DEPRIVATION AND APPREHENSION

IN YANNIS RITSOS, LINDA GREGG AND JACK GILBERT

Andrew Bennett
Critical Paper and Program Bibliography
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in
Creative Writing, Pacific Lutheran University, August 2013
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Deprivation and Apprehension in Yannis Ritsos, Linda Gregg and Jack Gilbert
Poets Yannis Ritsos, Linda Gregg and Jack Gilbert all render the way varying
states of deprivation are transformed into ongoing states of apprehension. If deprivation
is a lack of a standard sustenance or condition, apprehension is either the resulting fear of
an uncertain future or its a suddenly new way of knowingsometimes both. These poets
are remarkably similar in their understanding of this relation, but they differ, however, in
form, context, and thematic implication.
Ritsoss characters are deprived of one or more of the bodys sensessight,
touch, taste, hearing, smell. This deprivation results from cruelty, choice, nature,
environmental demand, societal condition, age or whim. The ensuing apprehension takes
many forms. Sometimes, the deprived character perceives with another sense what he
couldnt with the one he lacked; or, he gains heightened awareness or understanding
through such limitation. Sometimes, a speaker or character gains understanding or
awareness through witnessing the sense deprivation of another. Sometimes, a characters
deprivation results in the feeling of anticipation for the speaker or reader. Through
rendering these various transformations, Ritsos increases our awareness and
understanding of emotional and psychological realities that are hidden from view.
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Greggs speaker is partially deprived of the sense of sight due to darkened
conditions. This darkening is literal in terms of setting because the poems take place in
the evening or night. This darkening is metaphorical in terms of mood, for the speaker is

1
He also makes social and political commentary, but these subjects will not be a focus of
analysis. Im more interested in what close reading achieves by itself than with
biographical or historical context.
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in a state of despair. As a result of this darkening, the speaker sees objects more clearly
than she would in full light. This transformation is literal: deprivation sharpens her
vision. The speaker also better understands her grief-stricken circumstances and, through
them, her nature. This aspect of transformation is figurative: deprivation sharpens her
self-cognizance. By rendering these transformations, Gregg offers fresh perspective on
the nature of seeing, the nature of grief, and the difference between male and female
consciousness.
Gilbert deals less with sense deprivation than the other two poets. What his
speaker lacks is sometimes more abstract, such as the faculty of expression. Sometimes it
is more emotional, such as longing for his deceased wife. In both cases, he recovers the
virtual possession of what he believed lost through the vivid evocation of it. He seizes
upon new ways of knowing through the process of mourning. By rendering this kind of
transformation, Gilbert offers insight into the nature of yearning.
Ritsos portrays both a literal and metaphorical sense of deprivation. In
Maturity, he writes,
We knew him when he was dressed, austere, collected,
athletic and handsome, in a way. We all greeted him
quite naturally, possibly with a certain distrust
of the unbearable feeling weighing itself
in his half-closed eyes. Until, during the red sunset
in mid-Augusta blazing, terrible summer
he cast off all his clothes and stood there
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stark naked, red all over, dyed with that
deep red of solitude and endlessness,
utterly skinned,
like a magnificent ram hanging from the hook in the middle of the
marketplace
with his diaphanous, exposed veins
showing the circulation of blood and God. Some man couldnt take it;
he threw a sackcloth over him and ran away. The old people spat at him.
The men took out their pistols and fired at him. The kids
stoned him. Only the women and the youths
hid their faces in their hands and knelt. (Selected 89)
The ambiguity emerging from the title raises the question of which of the subsequent
behaviors constitutes maturity. Removing ones clothes and standing for all to see is the
act of an attention-craving toddler, but this mans having been skinned suggests his
public display might not be less reasonable than the punishment inflicted upon him. The
opening lines suggest that he used to bear an outward appearance of maturity. Everyone
else in this scene has his or her own method of coping with the sight of him. Which of
these reactions is mature? All they need to do is look away, not even to deprive but to
redirect their own sense of seeing that makes them uncomfortable. But only the most
innocent and humblethose who society might deem incapable of maturitylook away.
