Omen (Criticism)

Criticism

Scott Trudell

Trudell is an independent scholar with a bachelor's degree in English literature. In the following essay, Trudell examines the relationship of this poem to the other poems in Hirsch's collection, focusing on the themes of fate and God.

For a short poem, "Omen" brings up a great variety of themes, but its true implications seem somewhat underdeveloped until they are placed into context within Wild Gratitude. Images, symbols, and metaphors only briefly alluded to in "Omen" attain a broader significance and develop much more profoundly when considered along with the other poems of the collection. Fate and God are crucial themes in "Omen," but Hirsch's deeper implications about these ideas become clearer after the reader has examined the allusions to a higher power in its companion poems.

This is not to say that the poem fails to stand by itself; it is a powerful tribute to Hirsch's friend, and its meditation on grief and loss is coherent independently from the poet's other work. "Omen" also implies a great deal about the importance of childhood experience throughout a person's life, and it seems to suggest the existence of a vague higher power that bears some relation to the fate of humanity. The appearance of an omen presaging the speaker's friend's death suggests that a God exists, and the speaker looks to the night sky as the source of this fate or higher power.

The specific characteristics of this fatalistic force are quite unclear. From the scant evidence of the poem, it is possible that the omen is merely an effect of the speaker's state of mind. This essay will therefore examine how the images and symbols that seem to relate to a higher power in "Omen" are treated throughout Wild Gratitude. Since Hirsch seldomly refers to God explicitly, the best place to begin this examination is with his treatment of death, which is a central theme in the collection that naturally leads to many of the poet's meditations about religion.

"I Need Help" introduces the key idea in the book: sleep. Across Hirsch's body of work from this period, sleep is connected to death. In this poem, the insomniacs are unable to fly "out of the body at night," their skeletons are unable to leave their bodies, and they are unable to fall asleep in the empty coffins carried by the "six pallbearers of sleep." It is as though staying awake through the night is the only way to stay alive. This idea is reinforced in later poems. In "Leningrad (1941 – 1943)," Hirsch makes explicit that the only way to stay alive is to stay awake: "There are days when dying will seem as / Easy as sitting down in a warm, comfortable / Overstuffed chair and going back to sleep."

The connection between sleep and death is particularly important in "Poor Angels," in which, late at night, a tired body listens to the "clear summons of the dead," or sleep. Since sleep signifies death, the soul cannot escape to the heavens until the body falls asleep. Portrayed as "a yellow wing" and "a little ecstatic / cloud," the soul calls out to the "approaching night, 'Amaze me, amaze me,'" as if the night were some kind of heaven or afterlife full of miracles. The soul later "dreams of a small fire / of stars flaming on the other side of the sky," which suggests the existence of a higher power, full of light and flame, to be reached once the soul is separated from the body. "The Emaciated Horse" also depicts heaven as the source of light and suggests that there is a "celestial power / of that light," or a God.

Another way that Hirsch suggests the presence of a God is through the appearance of miracles, as in the title poem of the collection, "Wild Gratitude." Here the speaker comes to the realization that all creatures are miraculous and "can teach us how to praise," implying that God should be the object of this praise. Like "Poor Angels" and "The Emaciated Horse," the presence of God is signified by a "living fire," or a source of divine light.

Divine light usually appears in the night sky, such as in "Prelude of Black Drapes" and "In Spite of Everything, the Stars," both of which imply that one should praise God and have faith in him. "In Spite of Everything, the Stars" suggests that people look up to the sky with hope and faith "Because the night is alive with lamps!" and that the bright stars are the reason that sleepers' "plumes of breath rise into the sky." Hirsch is drawing from the association of sleep with death here, and the imagery of the rising plumes of breath reminds the reader of the soul rising toward heaven in "Poor Angels." "Prelude of Black Drapes," meanwhile, stresses that "it takes all our faith to believe" that the "curtain of ash," or the drapes that represent the smoky night as well as the ashes of dead bodies, "will ever rise again in the morning." This sounds a great deal like the passage of a soul to heaven, and the religious meaning of the lines is reinforced by the imagery of the moon, a "faint smudge / of light," obscured by the heavy fog but nonetheless a symbol of divine promise and light.

