HENRY WEINFIELD AND THE DARK DAYS

“When the dark days come, what will remain?” Henry Weinfield was reciting to me a year or so ago over dinner at an Italian Restaurant on the Upper West Side. “Will everything you’ve done seem done in vain[?"]

The poem gave me the chills, as if accusing me of never really having lived, of never having confronted some unstated but essential problem in my life.

Of course “When the Dark Days Come,” which you can read below, is at bedrock a self-accusation by the speaker, or perhaps an indictment of the poet himself by himself, a notion that becomes clear when we note the particularity implicit in “What of your wife, your daughters, and your son?” Henry and I have been friends for a half-century, and it would be impossible for me not to grasp that that is the exact structure of this poet’s own family.

That touch of particularity helps to soften the darkly relentless tone of interrogation that culminates each stanza with the haunting inevitability of the refrain, “when the dark days come.” When I first heard the poem—during better times than the present—it sounded to me like an exhortation to the reader as an individual, implying the urgent call to personal change that Rilke sounds in the famous last lines of “Archaic Torso of Apollo”: “for here there is no place/that does not see you. You must change your life.”

In this moment, however, when Dr. Fauci and other reliable public health authorities are predicting the imminent arrival of dark days for vast numbers of people as a result of the pandemic—and with the nation thrashing through a perilous Presidential transition—the poem resounds with wider implications.

I am moved to realize that when we call poems prophetic, we mean that, in the hands of a master like Weinfield, verse can assume completely unanticipated, but starkly actual meanings years after the poem was written. Thus, when we read lines like these in 2020, it’s impossible to disregard their perfect aptness to our current condition:

Will you be sunk in torpor and despair To which so many at the end succumb, And, as your body comes undone, grow numb, Anxiously waiting when the dark days come?

When I began reading a pre-publication copy of Henry’s new book, As the Crow Flies, in which “When the Dark Days Come” and many other of his highly musical, trenchantly philosophical poems appear, I therefore felt an urgent need to provide you with the chance to read two of them—the witty, Hardyesque (though much more cheerful than Hardy’s similarly themed “The Darkling Thrush”) “As the Crow Flies,” as well as the longer poem.

Slated for publication on February 2021 by Dos Madres Press, the book offers fresh evidence that, perhaps more than any other contemporary poet, Weinfield channels, with superb result, the sonic and metrical effects of Wyatt, Gray, Milton, and other avatars of the great English verse tradition. (Full disclosure: Dos Madres has published my most recent three books.) Here are the poems:

Henry Weinfield

WHEN THE DARK DAYS COME

When the dark days come, how will you fare?

Will you be sunk in torpor and despair,

To which so many at the end succumb,

And, as your body comes undone, grow numb,

Anxiously waiting when the dark days come?

When the dark days come, what will remain?

Will everything you’ve done seem done in vain,

And pain be passage to oblivion?

What of your wife, your daughters, and your son?

What will you leave them when the dark days come?

When the dark days come, as come they shall,

For neither hopes nor wishes can forestall

Them, will you seize on any fallen crumb,

Blind to the consequences, deaf and dumb?

What will you stoop to when the dark days come?

When the dark days come, and like a wave

Break heavily upon you, will you grieve,

Happy though you have been beneath the sun,

For what was done and what was left undone,

Uselessly longing when the dark days come?

You who have lived your life as in a dream,

Drunk on appearances, on how things seem,

Always addicted to delirium:

What did you mean? What meanings did you glean?

Who will it turn out then that you have been,

After the sands have summed their final sum?

What will you answer when the dark days come?

© 2021 Henry Weinfield

Henry Weinfield

AS THE CROW FLIES 

Late afternoons when the light dies,

Crows rise into the bare winter skies.

At evening we can hear their raucous cries.

If you could look into a crow’s black eyes,

Would what you found make you foolish or wise?

Would you take a crooked path and go on telling lies,

Or finally go straight—as the crow flies?

© 2021 Henry Weinfield