But There's Music In Us: Remembering Jack Gilbert

Jack Gilbert

1925 - 2012

But there's music in us.

Some people thought he was homeless.

"He never cared if he was poor or had to sleep on a park bench," wrote Linda Gregg, one of the great loves of his life. He abandoned academia and eschewed conventional frameworks. He knew fame and great acclaim and it didn't hold his interest very long. He chose a different path.

And he knew love and grief. He wrote of grief more powerfully than anyone. He wrote words that could bring his readers to tears or help them keep on living.

Poetry, he said, is a witnessing to magnitude...a "magnitude of pain, of being that much alive," and "a magnitude of beauty that allows me no peace."

But despite unbearable loss and personal suffering and a keen awareness of the miseries of the world, he was open to happiness, however fleeting. "We must risk delight," he wrote in A Brief for the Defense.

To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth all the years of sorrow that are to come.

Then, in a cruel irony for so exquisite a mind, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, and although his passion never left him, his ability to express it was gradually lost.  

"I think I should write something about getting old," he said in 2005, when he was 80. "It's never been explored properly."

What if the heart does not pale as the body wanes but is like the sun that blazes hotter each day on these immense, perishing fields? What then?

His heart never paled. Here's a moving article about him that appeared just a few days before his death. The portrait above, by Robert Tobey, accompanied that article.

Turns out I've posted three of his poems in this blog previously, Horses at Midnight Without A Moon, Brief for the Defense, and just last week, Falling and Flying.

Here's one more:

Ovid in Tears

Love is like a garden in the heart, he said.

They asked him what he meant by garden.

He explained about gardens. “In the cities,”

he said, “there are places walled off where color

and decorum are magnified into a civilization.

Like a beautiful woman,” he said. How like

a woman, they asked. He remembered their wives

and said garden was just a figure of speech,

then called for drinks all around. Two rounds

later he was crying. Talking about how Charlemagne

couldn’t read but still made a world. About Hagia

Sophia and putting a round dome on a square

base after nine hundred years of failure.

The hand holding him slipped and he fell.

“White stone in the white sunlight,” he said

as they picked him up. “Not the great fires

built on the edge of the world.” His voice grew

fainter as they carried him away. “Both the melody

and the symphony. The imperfect dancing

in the beautiful dance. The dance most of all.”