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Note: This piece is the beginning of a new column at Literary Matters which I am calling “Images and Words.” I have begun this series at the behest of our beloved Cameron Clark, who asked me to write it after my many discussions with him on the poetic merits of that popular art form, the movies. This column also seeks to help us meet the sixth goal of the ALSCW, as stated on our website, “to explore the literary dimensions of other arts, including film, drama, painting, and music.” This piece, in particular, is a reworking of a paper I wrote for Elijah Blumov’s “Poetry and Mythology” panel at the 2025 ALSCW Conference. Enjoy!

When our very humanity is alienated from us on a daily basis, we must have salutary art which recalls us to what we are; art which reminds us that we are not mere apes, not mere machines, but little less than angels: born to suffer and die, but also to grasp toward the divine. Now is the time for such art to be made again. May Epic and Tragedy rise. May Lyric regain the voice of eagles.

Elijah Perseus Blumov, “The Iron Lyre”

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To be a poet today is to work within conditions of fragmentation: of audience, of patronage, of medium, of culture, of myth. The poet’s traditional role as a public maker, or communicator, of meaning has receded in an age dominated by mass media, commerce, and spectacle—large in scale but small in presentation.

Even in The Republic, Plato agrees that, indeed, Homer is the great poetic educator of Greece, though his greatness is faded in most of his successors. Aristotle agrees, too, in his Poetics, saying that it is Homer in particular who taught the poets the best and most universal way to imitate life. Fast-forward a couple millennia, though, and Nietzsche writing of European decadence says through his Zarathustra that the poets lie too much, know too little, are bad learners, and are obliged to lie. Move forward less than 150 years more, and what do we have?—Perhaps poets who have even totally abdicated their role in culture, especially considering poets as writers of so-called verse, but even considering poets as literary writers at large.

Paradoxically, it is within this very spectacle of decadence and decline that something like poetry has continued to thrive. Only a decade after Nietzsche’s death, as verse poetry through Modernism was being revolutionized but also being made less popular, a new poetic form emerged: Cinema. In the 20th and 21st centuries, the “popular poet” is often not a writer of verse but a filmmaker, of one kind or another. Cinema, through its capacity for rhythmic imagery, emotional compression, and archetypal narrative, has, in its way, become the vessel in which popular poetry persists.

The popular poet, in the Aristotelian sense, as seen in the Poetics—where Aristotle further refines Plato’s understanding of “the poets” (their popular attitude being one of their key attributes)—is one who crafts stories that communicate the “probable”: εἰκός—kata to eikos—It rings deeply and true. As Aristotle says in Malcolm Heath’s translation, “The function of the poet is not to say what has happened, but to say the kind of thing that would happen, i.e. what is possible in accordance with probability or necessity,” and, for the poet, “probable impossibilities are preferable to implausible possibilities.” Further, the popular poet expresses, illustrates, and conveys universal truths through imitation, mimesis—through myth, through poiesis, through the shaping of “probability” in moral imagination.

Even so, especially in the current environment of decadence and hypercapitalism, such a poet faces extraordinary difficulties: to please a mass audience while aspiring toward artistic truth, to negotiate between art and patronage, and to preserve moral sincerity in an age of commodified emotion. These tensions partially define the careers of all the best of the great popular poets, likewise all the great filmmakers—especially the filmmaker I wish to consider here: the Chinese writer and director Zhang Yimou.

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Zhang Yimou is a filmmaker still working near the full of his strength today and still producing commercially successful films, so he presents himself to us as an excellent example of these tensions. He is an artist working to transform images and myths into modern poetic forms, and he is an artist whose struggles within power structures illuminate both the perils and the possibilities of being not only a poet but a popular poet in our postmodern age.

Zhang’s career as one of the greatest of the Chinese filmmakers illustrates how mythological imagination can survive within political constraints. It even reveals how this has long been the case—we have only to think of such examples as Virgil and his Aeneid.

Emerging in China’s Fifth Generation of filmmakers, who first artistically legitimized Chinese cinema post-Cultural Revolution, Zhang first gained international acclaim with social realist-adjacent films like Red Sorghum (1987) and Raise the Red Lantern (1991), which, despite their leanings toward and slightly away from Communist social realism, nevertheless employed formal beauty to critique Chinese government propaganda, social oppression, and cultural repression. Yet Zhang’s later works—approved and sponsored by the Chinese Communist Party, in contrast to his earlier films, in and around which he often resisted the CCP—increasingly turned to stylized mythology and historical allegory. Hero (2002), Shadow (2018), and Full River Red (2023) exemplify his evolution into a Chinese visual poet of national myth, a turn toward legend and epic, marking a shift in his stories from individual psychology to civilizational poetics.

Zhang’s films operate within (and, even still, subtly against, but in this regard more esoterically) the ideological apparatus of the Chinese state, which he has both resisted and served. In his early career, the CCP criticized and censored him for his veiled dissent. Later, they commissioned him to direct the Beijing Olympics ceremony, a nationalistic spectacle that nonetheless revealed Zhang’s mastery of choreographed beauty in images.

“The Chinese censorship system has been in practice for many years,” he told the Guardian in 2004. “I don’t think there will be much change in society… This situation has been present for a long time, and it is a reality in China. I work and live in this system.”

This duality marks Zhang as a modern version of the Chinese court poet, a servant to power yet striving desperately to humanize—to humanize his government, his nation, his people, the lovers of his work, even himself.

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In Hero, Zhang transforms the historical Chinese legend of Jing Ke’s attempted assassination of the Qin emperor King Zheng, the first emperor of China, into a meditation on unity and sacrifice. The film’s color-coded flashbacks (red for passion, blue for reflection, white for transcendence), shifting perspectives, stylized choreography, and love of calligraphy not only compose a visual prosody that helps elevate its narrative to the level of mythological poetry but also create an epic of moral ambiguity: Is peace purchased through tyranny justified? The mythic narrative becomes a mirror then for both China’s imperial past and its authoritarian present—again bringing Virgil and his Aeneid to mind—but also a contemplation on the universal problem of moral compromise. Hero is both a propagandistic patriotic allegory and a critique of authoritarian idealism on both sides in the story.

Shadow continues this exploration through a filmic color palette of grayscale tones and reflections, evoking the beauty of Chinese ink paintings. The film stages dualities of self and other, loyalty and betrayal. A historical martial arts drama with rare emotional depth and complexity of character. Its martial arts sequences are ballets of symmetry and negation, embodying what might be called a Taoist poetics of power. Zhang’s mythological imagination turns historical material into visual allegory. Each shot is a lyrical stanza in an epic cinematic poem of identity, nationality, and human frailty. The mirrored imagery allows for this Taoist meditation on duality.

The protagonist’s body double becomes a figure of both political substitution and ontological crisis.—What is the nature of being? Shadows—poetic, philosophic, aesthetic, and moral—abound. They reflect the artist’s and the nation’s conflicts of identity too. In Shadow, again, there is the concern with unity, this time in opposites. Yin-yang as symbol. Tai-chi as spiritual. The low versus the high (the high arises through the low, as the Tao Te Ching says). The male versus the female. The man and his shadow. The concerns are human, all too human, but the consequences are national and spiritual.

Full River Red, meanwhile, directly engages literary verse poetry: Central to the hidden romance of the story is a traditional “Cherry Song” lyric; toward the finale, character monologues fall in and out of Chinese poetic meters; and the film’s climax reveals the importance of General Yue Fei’s famous patriotic poem, “Man Jiang Hong (Full River Red),” to the plot.

