What’s not to like about an exuberant love poem? I mean such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How do I love thee?” sonnet with its list of outrageous, exaggerated declarations (“I love thee to the depth and breadth and height / My soul can reach...”), or David Kirby’s zany “I Think I Am Going to Call My Wife Paraguay” with its oddball points of comparison between the beloved and the nation (“My wife Paraguay and I / ourselves had to fight the War of the Triple Alliance, / although in our case / it wasn’t Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina / but Harry, Edward, and Maurice, her former boyfriends...”).
That flourish-forward, immediate pleasure of the exuberant love poem, though, has a counter in the understated staying power of the subdued love poem, such as, say, Josephine Jacobsen’s “Margins of Choice,” which draws its focus down to quietly observing the moment when, as you the beloved near death, I the lover “close with you, touch your skin, / your lips; / wake earlier, or lie awake, / look at you, look...” If the exuberant love poem leans into love’s novelty — you, my love, make the world new — the subdued love poem leans into love’s totality — you, my love, make the world the world.
It is into that latter category, the subdued love poem, that I would place Jean Nordhaus’s “Anniversary: A Large Enough Space,” a poem I expect to have staying power for me. In it, a speaker, after her husband’s death, looks back on their marriage. (I identify the speaker with Nordhaus herself: the poems in the collection read as autobiographical.) The poem starts with the couple’s wedding ceremony: “That morning, I was breathless,” Nordhaus writes. She knew she was committing to “something I could barely imagine.” The speaker’s inability to imagine the marriage before it happened is then juxtaposed with her inability to describe the marriage after her husband’s death has ended it. Both inabilities are expressions of wonder.
Characterizing the poem in that way makes it sound modest enough, but further reflecting on the craft of poem helps do more justice to its force. James Wood, discussing fiction, imputes to the point of view he calls “free indirect style” a peculiar power based on doubleness. In free indirect style, “we see things through the character’s eyes and language but also through the author’s eyes and language. We inhabit omniscience and partiality at once.” This point of view creates dramatic irony, enabling the reader “to see through a character’s eyes while being encouraged to see more than the character can see.”
For its peculiar poetic power, Nordhaus’s poem draws on a point of view one might call “identification-welcoming style,” based, like free indirect style, on doubleness. To deploy this style, an “I” in speaking of a “we” speaks at once to the other party of the “we” and about the other party to the reader. This style welcomes identification by placing the reader in two positions at once, the position of observer and the position of the beloved. Because of this style, I the reader experience intensely the love of this love poem because I am given access to it from two perspectives.
Speaking exclusively to the other party of the “we” (the husband who has died) happens once in the poem, early on. “You believed love, like wind, would / carry us. And it did.” From there on, everything can be read equally well as spoken to the departed husband, or spoken to the reader about the husband. So for example in the lines “Water washed over the gunwales. But / we had to make the mark, clear the point,” the “we” works either way, as meaning “you and I” or as meaning “he and I.” The reader’s identification with the beloved, created by the identification-welcoming style, helps give the poem’s subdued ending its staying power.
Now it is past. What
was it? I still can’t say—I only know
it was generous—an ocean of dizzying
steeps and soundless depths. It was a church
with its own ceremonies, a country
with a language only I speak.
It was a large enough space.
I focus thus on “Anniversary: A Large Enough Space” because I respond to it so strongly, but it can be taken as in some respects also representative of the whole collection. Nordhaus’s book is about people, and therefore about loves. And it is subdued throughout, patiently preparing moments of quiet observation and recollection and insight. I take the title poem of the first section as an ars poetica: the poems in the collection do operate
like fragments
of melody in Schubert calling
from the left hand
or the right, each one absolute
in grief or joy, yet joined
and chastened by the news of others.
Nordhaus’s poems are joined to and chastened by one another because her experiences are joined to and chastened by one another, and by the experiences of others. Which makes it humility rather than pretentiousness to see herself as a version of the sphinx’s riddle in the three stanzas of “I Was One.” In the first stanza, “I was one of these: / a swaddled bundle asleep on my back,” and so on through various aspects of childhood; in the second, she was various adult persons, such as “prairie schooner / bristling with children and frying pans”; and in the last stanza, she anticipates that “I’ll be one of these: / a cane-dibbler, a doughty dowager,” and so on through old age until she is “an odor, a whisper, / a breath among leaves.”
The joining and chastening of her experiences leads to the subdued-but-with-staying-power final observation in the book, the last stanza of its last poem.
The promised land can be anywhere, anything:
a message long-awaited, a continent, a cherished face,
a small house with the mortgage paid.