The Phoenix and the Turtle

by Kenneth Rexroth

" ... [P]oems written since the publication of In What Hour in 1940. Notable among them are the long philosophical poem 'The Phoenix and the Tortoise,' a group of mystical poems on themes of marriage and nature, and a series of adaptations of classic epigrams. ..." (from the dust jacket flap)

Genres: Poetry

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1944

About the author

Kenneth Rexroth was an American poet, translator, and critical essayist.

He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement. Although he did not consider himself to be a Beat poet, and disliked the association, he was dubbed the "Father of the Beats" by Time magazine.

Largely self-educated, Rexroth learned several languages and translated poems from Chinese, French, Spanish, and Japanese. He was among the first poets in the United States to explore traditional Japanese poetic themes and forms.

Rexroth died in Santa Barbara, California, on June 6, 1982. He had spent his final years translating Japanese and Chinese women poets, as well as promoting the work of female poets in America and overseas.

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published in 1944, The Phoenix and the Tortoise contains a number of poems that directly or indirectly articulate the anxiety that surrounded the Second World War...

September, nineteen thirty-nine.
This is the last trip in the mountains
This autumn, possibly the last trip ever.
The storm clouds rise up the mountainside,
Lightning batters the pinnacles above me,
The clouds beneath the pass are purple
And I see rising through them from the valleys
And cities a cold, murderous flood,
Spreading over the world, lapping at the last
Inviolate heights; mud streaked yellow
With gas, slimy and blotched with crimson,
Filled with broken bits of steel and flesh,
Moving slowly with the blind motion
Of lice, spreading inexorably
As bacteria spread in tissues,
Swirling with the precise rapacity of starved rats.
I loiter here like a condemned man
Lingers over his last breakfast, his last smoke;
Thinking of those heroes of the war
Of human skill, foresight, endurance and will;
The disinterested bravery,
The ideal combat of peace...
- from Strength Through Joy

"Hello NBC, this is London speaking..."
I move the dial, I have heard it all,
Day after day - the terrible waiting,
The air raids, the military communiques,
The between the lines whispering
Of quarreling politicians,
The mute courage of the people.
The dial moves over aggressive
Advertisements, comedians, bands hot and sweet,
To a record concert - La Scala - Madame Butterfly.
I pause, listening idly, and suddenly
I feel as though I had begun to fall
Slowly, buoyantly, through infinite, indefinite space.
Milano, fretting in my seat,
In my lace collar and velvet suit,
My beautiful mother weeping
Happily beside me. My God,
How long ago it was, further away
Than Rome or Egypt, that other
World before the other war.
Stealing downstairs to spy on the champagne suppers;
Watching the blue flame of the chafing dish
On Sunday nights: driving over middle Europe
Behind a cafe au lait team,
The evenings misty, smelling of cattle
And the fat Danubian earth.
It will never be again
The open work stockings,
The lace evening gowns,
The pink roses on the slippers;
Debs eating roast chicken and drinking whiskey,
On the front porch with grandpa;
The neighbors gaping behind the curtains;
The Japanese prints and the works of Huneker.
Never again will a small boy
Curled in a hammock in the murmurous summe air
Gnaw his knuckles, reading The Jungle;
Never again will he gasp as Franz Josef
And the princesses sweep through
The lines of wolf caped hussars.
It is a terrible thing to sit here
In the uneasy light above the strange city
And listen to the poignant sentimentality
Of an age more dead than the Cro-Magnon.
It is a terrible thing to see the world die twice,
"The first time as tragedy,
The second as evil farce."
- Un Bel Di Vedremo

In contrast to the foreboding of the years preceding the war, and the apocalyptic vision of a world on the brink of destruction during the war, there is an abundance of tenderness and sensuality. Perhaps this is what Rexroth was most needed during this trying time. (Not to say his other collections are devoid of tenderness and sensuality, but these characteristics are particularly prominent in this collection)...

