Useful Idiot: The Moral Hypocrisy of Anne Winters

In Anne Winters’ poem Sixty-Seventh Street: Tosca With Man in Bedrock, the poet juxtaposes the world of opera and those who can afford to attend such cultural events against the image of an inhabitant of the workaday world employed in dangerous and thankless employment and whose life is one of desperation, all for the benefit, of course, for those at the opera. It is a purely economic poem, with the technique of concrete imagery to create an impression in the reader’s mind. That this poem is purely economic is of no great import, but when one has read more of her poetry (her only two books are The Key to the City and her latest The Displaced of Capital), it is easy to comprehend the philosophy latent behind her stylistic and well-crafted poems. She is an unapologetic Marxist who applies Marxist literary theory to her criticism while excusing herself from it. Her latest book, fittingly titled The Displaced of Capital, focuses on New York City, where most of her poetry concentrates. On the cover, there is the grim black and white photo of an old tenement building with clothing hanging from a line, amid the sooty atmosphere of the city. Already, one senses one is about to enter a world of despair.

            The title poem concentrates on the fact and plight of immigrants, especially those from Central and South America, who have come to the United States because, she implies, of the cruelty of capitalism, especially American capitalism. They are, in her poetry, the displaced and devalued:

                  ‘A shift in the structure of experience . . .’

                        As I pass down Broadway this misty late-winter morning, the city

                             is ever-alluring, but

                        thousands of miles to the south

                        the farms of chickens, yams and guavas

                        are bought by transnationals, burst into miles

                        of export tobacco and coffee; and now it seems the farmer

                        has left behind his plowed-under village for an illegal

                        partitioned attic in the outer boroughs. Perhaps

                        he’s the hand that emerged with your change

                        from behind the glossies at the corner kiosk;

                        the displaced of capital have come to the capital.

            The place is downtown Manhattan, the symbol of international commerce that was once illustrated by the World Trade Center, which also symbolized not only the free trading of capital, but the free trading of ideas. Her imagination travels beyond the stifling environs of Manhattan, but not to wander, rather it screams to escape and its destination is to Central and South America where these transnational corporations that trade on Wall Street have demolished the little farmer, thus the creation of the displaced of capital. Because of this, she says, he must leave his country, devastated by capitalism, and come to the capital of capitalism where he is humiliated and devalued, living in some illegal housing arrangement in a neighborhood somewhere far, thus having a commute that grinds him further down. The city wants them, she says, but for a day and then ejects them into outer oblivion.

            It is a feat of poetic powers to be able to accurately illustrate such devaluation, the man from an unknown country who once was a farmer and owned his own farm (a property owner, which would not exist in the Marxist world) now has to work in the middle of the grinding city in a cramped kiosk selling magazines, newspapers, candy and other convenience items; and the lack of a face to be seen is amplified by his becoming only a ‘hand that emerged’ in a transaction that is symbolic of the crass capitalism that Anne Winters decries. It is this same capitalism that was responsible, she plainly states, for the plowing over of his farm. And what could he have done, but come to the country that is synonymous with capitalism and such practices, the United States, and to the city that is the financial capital, New York City. Such an accurate illustration works upon the reader, but not in the manner that Anne Winters wishes it would; the craftsmanship is applauded. That the reader may be impressed by the truth of the description, then throw the book down at this juncture in moral outrage at the capitalist system and experience extreme remorse at the fact that he is living in the prosperous United States that is responsible for the displacement of this and all immigrants, this the ambition of the description.

            Such is the Marxist worldview Anne Winters espouses. But one raises the question: Does Anne Winters not recognize the fact that if it were not for capitalism she would not have had a publisher; would not have been employed by the University of Illinois at Chicago where she teaches poetry, literary translation, as well as the bible as literature; also, that if it were not for capitalism there would be no Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and its generous sum of $25,000, which she was rewarded; or that she would not be able to live her successful life residing in Evanston, IL, that well-manicured suburb of Chicago? The poem continues with more contemplation upon the displaced:

                  The displaced of the capital have come to the capital,

                        but sunlight stems the lingerie-shop windows, the coffee bar

                        has its door wedged open, and all I ask of the world this morning is to pass down my

                        avenue, find

                        a fresh-printed Times and an outside table;

                        and because I’m here in New York the paper tells me of here:

                        of the Nicaraguans, the shortage of journey-man jobs, the ethnic

                        streetcorner job-marketers where men wait all day but more likely the women

                        find work, in the new hotels or in the needle trades,

                        a shift in the structure of experience.

