Week 19: Two Hours On The Pecatonica
Every poem spins its own story, something more than a mirror of a moment. Two Hours On The Pecatonica, a simple prayer poem about a river run with my son, is almost an exception. Every minute of it is true...
05/06:
TWL, Lines 60-68: The Flowing Crowd Of An Unreal City
60 Unreal City,
61 Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
62 A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
63 I had not thought death had undone so many.
64 Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
65 And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
66 Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
67 To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
68 With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
60. THE UNREAL CITY: Eliot: “Cf. Baudelaire:
‘Fourmillante cite; cite; pleine de rêves,
‘Ou le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant.’”
See Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal: Les Sept Vieillards (The Flowers of Evil: The Seven Old Men, 1867, tr. James Huneker, 1919):
“O Swarming city, city full of dreams,
Where in full day the sceptre walks and speaks.”
The Unreal City recurs at lines 60, 207, 259 and 377, and see also notes 208, 209, 248, 259, 374 and 376. Unreal or not, the City is also the name of London's long-standing financial district.
LONDON, the City and beyond, gets other nods at lines 60-66, 180, 207-208, 211-214, 258-260, 264, 275-276, 289, 293, 296 and 376, and see notes 66, 67, 69, 115, 209, 210, 215, 248, 258, 265, 266, 276, 283, 291, 293, 297 and 376.
61. THE BROWN FOG may allude to “the embrowned air” in Dante, Inferno 2.1:
“Day was departing, and the embrowned air
Released the animals that are on earth
From their fatigues; and I the only one
Made myself ready to sustain the war,
Both of the way and likewise of the woe,
Which memory that errs not shall retrace”
THE GREAT WAR, now known as World War I, casts its shadow throughout this poem; see also notes 15, 18, 70, 115, 139, 200, 291, 331, 374 and 419. The crowd of lifeless city workers flows over the bridge, up the hill and down the street, with no mention of any water flowing under the bridge and only a brown fog above them. The human flow suggests a metaphor for the stream of dead and injured soldiers being sent home after the war. See Whitman, Memories 6 (which in turn alludes to “the heads of the tired, miserable brothers” in Dante Inferno 32.21):
“With the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces and the unbared heads”
63. DEATH’S UNDOING: Eliot: “Cf. Inferno III, 55-57:
‘si lunga tratta
di gente, ch’io non avrei mai creduto
che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta.’”
See Dante Inferno 3.55-57:
“... so long a train
Of people, that I ne'er would have believed
That ever Death so many had undone.”
See also Inferno 3:35-36, 43-46, where Dante sees, at the gates of hell, how death has undone them by denying them:
“ ...the melancholy souls of those
Who lived withouten infamy or praise.
...And I: ‘O Master, what so grievous is
To these, that maketh them lament so sore?’
He answered: ‘I will tell thee very briefly.
These have no longer any hope of death...’”
Compare the Sybil’s wish to die at note 0.3: “‘I would that I were dead.’”
64. SIGHS AND THE DEATH OF AIR: Eliot: “Cf. Inferno IV, 25-27:
‘Quivi, secondo che per ascoltare,
non avea pianto, ma’ che di sospiri,
che l’aura eterna facevan tremare.’”
See Dante Inferno 4.25-27:
“There, as it seemed to me from listening,
Were lamentations none, but only sighs,
That tremble made the everlasting air.”
Dante and Virgil have now passed through the gates of hell and are entering a suspended state of Limbo and an even lower level of hopelessness; see Inferno 4:41-42:
“For such defects, and not for other guilt,
Lost are we and are only so far punished,
That without hope we live on in desire.”
Compare Eliot, Little Gidding (1942) 2:60-61:
“The death of hope and despair,
This is the death of air.”
Little Gidding would later be made part of Eliot’s Four Quartets (see note 0.5).
See also Heracleitus, On Nature (ca 475 BCE):
“Fire lives in the death of air; water lives in the death of earth;
and earth lives in the death of water.”
66. KING WILLIAM STREET runs from Lombard Street to London Bridge over the River Thames (see note 266). Eliot worked at the Lombard end of King Williams’ Street as a Lloyd’s Bank clerk from 1917 to 1926, a “stopgap” to make ends meet. See Eliot, Letters. See also notes 67, 68, 69, 209 and 214 for other references to Eliot’s employment.
67.CHURCHES appear several times in this poem. See lines 67 (St. Mary Woolnoth), 202 (voices in the dome), 265 (St. Magnus Martyr) and 389 (the empty chapel) and their corresponding notes. See also note 71 (God’s Acre).
St. Mary Woolnoth Church is at the southeast corner of Lombard and King William Streets, just across the street from where Eliot worked. The current structure was built in 1666, but the first Wilnotmaricherche dates back to 1191 and evidence of even earlier Roman and pagan worship at the site has been discovered beneath the building’s foundation.
68. NUMBER NINE: Eliot: “A phenomenon which I have often noticed.”
In passing, Eliot hears “a dead sound on the final stroke.“ The ninth hour is the start of the workday, but nine also marks the hour of Jesus’s death (see Luke 23:44), Beethoven’s ultimate symphony and the final circle of Dante’s Hell (see Inferno, Cantos 31-34). Compare this to the first part of Eliot’s epitaph, at note 306: “In my beginning is my end.”
