Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

John Frederick Nims’ "Explicating 'The Necromancers'" is a poem about poetry itself, about the act of writing as both an attempt at meaning-making and an act of evasion. It is a reflection on memory and desire, on the way experience is transformed into verse, and on the uneasy distance between lived passion and literary artifact. The poem presents a retrospective meditation on a past love affair, turning it into a self-aware poetic commentary that interrogates both the affair and the poet’s own rendering of it.

The poem’s structure is fluid, moving between past and present, between sensual memory and intellectual reflection. It begins with a recollection of a love affair—"Flushed and in heat my verses all that summer / When love was riotous in the blood."—immediately linking the experience of love with the impulse to write poetry. The speaker and his lover meet at a secluded cove, a "sainte-chapelle," a sacred retreat hidden from the world. This setting, described in lush, visual terms—"sand and seagrass / Niched in the gothic rock, which interplay / Of wave and sun threw stained-glass aureoles over"—transforms the location into a liminal space, both physical and spiritual, where light, water, and love merge into a single, suspended moment.

Yet the moment is already marked by foreboding. When the lover arrives and places her hand on the speaker’s shoulder, she whispers, "Wrong, it's wrong, / Meetings we hide from two who really love us." This admission punctures the idyllic setting, revealing the affair’s moral tension. The presence of unseen others—their "two who really love us"—introduces guilt and inevitability. The repetition of "wrong" and the "blackening clouds" foreshadow the affair’s dissolution, underscoring the theme that passion, however luminous, is transient and inevitably shadowed by consequence.

From here, the poem shifts to the act of writing itself: "Some tears. Ink even more. For soon I'd quill / —Quill! No, more glib a tool. I'd ballpoint rather / 'The Necromancers' with its sidling pun." This meta-poetic turn critiques the poet’s own craft, emphasizing the artificiality of literary creation. The poet dismisses the notion of writing with a quill—associated with classical grandeur—in favor of a ballpoint, a more modern, utilitarian instrument. The poem "The Necromancers," which was presumably written in the wake of this affair, is now exposed as a work of deliberate stylization rather than raw confession. The phrase "sidling pun" hints at the way language can simultaneously reveal and obscure truth, suggesting that poetry is both an act of exorcism and of self-deception.

The subsequent passage presents an excerpt from "The Necromancers," which is rendered in high-flown, self-consciously poetic diction: "Tally the take in that affair with glory. / How I lay gaudy on the blazoning shore." Here, the affair is transformed into a grand, theatrical tableau, complete with exotic imagery—"grottoes hung with corks and cordage," "feluccas," "halcyons." The poet’s earlier guilt and the lover’s admonition—"Wrong..."—are erased in favor of a mythic and aestheticized retelling, where passion is transmuted into poetic spectacle. This version of events is suffused with the golden glow of nostalgia, evoking "deep comas of the sun." Yet, for all its sensuous grandeur, the memory is already fragmenting, already dissolving into the poet’s own linguistic excess.

But reality intrudes again. The moment when the lover once placed her hand on the poet’s shoulder—previously an intimate gesture—returns as an admonition: "Long hair swung side to side, in sad negation, / 'Wrong...!'" The echo of "wrong" fractures the polished surface of poetic reminiscence, recalling the original moral unease that poetry had sought to aestheticize away. This leads to a darker turn: "So admonishing autumn took the shore, / Where two had mimed, palms conjuring, devotions / The sea-crows now asperse, and neume no more." The metaphor shifts from religious iconography to a musical one: their love was once a "psalm," but now even the "sea-crows" mock it, and the sacred chant—"neume"—has been silenced. Passion, once seen as a form of sacred devotion, has now been reduced to something shameful, something overwrought and abandoned.

The final stanzas expose the poet’s self-awareness of his own artifice: "Of all who grieved tot milia formosarum / I rate the least (decorum bids me say)." The phrase, which loosely means "of all who grieve for thousands of beautiful women," undercuts the earlier grandiosity. It suggests that, in the tradition of poets lamenting lost loves, the speaker is merely playing a well-worn role. The "splintered glory / Whose edge ran red, in dream at least" suggests that the affair was, at best, a beautiful but wounding illusion, one that lingers in memory but has no real consequence beyond its poeticization.

The poem concludes with a final shift: "A bass clef darkening, while our ooh's and croodles / Soured, with their tuneful nuisance, sea and sky." The grand romance, once an "affair with glory," now becomes merely "ooh’s and croodles," a diminutive phrase that reduces it to sentimental cooing. The "tuneful nuisance" suggests that their passion, once thought to be cosmic and eternal, was ultimately just another passing sound in the vast, indifferent world.

"Explicating 'The Necromancers'" is thus a poem about the failure of poetry to fully capture experience. It interrogates the tension between raw emotion and its stylized representation, between the immediacy of passion and the artifice of literary construction. The speaker, in revisiting the past, sees how his own words have distorted it, turning a morally complex, deeply felt affair into something grandiose yet ultimately hollow. By confronting this self-deception, the poem becomes an act of self-reckoning, acknowledging that while poetry can immortalize love, it can never fully recover it.

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