            What is the reader supposed to make of this? Yes, the reporting of her morning and her actions can be seen by the reader, but her sympathy for the displaced seems rather disingenuous, thus unconvincing. In fact, it is not sympathy she feels, but pity, the kind that looks down on those it claims to want to help, seeing them only as victims instead of responsible people who can better themselves by their own efforts. It is this kind of pity the liberal feels and demands that government steps in to act as parent and right the wrongs of a natural society and make everything equal, erasing natural inequality. She is distant from these victims, her implication, of capitalism, seeing them only as facts in a New York Times article, that bastion of MSM liberalism. All she asks, she says, of the world, is to enjoy a cup of coffee at an outside table at some trendy café and to read her New York Times, which depresses her because of what it tells her, of ‘here’ and its numerous displaced. The ability to show compassion for her subjects fails, partly because of the excessive emotion she attempts to include and the hypocrisy of her stance. “All I ask is to enjoy myself,” she does not say but says so, “in my own elite, liberal-mindset world. I’ll not recognize the fact that I am benefiting from capitalism, which is the root of all evil.” It fails also because of the error of her philosophy. She continues her disingenuous and hypocritical stance:

                  A shift in the structure of experience

                        told the farmer on his Andean plateau

                        “Your way of life is obsolescent.” – But hasn’t it always been so?

                        I enquire as my column spills from page one

                        to MONEY & BUSINESS. But no, it says here the displaced

                        stream now to tarpaper favelas, planetary barracks

                        with steep rents for paperless migrants, so that they

                        remit less to those obsolescent, starving

                        relatives on the altiplano, pushed up to ever thinner air and soil;

                        unnoticed, the narrative has altered.

            The world’s priorities have changed, the universe’s nonetheless, and the human psyche, and they have all conspired together and informed the South American farmer that his traditional way of life no longer matters, and that he must, in order to survive, abandon his field. In fact, corporate America has forced him from his fields and his way of life. What will replace it is probably American industry followed by American or American-owned retail businesses that cater to tourists, employing and underpaying the native citizenry, while industry scores the land of its nutrients and steals the wealth, investing nothing into the local economy, and polluting the community. One must ask Ms. Winters another question: What is the New York Times, yet not another global corporation that must make a profit? Her emphasizing the MONEY & BUSINESS section does not illuminate for the reader any profound perceptions, but only an act she employs in her poem to highlight the fact of a worldview she despises, and it is nonetheless a very easy target. Another question: Does the poet not recognize that capitalism has raised the living standard of most of the people of the world? (We do not need to wait for her answer; in fact, it is given.)

            Anne Winters fails to consider any of the myriad reasons why these immigrants have decided to come to America, from corruption in their native countries, to extreme poverty, which is a result of terrible government corruption, to suffering under a caste system (India), religious and political persecution, lack of upward mobility, failed economies, dictatorships and numberless others. Under Anne Winters’ dream (which is really a nightmare) society, all of these problems will exist, and they are not invisible to the clear-eyed who can easily look back to the Soviet Union, and then to Cuba and to Venezuela. Besides being disingenuous in her sympathy for these ‘victims’, it is not too difficult to realize that the poet is basically anti-Western civilization. She continues,

                  Unnoticed, the narrative has altered,

                        but though the city’s thus indecipherably orchestrated

                        by the evil empire, down to the very molecules in my brain

                        as I think I’m thinking, can I escape morning happiness,

                        or not savor our fabled ‘texture’ of foreign

                        and native poverties? (A boy tied into greengrocer’s apron,

                        unplaceable accent, brings out my coffee.) But, no, it says here

                        the old country’s ‘de-developing’ due to its mountainous

                        debt to the First World – that’s Broadway, my café

                        and my table, so how can I today

                        warm myself at the sad heartening narrative of immigration?

                        Unnoticed, the narrative has altered,

                        the displaced of capital have come to the capital.

            Evil empire? In a poem that for the most part is well-written, holding up despite some clumsy lines (‘but though the city’s thus indecipherably orchestrated’), and can be appreciated even though the philosophy is Marxist, the term ‘evil empire’ is unexpected. It is unexpected because it is a failure on the poet’s part to find a better adjectival phrase. One is not surprised at the choice to employ this phrase, however. The phrase has lost all of its meaning, only because of its overuse and abuse the past number of years by the Left. It is an empty phrase that is hurled for any purpose randomly. And for a poet of Anne Winters’ capacity and distinction, one is let down by her lack of imaginative power and her choice to grasp at the easiest phrase she could find. It is lazy writing resulting from lazy thinking.

