Four More Sibyls: Larry Levis’ “Elegy With a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage”

In his poem, “Elegy With a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage,” Larry Levis explores the nature of loss, specifically in relation to the failure of the poetic method. Levis threads the mythic tale of the Cumaean Sibyl among parallel stories of four contemporary characters who suffer the same fate as the prophetess, each becoming “sibylline” within their own context. Each character represents an aspect of the poetic process and the implications of its failure. The first of these is the speaker who has lost his connection to the past. Next is the character Stavros who had told the story of the Sibyl but has lost his poetic voice. Third, the Poet himself becomes the Sibyl, no longer able to make concrete connections between things. And finally the reader as the recipient of the poem becomes the Sibyl, entrusted with the continuation of the story. Through portraits of these characters Levis explores the failure of the poetic method and the larger resultant loss of meaning and significance therein. But just as the Sibyl’s apparent collapse of prophetic ability created an enduring and meaningful story, Levis’ “Elegy With a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage” actually succeeds in that which it laments to have failed.

Mythologized by writers from Plato to T.S. Eliot, the Cumaean Sibyl has had exceptional literary currency. According to myth, she was “a prophetess of classical antiquity” (Medieval Folklore 920)[1] who led Aeneas into the underworld and wrote nine books of prophecy, offering to sell them to the King of Rome (Dixon-Kennedy 279). Her prophecies were also written on leaves at the entrance to her cave and “petitioners gathered them before the wind scattered her words” (MF 921). Most importantly to Levis’ poem is the story recorded in the fourteenth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which the Cumaean Sibyl asked Phoebus for “as many birthdays…as there are particles of sand” (Ovid 387), forgetting to ask for eternal youth as well. So when she refused to have sex with him, Phoebus punished the Sibyl by granting her wish, causing her to shrink and wither away. Recounting this story to Aeneas, the Sibyl laments that “the time will come, when long increase of days will so contract me from my present size and so far waste away my limbs with age that I shall dwindle to a trifling weight, so trifling, it will never be believed I once was loved and even pleased a god” (Ovid 387).

I believe Levis chooses the myth of the Cumaean Sibyl for his poem because of its cultural and literary currency, but also because of its parallels to the failure of the poetic method. As D.W. Fenza suggests, “the sibyl seems to be a hyperbolic emblem for all those isolate and dedicated to restlessness and impermanence in Levis’ poetry: only death will put them at ease and relieve them of their myriad desires” (Fenza 16). The Sibyl was a valuable prophetess but her ambition for eternal life and knowledge resulted in the decline of her prophetic ability. That is the danger inherent in the poetic endeavor; amid the proliferation of stories poetry may become meaningless. Fenza shows that the poem “comments on the decadent plurality of styles and the isolation and moral relativism that accompanies a splintering of vision when one has learned too much and desired too much” (Fenza 16). In “Elegy With a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage” Levis equates the Sibyl’s fate with that of the poet’s. Each of his four contemporary characters represent an element of poetic failure parallel to the Sibyl’s prophetic failure.

The poem begins: “It’s a list of what I cannot touch” (1). The speaker then lists objects, places and people that make up a history with which he no longer has a connection. This poem begins in media res, with the speaker already in a position of isolation. In effect the speaker narrates from inside his Sibyl’s cage, attempting to remember and describe the things he has lost. These objects, places and names are symbols of the speaker’s estrangement from his past. Levis provides several images of abandonment, decay and degeneration. The speaker comments on the way innocence returns, comparing it to the “thoughtless” regrowth of flowers in an abandoned labor camp. He forgets the name of a Parisian town and confesses he would not be able to locate the trees there anymore. The details of the cat and the iron grillwork suggest a home that the speaker has left. He visualizes leaving that place as the familiar post office “grow[s] smaller, then lost” (14). Already in this first segment of the poem, Levis visually hints at the Sibyl; the image of the receding landmark mirrors the Sibyl’s receding youth. At the end of this list the speaker is in total isolation, remembering “Country music from a lone radio,” (16) as frost develops on the ground. The cold and desolate weather imagery here renders the emotion of the speaker removed from his own history.

