{"id":95764,"date":"2016-03-21T12:26:27","date_gmt":"2016-03-21T16:26:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=95764"},"modified":"2016-03-21T13:31:01","modified_gmt":"2016-03-21T17:31:01","slug":"that-inescapable-animal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/03\/21\/that-inescapable-animal\/","title":{"rendered":"That Inescapable Animal"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Delmore Schwartz\u2019s \u201cThe Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Delmore Schwartz, date unknown.<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

\u201cthe withness of the body\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The heavy bear who goes with me,
A manifold honey to smear his face,
Clumsy and lumbering here and there,
The central ton of every place,
The hungry beating brutish one
In love with candy, anger, and sleep,
Crazy factotum, dishevelling all,
Climbs the building, kicks the football,
Boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Breathing at my side, that heavy animal,
That heavy bear who sleeps with me,
Howls in his sleep for a world of sugar,
A sweetness intimate as the water\u2019s clasp,
Howls in his sleep because the tight-rope
Trembles and shows the darkness beneath.
\u2014The strutting show-off is terrified,
Dressed in his dress-suit, bulging his pants,
Trembles to think that his quivering meat
Must finally wince to nothing at all.<\/p>\n

That inescapable animal walks with me,
Has followed me since the black womb held,
Moves where I move, distorting my gesture,
A caricature, a swollen shadow,
A stupid clown of the spirit\u2019s motive,
Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness,
The secret life of belly and bone,
Opaque, too near, my private, yet unknown,
Stretches to embrace the very dear
With whom I would walk without him near,
Touches her grossly, although a word
Would bare my heart and make me clear,
Stumbles, flounders, and strives to be fed
Dragging me with him in his mouthing care,
Amid the hundred million of his kind,
The scrimmage of appetite everywhere.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

Preceding every poem is the same urgent need\u2014to say something and to have it acknowledged, to have some proof that what the poem said has been heard. By this measure, almost no poem succeeds: the poem offers only half of what would fulfill it; the other half resides in an imaginary reader, who may never open the book, and who, if he or she does, will almost certainly never send acknowledgment back to the poet in a way that the poet can receive it. Perhaps very famous poets\u2014Eliot, more recently Heaney\u2014palpably felt the acknowledgment of their readers, but normal poets rarely do, maybe only a few times in their lives. Of course, poets don\u2019t bet much on acknowledgment; what excites them is finding a precise way to say what they need, or finding out what they need in the act of saying it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me,\u201d the most famous poem by Delmore Schwartz, the twentieth century\u2019s most thwarted poet, strikes me as a prime example of this principle at work. The speaker of this poem is desperate for a very specific kind of feedback, a kind that the poem tries to pretend it doesn\u2019t want, but which finally it reveals its need for. Schwartz wanted, more than anything, to be famous, to be acknowledged as a genius\u2014his letters can be excruciating, stuffed with a kind of skull-busting ambition, self-aggrandizement that renders Schwartz so big that there can\u2019t possibly be room for him in the world. Finally, he sized himself out of it, dying crazed and spiteful in a New York hotel, having dispatched, through his lawyer, accusatory letters to friends and supporters for years.<\/p>\n

He wanted to be big because he was direly afraid he was small. And in fact, in many ways, he was\u2014unable to think much beyond himself, his fears, his frustrations, his hopes. His poems and stories, and letters and journals testify to that in abundance. As does the wreckage of spent friendships he left behind him.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m indulging deeply here in the suspicious act of reading a poet\u2019s biography into his poems, because, with Schwartz, the poems are enlarged by the roiling of his personality, they are justified, explained. Schwartz hoped that his poems would make up for him, excuse a lifetime\u2019s bad behavior in eternity, and because he encoded that hope in the poems themselves\u2014nowhere more than in this one\u2014they do.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There is a lumbering, blunt, over-the-head quality to these lines. The pieces\u2014the words\u2014that make up the poem are big, unsubtle bricks rather than feathers. \u201cThe central ton of every place\u201d can\u2019t be missed; it takes up most of wherever it is. There is wonderful, clumsy bearishness to this poem (and to many of Schwartz\u2019s\u2014this is the poem in which he teaches himself and us how to read him): \u201cface\u201d rhymes obviously with place; the bear \u201cclimbs the building,\u201d any building, because one is as good as another for this purpose\u2014the bear does what he shouldn\u2019t, gets in the way, doesn\u2019t control himself.<\/p>\n

How lucky to have \u201ca swollen shadow\u201d to whom to outsource one\u2019s sins, not even an evil twin, but someone who looks different, who looks not like you, not even like an evil you, but like evil. What is a bear? What do we think of when we think of \u201cbear\u201d? Play dead if you see one. Against his fury, there is nothing anyone can do. What a perfect figure he is. Because, of course, there is also the circus bear, \u201ca stupid clown of the spirit\u2019s motive,\u201d a monster in a skirt balancing on a ball, the anger trained out of it, forgotten, ridiculous, without even the dignity its fearsome body should command.<\/p>\n