            But ‘evil empire’, why? Anne Winters is willfully neglecting to observe the good that has resulted through the policies of this ‘evil empire’. Were it not for American foreign policy, the Soviet Union would have continued to expand and export its destructive force; old Europe would have been buried under the Soviet machine; Saddam Hussein would have still been fomenting violence and supporting terrorism; South and Central America would have fallen to Marxists; China would have had no real push towards capitalism; South Korea and Japan might have been overrun by North Korea; Grenada would have become the next Cuba; and life for millions around the globe would have been intolerable.

            This ‘evil empire’ is forbidding her, she tells us, from savoring her morning coffee and the ‘texture’ of poverties that are evident before her, i.e. the displaced. That is an insult to the immigrants, to refer to them as a texture of poverties. The language debases them and dehumanizes them. Are they merely poverties? Language like this is only economic and it is not unexpected coming from a poet who is a Marxist, for that is how a Marxist views the world and people, only in economic terms. For them, people are statistics. Her coffee is then brought out by a ‘boy tied into a greengrocer’s apron’; this is not just a boy who works at the greengrocer’s and who is wearing the apron that he must wear while working, but he is a slave being used by the capitalist system and he has no choice because he is tied into the apron. The pity from the poet is false, and she also ignores the fact that the employee can make a choice to work or not to work.

            Another factor, she says, that has driven the boy at the greengrocer’s and the many other immigrants to America is because their countries are ruined (‘de-developing’) by their debt to the First World. One thinks back to the international campaign last year by Sir Bob Geldof and Bono to write off debts owed by developing countries, specifically those in Africa. What kind of fiscal responsibility does this teach? What kind of incentive does it inspire in those who truly are concerned about impoverished nations but are unwilling to give because they know that many of those countries are run by corrupt and oppressive regimes and those in power (Robert Mugabe, for one) are getting off scot-free? ‘First World – that’s Broadway, my café/and my table,’ is the poet pointing at herself and saying “Bad Anne!” Again, false guilt, and showy, because it comes from a pure lack of understanding of economics and, more importantly, the immigration issue.

            But Anne Winters is not alone in contemporary poetry to hold this perspective. It seems that in order to rise to any respect, especially of Anne Winters’ stature in the higher echelons in the world of poetry and to maintain that certain status, one must adhere to these Leftist views, and it is tellingly so when The Nation is one of the central players in the world of contemporary poetry. When poetry consciously attempts to be political, it is the worst kind and it is used like a hammer to hit the reader over the head with, insulting the reader and his intelligence. In the same way that liberal politicians demand that voters leave important questions of morality and foreign policy at home when going to the ballot booth, these poets of the Left expect, or rather demand that readers put aside their moral imaginations. And that would only end in cultural suicide. One does not wish for poetry to be submissive to whoever is president and whichever party is in the majority; but for poetry to be relevant again, it must challenge society with a moral imagination. But with the Marxist and anti-Western philosophy espoused by Anne Winters and many others, and their lack of moral imagination, they continue to be Lenin’s Useful Idiots.

Notes Toward Form

Form offers poets an objective standard to which they can aspire. This it is that offers Auden a certain control in his poem In Memory of Sigmund Freud. Form in this poem offers the following:

1. Control of public grief;

2. The ability to hold society together in the midst of public grief;

3. Assure British society of 1939 that such loss and public grief is not new;

4. Link British society of 1939 to a history of grief that goes back for centuries.

Auden begins the poem with the admission that mourning for the dead is a fact of life. In his essay “Death & Politics” from the journal First Things, editor and writer Joseph Bottum points out the importance of our remembering the dead. He writes “What I am proposing is a complete revaluation of political theory: a return to an extra-political, even metaphysical, foundation for thought about politics. Death—the death not of ourselves but of others—becomes the key for understanding human association when we grasp three propositions about death and politics:

(1) The losses human beings suffer are the deepest reason for culture,

(2) The fundamental pattern for any community is a congregation at a funeral,

(3) A healthy society requires a lively sense of the reality and continuing presence of the dead.”