Although these women and youths cannot bear looking, which seems to be all the man
wants, their kneeling suggests a level of humility and respect. This gesture, therefore,
might be the most mature.
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The mystery of why the man was skinned complicates these reactions. If he was a
man with a history of wrongdoing, whose maturity was only pretense, his true form is
finally uncovered. Are the women and youths, then, immature because they do not
understand that this punishment has a purpose, or are they all the more mature because
they understand that such loss of dignity is never warranted? If one is skinless, his
sensitivity to touch is certainly altered; but is he more sensitive now, or less? If we
consider that sense can also mean rationality, then this poem contrasts a series of
senseless acts with one that is probably heroic. Because the language of the poem is so
concrete and direct, so clean of editorializing, its ambiguous which act is heroic. Who is
the protagonist? As readers, we want to know where we stand, to know whose side we
are on, to know with whom we should empathize. Every line in this poem, therefore,
generates surprise, and nearly every line contains some transformation. When we come to
expect transformation at every turn, we become apprehensiveanticipating the next
surprise.
In Country Woman, the protagonists sense of sight becomes honed in
darkeningboth literal and metaphorical. In the third stanza, the matriarch
closed her eyes, but since she couldnt die yet,
ordered them to light the candles. In their gentle glow
she saw her thin, dry hands, as powerful as those of the saints,
like dry trees that have yielded much fruitrough hands
hewn by housekeeping and the field. At that moment
she loved her hands. (Selected 92)
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The need for candlelight entails a literal darkening, while the approach of death suggests
a figurative darkening. Only at this time of darkening can she feel love for what she sees
because the dark allows her to see its true value similar to what Gregg calls form
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. The
accomplishments of these hands grant them their value, likened to those of a religious
figure who has performed miraclesyet with all the humbleness of domestic and pastoral
labor. This moment of seeing, of apprehending, is hard earned. Not just any of us can
light some candles in the dark and love ourselves; only at the onset of death and after so
much work, the penultimate lines suggest, can ones senses be honed enough to love
oneself. And as we will see with Gregg, this kind of seeing is not accomplished in total
darkness, but rather in minimal or alternative lightin this case candlelight.
Country Woman portrays a womans ability to perceive beauty and feel
lovein contrast to the frightfulness and despicability reflected in Maturitythrough
sense alteration. There is another instance of this paradox in Interchanges:
They took the plough to the field,
they brought the field into the house
an endless interchange shaped
the meaning of things.
The woman changed places with the swallow,
she sat in the swallows nest on the roof and warbled.
The swallow sat at the womans loom and wove
stars, birds, flowers, fishing boats, and fish.

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In the poem Too Bright to See
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If only you knew how beautiful your mouth is
you would kiss me on the eyes that I might not see you. (Selected 86)
The event in the first line is a physical possibility we can both see and believea plough
belongs in a field, but it might also transform the field. In this poem and so many of
Ritsoss, there are simple, credible things in the world that transform dramatically, given
changes in the conditions of their environment. The second line of this poem still
contains a feature and object we can see, but the event is surely less plausible. In fact, its
plausible only if we follow a change in scale the syntax encouragesperhaps it is not the
whole field that enters the house, but just a part of it, as on the bottom of a shoe.
The changes that take place in the second stanza are more miraculous, but they
remain credible if we conceive them as an example of the assertion that ends the first
stanza: an endless interchange shaped / the meaning of things. Because we do not know
exactly what this broad statement signifies, we are willing to make the associative leap
with the speaker that the swallow and woman might not only swap venues, but also
actions. Weaving primarily involves touch and sight, while warbling primarily involves
hearingbut both actions involve all five senses to perceive completely and maybe even
to perform.
