Archer in the Marrow by Peter Viereck

First published: 1987

Type of poem: Epic/lyric

The Poem

Archer in the Marrow, subtitled The Applewood Cycles, 1967-1987, is an epic lyric poem composed of eighteen cycles, a preface, an epilogue, and notes. The preface identifies the speakers, establishes the poem’s motifs, and presents an initial “Showdown on Land’s End” to establish the conflict or war of contraries that is played out in dramatic fashion throughout the book. The epilogue provides both resolution and direction, a blank canvas that serves as prologue to a new spiral, and there is a lengthy “Appendix: Form in Poetry” that discusses the biology of verse and likens the rhythm of iambic pentameter to the throbbing of the human heart. Strict form in poetry, according to Peter Viereck, is the holy essence of human nature. The section of notes and the “Glossary of Names, Foreign Phrases, Classical, Biblical, and Historical References” were added at the publisher’s request.

Peter Viereck’s book-length poem serves as a rite of passage into a harmonious world of spheres that includes a rebirth of rhyme. Poetry is likened to human physiology, and this analogy links the matter of the appendix to the cycles of the poem.

The three main speakers of the poem (identified in lowercase letters) are the father, the son, and “you”—the human of today who imagines the voices of the father and the son; the son is both Jesus and Dionysus (the annually hacked mythical vine god is presented as the son’s lost half). In addition, there is Eve, who is Mary Magdalene in the first cycle of the poem and Aphrodite in the last. A system of delineation helps determine who is speaking throughout. When the father speaks, the text is set at the left margin; his voice is additionally indicated by the use of Roman numerals. The son’s words are indented and represented by arabic numbers. The words of “you” are set in italics and quotation marks.

The text circles around the choice of whether to make a cross or a liberating arrow from the wood of the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden. If man should become more than a thing, determined by things, he must be “self-surpassing” (Viereck’s term). According to medieval legend, the wood of the apple tree was used to make the cross upon which Jesus was crucified. The “archer” in the bone marrow symbolizes Viereck’s idea that man should use applewood to make a liberating arrow rather than a cross.

The second section of the preface is entitled “Motifs,” and Viereck begins it by stating that “Eden’s forbidden appletree of knowledge lit man’s eyes with consciousness” (page 15). This awakening causes a conflict between man, who wants to be “more than a thing, to expand from dot into circle” and his Father-god, who wants to keep the human toy blank-eyed and robotized. Thus a duel takes place at Land’s End—the beach on which a mutant “rogue” gene, the lungfish, man’s forebear, first breathed air—and sets into play the motif of self-surpassing.

The discovery of lungs enables man to invade another realm—the sky—with the weapon known as human song or lyric poetry. The acquisition of this “formcraft” (Viereck’s term) is an additional motif. It involves the biology of poetry that is discussed at length in the book’s appendix. The blood of the poet is “Rh positive,” Viereck says, and in Archer in the Marrow, the Rh is the twofold Rh of rhyme and rhythm. These two factors form the poet’s rhapsody—the rhaps plus the ody—the “ode-stitching” of Viereck’s crisscross pattern of verse. The swords of the book’s dueling voices, then, are rhythms, not creeds, and the fight is for a living, body-rooted poetic form, instead of dead formalism or contemporary free verse.

The setting, or backdrop motif, of Viereck’s drama—though he warns that Archer in the Marrow is a poem, not a tract or a play—has a ceiling meat hook and two big canvases set up by father and son. The artwork, like poetry’s unparaphrasable uniqueness, is organic and nonverbal. Its pulse can be felt, and Rembrandt van Rijn’s Slaughtered Ox and Jan and Hubert van Eyck’s Adoration of the Lamb (one panel of the Ghent Altarpiece) set up a series of opposites: Hellenic and Hebraic, Dionysus and Jesus, Aphrodite and Eve, dust and loam, goatfoot and lamb. Only by means of free choice can man effect the reconciliation of these opposites. He must free himself from “the script writer in the sky” and by means of formcraft poach “creativity from its Creator” (page 16).

The final section of the preface begins the “Showdown on Land’s End.” The wine god, Dionysus, watches, and as modern man, or “you,” is about to lose the duel, he is cast into timeless Part Zero.

Part Zero, a frozen realm outside time and space, begins the circling or “cycles.” It is composed of Cycle One, “Up”; Cycle Two, “Hacked”; and Cycle Three, “Round”; in which “you” encounters the deaths of Jesus, the nailed son, and Dionysus. Cycle Three humorously juxtaposes Los Angeles and ancient Tarsus as east-west landmarks sway and are reversed in a “smog mirage” (page 40).

Two transitions follow. In the first, the father addresses an offstage “you” and claims that “it’s not been easy being God.” In the second, Dionysus comments that he is a “word-juggler, shape-juggler, world-juggling god, and quack” (page 54). He explains: “I’m Dionysus (or a wino pretending to be);/ Pan’s one of my selves; on the Nile, Osiris another” (page 54). Part Zero dissolves, and man’s various cycles follow. “Waltz,” a section in a waltzlike 1-2-3 rhythm, measures the imprisoning birth-spawn-death—“dumped, dunked, done”—cycle of man. It contains an amusing counterpoint of dialogue between “you” and the son that makes reference to modern technology and poetry: “The devil was never the snake in the tree,” the son says. “He’s the snake in computers named ‘Apple’ ” (page 64). Alluding to Emily Dickinson, “you” answers: “A narrow fellow programmed me/ With gene tapes, Xerox at the bone” (page 64).