The other major symbol connected to God that comes up in "Omen" and is then developed more thoroughly in its companion poems is rain, which is the central image of "In the Middle of August" and "Recovery." In both of these poems, rain is a source of great hope and promise, a symbol of good fortune from the heavens that allows people to move on with their lives. In fact, rain is connected to the wishes of some greater power even when it has a more negative connotation; the grandfather figure of "Ancient Signs" says that "rain is an ancient sign / of the sky's sadness," implying that there is some great figure in the sky who is sad.

The images and symbols examined above suggest the presence of a particular kind of God in "Omen." For example, that the moon is a source of divine light in "Prelude of Black Drapes" supports the idea that the moon in "Omen" has divine significance. Both poems describe the moon as "smudge[d]," and in both poems its appearance is followed by an inexplicable and somewhat eerie sign from the heavens. This helps to explain why the "glassy, one-eyed" moon of "Omen" that "comes out to stare" at the speaker and then "turns away from the ground" looks down on the speaker as if it were conscious. Turning away and replacing itself with an omen in the clouds, the moon is an instrument of a higher power foretelling the speaker's friend's death.

Nowhere in Wild Gratitude does Hirsch identify his idea of God with any particular religion, but the higher power of "Omen" is not necessarily a strictly Judeo-Christian God. Hirsch's depiction of God is perhaps better described as a naturalistic force working in the orderly cycles of the seasons to bring about the necessary and inevitable aspects of life. The omen of the gathering clouds that forms when the sky turns "purple, speckled red" is very similar to the "indigos and pinks, mauves and reddish-browns" in the sky of "Recovery" that set the stage for the speaker's departure, healed and happy, from the hospital. In both poems, though their omens signify very different events, the coloring of the sky represents the will of a higher power that works through the inflexible laws of nature.

The higher power of "Omen," therefore, is neither cruel nor kind, and it is tied very closely to the laws of nature. It is a stolid force that creates happiness and sadness depending on the season; the rules of childhood that summer is boundless and glorious while fall is confined with "too many rules" always apply, and this natural cycle shows no sign of ending. Because fall is the season of dying, it is in the fall that the higher power releases rain to beat down on the speaker like a hammer, keeping him indoors and unable to see the hopeful divine light. Having given the speaker warning of the inevitable, the higher power lets the "dark sky," which is "tilting on one wing" like the soul of "Poor Angels," descend on the world, putting the speaker to sleep and ending his friend's life. The reader must wait until later in the collection for the return of spring and summer, which come in poems such as "In the Middle of August," for Hirsch's idea of a naturalistic higher power to rain down the "immense" possibilities of survival and regeneration.

Source: Scott Trudell, Critical Essay on "Omen," in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

Patrick Donnelly

Donnelly is a poet, editor, and teacher. His first book of poems is The Charge. In this essay, Donnelly discusses the conventions and challenges of the elegy.

Many readers of poetry do not understand how hard it is to write a successful lyric poem, never mind how treacherous it is — artistically speaking — to attempt an elegy mourning the death of a friend or loved one. This poetic task is risky because there are so many ways to fail. In particular, an elegy may fail to rise to eloquence while lamenting and praising the dead person, or it may cross the line between sentiment and sentimentality. The several-thousand-year history of the elegy is illuminated by the brilliant achievements of poets who rose to this challenge — Milton, Tennyson, Whitman, Yeats, Auden, and Allen Ginsberg, to name a few — and also littered by the efforts of those who tried and fell short.

There is no shame in any unsuccessful poetic attempt: good art of any kind is hard to make. Fortunately for the skillful reader of poetry, there is almost as much to be learned about how poetry works from studying a not completely successful poem, as from studying one that is superbly successful.

