Loy published no poetry between 1931 and 1946. Perhaps what spurred her return to poetry was a combination of her return to New York and the war in the Europe, which the United States entered in 1941. Loy wrote âTime-Bombâ in 1945 and it comments directly on a bombed-out world.
Words like âexplosion,â âvalorous,â âruins,â âsentinels,â âstrewn,â and âdeathâ (as well as the titleâs âbombâ) echo reportage of the times and suggest that Loy sees every aspect of life as subsumed into this or some war. The poem gives no hint, however, of the nature of the conflict or who battles whom. The moment itself explodes. People are mere âdisreputables,â âruinsâ that act as âsentinelsâ without having anything to look out for. They do nothing active. Moreover, both the fact that the sentinels are âruinsâ and the reference to death in the final stanza suggest that the prophesied future contains little hope.
War Time
We do not know when in 1945 Loy wrote âTime-Bombâ but it registers a shock like that felt by many when the US dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in August, with its image of the âgoggleâ-eyed living or dead human âruins,â who look on in horror or appear to watch because death left them open-eyed.These strangely terrible beings look toward a dawn filtering through atomic fallout, âstrewnâ with prophetic comments like those Loy heard in Paris in the mid-1930s about the anticipated warâs bringing the end of the world. The poem âPhoto After Pogrom,â also written in 1945, articulates far more direct emotional response: its âArrangement by rage / of human rubbleâ expresses open shock. The speaker of âTime-Bombâ seems numb.
While this poemâs title suggests cataclysmic motion through its references both to âtime,â which never ceases, and âbomb,â which will at some moment explode, the poem projects stasis. It contains only one active verbââfixesââand that verb asserts a continuing state. The words suggesting movement or change occur in grammatical forms of substantive or participial event: leaving, strewn, goggle. The present does not cut past from future but âisâ a scission; the ruins do not watch but are âsentinelsâ; the future does not move but has âmomentary . . . fugitive / momentum.â
The most surprising word of the poem is âgoggle,â with its oddly colloquial and Anglo-Saxon ring among polysyllabic Latinate adjectives and nouns, but the âgoggleâ is of death. The landscape of this present is so lifeless that even death is not an event but a moment of staring with protuberant eyes, like the âsentinelâ âruins.â
The foreboding lifelessness of the poem seems consistent from beginning to end, yet the poem also suggests contrasts at odds with that pattern. The poem begins with an explosion that would seem to disrupt all momentum toward the future: the present divides past from future rather than linking them. In this sense, the present is unnatural. By making the poemâs subject the abstract âpresent momentâ rather than, for example, August 1945, Loy also leaves ambiguous whether she speaks philosophically or historically: is it the particular present moment of time in the United States in 1945 or all âpresent,â a concept infinite in reference because every moment is by definition âpresentâ rather than past or future? Consciousness occurs in the present. If each second explodes past from future, there can be little hope for knowledge or meaningful agency: one cannot understand life or time without a sense of sequence, a consciousness of the present in the context of both memory and anticipation or dread, past and future.
Yet the poemâs final stanza implies that the explosion of the present creates some kind of future momentum, or at least allows such momentum to proceed. It is âonly the momentary / goggle of deathâ that âfixesâ the movement of time. If one understands âfixâ to mean make stationary, the poem implies that the future does continue to move forward in at least a fugitive way, despite the momentary interruptions of death and the âscissionâ between it and the past. On the other hand, if âfixâ means to repair, then it is death that cures or puts back in order the future that is broken by the exploding present. In either case, the poem asserts âmomentumâ even while apparently denying it. That the sentinels watch âin an unknown dawnâ also suggests a continuing future linked with the past at least by prophecy if not by more active and personal memory or narrative: dawn anticipates the coming of day, a new beginning, a world that goes on.
In her notes on âextended consciousnessâ Loy writes both of âthe intellectual consternation, stunning as an explosion, before the unprecedented inhumanities of Axis warfareâ and of her conviction âthat human existence is not the meaningless âaccident in bewildermentâ it sometimes seems to meâ (B Box 7, folder 187). Explosion can echo actual warfare or suggest the intellectual consternation of observers. According to Loyâs notes, a spiritual experience of consciousness can counteract the cataclysm of both event and confusion, persuading people that neither inhumane warfare nor death marks the end of life. In âTime-Bomb,â Loy provides no such reassurance, presenting instead the frozen moment of explosion.
