Born on January 16, 1923, Anthony Hecht became one of the most accomplished American poets of the generation shaped by the Second World War, combining extraordinary formal control with an unflinching awareness of cruelty, mortality, memory, and moral responsibility. His poems could be elegant, learned, witty, musical, and technically intricate, yet beneath their polished surfaces often lay some of the darkest subjects imaginable.
Hecht’s experience as an American infantryman in Europe transformed his understanding of both human nature and poetry. He saw combat and entered the Flossenbürg concentration camp shortly after its liberation, experiences that remained with him for decades and eventually entered some of his most important work. Rather than abandoning traditional poetic forms in response to modern horror, Hecht discovered that meter, rhyme, dramatic monologue, and carefully controlled language could make disturbing subjects even more powerful.
That tension became one of the defining qualities of his career. Beauty in a Hecht poem does not necessarily provide comfort. Sometimes beautiful language makes terrible knowledge harder to escape. Across collections including A Summoning of Stones, The Hard Hours, Millions of Strange Shadows, The Venetian Vespers, The Transparent Man, and The Darkness and the Light, Hecht repeatedly explored what happens when civilization’s most refined artistic traditions encounter evidence of civilization’s capacity for brutality.
🗽 Growing Up in New York
Anthony Evan Hecht was born in New York City on January 16, 1923, into a prosperous German-Jewish family. He grew up in an educated household and attended private schools, although he later described himself as an indifferent student during much of his youth. Literature did not immediately appear to offer him an obvious vocation.
That changed as he entered adulthood. Hecht enrolled at Bard College in 1940, where the intellectual atmosphere gave him greater confidence and encouraged his interest in poetry. Those college years introduced him to writers and teachers who took literature seriously as both an art and a discipline, and Hecht gradually began imagining a life centered on words.
The timing could hardly have been more consequential. The United States entered the Second World War in December 1941, and Hecht’s education would soon be interrupted by military service. The young man beginning to discover poetry was about to encounter experiences that would alter the subjects he believed poetry needed to confront.
⚔️ The Second World War
Hecht was drafted into the United States Army and served as an infantryman in Europe. He fought in France, Germany, and Czechoslovakia during the final stages of the war, experiencing combat directly rather than observing it from a protected distance.
Military service exposed him to fear, exhaustion, destruction, and death on a scale that differed radically from his earlier life. Like many veterans, Hecht did not immediately transform those experiences into art. Years would pass before he found a poetic language capable of approaching them.
One event proved especially difficult to absorb. Hecht’s unit became involved in the liberation of the Flossenbürg concentration camp in Germany. Because he spoke some French, he was assigned to interview surviving French prisoners and gather testimony about what had happened there.
The encounters left a lasting psychological mark. Hecht later spoke about nightmares connected with what he had witnessed and heard. The concentration camp experience became part of a larger awareness that educated societies, cultivated traditions, religion, music, art, and philosophical sophistication provided no automatic protection against organized cruelty.
That realization would eventually enter the center of his poetry.
🕯️ Flossenbürg and the Problem of Writing About Atrocity
For a poet as deeply committed to beauty and formal skill as Hecht, the Holocaust created an enormous artistic problem. How could carefully constructed verse address extreme suffering without making suffering aesthetically pleasing? How could a poet write about victims without turning their deaths into material for personal artistic display?
Hecht never solved those questions once and for all, and his strongest poems often retain the discomfort. The elegance of the language exists alongside the horror rather than resolving it.
This tension became particularly important in poems associated with The Hard Hours. Hecht could use meter and rhyme to create order, but the subjects repeatedly demonstrate that human experience itself does not necessarily possess moral order.
The poem may be controlled.
The world it describes is not.
That contradiction gave Hecht a distinctive place among American poets writing in the decades after the war.
📚 Returning to College
After leaving the Army, Hecht resumed his education. He eventually attended Kenyon College in Ohio, where the poet and critic John Crowe Ransom had created an unusually rich literary environment around The Kenyon Review.
Ransom belonged to an older generation of poets and critics who valued close attention to language, meter, structure, and literary tradition. Those values suited Hecht’s developing temperament. Rather than treating technique as something that limited emotional expression, Hecht increasingly saw technique as the means through which difficult emotions could be made bearable enough to examine.
