DEPRIVATION AND APPREHENSIONIN YANNIS RITSOS, LINDA GREGG AND JACK GILBERT

Andrew Bennett

Critical Paper and Program BibliographySubmitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in

Creative Writing, Pacific Lutheran University, August 2013

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Deprivation and Apprehension in Yannis Ritsos, Linda Gregg and Jack Gilbert

Poets Yannis Ritsos, Linda Gregg and Jack Gilbert all render the way varying

states of deprivation are transformed into ongoing states of apprehension. If deprivation

is a lack of a standard sustenance or condition, apprehension is either the resulting fear of

an uncertain future or it’s a suddenly new way of knowing—sometimes both. These poets

are remarkably similar in their understanding of this relation, but they differ, however, in

form, context, and thematic implication.

Ritsos’s characters are deprived of one or more of the body’s senses—sight,

touch, taste, hearing, smell. This deprivation results from cruelty, choice, nature,

environmental demand, societal condition, age or whim. The ensuing apprehension takes

many forms. Sometimes, the deprived character perceives with another sense what he

couldn’t with the one he lacked; or, he gains heightened awareness or understanding

through such limitation. Sometimes, a speaker or character gains understanding or

awareness through witnessing the sense deprivation of another. Sometimes, a character’s

deprivation results in the feeling of anticipation for the speaker or reader. Through

rendering these various transformations, Ritsos increases our awareness and

understanding of emotional and psychological realities that are hidden from view.1

Gregg’s speaker is partially deprived of the sense of sight due to darkened

conditions. This darkening is literal in terms of setting because the poems take place in

the evening or night. This darkening is metaphorical in terms of mood, for the speaker is

1 He also makes social and political commentary, but these subjects will not be a focus ofanalysis. I’m more interested in what close reading achieves by itself than withbiographical or historical context.

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in a state of despair. As a result of this darkening, the speaker sees objects more clearly

than she would in full light. This transformation is literal: deprivation sharpens her

vision. The speaker also better understands her grief-stricken circumstances and, through

them, her nature. This aspect of transformation is figurative: deprivation sharpens her

self-cognizance. By rendering these transformations, Gregg offers fresh perspective on

the nature of seeing, the nature of grief, and the difference between male and female

consciousness.

Gilbert deals less with sense deprivation than the other two poets. What his

speaker lacks is sometimes more abstract, such as the faculty of expression. Sometimes it

is more emotional, such as longing for his deceased wife. In both cases, he recovers the

virtual possession of what he believed lost through the vivid evocation of it. He seizes

upon new ways of knowing through the process of mourning. By rendering this kind of

transformation, Gilbert offers insight into the nature of yearning.

Ritsos portrays both a literal and metaphorical sense of deprivation. In

“Maturity,” he writes,

We knew him when he was dressed, austere, collected,

athletic and handsome, in a way. We all greeted him

quite naturally, possibly with a certain distrust

of the unbearable feeling weighing itself

in his half-closed eyes. Until, during the red sunset

in mid-August—a blazing, terrible summer—

he cast off all his clothes and stood there

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stark naked, red all over, dyed with that

deep red of solitude and endlessness,

utterly skinned,

like a magnificent ram hanging from the hook in the middle of the

marketplace

with his diaphanous, exposed veins

showing the circulation of blood and God. Some man couldn’t take it;

he threw a sackcloth over him and ran away. The old people spat at him.

The men took out their pistols and fired at him. The kids

stoned him. Only the women and the youths

hid their faces in their hands and knelt. (Selected 89)

The ambiguity emerging from the title raises the question of which of the subsequent

behaviors constitutes maturity. Removing one’s clothes and standing for all to see is the

act of an attention-craving toddler, but this man’s having been skinned suggests his

public display might not be less reasonable than the punishment inflicted upon him. The

opening lines suggest that he used to bear an outward appearance of maturity. Everyone

else in this scene has his or her own method of coping with the sight of him. Which of

these reactions is mature? All they need to do is look away, not even to deprive but to

redirect their own sense of seeing that makes them uncomfortable. But only the most

innocent and humble—those who society might deem incapable of maturity—look away.

