Anthony Hecht: “More Light! More Light!”
Anthony Hecht had a daunting formality. He took a measured, classical approach to poetry that, at face value, could seem emotionally cool and intellectually distanced. It was easy to misunderstand his mannered approach to the lyric in the increasingly raucous world of American poetry of the 1960s and after. I liked him immediately when I met him in the early ’80s, but his demeanor put me in mind of T. S. Eliot, who, by all accounts, spoke with a dry, faintly concocted accent and always dressed as if he were going to High Church. As a Jewish American poet, there was a certain anxiety that shadowed Hecht’s style, a fear of exclusion, which he covered up with cunning wit and cultivated shine. He was an exceptional formal poet, like Richard Wilbur and James Merrill, with whom he is often grouped, but he was also a formalist with a difference.
Hecht was more aware of his own affectations than I initially realized. In a Paris Review interview in 1988, he told J. D. McClatchy: “I suppose my voice must sound affected in some way, though there is no ‘natural’ diction into which I might relapse. . . . Doubtless it’s a mask of some sort; a fear or shame of something, very likely of being Jewish, a matter I am no longer in the least ashamed of, though once it was a painful embarrassment.” Hecht wasn’t alone in the way he tried to cover up his origins and refashion himself as someone who belonged in sophisticated circles. There were very few Jews in the Academy when he was starting out, and most of them tried to sound as if they had attended Oxford or Cambridge and took high tea with the Dons. It was a mode of disguise.
The representation of Jews in the modern canon is a vexed one, and I’m not eager to repeat the whole painful story. As a poet, Hecht was deeply influenced by Shakespeare, and yet he never forgot his first experience of reading The Merchant of Venice in grade school:
It was mortifying, and in complicated ways. I was being asked to admire the work of the greatest master of the English language, and one universally revered, who was slandering all those of my race and religion. I was not even allowed to do this in private, but under the scrutiny and supervision of public instruction. And it took many class periods to get through the whole text. I can also remember the unseemly pleasure of my teacher in relishing all the slanders against the Jews in general and Shylock in particular. It was a wounding experience and the beginning of a kind of education for which I received no grades. And it has continued for the rest of my life.
To cite but two more examples. As a maker of elaborate sentences, Hecht owes an obvious debt to Henry James, but he was also aware that James once compared refugee Jews to worms that “wriggle away contentedly” as “denizens of the New York Ghetto” (The American Scene, 1907). Hecht schooled himself on Eliot’s poetry and criticism, but he was cognizant of Eliot’s comment that “reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable” (After Strange Gods, 1934). Eliot’s prejudices were well known but often excused, and the young poets of Hecht’s generation were taught to imitate the ironic tone and well-crafted quatrains of Eliot’s highly influential, openly anti-Semitic collection, Poems 1920. Its satiric hardness especially appealed to the New Critics.
History has a way of changing perspectives, forcing reassessments, reevaluations. American Jewish poets, even ones who were ambivalent about their origins, like Hecht, couldn’t keep quiet about World War II and the Holocaust, and their interventions unnerved American poetry. Amongst other things, I am thinking of a succession of texts, such as Muriel Rukeyser’s 1944 Petrarchan sonnet, which begins, “To be a Jew in the Twentieth Century / Is to be offered a gift,” and Karl Shapiro’s early book, Poems of a Jew (1950). The succession continues with Irving Feldman’s harrowing long poem “The Pripet Marshes” (1965), and Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust (1975). I wish more people knew the war and postwar American poems of the Yiddish poet Kadya Molodowsky, but Paul Celan’s German-language Holocaust poems, especially “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”), forced poetry readers everywhere to contend with barbaric truths.