There are sparkles of rain on the bright
Hair over your forehead;
Your eyes are wet and your lips
Wet and cold, your cheek rigid with cold.
Why have you stayed
Away so long, why have you only
Come to me late at night
After walking for hours in wind and rain?
Take off your dress and stockings;
Sit in the deep chair before the fire.
I will warm your feet in my hands;
I will warm your breasts and thighs with kisses.
I wish I could build a fire
In you that would never go out.
I wish I could be sure that deep in you
Was a magnet to draw you always home.
- Runaway

You have the body, blood and bone,
And hair and nail and tooth and eye.
You have the body - the skin taut
In the moonlight, the sea gnawing
At the empty mountains, the hair
Of the body tensile, erect . . .
The full barley ears whop and flail
In the rain gorged wind and the flame
Of lightning breaks in the air
For a moment and vanishes;
And I tell you the memory
Of flesh is as real as live flesh
Or falling stone or burning fire . . .
You have the body and the sun
Brocaded brown and pink naked
Wedding body, its eternal
Blood biding the worm and his time.
- Habeas Corpus

And as I stood on the stones
In the midst of whirling water,
The whirling iris perfume
Caught me in a vision of you
More real than reality:
Fire in the deep curves of your hair:
Your hips whirled in a tango,
Out and back in dim scented light;
Your cheeks snow-flushed, the zithers
Ringing, all the crowded ski lodge
Dancing and singing; your arms
White in the brown autumn water,
Swimming through the fallen leaves,
Making a fluctuant cobweb
Of light on the sycamores;
Your thigh's exact curve, the fine gauze
Slipping through my hands, and you
Tense on the verge of abandon;
Your breasts' very touch and smell;
The sweet secret odor of sex.
- from Incarnation

Most tender of all the poems in this collection are the poems Rexroth dedicated to his parents...

Under your illkempt yellow roses,
Delia, today you are younger
Than your son. Two and a half decades -
The family monument sagged askew,
And he overtook your half-a-life.
On the other side of the country,
Near the willows by the slow river,
Deep in the earth, the white ribs retain
The curve of your fervent, careful breast;
The fine skull, the ardor of your brain.
And in the fingers the memory
Of Chopin etudes, and in the feet
Slow waltzes and champagne twosteps sleep.
And the white full moon of midsummer,
That you watched awake all that last night,
Watches history fill the deserts
And oceans with corpses once again;
And looks in the east window at me,
As I move past you to middle age
And knowledge past your agony and waste.
- Delia Rexroth, Dies June, 1916

Now once more gray mottled buckeye branches
Explode their emerald stars,
And alders smoulder in a rosy smoke
Of innumerable buds.
I know that spring again is splendid
As ever, the hidden thrush
As sweetly tongued, the sun as vital -
But these are the forest trails we walked together,
These paths, ten years together.
We thought the years would last forever,
They are all gone now, the days
We thought would not come for us are here.
Bright trout poised in the current -
The raccoon's track at the water's edge -
A bittern booming in the distance -
Your ashes scattered on the mountain -
Moving seaward on this stream.
- Andree Rexroth, Died October, 1940

My favourite poem in the collection is "The Advantages of Learning". I connected with the narrator’s misanthropic words… At least with the first three quarters of the poem. I can’t attest to “Drawing nudes on the crooked margins, / Copulating with sixteen year old / Nymphomaniacs of my imagination.” Herein lies my only disconnect from Rexroth: his misogyny...

I am a man with no ambitions
And few friends, wholly incapable
Of making a living, growing no
Younger, fugitive from some just doom.
Lonely, ill-clothed, what does it matter?
At midnight I make myself a jug
Of hot white wine and cardamon seeds.
In a torn grey robe and old beret,
I sit in the cold writing poems,
Drawing nudes on the crooked margins,
Copulating with sixteen year old
Nymphomaniacs of my imagination.
- The Advantages of Learning

The collection ends with the long poem, "The Phoenix and the Turtle". The title evokes comparison to Shakespeare's poem of the same name. How the poems compare is still unclear to me, as they are both obscure works. From James P. Bednarz's Shakespeare and the Truth of Love I have derived the following passage: "William Carlos Williams moreover would recognize in the anarchist Kenneth Rexroth's 'The Phoenix and the Tortoise' (1944) (with its witty title) and impressive Modernist 'poetic achievement' that is a testament to mutual love based on Shakespeare's poem."...

The Phoenix and the Turtle
Let the bird of loudest lay
On the sole Arabian tree,
Herald sad and trumpet be,
To whose sound chaste wings obey.
But thou shrieking harbinger,
Foul precurrer of the fiend,
Augur of the fever's end,
To this troop come thou not near.

From this session interdict
Every fowl of tyrant wing
Save the eagle, feather'd king:
Keep the obsequy so strict.

Let the priest in surplice white
That defunctive music can,
Be the death-divining swan,
Lest the requiem lack his right.

And thou, treble-dated crow,
That thy sable gender mak'st
With the breath thou giv'st and tak'st,
'Mongst our mourners shalt thou go.