It is helpful, before turning to Edward Hirsch's "Omen" in particular, to review the "rules" or conventions of elegies or elegiac poems in general. Elegies belong to the larger category of lyric poetry, a form that has as its primary purpose the expression of strong feeling. In a broad sense, an elegiac poem mourns the general impermanence or sorrow of life. But, the usual focus of the elegy is grief for the death of a particular person. A secondary purpose is to praise qualities of that person's life, usually in the context of lamenting their loss. Some elegies also praise the departed as part of a larger project of finding consolation in spiritual or philosophical truths that are felt to be of greater consequence than the life of any one person.

The "pastoral elegy," of which Milton's "Lycidas" and Shelley's "Adonais" are examples, usually represented the dead person as a shepherd mourned by mythological figures and the natural world. Hirsch's "Omen" makes use of the poetic device, common in the pastoral elegy, of projecting human emotion onto natural phenomena like stormy weather and darkness.

Some poets have written "anti-elegies," which refuse to proceed in an expected or orderly manner, like Dylan Thomas's "Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London" and contemporary American poet Diane Fisher's "The Mother Has Her Say." These poems are in fact still elegies but make rejection of sentimentality or conventional sources of consolation an explicit part of their poetic projects.

The person doing the elegizing needs to have been close enough to the person being elegized that the poem seems justified. If the poet did not actually know the dead person well, there needs to be some other reason the poet felt a strong connection. Theodore Roethke acknowledges the expectation of connection in his poem "Elegy for Jane," both in the epigraph "My Student, Thrown by a Horse," and in his last lines "Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love: / I, with no rights in this matter, / Neither father nor lover."

The elegy has the difficult poetic task — perhaps in a sense impossible — of balancing the competing losses of the person doing the elegizing and the person being elegized. The dead person's loss of life itself (claims of an afterlife notwithstanding) is permanent and immeasurable. Some might argue that the loss of the elegizer is actually greater because that person is still sensible to the pain whereas the pain of the person who died is over. Conversely it can be argued that the living have the chance to become happy again, or at least to go on living, which the dead have lost. Ultimately, the dead person's claim for the greater loss would seem to be persuasive — though certainly good poems can and have been made asserting the opposite view. The point is that in order to be successful the elegy has to struggle with this question of balance, not proceed as though it did not exist. Ideally, the poet causes the two griefs implicit in the elegy to contend in a way that is productive of eloquence.

Is Hirsch's "Omen" an elegy? The person the speaker grieves is still alive during the time the poem describes. Because the impending death of the friend is placed in a position so close to the center of the poem's project, it virtually forces the reader to consider the poem an elegy and to compare the gestures the poem makes with those of other elegies. "Omen" is not so much an "anti-elegy" — the speaker does grieve in fairly conventional ways and, arguably, gives over to sentimentality in several passages — as it is a "pre-elegy." Even in that category it is not completely successful, because the poem does not acknowledge the competing griefs of the elegy in a meaningful way. Neglecting to do so undermines the all-important relationship between the speaker of a poem and the reader.

A reader may begin to withdraw sympathy, trust, and, most importantly, interest from the speaker of an elegy if that speaker reduces the large loss of the dead person primarily to an occasion to direct attention to the speaker himself. There have been many fine poems with speakers who have moral flaws yet still retain the speaker's interest. There is all the difference, in poetry as in life, between self-absorption (or an extreme subjectivity such as that caused by grief) and an acknowledgment of self-absorption or extreme subjectivity. Objectivity is no virtue in poetry, but an admission of subjectivity can be a very great virtue. As Carl Dennis has written in Poetry as Persuasion:

Poets whose speakers confess moral failures are usually on safer ground than those celebrating their moral triumphs. But even a confession, if it is aesthetically effective, will imply certain virtues: the honesty and humility, say, that confronts inadequacies directly, and the ambition implied by judging oneself by the highest standards.

