A Last Word from the Poet - The Decline of the West by John Ashbery

A Last Word from the Poet

John Ashbery is the author of 15 volumes of poetry, including A Wave, Flow Chart and the Skaters. He received a Pulitzer Prices and National Book Award for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.

How natural, it seemed to the editors of FORBES, to ask a poet to have the last word in this part of our 75th anniversary special section. As we stand here in 1992, just eight years short of the beginning of the Third Millennium A.D., we sense through­out the world a bewildering juxtaposition of material progress and spiritual discontent. What does it mean, this angst? It seemed fitting to turn
to a poet for an opinion. Poets, after all, often grasp great truths long before philosophers or economists or scientists become aware of them.

We chose the American poet John Ashbery, who, some think, is influencing poetry in the English language in the last third of this century as William Butler Yeats did in the first third.

Ashbery is not an "easy" poet, direct and accessible as, say, Edna St. Vincent Millay is easy. He is intricate, dense, given to metaphors that often seem to require, and elude, decoding. He also delights in the everyday language of adver­tising, of street talk, of old nursery rhymes. The combination can be extraordinary. Comment­ing on "Flow Chart," a very long (215 pages) Ashbery lyric published last year, the poet and critic Helen Vendler said: "By entering into some bizarrely tuned pitch inside myself I can find myself on Ashbery's wavelength, where everything at the symbolic level makes sense. The irritating (and seductive) thing about this tuning in is that it can't be willed, I can't make it happen when I am tired or impatient. But when the frequencies meet, the effect on me is Ash­bery's alone, and it is a form of trance."

Ashbery's title for the poem that follows is taken, of course, from the major work that brought Oswald Spengler, the German philoso­pher, worldwide fame earlier in this century. Spengler maintained that every culture goes through a life cycle from youth through maturi­ty and old age to death. Western culture, he believed, had gone through the same cycle and was now in a period of decline, to be conquered by "the yellow race." Ashbery here has applied his "affable skepticism" (the phrase is Vend­ler's) to Spengler's dismal theme.

The Decline of the West

O Oswald, O Spengler, this is very sad to find!

My attic, my children

Ignore me for the violet-banded sky.

There are no clean platters in the cupboard

And the milkman’s horse tiptoes by, as though

Afraid to wake us.

What! Our culture in its dotage!

Yet this very poem refutes is,

Springing up out of the collective unconscious

Like a weasel through a grating.

I could point to other extremities, both on land

And at sea, where the wave will gnash your stark theories

Like a person eating a peanut. Say, though,

That we are not exceptional,

That, like the curve of a breast above a bodice,

our parabolas seek and find the light, returning

from not too far away. Ditto the hours

we’ve squandered: daisies, coins of light.

In the end he hammered out

What it was not wanted that we should know.

For that we should be grateful,

And for that patch of a red riding-hood

Caught in brambles against the snow.

His book, I saw it somewhere and I bought it.

I never read it for it seemed too long.

His theory though, I fought it

Though it spritzes my song,

And now the skateboard stops

Impeccably. We are where we exchanged

Positions. O who could taste the crust of this love?