by Hasan Altaf
When I was in graduate school, in Baltimore, one of the poems I had to teach my own students was Robinson Jeffers's “The Purse-Seine.” Among both my classmates and the undergraduates it was one of the least popular poems, which should perhaps have been no surprise, since we were encouraged to use it as an illustration of the term “jeremiad”: “a long literary work… in which the author bitterly laments the state of society and its morals in a serious tone of sustained invective, and always contains a prophecy of society's imminent downfall.” My reaction was more mixed – I liked Jeffers's long lines; I liked his voice; I liked the imagery, the parallel between the phosphorescence of the shoals of fish and the lights of the city. The first two stanzas are seductive, almost hypnotic (“the crowded fish/know they are caught, and wildly beat from one wall to the other of their closing destiny the phosphorescent/water to a pool of flame, each beautiful slender body sheeted with flame”) – and then, in the third stanza, comes this:
“…we have built the great cities; now
There is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable of free survival, insulated
From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all dependent. The circle is closed, and the net
Is being hauled in. They hardly feel the cords drawing, yet they shine already. The inevitable mass-disasters
Will not come in our time nor in our children's, but we and our children
Must watch the net draw narrower, government take all powers – or revolution, and the new government
Take more than all, add to kept bodies kept souls – or anarchy, the mass-disasters.”
And at that point the poem always lost me: Even a piece as otherwise lovely (to me, although in Baltimore I was in I believe a minority of one) as “The Purse-Seine” could never convince me to look at cities in that way, not just out of personal geographical preference but mostly because the analysis is both paranoid and in the end mistaken. One can make an argument for “insulation from the strong earth” and “government powers,” but to me it seems that cities are overwhelmingly a positive force, not a negative one. Of all the things humanity has created, of all of our achievements, cities always seem to me the highest.
Recently however I was in Pakistan, in Islamabad and Lahore, and for some reason I began to reconsider the poem.