When the somewhat unpleasant speaker of Robert Lowell's poem "Skunk Hour" says, late in that poem, "My mind's not right," he does a great deal to retain (or regain) the reader's interest and sympathy. This kind of acknowledgment of subjectivity is missing from "Omen." When "Omen" diminishes the importance of the death of the friend by juxtaposing it, and seeming to compare it, with seemingly minor forms of suffering from the speaker's past, it cannot help but injure the speaker in the reader's eyes.

It is probably the speaker's description of the dying friend as looking "boyish and haunted" that causes the speaker to remember, associatively, the unhappiness of his own boyhood. The unhappinesses he describes in the sixth and seventh stanzas of the poem — "stormy clouds, too many rules." and "Sometimes I'd wake up / In the middle of a cruel dream, coughing / And lost, unable to breathe in my sleep" — do not amount to much when compared to the friend's impending death. The juxtaposition of the friend's death with the speaker's memory of childhood discomfort has the effect of including the friend's death on a list of other bad things that have happened to the speaker without any acknowledgment of the subjectivity of this perspective that might redeem it in the reader's estimation.

The problem with "Omen" is that the relationship between the speaker and the friend is not clear or compelling. We have no evidence for friendship but the label, no shared memories, no history, no details about the dying man to make him memorable or individual. This is part of what turns him into a prop on the speaker's stage.

"Omen" might have been more successful if the language had risen to genuine eloquence. Eloquence is difficult to define, but in poetry it has everything to do with freshness (lack of cliché), precision, compression, and rhythmic authority. Hirsch has achieved eloquence in other poems like "Lay Back the Darkness," or translation/adaptations like "The Desire Manuscripts." Passages like "the nights are getting cold," "I can't stop thinking about my closest friend" and "I know that my closest friend is going to die" in "Omen" are closer to the rhythms of everyday prose than poetry and are emotionally flat. Other passages in "Omen" resort to generic "poetry-speak" or stock gestures to express fear and grief: "Clear as a country lake" and "The rain was a hammer banging against the house, / Beating against my head" are examples of metaphors that lack surprise or freshness. If the most important metaphor in "Omen," which compares the dying friend's pain to "a mule / kicking him in the chest, again and again," had used more surprising, emotionally charged language, it might have done much to redress the feeling that the poem focuses too much on the speaker's pain. This important metaphor subsides into flat abstraction, with the deflating explanation "Until nothing else but the pain seems real."

In the best poetry, sensual specifics and images serve to anchor emotion in the reader's imagination. Abstractions and nonspecific language do not do this job as well. Compare this passage from "Omen"

Tonight the wind whispers a secret to the trees, Something stark and unsettling, something terrible Since the yard begins to tremble, shedding leaves.

with the following excerpt from Stanley Kunitz's poem "Quinnapoxet," which also projects human emotions onto nature:

I was fishing in the abandoned reservoir back in Quinnapoxet, where the snapping turtles cruised and the bullheads swayed in their bower of tree-stumps, sleek as eels and pigeon-fat.... The sun hung its terrible coals over Buteau's farm: I saw the treetops seething.

In Kunitz's poem, language charged with strong emotional associations — like "abandoned," "snapping," "terrible coals," and "seething" — creates true ominousness. The passage from "Omen" falls short of the same goal. Both passages use the word "terrible," but Kunitz's language embodies terribleness more viscerally and memorably.

The artistic challenge of writing successful elegies for the next thousand years is that every poet who attempts the form has to find a way to grieve an intensely personal loss in a way that acknowledges that the loss is also completely universal. This complex balancing act is precisely the kind of challenge for which lyric poetry was invented, but it requires a poet to call upon every ounce of philosophical, spiritual, and linguistic resources at her disposal.

Every human has the same primal desires and fears — wanting and needing love, and fearing death. Out of these old, old elements new poems will always be made, because love and death are not going to cease being of intense interest to readers. Poets will continue to exert themselves to express new truths about love and death, or to express old truths in language that makes them seem new. Whether they succeed or not in any given poem, one should be grateful for every poet willing to take on this difficult work of casting light on the human predicament.

