Canal Bank Walk
Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal
Pouring redemption for me, that I do
The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal,
Grow with nature again as before I grew.
The bright stick trapped, the breeze adding a third
Party to the couple kissing on an old seat,
And a bird gathering materials for the nest for the Word
Eloquently new and abandoned to its delirious beat.
O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web
Of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech,
Feed the gaping need of my senses, give me ad lib
To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech
For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven
From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.
Patrick Kavanagh 1960
Today is my sister's birthday, and I could wish her nothing more than the passion found in this poem. It is a love sonnet, in its way. Not directed at any single person, it rushes headlong into the world of the senses and experience. There are Romantic overtones here - a man walking alone, commenting on his surroundings, wishing to imbibe nature, to live on the edges of his nerves. Kavanagh updates the traditional lyric format, though, in giving the poem a pulse, at once musical and corporal.
** I will finish this poem up within the next several days - Happy Birthday Emmy, and Happy Valentines Day to the rest! **
Sunday, February 12, 2006
Monday, February 06, 2006
Poem of the Week 2/6/2006: Want Bone
Want Bone
The tongue of the waves tolled in the earth's bell.
Blue rippled and soaked in the fire of blue.
The dried mouthbones of a shark in the hot swale
Gaped on nothing but sand on either side.
The bone tasted of nothing and smelled of nothing,
A scalded toothless harp, uncrushed, unstrung.
The joined arcs made the shape of birth and craving
And the welded-open shape kept mouthing O.
Ossified cords held the corners together
In groined spirals pleated like a summer dress.
But where was the limber grin, the gash of pleasure?
Infinitesimal mouths bore it away,
The beach scrubbed and etched and pickled it clean.
But O I love you it sings, my little my country
My food my parent my child I want you my own
my flower my fin my life my lightness my O.
Robert Pinsky 1990
"Want Bone" is aptly titled. From sexual desire to paucity to simple, innocent longing, Pinsky's poem explores different states of wanting, though it emphasizes erotic desire. Underlying the erotic images and sharply tailored details is that want implies some mode of absence. The imagery, diction, and cadence explore the ache of wantingness.
The first stanza establishes the poem's eroticism, theme (wanting), and central image. It opens with the "tongue of the waves [tolling] in the earth's bell," which is blatantly sexual. The bell is not just a suggestive shape, however; its tolling conveys emptiness, hollowness - that space of absence inherent in desire. The next line, "blue rippled and soaked in the fire of blue," presents the kind of simple, energetic, dense imagery appearing throughout the poem. Repeating "blue" simplifies the visual field, readying us for the poem's central image, the shark's jaw.
The jaw, named "the want bone," actualizes wantingness. The bone is described by a series of "nothings," both connecting the jaw to longing and linking desire and absence. The jaw "gaped on nothing but sand," "tasted of nothing and smelled of nothing," and is "uncrushed, unstrung." In defining the jaw by what it lacks, Pinsky reiterates the connection between the jaw, desire, and absence.
He springloads the tension in the poem with his acute attention to detail; there are very few filler words like "and" or "the." Each line is packed to the brim, but, paradoxically, packed with nothingness. This tension, too, heightens the vibrancy in the lines. The phrase "scalded toothless harp" is at once jarring and brilliant; it juxtaposes the searing (scalded) with the impotent (toothless) with the musical (harp). This jangling set of images sends a shock of energy through the poem, heightening the desire. Pinsky emphasizes the erotic nature of this desire in describing the jawbone as "the shape of birth and craving" that is forever "mouthing O."
The following stanza reworks the same devices; Pinsky focuses the beam of energy with his marvelous consonants and twists that force with sexual imagery. Notice the strength of the phrase "groined spirals." Tack on "pleated like a summer dress" for a little erotic content and juxtaposition and you have a line absolutely packed with desirous energy. Pinsky redirects our attention to the absent inherent in wanting by asking "where was the limber grin, the gash of pleasure?" He openly wonders where the shark has gone, perhaps gesturing at our own lost gashes of pleasure. Is this a little trip into nostalgia? It certainly borders on yearning, that heart-lead lean to the past.
The next lines, "infinitesimal mouths bore it away, / The beach scrubbed and etched and pickled it clean" demonstrates self-similarity across scale. Just as Pinsky has pared away any extraneous imagery, so the billions of bacteria nibbled away at the shark. Then, too, the action and rhythm in the verb choices "scrubbed and etched and pickled" encourage the energy of desire, its strong focus. Perhaps the poem's energy reflects the strength of sexual desire or simply wanting. Perhaps, the poem suggests, wanting is absence strung with energy.
In the final three lines, the verb tense suddenly switches to present, indicating that this desire is ongoing. I find this list fascinating - it departs the terse, sexualized images of previous stanzas, approaching a wider set of desires. Each "my" phrase implies something different, though I will let you find those for yourself. Broadly, they touch on innocence and comfort, protection, ownership, joy, and, finally sexuality. The case could be made that the poem leaves the realm of erotic desire here, but I would argue that these elements are incased within erotic desire. That is, any sexual feelings will immediately or eventually include some mode of innocence and affection.