Schwartz embarrasses himself, \u201cDressed in his dress-suit, bulging his pants\u201d\u2014oh how I love Schwartz\u2019s misuse of verbs, passive \u201cbulging\u201d made active, odd and active \u201cmouthing\u201d suddenly a creepy descriptor\u2014and he \u201cHowls in his sleep for a world of sugar,\u201d the glutton, and shows himself to be no more than \u201cquivering meat.\u201d He is a jealous, threatening monster, too, one who \u201cStretches to embrace the very dear \/ With whom I would walk without him near.\u201d Those lines capture exactly the shame and pride that are everywhere in this poem, the imprisonment and the power. Look how the rhyme shackles the bear to the girl\u2014\u201cdear\u201d and \u201cnear\u201d are almost the same\u2014and the man to his bear. The rhyme leaves no way out of the fact of those lines, but the cage bars ring with music.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s dignity and indulgent beauty in the phrasing. The lines \u201cThat inescapable animal walks with me, \/ Has followed me since the black womb held,\u201d remind me of nothing more than the verbal lavishness of Dylan Thomas\u2019s masterpiece of dark luxury, \u201cLament<\/a>,\u201d which begins, \u201cWhen I was a windy boy and a bit \/ And the black spit of the chapel fold \/ (sighed the old ramrod dying of women).\u201d Schwartz aspired to that kind of music, the reader\u2019s payoff for enduring the writer\u2019s embarrassment and shame.<\/p>\n

So why does he drag himself through the mud this way, and why so beautifully? I taught this poem to a class of undergraduates along with the poem \u201cWild Geese<\/a>\u201d by Mary Oliver. It\u2019s a kind of ridiculous pairing, but my theme was poems of self-love and poems of self-hate. Photocopied on opposite sides of the same sheet, the two poems seem made to answer one another. Schwartz\u2019s \u201cbeating brutish one\u201d confesses right off to \u201c[Boxing] his brother in the hate-ridden city.\u201d Oliver answers with foregone forgiveness: \u201cYou do not have to be good.\u201d I\u2019ll wager Schwartz\u2019s is the better poem, but Oliver\u2019s is what he wants in return.<\/p>\n

Though a few of my students found Oliver\u2019s baiting: \u201cTell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.\u201d I think Oliver offers that in order to make whoever \u201cyou\u201d is feel more normal and comfortable, feel amongst friends who also feel despair. Schwartz offers no such trade. He wants to tell his despair, but is not here to listen to yours. He\u2019s not here at all, and his poem understands that in a way Oliver\u2019s doesn\u2019t. The poem is a megaphone, not a telephone, operating in one direction only. It must accomplish what it hopes to accomplish without having to hear back from the reader.<\/p>\n

So what does it want? What can it accomplish simply by being read, by being tolerated, even enjoyed until the end? Why do any of us confess the wrong we have done? What do we want in return? Forgiveness, of course, as I said. But what\u2019s so remarkable about this poem is the way that it gets what it needs: by reading it, enjoying it, singing and savoring its music, don\u2019t we forgive it? Aren\u2019t we implicitly admitting that the bear has his powerful charms? All we have to do is get to the bottom of the page and Schwartz is forgiven his whole miserable life.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n

Craig Morgan Teicher\u00a0is the author of the poetry collection <\/em>To Keep Love Blurry and the editor of the forthcoming <\/em>Once and for All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz<\/a>. Four of his short stories<\/a> appear in our new Spring issue.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Delmore Schwartz\u2019s \u201cThe Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me.\u201d \u201cthe withness of the body\u201d The heavy bear who goes with me,A manifold honey to smear his face,Clumsy and lumbering here and there,The central ton of every place,The hungry beating brutish oneIn love with candy, anger, and sleep,Crazy factotum, dishevelling all,Climbs the building, kicks the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":950,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2157],"tags":[647,16301,21347,8617,21606,165,2047,4275,1772,21604,7585,21605],"class_list":["post-95764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-poetry","tag-ambition","tag-delmore-schwartz","tag-issue-216","tag-mary-oliver","tag-once-and-for-all","tag-poetry","tag-poets","tag-seamus-heaney","tag-t-s-eliot","tag-the-heavy-bear-who-goes-with-me","tag-verse","tag-wild-geese"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nOn Delmore Schwartz\u2019s \u201cThe Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me\u201d<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Craig Morgan Teicher on Delmore Schwartz\u2019s most enduring poem.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/03\/21\/that-inescapable-animal\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"That Inescapable Animal by Craig Morgan Teicher\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"March 21, 2016 \u2013 On Delmore Schwartz\u2019s \u201cThe Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me.\u201d\u201cthe withness of the body\u201dThe heavy bear who goes with me,A manifold honey to smear his\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/03\/21\/that-inescapable-animal\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2016-03-21T16:26:27+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2016-03-21T17:31:01+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/tumblr_lvwjs7kyxe1qzn0deo1_1280.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"986\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"819\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Craig Morgan Teicher\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Craig Morgan Teicher\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/03\/21\/that-inescapable-animal\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/03\/21\/that-inescapable-animal\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Craig Morgan Teicher\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/326385b843652aaeaf860702604ac608\"},\"headline\":\"That Inescapable Animal\",\"datePublished\":\"2016-03-21T16:26:27+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2016-03-21T17:31:01+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/03\/21\/that-inescapable-animal\/\"},\"wordCount\":1499,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/03\/21\/that-inescapable-animal\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/tumblr_lvwjs7kyxe1qzn0deo1_1280.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"ambition\",\"Delmore Schwartz\",\"Issue 216\",\"Mary Oliver\",\"Once and For All\",\"poetry\",\"poets\",\"Seamus Heaney\",\"T. 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