Hecht may have written with a quill pen and inkwell, but that didn’t change the fact that he was internalizing a history and inscribing a horror. You’d have no idea from his ornamental, lighthearted first book, A Summoning of Stones (1954), what he had already gone through, but it can be gleaned from his second book, The Hard Hours (1967), his greatest single collection. Here, just under the surface, one finds a set of wounded experiences and barely concealed traumas. Some of these traumas revert to childhood (“A Hill,” which suggests a lonely and unhappy early home life), some are revealed in psychoanalysis (“Behold the Lilies of the Field,” which describes the flogging and flaying of a former emperor), and others evoke the Shoah with grimacing accuracy (“It Out-Herods Herod, Pray You Avoid It,” “Rites and Ceremonies”).
Hecht’s most harrowing poems are based on a bedrock of personal experience. In 1944, after graduating from Bard College, he was drafted into the United States Army’s 97th Infantry Division, where his unit was sent into combat in Germany and Czechoslovakia, most notably in the Battle of the Ruhr pocket. As a descendant of Bavarian Jews, it was a strange way to return to his ancestral homeland. He despised the army, which he found dehumanizing, and disliked the officers, whom he found swaggering and incompetent. The experience was bitter. As a twenty-two-year-old private, he participated in the liberation of the Flossenbürg concentration camp on the Czech border. By the time his unit arrived to help free the camp, more than 30,000 people had died there, and the SS personnel had fled. Prisoners were dying from typhus at the rate of 500 a day. As he explained in a book-length interview with Philip Hoy:
Since I had the rudiments of French and German, I was appointed to interview such French prisoners as were well enough to speak, in the hope of securing evidence against those who ran the camp . . . The place, the suffering, the prisoners’ accounts were beyond comprehension. For years after I would wake shrieking.
Hecht also described an encounter with the Germans that left some of his battle-torn fellow soldiers “legless, armless, or dead.” After the firing stopped, he said, he saw a group of German women, leading small children by the hand, coming toward them, waving makeshift white flags of surrender back and forth:
They had to descend the small incline that lay between their height and ours. When they were about halfway, and about to climb the slopes leading to our position, two of our machine guns opened up and slaughtered the whole group . . . This was all due to the plain panic of soldiers newly exposed to combat, due also to guilt, to frustrated fury at the casualties we had suffered. In any case, what I saw that morning was, except for Flossenbürg, the greatest trauma of the war—and believe me, I saw a lot of terrible things.
Hecht found the whole experience “inexpressibly horrible” and was forever changed by what he witnessed in a remote area of northeastern Bavaria.
After the war, Hecht was stationed in Japan, then attended Kenyon College on the G.I. Bill, where he studied with John Crowe Ransom, whose classical learning, deft formalism, and ironic mode particularly appealed to him, and William Empson, who initiated him into the pleasures of ambiguity. The young poet loved nothing better than “the well-wrought urn.” He was learning to armor himself, but when he started teaching at Iowa, his wartime experiences caught up to him, and he suffered from what used to be called “soldier’s heart” and we now term “Post-Traumatic-Stress Disorder” (PTSD). As he told Hoy:
I had what in those primitive days was called a “nervous breakdown,” and which today would be styled a “post-traumatic shock syndrome.” It was arrogant and foolish of me to have supposed that my war experiences could be smoothly expunged by a couple of weeks of heavy drinking. I returned to my parents’ home in New York and entered psychoanalysis. Of course, my analyst, a good and decent man, but an orthodox Freudian, was not prepared to believe that my troubles were due wholly, or even largely, to the war, and so we went ambling back together, down the rocky garden path to my infancy.
This is revealing, poignant, and funny, and it helps to explain something of the strategies and defenses in The Hard Hours and subsequent books, where one finds dark personal reminiscences and satirical portraits intermingled with lovely lyrics about Italian gardens and devastated poems about genocide.
Here in its entirety is one of those shattering poems:
“More Light! More Light!”
for Heinrich Blücher and Hannah Arendt
Composed in the Tower before his execution
These moving verses, and being brought at that time
Painfully to the stake, submitted, declaring thus:
“I implore my God to witness that I have made no crime.”
