\u201cDead Men\u201d as a whole is less satisfying and less achieved than \u201cCairo Jag\u201d, but the three opening stanzas are unforgettable:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
DEAD MEN<\/p>\n
Tonight the moon inveigles them
\nto love: they infer from her gaze
\nher tacit encouragement.
\nTonight the white dresses and the jasmine scent
\nin the streets. I in another place
\nsee the white dresses glimmer like moths. Come<\/p>\n
to the west, out of that trance, my heart \u2013
\nhere the same hours have illumined
\nsleepers who are condemned or reprieved
\nand those whom their ambitions have deceived;
\nthe dead men, whom the wind
\npowders till they are like dolls: they tonight<\/p>\n
rest in the sanitary earth perhaps
\nor where they died, no one has found them
\nor in their shallow graves the wild dog
\ndiscovered or exhumed a face or a leg
\nfor food: the human virtue round them
\nis a vapour tasteless to a dog\u2019s chops.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The first stanza hovers equivocally between maintaining a dream and undermining it. The balance between succumbing to and resisting the moon\u2019s suggestion seems constantly shifting without ever coming down on one side or the other. On the one hand, soft sounds, murmuring articulations, entrancing hesitations, suspensions and musical repetitions all support the dream, or perhaps dramatize the entranced state the speaker finds himself in. On the other, \u201cinveigles\u201d, \u201cinfer\u201d and \u201ctacit\u201d imply the speaker\u2019s scepticism by suggesting a kind of guilty collusion between the moon\u2019s deceit and the lovers\u2019 eagerness to be deceived.<\/p>\n
I said maintaining or undermining a<\/em> dream. A second dream seems to be in play, though, shaping the feeling<\/em> of the lines, if not their rational interpretation. Reading the poem in the light of the title, you find yourself with difficulty brushing aside the idea that it\u2019s dead men<\/em> that the moon is inveigling to love. The speaker or the poem seems to be caught between two visions, one a literal contrast between lovers far from the front and soldiers on the battlefield, the other that more surreal vision of dead men hearing the moon\u2019s call. The two make sense on different levels, and I think it\u2019s this swimming between different levels, like the mind caught between sleep and waking, that makes the poem so haunting. You can of course rationalise the surreal vision by pointing out that the living will die (Borges somewhere describes us as simply ticket of leave corpses) but there\u2019s something reductive about that kind of explaining of an imaginative impact.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n Although the dreamer tells himself to \u201cCome \/ . . . out of that trance\u201d, there\u2019s still something trancelike and unreal about what follows, and I think that\u2019s why all the first three stanzas are so haunting. The dreamlike quality of the second and third stanzas is more difficult to pin down than in the first, more a matter of language than sense, but it\u2019s still very strong. We feel it partly in the sleep-talking slowness of the instruction to himself, with that trailing enjambement between stanzas; partly in the slithering between precision (\u201cCome\u201d) and vagueness (\u201cto the west\u201d) and between geography (\u201cto the west\u201d) and mental state (\u201cout of that trance\u201d). Again, this kind of blurring is characteristic of the state between sleep and waking. Addressing his heart, as if he were a sixteenth century sonneteer, adds to the general feeling of dissociation and entrancement. Of course it\u2019s too rationalistic to talk about this trance as just the speaker\u2019s, though. The point and power of the poetry lies in the way it makes us ourselves participate in this entranced mode of perception. That is the reason why rationally explaining the surreal vision of the first stanza feels like a violation or betrayal of the imaginative impact of the writing. The trancelike state is sustained through the second and third stanzas by the peculiar syntax and punctuation that makes the different groups, the living, the to-die, the dead, the buried, the unburied, the unearthed, swim together in our minds.<\/p>\n I think these first three stanzas gain their power and imaginative hold by the way they bring different mental states into simultaneous and shifting play, without allowing one or another to achieve dominance. Unfortunately there\u2019s a real loss of overall imaginative power in the second half of the poem, memorable and effective though individual phrases are. Fundamentally the loss comes because the rational, argumentative mode of thought takes over from more imaginative modes, and the suggestiveness of the metaphors comes to be tightly constrained by the argument. This argument is itself a schematic and artificial posing of alternatives that belie the fluid way in which we all live with contradictions every day. The result is that a poem that begins brilliantly by inhabiting contradictions ends up driving itself into a blind alley by trying to repress them.<\/p>\n Here is the whole poem:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n DEAD MEN<\/p>\n Tonight the moon inveigles them to the west, out of that trance, my heart \u2013 rest in the sanitary earth perhaps All that is good of them, the dog consumes. Then leave the dead in the earth, an organism And the wise man is the lover <\/p>\n
\nto love: they infer from her gaze
\nher tacit encouragement.
\nTonight the white dresses and the jasmine scent
\nin the streets. I in another place
\nsee the white dresses glimmer like moths. Come<\/p>\n
\nhere the same hours have illumined
\nsleepers who are condemned or reprieved
\nand those whom their ambitions have deceived;
\nthe dead men, whom the wind
\npowders till they are like dolls: they tonight<\/p>\n
\nor where they died, no one has found them
\nor in their shallow graves the wild dog
\ndiscovered or exhumed a face or a leg
\nfor food: the human virtue round them
\nis a vapour tasteless to a dog\u2019s chops.<\/p>\n
\nYou would not know, now the mind\u2019s flame is gone,
\nmore than the dog knows; you would forget
\nbut that you see your own mind burning yet
\nand till you stifle in the ground will go on
\nburning the economical coal of your dreams.<\/p>\n
\nnot capable of resurrection, like mines,
\nless durable than the metal of a gun,
\na casual meal for a dog, nothing but the bone
\nso soon. But tonight no lovers see the lines
\nof the moon\u2019s face as the lines of cynicism.<\/p>\n
\nwho in his planetary love revolves
\nwithout the traction of reason or time\u2019s control
\nand the wild dog finding meat in a hole
\nis a philosopher. The prudent mind resolves
\non the lover\u2019s or the dog\u2019s attitude forever.<\/p>\n