collection, and offering, but the preacher is mentioned only to emphasize how he pauses in his peroration when Jean performs her cartwheel. This humble action surpasses all words, except perhaps those of Adair’s composition itself.

The piece is composed in iambic tetrameter. Its fifty-one lines follow a fluid rhyme schme.

“The Chapel at Mountain State Mental Hospital”