Nor was he forsaken of courage, but the death was horrible,
The sack of gunpowder failing to ignite.
His legs were blistered sticks on which the black sap
Bubbled and burst as he howled for the Kindly Light.
And that was but one, and by no means one of the worst;
Permitted at least his pitiful dignity;
And such as were by made prayers in the name of Christ,
That shall judge all men, for his soul’s tranquility.
We move now to outside a German wood.
Three men are there commanded to dig a hole
In which the two Jews are ordered to lie down
And be buried alive by the third, who is a Pole.
Not light from the shrine at Weimar beyond the hill
Nor light from heaven appeared. But he did refuse.
A Lüger settled back deeply in its glove.
He was ordered to change places with the Jews.
Much casual death had drained away their souls.
The thick dirt mounted toward the quivering chin.
When only the head was exposed the order came
To dig him out again and to get back in.
No light, no light in the blue Polish eye.
When he finished a riding boot packed down the earth.
The Lüger hovered lightly in its glove.
He was shot in the belly and in three hours bled to death.
No prayers or incense rose up in those hours
Which grew to be years, and every day came mute
Ghosts from the ovens, sifting through crisp air,
And settled upon his eyes in a black soot.
Hecht was teaching at Bard when he wrote “‘More Light! More Light!,’” which is dedicated to his colleagues, the refugee intellectuals, Heinrich Blücher and Hannah Arendt, both of whom had fled from Nazism. Hecht was supplementing his experience with his historical reading and trying to figure out and come to terms with the totality of what was done and who was responsible. As he put it:
In time I came to feel an awed reverence for what the Jews of Europe had undergone, a sense of marvel at the hideousness of what they had been forced to endure. I came to feel that it was important to be worthy of their sacrifices, to justify my survival in the face of their misery and extinction, and slowly I began to shed my shame at being Jewish.
In a general way, Hecht’s thinking was informed by Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and The Human Condition (1958). In a more specific way, “‘More Light!,’” which joins distinct historical stories, relies on two previous texts. Hecht adapts the first narrative from Joseph Foxe’s Protestant history, Actes and Monuments, popularly known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563, 1570), which describes the fate of three Oxford martyrs, the Anglican bishops Nicholas Ridley, Hugh Latimer, and Thomas Cranmer, who were burnt at the stake for heresy in 1555. He adapts the second from Eugen Kogon’s The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them (1950).
Formally speaking, “‘More Light!’” consists of eight quatrains, which rhyme on the second and fourth lines, as in a ballad or a hymn. It doesn’t sing, like a ballad, but it does tell a tragic story. It is also a sort of anti-hymn because there is no God to appeal to for salvation. Hecht sometimes wrote a smooth iambic pentameter, but here he roughens the meter to suit the brutality of the subject matter. The poem evokes heroic quatrains without following them. The logic is remorseless, but the rhythm is slightly impeded. It doesn’t amble along like Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” or Longfellow’s “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport” but stumbles and changes pace, sentence by sentence, stanza by stanza.
The title is literary and alludes to Goethe’s deathbed plea for “More Light!” (Mehr Licht). Goethe never made this pithy cry—in truth, he was calling for someone to open the shutters because his eyesight was dimming—but it has nonetheless taken on legendary status as a desperate prayer for illumination, a last petition for enlightenment. Here, Hecht makes an unmistakably ironic allusion to Goethe’s literal and metaphorical request. He quotes it twice, as if for emphasis, and signals the two parallel stories that will unfold in the poem. Light will not be coming. The lamp of Reason has gone out, and the German Enlightenment has been blinded.
There is a steely, unshakable calm to this poem. The opening stanza consists of one fragmentary sentence sinuously moving across four lines. The poet puts special pressure on the first word, Composed, which suggests both composition (something created) and composure (self-possession). The poem purposefully elides a first-person speaker:
Composed in the Tower before his execution
These moving verses, and being brought at that time
Painfully to the stake, submitted, declaring thus:
“I implore my God to witness that I have made no crime.”
