The Light Around the Body

Also of interest in today's incresingly frightening political climate is Robert Bly's The Light Around the Body (Harper & Row, 1967). It is an amazing book, straightforwardly political (and I might say, moral), passionate and sharp. Its target is not only the Vietnam War, but the whole of the Great Society, riddled with greed and almost unconscious consumerism, waste and destruction. In fact a poem entitled "The Great Society" is one of the most affecting in the book. Its first stanza sets the desolate scene:

"Dentists continue to water their lawns even in the rain;
Hands developed with terrible labor by apes
Hang from the sleeves of evangelists;
There are murdered kings in the light-bulbs outside movie theaters;
The coffins of the poor are hibernating in piles of new tires.

I'm not exactly sure about the import of the image in lines two and three, but the picture is painted. More desolation and political impotence end the poem without resolution, only sadness and anger:

"The city broods over ash cans and darkening mortar.
On the far shore, at COney Island, dark children
Play on the chilling beach: a sprig of black seaweed,
Shells, a skyful of birds,
While the mayor sits with his head in his hands."

"Sleet Storm on Merritt Parkway" has a perfect sense of suburban serenity, distrubed by trouble underneath, waiting to erupt:

"I think of the many comfortable homes stretching for miles,
Two and three stories, solid, with polished foors,
With white curtains in the upstairs bedrooms,
And small perfume flagons of black glass on the window sills,
And warm bathrooms with guest towels, and electric lights---
What a magnificent place for a child to grow up!
And yet the children end in the river of price-fixing,
Or, in the snowy field of an insane asylum.
The sleet falls, so many cars moving toward New York---"

This is such a perfect evocation of a time and place, and the last years of comfort with such times and places. The criticism is direct and sad, not harsh or self righteous. Only the word "flagon" seems out of place or inauthentic, recalling Robinson Jeffers. "Bottle" might have been better.

The most famous poems in the book are "The Counting of Small Boned Bodies" and "Driving Through Minnesota during the Hanoi Bombings." The angriest and one of the most effective is "At a March Againt the Vietnam War, Washington, November 27, 1965." This poem and the others in the Vietnam War section of the book are of course directly of their day and time, and the power with which they call up that day and time is their strength as poetry. Bly also displayed immense strength and courage by donating his check from an award (either the National Book Award or the Pulitzer?) to the War Resisters League and counseling in public, that young men do everything they could to avoid the draft. That these poems and actions are relevant again today is sad and frightening.

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A pretty good series of web pages on Bly, with separate discussions of many of his individual books, is written by William V. Davis a professor at Baylor University, and is/are available on a generically titled electronic reference site, Literary Encyclopedia (believe it or not). URL: http://www.litencyc.com . An unfortunate ellision occurs.