The speaker is sibylline in this introductory segment because in his current state he feels out of touch with his own history. In the poetic process the speaker represents experience and memory. Robbed of his connection with the objects and places of his experience, he loses his ability to recall events and images, an essential part of the poetic process. He is imprisoned by the failure of that memory, yet his nostalgia for his past has a kind of calm desperation as if he has grown used to that estrangement. Levis gives the speaker an elegiac voice as he associatively moves from one item on his list to the next in a careful, orderly lament. Levis often employs this technique illuminated by Halliday: “Levis’ mind is set in motion by a certain scene or image and then its associations of idea and feeling expand in a way that seems unpredictable…and potentially infinite” (Halliday 96). This technique suits the speaker’s condition because it renders well the associations of a failing memory.

Here Levis employs dense punctuation that restrains the rhythm and the one- or two-lined stanza form also contains and restricts the speaker’s lament. The speaker longs to “touch” these things from his past, but is still somewhat removed and objective. This first segment of the poem is the speaker’s systematic response to the question, “Sibyl, Sibyl, what do you want?” (40). Because of his loss of memory he wants that which he can no longer touch.

After the speaker’s lament for his lost past, Levis introduces the next contemporary sibylline character. The speaker describes the character Stavros as a poet or storyteller who had often told his own version of the myth at a café, but who lost his poetic voice. If the speaker represents loss of experience, Stavros represents the loss of the poetic voice. Levis effectively weaves several narrative layers in this segment of the poem: the speaker’s memory of Stavros and Stavros’ version of the Sibyl’s story. This weaving of narratives successfully links Stavros with the Sibyl. After describing Stavros’ version of the myth, the speaker returns his attention to Stavros:

As the years passed, as even the sunlight began to seem

As if it was listening to him outside the windows

Of the Midi, he began to lose interest in stories, & to speak

Only in abstractions, to speak only of theories,

Never of things (72-6).

Here the speaker clearly makes the connection between Stavros and the Sibyl: the Midi Café becomes Stavros’ “cage” wherein his poetic voice slowly degenerates until he “no longer spoke at all” (78). Levis renders Stavros’ loss of poetic voice in the image of the tree limbs in the city, which “became again // Only the bare limbs of trees; no girl stepped into them / To tell us of their stillness” (81-2). Stavros has lost the poetic inspiration that had previously enabled him to call the tree limbs something more than mere tree limbs. In addition, the bare limbs of trees evoke the image of the cage in which the Sibyl herself was imprisoned. This image returns in various forms throughout the poem.

Sinking deeper Stavros joins the “gypsy Pentecostalists” (83) in a desperate attempt to regain his lost voice. Here the speaker links Stavros again with the Sibyl, whose voice her listeners “could not have recognized… // As anything human” (64-5). The speaker reports Stavros speaking in tongues through the word “Glossolalia” (85). Then the speaker adds his own assessment, saying that the word “was all speech, & none” (85). His assessment demonstrates the impotence of Stavros’ endeavor to regain his voice. Too much speech, like the proliferation of stories, leads to creative poverty. The loss of the poetic voice corresponds to the failure of the poetic method for Stavros. When he loses interest in the telling, the story loses its meaning.

While less explicit than the first two examples of contemporary Sibyls, I believe Levis also inserts a third layer, the sibylline Poet, into his fabric of characters. The speaker had lost his ability to recall his own experience and Stavros had lost his poetic voice; here the Poet loses confidence in his ability to make comparisons. He represents the third element of the poetic process represented by Levis’ contemporary sibyls: the failure of the poetic gift of metaphor. The Poet is differentiated from the speaker and from Levis himself in that he is outside of the text and yet not necessarily the person of Larry Levis. The Poet stands for all poets—all those at risk of suffering the same fate as the Sibyl and as Levis’ contemporary sibylline characters.

Storytelling no longer has special value for the Poet because he cannot make comparisons and connections between things; like Stavros’ bare tree limbs, the wood grain on his writing desk functions as a prison. He stares at the design but cannot find poetic meaning in it. He tries on several comparisons and metaphors but none satisfy. If Stavros has lost his poetic voice, the Poet in this segment has lost his poetic vision—his ability to make concrete connections between things. The connections he does make are fleeting; even his feeble image of the old woman’s grimace is “there, then not there, then there again.” (115). In this layer of the poem, Levis has the narrator step outside the text and become the Poet in order to comment on the nature of writing and of poetic vision. He metafictively calls attention to the poem itself: “Poverty is what happens at the end of any story, including this one, / When there are too many stories” (103-4). Mark Halliday has also noted the poem’s metafictional comment on poetry itself:

The poetry is suffused with awareness that the poet won’t last, the reader won’t last, and the appreciation anyone gets in life will never be enough, and thus the ultimate sublime efficacy of poetry will have to come—if it comes at all—in a fabulously tenuous and threatened spiritual life beyond the life of the poet who breathed and walked (Halliday 89-90).

