Wheel Talk

Frank Bidart’s sweeping poem “The Fourth Hour of the Night” occupies a full third of the May 2015 Poetry. This thirty-page account of the adventures of Genghis Khan—thirteenth-century leader of the Mongols—matches the size of Khan’s ambition (and his empire). Comparison and competition mark Khan’s life, and they characterize the poem from the very beginning.

When Temujin—Genghis Khan’s birth name—suffers a major tribulation as a child, it is “because the universe then allowed a creature / stronger, taller, more / ruthless than you // to fasten around your neck a thick wooden wheel.” Bidart measures Temujin not just against that creature but also against the wheel itself: “at nine your cunning was not equal / to iron-fastened / immense wood.” Only at ten, when he tries again to master the wheel, does he challenge the universe, and “outwit” it.

The poem goes on to describe endless contests between brothers, friends, tribes and nations. It was his father’s rival who placed the wheel around Temujin’s neck. And once Temujin breaks free of the wheel, he rams it down “on the idiot guard’s / skull,” asserting his own superior strength. No wonder he reenacts the violence he suffered: the wheel suggests cyclicality, repetition. Bidart describes the wheel as “impossible to throw off,” and those words prove prophetic: its principle of iteration comes to define Temujin’s life.

Because his father stole his mother just after she married someone from her own tribe, that same tribe steals his own wife, Borte, after Temujin’s marriage. Because the Tatárs killed his father, he eventually exterminates them. And the “iron logic” that dictates his activities recalls the iron in the wheel, whose circularity predicts that very recurrence.

Temujin’s early quarrel with a half-brother echoes with particular resonance:

One day, with a freshly sharpened juniper
arrow, he brought down a lark, and his

half-brother, Bekter, nearly his age,
reaching the bird first, refused to give it up.

Who deserves the bird: he who shoots it or he who gathers it first? Does that question have an answer? Temujin thinks so. He concludes that Bekter “at each moment relentlessly / disputed and clearly forever would / dispute everything Temujin possessed,” rehearsing his early tendency ad infinitum. And he promptly kills his rival with an arrow (which parallels the slaughter of the lark).

With a dear friend, Jamuqa, Temujin replays his relationship with Bekter. “They swore they were anda, / brothers,” Bidart writes; like Temujin and Bekter, they are nearly brothers, not quite. “They sharpened arrows—juniper, cypress.” These arrows not only evoke the half-brothers’ extra-deadly hunt; they foreshadow Temujin’s killing of Jamuqa, too: the crowning moment of their own rivalry.

Competition colors even the friends’ most intimate moments. “They lay all night under the same blanket,” Bidart writes, and yet

For either to have expressed desire, to have
reached, would have been to offer the object of desire

It could not be done.

Suddenly the “sharpening of arrows” during their brotherhood ceremony takes on new meaning. And that double-symbolism illuminates another theme: in the world of the poem, love and murder imply each other. Thus Temujin’s devotion to his father leads him to kill the Tátars, and the children whom Temujin orphans become his most loyal followers.

What sends this friendship shooting, swift as an arrow, from affection to bloodshed? Rivalry, of course. Temujin wins more followers than Jamuqa, and is eventually elected Khan, partly because he is a descendant of royalty whereas Jamuqa is “merely descended from a favorite concubine.” As in the squabble with the half-brother over the lark, we might doubt the terms of the competition. What’s the implication of basing such significant contests on questionable grounds? Even as rivalry proves key to advancing the narrative—it anchors several crucial moments—does it also come to seem inherently foolish?

Jamuqa eventually becomes Temujin’s enemy; captured, he says:

What you must do is kill me.

I will never accede to your power.

Alive, I will rally your enemies.

Dead, I will, in their eyes, just be one more fool.

Even in this comment—which might sound like a surrender—Jamuqa does not “accede” to Temujin’s power. He orders his own execution and defines the terms of both his life and death; somehow, he manages to beat Temujin even now. And once Temujin finally agrees, the body presents a haunting sight: “the head was severed”—yet another echo of the wheel that cursed Temujin’s neck so long ago.

For the wheel is, in various ways, “impossible to throw off.” Not only does it set the repetitive pattern of Temujin’s life; it also haunts his dreams:

Too often now he woke with his mouth
gasping above water, the great wooden

wheel around his neck now

buoy, now too
heavy to lift.

The wheel both threatens him and keeps him afloat. Perhaps it resembles human relationships—that other force that both sinks and saves us.