Hecht loved W. H. Auden’s poetry—he later wrote a book about it called The Hidden Law—and here he takes Auden’s detached view of suffering in “Musée des Beaux Arts.” There is a close syntactical resemblance between “About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters” and “Composed in the Tower before his execution / These moving verses.” I am struck by the way the diction takes on the formality and even archness of an earlier period, thus migrating in the direction of the phantom poem composed in the Tower. This explains the phrasing of “being brought” and “declaring thus.” The rhyme is exact and inevitable (time/crime). Hecht admired the formal logic in seventeenth-century poetry, especially Donne and Herbert, and he adapts it here to grim circumstance. Since none of the Oxford martyrs wrote poetry, Hecht overlays it with another example, perhaps something like Tichborne’s “Elegy” (1586), which was composed in the Tower of London and combines it with a statement of Latimer’s on the night before his execution. Here, the unnamed figure implores God as a witness, but everything suggests that he will not be spared.
The first two quatrains comprise a unit and condense a terrible story. The second stanza consists of two sentences equally divided. One notes the logical phrasing (Nor was he . . . but) and lockstep rhyme (ignite/ Light). Hecht borrows and condenses Foxe’s story of Ridley’s death:
Nor was he forsaken of courage, but the death was horrible,
The sack of gunpowder failing to ignite.
His legs were blistered sticks on which the black sap
Bubbled and burst as he howled for the Kindly Light.
The martyr cries for the “Kindly Light,” a phrase Hecht lifted from an early nineteenth-century hymn, “Lead, Kindly Light” (“Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom, / Lead, Thou me on!”), based on a poem by John Henry Newman, “The Pillar of the Cloud,” who later explained it as “the voice of one in darkness asking for help from our Lord.” It was not lost on Hecht that he borrowed the words of a Catholic cardinal and placed them in the mouth of a Protestant martyr. Now the light is far from “Kindly,” and God’s salvation is nowhere to be found.
The stories in this poem are riveting, but there is an underlying logic that places them in perspective and makes them operational. This explains the voicing, an unseen or omniscient narrator who sounds as if he is in a courtroom (“And that was but one, and by no means . . .”). The language is removed, neither sympathetic nor unsympathetic, and mimics the diction of sixteenth-century clerics.
And that was but one, and by no means one of the worst;
Permitted at least his pitiful dignity;
And such as were by made prayers in the name of Christ,
That shall judge all men, for his soul’s tranquility.
In this one sentence, which includes a light, mildly stiff feminine rhyme (dignity/ tranquility), Hecht invokes an older worldview, a time when men were martyred for their Christian principles and died with their beliefs intact. The sound emphatically threads together the words permitted, pitiful, and prayers. But there is an allegorical element to this poem, and this story of martyrdom is just one of many stories, which later become much worse. The second part of the poem seems nostalgic for a time when suffering still had meaning.
The documentary tone of the next line is nerveless: “We move now to outside a German wood.” This is the voice of a newscaster reporting something in the present tense. Hecht’s poem has the authority of personal experience, but that experience is withheld—never mentioned, never spoken of in the singular. The speaker appears only as a generalized “we.” At this turning point, “More Light!” becomes a Holocaust lyric. In a letter, Hecht explained and justified the tone not just here but in all his German war poems:
Except for Wiesel’s Night, I have read no “literary” works about the prison camps that seem anywhere nearly as effective as straight reportorial account because the facts themselves are so monstrous and surreal that they not only don’t need, but cannot endure, the embellishment of metaphor or artistic design.
This is compelling and explains Hecht’s use of the reportorial or documentary mode. He takes the horrifying individual story and lets it stand for the entirety. But it’s not quite accurate to say the material “cannot endure” any supplemental artistry. If we take the next four stanzas as a narrative unit, for example, we can see how the gruesome story is subtly intermingled and even infused with “artistic design.”
