James Merrill: The Victor Dog

for Elizabeth Bishop

Bix to Buxtehude to Boulez.

The little white dog on the Victor label

Listens long and hard as he is able.

It’s all in a day’s work, whatever plays.

From judgment, it would seem, he has refrained.   

He even listens earnestly to Bloch,

Then builds a church upon our acid rock.

He’s man’s—no—he’s the Leiermann’s best friend,   

Or would be if hearing and listening were the same.   

Does he hear? I fancy he rather smells

Those lemon-gold arpeggios in Ravel’s

“Les jets d’eau du palais de ceux qui s’aiment.”

He ponders the Schumann Concerto’s tall willow hit   

By lightning, and stays put. When he surmises   

Through one of Bach’s eternal boxwood mazes   

The oboe pungent as a bitch in heat,

Or when the calypso decants its raw bay rum

Or the moon in Wozzeck reddens ripe for murder,   

He doesn’t sneeze or howl; just listens harder.   

Adamant needles bear down on him from

Whirling of outer space, too black, too near—

But he was taught as a puppy not to flinch,   

Much less to imitate his bête noire Blanche   

Who barked, fat foolish creature, at King Lear.

Still others fought in the road’s filth over Jezebel,   

Slavered on hearths of horned and pelted barons.   

His forebears lacked, to say the least, forbearance.   

Can nature change in him? Nothing’s impossible.

The last chord fades. The night is cold and fine.

His master’s voice rasps through the grooves’ bare groves.   

Obediently, in silence like the grave’s

He sleeps there on the still-warm gramophone

Only to dream he is at the première of a Handel   

Opera long thought lost—Il Cane Minore.

Its allegorical subject is his story!

A little dog revolving round a spindle

Gives rise to harmonies beyond belief,

A cast of stars . . . Is there in Victor’s heart   

No honey for the vanquished? Art is art.   

The life it asks of us is a dog’s life.

Written 1969. Trying way too hard, and way too long, to be clever: it might have worked at half the length. But the attractive conceit still lives, just. The poem incarnates its own message: art changes nothing, it's just art. I have no idea if Bishop liked the poem.