The Homo-erotic Poem Part I

It has always struck me as peculiar that love poems by Gay men are almost always more erotic and specific than those written by straights. There are, I know, countless exceptions, but the general rule seems to be to be generally true. I just finished going through the whole of The Faber Book of Love Poems, Edited by Geoffrey Grigson [London: Faber & Faber, 1973], and my predominant impression is that heterosexual love poetry tends towards the abstract, the merely decorative, whilst the homoerotic is more focused and direct. I'm thinking particularly of examples such as Whitman's "When I Heard at the Close of the Day" or Sir Philip Sidney's "My true love hath my heart, and I have his" which seem more specifically tender and frank than one is used to seeing in traditional (male) love poetry.  

Perhaps it is because of the historical idealization and ikonic personification of woman as a pure object (or vessel) which passes down, specifically, from the Renaissance, gathers steam during the Romantic Age, then is chastened by Victorian inhibition. The male object tends less towards the generalized, and more towards an individual.

The following poem by James Schuyler [1923-1991] (photo above) I first read in a pamphlet I found in 1968, May 24th Or So [Tibor de Nagy, 1966]:

A Head

A dead boy living among men as a man

called an angel

by, me, for want of a word,

spaniel-eyed: wet, with bits

of gold deep in the eyeballs

hidden, like a mysterious ingredient

(c'est la, le mystere)

fringed with black and with black,

thick-grown, delicately thumb-smudged eyebrows

and brown cast on the face

so the lips are an earth red

and the rings or pouches under the eyes

are dark, and all the blue

there is hovers in the hollows

under the ridges of the cheekbones

as, in fall haze, earth,

broken into clods, casts shadows on itself:

except what, in the small hours, shows

the razor's path, its wide swaths

along the cheeks and down below

the strong and bluntly heart-shaped chin

where the taut flesh loosens and softens,

heaviest at the corners of the mouth

turning petulantly down from the fold

that lifts the upper lip and points

to the divider of the nostrils.

This so-called angel

who steps back into the shadows of an empty door

and staggers on short flights of stairs

is filled with a kind of death

that feeds on little things:

fulfilled plans that no longer suit the hour,

appetites that sicken and are not slaked

(such as for milk shakes)

lost or stolen handkerchiefs,

invisible contagion

(such as the common cold).

Within this head where thought repeats 

itself like a loud clock, lived

the gray and green of parks before spring

and water on a sidewalk between banks of snow,

a skylit room whose windows were paintings

of windows with views of trees

converging in the park all parks imply;

in that head a million butterflies

took flight like paper streamers and bits of paper

a draught lifts at a parade.

Then they went away.

They went away in a dance-step

to the tune of "Poor Butterfly"

played on a wind-up phonograph

of red mahogany stuck with bits

of gold: right stele for him.

When night comes and lights come on

after the colors fade in the sky,

may he minister as he can to whom he may,

himself or other, give what grace

all the little deaths he stands for,

to me, have left him. He is an angel

for his beauty.  So what

if it fades and dies?

This poem is filled with ambiguities, most notably the contradictory mixture of sentiment towards an x-lover, for whom the poet continues to feel an explicit romantic tenderness, but whom he still regards with a half-sentimental, half-amused, pity--one might even call it bitterness. There is a clear condescension towards the boy's immaturity, mixed with a lingering solicitude:  He is "filled with a kind of death/that feeds on little things" as if fussiness, or triviality, were a mortal affliction. The line "right stele for him" seems a very elegant turn of phrase, saying (if I understand it) that the mahogany wood record player with gold inlay is a fitting stele (or "ancient" monument) to the departed "angel" which is also, of course, linked to the "bits of gold" "hidden" in the brown irises--that's it, the mystery. There's one very awkward bit of footwork he performs, in the last stanza. 

may he minister as he can to whom he may,

himself or other, give what grace

all the little deaths he stands for

to me, have left him. 

Give them what you stood for to me, is left. Or something. It sounds almost courtly in its intricacy--a locution that Donne might have tried. The ironic/pathetic "so what if it [his beauty] fades and dies?" seems fairly straightforward, a send-off, or tip of the cap. The rueful close to a temporary commitment.

This is a graceful poem. Poetry is often about love, but it seldom rises to this level of seriousness, without seeming overly formal, or stiff. Schuyler was a master of the ordinary. He could take a daily occurrence, and turn it into the stuff of elegance and resolution. It's an unique gift.   

The next post will be devoted to a similar kind of poem by Jonathan Williams.