The New Criterion

The Boy in the Well is Daniel Mark Epstein’s sixth book of poems. The plain-spoken, almost prosaic language of these poems is very different from the lyrical, sumptuous writing of Spirits (1987), his last collection. Very different, too, are the subjects that Epstein trains his eye on in this volume. The love poems of Spirits have given way mainly to narratives on historical subjects and poems dealing with myth and legend: for example, “Phidias in Exile,” “The Venus of Urbino,” “The Ferryman” (this last is about Charon, the ferryman who escorts the dead over the river Styx to Hades). Not that an interest in history is new for Epstein. No Vacancies in Hell (1973), his first book, featured poems about nineteenth-century Baltimore (the poet hails from that city and now resides there), while The Book of Fortune (1982) contained poems about Thomas Edison and the Civil War. The Boy in the Well recalls these two earlier volumes in the same way that Spirits recalls Young Men’s Gold (1978), love poems written in a lavish, at times wonderfully ornate language.

Although Epstein often delves deep into the past in The Boy in the Well, the book begins with poems that take place in the present and speak admiringly of those who can live in it unburdened by an acute sense of history. In “Lost Owl,” the owl “singing from the oak tree in our yard” charms the poet’s son but disturbs the poet because he is aware that such a vision has been “known for centuries as an omen of doom.” The poet’s knowledge of the past makes it hard to share his son’s delight: to be “pastless” like the boy is better. In the book’s eponymous poem, the boy of the title tumbles into a well and, although he does not survive the ordeal, can nevertheless marvel at the simple beauty of the stars. But to Epstein they are only “constellations acting out the old legends.”

In “At Poe’s Grave, Westminster Church,” the book’s opening poem, lovers walking through the graveyard are surrounded by the past, this time in the form of the buried dead. But the lovers’ kiss in the “green island Necropolis” momentarily loosens the past’s grip; the landscape vanishes into “a niche where there is no death,/ Past or future graveyard, no dominion/ But the bound and indivisible soul.” Here the main emissary of the encroaching past is Poe. His spirit almost seems to say that death will have its day despite that sweet, lingering kiss.

In “The Inheritance,” a candid poem about Epstein’s father, family history is the threat:

The night his heart stopped, and my father
Drove the Cadillac haywire into a shadow,
Nobody knew where he’d been. A heap of

money

Lay strewn across the front seat as if Death
Had thrown it back in his face;
In the ignition dangled his cryptic keys.

My job: to find the locks for those keys
And what they guarded, a puzzle my father
Left scattered in his wake for me to face.
I had to open the doors under his shadow
Though one might easily open upon my

death,

A scene of vengeance, or a vault full of money.

To lessen the burden of these possibly shadowy doings would involve, as Epstein admits later on in the poem, getting his father’s blessing or a proper farewell. But neither is possible. The past triumphs.

The personal past also triumphs in “The Book of Matches,” a harrowing poem addressed to Epstein’s ex-wife. Here, the poet conceives of his old union as a fire ravaging his house, begun in the basement with a book of matches, “each red tip a year of marriage.” The blaze engulfs first the living-room and stairs, then the poet’s books and bed; finally it “bursts into the children’s room/ Furious to find them gone, no longer children/ Any more than we are bride and groom.”

In “Epiphany,” the remnants of another family’s past—“carpets, lamps and bedsteads, kitchen range,” and “games the children scarcely learned to play”—lie discarded on the street. Hope lives, though not now and not yet:

Somewhere tonight a child is being told
There will be a better home for him
In the new year, a warm bed and fresh linen,
Constant love, and new toys for the old.

In the poems that follow, Epstein moves from confronting his personal past to the mythical past. Since he cannot turn himself at will into a “pastless” child or lover, and since his former life is a fire from which he barely escapes, Epstein turns to cultural history in search of a better, more useful “inheritance.” This is not an ideal solution—we have already been shown the down side of so much knowledge—but he seems to have no choice.

The first old tale he invokes—a variation on a story by Edward Dunsany—concerns the dead. “The Ferryman” recounts how the dead would arrive over the centuries, often in great numbers, to be ferried across the river by Charon, his grim task a part of “the grand scheme the gods had made.” Before long, though, the number starts to dwindle: at one point, not a single soul appears for a decade.

