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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 heavens 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.