I had a very hard time writing about this poem, partially because it was difficult to make myself focus and write for a couple of hours, and partly because the poem is so rich. I struggled with the alternate (and equally valid) thesis arguing that the poem, while acknowledging erotic desire, was more diverse in scope, addressing the energy inherent in wanting, the absence of wanting, and different modes of wanting. However, these all fit within the sexual desire thesis I chose. I thought that I would make you aware of the other argument, though, so that you can see how beautiful this poem is. I think there is a lot of beauty in brilliant craft and complexity. So who knows. This PotW is descending into my little ramble, so this is when I bid you all a good night and start working on tomorrow's poem!
The tongue of the waves tolled in the earth's bell.
Blue rippled and soaked in the fire of blue.
The dried mouthbones of a shark in the hot swale
Gaped on nothing but sand on either side.
The bone tasted of nothing and smelled of nothing,
A scalded toothless harp, uncrushed, unstrung.
The joined arcs made the shape of birth and craving
And the welded-open shape kept mouthing O.
Ossified cords held the corners together
In groined spirals pleated like a summer dress.
But where was the limber grin, the gash of pleasure?
Infinitesimal mouths bore it away,
The beach scrubbed and etched and pickled it clean.
But O I love you it sings, my little my country
My food my parent my child I want you my own
my flower my fin my life my lightness my O.
Robert Pinsky 1990
"Want Bone" is aptly titled. From sexual desire to paucity to simple, innocent longing, Pinsky's poem explores different states of wanting, though it emphasizes erotic desire. Underlying the erotic images and sharply tailored details is that want implies some mode of absence. The imagery, diction, and cadence explore the ache of wantingness.
The first stanza establishes the poem's eroticism, theme (wanting), and central image. It opens with the "tongue of the waves [tolling] in the earth's bell," which is blatantly sexual. The bell is not just a suggestive shape, however; its tolling conveys emptiness, hollowness - that space of absence inherent in desire. The next line, "blue rippled and soaked in the fire of blue," presents the kind of simple, energetic, dense imagery appearing throughout the poem. Repeating "blue" simplifies the visual field, readying us for the poem's central image, the shark's jaw.
The jaw, named "the want bone," actualizes wantingness. The bone is described by a series of "nothings," both connecting the jaw to longing and linking desire and absence. The jaw "gaped on nothing but sand," "tasted of nothing and smelled of nothing," and is "uncrushed, unstrung." In defining the jaw by what it lacks, Pinsky reiterates the connection between the jaw, desire, and absence.
He springloads the tension in the poem with his acute attention to detail; there are very few filler words like "and" or "the." Each line is packed to the brim, but, paradoxically, packed with nothingness. This tension, too, heightens the vibrancy in the lines. The phrase "scalded toothless harp" is at once jarring and brilliant; it juxtaposes the searing (scalded) with the impotent (toothless) with the musical (harp). This jangling set of images sends a shock of energy through the poem, heightening the desire. Pinsky emphasizes the erotic nature of this desire in describing the jawbone as "the shape of birth and craving" that is forever "mouthing O."
The following stanza reworks the same devices; Pinsky focuses the beam of energy with his marvelous consonants and twists that force with sexual imagery. Notice the strength of the phrase "groined spirals." Tack on "pleated like a summer dress" for a little erotic content and juxtaposition and you have a line absolutely packed with desirous energy. Pinsky redirects our attention to the absent inherent in wanting by asking "where was the limber grin, the gash of pleasure?" He openly wonders where the shark has gone, perhaps gesturing at our own lost gashes of pleasure. Is this a little trip into nostalgia? It certainly borders on yearning, that heart-lead lean to the past.
The next lines, "infinitesimal mouths bore it away, / The beach scrubbed and etched and pickled it clean" demonstrates self-similarity across scale. Just as Pinsky has pared away any extraneous imagery, so the billions of bacteria nibbled away at the shark. Then, too, the action and rhythm in the verb choices "scrubbed and etched and pickled" encourage the energy of desire, its strong focus. Perhaps the poem's energy reflects the strength of sexual desire or simply wanting. Perhaps, the poem suggests, wanting is absence strung with energy.
In the final three lines, the verb tense suddenly switches to present, indicating that this desire is ongoing. I find this list fascinating - it departs the terse, sexualized images of previous stanzas, approaching a wider set of desires. Each "my" phrase implies something different, though I will let you find those for yourself. Broadly, they touch on innocence and comfort, protection, ownership, joy, and, finally sexuality. The case could be made that the poem leaves the realm of erotic desire here, but I would argue that these elements are incased within erotic desire. That is, any sexual feelings will immediately or eventually include some mode of innocence and affection.
I had a very hard time writing about this poem, partially because it was difficult to make myself focus and write for a couple of hours, and partly because the poem is so rich. I struggled with the alternate (and equally valid) thesis arguing that the poem, while acknowledging erotic desire, was more diverse in scope, addressing the energy inherent in wanting, the absence of wanting, and different modes of wanting. However, these all fit within the sexual desire thesis I chose. I thought that I would make you aware of the other argument, though, so that you can see how beautiful this poem is. I think there is a lot of beauty in brilliant craft and complexity. So who knows. This PotW is descending into my little ramble, so this is when I bid you all a good night and start working on tomorrow's poem!
