George Oppen: Chartres

George Oppen
(1908-1984)

George Oppen (1908-1984):
"Chartres" from The Materials (1962)
"Poem 27" from Of Being Numerous (1968)

Professor Dick Maxwell who taught Poetry Workshops at Foothill College told the class of his poem on Chartres after visiting that magnificent cathedral outside of Paris. He thought he had written a nice Chartres poem until he read Oppen's and was floored by its utter simplicity. Maxwell said "In those opening lines— "The bulk of it / in air", Oppen described what I tried to say in two pages." When visiting Chartres on August 15, 1979, I too was overwhelmed by the magnificence of this towering poetic cathedral. The second poem of Oppen's, "Poem 27" from Of Being Numerous (1968), speaks of poetry and its profundity. I like Oppen's last stanza that one must not get bogged down with a thousand threads but "must somehow see the one thing". Aristotle writes in Poetics, Book XXII, that "a poet must have command of metaphor, an eye for seeing resemblances in differences." Plato traces all the differences back to the One, and writes in Philebus 16d: "From the gods a gift to the human race: thus I reckon the gift of seeing the One in the many and the many in the One." In Chinese cosmology the Tao gives birth to Yin & Yang, from which flow the ten thousand things. Oppen suggests that we reverse this process, going from multiplicity back to unity, our origin and our home. (Peter Y. Chou)

CHARTRES

The bulk of it
In air

Is what they wanted. Compassion
Above the doors, the doorways

Mary the woman and the others
The lesser
are dreams on the structure. But that a stone
Supports another

That the stones
Stand where the masons locked them

Above the farmland
Above the will

Because a hundred generations
Back of them and to another people

The world cried out above the mountain

George Oppen (1908-1984),
The Materials (1962)
The Collected Poems
New Directions, NY, 1975, pp. 56

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Poem 27 in George Oppen's Of Being Numerous:

It is difficult now to speak of poetry—

about those who have recognized the range of choice or those
who have lived within the life they were born to—. It is not
precisely a question of profundity but a different order of
experience. One would have to tell what happens in a life,
what choices present themselves, what the world is for us,
what happens in time, what thought is in the course of a life
and therefore what art is, and the isolation of the actual

I would want to talk of rooms and of what they look out on
and of basements, the rough walls bearing the marks of the
forms, the old marks of wood in the concrete, such solitude
as we know—

and the swept floors. Someone, a workman bearing about
him, feeling about him that peculiar word like a dishonored
fatherhood has swept this solitary floor, this profoundly
hidden floor— such solitude as we know.

One must not come to feel that he has a thousand threads
in his hands,
He must somehow see the one thing;
This is the level of art
There are other levels
But there is no other level of art

George Oppen (1908-1984),
Of Being Numerous (1968), Poem 27
New Directions, NY, 1968, p. 30