The executives

Reading Marjorie Garber's The Use and Abuse of Literature, I came upon her brief discussion, in her introduction, of Auden's poem "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" (1939). Garber uses the "Poetry makes nothing happen" as part of her discussion about whether literature is or should be "useful"—and here she's addressing it through Auden and Yeats, both of whom had political, social and moral impulses guiding their work. I looked up the Auden poem in my copy of his Selected Poems:

. . . Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

In the valley of its saying where executives

Would never want to tamper . . .

That line about "executives" rang a bell. I half-remembered a line and thought it came from a poem by Robert Bly. I have a dozen or so of his poems in a hip 1975 collection of poems, Contemporary American Poetry, edited by A. Poulin (and owned previously by my former sister-in-law). Didn't find it there, but dug out the line using Google (I must have the poem in some other collection). Here's the complete poem:

Romans Angry About the Inner World

What shall the world do with its children?

There are lives the executives

Know nothing of:

A leaping of the body,

The body rolling—I have felt it—

And we float

Joyfully toward the dark places.

But the executioners

Move toward Drusia. They tie her legs

On the iron horse. “Here is a woman

Who has seen our Mother

In the other world.” Next they warm

The hooks. The two Romans had put their trust

In the outer world. Irons glowed

Like teeth. They wanted her

To assure them. She refused. Finally

They took burning

Pine sticks, and pushed them

Into her sides. Her breath rose

And she died. The executioners

Rolled her off onto the ground.

A light snow began to fall from the clear sky

And covered the mangled body.

And the executives, astonished, withdrew.

The inner world is a thorn

In the ear of a tiny beast!

The fingers of the executive are too thick

To pull it out.

It is a jagged stone

Flying toward us out of the darkness.

I'd like to ask Robert Bly: Did you have that line about "executives" from Auden in mind when you wrote this?