The fact and acknowledgement of death obviously has an impact on a society’s moving forward in all of its endeavors, even politics. Also, he states wonderfully the following, that the “significance of life derives from the presence of the future, while the richness of life derives from the presence of the past. How we live is important only if we see the consequential future flowing toward us—beginning, always, with the fact that we will die and must prepare our children to assume the burdens of culture. How we live is thick and meaningful only if we see the momentous past, the ancient ghosts, dwelling among us—beginning, always, with the fact that our parents have died and left their corpses’ care to us. Death is the anchor for every human association, from the family all the way up to the nation-state. It provides a reason for association; it keeps us from drifting by tying us to a temporal reality larger—richer and more significant—than our individual present.”

It is with this paragraph that I will move on from. As I said just previously, Auden begins his poem with the recognition and acknowledgement that grief for the loss of someone, whether private or public (he does not state which in the opening stanza), is a fact of life.

            When there are so many we shall have to mourn,

            When grief has been made so public, and exposed

                        To the critique of a whole epoch

            The frailty of our conscience and anguish . . .

What happens here is thus: in the first line we are allowed to express our grief through mourning, but because the poem’s form requires only eleven syllables and the first line is a complete thought in itself, our mourning is checked from becoming irrational. Auden also has in that first line what Joseph Bottum mentions above, including all three propositions about death and politics; and that “[d]eath is the anchor for every human association, from the family all the way up to the nation-state.” All of the so many that we have mourned and will mourn in the future is contained by the rule of the syllabic count. It is in the second line that we are told it is a public grief we are observing and as readers will be participating in. Grief is public and has exposes our frailness, our conscience and anguish to being commented upon, how we mourn; but the form again acts as a check against our anguish overflowing beyond respectable boundaries, beyond respectable expression. Grief can drive people into states of irrationality, so Auden uses quantitative verse to hold us together, encouraging us comport ourselves in a manner befitting the one who is being mourned, but also because it is right to do so. Manners are what also make a society, and especially in moments when we feel so frail and vulnerable to our emotions, that we may often allow them to control us and direct our actions.

The form Auden uses links British society of 1939 with that of ancient Greece, and every society in-between. Because society is made up by humans, who are mortal, there will be loss and grief. And because loss and grief have been at the centre of human existence since the beginning of time, Britain in 1939 ought not to feel alone, but can draw comfort by looking back and seeing that it is part of and participating in a tradition that is very vital to the survival of civilization. This linking of societies puts Britain in a community of societies that mourns its dead, that does not seek to push death away from being a fact of life.

Out of this adherence to form and this specific tradition of this specific form, Auden creates his own society of words. The poem continues,

          Of whom shall we speak? For every day they die

            Among us, those who were doing us some good

                        And knew it was never enough but

            Hoped to improve a little by living.

            Such was this doctor: still at eighty he wished

            To think of our life from whose unruliness

                        So many plausible young futures

            With threats or flattery as obedience,

Alcaics allows Auden the control that is necessary in this poem to control the almost-impossible-to-control, i.e. grief. In the third stanza he breaks the line at two important words, ‘unruliness’ in the second line and ‘obedience’ in the fourth; and that is exactly what happens and what Auden wanted. The form does not just break the line in these specific places, but symbolically constrains unruliness and enforces obedience to it.

“A rhyme turns an idea into law,” said Joseph Brodsky in his lecture on Auden’s September 1, 1939, and so it is with Robert Lowell’s lyric poem Waking Early Sunday Morning. It is built upon this law of rhyme and strengthened with the instruction of iambic tetrameter, for the most part. Fourteen stanzas comprise the poem, each stanza containing eight lines composed in couplets, but for a variation in the last stanza; and each stanza is its own room with its own window. Lowell explained that Marvell’s eight-line four-foot couplet stanzas hummed in his mind throughout the summer and into the fall prior to writing this poem. This kind of statement is rarely heard today, that of a poet admitting and even displaying his influence/s; too many today try to hide their predecessors away in an attic in the name of ‘originality’.

