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The Nineteenth Century as a Song

“How like a well-kept garden is your soul.”
   John Gray’s translation of Verlaine
& Baudelaire’s butcher in 1861
shorted him four centimes
on a pound of tripe.
He thought himself a clever man
and, wiping the calves’ blood from his beefy hands,   
gazed briefly at what Tennyson called
“the sweet blue sky.”

It was a warm day.
What clouds there were
were made of sugar tinged with blood.
They shed, faintly, amid the clatter of carriages   
new settings of the songs
Moravian virgins sang on wedding days.

    The poet is a monarch of the clouds

& Swinburne on his northern coast
“trod,” he actually wrote, “by no tropic foot,”
composed that lovely elegy
and then found out Baudelaire was still alive
whom he had lodged dreamily
in a “deep division of prodigious breasts.”

   Surely the poet is monarch of the clouds.   
    He hovers, like a lemon-colored kite,
   over spring afternoons in the nineteenth century

while Marx in the library gloom
studies the birth rate of the weavers of Tilsit
and that gentle man Bakunin,
home after fingerfucking the countess,   
applies his numb hands
to the making of bombs.
Robert Hass, “The Nineteenth Century as a Song” from Field Guide. Copyright © 1973 by Robert Hass. Reprinted with the permission of Yale University Press, http://www.yale.edu/yup/.
Source: Field Guide (1973)

Writing Ideas

  1. Write your own “19th Century as a—” poem; explore some 19th century (Victorian and Romantic) poems in the archive and, like Haas, begin to select quotations and poets (reading biographies might be useful also) to build your poem around. Think of a different noun to complete your title: what kind of object is your 19th century like?
     
  2. Try writing “The Twenty-first Century as a Song.” Like Haas, use reported speech from political as well as artistic figures. Think about what kind of “song” you think the 21st century is.

Discussion Questions

  1. What are some of the oppositions Haas seems to set up in this poem? In the opening lines translation conjures butchering; sugar becomes blood; poets hover above revolutionaries. Does Haas make these oppositions absolute? How does the poem create, overturn, or complicate the kinds of categories we normally think of as oppositional (earth/sky, art/war, rich/poor).
     
  2. How do time and place work in the poem? Joy Katz notes in her poem guide that “the poem unfolds in Europe, from about 1850 to 1870,” and sees evidence of Haas’s own time and place (California in the 1970s) in the lines as well. How does the poem conjure both a specific time and different locales? Where does it move and how? Think about how Haas uses repetition, syntax, and stanza breaks to guide readers.
     
  3. The poem depends on multiple allusions both to other poets and historical figures and events. Do you recognize the poets’ names? How does knowing (or not knowing) an allusion in a poem affect your understanding of it? Does reading some poems by Verlaine, Baudelaire, Swinburne and Tennyson alter your reaction to this poem? How?

Teaching Tips

  1. In what way does Haas’s poem depend on its readers also knowing the political and literary history of the 19th century? Do your students feel like they “get” the poem, even if they don’t know who Bakunin was, or why it is important that Swinburne loved Baudelaire’s work? Have a discussion on the work such allusions do and don’t do. Your discussion might open up onto other poems that depend on outside knowledge or reference—T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” is only the most famous, but other poems might include works by Ezra Pound or Geoffrey Hill (you might have your students read Ange Mlinko’s poem guide to “On Reading Crowds and Power”). Have students explore poems with both literary and historical allusions, either through the Poetry Foundation’s archive or in anthologies. Ask them to think about different kinds of allusions, and the different kinds of work that allusions do. Then stage a class debate: allusions in poems are good versus allusions in poems are bad. Have groups prepare opening remarks and 2-3 main points and rebuttals.
     
  2. Have your students listen to Robert Haas’s reading of this poem and ask them to think about what makes the poem a “song.” You could frame a discussion around techniques like refrain, rhythm (asking students to mark the accents and showing them how popular songs also depend on rhythmic language), and different kinds of rhyme. Or you could ask students to think about the two forms as overlapping genres, perhaps by comparing Haas’s poem to actual song lyrics. Ask students to think about when a poem is a song and when a song is a poem. What kinds of work does a poet achieve by calling her poem a song? And vice versa? As a final activity, students could attempt cross-genre experiments, either setting poems to music or attempting to read song lyrics as poems.
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