In this way, Zhang fuses cinematic and literary traditions into a modern act of national remembrance. This can be seen as well in the way Zhang fuses genres in Full River Red (first thriller, then black comedy, then tragedy) as well as music (traditional and contemporary music mixed together in the soundtrack, drawing an explicit comparison between Song Dynasty and contemporary China in both culture and politics). Full River Red is so focused on Chinese things as to alienate much of the Western audience, yet it is also a subtle critique of the Han.

While Full River Red is ostensibly a historical thriller about the Song dynasty, it extends Zhang’s project by reworking classical Chinese poetry in cinematic form. The film concludes with the recitation of Yue Fei’s poem, invoking moral endurance within political constraint. Word, image, and myth work together for national memory. Yet, intriguingly, the story features a protagonist with the same family name as Zhang: Zhang Da—clever, careful, unassuming, but secretly carrying out a mission of immense national importance, a humanistic mission relying on the power of a betrayed general’s well-written poem to overcome the decadent intricacies of late Song Dynasty politics, or at least to let in a ray of hope.

“Man Jiang Hong (The River is Full and Red)”
By General Yue Fei

My helmet rattles furiously
As I lean against the parapet—
The rain stops… for a moment.

I turn to face the clouds
And hiss strong curses, toward the gods,
From deep within my aching breast.

At thirty years of age, my deeds and fame mean nothing—dust.
My journey—cruel—brought me eight thousand li beneath the moon.

“Fool, sit ye not by idly,” mocks the sage, “and let black hair grow gray!
Young men grow white despairing.”

Yet the crushing Jingkang Shame
Still lingers—winter snow.

When will oppressive hearts
Melt and bring on spring?

No more waiting! Let’s break out our chariots and ride for Helan Pass!

There we shall carve out freedom from those slopes—ambitious hunger!
There we shall laugh and drink red Jurchen wine—drink to our fills!

Let us restore these mountains and these rivers for ourselves, anew,
And here rebuild our thrones.

Zhang Yimou’s negotiation with the Chinese state, as his patron and his censor, thus mirrors the ancient poet’s relation to his own patrons: he serves the empire but attempts to speak moral truths from within it. His mythological imagery is a vehicle for both affirmation and critique, a visual poetics of moral ambiguity but also necessity and universality within the spectacle of Chinese nationalism.

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Zhang Yimou inhabits a world shaped by political censorship and navigates systems that demand compromise. He is a poet under an imperfect system of patronage, entangled with power, constrained yet creative within power’s orbit. His state-sponsored productions, smuggling moral insight and complexity into official narratives and importing tragic myth into escapist entertainment, represents a real form of artistic negotiation: propaganda and spectacle as parallel conditions of modern poiesis.

Zhang is a director who brings his strong mythological imagination to bear in mediating between art and authority. Myth allows him to encode moral truth within forms acceptable to his patrons. Even in his patriotic allegories, myth restores the human to systems that threaten to erase it. His visual formalism and techniques, the choreographic precision of his painterly compositions, demonstrate a belief that poetic form itself is moral. Beauty is his vehicle for truth, even when that truth must hide beneath spectacle—sometimes silly but not unserious in his hands. Zhang’s filmography suggests that beauty in poetry can be a form of moral resistance to decadence. Form almost as conscience.

Critically, Zhang Yimou is a director who asserts cinema’s potential as popular art with moral vision, elevating the mass medium to the level of mythic expression. He adapts an inherited vocabulary of Chinese historical legend to reimagine collective ideals. Through mythic poetics, he reconciles pleasure, imitation, and truth, giving his popular audience not simple escapism but participation in the moral imagination. He believes in cinema’s universality. As the Chinese put it, it is his tianxia, the all-under-heaven, a striving toward moral totality. He adapts that inherited mythic vocabulary and commits to it in order to reassert the moral universality of popular art, the ability of cinema to be an art of the people that still aspires to truth, and the shaping of collective feeling through symbolic action.

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It is through filmmakers like Zhang Yimou, then, that cinema endures as, currently, the last great art of the people, a modern poiesis reconciling spectacle with truth, transcending its constraints through the power of creative will, and discovering in myth the language through which mass art might still aspire to permanence.

Zhang’s work reminds us that myth remains the living grammar of collective imagination. To watch a film like Hero or Full River Red is to encounter, though not as purely, the same poetic impulses that moved Homer and Virgil: as Aristotle described it, the desire to show both emotionally and intellectually what humankind probably or inevitably does or should do in its search for justice, beauty, meaning, and transcendence.

Zhang Yimou has both faced and overcome challenges similar to those faced by all aspiring poets in the modern media landscape, and more. For the modern artist in general, his lesson is clear: to be a true popular poet today is not to abandon seriousness for accessibility, nor art for entertainment, but to find within the popular the very conditions of enduring art. Cinema, the art of images in motion, remains the medium where the ancient marriage of pleasure, imitation, and truth continues or can continue. Through filmmakers like Zhang Yimou, cinema shows us that poetry still lives, not in the margins, but in the luminous center of the world.

Cinema continues to be what Aristotle envisioned poetry to be: the art that makes human life intelligible through beautiful imitation. In the great filmmakers’ work, poetry still lives, in movement, in image, in myth.

However, in closing, I wish to offer some encouragement for those of us who are not filmmakers: Cinema need not continue as the last great art of the people, the last holding on and moving forward, if only the more traditionally serious poets will learn the lessons that such artists as Zhang Yimou have to teach us. There is no need for us to abdicate our responsibilities! As Ernest Fenollosa once advised, “The chief work of literary men in dealing with language, and of poets especially, lies in feeling back along the ancient lines of advance.”

Henri Cole is a creaturely poet who makes no attempt to domesticate the beast with two backs. His collections are menageries burgeoning with analogies of the self seeking and finding likeness in creatures living and dead, alongside estranging descriptions of his own body. Despite the proliferation of analogies between body and animal, these creatures are not familiars, not friends, not symbols, adjuncts or heralds. These interlocutors appear not because they have been evoked or summoned, but as a matter of course: their own lives overlap with his. To respect them as distinct beings, and not merely as representations, is one of the signal strengths of his poetry. “Pillowcase With Praying Mantis,” from Middle Earth (2003), begins without preamble: “I found a praying mantis on my pillow. / ‘What are you praying for?’ I asked. ‘Can you pray / for my father’s soul, grasping after Mother?’” The capitalization is the only clue to his divided loyalties; “American Kestrel,” from Blackbird and Wolf, begins in passionate observation:

I see you sitting erect on my fire escape,
plucking at your dinner of flayed mouse,
like the red strings of a harp, choking a bit
on the venous blue flesh and hemorrhaging tail.

If you’ve seen a kestrel eating on a fire escape or on a windowsill, the simile comparing flesh to harp strings is perceptive, well-judged, without exaggeration; and “American” in this context sounds as neutral as it is: just part of the common name of a species.^[1]

In the “Face of the Bee,” the first poem in Blizzard (2020), he asserts: “No one / is truly the owner of his own instincts, / but controlling them—this is civilization.” In his review of that collection, Dan Chiasson characterizes this as “dangerously naïve.”^[2] But who is endangered by the poet’s naiveté? Why ignore that he’s begun this poem by speaking to a bee, and imagining it has a face. Addressing a creature allows the poet to speak without condescending, for he isn’t speaking to himself or addressing us. Querying a member of a buzzing choir, Cole, like Flannery O’Connor’s ideal Southerner, “is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence, and he knows that a taste for self-preservation can be readily combined with the missionary spirit.” What’s more, Cole’s “this” leaves open the possibility that the epigrammatic conclusion coming after the em-dash is not a restatement of what comes before so much as a reminder of what the poet might or might not avow: that instincts must be answered by a stronger force that is not and can never be an equal and opposite reaction. Reading and rereading Cole, one gathers that to be civilized isn’t to control one’s instincts so much as to be able to take a forgiving view of the not-always-welcome failures to control them; and controlled is understood as a synonym for tamed, and taming is the first step in the process ending in domestication. “Face of the Bee” is an ars poetica, ending

With your fuzzy black face, do you see me—
a cisgender male—metabolizing
life into language, like nectar sipped
up and regurgitated into gold?

