Contents: IntroductionPoem Text Poem Summary Themes Style Critical Overview Sources Further Reading |
Criticism
Chris Semansky
Semansky publishes widely in the field of twentieth-century poetry and culture. In the following essay, he considers what is gained and what is lost in Justice’s revision of his poem.
Many reasons can dictate why writers revise their work after it has been published: psychological distance from subject matter, a change in aesthetics, a belief that a poem is never finished. Donald Justice is an inveterate reviser of his own writing. Like Yeats, he believes that revising is a lifelong process and that his poems can always be better. For his Selected Poems, Justice revised a number of poems and “Incident in a Rose Garden” substantially. The changes Justice made, however, effectively create a new poem.
The first version of the poem is written as a mini-drama. Three characters interact with one another through dialogue. No narrator intervenes to comment on the action or to describe the setting. It is a spare, elliptical poem, which succeeds because it shows rather than tells the reader what to see. The revised version changes to the master’s first person point of view, adds a little explanatory apparatus to the dialogue, and deepens a secondary theme. The poem opens now with these new lines:
The gardener came running,An old man, out of breath.
Fear had given him legs.
Adding this information allows readers to see the gardener as an old man before Death mentions this fact in his own speech. It also adds action, something the previous version of the poem didn’t have. Readers can see the old man running, afraid. After the gardener’s words, the master says, “We shook hands; he was off.” This revision tells readers that the poem is told from the master’s point of view. All subsequent information must be evaluated in light of this detail. The revised version demands that readers be aware that everything they see is seen through the master’s eyes. Not only does the master want others to see him as an understanding person, who can empathize with his gardener, but we must also now see Death through the master’s eyes as well. The revised version prefaces the master’s dialogue with these eleven lines:
And there stood Death in the garden,Dressed like a Spanish waiter.
He had the air of someone
Who because he likes arriving
At all appointments early
Learns to think himself patient.
I watched him pinch one bloom off
And hold it to his nose —
A connoisseur of roses —
One bloom and then another.
They strewed the earth around him.
These changes have several effects: they deepen the characterization of both Death and the master, and they make what was previously a secondary theme — the relationship of death to beauty — a primary one. By providing more details about Death, Justice creates a character who transcends type. He is almost a dandy here, an aesthete with an inflated sense of himself. But the master’s psychological insight into Death’s behavior also tells us something about himself. By describing Death as someone “Who because he likes arriving / At all appointments early / Learns to think himself patient,” the master shows his ability to read others. This is significant because it makes the reversal at the end of the poem all the more poignant. His insight into Death’s demeanor doesn’t make him any less vulnerable to Death; it merely makes the fact that he is not Death’s master, as he assumes, more ironic. Death’s preoccupation with the roses also highlights the idea that beauty only exists because death exists. The very temporal nature of life enables people to experience beauty. Wallace Stevens, whose own poetry influenced Justice’s, sums up this thought in these lines from his famous poem “Sunday Morning”:
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
For Stevens, Death has a feminine character. “She” gives birth to beauty, to all the moments of inspiration and feeling human beings experience. For Justice, Death is a male who arrives for appointments early. He is all business, and he takes pleasure in that business. His smelling of the roses is rife with allusions and meaning. It plays off the popular saying that people should “stop and smell the roses,” meaning that people should not be all about work but should take time to enjoy the good things in life. Justice’s depiction of Death here also underscores Stevens’s notion that without death, there could be no beauty. Like human beings, roses die.
The last revision Justice made also deepens a reader’s image of Death. Before Death is allowed to speak, the master reports his depiction of it:
Death grinned, and his eyes lit upWith the pale glow of those lanterns
That workmen carry sometimes
To light their way through the dusk.
Now with great care he slid
The glove from his right hand
And held that out in greeting,
A little cage of bone.
These details are true to type. Death appears, as the gardener says, like he does in his pictures. Many of the conventional personifications of death, such as the grim reaper, depict him as an emaciated figure or a skeleton either with black hollow eyes or with eyes that burn. Personifications of death appear in almost all cultures and religious traditions. In the Judeo-Christian-Islamic world, the Angel of Death was called Azrael. Seker was the name for death in ancient Egypt. The Greek personification of death, known as Thanatos, had a twin brother, Morpheus, the god of sleep, while the Romans had Orcus, a thin, pale figure with huge black wings.
The added detail of Death reaching out to shake the master’s hand links the revised version of the poem to stories about how death takes his victims. Sammael, the Angel of Death in Jewish folklore, stands above the victim’s head, a sword with a suspended drop of poison at its tip, poised to strike. In other incarnations Death carries a rod of fire, a shaft of light, a knife or, like Justice’s Death, a scythe. Death in Justice’s poem, however, isn’t violent, just matter of fact. His demeanor is gentlemanly, almost businesslike. His handshake, not his scythe, is his weapon. A significant detail in Justice’s description is that Death wears gloves. Gloves are a marker of the dress of aristocrats, of people of privilege. This detail highlights the fact that Death is more like the master than not.
