Poems on the homeless

[Note: “Dives” is reprinted below and is available on line in Google archives.]

Among poems about the homeless and insane, “Dives” is not perhaps as powerful, dramatic, or moving as Donald Justice’s “In Memory of the Unknown Poet, Robert Boardman Vaughn,” or even Ferry’s own poem “The Guest Ellen at the Supper for Street People,” also fromDwelling Places. But “Dives” is a remarkable poem nonetheless, and illustrates well how formal and musical elements shape and inspire poetry, and how metaphor can leads from and to insight.

In three stanzas of 11 lines each, the poet evokes, first, a corner garden of a back alley where “the dogheaded wildman sleeps,” the nearby old movie theater where “great dead stars” vied “in rich complaint,” and finally the subtle, vibrant hues of the trash spilling from neighbors’ bins. The wildman sleeps throughout these evocations, yet he is playfully brought to life in each, beginning with the viburnum whose leaves are “homely, crudely rough-cut”. They are as plainspoken as Kent in Lear, a play about another wild man.

Loosely iambic lines, pentameters and hexameters, are generously cut with anapests to lighten the tone, and difficult spondees aptly introduced for the difficult “wildman”, the phrase itself a spondee. But the textures and colors themselves in this poem become a formal element as they do for painters. The delicacy and minute observations of color in stanza three seem to evoke the richly chaotic inner life of the man who “sleeps/ in the freedom of his distress among abandoned/ containers of paint, eggshell and offwhite tints,/ umbers both raw and burnt […]” Ferry is as patient and studious as a 19th century landscape painter in getting the hues here just right to express and convey his scene.

Yet the poem is rigorously thoughtful, as well. In stanza two, the evocation of the Orson Welles Movie Theater and its past scenes of woe, exultation and ecstasy is a suitable neighborhood for Ferry’s “wild man.” Most powerfully, though, to my mind, is the introduction of Kent, who in Shakespeare’s play Lear, as Ferry reminds us, is “plainspoken, a truth-teller, /Impatient with comparison as with deceit”–itself another form, unlike the king’s own more poetic ravings, of madness. Ferry’s wildman, too, is “homely, crudely rough-cut, with/ A texture like sandpaper, an unluscious green”. In short, a man not able to maneuver in society, where white lies and deceit are necessary and apt.

Dives

By David Ferry

The dogheaded wildman sleeps in the back alley,

Behind the fence with bittersweet adorned,

In the corner of the garden over near

Where the viburnum flowers or fails to flower,

Depending on whether or not we water it.

Many times over again it has survived.

The leaves are homely, crudely rough-cut, with

A texture like sandpaper; an unluscious green,

Virtuous in look, not really attractive;

Like Kent in Lear plainspoken, a truth-teller,

Impatient with comparison as with deceit.

The wildman sleeps in the maple-shaded alley

Hidden behind the garden fence behind

The wooden garden seat weathering gray

In the corner of the garden over near

Where the Orson Welles Movie Theater used to be,

From which in former days you faintly heard

The voices of the great dead stars still vying

In rich complaint, or else in exaltation

Of meeting or farewell, in rituals

Of wit o’ermastered, or in ecstasy

Of woe beyond the experience of saints.

In the alley between the yard and the old theater

The wildman is, covered with leaves or clad

In the bark of our indigenous flourishing trees,

Elaborately enscrolled and decorated

With the names of heavenly pity; there he sleeps

In the freedom of his distress among abandoned

Containers of paint, eggshell and offwhite tincts,

Umbers both raw and burnt, vermilion, rose,

Purples, and blues, and other hues and shades,

Close by the tangled roll of wire screening,

Under a scribbled hieroglyphic sign.

From Dwelling Places: Poems and Translations (1993)