The last stanza is puzzling with its incorporation of a first and second person
ostensibly unrelated to the previous third-person plural and woman and swallow. In spite
of this associative gap in literal subject matter, the thematic connection to the rest of the
poem is clear: one sense is changed for another, whether because of necessity, desire,
hypothetical condition, nature, or some other factor. The speaker, in this couplet, suggests
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that his beloveds beauty is unbearable; but the proposed solution to thisrestricting his
sightwould only result in heightened desire for intimacy in the physical meeting of
mouth and eyes. So the swapping of senses increases the feeling of love. We often
conceive of love as one of anticipation as well as perception and possession of some
elusive mystery. For Ritsos, these are the very qualities of apprehension.
In Ritsoss Self-Knowledge, the protagonist apprehends himself through yet
another instance of sense deprivation:
He leaves sleep behind, and the road the moon paves
with thin gold leaf. Hes on his own now,
here, in this little, this next to nothing,
with a walking stick and an empty basket. He sees
mountains, hovering in the mist. His loneliness
is weightless now, he could almost fly. But no.
He sits in a chair. Picks up an apple. Bites into it.
At last, he can read his proper name in the teethmarks.
(Late into the Night 65)
Through a combination of isolation, fatigue, material poverty and the physical and mental
deterioration that comes with age, this man has become disassociated from himself. The
imagery in the poem suggests that he experiences this condition intellectually,
emotionally and physically: through third-person limited point-of-view, the speaker
projects the mans condition onto the mountains, which to him appear disconnected from
the earth. Through an act of will, he manages to sit down and lift a simple object. The
apple he lifts and bites into, given the poems title, might be the biblical apple, the fruit of
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knowledge. It restores in him not some universal knowledge, but insteadas the title
says and final line suggestsknowledge of himself. We might deduce, then, that for
Ritsos true knowledge of the self is the most valuable type of knowledge. Or, perhaps it is
worthless, as even after attaining what he does, the man has not literally gained anything
but perspectiveseeing his teeth via their impression in the fruit. This man may have lost
his sense of taste; after all, there is no indication that he tastes the apple. He only
apprehends through his sense of sight what knowledge the apple contains, the same sense
that betrays him when he looks at the mountains.
Another notable ambiguity in the final line is that the man is able to read his
proper name, but we are not told what that name is. Is it Adam? And does it actually
matter what his proper name is if he has lost connection with the world? Proper names
serve the practical purpose of differentiating one of a common species or category of
things from another. This man, like the biblical Adam, is the only man there is in his
world, so a proper name is extraneousand so might be, by extension, self-knowledge.
The various forms of sense deprivation in Ritsoss poems lead to new ways of
perceiving and registering elusive phenomena on two primary spectrums. One is an
emotional spectrum from love, to empathy, to indifference, to cruelty. The other is a
psychological spectrum from knowledge, to ignorance, to disassociation. The surfacing
of these hidden realities also elicits new ways of valuing them, with regard to both human
relationships and the individual self.
Of the three poets, Gregg is the most explicit in linking apprehension to
deprivation; this causality is a central theme in her collection Too Bright to See. The
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poems in this collection literally have a muted color palette, yet their emotional resonance
gives their images a metaphorical glow. Two poems not only exemplify this effect but
also reveal its significance. First, Different Not Less:
All of it changes at evening
equal to the darkening,
so that night-things may have their time.
Each gives over where its nature is essential.
The river loses all but a sound.
The bull keeps only its bulk.
Some things lose everything.
Colors are lost. And trees mostly.
At a time like this we do not doubt our dreams.
We believe the dead are standing along the other edge
of the river, but do not go to meet them.
Being no more powerful than they were before.
We see this change is for the good,
that there is completion, a coming around.
And we are glad for the amnesty.
Modestly we pass our dead in the dark,
and historythe Propylaea to the right
and above our heads. The sun, bull-black
and ready to return, holds back so the moon,
delicate and sweet, may finish her progress.
