"The Victor Dog" Texts and Notes

THE VICTOR DOG

for Elizabeth Bishop

[Notes follow the text]

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.

Published in

New American Review, 11 ([March] 1970): 93.

Braving the Elements (NY: Atheneum, 1971).

Collected Poems. J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser. (NY: Knopf, 2001).

(From Jack W. C. Hagstrom and Bill Morgan, James Ingram Merrill: A Descriptive Bibliography (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2009).

Notes

Title: The logo for the Victor Talking Machine Company and (later) RCA Victor featured a white dog listening to a gramophone, based on an 1899 painting (His Master's Voice) by the English artist Francis Barraud (1856-1924).

Manuscript 6 has the title, "DOGGEREL <for Mme. Verdurin>. "Merrill may be comparing the Victor Dog's listening skills to Mme. Verdurin's in Marcel Proust's The Captive: "I looked at the Mistress, whose sullen immobility seemed to be protesting against the noddings—in time with the music—of the empty heads of the ladies of the Faubourg. She did not say: “You understand that I know something about this music, and more than a little! If I had to express all that I feel, you would never hear the end of it!” She did not say this. But her upright, motionless body, her expressionless eyes, her straying locks said it for her. They spoke also of her courage, said that the musicians might go on, need not spare her nerves, that she would not flinch at the andante, would not cry out at the allegro." (The Captive 2.3)

Dedication: Elizabeth Bishop, American poet (1911-1979) and Merrill's friend.

Bix: Leon Bismark "Bix" Biederbecke, American jazz musician (1903-1931).

Buxtehude: Dietrich Buxtehude, Danish-born German Baroque composer (1637-1707).

Boulez: Pierre Boulez, French composer and conductor (1925-2016).

earnestly to Bloch: Ernest Bloch, Swiss-born American composer (1880-1959).

builds a church: "And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it" (Matthew 16:18).

Acid rock: rock music associated with psychedelic experiences.

Leiermann: "Der Leiermann" ("The Organ-Grinder"), the final song in the Winterreise cycle of songs by Austrian composer Franz Schubert (1797-1828).

Ravel's "Les jets d'eau du palais de ceux qui s'aiment": "Jeux d'eaux" ("Water Games") by Maurice Ravel, French composer (1875-1937). The French, which appears to be my Merrill himself, translates as: "the fountains of the palace of those who l ove each other."

Schumann: Robert Schumann, German composer (1810-1856). Perhaps Merrill refers to the striking opening of the Piano Concerto, in A minor, Op. 54.

Bach's eternal boxwood mazes: German Baroque composer (1685-1750).

oboe pungent as a bitch in heat: Bach wrote: Concerto for Oboe d'amore in A Major, BWV 1055, Oboe Concerto in G Minor, BWV 1056, and Oboe Concerto in D Minor, BWV 1059. View these performances to decide just how pungent the oboes sound.

Wozzeck: 1925 opera by Austrian composer Alban Berg (1885-1935), which uses atonal techniques and Sprechgesang ("spoken singing") to tell of the story of Wozzeck's murder of his wife and his death by drowning. Metropolitan Opera Synopsis.

Blanche . . . King Lear: Shakespeare's King Lear "The little dogs and all, / Tray, Blanch, and Sweetheart, see, they bark at me" (3.6).

Jezebel: In 1 and 2 Kings, the pagan wife of Ahab, king of Israel; she was thrown from a window and her body was devoured by dogs (2 Kings 9:30-37).

His master's voice: Title of Francis Barraud's painting of Nipper, the Victor dog, which The Gramophone Company acquired in 1899 and then adopted as a trademark by the Victor Talking Machine Company.

Handel . . . Il Cane Minore: German composer Georg Friedrich Handel (1685-1759). "The Smaller Dog" is a fictional title.

No honey for the vanquished: Variation of "Vae victis" ("Woe to the vanquished") from the Roman historian Livy (64 or 59 BC – AD 17).

With thanks to Amada Watson and the editors of Merrill's Selected Poems for help with these notes.