With each line and stanza, we feel Lowell fighting up against the constraints of the form he has chosen to work inside of. Like Auden’s poem, the form gives Lowell the ability to deal with such a weighty topic as spiritual despair in a clear manner, without falling all over the place, and staying in form, i.e., holding himself together, even if spiritual belief, or especially because spiritual belief, or lack thereof, cannot. He will not fall to pieces all over the place, poetically, mentally and personally. This poetical adherence is a spiritual hold or brace. And it also replaces, for lack of a better way of saying it, the Christian faith; if there is no Christian morality, at least there is a poetic morality. Things are not random in this poem. Words do not fall together and rhyme without purpose. The rhyme has a purpose: it instills in the poet the belief in a higher order that is more perfect than the everyday, i.e. the order of words. But also, the form affords Lowell to fulfill Coleridge’s definition of poetry: that is it equals the best words in the best order.

In the third stanza we see an example of Lowell breaking loose, like the Chinook salmon’s ability to jump against the current in its migration upstream to spawn before dying, yet he stays within his chosen boundaries,

         Vermin run for their unstopped holes;

            in some dark nook a fieldmouse rolls

            a marble, hours on end, then stops;

            the termite in the woodwork sleeps –

            listen, the creatures of the night

            obsessive, casual, sure of foot,

            go on grinding, while the sun’s

            daily remorseful blackout dawns.

The alert Lowell, his body fully awake, catches the actions of the creatures about him. His imagination is greedy like a dragon scouring his premises. There is so much action occurring in the poem, from vermin running around to a fieldmouse rolling a marble, to a termite in the woodworks, and other creatures of the night; and then sunrise. Because his alert imagination is ranging all around, if he had strayed beyond his chosen form, if he had written this in free verse, the tension would not be what it is – the tension between order and disorder, between lack of spiritual belief and desire to believe (in something), between the rundown world and that of the beauty of the word. It takes an imagination like this to catch what it does and to focus on these several things. Here again free as I is present. The choices and the freedom to roam and snatch up the action occurring around him is the will in action that is both industrious and playful, like the poet’s present engagement. He is ranging around, catching creatures, being specific and general. He begins the stanza with the general term vermin that could be mammals or birds that are believed to be harmful to crops, farm animals or game that carry disease and which could be foxes, rodents and insect pests. He then goes specific in naming one the smallest of the vermin, a field mouse; and then goes even smaller to a termite. Their actions have a bit of a direction, for he begins by describing them as running about outside of and going for their holes/burrows; then he tells of a field mouse in a dark nook; then the termite in the woodwork. Their actions are also in degrees as he goes from telling of their running about, to the cessation of rolling a marble to sleeping. It is imaginary to say that one knows a termite is sleeping in the woodwork.

            He then tells himself and us to listen to them. Don’t just read, but listen to the poem, he appears to say. Is not that what poets have been demanding from their readers, to hear the poem and not just read it? Experience the poem, listen to the sound of the words and hear the poem as a poem, along with what is in the poem. By telling himself to listen it is also as if he is forcing himself to concentrate and not become distracted. The industriousness of the creatures reflects that of the poet and this and is shown in the next line which is a perfect line of tetrameter, obsessive, casual, sure of foot, and that last word communicates the confidence of “I”. The stresses in this line fall perfectly where they are supposed to without making it a strict, lifeless line. The beat is confident, the breath natural and the diction casual. He has obsessed over the poem and its form, meter and direction/journey. In this line one is impressed by the deftness of Lowell’s hand that makes a line like this come off easy, obeying Yeats’ dictum that the poem should look easy. “Casual elegance,” he once told Derek Walcott when the latter fixed a knot on Lowell’s tie and Lowell loosened it. And it goes on grinding into the next line.

And Death Shall Have Dominion - Edward Thomas' "In Memoriam (Easter 1915)"

St. Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians, assures fellow believers that there is eternal life beyond and this promise was made possible through the resurrection of Christ following His crucifixion. “Now if Christ is preached,” he writes, “that He has been raised from the dead, how do some among you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty.” This would make them false witnesses, he continues, before finishing this section with “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable.” With this theme, many poets have attempted to say as much and John Donne (Death Be Not Proud) and Dylan Thomas (And Death Shall Have No Dominion) are two significant examples. However, Edward Thomas seems to dismiss such belief with his very short poem, a tragedy in four lines really, In Memoriam (Easter 1916):

                        The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood

                        This Eastertide call into mind the men,

                        Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should

                        Have gathered them and will do never again.

The poem is one sentence long, in fact, and though it does not outrightly banish the belief in resurrection, the promise of Easter, it at least holds off on such hope.

