Aleksandra the Great’s Exploits

[Allow me to make a value judgement on a poem, something I usually refrain from doing because art has inherent value and interpretation is subjective anyway.]

I came into NPR’s Fresh Air midway through the program today and was interested because they were talking about a dead female poet (I immediately hoped that it was SP) and an unpublished poem that the interviewee had copied while the poet was in the hospital and published without her express permission. Not knowing the name of the poet, I—perhaps unlike NPR’s reviewers—was able to listen without bias:

“Breakfast Song”

My love, my saving grace,
your eyes are awfully blue.
I kiss your funny face,
your coffee-flavored mouth.
Last night I slept with you.
Today I love you so
how can I bear to go
(as soon I must, I know)
to bed with ugly death
in that cold, filthy place,
to sleep there without you,
without the easy breath
and nightlong, limblong warmth
I’ve grown accustomed to?
–Nobody wants to die;
tell me it is a lie!
But no, I know it’s true.
It’s just the common case;
there’s nothing one can do.
My love, my saving grace,
your eyes are awfully blue
early and instant blue.

Now I ask: Is this a good poem? I tended to think not so much, although it is not without merit (the interviewer especially liked “ugly death / in that cold, filthy place”). But there’s something juvenile in the sing-song melody of “Today I love you so / how can I bear to go / (as soon I must, I know)” and “Nobody wants to die; / tell me it is a lie!”

What Professor Tratner (the book-burner) said about T.S. Eliot was that his poetry is so good because he takes really bad poetry (e.g. “Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky,” which could easily, predictably, and horribly conclude with something like “Like a big cherry pie”) and infuses it with weird, out-of-place, and unexpected language and images (the following line is, of course, “Like a patient etherised upon a table”). Eliot sets you up for something awful and then, defying your expectations, makes it interesting and strange. I had hoped that that’s what “Breakfast Song” was getting at, but I was let down.

In the course of the interview, it was revealed that the secret dead female poet was none other than Elizabeth Bishop (perhaps most known for “One Art”—”The art of losing isn’t hard to master”—which is a good poem). Bishop, who was a lesbian (the interviewer suggested that the poem was probably directed to a woman, completely ignoring the notion of a speaker whose purposes may differ from those of the poet’s), tended to shy away from personal inclusions of her life in her poetry, which could explain why this poem went unpublished. Perhaps her reason for not publishing overtly personal poems is that they weren’t very good.

I think that the NPR people were just too caught up in the excitement of a private Bishop poem and were willing to value it not for its poetic excellence but for its supposed insight into Bishop’s life and because, published 20 years after her death, it serves as the poet’s voice reaching from beyond the grave to lament the certainty of her death.