Kenyon also brought him into contact with a remarkable network of writers associated with mid-century American poetry. Figures such as Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Allen Tate belonged to the broader literary world through which Hecht moved as his career developed.
Hecht was entering a generation deeply concerned with what poetry could become after modernism, war, and the collapse of many older cultural certainties.
His answer would remain rooted in craft.
🏛️ Rome and Europe
Europe remained important to Hecht after the war, although his later relationship with the continent was profoundly different from his wartime experience. He received opportunities to study and travel abroad, including time connected with the American Academy in Rome.
Italy offered art, architecture, history, landscape, classical culture, and literary traditions that would repeatedly enter his poetry. Hecht became a deeply cosmopolitan writer, comfortable drawing upon Greek mythology, Renaissance painting, French literature, biblical stories, Shakespeare, and the long traditions of English verse.
Such erudition occasionally led critics to describe his early poetry as overly ornate. Hecht knew a great deal, and his poems sometimes made that knowledge conspicuous.
Yet his learning was not decorative in the long run. Art history, myth, religion, and literature became ways of testing the claims civilizations make about themselves.
A culture capable of producing beautiful things was not necessarily a humane culture.
Hecht had seen the evidence.
📖 A Summoning of Stones
Hecht’s first poetry collection, A Summoning of Stones, appeared in 1954. The book displayed the formal skill, literary knowledge, and elaborate vocabulary that would characterize much of his career, but it also reflected a poet still discovering how to make those qualities serve his deepest subjects.
Some critics admired the sophistication while finding the style excessively ornate. Hecht himself later became more selective about the early work, omitting some poems from subsequent collections.
The difference between A Summoning of Stones and his later poetry is important because Hecht did not simply arrive with a finished voice. His technical abilities were already impressive, but the relationship between technique and experience continued evolving.
The breakthrough would come more than a decade later.
By then, Hecht had discovered how to place extraordinary control beside experiences that threatened control itself.
⏳ The Hard Hours
Published in 1967, The Hard Hours transformed Hecht’s reputation and became one of the defining books of his career. The collection brought a harsher clarity to subjects that included war, death, cruelty, childhood, religion, and historical violence.
The title suggests the emotional territory immediately. These are poems concerned with moments when ordinary assurances fail and human beings confront realities they would rather avoid.
Hecht’s style had become more direct without abandoning formal sophistication. Meter and rhyme remained available, but they no longer seemed designed primarily to demonstrate elegance. Instead, structure could create pressure, forcing disturbing material into shapes whose beauty intensified rather than softened what they contained.
The collection won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
For Hecht, the award marked not the end of a career but the beginning of the period in which his mature achievement became unmistakable.
🔦 “More Light! More Light!”
One of Hecht’s best-known poems, “More Light! More Light!,” demonstrates the terrible effectiveness of his mature style. The poem places historical acts of execution and atrocity beside one another, eventually confronting a wartime episode in which people are forced into an impossible moral situation under threat of death.
Hecht refuses easy consolation. The title evokes light, a traditional symbol of truth, knowledge, religious revelation, and moral clarity, but the poem repeatedly shows a world in which such illumination fails to arrive when human beings need it most.
This is characteristic of Hecht. Cultural traditions provide symbols of order, but history repeatedly tests whether those symbols are adequate.
The poem’s formal control intensifies the horror precisely because the language refuses to become chaotic. Violence occurs within carefully shaped lines, forcing readers to confront the disturbing fact that barbarity and civilization are not always opposites.
The same society can contain both.
👦 “The Book of Yolek”
Another of Hecht’s powerful poems connected with Holocaust memory is “The Book of Yolek.” Rather than attempting to represent millions of victims simultaneously, the poem narrows attention toward a single child.
This movement from the enormous to the individual is essential. Statistics communicate scale, but individual lives create emotional recognition. A number can become impossible to imagine, while one child can restore the human dimension that numbers risk obscuring.
Hecht understood the moral power of specificity. The murdered child cannot stand for every victim in any complete sense, because every victim had an individual life that cannot be replaced by a symbol. Yet poetry can insist upon remembering one name rather than allowing mass death to become abstraction.
The poem also confronts the reader with memory as responsibility. Historical events are not finished simply because the people who experienced them are gone.
Someone living later must remember.