            Thomas wrote the poem in the midst of World War I, the first great and modern war the world had ever experienced, and meditates on the sorrow that the war has caused many girlfriends back in England who were waiting and hoping for their loved soldiers to return. He begins the poem with the descriptive image of flowers that have not been picked and are left to grow in the wood and the sound of the line echoes the imagery with its heavy consonants and words of fl, ft, thick and the f in nightfall. The line breaks with wood, which serves as a fence or border that encloses the unpicked flowers within its boundary.

            In the next line, Thomas does bring the men back from the dead, in a manner of speaking, resurrecting them through the power of his imagination and he knows that the sweethearts who are left to remember their dearly departed have memories that will not let them forget the dead, and will certainly resurrect them through the act of memory, which is the act of the mind. The promise of Easter serves not to reflect on Christ’s resurrection, but on the imaginative resurrection of the dead soldiers. It is Eastertide that serves as the springboard to call back the men into memory. As well, like the flowers that were left unpicked in the wood and are still living, these soldiers whose lives were picked away by bullets and general warfare are still ‘living’. With the break of second line at men and the blankness of the white page that follows, this is effective, as the reader sees the eternity of the blankness of/on the page.

            But the men were not killed in England, Thomas goes on to tell us, but they were killed far from home and their bodies are still there. Now far from home tells us of the ongoing killing and not too distant scything of life that is prevalent; Now does not let us forget the killing and in fact makes it live on in the mind. Distance and death have literally separated and forever the soldiers and their sweethearts. Had this not been so, the beautiful and romantic excursion of going into the wood at night to pick flowers would have occurred and those flowers that are now left alive would have been plucked and would have died, but for the war, they are alive. The most operative word in the poem comes at the break of the third line – should. This simple word is full of grief, for it tells of all that should have been, the romance between the once alive soldiers and their sweethearts, the picking of flowers (an everyday, simple but lovely thing to do), the promise of future bliss, an ideal that cut short by war. Again, the effect of the page’s whiteness comes into play and brings and emphasizes the heartbreak and loss experienced, as one reflects on what should have been, but all there is after the word is nothing and all the picking of the flowers that should have occurred is absent, picked off at the end of the line.

            The fourth and last line then explains what should have occurred after the flowers were picked – the soldiers and their sweethearts would [h]ave gathered them in bunches and would have been saved as memorial to this excursion and a symbol of the love between them. Halfway through the line, however, Thomas tells us that this will never be done, and will never do again. This comes halfway through the line in a manner that makes the reader think of the young age at which these men were cut down in life by war. There is no hope for life eternal for these men, but they live on in the memories of their sweethearts and in the imaginative act of the poet whose poem resurrects them. It is more heartbreaking because Thomas himself enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles, a volunteer regiment of the British Army, in 1915 at the age of 37, long past the age of enlistment and with a family of his own. Two years later he was killed at the Battle of Arras in France. Whatever flowers he would have picked with his wife Helen were left unpicked in the wood around East Hampshire where they lived.

Our Element is Time: Larkin's "Reference Back"

We are short-termed and shortsighted, and we live only in the present and it is better for us to be so – this is Philip Larkin’s conclusion in his poem Reference Back, although the title suggests a reflection of some sort, a remembering, and he uses this word twice in the second stanza. But as we read on, we see why there is the hesitation for reflection.

                        That was a pretty one, I heard you call

                        From the unsatisfactory hall

                        To the unsatisfactory room where I

                        Played record after record, idly

                        Wasting my time at home, that you

                        Looked so much forward to.

                        Oliver’s Riverside Blues, it was. And now

                        I shall, I suppose, always remember how

                        The flock of notes those antique negroes blew

                        Out of Chicago air into

                        A huge remembering pre-electric horn

                        The year after I was born

                        Three decades later made this sudden bridge

                        From your unsatisfactory age

                        To my unsatisfactory prime.

                        Truly, though our element is time,

                        We are not suited to the long perspectives

                        Open at each instant of our lives.

                        They link us to our losses: worse,

                        They show us what we have as it once was,

                        Blindingly undiminished, just as though

                        By acting differently we could have kept it so.