Forms of Momentum and Stasis
The form of the poem, however, suggests momentum as well as stasis. As in some of her early poems, Loy here uses unconventional spacing, in this poem isolating every word and punctuation mark from every other. Words, commas, and periods are âstrewnâ across the page, blind sentinels, fixed in place. The stanzas occur in a chiasmic pattern: a four-line stanza then two stanzas of three lines, then a final stanza of four. Most lines are approximately five syllables long, and each stanza contains one line of three syllables. The basic pattern from which the others vary seems to be set in stanzas 1 and 3: the first contains lines of five, five, three, and five syllables, and the third of three, five, and five syllables.
The nine-syllables line âthose valorous disreputablesâ most disrupts the syllabic order and provides another clue as to the cause of the present collapse. The disreputable are those without reputation, social standing, respect in the community: calling âdisreputablesâ âvalorousâ indicates that the speaker disdains dominant social judgment of worth, and finds the disrespected to be courageous, to have strength of mind and heart. In this reading, the explosion of the present isolates as âruinsâ those who disregard social conventions or depart from popular beliefs, acting valorously according to their own lights. In some cataclysmic moment, the poem implies, values changed so radically that what once was valorous is now a ruin, and what once was unthinkable now occursâincluding world war. Yet because these disreputables stand guard in a landscape containing prophecy (even if as litter), Loyâs poem suggests consciousness of what they witness and perhaps some minimal spirit of protection. It could be their âmomentum,â a moment Loy associates with the future, that continues fugitively at the poemâs end.
Sound Schemes
The poemâs sound schemes also suggest connection in spite of exploded distance and difference. There is no rhyme scheme in the poem. From the first line on, however, words are paired by echoing sound patternsâas occurs in many of Loyâs poems and becomes exaggerated in some (the âpurposeless peaceâ of âPhoto After Pogrom,â or âlidded with unlisted likingsâ in âFaun Fareââboth poems also written in the midforties). The repeated âent and trochaic two-syllable accentual pattern of âpresentâ and âmomentâ in line 1 lead to the âsion unaccented rhyme of âexplosionâ and âscissionâ in lines 2 and 3, accented by the repeated s sounds initiated in âpresentâ and âis.â
âPresentâ also prepares alliteratively for âpast,â just as âfutureâ anticipates by alliteration and assonance the concluding stanzaâs âfugitiveâ momentum, and by assonance the second stanzaâs âdisreputables.â The second stanza foregrounds ls and rs; the third stanza abounds in ns, especially in the sequence âan unknown dawn / strewn and the final stanza repeats ms and fs; âmomentary . . . momentum,â and âfixes the fugitive.â Nearly every grammatically significant word of the poem (and some of the function words as well) anticipates or echoes through soundplay some other word or grouping of words in the poem, suggesting tentacles of connection underlying the poemâs exploded form. The sound echoes also create thematic rhymes, linking disreputables with the fugitive future, for example, or the present with prophecy, and the moment with momentary momentum. The ear can hear what the reader cannot see: language works through aural connections, sequences, patterns, even when apparently most disrupted. In fact, the syntax of the poem is relatively simple, belying the visual disruption of the words on the page. Only the word âgoggleâ has no sound-partner in the poem, although the chiasmic placement of the presentâs explosion and deathâs goggle suggest that they may be analogous.
Scissions and Ruins of War
âTime-Bombâ suggests that World War II has had an effect on the structures and perception of time that no conclusion to the war can mend: the past has categorically disappeared; it has been vanquished, blown apart, divided forever from the present time with the force of the fission that divides atomic particlesâperhaps an implied rhyme in Loyâs âscission.â Consequently, those like Loy, whose lives were by and large defined by the decades before this war, exist as âruins,â like the bombed-out cities of Europe Loy would have seen in newspaper photographsâcities where she had lived: Berlin, Paris, London. They commemorate a bygone era. These sentinels are perhaps like sentries, standing guard at the passageway between past and present, but their function seems to be merely to watch rather than to combat the incursions of an enemy.