Monday, January 30, 2006
Poem of the Week 1/27/2006: First Song
First Song
Then it was dark in Illinois, the small boy,
After an afternoon of carting dung
Hung on the rail fence, a sapped thing
Weary to crying. Dark was growing tall
And he began to hear the pond frogs all
Calling on his ear with what seemed their joy.
Soon their sound was pleasant for a boy
Listening in the smoky dusk and the nightfall
Of Illinois, and from the fields two small
Boys came bearing cornstalk violins
And they rubbed the cornstalk bows with resins
And the three sat there scraping of their joy.
It was now fine music the frogs and the boys
Did in the towering Illinois twilight make
And into dark in spite of a shoulder's ache
A boy's hunched body loved out of a stalk
The first song of his happiness, and the song woke
His heart to the darkness and into the sadness of joy.
Galway Kinnell 1960
Oh poetry about love. This poem melds form and content; I hope to show you here how the form twists in on itself, cradling and loving its song. That its title is "First Song" is not surprising, given the music Kinnell achieves through unity of form. His images sing with the rhyme, which reinforces the repetition which emphasizes the content. The harmony of form and content make this poem beautiful.
You ask, can she argue that the poem is or is not beautiful? In some ways, yes. In my aesthetics class right now (I have a feeling that several future PotWs will contain that phrase), we are read an essay by Clive Bell. Therein, he argues that all true art will have "significant form," which is basically a self-consciousness of structure. Now I disagree with Bell on his argument and several of his other claims, but I agree that, fundamentally, art is concerned with form. And if I can explain why I see the form as beautiful, then perhaps you might agree. My discussion might add to your view of the poem. Or you might think that the form is beautiful in other ways, or perhaps not beautiful at all, and that is one reason why we talk about poetry and art. We are discussing why we think something is beautiful (unified, graceful, coherent).
Every word is a workhorse in "First Song," accomplishing multiple tasks. In the first stanza, the oft-used internal rhyme like "Illinois" and "boy," "dung" and "hung," "thing" and "crying," establishes unity from line to line and casts a childlike feel onto the poem. The unity presages the connectedness the boy eventually experiences, and the innocence underlines the final message of pure joy. Then, too, this is the most compressed internal rhyme in the poem, perhaps reflecting the boy's extreme tiredness. The diction in the first stanza articulates this empathy as well. The phrase "a sapped thing" tenderly regards the exhausted boy like a wilted flower. We imagine that all he can do is sit and listen.
"Weary to crying," his intellect retreats, allowing his elemental parts to tune in. The pond frogs "call on his ear" as if coming to court him out of his misery. The concert turns into a dance when two boys come out of the cornfield bearing "cornstalk violins / And they rubbed the cornstalk bows with resins / And the three sat there scraping of their joy." The sweetness and whimsy of it come through in diction like "rubbed" and "scraped" and images like "cornstalk violins." I love that cornstalks can't actually produce a melody in the conventional sense; they rustle. That's all. But, the narrator notes, it was "fine music."
Then it was dark in Illinois, the small boy,
After an afternoon of carting dung
Hung on the rail fence, a sapped thing
Weary to crying. Dark was growing tall
And he began to hear the pond frogs all
Calling on his ear with what seemed their joy.
Soon their sound was pleasant for a boy
Listening in the smoky dusk and the nightfall
Of Illinois, and from the fields two small
Boys came bearing cornstalk violins
And they rubbed the cornstalk bows with resins
And the three sat there scraping of their joy.
It was now fine music the frogs and the boys
Did in the towering Illinois twilight make
And into dark in spite of a shoulder's ache
A boy's hunched body loved out of a stalk
The first song of his happiness, and the song woke
His heart to the darkness and into the sadness of joy.
Galway Kinnell 1960
Oh poetry about love. This poem melds form and content; I hope to show you here how the form twists in on itself, cradling and loving its song. That its title is "First Song" is not surprising, given the music Kinnell achieves through unity of form. His images sing with the rhyme, which reinforces the repetition which emphasizes the content. The harmony of form and content make this poem beautiful.
You ask, can she argue that the poem is or is not beautiful? In some ways, yes. In my aesthetics class right now (I have a feeling that several future PotWs will contain that phrase), we are read an essay by Clive Bell. Therein, he argues that all true art will have "significant form," which is basically a self-consciousness of structure. Now I disagree with Bell on his argument and several of his other claims, but I agree that, fundamentally, art is concerned with form. And if I can explain why I see the form as beautiful, then perhaps you might agree. My discussion might add to your view of the poem. Or you might think that the form is beautiful in other ways, or perhaps not beautiful at all, and that is one reason why we talk about poetry and art. We are discussing why we think something is beautiful (unified, graceful, coherent).
