“Nothing Is Really Hard but to Be Real—”

—Now let me tell you why I said that.

Try to put yourself into an experimental mood.

Stop right here and try to review everything

you felt about that line. Did you accept it

as wisdom? as perception? as a gem, maybe,

for your private anthology of Telling Truths?

My point is that the line is fraudulent.

A blurb. It is also relevant that I know

at least a dozen devoutly intellectual

journals that will gladly buy any fourteen

such lines plus a tinny rhyme scheme and

compound the felony by calling that a sonnet.

—Very well, then, I am a cynic. Though, for

the record, let me add that I am a cynic with

one wife, three children, and other invest-

ments. Whoever heard of a cynic carrying a

pack for the fun of it? It won’t really do

I’m something else.

Were I to dramatize myself,

I’d say I am a theologian who keeps meeting

the devil as a master of make-up, and that

among his favorite impersonations he appears,

often as not, as the avuncular old ham who winks,

tugs his ear, and utters such gnomic garbage

as: “Nothing is really hard but to be real.”

I guess what the devil gets out of this—if he is

the fool he seems to be—is the illusion of

imitating heaven. If, on the other hand, he is no

fool, then his deceptions are carefully practiced

and we are all damned. For all of us, unless

we are carefully warned, will accept such noises

as examples of the sound an actual mind makes.

Why arc we damned then?—I am glad you asked that.

It is, as we say to flatter oafs, a good question.

(Meaning, usually, the one we were fishing for. Good.)

In any case. I may now pretend to think out the answer

I have memorized:

We are damned for accepting as

the sound a man makes, the sound of something else,

thereby losing the truth of our own sound.

How do we

learn our own sound? (Another good question. Thank you.)

—by listening to what men there have been and are

—by reading more poets than jurists (without scorning

Law)—and by reading what we read not for its

oration, but for its resemblance to that sound in which

we best hear most of what a man is. Get that sound into

your heads and you will know what tones to exclude.

—if there is enough exclusion in you to keep the

pie plates out of the cymbals, the tin horns out of

the brass section, the baling wire out of the strings,

and thereby to let the notes roll full to the ear

that has listened enough to be a listener.

As for the devil—when he has finished every imp-

ersonation, the best he will have been able to accomplish

is only that sound which is exactly not the music.

Copyright Credit: John Ciardi, “ ‘Nothing Is Really Hard but to Be Real’ ” from Person to Person (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1964). Used with the permission of the Ciardi Family Publishing Trust.

Source: The Collected Poems of John Ciardi (1997)