The poemâs concluding stanza may imply that the warâs casualties alone temporarily reinstate connections of past to present and future: the process of mourning necessarily involves memories of the past and makes one question what kind of future can be born from so many deaths. Loy does not mourn the loss of friends. In fact, the attitude of this poem is found in Loyâs earliest poems: the future is cut off from the past; most people are ignorant spectators, not agents, in the determination of their fate; conditions of being are static, not dynamic. The war did not provoke these conclusions, although it probably confirmed or sharpened attitudes Loy had long held.
A Poetry of Castigation
Loyâs is a poetry of castigation; catastrophe lurks in its revelations of the underbelly of the relations it observes. In âDer blinde Junge,â written about World War I, Loy describes the youth as an âexpressionless âthingâ / blow[ing] out damnation and concussive dark // Upon a mouth-organâ (LLB 84). And yet Loy believes in the powers of the spirit beyond those of destruction. Her call in âDer blinde Jungeâ to the âilluminati of the coloured earthâ to âListen!ââlike her representation of âruinsâ as sentinels in âTime-Bombââsuggests that consciousness endures and that people can hear something new. As she writes in âEphemerid,â âThe Eternal is sustained by serial metamorphosis, / even so Beauty isâ (LLB 116). Although âTime-Bombâ depicts no moment of change, its âdawnâ and mention of âmomentumâ suggest the possibility.
Loy presents the present moment through division. There are no friends or place whose passing the speaker mourns, and there is no power or person to appeal to. In fact, there is no acknowledged speaker. The isolated spacing of each word and the abstract reference to event, make the poem resemble a proclamation of fact on the basis of some impersonal authority rather than an elegy, a political commentary on the state of modern warfare or inhumanity, or any other kind of personal expression. âTime-Bombâ does not even contain the momentary acknowledgment of idiosyncratic aesthetic perspective suggested in âPhoto After Pogromâ: there a womanâs body is seen as âhacked to utter beauty / oddly by murderâ (LLB 122). This is indeed an âoddâ way to conceive the scene, as is the concluding assertion that âcorpses are virgin.â Such phrases insert a subjective presence into the poem. âTime-Bombâ contains no such phrases. Everything remains at armâs length from a particular consciousness.
In a View questionnaire conducted during the 1940s, when asked âWhat do you see in the stars,â Loy responded:
Our need of an instrument analogous to, yet the inverse of a telescope, which would reduce to our focus the forms of entities hitherto visually illimitable, of whose substance the astronomical illuminations are but the diamond atoms and electrons (Becoming Modern 394).
Marianne Moore, in contrast, answered the same question with one word: âHope.â This claim, like many of Loyâs poems, foregrounds language as such and minimizes its connection to audience or agency.
In âTime-Bomb,â language is disconnective, almost mechanical. The poem does not address an audience or trust its powers of communication. It lays out a design, as one would for a future age cut off from the present one and barely understanding its mode of communication. Loyâs poetry suggests Constructivist event more than communication: it exposes the energies of making, the powers of craft, and the devastation or, sometimes, intense beauty of its isolated moment. And while it frequently critiques a modern world incapable of love, incapable of accepting âdisreputablesâ (scything âimmortellesâ because it does not understand them, in âApology of Geniusâ), or without sympathy for outcasts like âDer blinde Jungeâ or the woman of âChiffon Velours,â hers is not a poetry of sympathy.[note]Marjorie Perloff writes that in Loyâs verse âstructures of voice and address take precedence over the âcontestation of fact,â as Pound called it, of the Imageâ (âEnglish as a âSecond Languageâ in Mina Loy: Woman and Poet, ed. Maeera Schriber and Keith Tuma, National Poetry Foundation 1998; 144). While I agree that Loy takes no primary interest in âcontestation of fact,â her poems do not seem to me structured as address, despite their emotional charge: illocutionary features are almost absent and the presence of an interlocutor seems a matter of indifference.[/note] When asked in a questionnaire to name her âweakest characteristics,â Loy responded âCompassionâ (LLB82, 305-6). Loyâs critique of her world is articulated through distance, satire, and language-play, which often seems to distrust the force of its own communication, as it does here. The âmomentumâ promised in the final stanza remains part of an âunknown dawn.â