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He Loved.... This poem, from Anna Akhmatova’s first book Evening, is at first glance little more than two lists. The speaker’s husband, we are told, loves “Evensong, white peacocks/And old maps of America.” He “hated it when children cried,/He hated tea with raspberry jam/And women’s hysterics.” He loves three things that are generally not part of the routine of a marriage, and hates the things which are very much a part of that routine: the day-to-day work of raising children, a meal, the stereotyped hysteria of women. He loves the ornamental and hates the necessary. Yet Akhmatova uses syntax to complicate this apparently clear distinction. Rather than couple the fanciful subject matter of the first half of the poem with an indirect syntax, and the mundane subject matter of the second half with a direct one, she does the opposite. The first half of the poem is, in fact, remarkably straightforward in its sentence structure. “Evensong” and “white peacocks” are both simple modified nouns, one in that it is a compound noun and the other in that it is modified by an adjective. The phrase “old maps of America” begins with a modified noun as well, and the “of America” appended afterwards uses “of” in its most direct sense. The maps simply represent America, and this is a far closer relationship between the maps and America than that which could be created by other senses of “of” (the sense meaning “belonging to,” for example, or even the sense in which I just used “of” in this sentence). The second list, however, is far more indirectly constructed. The husband hates “it when children cry” rather than simply the cries themselves. The phrase “tea with raspberry jam” even becomes complex in such a simple poem; no link in the first list is so loose as this ambiguous “with”. (Tea with jam? Surely Akhmatova is referring to the combination of a cup of tea and toast with raspberry jam? Or perhaps the husband does not enjoy eating raspberry jam at teatime? What, in fact, does “with” mean here?) Finally, the women’s hysterics are the hysterics of women in a very different and more removed sense from that in which the old maps are maps of America. Trailing ellipses and a pathos-infused “And” bring us into the seventh line, where the “I” is finally stated. How different this introduction of the wife is from the first mention of the husband, where a colon clearly delineates the break between the first line and the second while directing us forcefully into the center of the poem. The husband even performs an action there (“He loved...”) as opposed to the wife’s actionless “I was....” The objects in the first half of the poem (the ornamental) become, to the poem and to the husband, the necessary, because the syntax with which they are discussed is so direct and strong. On the other hand, the daily necessities of life mentioned in the second hand of the poem become disposable. The routine ornaments the decorative in a marvelously subtle reversal of our expectations. The poem, one might suppose, could be another useless artifact or ornament of the marriage. After all, the wife’s domain (the daily, the mundane) seems inconsequential in a close reading; why would her poem have any more weight? Yet in the meticulous construction of the poem, we find that none of it is disposable. Each word, each small choice, bears witness to the perspective of the wife, and thus to the necessity of poetry itself to tell her story. It is a silent testimony— the wife does not say anything to the husband, does not even explicitly state her unhappiness to the reader—but vital just the same, the sort of testimony that Milosz later argued for in his 1983 The Witness of Poetry. Poetry, often maligned as useless, unnecessary, indirect, becomes in fact the only option, the most direct and the most necessary, and not at all ornament. So may we always see it here at 21 South Street.
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