The poem, written in couplets, begins with the call of someone other than the narrator, Larkin, to him, from another room, which Larkin describes as an unsatisfactory hall. Instantly we get something of a picture of not the place itself, but an atmosphere of the place. The caller seems to want to engage in conversation with Larkin, or to be a participant in his enjoyment of blues, which he was a big fan and avid collector of. The same word is used to describe the room in which Larkin currently listens to blues. With this description of the place, we can guess that, besides the indulgence of blues itself as a pleasurable pastime, it is also used as an escape from having to be in the same unsatisfactory room with the other person. With the first line breaking at call, which is then followed on the page by silent white space, we can hear the lack of a response – just silence in return to someone who was hoping to engage in communication. The judgment though of the caller is vapid, however, and implies that the caller is not really a listener of blues, but it was only a desperate attempt to have communication with Larkin.

            He goes on to say that he was playing “record after record, idly/Wasting my time at home, that you/Looked so much forward to.” Here we have the speaker admitting the situation; the caller, his lover, looked forward to spending time with him at home, but he chose to isolate himself away in a room to solitarily and selfishly indulge in listening to blues. Instead of being with the other person, or even inviting her to listen to blues with him, he does this alone and prefers to waste his time away. But who sees it as an idle wasting away of time? We are not so sure, because Larkin uses this description without attributing it to anyone. He confesses it might be an idle wasting away of time, as others may see it as such, but in his eyes it may have been time spent valuably. Furthermore, with the image of separation between the two people, it was time happily spent.

            The next stanza begins with Larkin telling us the name of the artist and the song he was listening to, (King) Oliver’s Riverside Blues. From here, the poem is shown to be a complete memory, a reference back, per the title as the first line reads, “Oliver’s Riverside Blues, it was.” The line then continues, “And now/I shall, I suppose, always remember . . .” he remembers how the music was played and goes further back in time to the year of the recording of Riverside Blues, which was in 1923. We get this information from Larkin saying “The year after I was born”, which was in 1922. This now is an act of reflection and referencing back by Larkin, which is what poems are mostly about and made up of – memories. The act of writing a poem references back to previous acts of composition, each act of the mind and the hand has a memory before it. His choice of “antique” to describe the negro musicians places them beyond contemporary time and memory, in a manner, since antique is used to describe something very, very old and usually of some worth. The “huge remembering pre-electric horn” defines the music’s time and has a memory of its own, so to speak, since musicians invoke memories with their music; also, the horn and the music both recall earlier music and performances, the loss in nostalgia. It is important to note that the use of couplets and meter shape the memory, since memories are formless.

            But now Larkin jumps back into the present and the years are conflated between 1923 and the present through the following line, “Three decades later made this sudden bridge[.]” The word bridge is a good break since it connects the line it ends to the following line, but also because one gets the visual blankness of the page after the word at the line’s break, as if it connects to nothing. The music, the bridge, acts as the connection between Larkin and the other person in a manner that the person’s desperate attempt at communication that opens the poem didn't. But now we come upon that word again, unsatisfactory, with all that it implies. There is still much discomfort present, even though the music brings them together, even while they were separate. There is also dissatisfaction with both in their then present periods in life.

            The third and final stanza begins with “Truly,” as if Larkin is on the verge of saying or affirming something he very much believes. He says, “though our element is time,/We are not suited to the long perspectives/Open at each instant of our lives.” We are short-termed and shortsighted. Unlike the music that lives beyond the date of its composition and continues to have a life of its own even after all of the original musicians have died, we humans live in the present, in the now and that is all we can do, or prefer to do, or is preferable for us to do. The long perspectives open before and after each moment we live in contain memories and desires. Again, another effective line break, this one with perspective, is accomplished, as after the word the white blankness of the page is such a long perspective that is open to each instant of our lives. Then in the following line, instant sits effectively in the middle of the line with three words preceding and following it, as the long perspectives that precede and follow each instant of our lives, bracketing us.

            These long perspectives “link us to our losses” is what he affirms, if we reference back to what he seemed to just about to do with “Truly”. It is not very enjoyable to engage too much in reflection. When we do so, we end up seeing so much that is disappointing in our lives, such as what this poem illustrates: there is unhappiness – the separation between Larkin and his lover; the unsatisfactory hall and room; her unsatisfactory age and his unsatisfactory prime. “Worse,” he says, long perspectives show us that what we presently have is not as ideal and happy as it once was, that there is a decline in our circumstances. This vision is too much to bear. It is “[b]lindingly undiminished.” It is heartbreaking. It is all unsatisfactory. We then fool ourselves into thinking that if we had acted differently things might have turned out better. However painful and unbearable the act of reflection, Larkin uses it to create a poem which has lived a life of its own like Oliver’s Riverside Blues.