Although these “women and youths” cannot bear looking, which seems to be all the man

wants, their kneeling suggests a level of humility and respect. This gesture, therefore,

might be the most mature.

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The mystery of why the man was skinned complicates these reactions. If he was a

man with a history of wrongdoing, whose maturity was only pretense, his true form is

finally uncovered. Are the women and youths, then, immature because they do not

understand that this punishment has a purpose, or are they all the more mature because

they understand that such loss of dignity is never warranted? If one is skinless, his

sensitivity to touch is certainly altered; but is he more sensitive now, or less? If we

consider that sense can also mean “rationality,” then this poem contrasts a series of

senseless acts with one that is probably heroic. Because the language of the poem is so

concrete and direct, so clean of editorializing, it’s ambiguous which act is heroic. Who is

the protagonist? As readers, we want to know where we stand, to know whose side we

are on, to know with whom we should empathize. Every line in this poem, therefore,

generates surprise, and nearly every line contains some transformation. When we come to

expect transformation at every turn, we become apprehensive—anticipating the next

surprise.

In “Country Woman,” the protagonist’s sense of sight becomes honed in

darkening—both literal and metaphorical. In the third stanza, the matriarch

closed her eyes, but since she couldn’t die yet,

ordered them to light the candles. In their gentle glow

she saw her thin, dry hands, as powerful as those of the saints,

like dry trees that have yielded much fruit—rough hands

hewn by housekeeping and the field. At that moment

she loved her hands. (Selected 92)

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The need for candlelight entails a literal darkening, while the approach of death suggests

a figurative darkening. Only at this time of darkening can she feel love for what she sees

because the dark allows her to see its true value similar to what Gregg calls form2. The

accomplishments of these hands grant them their value, likened to those of a religious

figure who has performed miracles—yet with all the humbleness of domestic and pastoral

labor. This moment of seeing, of apprehending, is hard earned. Not just any of us can

light some candles in the dark and love ourselves; only at the onset of death and after so

much work, the penultimate lines suggest, can one’s senses be honed enough to love

oneself. And as we will see with Gregg, this kind of seeing is not accomplished in total

darkness, but rather in minimal or alternative light—in this case candlelight.

“Country Woman” portrays a woman’s ability to perceive beauty and feel

love—in contrast to the frightfulness and despicability reflected in “Maturity”—through

sense alteration. There is another instance of this paradox in “Interchanges”:

They took the plough to the field,

they brought the field into the house—

an endless interchange shaped

the meaning of things.

The woman changed places with the swallow,

she sat in the swallow’s nest on the roof and warbled.

The swallow sat at the woman’s loom and wove

stars, birds, flowers, fishing boats, and fish.

2 In the poem “Too Bright to See”

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If only you knew how beautiful your mouth is

you would kiss me on the eyes that I might not see you. (Selected 86)

The event in the first line is a physical possibility we can both see and believe—a plough

belongs in a field, but it might also transform the field. In this poem and so many of

Ritsos’s, there are simple, credible things in the world that transform dramatically, given

changes in the conditions of their environment. The second line of this poem still

contains a feature and object we can see, but the event is surely less plausible. In fact, it’s

plausible only if we follow a change in scale the syntax encourages—perhaps it is not the

whole field that enters the house, but just a part of it, as on the bottom of a shoe.

The changes that take place in the second stanza are more miraculous, but they

remain credible if we conceive them as an example of the assertion that ends the first

stanza: “an endless interchange shaped / the meaning of things.” Because we do not know

exactly what this broad statement signifies, we are willing to make the associative leap

with the speaker that the swallow and woman might not only swap venues, but also

actions. Weaving primarily involves touch and sight, while warbling primarily involves

hearing—but both actions involve all five senses to perceive completely and maybe even

to perform.

