The perfect poem

Perfection is a flaw in poetry. Or, to put this another way, the perfect poem must be flawed – it must flow from some essential flaw in the process of thinking or expression, it must bear that impress as fingers bear their fingerprints.

This is my opinion, and it hovers over my canon of poetry, my personal stash.

This morning, I wake up and read the news about Gaza children eating grass to stave off hunger pains and all I can feel is bitterness. The bitterness doesn’t help – it is a feeble attempt at a moral equivalence, but I eat, I drink, my stomach is full. It is in this mood that I wanted to read a poem, one of my stash. So I read Wallace Stevens Sunday Morning.

The flaw in this poem, from which it flows, is the line: “Death is the mother of beauty.” This seems to me utterly untrue, untrue to the cadaver, untrue to the body’s rot. But here the poem departs from argument and even the larger impression of things in order to fulfil or rather fill itself. That line comes in Part V of the poem, and by that point we have been altering between the central persona, the old woman evoked in part one – an old woman much like me on a Sunday morning, with her “late coffee and oranges” and her domestic bric a brac, the cockatoo “upon a rug” which gives us a suggestive ambiguity – is this the beast woven into the rug or a cockatoo in a cage? Is this real or décor? – and the poet’s inevitable sermoning, his revery upon the old woman. What captures and enraptures me, however, are these lines:

Divinity must live within herself:

Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;

Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued

Elations when the forest blooms; gusty

Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;

All pleasures and all pains, remembering

The bough of summer and the winter branch.

These are the measures destined for her soul.

For those lines, I forgive every flaw. I forgive everything. I am tethered. And that is the perfection of the poem - to tether the reader, or listener. To stop them in mid heartbeat, mid breathing, mid thought, mid middleness of one's muddled life. Flaw and perfection are joined, just for that second.