Here the anthem doth commence:—
Love and constancy is dead;
Phoenix and the turtle fled
In a mutual flame from hence.

So they loved, as love in twain
Had the essence but in one;
Two distincts, division none;
Number there in love was slain.

Hearts remote, yet not asunder;
Distance, and no space was seen
'Twixt the turtle and his queen:
But in them it were a wonder.

So between them love did shine,
That the turtle saw his right
Flaming in the phoenix' sight;
Either was the other's mine.

Property was thus appall'd,
That the self was not the same;
Single nature's double name
Neither two nor one was call'd.

Reason, in itself confounded,
Saw division grow together;
To themselves yet either neither;
Simple were so well compounded,

That it cried, 'How true a twain
Seemeth this concordant one!
Love hath reason, reason none
If what parts can so remain.'

Whereupon it made this threne
To the phoenix and the dove,
Co-supremes and stars of love,
As chorus to their tragic scene.
- excerpt from William Shakespeare's "The Phoenix and the Tortoise"


I am cold in my folded blanket,
Huddled on the ground in the moonlight.

The crickets cry in congealing frost;
Field mice run over my body;
The frost thickens and the night goes by.

North of us lies the vindictive
Foolish city asleep under its guns;
Its rodent ambitions washing out
In sewage and unwholesome dreams.
Behind the backs of drowsy sentries
The moonlight shines through frosted glass —
On the floors of innumerable
Corridors the mystic symbols
Of the bureaucrats are reversed —
Mirrorwise, as Leonardo
Kept the fever charts of one person.
Two Ptahs, two Muhammad’s coffins,
We float in the illimitable
Surgery of moonlight, isolate
From each other and the turning earth;
Motionless; frost on our faces;
Eyes by turns alive, dark in the dark.

The State is the organization
Of the evil instincts of mankind.
History is the penalty
We pay for original sin.
In the conflict of appetite
And desire, the person finally
Loses; either the technology
Of the choice of the lesser evil
Overwhelms him; or a universe
Where the stars in their courses move
To ends that justify their means
Dissolves him in its elements.
He cannot win, not on this table.
The World, the Flesh, and the Devil —
The Tempter offered Christ mastery
Of the three master institutions,
Godparents of all destruction —
“Miracle, Mystery, and Authority” —
The systematization of
Appetitive choice to obtain
Desire by accumulation.

History continuously
Bleeds to death through a million secret
Wounds of trivial hunger and fear.
Its stockholders’ private disasters
Are amortized in catastrophe.

War is the health of the State? Indeed!
War is the State. All personal
Anti-institutional values
Must be burnt out of each generation.
If a massive continuum
Of personality endured
Into grandchildren, history
Would stop.

“As the Philosopher says,”
Man is a social animal;
That is, top dog of a slave state.
All those lucid, noble minds admired
Sparta, and well they might. Surely
It is highly questionable
If Plato’s thesis can be denied.
The Just Man is the Citizen.
Wars exist to take care of persons.
The species affords no aberrants.

Barmaid of Syria, her hair bound
In a Greek turban, her flanks
Learnedly swaying, shivering
In the shiver of castanets,
Drunk, strutting lasciviously
In the smoke filled tavern...

What nexus gathers and dissolves here
In the fortuitous unity
Of revolving night and myself?
They say that history, defining
Responsibility in terms
Of the objective continuum,
Limits, and at the same time creates,
Its participants. They further say
That rational existence is
Essentially harmonic selection.
Discarding “is,” the five terms
Are equated, the argument closed.
Cogito and Ergo and Sum play
Leapfrog — fact — process — process — fact —
Between my sleeping body and
The galaxy what Homeric
Heroes struggle for my arms?

[...]

The vast onion of the actual:
The universe, the galaxy,
The solar system, and the earth,
And life, and human life, and men’s
Relationships, and men, and each man . . .
History seeping from capsule
To capsule, from periphery
To center, and outward again . . .
The sparkling quanta of events,
The pulsing wave motion of value . . .

Marx. Kropotkin. Adams. Acton.
Spengler, Toynbee. Tarn building empires
From a few coins found in a cellar . . .
History . . . the price we pay for man’s
First disobedience . . . John of Patmos,
The philosopher of history.