🌊 “The Dover Bitch”
Hecht possessed a playful and irreverent side that can be overlooked when attention focuses exclusively on the wartime poems. One of his most famous examples is “The Dover Bitch,” a comic and deliberately deflating response to Matthew Arnold’s celebrated Victorian poem “Dover Beach.”
Arnold’s poem uses the English Channel and the sound of retreating waves to create a meditation on faith, uncertainty, love, and the modern world. Hecht revisits the scene from another perspective and punctures some of its solemnity by imagining the woman listening to the male poet’s grand philosophical reflections.
The result demonstrates Hecht’s ability to engage literary tradition without treating it reverently. He knew the canon intimately, but knowledge gave him permission to argue with it.
That relationship with earlier literature appears throughout his career.
He could admire a poem deeply and still tease it.
🎭 The Dramatic Monologue
Hecht frequently used dramatic monologues, allowing invented or historical speakers to reveal themselves through their own language. The form gave him a way to explore psychology while maintaining distance between poet and speaker.
That distance was important because Hecht rarely wanted poetry to become uncomplicated autobiography. Even when personal experience stood behind a poem, he often transformed it through persona, historical reference, narrative, or formal structure.
Dramatic monologue also allowed him to explore morally difficult consciousness. A speaker can be intelligent and self-deceiving at the same time. Someone can speak beautifully while revealing something disturbing about themselves.
Hecht understood that eloquence is not evidence of virtue.
Indeed, some of his work depends upon the troubling possibility that terrible ideas can arrive in beautiful language.
🎼 Formal Poetry in a Changing Era
Hecht emerged during a period when American poetry was rapidly expanding its formal possibilities. Free verse had long since become established, while the 1950s and 1960s saw the growth of Beat poetry, confessional poetry, Black Arts poetry, experimental writing, and numerous movements skeptical of inherited forms.
Hecht continued using rhyme, meter, sonnets, sestinas, dramatic monologues, and other traditional structures without behaving as though literary history had stopped before modernism.
His formalism was not nostalgic.
He had no illusion that an orderly poem implied an orderly universe.
Instead, traditional forms became containers sturdy enough to hold disorder.
The contrast could make the poems more unsettling. A rhyme arrives exactly where expected even while the subject describes a world in which justice does not.
For Hecht, technique was not escape.
It was confrontation under discipline.
🌑 Beauty and Darkness
One of the central paradoxes of Hecht’s work is the relationship between beauty and suffering.
Readers often expect beautiful art to provide pleasure, consolation, or transcendence. Hecht understood those possibilities, but he also distrusted them. Beauty can make people attentive, yet it can also tempt them to admire the artwork while forgetting the suffering it describes.
His poems repeatedly test this danger.
Can artistic beauty bear witness?
Can a poem acknowledge suffering without exploiting it?
Does formal elegance clarify horror or place an unacceptable distance around it?
Hecht does not reduce these questions to theory.
The poems enact them.
Readers experience the beauty and discomfort simultaneously.
🌒 Millions of Strange Shadows
Hecht continued developing his mature voice in Millions of Strange Shadows, published in 1977. The collection explores memory, history, mortality, art, family, and the persistent shadows cast by earlier experiences.
By this stage, Hecht had become unmistakably himself. Literary allusion remained important, but the erudition had become integrated into a larger emotional architecture.
The past in Hecht’s poetry is rarely safely past. A work of art can reopen history. A landscape can carry memory. A biblical story can illuminate contemporary cruelty, while a contemporary event can alter the way an ancient story is read.
His poetry repeatedly collapses the comfortable distance between eras.
Human beings change their technologies.
Their moral problems prove more persistent.
🌆 The Venetian Vespers
Published in 1979, The Venetian Vespers contains some of Hecht’s most ambitious work. Venice, with its beauty, history, architecture, decay, art, and association with mortality, provided an ideal imaginative landscape for a poet fascinated by the coexistence of elegance and darkness.
The city itself can seem almost designed for Hecht’s sensibility. Magnificent buildings rise from water. Splendor exists alongside erosion. Art promises permanence while physical structures slowly decay.
The collection uses such contradictions to explore history, aging, memory, and cultural inheritance. Hecht’s Europe is never merely picturesque because his wartime experience prevents him from treating European civilization as an uncomplicated monument to achievement.
