If someone whose post I haven't read yet hasn't said so already, Paul Breslin offers us a sort of update to the famous devotional by John Donne, "For Whom the Bell Tolls". The part of the latter that is usually quoted is actually but a small part of the whole:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Although Foobs may not thank me for saying this, I believe that Mr. Breslin shows us (technically) what contemporary poetry on Slate should be. He takes the same fundamental idea behind Mr. Donne's devotion (which is not in rhyme and meter but in formal prose) and puts it in a modern context (which has no rhyme or meter either but which uses the free verse format effectively to express its message). Nor do I think the the message leads nowhere, as Foobs seems to think. Where it leads, however, is to an ideological landscape that is barren and unsown compared to the one that Donne lived and died in. Meaninglessness in modern culture has taken its toll (no pun intended) on us all, and especially on modern poets.
In terms of the ideology to which their respective works lead, Donne and Breslin are not even on the same planet. The common thread between their works is that the siren, like the bell, reminds us of our common human condition, especially of our common mortality. But what that simple human fact implies is not at all the same for Donne and for Breslin. The most that Breslin (or his narrator, as in the rest of my discussion) can offer us is a belief (perhaps) in ghosts, a viewpoint far less complex and challenging than Donne's deep and dedicated Catholicism. Moreover, Donne's empathy for the suffering of others is a selfless and outwardly directed thing -- he wants more such empathy and even the pain that it brings, as things both welcome and desirable:
Neither can we call this a begging of misery, or a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbours.
Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did, for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by it, and made fit for God by that affliction.
Whereas Breslin's empathy deals almost entirely with the suffering of others (and that involved with his own past) as it affects himself and his own sense of guilt. He no doubt would have less such emphathy and resultant suffering, if he could prevent it by undoing his past. Only at the end does he turn outward to consider the human condition generally, and even then his outreach is far less than Donne's.
Unlike Donne's nobly resigned reaction to the sound of the bell, Breslin's reaction (or, again, his narrator's) to the sound of the siren is one of pain and anger. Would it be too much to say that this reflects not only the nature of these instruments of sound, but of the nature of the authors' respective lives: one living for something truly transcendent, the other not? It's something worth considering not just by the audience, but by the poet himself. I hope that Mr. Breslin will do just that.
Ideology is part of what I call "function", as is content per se and the effect desired in the reader's mind and emotions. The two authors we have here then choose what "forms" are best suited (certainly from their points of view) to bring out the "functions" -- accounting for much of the vast difference in style between the two works.
wr ()()
P.S.: Here's Mr. Breslin's poem:
"Siren"
By Paul Breslin
Posted Tuesday, July 22, 2008, at 7:33 AM ET
Listen to Paul Breslin read this poem.
I could swear it is saying my name,
a human voice full of pain and anger:
it's the police come to arrest me
for a crime so long concealed
I forget its name. Or my father's ghost,
crying he might have lived
had I loved him better. It's my mother
folding her arms and saying take your anger
someplace else, it doesn't belong to me;
my wife asking Is this good-bye then?
Or my daughter in childhood saying
hoarsely through tears, Dad,
how can you say that to me?
So many things were almost the end.
At the fire station around the corner,
the engines are pulling away.
So little to separate us
from the one the siren is for,
whose house flies into the air as cinders,
who lies on his bed turning purple and clutching his heart.