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We look into the night, or death, our loss,
what is not given. We see another world alive
and our wholeness finishing. (20)
And again in Too Bright to See, from the same collection:
Just before dark the light gets dark. Violet
where my hands pull weeds around the Solomons seals.
I see with difficulty what before was easy.
Perceive what I saw before
but with more tight effort. I am moon
to what I am doing and what I was.
It is real beauty that I lived
and dreamed would be, now know
but never then. Can tell by looking hard,
feeling which is weed and what is form.
My hands are intermediary. Neither lover
nor liar. Sweet being, if you are anywhere that hears,
come quickly. I weep, face set, no tears, mouth open. (Too Bright 42)
Both of these poems focus on a condition of near darknessin mostly literal terms, but
with metaphorical implications as to the opportunities and advantages it affords.
The details in Different Not Less suggest that there are certain physical and
conceptual things we can see better in near-darkness, and certain ones we can only see in
near-darkness. Some things in daylight appear as less true or less vital versions of
themselves. That the river loses all but a sound suggests that sound alone can be more
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telling and distinctive by itself than sound plus sight. If bulk or massiveness is the true
essence of a bull, our impression of this animalin near-dark reduces itself to that.
That some things lose everything suggests that most of what some things are is
immaterial, and some things, such as dreams, take on a greater power at night than during
day. It is a time when transcendence can occur, but without any increased danger to the
beholder, as in the dead standing along the other edge of the river. What daylight has
to offer our senses, and our experience of the world, is incomplete. The irony of the sun
being bull-black is that itthe greatest source of lightgets in the way of another kind
of light. Gregg suggests that by witnessing the moons workfor the moon is what
provides this nocturnal lightwe can see other phenomena that similarly exist only as
types of absence, such as death and loss and unrealized expectations or desires.
The sun and moon imagery also suggests a difference between male and female
consciousness. The male sun garners its identity through dominance, which, while bold,
is both limited and limiting. The female moon is more vulnerable, attuned, sensitive and
subtle, so long as night-things have their time. If we dont give way to the female
moon, we cut ourselves off from half of human consciousness. And at nighttime, we
cant help but give such attention if we are to have vision at all.
At the end of Different Not Less, Gregg achieves a remarkable linguistic feat:
she makes an abstraction seem concrete. The key phrase of the last lineour wholeness
finishingis tangible even though it is unspecific. It needs to be unspecific because in
the moonlit evening-scape of this poem, wholeness is precisely the class of detail one is
able to perceive, akin to that of a bulls bulk or a rivers sound. Thus, one of the reasons
this particular abstraction works is the context of the setting that the poet has established.
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Another is grammar: We see another world alive / and our wholeness finishing. By
putting the abstraction into action, she makes it more dramatic and more dynamic. We do
not just see our wholenesswe see it finishing; it is in the process of coming into being.
The image, rather than reported to us after the fact, comes into being simultaneously with
our experience of it.
Too Bright to See portrays the how and why of this phenomenon, which has to
do with effort. Because the speakers eyes have to work harder to see at night, sight
becomes more pronounced. At night she earns her sight; it is not given to her, therefore
her stake in it increases. In the conditions of night, she cannot see the quantity of objects
she could beforeand this lack of clutter might be cause as well as consequence. But the
distinctions she can make at night bear more significance than those during the day:
which is weed and what is form. There is even a key difference between which and
what. Which signifies one of a plurality, the multiplicity of dispensablesweeds (though
she uses the singular form of this noun to indicate lack of distinguishable characteristics
between them). What signifies an elemental substance or structureform. My hands are
intermediary, the speaker says, because sight paradoxically is still the predominant
sense, even in these nighttime conditions.