Beauty survives.
So does history.
The two cannot always be separated.
😄 Hecht’s Sense of Humor
The seriousness of Hecht’s major subjects can obscure how funny he could be. He loved wordplay, parody, comic verse, literary jokes, and elaborate verbal games.
One especially playful example was his work with poet John Hollander on Jiggery-Pokery: A Compendium of Double Dactyls. The double dactyl is a deliberately restrictive comic verse form built around an absurdly demanding rhythmic and verbal pattern.
Such exercises might seem far removed from poems about war and death, but they reveal another side of the same fascination with formal structure.
Rules can create gravity.
Rules can also create comedy.
Hecht enjoyed both possibilities.
The poet capable of extraordinary solemnity never lost his delight in what language could do when treated as a game.
👨🏫 Teaching Poetry
Teaching became a major part of Hecht’s life. He held positions at several colleges and universities and spent eighteen years on the faculty of the University of Rochester, from 1967 to 1985.
His classrooms reflected the same qualities visible in his criticism and poetry: close attention to language, deep knowledge of literary tradition, and a belief that poems deserved careful reading.
Hecht did not approach poetry as spontaneous emotional expression alone. Words have histories. Forms carry expectations. Rhythms create effects. Allusions establish relationships across centuries.
To read well therefore required patience.
To write well required even more.
His influence extended through generations of students who encountered not only a major poet but an unusually attentive reader.
🏆 The Bollingen Prize
In 1973, Hecht received the Bollingen Prize in American Poetry, adding another of the country’s major literary honors to the Pulitzer Prize he had received several years earlier.
Additional awards followed throughout his career, including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Frost Medal, and other major recognitions.
Awards mattered, but Hecht’s reputation rested increasingly on the consistency of the work itself. He had become one of the poets other poets studied for technique.
His control of meter and sound was particularly admired.
Yet technique alone never explains why poems survive.
Hecht’s formal mastery mattered because it served an imagination preoccupied with questions that did not become easier simply because the lines were beautiful.
🇺🇸 Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress
From 1982 to 1984, Hecht served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, the position later renamed U.S. Poet Laureate.
The appointment placed him within a distinguished lineage of American poets charged with promoting poetry and participating in the nation’s literary life. It also reflected how dramatically his position had changed since the publication of his first collection.
The young poet once criticized for excessive ornament had become a major representative of American poetry.
Hecht used the role not simply as ceremonial recognition but as an extension of his lifelong commitment to reading, criticism, teaching, and literary conversation.
His lectures and recordings preserved by the Library of Congress also allow later readers to hear the poet discussing and reading the art that occupied his life.
📘 The Hidden Law and W. H. Auden
Hecht was an accomplished literary critic as well as a poet, and W. H. Auden became one of the writers to whom he returned most thoughtfully.
His study The Hidden Law: The Poetry of W. H. Auden examines a poet whose mixture of technical brilliance, moral seriousness, wit, politics, religion, and intellectual range held obvious attractions for Hecht.
The connection between the two poets illuminates Hecht’s own work. Both understood that formal poetry could remain intensely modern. Both moved comfortably between comic and serious registers, and both were suspicious of easy moral certainty.
Hecht’s criticism frequently feels like the work of one craftsman examining another. He was interested not only in what poems said but in how their structures allowed them to say it.
Close reading was for him a form of respect.
📚 Obbligati and the Critic’s Mind
Hecht collected many of his essays in Obbligati, published in 1986. His criticism ranged across poets and playwrights including Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Emily Dickinson, Shakespeare, and others.
The title itself suggests his musical sensibility. An obbligato is an essential accompanying part, and criticism for Hecht could be understood as a companion to poetry rather than a replacement for it.
He approached literary works with patience and precision, tracing patterns of sound, image, structure, allusion, and meaning. His criticism rarely treats a poem as a simple container from which a message can be extracted.
The poem means through its construction.
Change the structure and the meaning changes.
That belief explains both his demanding criticism and his meticulous poetry.
🪟 The Transparent Man
Published in 1990, The Transparent Man demonstrated that Hecht’s late career retained remarkable imaginative power. The collection returned to mortality, illness, memory, history, and the fragile body while continuing to experiment with voice and dramatic situation.