The problem of the failed poetic process becomes more serious here. Against late twentieth century nihilism the only defense had been the creation of art itself. If creativity fails or proves impoverished, there is nothing meaningful left. Halliday shows that the implications of the failed poetic process are a loss of meaning that even the artistic process cannot assuage. If poetry is meaningless, then the Poet is meaningless and there is no remedy for it.

In this segment Levis renders the change in perspective by using a rhythm less orderly, and diction less poetic, than the speaker’s segment in the beginning of the poem. The Poet’s voice is also much more desperate and less elegiac than the speaker’s. D.W. Fenza observes that Levis’s poems often “turn prosaic, antipoetic” (Fenza 14), in order to serve his aesthetic goals. That technique succeeds here by rendering the Poet’s failed poetic vision which he confesses at the end of this segment: “is [the wood grain] the place where the comparisons, the little comforts / …give way beneath us?” (116-17). For the Poet the comparisons and little comforts are the very words in the poem he is writing which can no longer bear the weight of meaninglessness resulting from his lost poetic vision.

The Poet’s perspective carries over into the next segment of the poem with increased velocity. He describes his failing creativity in the image of the angel fasting within him. Here the Poet also relates poetry to prophecy through the angel that signifies poetic inspiration connected to the holy or divine. But within the Poet the angel is starved so thin that he can no longer sense its presence or its departure. In this image the Poet also links himself with the Sibyl and the tangible furnishings inside her cage. The thimble of water is the well which had not evaporated in the Sibyl’s cage, but which dries up within the Poet. It symbolizes poetic inspiration—the memory, the voice and the vision that the speaker, Stavros and the Poet have lost, respectively. And each of these elements contributes to Levis’ elegy for the failed poetic process.

The swinging perch is the only evidence of the Sibyl’s remaining life, but this comes to rest within the Poet’s cage. The Poet laments his lost vision with almost violent resolve. In answer to his own question, “What do you do when nothing calls you anymore?” (118), the Poet replies:

I’m going to stare at the whorled grain of wood in this desk

I’m bent over until it’s infinite,

I’m going to make it talk, I’m going to make it

Confess everything (125-28).

The Poet becomes imprisoned within the grain of wood in his writing desk, evoking once more the Sibyl’s own imprisonment and linking it with the creative task. The Poet longs for his lost poetic gift, commanding himself to stare at the wood until he can see some infinite meaning within its grain. This is the climax of the poem; the repeated first-person pronouns create a tone of urgency and even maniacal desperation.

Lastly, I believe the reader himself becomes the fourth contemporary sibylline character in the poem. After Levis uses portraits of the speaker, Stavros, and the Poet to reveal the failure of the poetic process, he places the same burden onto the reader’s shoulders, causing him or her to become sibylline as well. The direct address in the final lines draws the reader into the poem and the recurred images link the reader with the Sibyl. Earlier in the poem the sunlight had been a kind of audience for Stavros’ story. Here Levis repeats the imagery of the sunlight on the windows, but now the reader has become like the audience of Stavros’ seemingly endless story.

The final short segment of the poem is enigmatic in several ways. Structurally, it is broken into two one-line stanzas, the second indented as if it were an extension of the first line. This suggests a certain weight and finality that is yet unsure of itself. The poem’s ending is far from resolute and Levis renders that irresolution in the structure of the last segment. Grammatically, the last sentence lacks final punctuation. Again Levis mechanically renders the poem’s confessed artistic failure. Thematically, the final segment is enigmatic because it places the reader in the position of the Sibyl.

