A Handpicked Poem presented by Michael Steffen

A Handpicked Poem

presented by Michael Steffen

 

 

by Daniel Tobin, from Dusk, Empire: New and Selected Poems 1987-2024

The Creature Has a Purpose

 

 

Incongruities of the “English Palace,”

And a rush of Ohio River air,

That smells of millwork and the driven flange,

Mingle in the great poet’s brother’s room

Where he lies, dying of the family complaint,

The rusted bellows of his lungs giving out.

Penniless, he has become his debtors,

Having braved the Great Western Road across

The Alleghenies’ broad and fordable sublime,

Their expendable grandeur mastered in flat

And keelboat, broadhorn and ark, to make

His name: two fortunes won, two sawyered

In the roiling confluence of the New World.

 

No death is a death of luxury—not this life

That pioneered “the Dark and Bloody Land,”

Nor the boy pent, opaque, in a Hampstead room.

Or the one who stayed and wrote and broached

His end in a far country consigned to the past,

Fountain, Forum, sun-burnished piazzas

Where posthumous lives encounter their ruin

In catacomb and column and shuttered light—

This brother absent all ends but his own.

 

On the mantle, the poet’s portrait, wreathed

In hyacinth, Apollo’s flower, looks off,

Akin to a figure on that antique vase—

All unmoving activity and scope; though

Where the poet is, now, is not the place

He sat to have his minor image drawn.

Margate is gone, and Cheapside, and Wentworth.

Which makes the brother fading here, alone,

Or tended by his slaves, a dreaming thing.

Without the social thought of thee, the poet wrote

Nothing could stay life from the vastness,

The vagrant expanse of sea and sky.

And this, amid the great outpouring,

The poet against all likelihood breeching

The conditions:—the Moon is now shining full

And brilliant—she is the same to me in Matter,

What you are to me in Spirit—the hurt belied

On that letter’s fraught, disconsolate seal:

Qui me néglige, me désole—“Who neglects

Me, torments me,” the gem signaling

The poet’s final letter to the beloved,

How short is the longest life. And, at the crux:

We cannot be created for this sort of suffering.

 

But to have stayed, or turned back, to have

Chosen sacrifice, owned that capability,

Unlike the stoat the poet glimpsed, its head

Peeping from a patch of withered grass—

The creature has a purpose and its eyes

Are bright with it ? Though how to make a soul

The poet asked, but through the medium

Of a world like this, the elemental space

That schools and scars till each becomes oneself?

 

He shifts a little on the bed, the one

Whose body was electric with leaving,

So his might be again at sea, sails flown

In pursuit of the Narrows, the continent

Beyond, its wonders and wealth, his offices,

Parlor life brimming with Old World ways—

The nagging neatness of a well-made life.

Under him the waters lift, purgatorial

In the predatory depths, dolphin, shark,

The greater bodies cruising, thrashing,

Scale after scale in the moon-washed swell,

A nautilus scenting currents, scavenging,

 

All mother-of-pearl chambers spiraling

Logarithmic, prized, rise to the surface,

The pinhole camera of its eye open, blind

To this teeming speck of a firmament.

A breath. One more. His mouth opens,

Wider now, as if he had begun to sing.

 

 

            _          _

            _          _

            _          _

 

 

Henry David Thoreau had a vision of his pond near Walden and its millennial origin as a glacier. Local stories by the natives had passed this down, over the thousands—tens of thousands—hundreds of thousands of years it would take for a glacier to subside into a pond—unless under drastic climatic conditions that would make short order of such dramatic changes. Still the tectonic shifts of the glaciers creeping across the continent to foist up the great North American mountain ranges would not happen over such proverbial nights. 19th-century naturalists (John Muir also comes to mind) and their fabulists the artists, especially in the majestic panoramas they encountered in the New World, had a special term for the feeling of awe undergone when beholding the grandeur of a natural landscape, and the imponderable ages of its creation—well beyond what humans, basing their beliefs on Biblical figures, had imagined for our earth’s existence. This word, “sublime,” carried a middle sense both for the profound feeling as well as the object of grandeur. It primarily pertained to a work of art of extraordinary mindful and emotionally responsive beauty. When we come upon the word in the ninth line of this poem, the poet is referring to the geological “wonder” or “splendor” of the Allegheny Mountains, which George Keats would have crossed getting over into Illinois and Kentucky, then the “far west” of America. Tobin’s word here so aptly resonates with his tangential reference, the poet John Keats, able with such lofty language, “beauty,” “truth,” which we in our local poetry share groups are warned to stay away from, for their likely hyperbole and imprecision. In Tobin’s hands, the word can hardly be more historically or emotionally grounded and exact. Even if the passage might not inspire the next Big Ocean boys band hit.