Its title suggests visibility and disappearance simultaneously. To become transparent is to be seen through, but it is also to become less substantial.
Such contradictions suited an aging poet increasingly aware of mortality.
Yet Hecht’s later work does not simply withdraw into private contemplation. History remains present, as do art, religion, family, and the moral questions that had occupied him for decades.
Age changes the angle of vision.
It does not erase the earlier shadows.
🌗 Darkness and Light
Hecht’s 2001 collection The Darkness and the Light returns in its title to an opposition that runs through much of his career.
Light traditionally suggests knowledge, goodness, revelation, and hope.
Darkness suggests ignorance, death, evil, concealment, and fear.
Hecht rarely accepts those symbolic meanings without complication.
Knowledge does not necessarily save people.
Civilization does not guarantee goodness.
Faith does not eliminate suffering.
Beauty does not erase violence.
Yet his poetry is not simply nihilistic. The act of paying attention remains meaningful. Memory matters precisely because forgetting would be easier. Art matters because it can force readers to encounter experiences they might otherwise turn away from.
Hecht does not promise that poetry redeems suffering.
He demonstrates that poetry can refuse to ignore it.
📖 Melodies Unheard
In 2003, near the end of his life, Hecht published Melodies Unheard: Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry. The collection brought together decades of thinking about how poems create meaning through rhythm, form, sound, allusion, and structure.
By then, Hecht had spent a lifetime as both maker and reader.
That combination gave his criticism unusual authority. He knew formal technique not merely from study but from the experience of struggling with it on the page.
He also understood that explanation has limits.
A poem can be analyzed extensively without being exhausted.
Something remains after criticism has identified patterns and structures.
That remainder may be one reason people continue reading poems instead of replacing them with explanations.
🏛️ A Poet of Civilization and Its Failures
Hecht is sometimes described as highly civilized, and the word fits his literary range. His work draws freely from painting, music, classical mythology, scripture, European languages, drama, history, and centuries of poetry.
Yet few poets were more suspicious of the comforting implications hidden inside the word “civilized.”
The Second World War had shown him that a culture capable of producing philosophy, music, literature, and art could also organize industrial-scale murder.
Civilization and barbarism were not securely separated.
Hecht’s poetry lives inside that disturbing knowledge.
He values art deeply without imagining that art automatically makes people good.
He values intelligence without confusing intelligence with morality.
He values tradition without pretending tradition is innocent.
That complexity gives his work much of its lasting force.
🧠 Memory as an Obligation
Memory in Hecht’s poetry is rarely comfortable nostalgia.
To remember can be painful.
To remember can also be necessary.
War survivors carry memories they did not choose, while later generations inherit the responsibility of remembering events they did not witness.
Hecht’s poems repeatedly ask what should be done with such knowledge.
Forgetting may offer psychological relief, but collective forgetting creates another danger. History loses the individual faces that make atrocity comprehensible.
The poet therefore becomes a custodian of difficult memory.
He cannot repair what happened.
He can insist that it happened to someone.
🎵 The Music of Formal Control
Hecht’s command of meter and sound was among the most admired aspects of his writing. Even readers unfamiliar with technical prosody can often hear the deliberate balance of his lines.
The musical quality creates an unusual tension when the subject is violent or frightening. Language continues to move beautifully through scenes that resist beauty.
This is not accidental decoration.
The contrast forces readers to remain attentive.
Prose can sometimes tell us that something terrible happened and allow the eye to move quickly onward. Hecht’s formal structures slow that movement.
The reader must stay with the sentence.
The poem controls the pace.
Attention becomes a moral act.
🪞 The Difference Between Poet and Speaker
Hecht’s dramatic skill also reminds readers that the speaker of a poem should not automatically be confused with the poet who wrote it.
He enjoyed creating masks, voices, historical perspectives, and characters whose assumptions could differ radically from his own.
This approach creates interpretive complexity. A speaker may reveal more than intended. A polished argument may contain moral blindness. An apparently sympathetic voice may gradually become unsettling.
Hecht trusted readers to recognize these differences.
The technique also allowed him to investigate aspects of human behavior without reducing poetry to personal confession.
The poem becomes a small theater.
Language enters wearing a costume.