In an effective framing device the speaker recalls the letter and sleeping cat details from the first segment of the poem. I believe the poem itself is the letter and the reader, its addressee. The iron grillwork into which the speaker passes the letter visually evokes once more the bars of the Sibyl’s cage. The reader stands behind that iron grillwork as the recipient of the letter. In the final line of the poem, the speaker passes the letter “into the irretrievable” (136). The poem is “irretrievable” because it has become a part of the reader. No longer an isolated art object, the poem breaks out of its cage of text and enters the reader. Now that the reader has received the poem, he or she becomes responsible for its continuation. Here again Levis suggests the relationship between poetry and prophecy. Just as prophets are held divinely accountable for the accurate delivery of their prophecy, so must poets bear the same responsibility. The lack of punctuation at the end of this final line also mimics the unending fate of the Sibyl. The poem does not end for the reader, and that incompletion forces the reader to examine his or her own loss.

As Halliday shows, “the beauty of the [opening] passage comes from the way his imagination does touch each of the things he ‘cannot touch’ in their disappearance” (Halliday 95). Those things the contemporary sibylline characters have lost—a connection to the past, the poetic voice and vision—are all to be found in Levis’ “Elegy With a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage.” The strength of this poem is that it accomplishes its aesthetic and thematic goals so underhandedly. In an elegy lamenting the failure of the poetic process, Levis actually succeeds in creating a poetic masterpiece.

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses the Cumaean Sibyl says: “but, though I change till eye would never know me, my voice shall live, the fates will leave my voice” (Ovid 388). The Sibyl’s failure in the prophetic process resulted in a timeless story whose resonances have far outlived the words written on scattered leaves at the entrance to her cave. In the same way, Levis’ confessed failure actually accomplishes that which it laments to have lost, reestablishing confidence in the poetic method for both the reader and the poet. The poem is an elegy that brings to life the subject of its mourning—the poetic method.

Bibliography

Dixon-Kennedy, Mike. Encyclopedia of Greco-Roman Mythology. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO,

1998. NetLibrary

Lindahl, Carl, John McNamara, John Lindow. Ed. Medieval Folklore: An Encyclopedia of

myths, legends, tales, beliefs, and customs. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2000.

NetLibrary

Ovid. Metamorhposes. Horace Gregory, Translator and Introduction. New York: Penguin, 2001.

Halliday, Mark. "Levis and All Loss." Chicago Review. 45.1 (1999): 89-97.

Fenza, D. W. "The Wish to Be Swept Clean: The Poetry of Larry Levis." American Poetry

Review. 31.2 (2002): 11-17.

Sullivan, Richard A. "The Sibyl and the Voice: Eliot's Epigraphs to The Waste Land." Yeats

Eliot Review: A Journal of Criticism and Scholarship. 7.1-2 (1982): 19-27.

Campbell, Elizabeth A. "The Woman Artist as Sibyl: Sappho, George Eliot, and Margaret

Atwood." The Nassau Review: The Journal of Nassau Community College Devoted to

Arts, Letters, and Sciences. 5.5 (1989): 6-14.

Levis, Larry. “Elegy With a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage” The Selected Levis. Selected and

with an Afterword by David St. John. Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 2003.

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[1] I will cite this source as “MF” for the remainder of this paper

“Pocket Wonderlands”: Significant Moments of Aesthetic Appreciation

an essay on Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory

With a similar potential for misapprehension as Nabokov’s “inclination to equate in retrospect [his] age with that of the century” (13), the reader is inclined to equate his novel Speak, Memory with that of an account of Russia at the turn of the century. The book appears also to be about Nabokov’s life. But what Nabokov has cleverly disguised as a personal memoir is actually an aesthetic exploration of the nature of beauty, especially as it relates to memory. Each chapter is a kind of butterfly hunt (indiscriminate of season or species) for a rare and beautiful specimen worthy of induction into Nabokov’s elaborate collection. In his collection are the moments of aesthetic appreciation that retain a certain significance through the process of memory. The hunt for these is the eager occupation of each chapter, each paragraph, each sentence. Nabokov hunts with the net of memory, and pins his Lepidoptera with elegant style. That is not to say that Nabokov’s prose is dead, for even on the corkboard, his moments of aesthetic beauty come to life. Speak, Memory is Nabokov’s eloquent recollection of those “momentary vacuum[s] into which rushes all that [he] love[s]” (139). For Nabokov memory, beauty and aesthetics are intrinsically linked and arriving at their junction becomes the project of his autobiography.

Nabokov skillfully uses the aesthetic technique of relating the memories of a (however prodigious) child through the lens of a mature adult artist. Nabokov confesses to this technique: “I like to fold my magic carpet [of time], after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another” (139). He superimposes the experience of half a century upon a child’s appreciation of such trivial moments as hiding behind a divan: “it was the primordial cave…that lay behind the games I played when I was four” (23). This technique accomplishes a retrospective significance and attaches a psychological depth to each memory he relates.

