The Classic Ground (1941)
Review of Marya Zaturenska’s The Listening Landscape
With this third book of poems, Marya Zaturenska has established a direction which was traceable in the difference between Cold Morning Sky and Threshold and Hearth.1 In those earlier volumes, the lyric form she has made her home was developing: lucid and musical, and obliquely lit by the application of formal symbols to complex emotion. Those books were isolated in a strange way, although they won prizes. Markedly traditional on the surface, they issued at a distance from the one traditional parcel of writers in the country, who were occupied in fighting every other approach tooth and claw. Their dark and intricate under-content shut them off from the other lyrics that were being written to lie on the surface, in which form and content outdid themselves to be at rest and unity. These other lyrics accepted conventional treatments, and immediately surrendered themselves to conventional thought and emotion, in the pre-surrender which is coming to be an emblem of these times. Before the battle, nations give themselves up; before the censorship, writers impose their own restrictions on their spirits; and in poetry, this has its reflections and sometimes its predictions, in a contemporary return to formalism before there is any need for its disguises.
To Marya Zaturenska, the form of her work has not arrived as a compromise or a late choice: The Listening Landscape carries on the style of ten years ago in what may now be seen as an even growth. This poetry is extremely deceptive, and, I believe, has not been clearly read. Here we have lyrics sealed in their transparency, through which may be seen the amazing and troubled images of the world. Readers have been confused through their misunderstanding of the lyric itself, and I suppose the quarrel about form and content has thrown off many readers. Because here there is a double process going on. Form has been unified with content, and at the same time another strain has been imposed; under the restrictions of the unity, the image struggles to be freed again. The same thing happens here with the symbols themselves. We read in these poems rose, bough, and moon, petal, and sea; but under them the contemporary stress:
Slowly the god arises from sleep, the unsaving spear in his hand,
Awaits the assault of the beast, the wail of the Magna Mater,
Reechoing through the cedars.2
And this, the ending of “St. Dorothy Presents the Fruit and Flowers of Paradise”:
. . . On that vast orchard hurled,
The sunbursts and the longings of the world!
You who have witnessed her death, denied her immortality,
Draw nearer, see revealed that downrushing, living sea,
Toward which our blood tides move; furtive, sullen slow,
Till revelation quickens our sight, and the bronze trumpets blow.3
Another reason for the misplacement of these poems has been the range of reference in them. The Listening Landscape draws on Hans Christian Andersen, Poussin, Ryder (in the fine lines of “Forest of Arden”), Linnaeus, and Kafka, classical mythology and the two generations of the war through which we are going.4 But, again, the sources feed the form; the meanings are renewed. “Head of Medusa” is a profoundly disturbing version of the myth; Perseus arrives (“foe or deliverer?”) under a sexual mask, as a murderer whose act is the only possible deliverance.5 In “Child in the Crystal” the image of the infant Time, which so seldom reaches us now except in the debased form of a cheap magazine cover for the New Year issue, is again able to carry lines like these:
Thy Sire is manifest through fire, but thou in the fire’s light,
Thy great descent is made clear in the dews and stars of the night,
Thy beauty brief and dear,
Quicksilver in water, ecstasy pointing to dark, in rust and smoke.6
This range and its compression are another indication of the way in which the poet’s personality has been resolved, as the creative strain in the form is an indication. Here is a woman who has imposed upon a wide critical attitude and a background of learning the composure and strict flexibility of the lyric form, submitting constantly to its restrictions, but injecting more and more, as her work goes further, the color and meaning that we have falsely learned to associate with experimental work.
In this book, she has included several poems that are so much broader in scope that I imagine critics who wish to pigeonhole her in one classification will overlook them altogether. But such poems as “Century of Athletes” and “The Unsepulchred” and the extremely beautiful and suggestive sequence “Leaves from the Book of Dorothy Wordsworth” make it plain that Marya Zaturenska is choosing her limitations.7 They are not being forced upon her, as they are upon some of the poets who are, on the surface, experimental. The Dorothy Wordsworth poems invoke Coleridge:
Not as when I saw him at the last,
The grotesque, dropsical body worn with sick desires,
Burning with fitful fires,
But as in youth we met . . .
—and the loved brother:
Wandering through summer fields watching the gypsies roam
Through moorland wind;
Each day a renewal of wonder, each day the growing
Of a checked passion . . .
—and the moorlands, the islands, the poems, the approaching destruction in madness, in a unique and illuminating treatment of that neglected life.8
Distinct and terrible, the images of this time find a classic reflection, giving them distance and the clarity of grace and wisdom, that clarity which life has not yet given them. I hope this book will be read for what it is. I hope for the book that it may be seen in its full darkness and sunlight; seen against an age which Marya Zaturenska names:
Century of athletes where the young men run
To action in a noisy wrestling ring,
All intellectual passion cast away
In that barbaric ecstasy of hate . . .
—and for which she makes a wish which summarizes her work:
When fountains of despair run dry, when chance,
War, ruin, misery, their cycles round
Men turn again to music, sun, and dance,
The burning roses on the classic ground.9
(Decision, 1941)
1. Threshold and Hearth (1934) and Cold Morning Sky (1937) were the first two collections by Marya Zaturenska, a Russian immigrant and Horace Gregory’s wife.
2. Marya Zaturenska, “Watchers in the Sacred Wood,” in The Listening Landscape (New York: Macmillan, 1941), 21.
3. Zaturenska, “St. Dorothy Presents the Fruit and Flowers of Paradise,” in Listening, 68. Much of the collection is inspired by Romantic writer Dorothy Wordsworth’s letters and diaries.
4. Zaturenska alludes or dedicates poems to children’s writer Hans Christian Andersen (“Quiet Countries; The World Hans Christian Andersen,” in Listening, 11–12); painters Nicolas Poussin (“Landscape After Poussin,” in Listening, 15) and Albert Pinkham Ryder (“Forest of Arden,” in Listening, 18); botanist Carl Linnaeus (“Summer to Lapland,” in Listening, 84–85); and modernist Franz Kafka (“Silence and the Wayfarer” and “Century of Athletes,” in Listening, 44–45, 79–81).
5. Zaturenska, “Head of Medusa,” in Listening, 33.
6. Zaturenska, “Child in the Crystal,” in Listening, 14.
7. Zaturenska, “Century of Athletes,” “The Unsepulchred 1914–1918,” and “Leaves from the Book of Dorothy Wordsworth,” in Listening, 79–81, 82–83, 52–58.
8. Zaturenska, “Coleridge” and “First Memories” from “Leaves from the Book of Dorothy Wordsworth,” in Listening, 55, 53.
9. Zaturenska, “Century of Athletes” and “The Golden Rose,” in Listening, 79, 86.