11:4 Winter 1958

JOHN HOLLANDER

Glaucon and the Moon

John Hollander’s “Glaucon and the Moon” appeared in the Winter 1958 issue and was one of the earliest-written poems in the poet’s first book, A Crackling of Thorns. Hollander explains how it came about:

“Glaucon and the Moon” is one of a series of short lyrics that I’d originally written while at college, at about 19. My head was full of Yeats’s late poetry, and their sometimes slant rhyming and something of their diction crept into these. As I fiddled with them over the next few years—and as I grew more distant from the ill-defined state (with respect to both love and work) in which I had written them—I confirmed their status as dramatic lyrics (rather than personal outpourings) and gave them all to one speaker. The Glaucon of the poems is an ephebe, a youth evading older women and men. I meant by his name neither the famous rhapsode mentioned in Plato’s Ion nor the full-grown and accomplished speaker in the Republic, even though one of the poems indeed plays with Socrates’s myth of the line in the sixth book of that dialogue. The last stanza of this song, “Glaucon Muddles a Lesson,” leads to the opening of the present poem (two away in the final sequence), and helped suggest the rather simple trope of straight/curved // knowledge/feeling:

From a divided line we learn
Four faculties of knowing;
In brittle winter once they served
To tell me it was snowing.
But she will teach me, in her turn,
To bend the line by throwing
The golden ball of knowing
Up in the air, and then we’ll sing
Of how we have escaped the spring.

The matter of Connecticut in the poem was simply anecdotal—I’d just come back from a few days’ hitchhiking with a friend in the Berkshires and northwestern Connecticut, and had ended up at night at the Bridgeport railroad (then, the NYNH&H) station. I think I meant the end of the little poem to demystify the carrying-on about curvature in the earlier lines and previous poems.

[DN, 1996]

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