Every word is a workhorse in "First Song," accomplishing multiple tasks. In the first stanza, the oft-used internal rhyme like "Illinois" and "boy," "dung" and "hung," "thing" and "crying," establishes unity from line to line and casts a childlike feel onto the poem. The unity presages the connectedness the boy eventually experiences, and the innocence underlines the final message of pure joy. Then, too, this is the most compressed internal rhyme in the poem, perhaps reflecting the boy's extreme tiredness. The diction in the first stanza articulates this empathy as well. The phrase "a sapped thing" tenderly regards the exhausted boy like a wilted flower. We imagine that all he can do is sit and listen.
"Weary to crying," his intellect retreats, allowing his elemental parts to tune in. The pond frogs "call on his ear" as if coming to court him out of his misery. The concert turns into a dance when two boys come out of the cornfield bearing "cornstalk violins / And they rubbed the cornstalk bows with resins / And the three sat there scraping of their joy." The sweetness and whimsy of it come through in diction like "rubbed" and "scraped" and images like "cornstalk violins." I love that cornstalks can't actually produce a melody in the conventional sense; they rustle. That's all. But, the narrator notes, it was "fine music."
Monday, January 23, 2006
Poem of the Week 1/23/2006: An Ode to Asymmetry
An Ode to Asymmetry
What you unearth is an unearthly thing:
what clings to it is neither root nor soil
nor any *thing*, but evanescent, scentless
thought, a hovercraft that crosses on twin foils,
back and forth the agitated waters of the mind,
and never lands. And what it crosses, it negates;
it crosses out.
Like the antimatter
of the universe, with all of matter's properties
reversed: when it meets a particle of
matter, the pair annihilate each other--
in their place: pure energy, radiant light,
as if destruction were divine. Not so!
For symmetry is broken from the start,
from which all things descend, and here we are.
When the universe began--Creation
as Big Bang--for reason science can
not explain, the balance tipped toward
matter: more was made of matter
than of its absent antimatter twin.
Perfect symmetry would have equaled
pure annihilation, that nothingness
of which both Indian saint
and French logician
dream, exquisite binary machine--
Being and Nothingness: ka-boom.
And knowing that, the thought, unearthly,
which these lines at first unearthed, dissolves,
a cloud that had obscured the sun:
the ocean waves continue as before, embrace
with foam the swimmer on her board
(each bubble a lens to catch the light),
the mountain rises from the ocean's floor,
and out in space, the galaxies spin on,
the stars wink back at everything:
root, plant, orangutan,
blue planet, rutabaga, kitchen sink.
Eleanor Wilner 2005
Sometimes I want to stop everyone I see and tell them that yes: poetry exists, and I love it, and then I love them. Is that strange? Perhaps. In any case, I think that it is one of the byproducts of reacting to something aesthetically. The reason I took so long to write this Poem of the Week is that I love it so much. I can't write about many of my favorite poems. I almost don't want to - I make notes in my book, but I don't want to come at the poem with ropes and a thesis. Sometimes I just want to surrender to it.
This is something we talked about in my aesthetics class - great works can move us to silence. And yet we chatter endlessly about what James Joyce meant if the period in the third episode was just a typo and what could this mean etc. Some might say that the entire field of literary criticism is an attempt to intellectualize what we ought to just be loving. There are certainly professors, students, and critics who fall away from their love for literature, but I think that most of us are just desperately trying to understand what we love so much. I know that that's what this blog is for me - an endless attempt to express my love for poetry. I hope that you can all see that. I try to hold on to it as much as possible. If I go into literary criticism, I want to attempt to always infuse my work with love. I don't know if that's forever possible, but it is certainly possible to try.
This is a poem that traverses the universe and the properties of matter to end with extraordinary love. Asymmetry glimmers out at every level, and we appreciate it. There is a Romantic twist in the title; "An Ode to Asymmetry" perhaps references Keats' famous "Ode on a Grecian Urn" or "Ode to a Nightingale." It's thus probably about beauty or truth. Or love! I think, in the end, it's a poem about love, beauty, and appreciating what is around us.
The structure is circular; it begins with a thought and flies to the edges of the universe before returning to that thought. In the first stanza, the dominant metaphor is that of the human mind as the earth. You dig up this thought as if from the mind's soil and it hovers over the brain's "agitated waters." This thought is never named. Much of the poem attempts to describe this thought, and, by the end, we get the idea that it is something disturbing and destructive. Perhaps even symmetrical.
We know this thought is "like the antimatter / of the universe, with all of matter's properties / reversed." It destroys what it touches, albeit in a flash of "pure energy, radiant light." The next line, "as if destruction were divine," does not mean "as if destruction were holy:" rather, "as if destruction were the way of things." Luckily, the universe does not have matter and antimatter in proportion. It is unbalanced, and from that inequality we descend. This idea is familiar - humans descend from a break in creation, from imperfection, from some original sin. Perhaps this poem is another theory of the fall of matter.
It is positive, though. Luckily in the creation of the universe, "the balance tipped toward / matter." The poem suggests that it perhaps favored asymmetry because "perfect symmetry would have equaled / pure annihilation." I am not sure who the Indian saint is (any ideas, anyone?), but the French Logician is probably Jacques Derrida. He started Deconstructionism, a movement arguing against meaning. Essentially, he writes that language is an inconstant structure, and that we can never really "know" any word's definition. There is an infinite looping of definitions - each word is defined by more words, so each definition cancels out the word. Meaning doesn't exist. I could be wrong about the reference - any feedback is welcome! The phrase "exquisite binary machine" takes a little dig at technology's binary system because it's connected to symmetry, perhaps pushing against our society's idealization of machines.
