Homage to Paul Cézanne by Charles Wright
"Homage to Paul Cézanne" is a poem by Charles Wright that features eight unnumbered sections, each consisting of sixteen lines. The poem delves into the intricate relationship between the living and the dead, reflecting themes of memory, presence, and communication. It opens with a vivid portrayal of the dead, emphasizing their similarities to the living and their persistent efforts to connect. Throughout the poem, Wright explores how the dead seem to grow more present over time, as if nudging closer to the surface of existence. They are depicted as integrated with nature, their stories intertwined with the landscape, invoking a plea to "remember me, speak my name."
Wright’s use of color, particularly shades of blue, adds a metaphysical layer to the understanding of the dead's condition. The poem also illustrates the delicate communication between the living and the deceased, suggesting that the dead are omnipresent, akin to rain falling around us. In the concluding section, Wright contrasts this with the living's more mundane reality, highlighting their limitations in reciprocating the dead's attentiveness. The poem marks a significant evolution in Wright's poetic style, characterized by a more accessible and transparent structure while maintaining a modern sensibility, reflecting the complexity of mortality and memory through rich imagery and contemplative exploration.
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Homage to Paul Cézanne by Charles Wright
First published: 1977; collected in The Southern Cross, 1981
Type of poem: Meditation
The Poem
Charles Wright’s “Homage to Paul Cézanne” consists of eight unnumbered sections of sixteen lines each that examine the nature of the relationship between the living and the dead. “Homage to Paul Cézanne” opens Charles Wright’s fifth volume of poems, The Southern Cross, which inaugurates a departure in both technique and outlook from his earlier volumes. It stands on the threshold of the poet’s mature style, and, as the poet himself acknowledged, “Homage to Paul Cézanne” holds a special place in his entire work.
The poem begins by describing the dead and what they are wearing at night, when their presence is both visible and ascertainable. Although some specific features are singled out, the speaker’s voice (presumably the poet’s) keeps reassuring the reader that the dead are “like us,” in many respects, and act accordingly: “Like us,/ They keep on saying the same thing, trying to get it right.” After putting together some familiar and some less familiar traits, in the second section their presence is further qualified by pointing out some rules or even laws underlying their behavior: “Each year the dead grow less dead, and nudge/ Close to the surface of all things.”
The third section of the poem deals with the degree of integration with nature and the landscape, which the dead have succeeded in achieving in order to communicate both their story and their utmost desire—never to be forgotten: “Remember me, speak my name.” The fourth section, or variation on the theme, brings the reader closer to a metaphysical understanding of their condition, which in terms of color—after all, the poem is in praise of a great French painter, Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)—is a certain kind of blue, endowed with psycho-intellectual abilities, such as understanding.
Once this identity is established, it can be further naturalized either by requiring the dead to do various domestic chores or by pointing to their involvement in the greater drama of the elements: “Over our heads they’re huge in the night sky” and “Their sighs are gaps in the wind.” Next, the reader becomes acquainted with the minute acts of communication that occur through the day between the dead and the living “we,” their initiatives and their solicitude:
The dead are waiting for us in our rooms,
In the seventh part the claim of omnipresence is greater still: “The dead fall around us like rain.” Finally, the poem concludes by returning to the mundane, palpable reality of the humble and helpless condition of the living. If the dead are so involved in what “we” do and think, then, it seems, the living are less able to reciprocate: “Whose tongue is toothless enough to speak their piece?” Against this background of who can do what and, especially, of who can transcend what, the poet rather humorously reminds his readers of another presence with other concerns. Nonchalantly, screened by the clouds, bears “Amble across the heavens, serene as black coffee.”
Forms and Devices
Having opted, in his fifth volume, for a less elliptical and encoded poetic mode, and in favor of a more discursive type of utterance, implicitly Wright moved, on the whole, in the direction of a more fully fledged sentence structure, more classical in form and, therefore, more transparent and explicit. This strategy imparted to the poem a greater rhetorical forcefulness, without losing the flexibility of a modern free form. Each section has a specific inner structure, which can be further examined in terms of a center or of a symmetry axis in order to observe the way meaning gets organized in smaller or larger syntactical units.
The best way to assess how meaning emerges in a Wright poem is to consider the individual line, which in this poem varies in length (number of syllables and of stresses) and, moreover, is not vertically grouped or linked by means of rhyme. This way of building a complex poem imparts a sense of an overall pattern whose intricate order is coupled with much local (horizontal) freedom. The poet achieves his line in the same manner the painter employs his palette knife or brushstroke.
Both the beginning and the ending of the poem—the first and the eighth sections—are more daringly “poetic” than the rest. There is room for language employed figuratively in the traditional sense. In the first section, moonshine is “fish-light”; leaves have gotten “little arks”; envelopes “wait” on desks; water “unsettles” (erases) dead people’s names; “We [the living] rub” the dead people’s answers “off our hands.” In contrast, the imagery in the closing section is full of movement: Stars are “streaming”; the mountain “glides”; bears “amble across the heavens”; “Our gestures salve for the wind.”
In the remaining—middle—sections the utterances are less tentative, plainer in their intent. Hence a rhetoric of insistent stress and repetition is served by shorter, terse sentences. An explanatory mode, as in the climactic fourth section, creeps in. Even when states of mind get more complex, as in the sixth section, and the sentences more elaborate and less manageable, what prevails is an argumentative stance in which a sense of temporal reality—however misleading and unreal the temporality of the dead is—has to be established in terms of spatial coordinates and activities: “The voices rising around us like mist// And dew, it’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right.”
Bibliography
Andrews, Tom, ed. The Point Where All Things Meet: Essays on Charles Wright. Oberlin, Ohio: Oberlin College Press, 1995.
Bourgeois, Louis. “An Interview with Charles Wright.” The Carolina Quarterly 56 (Spring/Summer, 2004): 30-37.
Wright, Charles. Halflife: Improvisations and Interviews, 1977-1987. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988.
Wright, Charles. Quarter Notes: Improvisations and Interviews. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.