His first three books were written in the tailored shadow of the patrician James Merrill, and then came the break announced by “Arte Povera,” the first poem in The Visible Man (1998), a seminal book in multiple senses.

In the little garden of Villa Sciarra,
I found a decade of poetry dead.
In the limestone fountain lay lizards
and Fanta cans, where Truth once splashed from The Source.

With its history as a retreat for the blood aristocracy, before becoming the property of a succession of plutocrats, the garden of Villa Sciarra, with its aviary, is a promising stage for a crisis. Not quite four centuries after the land was bought to build an estate, and after cycling through several owners and remodels, in 1932 it was given by Henrietta Tower, the widow of the final owner, to Mussolini, “on condition it became a public park.”^[3] One means of salvaging or subverting public space co-opted for fascist ends is to revive it as the setting of an ongoing private struggle. For the struggle to locate—or relocate—the self back into the truths we hold self-evident can be staged anywhere, at any moment.

When Guy Davenport titles a marvelous book of criticism with the words of Mother Ann Lee, “every force evolves a form,” he means the form essential to what Dickinson describes as “formal feeling.”^[4] Cole’s impulse to break with tradition is constrained by a storied form, the sonnet, and by the presence of creatures that can be caged but never denatured. The poem announces the breaking of a style, but not a break with style; “Arte Povera” and the rest of The Visible Man is very stylish. The third stanza is a terrifying list:

Nearby, a gas-light shone its white-hot tongue,
a baby spat up—the stomach’s truth-telling—
a mad boy made a scene worthy of Stalin.
Ah, to see the beast shitting in its cage!

With a tongue to stick out, a flame might speak. Yet the subsequent line suggests that showing “its white-hot tongue” is a preverbal form of communication, a child’s means of expression or a childish insult. From this point forward, Cole’s poetics will be metabolic. A baby’s spit-up tells the truth of what’s inside us just as well as ejaculate; and the last line is not a confession of scopophilia but renunciation expressed as pleasure at the sight of what is conventionally held to be disgusting. Yet the pleasure we might take in watching any creature confined for our delectation to pacing, lazing, shitting, copulating, is never as simple as what it appears to be. The bars, civilized and barbaric at once, constrain the poet’s pleasure as much as the creature’s life. The word “beast” has a long history as a term of endearment for domesticated animals, and this adds to the effect: the exclamation only rises so high; the voyeur only risks so much: the self cannot escape the form it elects.

And yet the poet, risking everything, goes to or beyond a limit; the third of these four lines does not go down—or come back up—so easily. Almost never without its attendant, the preposition “of,” the adjective “worthy” is freighted with irony. The Oxford American College Dictionary has the plain sense as “deserving effort, attention, or respect,” while the plural is characterized as “often derogatory.” The adjective “mad” contains both senses, with a finger on the scale favoring the synonym for insane. Any scene “worthy of Stalin” must be excessive, possibly murderous; yet whether the epithet praises or mocks, Stalin cannot be among the “worthies.” A generic child might be a tyrant, pure id; and yet a generic child is not a beast, even if said child might freely shit in public or scream down the trees. The proper name “Stalin” sticks out in a way that the name of an individual creature—which would be the name of a species—never could.^[5] Proper nouns—names of persons, places, brands—have inescapable associations, and their present incarnations have an invidious supremacy.^[6] Whether ironic or deadly serious, the adjective “worthy” is too soft on its subject; and if hyperbole, the trope escapes the poet. But this is not a failure so much as the consequence of breaking, completely, with the refinements of a style Cole found insufficient to account for his life and times. The millennium did not promise relief from AIDS, one crisis among several.

“Arte Povera” rehearses and develops the old—false—dichotomy between classical restraint and plain speech, and between the paired terms Trilling defines early in Sincerity and Authenticity, which is not to say that the feelings expressed are in any way false. Authenticity being “a more strenuous moral experience that ‘sincerity’ [. . .], a more exigent conception of the self and of what being true to it consists in,” (or, in Cole’s phrase: “the stomach’s truth-telling”).^[7] As if words might be spewed out of the mouths of babes and committed poets, bypassing lungs and larynx completely. The final couplet, with its suggestive doubling of lying to a real parent and the true lie one tells a dominant partner, “changes nothing.” The truth is another casualty of the pursuit of the authentic, which must make inevitable, natural allowances for dramatic—and melodramatic—changes of heart and mind. The family situation in Cole’s poems is never strictly Oedipal, except for those times when it is terrifyingly so (see “Chiffon Morning”). Some of his most remarkable, anguished poems are about his parents, while one might never know from reading his work that he has four brothers, except that Blackbird and Wolf (2007) is dedicated to them. The final line of “Arte Povera”—“My soul-animal prefers the choke-chain”—provides more evidence that Cole’s objective correlatives are creatures: beasts, and birds and bees, real and proverbial; and more evidence of Cole’s sensitivity to idioms. Had he taken the conventional spirit “animal,” the assonance of “soul” and “choke” would have been lost.^[8]

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Since Man, Cole has written more sonnets, or more poems of fourteen lines, than poems in any other form, and in interviews he has spoken of the importance of—the ideal of—the volta, or “turn” of thought that belongs to the sonnet form. Rather than essay whether his many fourteen-line poems are Petrarchan, Shakespearean or some modern hybrid sonnet form, it is more constructive, I think, to accept his capacious definition. This, from the Afterword to his Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets 1994-2022: “I believe a poem is a sonnet if it behaves like one, and this doesn’t mean rhyming iambic pentameter lines. More important is the psychological dimension, the little fractures and leaps and resolutions the poem enacts.” “He has made the form his own,” Chiasson asserts, before offering this useful summary: “often they begin loose-limbed and amiable, with an anecdote, then fall through a trapdoor of reminiscence and rue.”^[9] I would add that the anecdote often arises in an encounter with a creature.

Horses, living and dead, appear throughout his work, as do other domestic animals, though dogs only rarely. The majority of creatures appearing in Cole’s poems are wild in the sense that they remain incompletely unassimilable to a poem’s, and the poet’s, experience. The Marble Queen (1986) his first book and a collection about which he has expressed reservations, includes “The Mare,” “The Beavers at Sweet Briar,” “Heart of a Monarch,” “Of Island Animals” “The Octopus Orchid.” Plus, there is “Canard,” which may be a—French—duck or “an unfounded rumor or story,” and “Diana and the Adder.”^[10] “V-Winged and Hoary,” the first poem in Queen, is a little ornithological treatise that ends with children watching in wonder as “Iceland gulls” dive through a hole in the ice for the rising trout. The Visible Man has “Horses” and “Black Mane.” The exceptional Nothing to Declare (2015) opens with “City Horse” and includes “Gelding.com.” In Blizzard (2020), he gives us the explicitly political “Migrants Devouring the Flesh of a Dead Horse.” Middle Earth includes “The Hare,” “Swans,” “Ape House, Berlin Zoo,” “Landscape with Deer and Figure,” “Crows in Evening Glow,” “Cleaning the Elephant,” “Myself with Cats,” “Pillowcase with Praying Mantis,” “Melon and Insects,” “Fish and Watergrass” and “Medusa.”

