Paradiso

Alvin Feinman may very well be one of the most underrated, yet powerful, modern poets I have had the pleasure of reading. I found Feinman—not wholly unsurprisingly—through Prof. Harold Bloom, whose The Western Canon, Anxiety of Influence, How to Read Poetry, among many other works, I have read and still reread incessantly. Few critics (and thinkers for that matter; for that’s what Harold Bloom proved to be beyond anything else—and of the highest order), from Aristophanes to Emerson to Frank Kermode, have had as much influence on me as Harold Bloom; hence, when he writes well of a poet, I listen, and I read, and I dissect.

In the case of Alvin Feinman, I have read his only collection of poetry, published posthumously, Corrupted into Song, about as thoroughly as I have read any of our modern poets from Lowell to Bishop, from Frost to R. P. Warren—that is to the extent I have found myself swallowed up, whale-like (if I may use that simile), into the Feinmanic universe. He is a poet to be taken seriously and to be rigorously studied.

I have found myself obsessed with one Feinmanic poem in particular, “True Night”, the literary background of which, like most of Feinman’s poems, I know little, if anything, of. Like much of Feinman’s poetry, it is a complex poem which, with an almost Dickinsonian intensity, seems to be a process more than a fixed entity. One can read Feinman’s poems again and again, and with each reading uncover new depths. I have noted before in my Dissecting Dickinson issues that few poets can pack as much into a short poem as Dickinson—her cognitive capabilities are unmatched. And while Feinman might not be tête-à-tête with Dickinson (who is, anyway?) he is one of the few modern poets who has dared to try, and, on the whole, succeeded better than most.

I am aware Bloom critiques Feinman for never writing a true long-form poem like Whitman’s Song of Myself, Hart Crane’s The Bridge, or Stevens’s The Auroras of Autumn, but I, who am, granted, a late-comer to the Feinmanic “party”, as it were, find that Feinman’s refined, Dickinsonian meditations provide something to our modern tradition that has been largely missing since, well, the myth of Amherst herself.

Here is “True Night” accompanied by a line-for-line dissection which, on the whole, I have tried to keep as concise as possible as, with a poet of Feinman’s stature, one can easily get trapped in the endless, Dickinson-like wheel of interpretation.

True Night
So it is midnight, and all
The angels of ordinary day gone,
The abiding absence between day and day
Come like true and only rain
Comes instant, eternal, again:
As though an air had opened without sound
In which all things are sanctified,
In which they are at prayer—
The drunken man in his stupor,
The madman’s lucid shrinking circle;
As though all things shone perfectly,
Perfected in self-discrepancy:
The widow wedded to her grief,
The hangman haloed in remorse—
I should not rearrange a leaf,
No more than wish to lighten stones
Or still the sea where it still roars—
Here every grief requires its grief,
Here every longing thing is lit
Like darkness at an altar.
As long as truest night is long,
Let no discordant wing
Corrupt these sorrows into song.

L. 1-3:
So it is midnight, and all
The angels of ordinary day gone,
The abiding absence between day and day

Needless to say, what comes across upon first reading is l. 1 read in the light of the poem’s title: True Night. We are told, at an early stage, that for Feinman, what constitutes ‘true night’ is midnight (l. 1). We are at the mid-point or centre of the night, even, if you will, at the ‘height’ of night. We are as far removed from day as we possibly can be—the day that had just concluded, as well as the day that is to come. It is the point when: “The angels of ordinary day gone.” Notice how, as I mentioned above, Feinman follows in the footsteps of Dickinson, setting up a significant contrast in “ordinary day” vs. “true night”. What inaugurates the bridge between the two contrasts are the “angels”, that is to say, if the angels of ordinary day are gone, one must assume that the angels of true night will arrive at midnight.
L.3: “The abiding absence between day and day” is a line in which Feinman tells of the vacuum that exists between each day, one that is both timeless (absence) and very much temporal (between).