The last stanza is a love stanza. The disturbing thought dissolves, and the mind's earth recedes to the real one. This earth embraces its swimmers, the mountains and the ocean move in harmony, and the very galaxies wink at the odd, lovable elements of this world. It reminded me of the title of one of Richard Wilbur's poems, "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World." Perhaps asymmetry does as well.
What you unearth is an unearthly thing:
what clings to it is neither root nor soil
nor any *thing*, but evanescent, scentless
thought, a hovercraft that crosses on twin foils,
back and forth the agitated waters of the mind,
and never lands. And what it crosses, it negates;
it crosses out.
Like the antimatter
of the universe, with all of matter's properties
reversed: when it meets a particle of
matter, the pair annihilate each other--
in their place: pure energy, radiant light,
as if destruction were divine. Not so!
For symmetry is broken from the start,
from which all things descend, and here we are.
When the universe began--Creation
as Big Bang--for reason science can
not explain, the balance tipped toward
matter: more was made of matter
than of its absent antimatter twin.
Perfect symmetry would have equaled
pure annihilation, that nothingness
of which both Indian saint
and French logician
dream, exquisite binary machine--
Being and Nothingness: ka-boom.
And knowing that, the thought, unearthly,
which these lines at first unearthed, dissolves,
a cloud that had obscured the sun:
the ocean waves continue as before, embrace
with foam the swimmer on her board
(each bubble a lens to catch the light),
the mountain rises from the ocean's floor,
and out in space, the galaxies spin on,
the stars wink back at everything:
root, plant, orangutan,
blue planet, rutabaga, kitchen sink.
Eleanor Wilner 2005
Sometimes I want to stop everyone I see and tell them that yes: poetry exists, and I love it, and then I love them. Is that strange? Perhaps. In any case, I think that it is one of the byproducts of reacting to something aesthetically. The reason I took so long to write this Poem of the Week is that I love it so much. I can't write about many of my favorite poems. I almost don't want to - I make notes in my book, but I don't want to come at the poem with ropes and a thesis. Sometimes I just want to surrender to it.
This is something we talked about in my aesthetics class - great works can move us to silence. And yet we chatter endlessly about what James Joyce meant if the period in the third episode was just a typo and what could this mean etc. Some might say that the entire field of literary criticism is an attempt to intellectualize what we ought to just be loving. There are certainly professors, students, and critics who fall away from their love for literature, but I think that most of us are just desperately trying to understand what we love so much. I know that that's what this blog is for me - an endless attempt to express my love for poetry. I hope that you can all see that. I try to hold on to it as much as possible. If I go into literary criticism, I want to attempt to always infuse my work with love. I don't know if that's forever possible, but it is certainly possible to try.
This is a poem that traverses the universe and the properties of matter to end with extraordinary love. Asymmetry glimmers out at every level, and we appreciate it. There is a Romantic twist in the title; "An Ode to Asymmetry" perhaps references Keats' famous "Ode on a Grecian Urn" or "Ode to a Nightingale." It's thus probably about beauty or truth. Or love! I think, in the end, it's a poem about love, beauty, and appreciating what is around us.
The structure is circular; it begins with a thought and flies to the edges of the universe before returning to that thought. In the first stanza, the dominant metaphor is that of the human mind as the earth. You dig up this thought as if from the mind's soil and it hovers over the brain's "agitated waters." This thought is never named. Much of the poem attempts to describe this thought, and, by the end, we get the idea that it is something disturbing and destructive. Perhaps even symmetrical.
We know this thought is "like the antimatter / of the universe, with all of matter's properties / reversed." It destroys what it touches, albeit in a flash of "pure energy, radiant light." The next line, "as if destruction were divine," does not mean "as if destruction were holy:" rather, "as if destruction were the way of things." Luckily, the universe does not have matter and antimatter in proportion. It is unbalanced, and from that inequality we descend. This idea is familiar - humans descend from a break in creation, from imperfection, from some original sin. Perhaps this poem is another theory of the fall of matter.
It is positive, though. Luckily in the creation of the universe, "the balance tipped toward / matter." The poem suggests that it perhaps favored asymmetry because "perfect symmetry would have equaled / pure annihilation." I am not sure who the Indian saint is (any ideas, anyone?), but the French Logician is probably Jacques Derrida. He started Deconstructionism, a movement arguing against meaning. Essentially, he writes that language is an inconstant structure, and that we can never really "know" any word's definition. There is an infinite looping of definitions - each word is defined by more words, so each definition cancels out the word. Meaning doesn't exist. I could be wrong about the reference - any feedback is welcome! The phrase "exquisite binary machine" takes a little dig at technology's binary system because it's connected to symmetry, perhaps pushing against our society's idealization of machines.
The last stanza is a love stanza. The disturbing thought dissolves, and the mind's earth recedes to the real one. This earth embraces its swimmers, the mountains and the ocean move in harmony, and the very galaxies wink at the odd, lovable elements of this world. It reminded me of the title of one of Richard Wilbur's poems, "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World." Perhaps asymmetry does as well.