This body huddled on the whirling
Earth, dipping the surface of sleep
As damsel flies sting the water’s skin
With life. What is half remembered
In the hypnogogy of time;
Ineradicable bits of tune;
Nicias in rout from Syracuse;
Scarlet Wolsey splendid on the Field
Of the Cloth of Gold; More on trial;
Abélard crying for that girl;
“More than my brother, Jonathan,
Of one soul with me,
What sin, what pollution,
Has torn our bowels asunder.”
The burnt out watch fires of Modena;
Or Phoebi claro — lover, dawn, and fear
Of treacherous death; the enervated
Musical, dim edge of sleep;
Archdeacon Stuck on McKinley
Singing, “Te Deum laudamus . . .”
In the clenching cold and the thin air;
Lawrence dying of his body,
Blue gentians burning in the dark mind;
The conflict of events and change.

[...]

Softly and singly an owl
Cries in my sleep. I awake and turn
My head, but there is only the moon
Sinking in the early dawn.
Owls do not cry over the ocean.
The night patrol planes return
Opaque against the transparent moon.
“The owl of Minerva,” says Hegel,
“Takes her flight in the evening.”
It is terrible to lie
Beside my wife’s canvas chrysalis,
Watching the imperceptible
Preparation of morning,
And think that this probably is not
The historical evening we thought;
Waking in the twilight like bemused
Drunkards; but the malignant
Dawn of the literate insect,
Dispassionate, efficient, formic.

[...]

Would it have been better to have slept
And dreamed, than to have watched night
Pass and this slow moon sink? My wife sleeps
And her dreams measure the hours
As accurately as my
Meditations in cold solitude.
I have lain awake while the moon crossed,
Dragging at the tangled ways
Of the sea and the tangled, blood filled
Veins of sleepers. I am not alone,
Caught in the turning of the seasons.
As the long beams of the setting moon
Move against the breaking day,
The suspended light pulsates
Like floating snow. Involuntary,
I may live on, sustained in the web
Of accident, never forgetting
This midnight moon that already blurs
In memory.

[...]

The light grows stronger and my lids
That were black turn red; the blood turns
To the coming sun. I sit up
And look out over the bright quiet
Sea and the blue and yellow cliffs
And the pure white tatters of fog
Dissolving on the black fir ridges.
The world is immovable
And immaculate. The argument
Has come to an end; it is morning,
And in the isolating morning
The problem hangs suspended, lucid
In a crystal cabinet of air
And angels where only bird song wakes.

[...]

Nude, my feet in the cold shallows,
The motion of the water surface
Barely perceptible, and the sand
Of the bottom in fine sharp ridges
Under my toes, I wade out, waist deep
And swim seaward down the narrow inlet.
In the distance, beyond the sand bar,
The combers are breaking, and nearer,
Like a wave crest escaped and frozen,
One white egret guards the harbor mouth.
The immense stellar phenomenon
Of dawn focuses in the egret
And flows out, and focuses in me
And flows infinitely away
To touch the last galactic dust.

This is the prime reality —
Bird and man, the individual
Discriminate, the self evalued
Actual, the operation
Of infinite, ordered potential.
Birds, sand grains, and souls bleed into being;
The past reclaims its own, “I should have,
I could have — It might have been different —”
Sunsets on Saturn, desert roses,
Corruptions of the will, quality —
The determinable future, fall
Into quantity, into the
Irreparable past, history’s
Cruel irresponsibility.
This is the minimum negative
Condition, the “Condition humaine,”
The tragic loss of value into
Barren novelty, the condition
Of salvation; out of this alone
The person emerges as complete
Responsible act — this lost
And that conserved — the appalling
Decision of the verb “to be.”
Men drop dead in the ancient rubbish
Of the Acropolis, scholars fall
Into self-dug graves, Jews are smashed
Like heroic vermin in the Polish winter.
This is my fault, the horrible term
Of weakness, evasion, indulgence,
The total of my petty fault —
No other man’s.

And out of this
Shall I reclaim beauty, peace of soul,
The perfect gift of self-sacrifice,
Myself as act, as immortal person?

I walk back along the sandspit,
The horizon cuts the moon in half,
And far out at sea a path of light,
Violent and brilliant, reflected
From high stratus clouds and then again
On the moving sea, the invisible
Sunrise spreads its light before the moon.

My wife has been swimming in the breakers,
She comes up the beach to meet me, nude,
Sparkling with water, singing high and clear
Against the surf. The sun crosses
The hills and fills her hair, as it lights
The moon and glorifies the sea
And deep in the empty mountains melts
The snow of Winter and the glaciers
Of ten thousand thousand years.
- excerpts from Kenneth Rexroth's "The Phoenix and the Tortoise"