Source: Patrick Donnelly, Critical Essay on "Omen," in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

Contemporary Authors Online

In the following essay, the critic discusses some highlights of Hirsch's career.

"I would like to speak in my poems with what the Romantic poets called 'the true voice of feeling,'" Edward Hirsch once told CA. "I believe, as Ezra Pound once said, that when it comes to poetry, 'only emotion endures.'" Described by Peter Stitt in Poetry as "a poet of genuine talent and feeling," Hirsch has been highly acclaimed for his poetry collections, For the Sleepwalkers and Wild Gratitude. For the Sleepwalkers was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1981, and Wild Gratitude won the award in 1987. The two books contain vignettes of urban life and numerous tributes to artists, which, according to David Wojahn in the New York Times Book Review, "begin as troubled meditations on human suffering [but] end in celebration." New Republic contributor Jay Parini wrote that in For the Sleepwalkers, "Hirsch inhabits, poem by poem, dozens of other skins. He can become Rimbaud, Rilke, Paul Klee, or Matisse, in each case convincingly." "I admire Edward Hirsch," declared Phoebe Pettingell in the New Leader, "for his mystical vision, for the mastery he has . . . attained — and for his daring."

While many reviewers have applauded Hirsch's poetry, declaring that it exhibits tenderness, intelligence, and musicality that goes beyond mere technique, they have also recognized in his highly rhetorical style the propensity to "cross the borderline between effectiveness and excess," as Stitt asserted. For instance, Wojahn maintained that "Hirsch's tenderness [in Wild Gratitude] sometimes threatens to become merely ingratiating," and Hugh Seidman, in a New York Times Book Review article, thought that Hirsch's first work, For the Sleepwalkers, is "a poetry of narcissistic invention employing exaggerated tone and metaphor," an excess that Seidman believed is typical of much contemporary American poetry. Nevertheless, Parini insisted that Hirsch's poems "easily fulfill Auden's request that poems be, above all else, 'memorable language,'" and Carolyn Kizer declared in the Washington Post Book World that Hirsch's "great strength lies in his descriptive powers." As Hirsch "learns to administer with lighter touch his considerable linguistic fertility," claimed Stitt, "he will surely grow into one of the important writers of our age."

The poems in Hirsch's third book, The Night Parade, continue with themes presented in his first two works, but stray from his stylistic and formal techniques, perhaps indicating a transitional period. Hirsch told CA: "Many of these poems are more meditative and narrative, linking the personal to the historical, contemplating the nature of family stories and expanding outward from there to consider the history and development of Chicago as a city." He added, "The passionate clarity of [my] style has not always met with critical approval." In the New York Times Book Review, Stephen Dobyns remarked, "Despite several marvelous poems, The Night Parade doesn't seem as strong as his previous book. Too many poems become sentimental or seem willed rather than to come from the heart." Pat Monaghan in Booklist, however, praised Hirsch's "sure sense of the line between emotion and sentimentality." New York Review of Books critic Helen Vendler felt that "when Hirsch is not being historically stagy, he is being familially prosaic, as he recalls stories told by his parents," but she also thought Hirsch "capable of quiet, believable poems." She cited the poem "Infertility" from Hirsch's The Night Parade as the most believable poem of the book, and suggested, "This poem, I suspect, will turn up in anthologies. It touches a particular connection between religious longing and secular pessimism that belongs both to the hope and desolation it commemorates and to the moment of scientific possibility and disappointment in which we live."

In his fourth collection of poems, Earthly Measures, Hirsch offers a collection focused on religious issues and imagery. Hirsch told CA: "If I were to describe [Earthly Measures], I would say that it is 'god hungry.' Earthly Measures is very much about what the soul does after hungering after God and He does not come. What does one do to fill the subsequent emptiness? The book begins in the dark wood with landscapes of ash and emptiness and hell. Throughout the book are elegies which point toward the loss of presence, power, and direction. The emptiness contains infertility but it is not defined by it. About halfway through the book it takes a turn — not toward celebration exactly, but a sort of agonized reconciliation. The tutelary figures are Simone Weil, Leopardi, and Hoffmansthal. The poems take the transformative and even redemptive powers of art seriously. Art stands against the emptiness. The book is about a soul-journey. It begins in 'Uncertainty' and concludes with an homage to the 17th century Dutch painters and their feeling for 'Earthly Light.' It is a pilgrim's progress struggling toward the light."