A harmless sea creature, the Medusa is better known as the Gorgon, a terrifying mythical monstrosity.^[11] The sonnet by that name, however, begins with vultures and wood storks, and ends with this six-line sentence:

When I poked the wet, mahogany mud,
it felt like something human I had my hand on,
as if the earth were a girl’s black-haired head
being lifted up in a great clatter that ebbed
and flowed, like sea foam or a red sky or pain
obscuring pleasure in a flesh tunnel.

An echo of Seamus Heaney’s “Strange Fruit” is audible, and the head examined in that poem is a mythological medusa that can stone the presumptuous. Heaney’s anonymous victim is a “Murdered, forgotten, nameless, terrible / Beheaded girl, outstaring axe / And beatification, outstaring / What had begun to feel like reverence.” Who reveres this decapitated girl? Performers of that ancient rite of human sacrifice, or the poet reviving the sacrifice in and as a poem? The invocation of the girl’s decapitated head preserved by the bog juices is alive in Cole’s “mahogany mud,” and the sacred occasion is present earlier in the same poem, in his vultures “perched stiffly, like little martyred saints, with gaudy / red heads.” To compare martyred saints to carrion-eaters is Cole’s fine idea of a joke. Cole is a cat person but not a cat; he has a sense of humor, but when laughter barges in, it rarely offers relief. As the vultures do here, creatures minimize the risk that Cole might take himself too seriously, or affirm too strongly. Which is not to say that creatures embalm the poems in irony.^[12] It is in the volta, if that’s what it is, that wood storks appear. The large, awkward birds “conveyed their own way of being, / not debunking violence but commingling with it, / as if freedom meant proximity to danger.” One wonders what else freedom might be: it cannot be proximity to safety, though it is too often mistaken for what allows us to make only ourselves safe.

Cole’s allusion to Heaney’s renowned bog poems is a friendly nod, and not without risk. The younger poet interviewed the elder for The Paris Review, “The Art of Poetry No. 75”; they were colleagues when Cole taught for five years at Harvard. One of his rare prose pieces is an account of a meal shared with the by-then famous and recognizable Heaney; and The Other Love contains an elegy, “Lament for the Maker.”^[13] Both poets share a desire for clarity, for an immediately apprehensible sensuous surface that makes their least successful poems no better than lineated prose. Roy Foster, author of a short biography of the Irish Nobel Laureate, is astute on what distinguishes Heaney from his talented cohort of Irish poets, writing: “The odd contract he had forged with his readership was based not only on their affection for him as a poet but on a belief that he recorded something shared and essential, and that they knew that he could be trusted.”^[14] Foster understates, I think, the possessive affection the Irish had and have for Heaney; their Poet was trusted even by those who didn’t particularly like his work. Loved and resented, he became too big to denounce. Impossible to deny that Heaney grew to fill the role he was given, the mask as mobile as his face. I doubt any other poet will ever again be as popular, and will earn the praise of judges and critics, never mind selling a million copies of his poems and translations, as Heaney did in his lifetime. Well-awarded, with an endowed chair at Claremont-McKenna College, Cole does not have that kind of trusting readership; no American poet is as trusted, nor do I believe an American poet could earn it in our militant aesthetic situation.

Hard to recall the hue and cry that greeted Heaney’s North, not all of it praise, now that he has become an epitome and an enduring publishing phenomenon with three posthumous doorstops appearing in the last four years.^[15] Ciaran Carson, another Northern Irish poet with his own complicated relationship to The Troubles, denounced Heaney in The Honest Ulsterman as “the laureate of violence—a mythmaker, an anthropologist of ritual killing.”^[16] True, Heaney’s bog poems risk the glamor of the war photographer who cannot help but see beauty which is not just the beginning of terror, but its end.^[17] In his Paris Review interview with Sasha Weiss, Cole recalls his teacher Richard Howard’s definition: “Poetry is organized violence!”^[18] Howard came out with this during a class devoted to reading Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Bight”; and while a bite of life may be as prosaic as a slice, it is ever so much more intimate to serve up and take in. Imagining violence, one cannot escape the risk of doing violence; one must risk it, otherwise the imagination has failed to see into the shadows imagined objects cast, for only in the movies is the ‘real’ lit from its best side. Carefully weighing Robert Lowell’s words, Christopher Ricks anatomizes: “For this is the nemesis that lies in wait for all imaginings of violence, even or especially the denunciations of violence: that to imagine it may be to collude with and to minister to it.”^[19] In his search for analogies to desire, Cole has flirted with collusion, cavorted with violent similes, and it is only his wondering tone that has kept his analogies from becoming excesses, such as the involved simile ending in a list in the sextet of “Medusa.” Could the process of lifting this figure of mud, this decapitated head, be like any or all these things: “sea foam or a red sky or pain / obscuring pleasure in a flesh tunnel”? No matter how the question is answered, tone does not grant complete immunity from what words mean.^[20] To think it could gives too much credit to the authentic as Trilling defines it.

When Cole had doubts about the sexual frankness of The Visible Man, “[Heaney] told me the poems were a record of something in ‘the arena of human emotion.’ The most important thing was to contribute something to the arena of human emotion, he insisted. I’ve never forgotten this.”^[21] Heaney’s ideal affirms what might be Cole’s most famous summary of his intention, from the 10^th section of “Apollo,” the superb final sequence in Man: “To write what is human, not escapist: / that is the problem of the hand moving / apart from my body.” The first line often appears in blurbs without what follows, and so floats free and becomes definitive, while the complete sentence is a paradox. The arena of human emotion is wide as a colosseum, ludic, violent, bestial. Yet what the hand writes, even when it writes of encounters with creatures, is always at a remove from, as Cole puts it in “Blur,” the “marrowy / emissions, the gasping made liquid.” Cole is not one of those poets gasping in ink.

Cole might be the laureate of creaturely desire among contemporary poets (whereas Frank Bidart might be laureate of human desire escaping the creaturely). Cole suffers for and from desire; desire modifies, sometimes terribly, his experience of his body, and yet Cole concurs with and finds solace in what Whitman says about creatures: they are not “respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.” And, finally, he is reconciled to the fact that he is more creaturely than he might wish. The enduring value of creatures to Cole and to his poetry is, to paraphrase immortal words of Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) in Singin’ in the Rain, a star supremely apart, “they ain’t people!”^[22] Likeness to creatures, then, is ultimately impossible; he attempts a form of decentering, of othering the self and keeping us, his readers, at a distance. In “At the Grave of Elizabeth Bishop,” one of the few poems in Middle Earth that is not a sonnet, the longer he pursues his likeness to a cat, the more alienating likeness becomes, and all the while he plays at being the tame lion to her St. Jerome.

3

The final sequence in Middle Earth, “Blur,” opens grandly. “It was a Christian idea, sacrificing / oneself to attain the object of one’s desire.” As the first couplet of a poem about desire, blurring the needs of body and soul, this verges on the sacrilegious. The title is multivalent, alive to the common sense of an adjective describing a stretch of lost time and to a loss of boundaries between self and other. The stakes here are far higher than some ordinary therapeutic operation or corrective lenses could repair. In the fourth section—each section is of 14 lines—the word “flesh” appears ten times. The effect is startling, and yet the word never becomes it; desire is not consecrated or profaned, but remains inalienably creaturely. The poem remembers the pursuit of pleasure, of debasement that amounts to the sacrifice of the values that make a self whole—and yet even at this extreme, the volume of Cole’s poetry is the speaking voice: “All the things I loved [ . . .] presupposed / a sense of self locked up in a sphere, / which would never be known to anyone.” An account of ardent defenselessness, the sequence ends in love-making: “I, flesh-to-flesh, sating myself / on blurred odors of the soft black earth.” The consonants inflect the “o” sounds of the vowels in “on,” “odors” and “soft,” lending the line an aural delicacy that belies what might be a cryptic image of death, of loving unto death. Yet I am not convinced that Cole would be satisfied by the sound of sense at the expense of meaning.