Monday, January 16, 2006
Poem of the Week 1/16/2006: Little Red-Cap
Little Red-Cap
At childhood’s end, the houses petered out
into playing fields, the factory, allotments
kept, like mistresses, by kneeling married men,
the silent railway line, the hermit’s caravan,
till you came at last to the edge of the woods.
It was there that I first clapped eyes on the wolf.
He stood in a clearing, reading his verse out loud
in his wolfy drawl, a paperback in his hairy paw,
red wine staining his bearded jaw. What big ears
he had! What big eyes he had! What teeth!
In the interval, I made quite sure he spotted me,
sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, and bought me a drink,
my first. You might ask why. Here’s why. Poetry.
The wolf, I knew, would lead me deep into the woods,
away from home, to a dark tangled thorny place
lit by the eyes of owls. I crawled in his wake,
my stockings ripped to shreds, scraps of red from my blazer
snagged on twig and branch, murder clues. I lost both shoes
but got there, wolf’s lair, better beware. Lesson one that night,
breath of the wolf in my ear, was the love poem.
I clung till dawn to his thrashing fur, for
what little girl doesn’t dearly love a wolf?1
Then I slid from between his heavy matted paws
and went in search of a living bird – white dove –
which flew, straight, from my hands to his hope mouth.
One bite, dead. How nice, breakfast in bed, he said,
licking his chops. As soon as he slept, I crept to the back
of the lair, where a whole wall was crimson, gold, aglow with books.
Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head,
warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood.
But then I was young – and it took ten years
in the woods to tell that a mushroom
stoppers the mouth of a buried corpse, that birds
are the uttered thought of trees, that a greying wolf
howls the same old song at the moon, year in, year out,
season after season, same rhyme, same reason. I took an axe
to a willow to see how it wept. I took an axe to a salmon
to see how it leapt. I took an axe to the wolf
as he slept, one chop, scrotum to throat, and saw
the glistening, virgin white of my grandmother’s bones.
I filled his old belly with stones. I stitched him up.
Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone.
Carol Ann Duffy 1999
1see Sylvia Plath, “Daddy,” line 48, “Every woman adores a fascist”
I guess that I had never really thought about the archetypal significance of fairy tales, though I now can’t think why not. Often, the simplest stories hold some of the greatest truths, and the ones that stay on the cultural radar like Little Red-Cap (the original British title for Little Red Riding Hood) do so because they continue to hold relevance. This incarnation points out that Little Red-Cap is a story of childhood’s end, the transition from innocence to experience. Duffy’s poem is a riff on a theme appearing in texts from the Bible to the Little Prince, and a particularly firey one at that.
Rather than ruminating about the now-grown-up girl or nostalgically sighing about lost childhood, “Little Red-Cap” throws us full-force into the heady whirlwind of adolescence. Finding love, sex, passion, independence, darkness, and poetry is so consuming that it replaces the traps of nostalgia. This poem hands us a girl ready to throw her child-self into the fire of experience and march into the woods alone.
Indeed, the poem begins “At childhood’s end,” almost the name of a physical place. Here, the landscape itself points towards a more aware, dangerous, sexual world. “The houses [peter] out / into playing fields,” perhaps symbolizing the gradual diminishment of childhood securities, and garden plots, gesturing at sexuality, are “kept, like mistresses, by kneeling married men.” As Little Red-Cap walks to the edges of this land, her surroundings stretch vast and bade, the only inhabitants a forsaken rail line and a hermit. Childhood seems empty, at its end.
Enter the wolf. She claps eyes on him, and her world shifts. The word “clap” recalls a thunder-clap, foreshadowing the coming tempest. He is alluring, rugged, adult, and exotic. His language is different, his paws are rough, and his chin bears a forbidden sign of adulthood: wine. In every way, we can imagine, he is different from the soft, safe world of childhood. Unfamiliar and magnetic. She registers his eyes, teeth, and ears again, but, rather than frightening, they are seductive. His eyes can watch her, his ears can hear her, and his teeth, well, we’ll leave that to the imagination.
Thus, rather than being tricked by the wolf, per the original tale, Little Red-Cap seeks him out, choosing to grow up. This is a ritual most girls (and I imagine many guys) will recognize: parading oneself, making oneself noticed, inhabiting that exhilarating vision of the self as attractive, “sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif.” And so he buys her a drink, her first.
She then feels the need to justify herself, saying, “You might ask why. Here’s why. Poetry.” This line is tremendously important. Rhetorically, it rehearses a compressed internal rhyme. These patches of simple rhyme appearing throughout the poem perhaps reveal Little Red-Cap’s final vestiges of childhood rearing their head and maintain the consciousness that this was (at one time) a children’s tale. Then, too, it is crucial that poetry is the reason she chooses experience. Not the wolf, but an idea, a thought-structure, a compressed arrangement of words. Thus, we may meditate on what this reveals about experience. Perhaps she, like me (and perhaps you), finds poetry to be the passion of her life. I think that the answer is not so literal, though. Poetry's richness and challenge and mystery were perhaps alluring, or its individuality, or its energy. Perhaps becoming an adult is poetic, beautiful.
