Printer Friendly

Poetry: Katherine Hoskins.





Take, for example, the opening of a poem that, by the time its mere three stanzas close, has shown us the horrifying tableau of a woman (clearly a black woman) cradling in her arms a man who has been beaten to death, and whose head now is only" 'a sack of little bones.' "The poem is called "After the Late Lynching." (The asterisks, my own, are explained below.)

No, It goes not liquidly for any of us.(*) Yseult 's as hard as Troilus. Heloise is far away and Difficult. Nor's Death felicitous.(*) Not princes' proud defiant trumpets, Not good men's easyness With Death is not ours yet(*)

This elaborate stanza is faithfully repeated (though with approximate rhymes later on) throughout. Its tone is seemingly wry and disenchanted. It speaks of the old juxtaposition of Love and Death, and it does so by deliberate literary allusion. Yseult is given her medieval (not her Wagnerian) name to insist upon the antiquity of the conflict in which she played a part. Troilus and Heloise are both "far away and/ Difficult." It all seems artificial, legendary, highly literary in the most removed sense, and the poet knows exactly what she's doing.

But in addition to those famous names, there are also allusions in the lines I've starred with asterisks. The first is to a poem ("Philomela") by John Crowe Ransom, which I had occasion to comment on recently in these pages [WQ, Spring '94]. The allusion is important here. Philomela, too, was a victim of love and rape; she too was an ancient figure. In Ransom's poem we, in our modern era, are hopelessly severed from the grandeurs of music and of tragedy that her story and her song as a nightingale represent. There has been for Ransom, as for Hoskins, a crude and degenerate falling away from an earlier loveliness, though with no diminution of the world's horror.

The second starred line is meant to recall the dying words of Hamlet, who says to Horatio, "If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,/ Absent thee from felicity a while,/ And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,/ To tell my story." There is brilliant irony at work here. For Hamlet, death may seem felicity because life is repellent; for Hoskins, the death she is about to describe is almost too hideous to believe.

Finally, the third starred phrase concerns the death of good men as conceived by John Donne in a poem called "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning." The very title suggests its relevance to Hoskins's purpose. And her spelling of "easyness" is meant, once again, to confer the burnish of antiquity. Donne opens his poem thus:

As virtuous men pass mildly away, And whisper to their souls, to go, Whilst some of their sad friends do say, The breath goes now, and some say, no. . . .

The serene tranquility Donne allows to those who have a clean and untroubled conscience at the hour of death is, again, opposed by Hoskins to what is found in the world we moderns inhabit. The richness and ramifications of all her allusions serve as substructure and solid foundation for the modern horror she is ruthlessly planning to expose.

Readers properly equipped to get the most of Katherine Hoskins's poems will come upon her splendid "To Apollo Musagetes" (Apollo as leader of the Muses) and will find themselves compelled to think of Yeats's "The Circus Animals' Desertion," Coleridge's "Work Without Hope," Robert Lowell's "Epilogue" to his last book, and, finally, of Keats's self-composed epitaph: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."
COPYRIGHT 1994 Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Copyright 1994 Gale, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.

Article Details
Printer friendly Cite/link Email Feedback
Author:Hecht, Anthony
Publication:The Wilson Quarterly
Date:Jun 22, 1994
Previous Article:Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science.
Next Article:A merry meeting.