The appearance of the last hell-bound soul breaks the rower’s indifference:

Then one man walked the pier. His little shade
Sat shivering on the skiff as it pushed off.
Only one passenger: the gods know best.
The weary ferryman rowed on and on
And the river sighed the way Grief in the dawn
Of ages moaned and sighed among her sisters,
A song that could not die like the echoes
Of human sorrow failing on the earth,
Though it was old as Time and Charon’s pain.

From the slow river the boat loomed to the

coast

Of Hades. The lone passenger stepped ashore
As Charon turned his boat toward the world.
“But wait, I am the last,” said the new ghost
Alarmed by Charon’s face against the sky—
For no one had ever made him smile before,
No one had ever seen the ferryman cry.

“The past,” in the form of a story salvaged from it, helps alter the perception of death as something incurably bleak. More important, though, the poem suggests that Epstein, too, might be on the verge of considering ways of breaking the hard shell of indifference he had developed from dealing with his dead.

“The Great Pyramid” contains a gloss on the whole business of using others’ words to get one going. “Centuries before the flood,” Epstein writes, “a king/ Dreamed the earth turned over, burying/ Everyone.” When the king learns from his priest that the stars “foretold the deluge,” he “ordained the pyramid.” The priest’s words “became a juggernaut,” prompting the king to build the pyramid—much the way old stories and other writers’ words inspire Epstein to build his “edifice” of words. (Besides “The Ferryman” and the poems based on unattributed tales, two poems are inspired by Mallarmé, while another is based on a Sephardic tale.) For this poet, at least, words motivate as much as deeds do; and the objects created by men so inspired— poems, sculptures, a pyramid (with “deepest man-made night” at its core)—are admired as much as any natural phenomenon. When we read in “Phidias in Exile” that the great sculptor of antiquity was accused by rivals of stealing gold, we can’t help but smile: Epstein, too, borrows the “gold” of others for his poetry.

In “The Hanging Gardens,” what inspires the Babylonian king to build his garden is his wife’s “desire … for the country of her youth.” What the queen wants, in short, is a zone of bliss free from the corrupting reach of the past, whether it be her own past or history proper. These myth-laden poems of Epstein’s have a similar function: they provide shields from a painful present.

Indeed, it isn’t until “Diana,” toward the end of the book, that the present surfaces again at all. Here, in a poem addressed to a new love, Epstein writes: “All day you seemed fearful of me,/ Your wide, brave gaze/ Wavering, haunted.” The source of fear turns out to be his new beloved’s dream the previous night in which the poet, “a country hunter with a bow,” chased her, a doe, through the woods:

I thought of the old story, Actaeon,
And one lesson seemed plain enough.
If you have never been in love
Like this, or thought of children
Dividing your ecstatic solitude,
You must feel like the hunter hunted.
Running from the game you have pursued.

Given his history, of course, Epstein is probably as afraid of any new promise of love as she! But for the first time in quite a while, the past doesn’t dominate. In fact, “Diana” ends with a vision recalling the hanging gardens, but that is wholly of today: “I thought I’d broached a shrine of innocence/ The day you took me home and I first saw// Your childhood dolls kept in a cabinet.”

The shrines of innocence Epstein has been honoring are finally transformed into a reality. A trying present forced the poet to seek refuge in the past, which in turn prompted him to embrace the present when it, too, finally reappeared. Thanks to his new love, Epstein can see the world again, and be inspired by it, for a change, not just by stories or words: he has come full circle.

“Helen,” the last poem in the book, doesn’t refer to Helen of Troy, but that is who we think of when we start to read:

“Tell us a love story,”
Pleaded the class in chorus.
“Our lessons are all done,
Now don’t lecture or bore us,”

They prattled, except for one,
Helen, whose gaze looked lost
In the maze of willow branches,
The girl the boys liked most

For the faraway blue of her eyes
And brown hair straight as rain.
“Tell us a love story, please,”
They begged the teacher again.

He frowned and longed for the bell,
Saying, “All the love stories I know
End in heartache, or death—”
Then Helen, from the back row

Called at last from her daydream
In the voice of an innocent lover,
“Tell us a love story anyway
And stop before it is over.”

We think of the myth, but not for long. For the advice of this beautiful, utterly unwise girl beats anything Epstein ever encountered in a book: to “stop” his own love story “before it is over.” What better way to repudiate the specter of death looming in that first poem set at the grave of Poe? What better way to put in perspective (though not reject) all that knowledge accumulated in his mind? What better way to end such a thoughtful, moving story?