That she acknowledges the reason for becoming an adult shows that she accepts it is *her* choice. This choice is not lightly made, either. The next several lines demonstrate her acceptance of the darkness in the change, the difficulty changing.
After all, Little Red-Cap is a tale for children, so folding an allegory for growing-up into a traditional kid’s structure is somewhat genius.
At childhood’s end, the houses petered out
into playing fields, the factory, allotments
kept, like mistresses, by kneeling married men,
the silent railway line, the hermit’s caravan,
till you came at last to the edge of the woods.
It was there that I first clapped eyes on the wolf.
He stood in a clearing, reading his verse out loud
in his wolfy drawl, a paperback in his hairy paw,
red wine staining his bearded jaw. What big ears
he had! What big eyes he had! What teeth!
In the interval, I made quite sure he spotted me,
sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, and bought me a drink,
my first. You might ask why. Here’s why. Poetry.
The wolf, I knew, would lead me deep into the woods,
away from home, to a dark tangled thorny place
lit by the eyes of owls. I crawled in his wake,
my stockings ripped to shreds, scraps of red from my blazer
snagged on twig and branch, murder clues. I lost both shoes
but got there, wolf’s lair, better beware. Lesson one that night,
breath of the wolf in my ear, was the love poem.
I clung till dawn to his thrashing fur, for
what little girl doesn’t dearly love a wolf?1
Then I slid from between his heavy matted paws
and went in search of a living bird – white dove –
which flew, straight, from my hands to his hope mouth.
One bite, dead. How nice, breakfast in bed, he said,
licking his chops. As soon as he slept, I crept to the back
of the lair, where a whole wall was crimson, gold, aglow with books.
Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head,
warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood.
But then I was young – and it took ten years
in the woods to tell that a mushroom
stoppers the mouth of a buried corpse, that birds
are the uttered thought of trees, that a greying wolf
howls the same old song at the moon, year in, year out,
season after season, same rhyme, same reason. I took an axe
to a willow to see how it wept. I took an axe to a salmon
to see how it leapt. I took an axe to the wolf
as he slept, one chop, scrotum to throat, and saw
the glistening, virgin white of my grandmother’s bones.
I filled his old belly with stones. I stitched him up.
Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone.
Carol Ann Duffy 1999
1see Sylvia Plath, “Daddy,” line 48, “Every woman adores a fascist”
I guess that I had never really thought about the archetypal significance of fairy tales, though I now can’t think why not. Often, the simplest stories hold some of the greatest truths, and the ones that stay on the cultural radar like Little Red-Cap (the original British title for Little Red Riding Hood) do so because they continue to hold relevance. This incarnation points out that Little Red-Cap is a story of childhood’s end, the transition from innocence to experience. Duffy’s poem is a riff on a theme appearing in texts from the Bible to the Little Prince, and a particularly firey one at that.
Rather than ruminating about the now-grown-up girl or nostalgically sighing about lost childhood, “Little Red-Cap” throws us full-force into the heady whirlwind of adolescence. Finding love, sex, passion, independence, darkness, and poetry is so consuming that it replaces the traps of nostalgia. This poem hands us a girl ready to throw her child-self into the fire of experience and march into the woods alone.
Indeed, the poem begins “At childhood’s end,” almost the name of a physical place. Here, the landscape itself points towards a more aware, dangerous, sexual world. “The houses [peter] out / into playing fields,” perhaps symbolizing the gradual diminishment of childhood securities, and garden plots, gesturing at sexuality, are “kept, like mistresses, by kneeling married men.” As Little Red-Cap walks to the edges of this land, her surroundings stretch vast and bade, the only inhabitants a forsaken rail line and a hermit. Childhood seems empty, at its end.
Enter the wolf. She claps eyes on him, and her world shifts. The word “clap” recalls a thunder-clap, foreshadowing the coming tempest. He is alluring, rugged, adult, and exotic. His language is different, his paws are rough, and his chin bears a forbidden sign of adulthood: wine. In every way, we can imagine, he is different from the soft, safe world of childhood. Unfamiliar and magnetic. She registers his eyes, teeth, and ears again, but, rather than frightening, they are seductive. His eyes can watch her, his ears can hear her, and his teeth, well, we’ll leave that to the imagination.
Thus, rather than being tricked by the wolf, per the original tale, Little Red-Cap seeks him out, choosing to grow up. This is a ritual most girls (and I imagine many guys) will recognize: parading oneself, making oneself noticed, inhabiting that exhilarating vision of the self as attractive, “sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif.” And so he buys her a drink, her first.
She then feels the need to justify herself, saying, “You might ask why. Here’s why. Poetry.” This line is tremendously important. Rhetorically, it rehearses a compressed internal rhyme. These patches of simple rhyme appearing throughout the poem perhaps reveal Little Red-Cap’s final vestiges of childhood rearing their head and maintain the consciousness that this was (at one time) a children’s tale. Then, too, it is crucial that poetry is the reason she chooses experience. Not the wolf, but an idea, a thought-structure, a compressed arrangement of words. Thus, we may meditate on what this reveals about experience. Perhaps she, like me (and perhaps you), finds poetry to be the passion of her life. I think that the answer is not so literal, though. Poetry's richness and challenge and mystery were perhaps alluring, or its individuality, or its energy. Perhaps becoming an adult is poetic, beautiful.