L. 4-8:
Come like true and only rain
Comes instant, eternal, again:
As though an air had opened without sound
In which all things are sanctified,
In which they are at prayer—

L. 4–5 are a continuation of “The abiding absence between day and day”; now, we are told it comes like “true and only rain”, and that it “comes instant, eternal, again.” As noted above, true night is “instant” (temporal), “eternal” (timeless) and it comes “again” (temporal). To be more specific: any given thing that is “instant” and “comes again” is by very definition temporal, as it works within time and space, while the eternal is just that: eternal—in opposition to time. Feinman’s true night feels like “eternity” and in a sense it acts like eternity between the days. Yet night itself is very much not, however much it feels like it, an eternal phenomenon. It arrives (to use a Heideggerian phrase) always-already “again” (l. 5).
L.6–8 describe this very timeless–temporal vacuum between day and day, a vacuum that is “soundless”—think of nocturnal quietude—”in which all things are sanctified”—that is to say, e.g.: night’s when we make love and night’s when the abuser strikes a blow. Feinman goes on to elaborate this in the following lines.

L. 9-14:
The drunken man in his stupor,
The madman’s lucid shrinking circle;
As though all things shone perfectly,
Perfected in self-discrepancy:
The widow wedded to her grief,
The hangman haloed in remorse—

“As though all things shone perfectly” is a wonderful continuation of l.7, meaning: it appears everything shines perfectly. We feel sanctified in our choices—be it the drunken man, the madman, or the later oppositions in “the widow wedded to her grief” or “the hangman haloed in remorse.” I use with deliberation “appear” as Feinman equally deliberately writes: “As though” and later in l. 12: “Perfected in self-discrepancy”—both lines suggest that in this vacuum/absence that feels eternal, cut off from the world of day-time, all is “at prayer—” (l. 8).
Or, for simplicity, to carve it in stone: Everything is at once what it is and what it is not.

L. 15-20:
I should not rearrange a leaf,
No more than wish to lighten stones
Or still the sea where it still roars—
Here every grief requires its grief,
Here every longing thing is lit
Like darkness at an altar.

Feinman does not want to change a single thing about this vividly and lucidly painted scene; instead he wishes to capture it. Not a leaf will be rearranged, no burdens (stones) will be lifted. The central question is, naturally: Why does the poet not want to change anything? Is it because Feinman sees the scene as a sort of perfectly made tableau? Or is he aware he cannot change it anyway—in other words: who can change or touch eternity? He finishes l. 20 with another opposition one could expect to see in a Dickinson poem: “Like darkness at an altar.” We are faced with what is traditionally known to be holy or sacred (the altar), suddenly dappled with darkness. It is a return to our initial inquiry: who is the night’s angels . . .? Who is this sacred entity Feinman alluded to . . .?—Well, I dare say it is us. It is ourselves; touched by this darkness, both the literal (night) and the figurative (emotions/grief). The ordinary angels (naturally, us as well . . .) have truly evaporated during “true night”, and the true angels will arise.

It is a statement that speaks directly to the core of human nature, almost in line with a Shakespearean soliloquy or a Montaigne essay.

L. 21-25

As long as truest night is long,
Let no discordant wing
Corrupt these sorrows into song.

The last stanza is exuberant and it postulates another Dickinsonian opposite (or, even, an irony)—As long as truest night is long (mind you “long”, logically, breaks with the proposition of the eternal, as anything within space and time cannot be eternal which, Feinman was well aware when writing this poem), we should not let any discordant wing corrupt the sorrow, of which Feinman has just fleshed out, into song.
It gives me réminiscences of Proust’s “Les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu’on a perdus” or “The only true paradise is a paradise that we have lost.” True Night is a poem that juxtaposes endlessly, and in the spirit of Dickinson, it sets up an interpretive scheme that must, in order to be fully understood, be viewed in the light of what a given thing/phenomenon is and is not (I think my essay on Hegel highlights this logic well).

That is to say,
Night is true, daylight is ordinariness—we come to ourselves within night which, traditionally and very much practically, is a vacuum of darkness, of grief, sorrow, but of love too, of warm bodies sleeping closely, of chitchats until the smallest hours. It is a space for the madman and for the grieving widow—it is a space for prayers and contemplation. It is, which is the line that most haunts me, “like darkness at an altar.”