Among the notes for his unfinished final novel, The Last Tycoon, found at the time of his death, F. Scott Fitzgerald, striving for ever greater compression, typed: “ACTION IS CHARACTER.” For Cole, action is declaration, and declaration reveals character and suggests a plot, which is one of the reasons why so many of the poems in Nothing to Declare compel. Most of Middle Earth was written during Cole’s year-long stay in Japan, the country of his birth, and much of The Visible Man is set in Italy, while the poet of Nothing to Declare has returned to his own homely materials. Take the extraordinary “Lightning Towards Morning,” which demythologizes Heaney’s Tollund Man. Cole, to use Heaney’s word, “ghostifies” himself, but writes from the perspective of a murdered corpse soon to be discovered by the cops, and examiners in latex gloves. Consider a poem written with a view of the authorities opening the coffin of Abraham Lincoln “to make a slight adjustment / in the position to the body.” Or “The Lonely Domain,” with its epigraph from Dickinson (“A Coffin—is a small Domain”), a plot taken for a plot, that opens with the arrival of an androgynous, creaturely, distinctly un-Christ-like carpenter:

She had a bleeding vagina but no bosom
and a man’s voice that barked, “Shut the fuck up,”
as she carried a carpenter’s bench to the kitchen
and chose some boards from the yard.

Yet no poem in this book of poems that have the simplicity and stringency of samplers, is as unsparing as “Sphere,” which is that rare thing, an excremental vision. A son remembers his father, a man not inclined to believe that austerity affords any consolation, not when there is liquor, and petty crime, and a noirish fatalistic sense of life as pure appetite to be slaked even on the dregs. Again, the opening is novelistic, Southern but not Gothic: “‘Sir, I don’t have no black tea,’ the waitress replied, / so I ordered Black Label instead.” The use of dialect might suggest that the waitress is Black, and the word “black” appears twenty-three times in twenty of the poem’s twenty-two lines, referring only once to the race of a person, a surgeon. Capitalized three times (a brand of scotch, in the proper name of a college, and as AIDS, which Cole calls here “the Black Death,” only to add, in parenthesis, “(I shouldn’t call it that)”); once as part of the colloquial name for chickadees, “blackcaps,” once as part of the past participle “blacked out,” once in “blacktop.” About two-thirds of the way around “Sphere,” this father confesses to his son or to himself, the son a reservoir for the truth and its instrument: “(‘Son, you got mixed blood.’).” Tactfully the poet cups the hands of a parenthesis around this admission, as if genealogy were the sort of information reserved for—and gently mocked by—a headstone. After twenty long lines of blank verse, “Sphere” ends with a rhymed couplet of two questions that may or may not be answerable (they are certainly not rhetorical). To ask whether this son, a poet, loved his father “with all my heart / and all my liver,” to invoke the so-called ‘silent organ’ that releases bile and digests alcohol, as one of the harbors of love, is to reinforce, again, Cole’s metabolic poetics.

4

Blizzard began with a fresh ars poetica, “Face of the Bee,” and Cole’s latest, The Other Love (2025), begins more modestly, with “Mouse in the Grocery”:

There are no bacon strips this morning,
so a mouse ponders a pound of sugar.
A mouse wants what a mouse wants,
salt-cured pork instead of soluble carbs.

A mouse is not a beast, and though the sight of vermin is never welcome, this creature’s tastes are almost human. Yet what begins in wry identification, analogy complicates:

A mouse is like a heart: it sleeps in winter;
it knows uncertain love; it appears to have no gender.
Now the mouse contemplates a woman sprinkling water
on lettuce as a man pushes a broom up the aisle.

We don’t often think of the gender of our vermin, companions thriving in our degraded environments, and the off-rhymes proceeding from “gender” to “winter” to “water” are suggestive, but the poet, now 70, is cautious, chastened. In her review of Gravity and Center (2023), Daisy Fried didn’t quite commit to a striking claim: “Cole’s sonnets are always ending up somewhere other than where they began, and Cole appears to perceive this as a moral responsibility, not simply as an aesthetic or formal one.”^[23] If it only “appears” so, is it so? Cole’s aesthetic and formal approach has evolved, and the morals of his stories have changed. While the ninth line announces something that Cole has always believed— “None of us knows what to expect out there”—, he goes on to itemize the inevitable:

Surely pain is to be part of it,
and the unwelcome intrusion of the past,
like violent weather that makes a grim chiaroscuro
of the air before a curtain of rainwater falls.

There is no longer finality, as if the balance of desire and loss has tipped, definitively, towards acceptance. This fourteen-line poem closes: “I clutch my basket and push on.” We are very far from the poet of “Blur,” then so ravenous for flesh, so consumed by desire, he could almost be mistaken for a genial cannibal.

Though the struggles are not as violent as they once were, these late poems often arrive at defeat; and often, at this low point, after circumstances or outrages have left the poet beaten down, he finds again his feet, paws, hooves, and says something like this, from the late “Gay Bingo At the Pasadena Animal Shelter”:

The person I call myself—elegant, libidinous, austere—
is older than many buildings here, where time moves too swiftly,
taking the measure of my body, like hot sand or a hand leaving its mark,
and the bright sunlight blurs the days into one another.
Still, the sleeping heart awakens,
and, pricked and fed, it grows plump again.

It must be said that to be “pricked and fed” might be sexual. Then again, it might describe the life of an animal raised for slaughtering.

If there was ever time when Cole was in thrall to his creaturely nature, with what he cannot escape or deny about himself, he no longer is. There are other loves than the love for flesh and its marrowy satisfactions. And the creatures, too, have matured; this “Mouse in the Grocery” escapes from analogy back into something complete in itself. While the desire for company may be undiminished, the satisfactions might be more attenuated, and only his need to be alone remains as it has always been, inviolate. That need was expressed beautifully in a poem from Blackbird and Wolf. Here the final two-and-a-half lines of “Oil and Steel,” one of his finest poems, so exquisitely does comedy dog the sadness (and yes, dogs haunt this poem): “this man who never showed / me much affection but gave me a knack / for solitude, which has been mostly useful.” The man in question is again Cole’s father, the son’s inheritance “a plaid shirt from the bedroom closet / and some motor oil,” and this “knack”— a small, casual word, exact for this poet’s necessary, gently misanthropic, self-sufficiency.

