Joseph Brodsky and the God You Can't Mean
The non-flourishes of “Flourish”
Yesterday was a series of small personal disasters to go along with of course the ongoing national misery. So I thought I’d wrap things up by trying to parse a completely impenetrable poem with which I’m somewhat obsessed.
This is “Flourish” by Joseph Brodsky; he wrote it originally in Russian and then translated it himself in 1994, two years before his death at 56.
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Flourish
O if the birds sang while the clouds felt bored by singing,
and the eye gaining blue as it traced their trill
could make out the keys in the door and, beyond, a ceiling,
and those whose address at present begins with nil.And other than that, it’s just shifting of chairs and sofas,
and flowers on walls and in vases obstruct their view.
And if there was ever a bee sans beehive or solace
with extra spores on its paws, it’s you.O if the transparent things in their blue garret
could hold their eye-dodging matter in second gear
to curdle themselves one day into a tear or star at
this end of the universe. Afterwards, everywhere.Yet oxygen seems to be just the raw material
for lace strung out on spokes in the tsars’ back yard,
and the statues freeze as though they smell a serial
Decembrist, beheaded later and breathing hard.
So, what on earth does this mean? Frustratingly, there don’t seem to be any critical discussions online. Either no one else has really tried to figure it out, or else they did and gave up in annoyance.
Part of what drew me to the poem is the way it echoes (almost certainly intentionally) the beginning of Siegfried Sassoon’s marvelous lyric “Everyone Sang,” written when he heard that World War I had ended.
Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on - on - and out of sight.
Sassoon’s poem is a straightforward exultation; birds and people fuse into a single singing voice, which soars up to a transcendent experience of heaven.
Brodsky is giving an ironic nod to that spiritual outpouring. His birds are diffident; they aren’t necessarily singing, he’s just speculating on what might happen if they did. And even if they did, the universe doesn’t join them; it looks on with bored indifference, while people (those eyes gaining blue) try to follow the sound that may or may not be there, and which may or may not be meaningful.
could make out the keys in the door and, beyond, a ceiling,
and those whose address at present begins with nil.
The language here is deliberately deflationary; instead of a poem lifting up and up as with Sassoon, you have hesitation and a bunch of clumsy metaphors. There’s a door in the sky beyond which is a ceiling—a heaven which is closed off as soon as it’s opened. And in that heaven are “those whose address at present begins with nil”—a circumlocution ending with an awkward Ogden-Nash-esque forced rhyme (trill/nil) that places the dead in heaven while immediately erasing them. Faith is not just baffled; it’s mocked and left to go splat against those indifferent, ceiling-like clouds.
The next stanza floats or splats down from up there into the mundane and merely decorative interior of a home and/or mind.
And other than that, it’s just shifting of chairs and sofas,
and flowers on walls and in vases obstruct their view.
And if there was ever a bee sans beehive or solace
with extra spores on its paws, it’s you.
Instead of the ecstasy of transcendence, we’re merely rearranging chairs, sofas, perhaps deck chairs on a particularly uninspiring Titanic. The flowers on walls are indistinguishable from flowers in vases; reality and representation are interchangeable clutter, hiding a truth that (per the first stanza) may not even be there—as if Plato’s cave were just a cast-off and unilluminating metaphor.
The last two lines of the stanza are, then, (not coincidentally) a metaphorical garble; “you” (Brodsky himself? The reader? Everyone”) are a bee isolated from beehive or solace with too many spores on the paws that it doesn’t have. If there’s a meaning here it’s the clumsy failure of meaning; human beings are so alienated from truth that their symbolic efforts to limn it end up as a weird bumbling around flowers that aren’t there. The excess spores and paws are in this case the excess “spores” and “paws”—words intended to refer which end up referring solely to their own absurdity and opacity, and/or a song that gets clubbed down when it clonks against the clouds.
Having established that the poem is meaningless buzzing, Brodsky moves into even more incomprehensibility.
O if the transparent things in their blue garret
could hold their eye-dodging matter in second gear
to curdle themselves one day into a tear or star at
this end of the universe. Afterwards, everywhere.
The “transparent things in their blue garret” seem to point back towards a heaven that is or is not there. The “eye-dodging matter in second gear” is maybe a deliberately ungainly way to suggest a godhead that is slowing the speed with which it eludes human conception? The stanza enacts its meaning, curdling or obscurely gelling into a “tear or star”, an emotional or luminous payoff within human ken. And from there, once the brain has assimilated whatever it is that is beyond it, both brain and not brain can be “everywhere”.
The poem could have ended there on a note of obscure hope. But instead Brodsky pulls back again into a final anti-lyrical cul de sac.
Yet oxygen seems to be just the raw material
for lace strung out on spokes in the tsars’ back yard,
and the statues freeze as though they smell a serial
Decembrist, beheaded later and breathing hard.
“Oxygen” seems like a reference to the sky or the “blue garret”, which is once more de-mysticalized, transformed from a possible route to God into the chemical O2, just “raw material.”
The oxygen doesn’t become part of a recognizable chemical process though. Instead it huffs and puffs into an obscure political analogy. The last lines reference an unsuccessful December 1825 uprising against Tsar Nicholas, though how we’re supposed to connect this to the theological/cosmological uncertainties of the rest of the poem is unclear.
You could see the tsar as a metaphor for God, perhaps. In which case the Decembrist might be Brodsky, who is doubting or beheading or questioning the power of transcendence, over and over again, returning into his own head with labored breathing, and then trying to escape (from himself? From the tsar?) in a kind of Sisyphysean auto-da-fé.
I don’t know that this reading is especially convincing, which may be part of the point. The tsar isn’t God, and isn’t even really a good metaphor for God. Oxygen as “lace on spokes” as a way to talk about the divine or its absence doesn’t make any sense. The “serial/Decembrist”—cut in the middle by the enjambment as if beheaded—seems like the sort of thing you’d write if you were a poet without a head and all your words and concepts were leaking out of your neck. The bird song doesn’t get to heaven and doesn’t get to meaning; Brodsky’s rhetorical flourishes are frozen and sterile like statues; they can’t fly. But the failure of the flourish is also perhaps a kind of flourishing, the hard breathing an assertion of life before the ax comes down.
Brodsky was a refugee from Soviet persecution, a converted Jew, and a Christian believer. “Flourish” buzzes around ideas of faith in and skepticism about art, God, maybe political power, maybe meaning. The rhymed abab quatrains are an exercise in frustrating satisfying cadence; the rhymes are resolutely unnatural, seeming to demand ugly or inappropriate images, like the bird songs butting un-euphoniously against the sky. Art can’t mean God; birds can’t speak to God. And then with a flourish, by not flying, by not overthrowing, by not knowing, they (sort of) do.