The Alberta Clipper
Summertime is often sweltering in Nebraska. July of 1962 was no different. With daily highs in the upper 90s, a poem that features flames, torches, candles, and fire was especially appropriate for the season. Octavio Paz’s “The Broken Jug” was published in the Summer 1962 edition of Prairie Schooner. Its mention of solitude, however, was increasingly contrary to conditions in Lincoln. Two years earlier, the 1960 census put the city’s population at just over 128,000: a whopping 30% increase from ten years prior! Perhaps the editors were trying to reclaim that sense of isolation?
The Broken Jug
Octavio Paz
Translated from the Spanish (Mexico) by Bruce Cutler
The inner eye opens and a world of vertigo
and flame is born beneath the forehead of the one who dreams:
blue suns, green whirlwinds, nibs of light that pick open stars
like pomegranates,
a solitary sunflower, golden eye gyring in the middle
of a burnt-lime esplanade.
crystal groves of sound, forests of echoes and replies
and waves, dialogue of transparencies,—
wind! gallop of water between the endless walls
of a throat of jet,
horse, comet, sky-rocket that drives itself exactly through
the heart of night, quills, water-jets,
feathers, sudden flowering of torches, candles, wings,
invasion of white,
birds of the islands singing beneath the forehead
of the one who dreams!
I opened my eyes; I raised them to the sky and saw how the night
was covering itself with stars.
Living islands! bracelets of islands aflame, rocks blazing,
breathing, grape-clusters of living rocks,
what a wellspring! what clarities, what tresses spread over a dark
shoulder,
what a river there above, and that far distant sound of water
next to fire, of light against shadow!
Harps, gardens of harps.
But there was no one next to me.
Only a plain: cactus, sponge-trees, huge stones that crack open
under the sun.
No cricket chirred;
there was a vague smell of lime and burnt seeds;
the village streets were dry arroyos
and the air would have shattered had someone
shouted, “Who’s alive?”
During December 1949 in Lincoln, Nebraska, the temperature dropped to a low of 1.9 degrees F and the wind picked up to a maximum speed of 26 MPH. There were daily reports of rain and melting snow.
That same season, Prairie Schooner published in its Winter 1949 issue Tennessee Williams’s poem “The Harp of Wales.” Williams was 38 at the time and had won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama for A Streetcar Named Desire the year before. For all the poem’s peculiarities, the wonder and dignity instilled in the harp still impress:
The Harp of Wales
Tennessee Williams
They do not know through the blood of what witch-like women
the instrument passed unwillingly into their hands
but in it is mist ever clearing and women that keen
among scattered nets at the wet grey edge of the sands.
They cannot guess how the wild harp of Wales came to them,
this ancient of shells in the troubled cleft of their hands,
but schooling was not necessary to master its touch
and the moving of light spells through its transparent strands.
Early they learned of it, often before they were grown,
and forebodings, their own and older, could draw from its strings
the moan of those witch-like women who fashioned in Wales
a harp made for keening the deaths of the wild grey kings.
And remembering skills in which they were never instructed,
they know what the laws of the uncivil instrument are
and where the harp strings should be struck not at all or so lightly
the demon from anarchy turns to pay his devoir.
Immutable is the shell, but not the touch,
and possibly now it has an accustomed ring
and the wonder dispelled a degree, but still for a time
it is sorrow not only their own that compels them to sing.
And still for a time they will stay with a sorrow to sing,
with instinct of rules too deep in their blood to forget,
for the wild harp of Wales is enduring among them and cries,
Ο stay for a time, Thou Stranger, turn not away yet!
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