Footnotes

1. And Cole is aware, as he observed in a piece about John Berryman in The New Yorker, April 6, 2016, that “to the ancient Greeks, anything lyrikos was considered appropriate for the lyre, the elegant stringed instrument that was highly regarded by them and played as an accompaniment to unarmored or personal poetry.” ↑
2. “Critical Distances,” Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker, Vol. 96 Issue 29, 09/28/2020, 69-70 ↑
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_Sciarra_(Rome). First accessed on 11/19/25 Cole’s poem may allude to Richard Wilbur’s “A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra.” But if so, the allusion is not the source of its strength. ↑
4. Davenport opens his Foreword: “My title, which sounds like Heraclitus or Darwin, is from Mother Ann Lee (1736-1784), founder of the Shakers.” ↑
5. For instance: even though he has not been in office a year, to mention New York now is to call to mind that political prodigy Zorhan Mamdani. Closer to the poem, it’s possible that it might mean something quite different to a lifelong resident of Rome who lived the history of Villa Sciarra more intimately. ↑
6. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, Harvard University Press, 1972, 11. ↑
7. A “soul-animal” prowls through the final lines of “Mud and Flesh” in Nothing to Declare. ↑
8. Chiasson, op. cit. ↑
9. According to the Oxford American College Dictionary, a “canard” is also and—much less likely—“a small winglike projection attached to an aircraft forward of the main wing to provide extra stability or control,” which seems an unlikely subject for a poem. I mention it only to recall multivalence makes for strange bedfellows. ↑
10. “A terrible monster in Greek mythology, Gorgo was their daughter of the marine deities Phocrys and Ceto. She had a round, ugly face, snakes instead of hair, a belt of the teeth of a boar, sometimes a beard, huge wings, and eyes that could transform people into stone.” Oxford Classical Dictionary, Second Edition, edited by N.G.L. Hammond and H.H. Scullard, Clarendon Press, 1970. ↑
11. Cole has never exhibited symptoms, arising from corrosive doubt, of the chronic contemporary condition of ironitis: afraid of being seen to take seriously the ‘wrong’ things, afraid of appearing insufficiently exercised by the ‘right’ things, renders one terminally unserious. Better still, his seriousness never becomes solemnity. ↑
12. “Dinner with Seamus Heaney: A Remembrance,” The New Republic, August 8, 2023. ↑
13. Roy Foster, On Seamus Heaney, Princeton University Press, 2020, 201 ↑
14. The Translations of Seamus Heaney (2022), The Letters of Seamus Heaney (2023) and The Poems of Seamus Heaney (2025) add up to 2757 pages. ↑
15. This phrase of Carson’s might characterize Ted Hughes and Geoffrey Hill, if only for their least perceptive critics. ↑
16. See for instance, the work of James Nachtway: the single sufferers of wars, famines and death camps are shot in silvery black-and-white, “Industrial Pollution” in flaming color. ↑
17. “The Art of Poetry No. 98”, The Paris Review, 209, Summer 2014. ↑
18. Christopher Ricks’s “Robert Lowell: ‘The war of words’” in The Force of Poetry, Oxford University Press, 1984, 257. Ricks makes a convincing case that Lowell is the laureate of violence. ↑
19. This is, I think, part of what Geoffrey Hill is trying to get at in his criticism of T.S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets. Eliot sank to tone rather than continuing to work in the more mixed, demanding register—or unforgiving material— that is pitch. ↑
20. “The Art of Poetry No. 98,” op. cit. ↑
21. Her (in)exact words are, “I ain’t people!” ↑
22. Daisy Fried, “The Shape of Thoughts,” The New York Times, 04/18/23 ↑

O. Henry presents an odd conundrum in contemporary short fiction. He lends his name to one of the most prestigious prizes in the genre (winners include Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Updike, Carver, Oates), but contemporary authors, especially in universities, often look down upon his sentimentality, breezy narration, relatively shallow characterization, and predictably surprising endings. Happily, there is a solution to this dissonance. O. Henry’s enduring popularity should not obscure that his better stories amply reward deeper reading. His most popular story, “The Gift of the Magi,” achieves a profound resonance, primarily through biblical allusion, both obvious and subtle, at once inviting and endlessly provocative, proliferating far beyond the title. The nexus of biblical allusions, finely attuned to the details of the story, evinces a sophisticated command of Scripture, which in turn enlarges the story of a few pages to a true work of art that is so much more than a cute and clever irony.

The title makes the first biblical allusion, precise, unmistakable, pointing to a single verse, really less than half a verse, from the nativity of Jesus:

And when they [the wise men, magoi in Greek] were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down and worshipped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense, and myrrh. (Matthew 2.11 KJV)

The entire biblical episode of the Magi is brief, just thirteen verses, but to O. Henry’s original readers it was (and still largely is) well known, beloved, and enormously influential. With just two key words, the reader is prompted to recall the details of the full passage: the long journey, the guiding star, the jealous king, and of course the wise men and their highly particular gifts. But having staked the allusion from the very start, O. Henry sets it aside until the story’s final paragraph. Until then the allusive title, at first the single word “Gift,” serves as more of a general subject heading for what follows, a dramatization of the modern phenomenon of Christmas gifting, particularly the twin challenges of finding just the right gift for the beloved and then finding a way to pay for it.

On Christmas Eve, Della comes to a double epiphany: she would sell her lush hair to buy a luxurious chain for Jim’s gold watch. The narrator casually adds, seemingly just a random association, this allusive observation:

Had the Queen of Sheba lived in the flat across, Della would have let her hair hang out the window some day to dry just to depreciate Her Majesty’s jewels and gifts. Had Solomon been the janitor, with all his treasures piled up in the basement, Jim would have pulled out his watch every time he passed, just to see him pluck at his beard with envy. (619)

One of the most notable figures in the Old Testament, Solomon is featured in numerous books (1 Kings, 2 Chronicles, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs) as lead protagonist or traditional author, sometimes both, along with significant appearances in books ranging from Samuel and Psalms to the gospels. He personifies, literally, the qualities of wealth and wisdom. The Queen of Sheba is a much briefer character, figuring in just one episode, sudden, cryptic even, both coming and going; nonetheless, she too is well known, proverbial, and magnified by both imagination and tradition. In tandem Solomon and the Queen of Sheba have come to suggest a love story. All three of these subjects—wealth, wisdom, romantic love—meet at the thematic core of “The Gift of the Magi.”

With his quirky humor, for worse or for better, O. Henry first engages Solomon for his wealth, re-imagining the ancient magnificent king as an apartment janitor in early 20th-century New York City, with his treasures gathered not in the Temple or Palace but “piled up in the basement.” But there is a subtle sense to this peculiar twist. The allusion to Solomon (and later to the Magi) is inherently comparative. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus sets the precedent, alluding to Solomon as the paragon of glorious wealth:

And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? (Matthew 6.28-30)

The construction runs a fortiori: Solomon was wondrously wealthy, and yet the simple lilies are more splendid than him, and yet again the peasants listening to Jesus on the Galilean hillside (and the generations of readers ever since) are of far greater worth than those same lilies, and so two degrees higher than Solomon. So, too, Jim and Della and their prized possessions stand superior to Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. But between Sermon and short story, the tone has shifted. As the middle term, the lilies invest the biblical analogy with sublime beauty, while O. Henry’s “janitor” and “basement” storage bend toward bathetic comedy, though the structure remains the same.

Because Solomon is such a large looming figure, the allusion is largely conceptual, but that one word “treasures” does sound an audible echo and trace a textual legacy from Kings through Matthew into O. Henry’s story. 1 Kings recounts how Solomon ruled over the glory days of the united kingdom and the construction of the Temple: “And Solomon brought in the things which David his father had dedicated, even the silver, and the gold, and the vessels, did he put among the treasures of the house of the Lord” (1 Kings 7.51). Matthew’s passage comes to its narrative and poetic climax when the Magi “opened their treasures” (Mt 2.11) and brought forth their iconic gifts. With its own allusive echo of “treasures,” even if “piled in the basement,” “The Gift of the Magi” aligns all three texts: ancient, very ancient, and modern. So juxtaposed, Solomon and the Magi are of a type—royal, wealthy, and wise—and so, too, O. Henry begins to imply, are Jim and Della Young.

