Seidel is known for being a bit rough, for breaking poetic taboos. Yet today I’ve been looking at his 1963 poem “To My Friend Anne Hutchinson,” which is is skillful, gentle, and touching.
It’s addressed to a woman dying of cancer who’s the namesake of the famous 17th century religious reformer—the one who got herself kicked out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Seidel makes hay out of the comparisons, quotations, and sly or obvious references to Anne the first, as you’d expect, though treatment of his friend remains respectful. Despite seeming not to share her religious devotion, he harnesses some gorgeous imagery to capture it.
Here’s one of my favorite tidbits, the end of the 9th stanza with the whole of the 10th. As he sits at his friend’s deathbed:
Between the unreal and the next world, stretched taut,
Anne, you are trying to talk, wide-eyed and hollow-eyed,
Bright starving eyes! Like sections
Of a tapeworm, the anacoluthons
Break off—fed
On your daily bread
Dread.
That creepy image of the tapeworm coming off in sections perfectly captures the horror of the patient’s inability to complete a sentence. She may be talking in monosyllables such as “Dread”—the work’s only such line.
“To My Friend Anne Hutchinson” is structured consistently with five lines per stanza, though if you try to scan them you go crazy: hexameters, trimeters, tetrameters, and that other thing I mentioned—yet within each stanza he’s highly attentive to rhythm. Each boat is on its own bottom except where the enjambment crosses over into a new stanza, when the rhythmic and aural relationship is tighter, as between stanzas 9 and 10.
He uses some internal rhyme and, unpredictably, a bit of end-rhyme, though often his focus on sound takes subtle forms. Consider again the lines quoted above: we have next/stretched, taut/talk, wide-eyed/eyed/eyes, tape/break, fed/bread/dread—and a bunch of consonance and assonance in which the sibilants s and st figure prominently, perhaps evoking the quiet hiss of hospital equipment. When I read it aloud, those esses elongate the words slightly, slowing me down in contrast to the cold-water shock of “bright / break,” which underscore the sense.
I mentioned his respect for her devotion. Here is the ending, the moment of death:
The mind stops . . . mind and body
Longing for order and mystery,
To be as a cloud, pure as a Taj Mahal
Of grief for a cherished soul,
Floating over beautiful wine-colored October.
What a lovely tribute.