'A Frangible and Transparent Failure'

The title poem in Anthony Hecht’s 1979 collection The Venetian Vespers is a dramatic monologue spoken by an aging American expatriate living in Venice. Across its roughly eight-hundred lines the speaker gives the impression of fleeing something left unstated – not a scandal or crime but his unsatisfactory self. In the sixth and final section he writes: “Ho fatto un fiasco, which is to say, / I’ve made a sort of bottle of my life, / A frangible and transparent failure.” The Italian can be translated: “I made a complete mess of it.” This indulgence in self-disgust continues: “My efforts at their best are negatives: A poor attempt not to hurt anyone, A goal which, in the very nature of things, Is ludicrous because impossible. Viscid, contaminate, dynastic wastes Flood through the dark canals, the underpasses, Ducts and arterial sluices of my body . . .” Here, Hecht makes an inspired transition: “. . . As through those gutters of which Swift once wrote: ‘Sweepings from Butcher Stalls,…