All three narratives—of Solomon, of the Magi, of Della and Jim—feature treasured things, and the three stories agree that their characters’ wisdom is greater than their wealth, or rather, that their wisdom is their true wealth. Solomon’s story is the longest and most thorough and thereby helps clarify the others. His riches are grounded in his wisdom. In his dream encounter with God, given an open-ended gift, Solomon asks for “an understanding heart.” The Lord is pleased, and because Solomon asked wisely, God also gives him “that which you hast not asked, both riches and honor” (1 Kings 3). The parallel account in 2 Chronicles 1 immediately sets forth to measure this intangible wisdom by material wealth: 1400 chariots, 12,000 horses, the value in shekels of prime specimens, the first of scores of numbers to describe his extraordinary riches. 1 Kings would even number his wisdom—3000 proverbs (exceeding the count in Proverbs) and 1005 songs—but these fall short. Solomon’s wisdom runs still deeper, immeasurably so. In an often-overlooked application of one of Scripture’s profoundest similes, “And God gave Solomon wisdom and understanding exceeding much, and largeness of heart, even as the sand that is on the sea shore” (1 Kings 4.29). The following verse—”And Solomon’s wisdom excelled the wisdom of all the children of the east country, and all the wisdom of Egypt, for he was wiser than all men” (4.30-31a)—strangely anticipates the Magi and invites O. Henry’s typological reading (notice once again the comparative ascending to the superlative) of these kings. Even more uncannily, the reference to Egypt aligns with the very next passage in Matthew 2, the escape to Egypt, as if not only O. Henry were reading in Kings but Matthew was as well.

In Scripture Solomon is a far larger character than the Queen of Sheba. In the Old Testament she appears in but this one episode (told twice), and we never even learn her name. In the gospels, Jesus adds just one more verse to her lore as the Queen of the South. But in “The Gift of the Magi,” the allusion pointedly begins with the Queen of Sheba, and she is magnified still further by the story’s focus on Della. In 1 Kings 10 and 2 Chronicles 9 she reaffirms the Solomonic complex of wisdom and wealth. Much as the Magi will, she makes a long pilgrimage, hers from Sheba in Southern Arabia, “to prove” (that is, to test or challenge) Solomon “with hard questions” (1 Kings 10.1). After Solomon answers all her questions and passes all her tests, she marvels: “thy wisdom and prosperity exceedeth the fame which I heard. Happy are thy men, happy are these thy servants, which stand continually before thee, and that hear thy wisdom” (1 Kings 10.7b-8). The wealth is no small part of the wonder, but it is the wisdom that comes both first and last. In Matthew Jesus extracts precisely the same emphasis when he addresses the Pharisees: “The Queen of the South shall rise up in the judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: for she came from the uttermost parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and, behold, a greater than Solomon is here” (Matthew 12.42). Jesus’ allusion to the Queen seems to come out of nowhere—unless one holds the prior allusion to Solomon and the lilies in mind—then it completes a perfect balance. And as with Solomon and the lilies, Jesus makes another complex comparison: the Queen of the South was wiser and more receptive than you Pharisees, even as I am wiser and greater than Solomon.

For O. Henry’s purposes, the inclusion of the Queen of Sheba points to a particular passage and adds to Solomon’s familiar complex of wisdom and wealth the crucial element of gifting. Though Solomon hardly needs anything, she is so impressed that “she gave the king a hundred and twenty talents of gold, and of spices very great store, and precious stones: there came no more such abundance of spices as these which the queen of Sheba gave to king Solomon.” In return, “King Solomon gave unto the queen of Sheba all her desire, whatsoever she asked, beside that which Solomon gave her of his royal bounty” (1 Kings 10.10, 13). The exchange can be read as just near eastern customs and politics, but generations of readers have surmised a fonder relationship here, and if so, then treasure is their mutual love language.

The romantic reading is more eisegesis than exegesis—the text does not spell it out—but some striking expressions paired with Solomon’s broader character converge to suggest something more than political tribute. Solomon is the traditional author of, and co-lead within, the Song of Songs, also titled The Song of Solomon from its opening verse, perhaps the world’s single most beautiful and influential poem of romantic love. Elsewhere Kings and Chronicles recount how Solomon was fond of foreign women and wives, by the hundreds, including pharaoh’s daughter, whom he married. So why not the Queen of Sheba who does not seem to have a consort? In this context, certain expressions in 1 Kings 10—“and when she was come to Solomon, she communed with him of all that was in her heart” (10.2b)—seem to suggest more than a botany tutorial. In this context, just before she returns to Sheba, the mention that “king Solomon gave unto the queen of Sheba all her desire” (10.13a) takes on a deeper meaning. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim extrabiblical legends all extrapolate that the Queen returned to Sheba with child, who became Menelik, the legendary founder of the Ethiopian dynasty. O. Henry’s allusion builds upon this long tradition of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba as royal lovers and enriches it still further with Jim and Della.

So grounded, “The Gift of the Magi” is now ready to turn to its own exchange of gifts and the title allusion, almost. But first O. Henry drops one more biblical allusion. After Della has sold her hair and bought the watch chain, and just before she faces Jim, “She had a habit of saying little silent prayers about the simplest everyday things, and now she whispered: ‘Please God, make him think I am still pretty.’” There is no specific allusion here, just the evocation of a broad biblically consistent tone to prepare the allusions to come. A moment later Jim enters and stands amazed. Della begins to explain her cut hair:

“You needn’t look for it,” said Della. “It’s sold, I tell you—sold and gone, too. It’s Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you. Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered,” she went on with a sudden seriousness, “but nobody could ever count my love for you.”

Two allusions richly intersect. In Matthew 10 Jesus assures his disciples, “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows” (Matthew 10.29-31). In yet another a fortiori construction turning upon sublimely simple imagery, the passage assures the compassionate providence of God. Pivoting upon the key word count, the allusion shifts to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s famous sonnet (even while writing for a popular audience, O. Henry’s stories abound with poetic allusion, from Shakespeare and Milton to Keats and Tennyson, and here Browning): “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” Della seems to dissent from her own allusion: “but nobody could ever count my love for you.” In truth, Browning’s poem already turns upon itself, as lively sonnets often do (as Jesus’ own accounting does in the front half of the double allusion), resolving to count only to find herself multiplying uncountable superlatives, “to the depth and breadth and height / [that] soul can reach.” Finally, the sonnet gushes toward an incalculable love forever growing through timeless eternity.

Note among Jesus’ images above the glancing detail of the farthing, like Della’s pennies. Coinage is a kind of counting and valuation. So the story begins: “One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents was in pennies.” Like the wealth of Solomon, “The Gift of the Magi” abounds with numbers and prices seeking to put a value on things: $30 salary, then $20; $8 rent; $20 hair; $21 watch chain; 87 cents that remain, mostly in pennies. And as with Solomon in Kings (or a MasterCard commercial turning upon what is “priceless”), all these numbers specify the value of things, some quite large, only to be rendered insignificant by greater immeasurable qualities.

The enduring popularity of “The Gift of the Magi” has inspired many imitations of self-effacing ironic gifts, sometimes serious, more often silly. So Mickey Mouse sells his prized harmonica to buy Minnie a chain for her watch, while Minnie Mouse sells her watch to buy a harmonica case. Riffing even further from the original, Bert and Ernie respectively give up their beloved paper clip collection and Rubber Duckie to buy cases for the sold objects (only to be redeemed by Mr. Hooper). The silliness is apt, an admission even that no other objects work so well as the hair and watch. Like the gold (for a king), frankincense (for a priest), and myrrh (foretelling suffering and death) brought by the Magi, the hair and watch mean something. The gifts are, the narrator concludes, “wise ones.” Both Jim and Della take “a mighty pride” in her rippling, shining, cascading hair. In 1 Corinthians 11 Paul observes that hair, specifically long hair, is a woman’s “glory” (11.15). Paul and O. Henry surely knew the Solomonic celebration in Song of Songs, “Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves’ eyes within thy locks: thy hair is as a flock of goats, that appear from mount Gilead” (4.1). The simile may puzzle modern readers, but for ancient middle-eastern herdsmen watching their flock descend a rocky hill, the image richly suggested the descending waves and curls of long hair, essentially what O. Henry has modernized and culturally translated with “fall,” “rippling,” and “cascade.” Hair, Della’s hair, is alive, at the roots anyhow, and if cut, will grow back, given time, which is where hair and watch intersect.

