Nr. 2 (19) anul VI / aprilie-iunie 2008 - ROMDIDAC

Dustbowl growl, the song interminable, inept. Should he
Sing another? The eyes roll their half-hearted yes.
The nurse grits her teeth, stubs out the cigarette.
Although it employs the indirect speech, the sonnet stages Guthrie’s point
of view alternated with the one of the speaker as a classic (i.e., omniscient,
omnipresent) story-teller save for the Dylan character whose own perspective
is opaque to the speaker. In this respect, the syncopated tone and jagged
sentences are so much the more illustrative of Guthrie’s condition, hardly
gasping, with discontinuous reactions and thoughts. But no matter how
impaired, the established musician’s senses and judgment are 100% focused
(for lack of anything else if not for another better reason) on the young, just
emerging, but still awkward artist. This centrality and attention monopolizing
presence of a younger person reminds me of a classical sonnet, written
in a perfect Shakespearian form (– crossed rhymes and a final rhyming
couplet – whereas Wojahn’s one ‘kind of’ sticks to those rules and is perfect
in manipulating the imperfections of the deft inspirational slant-rhymes) – a
sonnet of Shakespeare himself, number 75:
So are you to my thoughts as food to life,
Or as sweet-season'd showers are to the ground;
And for the peace of you I hold such strife
As 'twixt a miser and his wealth is found;
Now proud as an enjoyer and anon
Doubting the filching age will steal his treasure,
Now counting best to be with you alone,
Then better'd that the world may see my pleasure;
Sometime all full with feasting on your sight
And by and by clean starved for a look;
Possessing or pursuing no delight,
Save what is had or must from you be took.
Thus do I pine and surfeit day by day,
Or gluttoning on all, or all away.
If we read Wojahn’s sonnet as a postmodern replica of the Shakespearean
one, or better, a translation of it into the language of fin-de-siècle pop culture,
we could discover relevant correspondences. The nurse may be read now as
the surrounding society that made the Shakespearian speaker fear he could
get “better’d that the world may see my pleasure,” and then the apparent
reluctance of Guthrie to receive or listen to the young Dylan may be interpreted
as a postmodern reenactment of the Renaissance poet’s oscillation between
glutting on the vigorous presence of the younger companion and abstaining
from indulging in such devouring pleasure. The “eyes [that] roll their halfhearted
yes” in the last but one line of Wojahn’s poem speak for themselves
in that very respect. But still, the Guthrie in the latter poet’s sonnet is the
speaker in Shakespeare’s one gone beyond that initial ‘innocent’ vacillation –
the Zeitgeist itself is now one of deep fatigue, lingering malaise and solipsistic
seclusion, so that the Renaissance sensual miserliness clings now only to the
remaining breaths, while the hedonistic gluttony has shrunk meanwhile into
just hardly hearing two songs that echo a possible fulfillment.
Caught -- the bubble
in the spirit level,
Ex Ponto nr.2, 2008
123