The warm, sunny weather has put me in the mood for something contemporary (not Adult Contemporary), so I thought we could look at James Tate's "Go, Youth," the first poem in his Worshipful Company of Fletchers, which won the National Book Award in 1994.
Tate's work is full of paradoxes and contradictions and hilarity and shadows. "Go, Youth" lacks none of these:
GO, YOUTH
I was in a dreamstate and this was causing a problem
with the traffic. I felt lonely, like I'd missed the boat,
or I'd found the boat and it was deserted. In the middle
of the road a child's shoe glistened. I walked around it.
It woke me up a little. The child had disappeared. Some
mysteries are better left alone. Others are dreary, distasteful,
and can disarrange a shadow into a thing of unspeakable beauty.
Whose child is that?
Where to begin with this one? So much is going on in such a small space. Some of the strangeness is mitigated by the fact that the speaker is in a "dreamstate," but this is almost a way for Tate to smilingly distract from the depth of what he's trying to communicate.
Look at his use of cliches. First he says his loneliness is a result of having "missed the boat," a common enough cliche meaning he was left behind or did not act quickly enough. But then he twists the cliche, takes it literally: "or I'd found the boat and it was deserted." This is both funny and chilling, an upsetting of our expectations of the cliche and a suggestion that loneliness will follow us around regardless of how timely or untimely our actions are. Loneliness, it seems for this speaker, is inescapable.
Check out the next cliche, used almost more subtly: "In the middle / of the road a child's shoe glistened." Here again he takes a cliche literally. "Middle of the road" is another way of saying mainstream, bland, inoffensive. And yet in the poem it is also a specific location, not an abstraction. And what do we find there? An empty shoe. What happened to the child? Was the shoe lost? Was the child stolen or killed? After all, the shoe is in the middle of traffic. So Tate takes a cliche that suggests inoffensiveness and finds in it a sign of something very wrong. The shoe is as empty as the boat.
Tate says "Some / mysteries are better left alone. Others are dreary, distasteful, / and can disarrange a shadow into a thing of unspeakable beauty." Into which of these categories does the missing child fall? Should we leave it alone? What are we to make of the second option? How can something dreary and distasteful lead to "unspeakable beauty"? Are we to read "unspeakable" as meaning "so awful it should not be spoken" or as "something that cannot be put into words"? My guess is a combination of the two.
For reference, let's look at a poem to which Tate seems to be referring here: John Keats's Endymion. Endymion opens with the famous line, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever." The poem continues:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Keats suggests that beauty is an eternal Good, that in contrast to the decay of human existence, Nature and Poetry hold a timeless beauty that will always be there for us.
If we are to believe Tate's speaker, his dreams are far from sweet, and yet that is not from a lack of beauty. Some beauty, according to the speaker, is unspeakable. Some beauty is caused by mystery, by tragedy, by fear, by loneliness, by absence. Beauty is not a thing that is only located in goodness - it seems to be behind every aspect of this strange world we live in, even in the supposedly ugly parts. "Whose child is that?" the speaker asks. In other words, who or what is responsible for the beauty that lurks behind the world's shadows, on the lonely peripheries of existence? Another mystery, but one that Tate would not have us leave alone.
I automatically think of the shoe glistening with blood but maybe that's just my macabre nature.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment! I really think you are onto something there. Glistening is a charged word that can be taken in several ways. The glistening of blood is certainly one way, especially because of the suggestion of wetness in the word.
ReplyDeleteSarah or anyone else who is reading, what do you think are some other ways that word could be taken?
Maybe it's just because I am used to nine months a year of rain, but I imagine the whole scene happening on a rainy day, and the glistening is because it's damp everywhere.
DeleteI also wonder if there's something about the resurrection and/or the rapture, the child has been abducted/murdered/harmed/taken bodily into heaven and its shoes left behind , but "Whose child is that?" immediately, of course, brings to mind "What child is this?", the answer to both questions being "The son of god." Then again, even if this isn't a reference to Christian theology, could it be a reference to "namaste", the divine spark in all of us?
DeleteI just read the poem and found your insight-filled commentary. "Glisten" stopped me in my tracks. I do not think of a shoe as glistening. My first association was with something metallic with the power to reflect. (grateful for the "blood" reference, BTW.) And why a shoe and not, say, the child's cap, or his tricycle? Perhaps the poem refers to the writer's childhood and the shoe is an invitation to reflect or walk, for awhile, in his own past?
DeleteI think you're on to something with that train of thought. "Whose child is that?" sounds like a question that is in response to something else. So it would make sense for it to be an almost ironic reply to "Whose child is this?" The mysteries, of course, could bring to mind the Christian mysteries.
ReplyDeleteI used this poem in my poetry unit as a middle school teacher for years. It prompted great discussions. My favorite line is "I was in a dreamstate and this was causing a problem with the traffic." I believe this is a metaphor for traffic of the mind; when you're in a dream state (Tate makes it one word-genuis) isn't the normal traffic of your brain stalled? I used four of his poems to illustrate to my students that, unless you have the poet in the room, you will never know what it is about. I love your analysis of the poem, but with Tate gone, will we ever know?
ReplyDelete