The last stanza is puzzling with its incorporation of a first and second person

ostensibly unrelated to the previous third-person plural and woman and swallow. In spite

of this associative gap in literal subject matter, the thematic connection to the rest of the

poem is clear: one sense is changed for another, whether because of necessity, desire,

hypothetical condition, nature, or some other factor. The speaker, in this couplet, suggests

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that his beloved’s beauty is unbearable; but the proposed solution to this—restricting his

sight—would only result in heightened desire for intimacy in the physical meeting of

mouth and eyes. So the swapping of senses increases the feeling of love. We often

conceive of love as one of anticipation as well as perception and possession of some

elusive mystery. For Ritsos, these are the very qualities of apprehension.

In Ritsos’s “Self-Knowledge,” the protagonist apprehends himself through yet

another instance of sense deprivation:

He leaves sleep behind, and the road the moon paves

with thin gold leaf. He’s on his own now,

here, in this little, this next to nothing,

with a walking stick and an empty basket. He sees

mountains, hovering in the mist. His loneliness

is weightless now, he could almost fly. But no.

He sits in a chair. Picks up an apple. Bites into it.

At last, he can read his proper name – in the teethmarks.

(Late into the Night 65)

Through a combination of isolation, fatigue, material poverty and the physical and mental

deterioration that comes with age, this man has become disassociated from himself. The

imagery in the poem suggests that he experiences this condition intellectually,

emotionally and physically: through third-person limited point-of-view, the speaker

projects the man’s condition onto the mountains, which to him appear disconnected from

the earth. Through an act of will, he manages to sit down and lift a simple object. The

apple he lifts and bites into, given the poem’s title, might be the biblical apple, the fruit of

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knowledge. It restores in him not some universal knowledge, but instead—as the title

says and final line suggests—knowledge of himself. We might deduce, then, that for

Ritsos true knowledge of the self is the most valuable type of knowledge. Or, perhaps it is

worthless, as even after attaining what he does, the man has not literally gained anything

but perspective—seeing his teeth via their impression in the fruit. This man may have lost

his sense of taste; after all, there is no indication that he tastes the apple. He only

apprehends through his sense of sight what knowledge the apple contains, the same sense

that betrays him when he looks at the mountains.

Another notable ambiguity in the final line is that the man is able to read “his

proper name,” but we are not told what that name is. Is it Adam? And does it actually

matter what his proper name is if he has lost connection with the world? Proper names

serve the practical purpose of differentiating one of a common species or category of

things from another. This man, like the biblical Adam, is the only man there is in his

world, so a proper name is extraneous—and so might be, by extension, self-knowledge.

The various forms of sense deprivation in Ritsos’s poems lead to new ways of

perceiving and registering elusive phenomena on two primary spectrums. One is an

emotional spectrum from love, to empathy, to indifference, to cruelty. The other is a

psychological spectrum from knowledge, to ignorance, to disassociation. The surfacing

of these hidden realities also elicits new ways of valuing them, with regard to both human

relationships and the individual self.

Of the three poets, Gregg is the most explicit in linking apprehension to

deprivation; this causality is a central theme in her collection Too Bright to See. The

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poems in this collection literally have a muted color palette, yet their emotional resonance

gives their images a metaphorical glow. Two poems not only exemplify this effect but

also reveal its significance. First, “Different Not Less”:

All of it changes at evening

equal to the darkening,

so that night-things may have their time.

Each gives over where its nature is essential.

The river loses all but a sound.

The bull keeps only its bulk.

Some things lose everything.

Colors are lost. And trees mostly.

At a time like this we do not doubt our dreams.

We believe the dead are standing along the other edge

of the river, but do not go to meet them.

Being no more powerful than they were before.

We see this change is for the good,

that there is completion, a coming around.

And we are glad for the amnesty.

Modestly we pass our dead in the dark,

and history—the Propylaea to the right

and above our heads. The sun, bull-black

and ready to return, holds back so the moon,

delicate and sweet, may finish her progress.

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We look into the night, or death, our loss,

what is not given. We see another world alive

and our wholeness finishing. (20)

And again in “Too Bright to See,” from the same collection:

Just before dark the light gets dark. Violet

where my hands pull weeds around the Solomon’s seals.

