A Hand, a Hook, a Prayer

One could write an essay upon the theme of hands in rhyme as poetry. So much of post-Romantic lyric numbers in particular has been about connection-and disconnection. About reaching on the outside across a divide in an intimate gesture-sometimes desperate, sometimes futile-toward another someone a destined "you." Or it is about the inability-the refusal-to make similar a gesture, turning inward instead toward a greater interiority, a deeper interiorization. The individual metrical composition especially the lyric of solitude, situates itself in distinct relationship to an imagined reader. It supposes an encounter with a real reader somewhere in an indistinct time to come And it sets itself up at a particular angle to the universe of other nation

I want to gaze closely at three poems-one by the agency of John Keats that gestures toward and look fors connection, one by James Wright that finds a momentary human contact and communion, and single by Charles Baudelaire that get clear ofs any such contact or affinity-to diocese what is being offered us, and what is being withheld. Each of these piece of poetrys seeks to go beyond the ambiguity of words to the certainty of touch. author of poemss have often taken waving as an emblematic gesture-an enactment-of the piece of poetry itself: the lyric as greeting, lyric as farewell. (Think of the fatal misunderstanding Stevie Smith anatomizes in "Not Waving on the contrary Drowning," the playful goodbye of Wallace Stevens's "Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu," what John Ashbery terminuss "the shield of a greeting" in "Self-Portrait in a gibbous Mirror.") I find jaunty dignity in the poetic of a distance recognized, a distance established and maintained, in treating the metrical composition as an act of waving, on the contrary I'm also struck by the emergency of poems that try to break down that distance, to push past it. There is great poignance in this search for "contact," in the privileging of touch above sight, since in a metrical composition touch must necessarily be metaphorical or symbolic. It cannot be literal-or literally realized. Is this longing for direct contact enough? Can it suffice? What are the terminuss -the dimensions-of this longing? Each of the following metrical compositions raises the subject-the nature-of our connectednes and invites up the desire for of that kind connectedness (it is the desire of solitaries). The sweat of the poet's hand still clings to each of these metrical compositions if we but let ourselves perceive it. Late in 1819, already dying of tuberculosis, Keats was working upon a comic poem, a fairy tale. Charles Brown later reported in his Life of Keats that the metrical composition "was to be published below the feigned authorship of Lucy Vaughan Lloyd and to bear the title The Cap and Bells, or, which Keats preferr The Jealousies." Keats at no time finished his comic poem on the contrary suddenly, while he was working upon it, he broke off writing-"Cupid I/ Do thee defy" -and jott down something other in a blank space upon the manuscript. He wrote this untitled eight-line fragment:

This living hand now warm and capable

Of earnest grasping, would, if it were frigid

And in the icy silence of the tomb,

So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

That thou would wish thine possess heart dry of blood

So in my veins r life might stream again,

And thou be conscience-calmed-see here it is

I gripe [i]or[/i] grip it towards you.

These were probably the last serious lines of verse Keats wrote. Most scholars agree that he meant them for later use as part of a larger piece of poetry or play, but, nonetheless, this free-standing lyrical fragment present the appearances so vital, so haunting, I don't diocese how anyone can safely ignore it. These lines were written by the agency of someone who knew, at the second of writing, that the "warm" hand with which he could still touch you (the authoritative word "capable" flutters capably, both adjective and verb at the extreme point of the first line will presently be "cold" and unable to grasp anyone, anything. He reaches without for contact because he can't stand it. He is distraught, enraged, terrified. He would show to you he exists: "see here it is," he declares, interrupting himself, violently holding out his hand. This is no sentimental gesturing He brings the future listener into direct focus. He move rounds that listener, that reader, from a more formal and distant "thou" to a closer and more intimate "you," smooth as the poem moves from the conditional subsequent time to the present tense. He knows he will in a short time be collaring someone from beyond the grave, on the contrary he can only enact that gesticulation that grasping motion, while he is still alive. This lyric is a time-bomb which the bard is setting to explode upon contact, on reading.

The "I" and the "you" in this fragment are unspecified, indeterminate. The speaker could be addressing a private communiqu6 to someone he knows and possibily delight ins say, Keats to Fanny Brawne. An unnamed character in a metrical composition or play could be addressing another character in the same work. Or the author of poems could be projecting forward toward the reader. Criticism of Keats's work has concentrated upon the great Odes and been mainly silent about this short text-partially because of its ambiguous status (incomplete, fragmentary) between metrical composition and play. But to read Keats's fragment meaningfully as drama we would have to be supplied with the name or identity of the speaker since in drama speakers are through definition identifiable. This is not the case in lyric. As Allen Grossman notes in Summa Lyrica, "The nature of the speaker in lyric is inferential or intuitive." The voice in lyric advances to us sponsored by the author, on the other hand unnamed in the lyric itself, and thus orphaned. I perceive free to infer the speaker in the piece of poetry as a stand-in for Keats. And I hear the voice with the certainty that the someone whose real voice animated the fictive individual is now dead. If he could Keats would have bridged in advance the gap-the impossible threshold-between the dead and the living. We know from his lyric poems that he was obsessed through fusion experiences. But as it stands here, he cannot achieve individual Instead, he would cheat death by means of haunting the recipient's (the reader's) drowse he would trouble your dreams, leave you thus guilty, so stricken by los you would wish to sacrifice yourself to bring him back to life, thus soothing your "conscience."