The Great Wheel by Paul Mariani

First published: New York: W. W. Norton, 1996

Genre(s): Poetry

Subgenre(s): Narrative poetry

Core issue(s): Contemplation; daily living; doubt; faith; love; memory

Overview

The eldest of seven children in a working-class family, Paul Mariani grew up on Long Island. At the age of sixteen, he briefly attended a religious school in preparation for entering a seminary, but he ultimately decided against becoming a priest. Nevertheless, he continued his religious education over the years, initially studying subjects such as church history and ethics at Manhattan College in New York. Mariani wrote his doctoral dissertation on the work of poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins, a study that was subsequently published as A Commentary on the Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1970). In 1968 he began teaching English at the University of Massachusetts, where he remained for three decades. Mariani also gained recognition as a biographer, writing on the lives of such esteemed poets as William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell, and Hart Crane. After a religious experience that took place while he was attending a Jesuit retreat in 1999, Mariani accepted a professorship at Boston College, a Catholic university. The Great Wheel is his fifth volume of poetry.

Mariani achieved the courage to write poetry through prayer, publishing his first collection, Timing Devices, in 1977. As a poem in The Great Wheel reveals, he had believed even as a youth that life offered him a significant opportunity to achieve. “The Great Assembly” describes the way in which shafts of sunlight illuminate the hall where Mariani and his classmates gathered, not long after the end of World War II, to sing the national anthem. The nearby the Statue of Liberty symbolizes opportunity for immigrants even as it once welcomed the poet’s grandparents. Unfortunately the young Mariani also knows that later in the day he will have to flee members of a violent German-Irish gang, the same group that has recently hung a swastika near a synagogue. Although the neighborhood is plagued by such cruelties, the boy retains his faith that there is a grand design in which he will play a role, a design as vibrant and compelling as the music and sunlight of “The Great Assembly.”

Although the poems in The Great Wheel seldom refer specifically to biblical events or characters, they do reflect the author’s vast knowledge of Christianity and Western civilization as a whole. Comparisons woven into the poems relate individuals and events in Mariani’s immediate realm to diverse figures such as Socrates, the Athenian philosopher; Nostradamus, a prominent figure in the French Renaissance; and Rambo, the fictional hero of Hollywood fame. For example, “The Gods Who Come Among Us in the Guise of Strangers” makes reference to an individual described by English poet Geoffrey Chaucer. Mariani first reveals that he feels an increasing sense of loss for not spending enough time with an elder poet who liked to visit him. Realizing too late how the old man resembled the “gods of old who walk among us like/ the dispossessed” and ask for “a cup/ of water and a little of your time,” Mariani likens himself to Chaucer’s character “who seems always busier than he is.”

“The Great Wheel” refers to a Ferris wheel in Paris, France, from which a mature Mariani and a friend viewed the night sky and the city below. The poem reflects on the inevitability of death as the wheel revolves, passing first through a golden summer season and continuing forward until the two men descend “toward the Wheel’s one appointed end, the Great Return.” The Ferris wheel of the poem may suggest to the reader the symbolic wheel of fortune of medieval times, a symbolic representation of the pattern of ascent and decline that typifies the human life cycle.

Other poems in the volume also feature symbolic wheels and circles. For example, in “Falling Asleep,” Mariani recalls a childhood experience of shadows wheeling slowly around him, preserving his family. “Steps” takes place at a later stage in the poet’s life. His sons grown and departed from home, he recalls their childhood efforts to learn a circular dance step. In “Moonrise as Abstraction,” the wheels on Mariani’s car carry him forward to a place where he can achieve an unobstructed view of the moon—an event that relieves his grief over the death of a friend.

“Shadow Portrait,” the tragic opening poem of the book, describes the despair the poet Hart Crane must have felt before he committed suicide by leaping into the sea in the waters between Florida and Cuba. Unable to write, he chose to face the circling sharks below instead of the blank page waiting in his cabin. The final poem of the book, “Antiphon,” opens “But no. Death cannot be the only end of it,” and later quotes a passage from Dante’s “Paradiso” in La divina commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802) in which a wheel turned by love moves the sun and stars. In the conclusion of the poem, Mariani attends Mass in order to kneel at an altar and light a candle for his long-dead mother. The candles in the sanctuary form “small wheels/ of fire” tugging “against their wicks, as if/ eager now to join the great wheel that is/ the morning sun come up to greet them.” Resolutions such as the one achieved in “Antiphon” have not come easily in Mariani’s life, as can be seen in poems describing his difficult early years as a student and young adult.

Christian Themes

Several of the issues involved in living according to Christian principles surface as Mariani recounts youthful episodes that weakened his self-respect and religious faith. In “Manhattan,” participating in a drinking bout the night before an ethics test causes the poet to feel ashamed and fearful. A drunken and violent hazing ritual leaves him dissatisfied with the “Brotherhood” he had hoped for in a fraternity. In “Quid Pro Quo,” Mariani suffers a heartbreaking setback caused by his wife’s second miscarriage. He is shocked at the depth of his anger at God’s treatment of human beings, but his outrage dissolves when his wife carries their firstborn to term. As an adult, this son becomes a priest, leaving Mariani in awe of a God who appears to have arranged the whole affair quid pro quo—a more-or-less equal exchange of divine proportions.

Two poems that treat the subject of romance, “Music of Desire” and “Then,” reveal the efficacy of faith in God. In the first poem, a young Mariani, working in a local grocery store, describes his disappointment at the loss of a girlfriend. He recalls thinking that his sorrow, when viewed in a greater context, is as commonplace as the act of consecration. In “Then,” he meets the woman who will become his wife and wonders how such a gift can have materialized. In characteristic style, the poet compares the gift of love to the gift of life, the June blossoming of a catalpa tree, “white/ on white on white, flaring,” leading to a miraculous vision as “the very air around is turned to whiteness.” In this manner, the divine light that is intermittently revealed in The Great Wheel reflects the fulfilment of faith.

Sources for Further Study

Berggren, Kris. “An American Idiom Infuses Poems of Ordinary Life.” Review of Deaths and Transfigurations, by Paul Mariani. National Catholic Reporter, October 7, 2005, pp. 2a-3a. Review evaluates the poet’s achievement within the American tradition.

Ingebretsen, Edward J. “Poetry Roundup.” America 175, no. 12 (October 26, 1996): 24. Reviews The Great Wheel and other volumes of poetry released within the same period of time and featuring similar religious concerns.

Mariani, Paul. “Confirmation.” In Signatures of Grace: Catholic Writers on the Sacraments, edited by Thomas Grady and Paula Huston. New York: Dutton, 2000. Mariani describes his childhood confirmation, the role of religion in his life, and the importance of a Pentecostal experience he had as an adult.

Mariani, Paul. God and the Imagination: On Poets, Poetry, and the Ineffable. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002. A valuable collection of essays providing a biographical account of Mariani’s writing life and including description of similar struggles affecting other poets.

Ratner, Rochelle. Review of The Great Wheel. Library Journal 121 (March 15, 1996): 74-75. Review discussing Mariani’s craftsmanship as a poet, praising particular poems and discounting others.