I see with difficulty what before was easy.

Perceive what I saw before

but with more tight effort. I am moon

to what I am doing and what I was.

It is real beauty that I lived

and dreamed would be, now know

but never then. Can tell by looking hard,

feeling which is weed and what is form.

My hands are intermediary. Neither lover

nor liar. Sweet being, if you are anywhere that hears,

come quickly. I weep, face set, no tears, mouth open. (Too Bright 42)

Both of these poems focus on a condition of near darkness—in mostly literal terms, but

with metaphorical implications as to the opportunities and advantages it affords.

The details in “Different Not Less” suggest that there are certain physical and

conceptual things we can see better in near-darkness, and certain ones we can only see in

near-darkness. Some things in daylight appear as less true or less vital versions of

themselves. That “the river loses all but a sound” suggests that sound alone can be more

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telling and distinctive by itself than sound plus sight. If “bulk” or massiveness is the true

essence of a bull, our impression of this animal—in near-dark— reduces itself to that.

That “some things lose everything” suggests that most of what some things are is

immaterial, and some things, such as dreams, take on a greater power at night than during

day. It is a time when transcendence can occur, but without any increased danger to the

beholder, as in “the dead… standing along the other edge of the river.” What daylight has

to offer our senses, and our experience of the world, is incomplete. The irony of the sun

being “bull-black” is that it—the greatest source of light—gets in the way of another kind

of light. Gregg suggests that by witnessing the moon’s work—for the moon is what

provides this nocturnal light—we can see other phenomena that similarly exist only as

types of absence, such as death and loss and unrealized expectations or desires.

The sun and moon imagery also suggests a difference between male and female

consciousness. The male sun garners its identity through dominance, which, while bold,

is both limited and limiting. The female moon is more vulnerable, attuned, sensitive and

subtle, so long as “night-things… have their time.” If we don’t give way to the female

moon, we cut ourselves off from half of human consciousness. And at nighttime, we

can’t help but give such attention if we are to have vision at all.

At the end of “Different Not Less,” Gregg achieves a remarkable linguistic feat:

she makes an abstraction seem concrete. The key phrase of the last line—“our wholeness

finishing”—is tangible even though it is unspecific. It needs to be unspecific because in

the moonlit evening-scape of this poem, wholeness is precisely the class of detail one is

able to perceive, akin to that of a bull’s bulk or a river’s sound. Thus, one of the reasons

this particular abstraction works is the context of the setting that the poet has established.

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Another is grammar: “We see another world alive / and our wholeness finishing.” By

putting the abstraction into action, she makes it more dramatic and more dynamic. We do

not just see our wholeness—we see it finishing; it is in the process of coming into being.

The image, rather than reported to us after the fact, comes into being simultaneously with

our experience of it.

“Too Bright to See” portrays the how and why of this phenomenon, which has to

do with effort. Because the speaker’s eyes have to work harder to see at night, sight

becomes more pronounced. At night she earns her sight; it is not given to her, therefore

her stake in it increases. In the conditions of night, she cannot see the quantity of objects

she could before—and this lack of clutter might be cause as well as consequence. But the

distinctions she can make at night bear more significance than those during the day:

“which is weed and what is form.” There is even a key difference between which and

what. Which signifies one of a plurality, the multiplicity of dispensables—weeds (though

she uses the singular form of this noun to indicate lack of distinguishable characteristics

between them). What signifies an elemental substance or structure—form. “My hands are

intermediary,” the speaker says, because sight paradoxically is still the predominant

sense, even in these nighttime conditions.

