Poet's Choice

By Mary Karr
Sunday, November 9, 2008

In his seminal essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," T.S. Eliot argues that only a poet's grounding in history sustains the work after the tidal upsurge of adolescent passion has receded. Jack Gilbert draws from history when he goes from a warrior's fevered heroics to the average wife's daily fidelity in "The Abnormal Is Not Courage":

The Poles rode out from Warsaw against the German

tanks on horses. Rode knowing, in sunlight, with sabers.

A magnitude of beauty that allows me no peace.

And yet this poem would lessen that day. Question

the bravery. Say it's not courage. Call it a passion.

Would say courage isn't that. Not at its best.

Those overly punctuated lines make you stop and start, forcing you to inhabit a mind formulating an opinion, one phrase at a time. And then he delves into what he means:

It was impossible, and with form. They rode in sunlight.

Were mangled. But I say courage is not the abnormal.

Not the marvelous act. Not Macbeth with fine speeches.

The worthless can manage in public, or for the moment.

It is too near the whore's heart: the bounty of impulse,

and the failure to sustain even small kindness.

Not the marvelous act, but the evident conclusion of

being.

Not strangeness, but a leap forward of the same quality.

Accomplishment. The even loyalty. But fresh.

Not the Prodigal Son, nor Faustus. But Penelope.

The thing steady and clear. Then the crescendo.

The real form. The culmination. And the exceeding.

Not the surprise. The amazed understanding. The

marriage,

not the month's rapture. Not the exception. The beauty that is of many days. Steady and clear.

It is the normal excellence, of long accomplishment.

In a landscape of more contemporary suffering, "A Brief for the Defense," Gilbert still insists on hope:

. . . We must have

the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless

furnace of this world. To make injustice the only

measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,

we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.

" The Abnormal Is Not Courage" is from "Monolithos: Poems 1962 and 1982" (Knopf, 1982). "A Brief for the Defense" is from "Refusing Heaven" (Knopf, 2005).

Mary Karr has published four books of poems, most recently "Sinners Welcome."