Ogden Nash - Salem Press

Critical Survey of Poetry Nemerov, Howard
and the Law deals mainly with the city, war, and death, it
also contains religious imagery and wit. His poems wail,
like an Old Testament lament—“I have become a gate/
To the ruined city, dry” (“Lot’s Wife”). The poems in
The Image and the Law exhibit ironic detachment as
well as seriousness, for to Nemerov “the serious and the
funny are one.” The dualism in the poems is suggested
in the title.
Guide to the Ruins has a broader scope than his first
collection and reveals artistic growth. The “ruins” are
those created in World War II, although the war is not
actually over. Again, there is duality in the poems; the
poet feels trapped between art-faith and science-reality,
but sides with neither wholeheartedly. His tension between
the two produces a Dostoevskian religious agony
that visits Christianity, but consistently returns to Judaism.
Several poems in Guide to the Ruins unite war and
religion into a pessimism that will become more evident
in later works. Paradoxically, and typical of his dualistic
vision, he celebrates life not only in spite of war but also
because of it.
The Salt Garden
The Salt Garden, while still exhibiting some derivation,
exhibits not only the poet’s own voice but also a
“center,” that center being Nemerov’s interest in nature.
True to his double vision, he contrasts “brutal” nature
with “decent” humankind. The link between the two is
found in liquids such as ocean and blood, which combine
into humankind’s “salt dream,” the call of the subconscious
toward wildness. The poems in The Salt Garden
range from a decent, rational man’s reflection on his
garden to the nightmarish, Freudian dream “The Scales
of the Eyes.” A brilliant combination of the “civilized”
and the “wild” is found in “I Only Am Escaped Alone to
Tell Thee.” By degrees, this poem shows the submerged
anguish of a prosperous nineteenth century woman. The
whalebone stays of her corset are a central image, leading
to other images of sea, mirrors, and light, until “the
black flukes of agony/ Beat at the air till the light blows
out.” The Salt Garden treats not only humanity, “brutal”
nature, and the link between the two, but death as a part
of “time’s ruining stream.” Water, sea, and blood are beyond
moral categories; they are the substance of life. In
this respect, according to Julia Bartholomay in The
Shield of Perseus: The Vision and Imagination of Howard
Nemerov (1972), Nemerov’s perspective is biblical. Water
is creative and purifying; it “sanctifies that which it permeates
and recreates, for all objects are but fleeting
forms on the changing surface of eternity.”
Mirrors and Windows
Nemerov’s interest in nature, which is first evident in
The Salt Garden, continues in The Next Room of the
Dream, Mirrors and Windows, and The Blue Swallows.
Nature, in these poems, has objective reality; it is never
merely a projection of human concerns. Like Robert
Frost, Nemerov not only describes nature as something
“other” than himself but also brings philosophical issues
into his nature poems. In Mirrors and Windows, Nemerov
indicates that poetry helps make life bearable by
stopping it in a frame (poem). It sheds no light upon the
meaning of life or death; it only reveals life’s beauty or
terror.
The Next Room of the Dream
The Next Room of the Dream, a collection of poems
and two verse plays, illustrates Nemerov’s decision to
stay close to what he calls in Journal of the Fictive Life
the “great primary human drama.” His plays Cain and
Endor, based on biblical themes, illustrate his humanitarianism
as well as his quest for ultimate truth. This
quest is ironically expressed in “Santa Claus,” which begins,
“Somewhere on his travels the strange Child/ Picked
up with this overstuffed confidence man,” and ends, “At
Easter, he’s anonymous again,/ Just one of the crowd
lunching on Calvary.”
Nemerov’s plays, however, provide no spiritual resolution
to man’s questions. Stanley Knock in The Christian
Century comments, “Nemerov succeeds only in revealing
the devastating emptiness of contemporary
beliefs.” The poem “Nothing Will Yield” sums up Nemerov’s
perception of human helplessness in the face of
reality; even art is no solution, although poets will continue
to speak “holy language” in the face of despair. In
The Next Room of the Dream, the poems become simpler,
with more precise natural descriptions and more
obvious compassion for humankind.
Nemerov’s dark vision mellows in his later work. In
two later collections of poetry, Gnomes and Occasions
and Sentences, the emphasis is spiritual, the tone elegiac.
In The Western Approaches: Poems, 1973-75, the
topics range from speculation about fate (“The Western
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