The most transcendent event in “Too Bright to See” occurs in lines five and six:

“I am moon / to what I am doing and what I was.” The moonlight, she imagines, allows

her to step outside herself and be the moon; as such, she shines her nocturnal light on

herself, and thus sees herself in a truer way. She gains deeper interior self-access

through—paradoxically—objectivity. This may be because in daylight she is too

distracted by the external world, when all the “weed” is visible and she cannot distinguish

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it from “form.” Of course, this physical transformation is not literal. But because the

conflict in the poem concerns identity—how she feels about who she is—a figurative

transformation is nevertheless astounding. Insofar as the moon symbolizes chastity, the

speaker becomes a purer version of her female self. Because the conflict also has to do

with a romantic relationship gone awry—hinted at in the final lines of this poem, but

made clear in another poem of the same collection, “The Wife”—she returns out of

necessity to her purest, virgin self. Only in this mindset free of distractions and

complications—the “weed” of sexual desire—can she clearly distinguish “form.”

Gregg’s darkness is also metaphorical, the source of which is alluded to at the end

of “Too Bright to See” but made explicit in “The Wife”:

My husband sucks her tits.

He walks into the night, her Roma, his being alive.

Toward that other love. I wait in the hotel

until four. I lurch from the bed

talking to myself, watch my face in the mirror.

I change my eyes, making them darker.

Take it easy, I say. It is a long time to wait in,

this order of reality. My presence stings.

I grow specific without consequence. (23)

The speaker in this scene experiences betrayal. But in accordance with her response to

the literal darkening in the other poems, she embraces this metaphorical darkening rather

than attempt to resist or overcome it. She performs the painful act of waiting, looking in

the mirror and talking to herself because it grants her the opportunity to see her true self

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and her husband’s true self. She “change[s] her eyes,” which could mean literally

reapplying makeup ruined due to tears, indeed “making them darker” because the

darkness—grief due to betrayal—is what allows her to see. From the angle of the mirror

facing her, her eyes appear dark from mascara, eye shadow, eye liner. But sitting in front

of a mirror, she sees herself—more complexly—looking through this literal darkness that

covers her eyes. From her angle, the darkness appears to be a lens through which she

sees. This lens, due to the context established in the poem’s first three lines, takes on

metaphorical weight as well. That is, she perceives the truths surrounding her marriage

and identity more accurately from her state of despair than she would from a state of

bliss.

The speaker’s line eight assertion—“My presence stings”—is another example of

Gregg’s ability to render abstractions concrete. She has made the condition of sitting in

darkness and seeing through it such a complete human experience, indeed an “order of

reality,” that it feels tangible. In addition to expressing her own pain, “my presence”

might also be meant to “sting” her husband. Her embracing all this pain will, she posits,

allow him to see the damage he has caused.

She repeats this trope again in the final line: “I grow specific without

consequence.” The word “specific” is actually quite unspecific. However, “my husband

sucks her tits” is very specific, more so than, for instance, my husband is unfaithful. She

is not, however, just playing with language. She reveals that the seeing of specifics has

not yielded the outcome of changing her condition. Knowing that her husband had sex

with another woman, and in what manner, does not make her feel better. These specifics

have more or less paralyzed her. She is waiting, looking in the mirror, talking to herself.

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Likewise, she is left similarly statuesque at the end of “Too Bright to See”: “I weep, face

set, no tears, mouth open.” She finds at the end of “The Wife” that her presence has not

in fact had the consequence of stinging her husband. All this work she has done in the

darkness has allowed her to apprehend her own grief, as well as the broader nature of

grief. However, neither the grieving nor her understanding of it has made her happier. In

order to become happy, she would likely need to regain her husband’s fidelity, or even

undo his adulterous acts—which is impossible.

Apprehension, for Gilbert, is the possession of that which is elusive. Gilbert

concerns himself not just with the seizing of such possession, but with the sustained

awareness or apperception of it. He writes in the last stanza of “Poetry is a Kind of

Lying”:

Degas said he didn’t paint

what he saw, but what

would enable them to see

the thing he had. (Collected 52)

These lines, as the title suggests, refer as much to Gilbert’s poetry as Degas’s painting.

Gilbert’s subject, most often, is what he does not have—what he desires, what he has

lost. Yet by the end of a given poem, he evokes this deprivation vividly enough to

persuade both himself and the reader that he does have what he believed he didn’t.

Though he doesn’t regain literal possession, there is the sensation or faith that he does.

