Roots of Understanding: The Poetry of Robert Hillyer

"Quite simply, for a long long time now, You've made me happy, sad, and tremendously alert with your poems. For all this, I want to thank you." Letter written by Ray Bradbury to Robert Hillyer on September 10, 1959

As I wondered how to address Poetry Month I perused the poetry books on my bookshelf. When I saw the first book of poetry I ever purchased for myself I knew what to write about.

As a girl I would bring home books of poetry from the school library, reading everything from Walt Whitman to Catullus over the years. The Collected Poems by Robert Hillyer was one of my early favorites. My copy was purchased on December 31, 1968 for $4.75 with Christmas money. I read those poems over and over. I didn't know anything about Hillyer. I realized I never heard anything about him in my classes.

I Goggled and found Robert Stillman Hillyer won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1934. He was part of the Harvard Aesthetes, a group that included Malcolm Cowley, E. E. Cummings, John Dos Passos, S, Foster Damon, and John Brooks Wheelwright. He was an ambulance driver in the war, and taught in many universities.

The poems were very nostalgic, which appealed to me. I've written before about how moving when I was ten years old affected me, that I was full of longing and nostalgia for the 'old days' of my first home. I found especially poignant the poem Julia's Room, which was one of Hillyer's poems set to music.

He went up the dark stairs and knocked at Julia's door;
It opened, and a blade of light cut the dim hall,
But the girl was a stranger and when he spoke to her
She could not--or would not--understand at all.
She looked at him a moment--horrified, he thought--
Then slammed to door shut.

Bewildered, he guessed that while he was away
Julia must have invited a friend he had never known;
Sometimes when she asked an old friend to stay
She moved to the attic room and gave her own away.
So he climbed the second flight, but that floor was dark
As rain-drenched bark.

"Julia!" he called but no light flashed on.
"Julia!" he called down the stairwell gloom...
"Whoever you are, for God's sake be gone!"
Then he remembered it was fifty years ago
And he melted like snow.

Oh, I loved nostalgia! Like this poem remembering a childhood scene of skipping pebbles with a friend:

Of lives that intersect, then go their way
At last to lose themselves alone against
The shores of silence, our brief hours of play
Seem now the symbol; the bright memory fenced
With deep, oblivious forest, and condensed
Into one flash, one fragmentary scene
That skips the surface of the years between.
from A Memory

Another poem I especially liked was The Victim.

The hummingbird that darts and hovers
Made one fatal dart--alas!--
Against a counterfeit of flowers
Reflected in the window glass.
When four-o'clocks had sunk in shadow,
The window caught an extra glint
Of color, like the sudden rainbow
Arching the purple firmament.
Transcendent are the traceries
Illusion weaves to set a snare;
The quick competitor of bees,
Trusting his universe of air
Fr flight and fancy, dazzled so
In quest of sweetness, was waylaid
By something hard that had a glow
Brighter than the garden made.
Illusion shatters; the ideal
Is much more ruthless than the real.
The visionary hummingbird
Hit nothingness, and hit it hard.

This poem was a little morality tale, like The Spider and The Fly in my One Hundred and One Famous Poems, which I wrote about here.

Throughout the volume I underlined lines that caught my heart or mind.

"Is there nobody now 
Who can speak with my speech
But the wind in th ruin,
The waves on the beach? 
from Manorbrier

In Thermopylae he wrote, "Men lied to them and so they went to die. Some fell, knowing that they were deceived, And some escaped, and bitterly bereaved, Beheld the truth they loved shrink to a lie."

This was deep stuff!

"For life deals thus with Man, to die alone deceived or with the mass, Or disillusioned to complete his span. Thermopylae or Golgotha, all one, The young dead legions in the narrow pass, he stark black cross against the setting sun."

I didn't know what Thermopylae was, or hardly even Golgotha although the cross reference may have helped me on that. It gave me something to think about.

His long poem The Gates of the Compass II. The Nightmare was quite horrible and Gothic to me. It starts,

We come on leaden feet, we come with leaden
Tread along the haunted corridors
Through darkness void as in a dying brain
Where one by one the thoughts have flickered out.

We are told the unknown dead loved life, and not to dismiss his death, for "In him you weep the doom that is your own."

Traditional verse fell out of favor. Hillyer seems to be a forgotten poet. I had not picked up this volume in years. But the poems spoke to my girl's mind and, like Ray Bradbury, I want to thank him.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/robert-hillyer
http://library.syr.edu/digital/guides/h/hillyer_r.htm