Formal Causes

I said, 'A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.'

—Yeats, "Adam's Curse"

Even if not a tour de force,

a poem's tacitly a wager,—

a bet with certain risk assumed

(albeit ensuring it may be caught)

putting the cart before the horse

when that’s what the sibylline muse

assigns to your ordainèd course—

a morceau de bravoure,* in sh inort.

Yeats’ gong-tormented Byzantine sea,

the Emperor in Roth's Radetzky

March,†

e.g., are blatant clues in Sherlock's sport.

Deciduous history's poetry's not.‡

And as to the formal causes of art . . .

Well, there's this horse before the cart.

* Cf. Charles Dantzig, Dictionnaire égoïste de la littérature française (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2005), s.vv. Morceau de bravoure, tour de force, originalité.

† Joseph Roth’s novel Radetzkymarsch (Radetzky March), tracking the decline and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was published in 1932.

‡ "As if all history were deciduous," Anthony Hecht exclaims in "A Birthday Poem."

Saturday, February 15, 2025