The most transcendent event in Too Bright to See occurs in lines five and six:
I am moon / to what I am doing and what I was. The moonlight, she imagines, allows
her to step outside herself and be the moon; as such, she shines her nocturnal light on
herself, and thus sees herself in a truer way. She gains deeper interior self-access
throughparadoxicallyobjectivity. This may be because in daylight she is too
distracted by the external world, when all the weed is visible and she cannot distinguish
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it from form. Of course, this physical transformation is not literal. But because the
conflict in the poem concerns identityhow she feels about who she isa figurative
transformation is nevertheless astounding. Insofar as the moon symbolizes chastity, the
speaker becomes a purer version of her female self. Because the conflict also has to do
with a romantic relationship gone awryhinted at in the final lines of this poem, but
made clear in another poem of the same collection, The Wifeshe returns out of
necessity to her purest, virgin self. Only in this mindset free of distractions and
complicationsthe weed of sexual desirecan she clearly distinguish form.
Greggs darkness is also metaphorical, the source of which is alluded to at the end
of Too Bright to See but made explicit in The Wife:
My husband sucks her tits.
He walks into the night, her Roma, his being alive.
Toward that other love. I wait in the hotel
until four. I lurch from the bed
talking to myself, watch my face in the mirror.
I change my eyes, making them darker.
Take it easy, I say. It is a long time to wait in,
this order of reality. My presence stings.
I grow specific without consequence. (23)
The speaker in this scene experiences betrayal. But in accordance with her response to
the literal darkening in the other poems, she embraces this metaphorical darkening rather
than attempt to resist or overcome it. She performs the painful act of waiting, looking in
the mirror and talking to herself because it grants her the opportunity to see her true self
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and her husbands true self. She change[s] her eyes, which could mean literally
reapplying makeup ruined due to tears, indeed making them darker because the
darknessgrief due to betrayalis what allows her to see. From the angle of the mirror
facing her, her eyes appear dark from mascara, eye shadow, eye liner. But sitting in front
of a mirror, she sees herselfmore complexlylooking through this literal darkness that
covers her eyes. From her angle, the darkness appears to be a lens through which she
sees. This lens, due to the context established in the poems first three lines, takes on
metaphorical weight as well. That is, she perceives the truths surrounding her marriage
and identity more accurately from her state of despair than she would from a state of
bliss.
The speakers line eight assertionMy presence stingsis another example of
Greggs ability to render abstractions concrete. She has made the condition of sitting in
darkness and seeing through it such a complete human experience, indeed an order of
reality, that it feels tangible. In addition to expressing her own pain, my presence
might also be meant to sting her husband. Her embracing all this pain will, she posits,
allow him to see the damage he has caused.
She repeats this trope again in the final line: I grow specific without
consequence. The word specific is actually quite unspecific. However, my husband
sucks her tits is very specific, more so than, for instance, my husband is unfaithful. She
is not, however, just playing with language. She reveals that the seeing of specifics has
not yielded the outcome of changing her condition. Knowing that her husband had sex
with another woman, and in what manner, does not make her feel better. These specifics
have more or less paralyzed her. She is waiting, looking in the mirror, talking to herself.
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Likewise, she is left similarly statuesque at the end of Too Bright to See: I weep, face
set, no tears, mouth open. She finds at the end of The Wife that her presence has not
in fact had the consequence of stinging her husband. All this work she has done in the
darkness has allowed her to apprehend her own grief, as well as the broader nature of
grief. However, neither the grieving nor her understanding of it has made her happier. In
order to become happy, she would likely need to regain her husbands fidelity, or even
undo his adulterous actswhich is impossible.
Apprehension, for Gilbert, is the possession of that which is elusive. Gilbert
concerns himself not just with the seizing of such possession, but with the sustained
awareness or apperception of it. He writes in the last stanza of Poetry is a Kind of
Lying:
Degas said he didnt paint
what he saw, but what
would enable them to see
the thing he had. (Collected 52)
These lines, as the title suggests, refer as much to Gilberts poetry as Degass painting.
Gilberts subject, most often, is what he does not havewhat he desires, what he has
lost. Yet by the end of a given poem, he evokes this deprivation vividly enough to
persuade both himself and the reader that he does have what he believed he didnt.