 

The occasion of this steeple chase gallop of a poem by Daniel Tobin is the death of George Keats, the younger brother of the famous Romantic poet John Keats. George and his wife Georgiana emigrated to America, making their way to Louisville, Kentucky, where he eventually established himself as a land developer and civic leader. From the year of his older brother’s death in 1821 for his remaining twenty years, George led a philosophical society intended for the cultural betterment of the young raw then western frontier town. A Lyceum emerged from Keats’s salon, which became the board of Louisville College, the cornerstone of Louisville University. George’s extensive library housed many of John Keats’s important letters along with Audobon’s Ornithology.

 

Historical inspirations for American writers have become prominent as the nation has grappled for its identity in this early 21st century, between the radical proposals of cosmopolitan sophistication and inclusiveness, in a tug-of-war with notions of citizenry and patrimonial heritage and rights. The opening lines of Tobin’s poem address this pressing dilemma, yet with a reminder that our staple modern identity as Anglophones is a foreign-import to start with, which created and endured shock with its native elements:

 

Incongruities of the “English Palace,”

And a rush of Ohio River air,

That smells of millwork and the driven flange,

Mingle in the great poet’s brother’s room

Where he lies, dying…

 

When working with “historical” materials, author’s choices emerge with their creative challenges, such as Tobin’s choice to have George the younger brother also dying of tuberculosis—"the family complaint, The rusted bellows of his lungs giving out.” It isn’t a matter of scruple that George Keats in fact succumbed to a stomach disorder. It is remarkable to note Tobin’s poem appears in this New and Selected volume under the chosen 2018 Blood Labors, written before that publication date with some dark intuitive anticipation of the shuttering world event of COVID which found so many afflicted with severe respiratory failures. In that sense Tobin has made history a sort of project as well as topic of this remarkable poem.

 

The tone around the death bed, rooted in American poetry’s New England mother voice, Dickinson, is elegiac. One of Tobin’s more immediate fathers or uncles in the Anglo-American inspiration, W. H. Auden, surfaces in the line “Penniless, he has become his debtors,” an unexpected twist on, yet deftly stemming from “He became his admirers,” Auden’s dark pronouncement on Yeats in the sublime elegy for the latter on his death.

 

The versification is American pentameter, a term emerging under my breath as I’ve scanned mainline American 20th and early 21st century poets, noting the English standard with definitive American allowances of skipping anapests and mid- and endline spondees—a verse of, well, versatile possibilities for innovation and originality within a recognizable basic line pattern.

 

The verse, as well as the chosen material of the poem here, reflects its author’s concerns about national identity, but also deeply personal trade querying by Tobin as to the brunt to identity America poses to its own children helpless but to be curious about and somewhat attached to the mother traditions of their tongue.

 

The Elizabethan metaphysical poet John Donne, a prime inspiration for Tobin, provides a luminous epigraph for Tobin’s 2014 collection, The Net, with its remarkable conceit of human ingenuity’s compass on the world, long before the Internet, in the net-like coordinates lined up and down and crosswise on globes and maps:

 

            For of Meridians, and Parallels,

            Man hath weaved out a net, and this net thrown

            Upon the Heaves, and now they are his own. (“Anatomy of the World”)

 

To cultivate (and inherit) the world reach of art comes with a heavy cloud-exacting price of remoteness, graying in shades to solitude, desolating loneliness, a palpable air and feeling in Tobin’s poem about George Keats. At the same time the effort allows Tobin (and his readers) a rare intimacy with the genius of the Odes who so drove home the ultimate impersonality and coldness of images on artifacts (a Grecian urn) and even of the calling fathomless song of a thrush deep in the woods on a sleepless spring night.

 

            On a mantle, the poet’s portrait, wreathed

            In hyacinth, Apollos’ flower, looks off,

            Akin to a figure on the antique vase—

            All unmoving activity and scope…

            Margate is gone, and Cheapside, and Wentworth…

            Nothing could stay life from the vastness…

 

The recovery the poem makes from this dark pass into a vital sense of imaginative transcendent voyage is a trademark of Tobin’s resilient spirit and invention, containing much of the tenor, music and historical character of The Mansions, the poet’s epic trilogy. Dusk, Empire New and Selected Poems 1987-2024, gives us the rare vista of a generous companion career for ready reader, scholar and apprentice of poetry—the generous gift of a true master in his own right with a coveted bone to be fetched and gnawed on and contested.

 

Daniel Tobin's poems have appeared in a myriad of journals, from The Times Literary Supplement to The Paris Review to Poetry, and hundreds of others on both sides in America and Europe, and in more than fifty anthologies, including The Norton Introduction to Poetry. His many prestigious awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.

 

Daniel will be reading with Lloyd Schwartz for The Hastings Room November reading, on Thursday November 19, 2026, at 7pm, in the Harter Room at First Church Cambridge, 11 Garden Street, at the back of Cambridge Common.

 

Simon Walsh will also be reading from his new collection “A Kentish Lad.”

 

All are welcome. The reading is free and open. Please join us.