Some of his poems describe this form of apprehension, like the one above; some enact it,

and some do both.

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One poem that does both is “The Butternut Tree at Fort Juniper,” in which the

speaker feels deprived of accurate language. He believes what he has is barely adequate:

I called the tree butternut (which I don’t think

it is) so I could talk about how different

the trees are around me here in the rain.

It reminds me of how mutable language is. Keats

would leave blank spaces in his drafts to hold on

to his passion, spaces for the right words to come.

We use them sideways. The way we automatically

add bits of shape to hold on to the dissolving dreams.

So many of the words are for meanwhile. We say,

“I love you” while we search for language

that can be heard. Which allows us to talk

about how the aspens over there tremble

in the smallest shower, while the tree over by

the window here gathers the raindrops and lets them

go in bunches. The way my heart carols sometimes,

and other times yearns. Sometimes is quiet

and other times is powerfully quiet. (Collected 41).

Most good poems have a transformative moment, a moment that illuminates the outcome

of the speaker’s—or protagonist’s—battle with a given impediment to happiness or

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fulfillment3. This transformative moment occurs at the end of “Butternut Tree,” when the

reader realizes the speaker has evoked how he feels precisely because there are no exact

words for it. Such a sensation doesn’t need to be described in abstract terms if it can be

rendered through comparative imagery. The poem reveals that while language is often

only filler—a bridge to feeling and insight, a stand in, an inexact approximation—it has

the potential to take on its own original power. It can gain this power from context. The

feat of this poem is that it renders the opposite of what it says. The speaker

simultaneously exercises the faculty of which he claims to be deprived. He laments the

infinitely differential nature of language, yet he captures, in a mere seventeen lines, the

nature of a poet’s yearning. Gilbert’s allusion to the master Keats elevates the worthiness

and timelessness of his struggle.

“The Butternut Tree at Fort Juniper” is lament from beginning to end; on a literal

level, he only grieves, and never announces redemption. But he does make this

transformation explicit in another poem, “The Lost Hotels of Paris.” The poem opens:

The Lord gives everything and charges

by taking it back. What a bargain.

This sarcasm is rare for Gilbert. He might license himself this moment of levity because

he so often portrays the subject loss. Perhaps he believes some self-deprecation is in

order. He proceeds to list several examples of fleeting joys: hearts of women, small hotels

of Paris, the best Greek islands. But he resolves, “it’s the having / not the keeping that is

the treasure,” and closes:

We look up at the stars and they are

3 I’ve taken the term transformative moment from one of Kevin Clark’s lectures at theRainier Writers Workshop. The definition here is a paraphrase.

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not there. We see the memory

of when they were, once upon a time.

And that too is more than enough. (Collected 53)

While in “Butternut Tree…” the speaker feels deprived of verbal faculty, here he feels

deprived of apperceptive faculty. It’s neither the experience nor the memory of the joy he

yearns for per se, but rather knowing that he experienced it. The implication is that “The

Lord” has similar blessings in store—though these will also, in turn, be taken back. But,

Gilbert argues, if one seizes pleasure in a blessing when the blessing is present, then the

pleasure remains once the blessing has died or disappeared; and moreover, the value of

the pleasure lasts even longer than the pleasure itself.

In the Michiko poems, Gilbert renders this form of apprehension more

thoroughly, in slower exposure.4 He does it most powerfully—because most

surprisingly—in “Alone”:

I never thought Michiko would come back

after she died. But if she did, I knew

it would be as a lady in a long white dress.

It is strange that she has returned

as somebody’s dalmatian. I meet

the man walking her on a leash

almost every week. He says good morning

and I stoop down to calm her. He said

4 The “Michiko poems” is my own term for the series of poems scattered throughout TheGreat Fires and Refusing Heaven (both in Collected) about the speaker’s wife’s death.They are not designated as such in the actual collections.