05/07:
A Sonnet, Defined
It makes me smile to write these fourteen lines
With structure, cadence, balance, pattern, pose
But I have learned that just one thing defines
A sonnet and determines how it flows
More than the number of its syllables,
More than its meter or the way it rhymes,
More than the measure of its parables
Dressed up in templates drawn from other times:
A sonnet is a river that appears
To trickle out of nowhere; it’s a stream
That cuts its path, a course that winds and veers
With more beneath its surface than would seem
But what defines the river most to me
Is how, in time, it brings me to the see.
05/08:
Movie Review Of The Bark River
This was a lazy river, an easy run
without resistance for those paddling
against the flow and gentle as the breeze
for those who want it breezy coming home.
It was a winding stream, each twist and turn
keeping the paddler’s journey interesting
but wide enough so that the water flows
around each bend in ordinary time.
It was a rural river with the smell
of fertile pastures just beyond the bank,
yet with rows of woods on either side it was,
for those who would prefer, a forest stream.
But in the end, and at the casting call,
this paddler’s lazy river was, for all
its wandering, a small town resident
with locals fishing at the final bend.
05/09:
Introduction To Two Hours
In two hours' time
we wrote a poem
spent time together
rode a river
and enjoyed the day
we committed that day to memory
shared a moment as son and father
followed a downstream flow
and appreciated the heart of spring
we sang a song along the way
learned to be more than old man and teenager
let the current carry us
and took the moment as our own
we established a record
built a relationship
ran the course
and made good time.
This one I will remember:
son and father in the same story,
riding that river to the pickup point
and making the day count.
A record.
A relationship.
A course to follow.
A time to keep.
05/10:
Two Hours On The Pecatonica
To my son, on his birthday
One mile down a winding river,
full of overhanging strains
and random estimates, the father
listens as his son complains,
“I’m never doing this again.
The water’s cold, the waves are high,
The stretch we’re on is longer than
you promised. Everything’s a lie!”
Two miles down a rending river,
with the surface rippling
less from flow than from the weather
blowing six weeks into spring,
now the boy turns his teen anger
everywhere at once, turns mad
to the boats and to the river,
to Wisconsin, to his dad.
Three miles down a bending river
making slow turns south and east
through rural hills and rustic pastures,
answering a prayer for peace,
and in time the boy turns quiet,
sullen still but out of breath,
paddling the waves in silence
having beat the horse to death.
Four miles down a wending river,
later in the afternoon
the sun comes out from undercover
like a mouse predicting June
and the boy from broken shadows
finds the words he hadn’t said
and the father smiles at the
son, as two boats forge ahead.
Five miles down a wand’ring river
muddy shores turn into rocky
bluffs that would defy the river’s
native title, what the Sauk
had called wet earth, but for the moment
man and boy behold the banks
that rise above them as they lumber
onward with unspoken thanks.
Six miles down a wondrous river
four deer running up the bluff,
a turkey flushing into flight,
an eagle soaring just above,
and then the son: “When this is over
and we bring our kayaks home
I guess you’re gonna chew me out for
all the things I’ve said and done.”
Seven miles down the river
a snapping turtle almost bites
the passing paddle, then the father:
“No, son, everything’s all right.
I will be glad when this is over,
proud of you and thrilled that we
could have this afternoon together,
happy you were here with me.”
Eight miles down a winsome river
on a stretch we’ve made our own,
from Blanchardville to Thunder Bridge,
but there’s an island halfway down,
and there’s a goose nest on the island,
and all along the muddy banks
the world is fishing, farming, hunting,
living with unspoken thanks.
05/11:
Rush Hour
every day, Chicago, every morning we crawl
down your lethargic distressways, the rivers named
with dignity — the Stevenson, the Kennedy,
and all the paths aimed purposefully at your heart.
we want to beat with you; the coffee in our blood
would have us flow through these veins to offer you life
but every morning, Chicago, every day, life
is slow to start as each cell of our self must crawl
through the same veins/at the same time/with angry blood
meeting on that hour so insistently named—
unwittingly converging, en route to your heart,
with words, the very rush, of John F. Kennedy,
“countrymen, ask what you can do,” cried Kennedy,
speaking now to citizens, who choose to do life
by committing themselves to fuel a city’s heart
yet sacrificing themselves—to wit, their great crawl.
to you, Chicago, our commitment is duly named;
for you, Chicago, we submit this daily blood.
05/12:
Moleskin 3.1: Chicago
Chicago. Home and hub of the Midwestern Irish, who paint their river green every March; of traveling Poles, their collective numbers second only to Warsaw; of transplanted Mississippi Deltans, giving the city its own brand of blues. Windy City. Second City. City on the Lake. Home of Al Capone and Ernie Banks, Mayor Daley and our very own Bozo the Clown. In 1972 it was where the Cubs were still freshly reeling from the Billy Goat curse, the Bears still answered to Papa George Halas, the Hawks had known Bobby Hull for 15 years and the young Bulls had their first fifty win season. History —the Chicago fire, the Haymarket Riots, the stockyards —was entering modern times: the El still looped around the heart of the city, but the Hancock defined the skyline and the Sears Tower was climbing above it, and further out, O’Hare was outpacing Midway. I heard all about it that first year of being a Chicagoan —the sassage accent, the skunk-onion story of the city’s name, the constant sound of politicians, the pride of being the beat of the Heartland.
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