This is a parable of the way that “casual death” drains the soul. Barbarism completely dehumanizes its victims. The story is told without much commentary, and the focus is rightly on the two Jews, the Pole, and the German solider, who is only identified metonymically as “a Lüger.” Everyone is nameless, no one escapes the inhumanity. I have little interest in aestheticizing the subject matter, and yet it’s hard not to notice the rhetorical use of light, a word that appears seven times in the poem. Hecht finally repositions it as a pistol that “hovered lightly in its glove.” Could Goethe’s dream have devolved any further?
The acrid irony of the title only gradually comes into focus. Goethe’s deathbed plea reverberates and echoes through a series of intense negations: “Not light . . . Nor light” and “No light, no light.” The Pole’s initial refusal was a straightforward act of heroism. In narrating it, Hecht specifically reports that a saving light does not come from Weimar, Goethe’s home and thus the heart of the German Enlightenment, nor from heaven, which Cardinal Newman identified with the “Kindly Light.” By referring to Weimar, Hecht is also calling attention to its proximity to Buchenwald, thereby identifying one of the cultural centers of Europe with historical atrocity. I am reminded of Walter Benjamin’s observation, “There is no document of civilization that is not simultaneously a document of barbarism.”
Hecht learned the grandeur of rhetorical negation from Shakespeare. He said that of all Shakespeare’s plays the one that emotionally moved him the most was King Lear, which he called “the bleakest of the plays, the most unconsoling.” He adapted the title The Hard Hours from Lear (“is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts”), and it stands behind all of his Holocaust poems, especially the conclusion of “Rites and Ceremonies,” where he quotes Lear wandering on the heath: “None does offend, / None, I say, / None?” Hecht kept in mind Shakespeare’s pun on no and know, negation and knowledge, and schooled himself on Lear’s repeated refusals, the way he repeats “No, no, no, no!” and “Never, never, never, never, never.” Lear comes to know “naught” and “nothing can be made out of nothing.” Here, Hecht takes the Shakespearian pattern and marshals it for his own devastating consequence. I would add that the plainness of rhetoric also suggests a stylistic paring down; the literary embellishments, too, come to naught.
The last stanza is rhetorically insistent and moves from “More Light! More Light!” to “Nor was he forsaken” to “Not light . . . Nor light,” to “No light, no light” and finishes with “No prayers or incense . . .” In conclusion, Hecht both widens and narrows the camera view. First, he denies that any religious petition or magical incantation will come to save human beings from each other. He enlarges and allegorizes the hours into years and then notes the relentless dailiness of the horror. It’s hard to think about line breaks when someone is delivering this kind of news, and yet it is enacted through the bracing cut from mute to Ghosts, and the eerie half-rhyme on mute and soot. One feels the unsettling way that the poem settles into finality:
No prayers or incense rose up in those hours
Which grew to be years, and every day came mute
Ghosts from the ovens, sifting through crisp air,
And settled upon his eyes in a black soot.
The last image spotlights a permanent blindness. There is no escaping reality here, the indifference of nature, the cruel machinery of death that turned people into soot. Like King Lear, “‘More Light!’” is bleak and unconsoling. It denies transcendence or the solace of faith. It refuses to let us look away or distract ourselves. As readers, we, too, are made to watch. No one sleeps better after reading it, but no one forgets what happened, either. The only redemption comes in the fact of “these moving verses.” The lyric encounter becomes a challenge, an ethical act of testimony and witness.
Anthony Hecht was a poet of transfigured dread. He combined personal experience with deep reading to come to a moral reckoning and historical understanding. His formalism was a psychological necessity, a way of trying to distance and contain something that was psychologically threatening and perhaps uncontainable. Like many classically oriented poets, from Samuel Johnson to Louise Bogan, his literary mode was a way of holding off an overwhelming fear of breakdown and madness. We don’t typically think of writing poetry as a form of courage, but Hecht’s iron resolve to face the demonic, not just in himself, but also in history, strikes me as courageous and humane.