Praising nothing: Jack Gilbert's "Getting It All"

Jack Gilbert's "Getting It All" begins with negation and assertion: "The air this morning is pleasant and praises nothing. / It lies easily on each thing." First, the unpraising air is distanced from everything, but then distance collapses "easily", whose letters echo the "pleasant" air. But unlike this air that's both distanced from and close to the world, we depend on what we "notice": "We see the trees in their early-spring greenness, / but not again until just before winter." Here, we don't "lie easily on each thing", but only connect with the world when its changes give pattern to the new, as in the rhyme of "sees", "trees", and "greenness." (Andrew Shields, #111words, 5 December)

 

Getting It All

Jack Gilbert, The Great Fires, 81

 

The air this morning is pleasant and praises nothing.

It lies easily on each thing. The light has no agency.

In this kind of world, we are on our own: the plain

black shoes of a man sitting in the doorway,

pleats of the tall woman's blue skirt as she hurries

to an office farther on. We will notice maybe

the gold-leaf edges of a book carried by the student

glinting intermittently as she crosses into the bright

sunlight on our side of the street. But usually

we depend on meditation and having things augmented.

We see the trees in their early-spring greenness,

but not again until just before winter. The common

is mostly beyond us. Love after the fervor, the wife

after three thousand nights. It is easy to realize

the horses suddenly running through an empty alley.

But marriage is clear. Like the faint sound of a cello

very late at night somewhere below in the stillness

of an old building on a street named Gernesgade.