The watch of course measures time, the one thing Jim and Della have plenty of, amidst their relative poverty and now absence of prized possessions. As Jim reveals the final irony of having sold his watch to buy her combs, he gently comforts, “Dell . . . let’s put our Christmas presents away and keep ’em a while. They’re too nice to use just at present.” The watch is another way of counting, in this case the minutes and hours which are but the rags of time. These lovers need only each other in the blessed “present,” not the material “presents,” thoughtful as they are. They live and love in the present moment, even as they share a future that will restore the value of their sacrifices, if they can only wait “for a while.” Her hair will grow back, and maybe he can redeem his watch from the pawn shop—or maybe he can’t, or maybe he won’t, and just as well. In a significant detail, “Jim’s gold watch . . . had been his father’s and his grandfather’s.” That legacy makes the sacrifice greater, yet still one gladly given and not regretted, the willful extravagance of a personally costly gift. Across his many stories O. Henry frequently alludes to Adam and Eve, by far his most common biblical reference. In Genesis 2, the coupling of Adam and Eve, the climax of creation, concludes, “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh” (2.24). Giving up the gold watch, Jim and Della surpass Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. In sacrificing his family watch, Jim has left father and grandfather behind to cleave unto his wife. As the other Browning bids, “Grow old along with me, / the best is yet to be,” in a fullness of time no watch can measure. Jim and Della are literally Young, with all the world before them.

So “put the chops on,” Jim concludes, as they embrace the wondrous absurdity of the present moment flowing indivisibly into their future together. The final paragraph then belongs to the narrator who completes the promise of the title allusion: “The magi, as you know, were wise men—wonderfully wise men—who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving presents.” The paragraph begins and ends with magi, that is, magically wise ones from the Greek and Persian, and makes nine varied soundings of the word wise, rising through “wonderfully wise” to the superlative “wisest,” an insistent three times in conclusion. And yet Jim and Della are “two foolish children” as well, “who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the treasures of their house.” O. Henry plays upon a familiar paradox, one that Scripture employs. While Proverbs tidily contrasts the antinomy of wisdom and foolishness, Paul turns it inside out, posing a series of questions: “Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?” (1 Corinthians 1.20). Paul answers himself: “But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise” (1.27b). Jim and Della are just such fools, their foolishness wiser than men’s wisdom, their poverty richer than conventional wealth (1.25).

There are differences to bridge between Paul and O. Henry. Paul’s paradox of foolishness and wisdom is focused on Christology and the cross. Jim and Della do sacrifice for one another, but the defining context is romantic and married love. And yet Paul’s paradox has not been entirely secularized or humanized. Though not nearly as erudite and densely allusive as, say, George Herbert or John Milton, O. Henry fairly sprinkles his stories with biblical allusions, and yet he seldom mentions God (Della’s little prayer a safe exception), strategically to avoid religious controversy, it seems, so as not to take (by 1905 standards) the Lord’s name in vain in a piece of pop fiction. But the capital letter in “Babe” discreetly asserts the divine nature of the baby Jesus, the Christ child, and serves as a banner over the whole story. That same Babe grown up would make yet another comparison, “it is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20.35), and here both have given. The young lovers do not abandon or really even swerve from their source. Their love harmonizes with it.

The phrase “treasures of their house” succinctly recalls the prior allusions and the trail of typological reading from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba through the Magi to Jim and Della. In contrast to their literal “flat,” house shades toward metaphor, such as the House of David, making Jim and Della into royals of sorts. Kings and Chronicles repeatedly impress that Solomon was the wisest of all men. But Jim and Della supersede the wisdom of their prototypes. For Solomon, wisdom begets wealth and then crowns it again. The Magi are often called kings too, though less splendiferous, more strategic in their treasure, more mysterious in their wisdom, creating some separation between wealth and wisdom. The near poverty of Jim and Della sharpens that distinction: their wisdom is their only wealth, and their sacrificial love is the living proof of that wisdom. A few chapters after the Magi, a few verses above Solomon and the lilies in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus himself invokes treasure, not a repudiation but a resituating: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matthew 6.21). We can track O. Henry reading in Kings and Matthew. He was also reading in 1 Corinthians, where, after a multi-chapter survey of virtues including Wisdom and Knowledge, Paul famously concludes, “and the greatest of these is Charity” (in the old KJV), that is, Love (13.13). In a love story that mentions love just once, even as it is implicit everywhere, it is Paul’s superlative, I suggest, that O. Henry transfers to Jim and Della’s wisdom: “Let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are the wisest. Everywhere they are the wisest. They are the magi.” Easily overlooked, the first term of O. Henry’s title is singular,  “Gift,” not gifts, neither gold, frankincense and myrrh, nor shiny chain and fancy combs. The singular unifying Gift is love itself, and these lovers have integrated agape and eros, no small achievement, while O. Henry has integrated pleasure reading and deep meaning.

The deeper one goes into the allusions the richer they become. It is an odd quirk, but typical O. Henry, that the way he characterizes Solomon and then evokes Matthew’s nativity account glancingly associates envious Solomon with jealous Herod, not just the Magi, another elevation of the wise men over worldly kings, then all of them superseded by the young lovers. The emphatic “Babe,” paired with the fruitful love affair of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba just beyond the page, intimates a growing family for Jim and Della, as the two become one flesh over the fullness of time, as their sublimely simple monogamy contrasts and corrects Solomon’s astonishing polygamy. Through allusions variously pellucid and intuitive, O. Henry’s little story generates a multitude of expansive reveries, the way great stories do.

Over 120 years and counting, “The Gift of the Magi” has earned the status of an enduring work of literary art. It will be read—and loved—as long as the English language remains alive. But is O. Henry a great writer? Should he be one of the guiding names of contemporary fiction? He is almost always entertaining, but seldom does he achieve such depth of both thought and feeling. He does so here by complex allusion that makes a short story read much larger than its few pages. Moreover, the gravitas of its sources lends their profundity to what otherwise might have truly been “a lamely related uneventful chronicle” with a clever ending. But O. Henry is no one-hit wonder. Among the second echelon of his better-known stories, “The Trimmed Lamp” follows “The Gift of the Magi” with a similar nexus of biblical allusions applied to a contemporary love intrigue, happily concluded, that rewards deeper reading. Among his hundreds of stories, he has another handful that are still widely read, not just assigned, including “The Ransom of Red Chief,” “The Last Leaf,” “After Twenty Years,” and more. Shortly after his death in 1910, not yet 48, the prolific O. Henry was esteemed an illustrious writer among the ranks of  Dickens and Dostoevsky, Hawthorne and Melville, and so the O. Henry Award was established in 1919. Few hold him so highly today, but the ensuing century, especially the last few decades, have also seen Hawthorne and Melville, after a long rise, now largely reduced to a single short story each and maybe a single novel, even among English majors. O. Henry’s achievement is not the same as these vaunted predecessors, neither as dark nor as dazzling, but today his readership is as wide, in some cases wider. And at his very best, as in “The Gift of the Magi,” O. Henry has achieved something uniquely his own, ambitious, profound, charming, eagerly read, a rare combination of qualities that well befit a writing prize of which any contemporary recipient may be justly proud.