The revised version of the poem not only adds more information about the characters and changes the emphasis of the poem’s theme, but it also establishes a more personal tone. The voice of the master knows Death more intimately, as do readers. By drawing out the encounter between the master and Death, Justice creates a kind of slow-motion scene. The “care” with which Death attempts to physically befriend the master, presages the master’s own death. The problem with this revision, of course, is the same as the problem with the movies Sunset Boulevard and American Beauty: it is narrated by a dead man.
Justice himself was more than a decade older when he revised “Incident in a Rose Garden,” so readers might legitimately infer that his revisions are informed, at least in part, by the writer’s own experience and growing intimacy with the encroaching inevitability of death. The changes in the poem, then, reflect Justice’s own creeping mortality.
Source: Chris Semansky, Critical Essay on “Incident in a Rose Garden,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
What Do I Read Next?
- Justice dedicated “Incident in a Rose Garden” to poet, friend, former student, and former Poet Laureate of the United States, Mark Strand. Like Justice, Strand frequently writes about the absence of the self and the sadness of human life. His Selected Poems (1979) is a good introduction to his work.
- Philip Ziegler’s The Black Death (1998) details the plague that gripped Europe from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Ziegler notes that plague probably cost Europe between 12.5 and 70 percent of its population according to region, population density, hygiene, and other factors.
- Justice’s New and Selected Poems (1997) updates his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1979 Selected Poems by changing the previous volume’s selection and adding many poems written in the intervening fifteen years.
the Master was — except when it was time for the Gardener to make a neat and abrupt departure to save his own skin). “This is my property, sir,” the Master tells Death, and you are not welcome. Why is Death not welcome here? Because he is a “stranger.” How unfortunate for the Master that he does not recognize Death. Not only does he not recognize Death, he disbelieves his own gardener’s recognition. What could a gardener know? He is merely a superstitious fool who is easily spooked. And Justice says all this in such few words. How does he do it?
One thing that Justice does is create a tone of voice that is filled with obvious psychological implications. For instance, the tone of his words gives away the psychology of the Master. “You must be that stranger,” he says. He does not ask, “Who are you?” Neither does he ask anything else of him. Instead, he attempts to tell Death who he is, and he does this in a tone of admonishment: not only are you a stranger but you have “threatened my [note the possessive pronoun] gardener.” Then the Master more or less points out the no trespassing signs that he has posted around the periphery of his private estate, saying, “I welcome only friends here.” There is a guest list implied here. This is a private club, and no one enters without the Master’s permission. All this Justice says in four lines.
Now for the climax: Death also begins his part of this poem with the word “Sir.” But here Death mocks not only humility but also the Master. Death knows who the real Master is, even if the Master is ignorant of his place in life’s hierarchy. Death mocks the Master first with the honorific salutation; then he mocks him by turning the Master’s list of friends on its proverbial head. I was a friend of your father’s, Death states. “We were friends,” he says, but then cleverly adds, “at the end.” Here Justice makes several points: First he has Death put the Master in his place. This Master might own the garden, and he might have the right to keep anyone he chooses outside its gates, but he cannot avoid facing Death. And by using the phrase “at the end,” Justice is also, in three little words, exposing the identity of Death to the Master. Another interesting thing that is going on here is that this so-called Master, who has witnessed the death of his father, does not recognize Death. Why is that, and what is Justice saying here?
Whereas the Gardener immediately recognized Death and found a way to escape, stating that he has more to do with his life and is not ready to face him, the Master is clueless. Where was the Master when his father died? Is Justice implying that the death of the Master’s father was not enough to wake him up to fear Death enough to make the most of his life? Is that why the Master is caught off guard? Was his arrogance his own undoing? Did he think he could live forever? In his statement, “I welcome only friends here,” is he repeating a remark that his father once said, and is that why Death counsels him with “we were friends at the end?” Was the Master’s father also as arrogant as his son?
Death, in this poem, now controls the stage. He explains himself as humbly as Death can. He did not mean to frighten the gardener. “Old men mistake my gestures.” This statement is close to being read as a private joke. The Gardener mistook his gestures to mean that Death was coming for him, whereas the Master mistook his gestures to mean that he was some stranger come to try to win favors. But the last joke is yet to come, and of course Justice portrays it so simply and so powerfully that the last line turns the whole poem inside out. Justice makes fools of everyone, the Master as well as everyone who reads this poem. Of course that is why Death allowed the Gardener to leave. Of course Death knew exactly what he was doing. Of course the Master did not know what was going on, but neither did any of the readers. “I only meant to ask him / To show me to his master. / I take it you are he?”
Source: Joyce Hart, Critical Essay on “Incident in a Rose Garden,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
“By providing more details about Death, Justice creates a character who transcends type. He is almost a dandy here, an aesthete, with an inflated sense of himself.”
