Robert Hass, “A Sunset” and “Meditation at Lagunitas”

 ROBERT HASS HAD a poem, “A Sunset,” in the September 9 issue of the New Yorker, and its final line—“That burned, that burned and burned”—reminded me suddenly and sharply of the final line of what may be Hass’s best-known poem, “Meditation at Lagunitas”: “saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.”

Interesting coincidence, both poems ending with a thrice-repeated word, so I fetched down Hass’s Praise (1979) to re-read the earlier poem and see whether they were related in any other way. I would say they are. 

“Meditation” addresses the inability of language to achieve plenitude, that “a word is elegy to what it signifies,” making the repetition of “blackberry” at the end poignant. Can poetry use language to transcend  language’s limitations? Can it bring us a little closer to the truth that language falls so short of? The poem does not exactly say “yes,” but it does leave an opening for “maybe.”

“Sunset” also begins with a nod to the duplicity of language, claiming that “sordid” can mean “bruise-colored, a yellow-brown.” News to me, and unrecorded in the OED, but certainly a good instance of language being slippery—and if language is that slippery, can poetry be anything but slippery? Can it (Auden not withstanding) make things happen? Could it, for instance, have prevented the school massacre at Uvalde? If the “angry adolescent boy in Texas / Who shot and killed nineteen children / With a high-powered weapon my culture / Put into his hands” had read poetry rather than play first-person-shooter games, would that have made a difference?

The question of whether “culture” in the old sense (books, paintings, and opera, rather than the NRA and computer games) can make anything happen occupies most of “A Sunset.” Ashbery knew better than to try, Hass suggests, not out of indifference but out of modesty. Hitler’s record collection (“Wagner, of course, the operas / Especially, but also Mussorgsky, / Rachmaninoff”) did not stop him from being Hitler, nor did Monet’s painting the waterlilies at Giverny lessen the carnage of trench warfare.

Beauty ought to make a difference, right? But will we ever know that it does? Just as “Meditation” has no evidence that language gets us somewhere other than the uncanny lift of “blackberry, blackberry, blackberry”, “Sunset” has no evidence that beauty gets us somewhere other than our capacity to be brought up short by a sunset: “In the dark / I thought of an ordinary radiance / That burned, that burned and burned.”