🕯️ The Final Years
Hecht remained active as a poet, critic, teacher, and literary figure throughout his later years. He lived in Washington, D.C., continued publishing, and received some of the most prestigious honors available to an American poet.
He died on October 20, 2004, at the age of 81.
By then, he had published eight major poetry collections and a substantial body of criticism. His work stretched across more than half a century, from the ornate early poems of A Summoning of Stones to the grave, reflective poems of his later years.
A poet once shaped by wartime Europe had spent the remainder of his life asking what language could responsibly make of what he had learned there.
He never settled for an easy answer.
📚 Hecht’s Place in American Poetry
Anthony Hecht occupies an unusual position in postwar American poetry because he combines qualities literary history sometimes treats as opposites.
He is formal and modern.
Learned and emotionally direct.
Comic and grave.
Traditional and deeply suspicious of tradition’s moral claims.
His work stands apart from the confessional poetry associated with Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, yet Hecht also drew upon personal trauma. He simply transformed it through historical distance, dramatic voice, literary allusion, and form.
That distance did not necessarily make the poetry less personal.
Sometimes it made the underlying emotion harder to escape.
Hecht understood that restraint could intensify feeling.
🌒 Reading Anthony Hecht Today
Hecht’s poetry asks a great deal of readers. His poems may contain biblical references, Renaissance art, Greek mythology, French literature, traditional meter, obscure historical details, or conversations with poems written centuries earlier.
That difficulty is real.
It is also part of the reward.
Hecht believed poems could assume readers were capable of attention. He did not simplify every reference in advance or remove complexity to make the path easier.
At the same time, the deepest subjects of his work require no specialized training to understand.
Fear.
Cruelty.
Memory.
Death.
Love.
Guilt.
Beauty.
The desire to make meaning after terrible events.
The scholarship surrounding the poems is extensive, but the human problems at their center remain immediate.
🎂 Remembering Anthony Hecht
Born in New York City on January 16, 1923, Anthony Hecht began adulthood during a historical catastrophe that permanently altered his understanding of human beings and the culture they create. He served as an infantryman in Europe, encountered survivors of Flossenbürg concentration camp, returned to literary study, and eventually transformed experiences that had haunted him into some of the most formally accomplished poetry of postwar America.
His career extended far beyond war poetry. He wrote about art, love, family, aging, religion, myth, literature, cities, childhood, mortality, and the endless conversation between contemporary writers and the poets who preceded them. He could respond irreverently to Matthew Arnold, study W. H. Auden with enormous seriousness, construct intricate formal poems, and collaborate on deliberately ridiculous double dactyls.
The range matters because Hecht was never merely a poet of darkness.
He was a poet fascinated by what light can and cannot reveal.
His poems do not promise that art can redeem history, that beauty can justify suffering, or that knowledge guarantees wisdom. They offer something more demanding: sustained attention to experiences we might prefer not to examine.
Hecht gave terrible subjects beautiful forms without pretending that beauty made them less terrible. That tension became his signature.
The lines remain controlled.
The darkness remains visible.
And the reader is asked to keep looking.
One of his most famous poems, The Dover Bitch, is a reply to Matthew Arnold’s poem Dover Beach, a poem where Arnold decries the declining world and “Sea of Faith.” In The Dover Bitch, Hecht offers a humorous, imaginative perspective of the female companion to which Dover Beach was addressed. Here are both poems for consideration:
Dover Beach
By Matthew Arnold
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
The Dover Bitch
By Anthony Hecht
A Criticism of Life: for Andrews Wanning
So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, ‘Try to be true to me,
And I’ll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc., etc.’
Well now, I knew this girl. It’s true she had read
Sophocles in a fairly good translation
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,
But all the time he was talking she had in mind
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck. She told me later on
That after a while she got to looking out
At the lights across the channel, and really felt sad,
Thinking of all the wine and enormous beds
And blandishments in French and the perfumes.
And then she got really angry. To have been brought
All the way down from London, and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.
Anyway, she watched him pace the room
And finger his watch-chain and seem to sweat a bit,
And then she said one or two unprintable things.
But you mustn’t judge her by that. What I mean to say is,
She’s really all right. I still see her once in a while
And she always treats me right. We have a drink
And I give her a good time, and perhaps it’s a year
Before I see her again, but there she is,
Running to fat, but dependable as they come.
And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d’ Amour.
