Poetry and synthesis: the art of Samuel Menashe

Since publication of his first book, The Many Named Beloved (London: Golancz, 1961), little has been said about the work of Samuel Menashe. The MLA Bibliography doesn't even know he exists. With the exception of short essays by Donald Davie and Derek Mahon, the critical record concerning Menashe consists of reviews, in which he has been briefly praised by such figures as Austin Clarke, P. N. Furbank, Stephen Spender, and Hugh Kenner.(1) The poet himself has been obliged to provide the most comprehensive account of his intentions and accomplishments.(2)

Menashe's neglect becomes all the more striking when we consider how thoroughly his body of work exemplifies the synthesizing tendency prevalent in poetry since Wordsworth remarked in his preface to Lyrical Ballads that "the primary laws of our nature" could best be illuminated by attention to "the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement" (Wordsworth 39-40). More than a century later, Robert Frost called the excitement "enthusiasm," and carried the notion of association further. In "Education by Poetry" he observes that:

Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. (Frost 719)

He goes on to make an extraordinary claim. "I have wanted in late years to go further and further in making metaphor the whole of thinking" (Frost 720). Frost implies that the mind habitually generates metaphors, and by so doing makes what sense it can of the world. In other words, the mind's action is ineluctably a process of comparison and synthesis, of creating, as Frost remarks, "a gathering metaphor." (Even Charles Bernstein, while fulminating against a "common readership" or "a common standard of aesthetic judgment," finds himself speaking of poetic form as a matter of "putting things together, or stripping them apart" [1]; in other words, as acts of association or disassociation.) Menashe's work exemplifies the associational and synthesizing power that Wordsworth and Frost deem central to poetry. He habitually juxtaposes and marries otherwise conflicting or diverse discursive categories.

But if this is an old story with the poets, why single out Menashe for notice? At least part of his claim to our attention consists in the number of different kinds of categories he coordinates. We find him aligning the animate and the inanimate, the visible and the invisible, Hebrew and Christian tradition, the literary and the colloquial. Another, stronger claim on our attention is the exceptionally spare, rigorously economical means by which he accomplishes his synthetic legerdemain.

Of course, only a series of close readings of his poems will demonstrate what I mean. Let me begin with an untitled poem from the 1961 collection:

A flock of little boats Tethered to the shore Drifts in still water . . . Prows dip, nibbling (Collected Poems 50)

This poem's components are managed impeccably. The poem divides into two; lines 1 and 2 posit a stasis, lines 3 and 4 a dynamic. This effect arises from the disposition of nouns and verbs. Nouns in the first two lines ("flock," "boats," "shore") outnumber those in the last two ("water," "prows"). In contrast, verbs ("drifts," "dip") are pushed to the last two lines, along with the participle ("nibbling"). Furthermore, the stresses fall on the monosyllabic nouns ending lines 1 and 2, but the more fluid lines 3 and 4 end with trochees. This establishes a distinction between firm stress on stable materials (boats, shore) and the wavering stress on liquid (water) and process (nibbling). In terms of imagery, the poem successfully masquerades as a pastoral scene - but on water. With "flock" we are invited to see the little boats as so many aquatic sheep. Vocabulary aids the effect; animation is granted to the boats by virtue of the poem's observation that they drift in "still" water. To the eye, the water seems motionless. The boats therefore appear to be moving of their own volition. The act of observation itself is a covert subject of the poem. It gradually moves to a closer inspection of the scene, with attention shifting from the flock to the prows. This closer inspection of a particular part of the scene coincides with the narrowing in the number of syllables per line: 6, 5, 5, 4.

We could see in this early poem a debt to imagism. If, as Pound suggested, imagism was partly concerned with the appreciation of invisible energies, we might locate the unseen energy in the currents moving so imperceptibly that the boats appear to possess a life of their own. Yet the poem insists on finding vitality in this moving still life; it moves beyond imagism by locating the energy in the things themselves. The poem virtually erases the distinction between the animate and the inanimate. Or, to put it simply, we are in the presence of a poem that sees all things as living. We need no longer hunt for invisible energies; to Menashe they are limpidly present.