In Cycle Five, the “Bread” cycle, a series of sestets, “you” asks the son as Dionysus to “Help us know deeper meanings,” but the time for self-surpassing has not come; man’s knowledge of applewood is incomplete. This cycle is set against a backdrop of “gas lights, high hats, and such incongruous pairs as Queen Victoria chatting with Freud and Andrew Carnegie with Marx” (page 71). The time is the late nineteenth century, which gives way to the late twentieth century backdrop in the “Epilogue to the Bread Cycle.”

Cycle Six, “Rogue,” is cast in the Devonian period of the Paleozoic Era. “You” becomes the lungfish and addresses future selves of 1987. Cycles Seven through Nine—“Salt,” “Bells,” and “Stain”—continue “you’s” quest toward self-surpassing as alternate dialogues with father and son and varying poetic forms punctuate the plight of the human toy’s attempt to be more than a toy.

Part Two contains a prologue and four additional cycles: Cycle Ten, “Pish”; Eleven, “Eyes”; Twelve, “Book”; and Cycle Thirteen, “Auschwitz.” In this latter cycle, “you” and the son argue about Nietzsche, the son’s adopted brother, who predicted the slaughter of Jews. Part Three also begins with a prologue to cycles fourteen through eighteen: “Mek,” “Core,” an epilogue to “Core,” “Choose,” “Toward,” and “Threads.” Mek is the Hittite word for “power,” and in this cycle, modern technology has surpassed Christianity as a significant and meaningful force. The result divides the outdated self and post-modern mechanics; the speaker is a male laboratory boss. In Parts Two and Three, Viereck explains that the father keeps his toys’ apple-knowledge blinkered “by luring them to soar beyond that human frailty which is their true strength” (page 16).

“Part Zero Replayed” ends the poem. Opposites are united. The conflicts between the son and his pagan double, Dionysus, between Eve and Aphrodite, and between goatfoot and the lamb are resolved. The son tells “you” at the end of “Part Zero Replayed” that “God only fears one arrow: God’s image, made human by Eve./ Now, archer in the marrow, stretch your own birth-cord’s bow” (page 196). Wildness is freed. “You” concludes by saying: “Pierced hands…bending cross into cross-bow./ Look: goatfoot Jesus on the village green” (page 211).

Forms and Devices

Archer in the Marrow embodies Peter Viereck’s contention that poetry is inseparable from biology. Functional form is alive and liberating; mechanical or decorative formalism is dead.

The appendix of the book, subtitled “Form in Poetry: Would Jacob Wrestle with a Flabby Angel?” provides an assessment of Viereck’s theory of poetic “formcraft.” He asks if modern poetry is alive and has a structure, and points out that a metronome cannot feel; it is a mechanical tic. The rhythms of a lyric, however, are “the onomatopoeia of the flesh” (page 215). Life and poetry are organic recurrent vibrations. Viereck asserts that the formal poet marshals words “the way the body organizes its nervous system” (page 216). Enjambments are “synapses,” and the thump-THUMP of the heart is the iambic pentameter of rhyme. Such anatomical functions as the “inhale and exhale of breath, systole and diastole of heart, pound and pause of pulse, in and out of coition, ebb and flow of tide” are all iambics (pages 219-220). Trochees, according to Viereck, are iambics in reverse; dactyls and anapests are iambics with stutter. The Greek word for foot is iamb, the name of the scansion unit. Anatomy, then, is one of the arts, and biology forms a synthesis with poetry. Viereck maintains that rhyme should be extended into new areas of metrical and biological sensation. Poetry should be a rhythm message as well as a word message. While a word message is partly conscious and corresponds to the indicative or imperative in grammar, a rhythm message is partially unaware and is conditional or subjunctive. Poetry needs to concentrate on the nonverbal language of rhythm, which is the noncorporeal origin of form. “Strict form, in the broadest sense of ‘form,’ ” Viereck claims, “may be both creator and product of the entire immortal macrocosm (as well as the microcosmic mortal poem)” (page 223).

Viereck’s new form, “crisscross,” rhymes the first two syllables of each line with the last syllables of other lines or of the same line. Its intent is to counter a “sloppy neglect of opening syllables and the pompous exaggeration of closing ones” (page 224).

Crisscross rhymes form the prosodic basis of Archer in the Marrow, and as poetry is freed from the deadwood, dead-end, formless wildness that is free verse, so is man led to self-surpassing, to a strict wildness in verse that Viereck sees as emancipating and earth-rooted. In the May/June, 1988, issue of Poets & Writers, he explains:

This is why, in our post-modern era, we are witnessing a return, not to the dead mechanical “formalism,” which free verse justifiably junked, but to a living, biological, content-expressing form. For if a definition of artistic creativity be demanded…then let us define it as expressive form: form for the sake of expressing an imperfection known as humanity.

Form, then, is neither artificial nor outdated. It is holy, a part of human nature. Although many poetic forms are used throughout the book, it is crisscross that liberates. When “you” asks at the end of the poem, “What makes two rival god-lies true for us?” the answer is crisscross—the poem’s formcraft and the final appearance of “goatfoot Jesus on the village green” (page 211).

Sources for Further Study

Choice. XXV, October, 1987, p. 316.

The Christian Science Monitor. May 27, 1987, p. 19.

Library Journal. CXII, February 15, 1987, p. 150.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. June 14, 1987, p. 6.

National Review. XL, February 5, 1988, p. 55.

The New Leader. LXX, August 10, 1987, p. 16.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXI, January 16, 1987, p. 65.