Though he doesnt regain literal possession, there is the sensation or faith that he does.
Some of his poems describe this form of apprehension, like the one above; some enact it,
and some do both.
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One poem that does both is The Butternut Tree at Fort Juniper, in which the
speaker feels deprived of accurate language. He believes what he has is barely adequate:
I called the tree butternut (which I dont think
it is) so I could talk about how different
the trees are around me here in the rain.
It reminds me of how mutable language is. Keats
would leave blank spaces in his drafts to hold on
to his passion, spaces for the right words to come.
We use them sideways. The way we automatically
add bits of shape to hold on to the dissolving dreams.
So many of the words are for meanwhile. We say,
I love you while we search for language
that can be heard. Which allows us to talk
about how the aspens over there tremble
in the smallest shower, while the tree over by
the window here gathers the raindrops and lets them
go in bunches. The way my heart carols sometimes,
and other times yearns. Sometimes is quiet
and other times is powerfully quiet. (Collected 41).
Most good poems have a transformative moment, a moment that illuminates the outcome
of the speakersor protagonistsbattle with a given impediment to happiness or
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fulfillment
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. This transformative moment occurs at the end of Butternut Tree, when the
reader realizes the speaker has evoked how he feels precisely because there are no exact
words for it. Such a sensation doesnt need to be described in abstract terms if it can be
rendered through comparative imagery. The poem reveals that while language is often
only fillera bridge to feeling and insight, a stand in, an inexact approximationit has
the potential to take on its own original power. It can gain this power from context. The
feat of this poem is that it renders the opposite of what it says. The speaker
simultaneously exercises the faculty of which he claims to be deprived. He laments the
infinitely differential nature of language, yet he captures, in a mere seventeen lines, the
nature of a poets yearning. Gilberts allusion to the master Keats elevates the worthiness
and timelessness of his struggle.
The Butternut Tree at Fort Juniper is lament from beginning to end; on a literal
level, he only grieves, and never announces redemption. But he does make this
transformation explicit in another poem, The Lost Hotels of Paris. The poem opens:
The Lord gives everything and charges
by taking it back. What a bargain.
This sarcasm is rare for Gilbert. He might license himself this moment of levity because
he so often portrays the subject loss. Perhaps he believes some self-deprecation is in
order. He proceeds to list several examples of fleeting joys: hearts of women, small hotels
of Paris, the best Greek islands. But he resolves, its the having / not the keeping that is
the treasure, and closes:
We look up at the stars and they are

3
Ive taken the term transformative moment from one of Kevin Clarks lectures at the
Rainier Writers Workshop. The definition here is a paraphrase.
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not there. We see the memory
of when they were, once upon a time.
And that too is more than enough. (Collected 53)
While in Butternut Tree the speaker feels deprived of verbal faculty, here he feels
deprived of apperceptive faculty. Its neither the experience nor the memory of the joy he
yearns for per se, but rather knowing that he experienced it. The implication is that The
Lord has similar blessings in storethough these will also, in turn, be taken back. But,
Gilbert argues, if one seizes pleasure in a blessing when the blessing is present, then the
pleasure remains once the blessing has died or disappeared; and moreover, the value of
the pleasure lasts even longer than the pleasure itself.
In the Michiko poems, Gilbert renders this form of apprehension more
thoroughly, in slower exposure.
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He does it most powerfullybecause most
surprisinglyin Alone:
I never thought Michiko would come back
after she died. But if she did, I knew
it would be as a lady in a long white dress.
It is strange that she has returned
as somebodys dalmatian. I meet
the man walking her on a leash
almost every week. He says good morning
and I stoop down to calm her. He said

4
The Michiko poems is my own term for the series of poems scattered throughout The
Great Fires and Refusing Heaven (both in Collected) about the speakers wifes death.
They are not designated as such in the actual collections.