Reviewers had mixed opinions of Earthly Measures, with some critics praising the "god hungry" nature of the work and others terming the collection insufficiently nuanced. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Patricia Hampl remarked, "The absence of God and the abundant presence of human desire reign over his book and form a passionately important inquiry into the nature of worship." Robert B. Shaw, commenting in Poetry, likewise praised the poems in the collection for being "accessible in subject, direct in phrasing, open in their expression of emotion, graced with a finely-tuned lyricism." Yet, Shaw noted, "the neo-Romantic tone and coloration makes for a sameness . . . so that the subjects lose something of their individuality in an all-purpose luminous haze." Washington Post Book World contributor Eric Murphy Selinger also lamented the lyrical romanticism of the poems, declaring that "Hirsch is better off when his voice has a bitter or critical edge." Hampl, though, commended Hirsch for his achievement in Earthly Measures, concluding, "These are poems of immense wonder and rigor. To say they are religious poems is only to recognize their grandeur and generosity, and their heartbreaking longing."

In the collection On Love, Hirsch takes the voice of some two dozen poets from the past, including such diverse writers as D. H. Lawrence, Charles Baudelaire, and Jimi Hendrix. He creates an imaginary conversation between them in which they discuss the subject of love. The verses in On Love prove "without question" that Hirsch is "heir to all the great poets of the past," in the opinion of Donna Seaman of Booklist, who added that when writing about his own life, Hirsch achieves "lyric poems nearly incandescent in their sensuality." The reviewer for Publishers Weekly noted that when reading Hirsch's work, "one is always aware of a formidable intelligence; wide reading, and an ambition to connect the poet's own achievement with the great poetry of the past." While acknowledging the "controlled, precise, formally ambitious" quality of Hirsch's verse, the Publishers Weekly reviewer faulted the poet's use of "a highly artificial premise, made more so by the incredibly strict forms." Yet Thomas F. Merrill in Library Journal called On Love "often stunning" for its "complex evocations of the adopted voices as well as Hirsch's own insight."

Hirsch has also written prose works that have met with critical acclaim. In How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry, he collected verses from diverse times and places and then suggested ways to understand and appreciate the works. "The book is scholarly but very readable and incorporates interesting anecdotes from the lives of the poets," noted Ellen Sullivan in Library Journal. Booklist's Donna Seaman declared: "Hirsch, a truly gifted poet and scholar, brings the full heat of his literary passion to this enlightening and deeply moving journey into the heart of poetry. . . . Hirsch's magnificent text is supported by an extensive glossary and superb international reading list."

Source: "Edward Hirsch" in Contemporary Authors Online, Thomson Gale, 2003.

What Do I Read Next?

• Hirsch's collection of poems The Night Parade (1989) is more autobiographical in its themes than Wild Gratitude, and it explores the elements of Hirsch's childhood alluded to in "Omen."
• "The Cave of Making" (1965), by W. H. Auden, is a poem about writing and an elegy for Auden's friend Louis MacNeice. Another classic elegy by Auden, who influenced Hirsch's writings and who is quoted in the epigraph to Wild Gratitude, is "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" (1939).
• Hirsch's scholarly but readable prose work How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry (1999) contains a variety of compelling poems and suggestions on how to approach them.
• Steven Millhauser's Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943 – 1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright: A Novel (1972) is a vivid and delightful tale of a boy describing his relationship with a childhood friend who died very young.
• Sailing Alone around the Room: New and Selected Poems (2001), by Billy Collins, contains some of the best examples of the poet's funny, sad, and tender explorations of everyday life.