Solitary Observation Brought Back from a Sojourn in Hell
At midnight tears
Run into your ears.
– Louise Bogan
Your reading of & reaction to this poem are likely to depend on your reading of & reaction to its title, a title which is actually longer than the poem for which it sets the stage. Is this a solemn claiming of space for personal anguish? Or a melodramatically inflated bit of self-importance? As with panegyrics to Louis XIV or Stalin, is the rhetoric just slightly overheated enough so that some irony is intended (albeit with plausible deniability)? Or is interpretation here a matter of other factors – personality, gender (yours as well as the poet's), & maybe above all, age – coming into play?
It's probably significant that when I started remembering & considering this poem, I realized, when I looked it up, that I had over the years mentally rewritten the title into something much more understated & ironic. This is probably a function of the way aging (& whatever life experiences I have accumulated) plays against my naturally theatrical emotions: over the years, you get, or hope you get, a better sense of how you fit into the world, & how you fit in with other people, & adjust the temper of your temperament accordingly. (This is why some poems by Sylvia Plath that I loved when I was younger now strike me as ludicrously overblown & deeply narcissistic.)
Sojourn in Hell, in particular, sounded suspiciously grand when I read the poem this time around. A sojourn is a short stay or visit, & at least one website tells us that it is a fancy way of saying that: a borderline example of the sort of elevated "poetic" diction that many poets have tried to purge from their language. Of course the word does get used regularly enough (& to what extent, at least for an American, is the word elevated by association with the powerful figure of Sojourner Truth?).Hell, of course, is its own kind of ultimate; the word here is assuredly metaphoric, as Hell, assuming the poet believed in it, is famously a place you don't get out of. So to sojourn there does carry overtones associating the poet with epic heroes (Aeneas or Odysseus, for example), who visited the Underworld & returned, or with the even grander figure (for poets) of Dante, who walked through Hell, Purgatory, & Heaven & emerged to tell all.
What is this Hell the poet has undergone? It is unspecified, though it is surely hellacious. But we have no reason to think it's one of the more terrifying tragedies of our (or rather the poet's) time: genocide, gulags, bombings . . . . it appears to be ordinary, everyday human suffering: horrible for those undergoing it, but (& this is part of the misery), nothing grand or world-historical. The temptation (perhaps guided by the poet's gender, or just by the fact that she's a poet) is to assume there is some sort of romantic / sexual unhappiness going on, but there's nothing that narrows the situation that way. It could be any number of things: finances, regrets, aging, solitude . . . . What does it mean, in the aftermath of the Holocaust & the atomic bomb, to describe oneself as residing in Hell, even for a sojourn, when one is, as Bogan was, a lauded poet & in the culturally significant role of poetry critic for The New Yorker? I'm not saying that her deserved acclaim negates any private suffering: people, even outwardly successful ones, have the right to their own unhappiness. But does it push self-regard too far to sweep aside history & the daily news & proclaim one's own sorrow exemplary and perhaps unique? At one point does exalting one's own unhappiness become self-indulgent, even smug, & lacking in empathy for the widespread & considerable sufferings of other people?
Whatever this poet's Hell is, isolation, whether self-imposed or inflicted upon her, is clearly part of it: the first word here is solitary, & though it modifies observation, suggesting both an observation made in solitude & the one & only observation made during & brought out from the sojourn, the word carries over into our image of the poet: there is no one beside her at midnight to wipe away the ear-bound tears. Is it part of the hellaciousness of her condition that she is so isolated? Or is it just self-centered of her not to realize that her alienated misery is a condition shared by many, many other people? (And of course, the two propositions might both be true.)
Suggesting that the poet realizes there is a perhaps a bit of posturing in her title is the poem itself: a tight, lapidary, & very musical description of a specific bodily phenomenon: she is lying down, presumably in a bed since it's midnight, she is sleepless & crying, &, since she is lying down, the tears don't drip down her cheeks, they roll into her ears. This is an actual thing that happens; I have experienced it, & I assume most others have as well. There's something if not outright comic then lightly amusing about the misdirected tears pooling in her ears. (There might be a suggestion that her emotions are as misguided as the tears.)
Did she feel this irony at the time? Most likely not: would it be a sojourn in Hell if you were carrying that kind of self-awareness with you? But perhaps the self-awareness, or some part of it, was indeed there, & that's why she had a sojourn in Hell & not a permanent residency. Either way, some element of that self-awareness must have been with her, allowing her to make the observation. And it's the only thing she's says she's bringing back from this time: a distanced, elegantly phrased, slightly amused observation of a physical phenomenon caused by intense sorrow. The observation & its tone form a bit of a protective shell over an obviously rough & painful time, & perhaps that carapace hardening over her misery is something else she's brought back from the depths of her undefined Hell: a hardening, a self-removal, which is another outcome of aging & life experience.
I took this poem from The Blue Estuaries: Poems: 1923-1968 by Louise Bogan.
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