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once that she was never like that with
other people. Sometimes she is tethered
on their lawn when I go by. If nobody
is around, I sit on the grass. When she
finally quiets, she puts her head in my lap
and we watch each others eyes as I whisper
in her soft ears. She cares nothing about
the mystery. She likes it best when
I touch her head and tell her small
things about my days and our friends.
That makes her happy, the way it always did. (Collected154)
The speakers wife has died, and he is able to evoke her more vividly than if she were
alive. One tension in the poem is between despair and gratitude. The speakers losshis
deprivationis so devastating that he becomes thankful for any sign of Michikos
presence. Another tension is between gratitude and absurdity. A reader feels empathy for
the speaker because he expresses joy in the impossible. Hes not deluded, either, because
he admits that the situation is strange. And he indicates he knows he does not literally
possess what he has lost when he says she was somebodys dalmatian. Ultimately, he is
able to apprehend what was most important in their relationshipcompanionate
tendernessbecause in this context he is deprived of every element except that.
Apprehension in Gilberts The Negligible operates similarly to the way it does
in Ritsoss poems. Gilberts speaker apprehends his deceased spouse, again, when one
sense compensates for the lack of another:
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I lie in bed listening to it sing
in the dark about the sweetness
of brief love and the perfection of loves
that might have been. The spirit cherishes
the disregarded. It is because the body continues
to fail at remembering the smell of Michiko
that her body is so clear in me after all this time.
There is a special pleasure in remembering the shine
on her spoon merging with faint sounds
in the distance of her rising from the bathwater. (Collected 262)
The speakers opening-line assertion that he hears the bed sing even though he is merely
lying in itpresumably stillsuggests his depth of attunement to both present and
recollected sense perception. This context persuades us that his failure to remember
Michikos smell is a deprivation deeply felt. In turn, the clarity of her body in him seems
a remarkable achievement of his other senses, sight and hearing, indicated in the last
three lines of the poem. Moreover, his senses cannot help but evoke each other. Because
the shine / on her spoon gets us thinking in terms of light, we anticipate another visual
image shrouded in light. So when we get faint sounds / in the distance of her rising from
the bathwater, we dont just hear the dripping, falling and splashing of water. We see a
woman rising and shining. There is the body so clear that the speaker has mentioned
in spite of the failure to remember smell. Furthermore, he might only gain access to these
visual and auditory details because of his failure to remember smell. The desirethe
yearningto apprehend what is lost triggers whichever senses are available. So
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ultimately, the deprivation of one sense leads to the enhancement of the others. It further
leads to the apprehension of the lost object or experience, in this case his wife.
Ritsos, Gregg and Gilberts unique cognizance of the relation between deprivation
and the resulting apprehension gives readers access to illumination without
sentimentality. The deprivation in their poems almost always involves some form of
suffering, and the ensuing apprehension does not promise alleviation. Ritsoss characters
either continue to suffer or are so close to death that their new ways of knowing are futile.
So the reader, who does not actually suffer from deprivation, is truly the one to
experience sustained apprehension. Greggs speaker comes to understand the nature of
her suffering, but that still does not mitigate the suffering. Meanwhile, this transformation
does not harm, but may enlighten, the reader. Gilberts speakers temporary repossession
of what he has lost grants him morsels of pleasure, but these morsels ultimately wilt in
the magnitude of the losss permanence. All three poets offer pleasurenot sufferingto
readers, because we are not actually subject to the deprivation in the poems. We do,
however, partake of the attendant new ways of knowing, the intellectual and visceral
experience of which is thrilling.
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WORKS CITED
Gilbert, Jack. Collected Poems. NY: Knopf, 2012. Print.
Gregg, Linda. Too Bright to See and Alma. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2002. Print.
Ritsos, Yannis. Late Into the Night: The Last Poems of Yannis Ritsos. Martin Mckinsey,
trans. Oberlin, OH: Oberlin College, 1995. Print.
---. Selected Poems 1938-1988. Kimon Friar and Kostas Myrsiades, ed. and
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