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once that she was never like that with

other people. Sometimes she is tethered

on their lawn when I go by. If nobody

is around, I sit on the grass. When she

finally quiets, she puts her head in my lap

and we watch each other’s eyes as I whisper

in her soft ears. She cares nothing about

the mystery. She likes it best when

I touch her head and tell her small

things about my days and our friends.

That makes her happy, the way it always did. (Collected154)

The speaker’s wife has died, and he is able to evoke her more vividly than if she were

alive. One tension in the poem is between despair and gratitude. The speaker’s loss—his

deprivation—is so devastating that he becomes thankful for any sign of Michiko’s

presence. Another tension is between gratitude and absurdity. A reader feels empathy for

the speaker because he expresses joy in the impossible. He’s not deluded, either, because

he admits that the situation is “strange.” And he indicates he knows he does not literally

possess what he has lost when he says she was “somebody’s” dalmatian. Ultimately, he is

able to apprehend what was most important in their relationship—companionate

tenderness—because in this context he is deprived of every element except that.

Apprehension in Gilbert’s “The Negligible” operates similarly to the way it does

in Ritsos’s poems. Gilbert’s speaker apprehends his deceased spouse, again, when one

sense compensates for the lack of another:

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I lie in bed listening to it sing

in the dark about the sweetness

of brief love and the perfection of loves

that might have been. The spirit cherishes

the disregarded. It is because the body continues

to fail at remembering the smell of Michiko

that her body is so clear in me after all this time.

There is a special pleasure in remembering the shine

on her spoon merging with faint sounds

in the distance of her rising from the bathwater. (Collected 262)

The speaker’s opening-line assertion that he hears the bed sing even though he is merely

lying in it—presumably still—suggests his depth of attunement to both present and

recollected sense perception. This context persuades us that his failure to remember

Michiko’s smell is a deprivation deeply felt. In turn, the clarity of her body in him seems

a remarkable achievement of his other senses, sight and hearing, indicated in the last

three lines of the poem. Moreover, his senses cannot help but evoke each other. Because

“the shine / on her spoon” gets us thinking in terms of light, we anticipate another visual

image shrouded in light. So when we get “faint sounds / in the distance of her rising from

the bathwater,” we don’t just hear the dripping, falling and splashing of water. We see a

woman rising and shining. There is the “body… so clear” that the speaker has mentioned

in spite of the failure to remember smell. Furthermore, he might only gain access to these

visual and auditory details because of his failure to remember smell. The desire—the

yearning—to apprehend what is lost triggers whichever senses are available. So

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ultimately, the deprivation of one sense leads to the enhancement of the others. It further

leads to the apprehension of the lost object or experience, in this case his wife.

Ritsos, Gregg and Gilbert’s unique cognizance of the relation between deprivation

and the resulting apprehension gives readers access to illumination without

sentimentality. The deprivation in their poems almost always involves some form of

suffering, and the ensuing apprehension does not promise alleviation. Ritsos’s characters

either continue to suffer or are so close to death that their new ways of knowing are futile.

So the reader, who does not actually suffer from deprivation, is truly the one to

experience sustained apprehension. Gregg’s speaker comes to understand the nature of

her suffering, but that still does not mitigate the suffering. Meanwhile, this transformation

does not harm, but may enlighten, the reader. Gilbert’s speaker’s temporary repossession

of what he has lost grants him morsels of pleasure, but these morsels ultimately wilt in

the magnitude of the loss’s permanence. All three poets offer pleasure—not suffering—to

readers, because we are not actually subject to the deprivation in the poems. We do,

however, partake of the attendant new ways of knowing, the intellectual and visceral

experience of which is thrilling.

22

WORKS CITED

Gilbert, Jack. Collected Poems. NY: Knopf, 2012. Print.

Gregg, Linda. Too Bright to See and Alma. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2002. Print.

Ritsos, Yannis. Late Into the Night: The Last Poems of Yannis Ritsos. Martin Mckinsey,

trans. Oberlin, OH: Oberlin College, 1995. Print.

---. Selected Poems 1938-1988. Kimon Friar and Kostas Myrsiades, ed. and

trans. Brockport, NY: BOA, 1989. Print.