Episodes in his earliest years, like the one with Kuropatkin’s matches, provide symbolic and thematic material that a child of such an age could not have understood, but that Nabokov claims to have sensed. And now he articulates the thematic material through his autobiography. Seemingly trivial moments of the past retain a beauty and weight that unfolds later with the end of the thematic strand. Sometimes, as in the case of Nabokov’s first captured (and escaped) butterfly, the strand “dip[s] and dodg[es] and soar[s]” (120) for forty years before it is caught. Nabokov claims that the true purpose of autobiography should be “the following of such thematic designs through one’s life” (27). And if the thematic design of matches (rather than Kuropatkin’s evasion of Soviet imprisonment) is indeed “the point”, then the reader has early been warned of Nabokov’s intended emphasis: the autobiography will focus on rectangles of framed sunlight (119), meerschaum penholders (151), and unprojected film slides (162). These visual metaphors illumine the autobiography’s emphasis on the beautiful particulars. The small, detailed things provide a perspective into something grand and beautiful, which is exactly his desire for Speak, Memory. In the beautiful particulars we find the “intrinsically artistic…meeting place between imagination and knowledge” (167), where Nabokov dwells with reverence.

The first of these perspectival images is the rectangle of framed sunlight in the window which had disclosed the day’s weather and, therefore, its suitability for a butterfly hunt. Nabokov could deduce by that strip of light whether the day would be sullen or brilliant. The next symbolic object is a souvenir Nabokov acquired at Biarritz, a “meerschaum penholder with a tiny peephole of crystal in its ornamental part” (151). Inside the peephole one could see a “miraculous photographic view” of a lighthouse scene, but only after getting rid of the “shimmer of one’s own lashes” (151). The third visual symbol is that of the unprojected Magic-Lantern slide Lenski had used for instructive readings. Nabokov remarks that the slides had looked “tawdry and tumid” when projected on the screen, but when “simply held between finger and thumb and raised to the light”, they had revealed a particular loveliness (166). It is in the detailed particulars that Nabokov finds beauty and meaning.

However in Speak, Memory Nabokov does not often explain the beauty and meaning of the detailed particulars and thematic strands. He even confesses occasional ignorance; he admits that with one “marble” of aesthetic appreciation, he “still seem[s] to be holding that wisp of iridescence, not knowing exactly where to fit it” (152). Instead he relates the moment with a crafted style that both installs the reader into Nabokov’s childhood and awakens his or her own catalogue of memories. Thus, part of Nabokov’s project is to appeal to the very human (and specifically childlike) apprehension of the beautiful particulars and to mourn the “astounding” fact of “how little the ordinary person notices butterflies” (129). These are the real treasures of human memory and history, which “as if an evil spell had been cast on the Adriatic coast” (130) are so easily overshadowed by generalities (Russia, Soviet literature). In awakening these treasures in the reader he implicitly asks him or her to consider the significance of (and relationship between) memory, beauty, and aesthetics. He does not overburden with explanations; nor is he nostalgic and sentimental during his childhood reminiscences. For Nabokov the apprehension of the beautiful particulars is a serious endeavor; the moment of significant memory is the very seed of art, out of which grows everything beautiful and full of life.

Nabokov’s autobiography attempts to diminish the generalities to particulars, and to peer into the beautiful particulars where there are wonderlands of meaning and significance. At their meeting place is the point of aesthetic beauty which is Nabokov’s intended destination. And he will travel land and sea, across Russia and the United States, in order to catch and catalogue that butterfly. The anthem of Speak, Memory: “How small the cosmos (a kangaroo’s pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!”(24).

Magician’s Tricks

What about when I’m lost for words?
When the fearful heart you’ve made
plays no music. And silent chords
trickle from trumpet to the grave;
trees tremble for the song of birds.

Is there beauty in what isn’t?
A quiet mind, soul and spirit
can do more than slick magician
tricks of words, pen and paper wit.

Apocrypha is blessing to
ears that hear only soft, sweet songs
which sail like fragrant ocean views.

The quiet wind, blowing words hard
will quiet my winding, fleshy heart.

Still the voice of stillness speaks, “Come.”

11/01/06