CHRISTIAN WIMAN teaches at Yale Divinity School. He is the author most recently of Survival Is a Style. This essay is adapted from his forthcoming book Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, to be published in December by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
I
You only love
when you love in vain.
Try another radio probe
when ten have failed,
take two hundred rabbits
when a hundred have died:
only this is science.
You ask the secret.
It has just one name:
again.
In the end
a dog carries in his jaws
his image in the water,
people rivet the new moon,
I love you.
Like caryatids
our lifted arms
hold up time's granite load
and defeated
we shall always win.
—MIROSLAV HOLUB, “Ode to Joy,” translated from the Czech by Ian Milner
II
. I am drawn, like any “common reader,” to poems that reach for succinct and universalizing statements like this. “Hope not being hope / until all ground for hope has / vanished” (Marianne Moore). “The end of art is peace” (Seamus Heaney). “We are what we are only in our last bastions” (me). Removed from the flesh of their poems, though, the statements become a bit bony and cold. They don't pierce or reverberate; they thud and nag. The end of art is “peace”? Can we really have