That she acknowledges the reason for becoming an adult shows that she accepts it is *her* choice. This choice is not lightly made, either. The next several lines demonstrate her acceptance of the darkness in the change, the difficulty changing.
After all, Little Red-Cap is a tale for children, so folding an allegory for growing-up into a traditional kid’s structure is somewhat genius.
Monday, January 09, 2006
Poem of the Week 1/9/2006: Elegy for Jane
Elegy for Jane
My Student, Thrown by a Horse
I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,
A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing;
And the mold sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.
Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw;
Stirring the clearest water.
My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiny shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.
If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.
Theodore Roethke 1953
An elegy, as I am sure most of you know, is a poem written in memory of one who has died. I choose this particular elegy for its energy, precise images, and delicate tenderness. "Elegy for Jane" gracefully captures the real girl Jane; in 22 compact lines, we almost see this flesh-and-blood girl and the love she brought forth. In animating Jane, the poem allows us to recognize Jane's beloved characteristics in those around us. She is, like all of us, and individual with universal traits.
Roethke reminisces about her (yes I am muddling speaker/author) personally, leaving the universal recognition up to the natural images and the readers. The first line, "I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;" demonstrates a very personal and even intimate view of this girl. He regards the nape of her neck, connoting vulnerability, and talks of her curls as soft, delicate tendrils. The connection with plants here rehearses the consistent twining of man and nature. In the next line, Jane smiles like a pickerel, a fish with a wide, oblong grin. The assonance in "quick look" heightens the energy in the poem, which again appears consistently throughout the poem. This energy reflects Jane's energy, and makes the thought of her loss even sadder. As if a light has winked out in the sky.
The next several lines, "how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her, / And she balanced in the delight of her thought, / A wren, happy, tail into the wind, / Her song trembling the twigs and small branches" again display natural imagery and energy. Because it shifts almost fully into a natural metaphor, the poem's universality comes through especially clearly. Perhaps I should pause and explain why natural imagery is universalizing. Excepting a few cases, a wild animal is not named. That is, one salmon, to the human eye, looks no different than any other salmon. "Salmon" or "wren" or "tendril" is universal, encompassing all salmon, all wren, and all tendrils. The natural metaphors in "Elegy" are tailored for an individual, Jane, so they are at once broadly relevant and personally applicable. The choice of a wren gestures that Jane was light, energetic, and graceful. Even the word "wren" sounds small and nimble.
Jane doesn't just inhabit natural images, though; she works in harmony with them, evident in the lines "the leaves, their whispers turned to kissing; / And the mold sang in the bleached valleys under the rose." Here, the environment also expresses the love felt for Jane. It was everywhere, in the leaves, the brooks, the flowers and even the mold. For those good and bad, her presence delighted.
But she was not always effervescent. Roethke writes, "when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth, / Even a father could not find her." Her emotions were strong and clear; I believe that this characterization also makes her more real. She is a creature of pure emotion, sadness or happiness, which makes her easy to imagine and even empathize with. We all, I expect, experience straight emotions from time to time.
The speaker's affection begins to seep into the poem in the next lines, "My sparrow, you are not here, / Waiting like a fern, making a spiny shadow." Affection and nostalgia, really. Again, too, we note the tender, universal/personal images and Jane's bubbly grace. When Roethke writes, "If only I could nudge you from this sleep, / My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon," and I want to nudge her, too. I want to nudge everyone who has ever fallen. This poem, for me, is so beautifully and powerfully loving. And I suppose that an elegy should be a form of love poem, though I haven't read enough elegies to recommend examples or counterexamples. I like the idea of an elegy as a love poem.
The poem ends with a line that could be construed as problematic: with the implication that a father (male) or lover (stereotypically male) should have rights over remembering her. It sidesteps controversy, though, because the narrator is (arguably) male and her teacher. I think that he is only referring, in the end, to his possible position to her. He would usually love a girl because he is (a) her father or (b) her lover. How do we reconcile being neither of these things? Perhaps we don't have to, the poem suggests. Love exists outside our typical models. And indeed, it can be surprising to find that you love someone when you have no "right" to. My stepmother told me that she sometimes looks at a stranger working away at his life and imagines that he is her son. I found that so beautiful, and have tried it often. It's amazing how easy it is to love people, if you only see them as lovable. I try to look at girls as if they were one of my sisters or best friends. They become so clear and pure. I think that looking at Jane in this poem provides that same experience. She is a stranger, but looking at her through loving eyes, we love her as well. By seeing another that loves her, we may love her too, in a way. The narrator's affections, cloaked in natural imagery, guide us to affection and tenderness. Surprising, no?
My Student, Thrown by a Horse
I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,
A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing;
And the mold sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.
Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw;
Stirring the clearest water.
My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiny shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.
If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.
Theodore Roethke 1953
An elegy, as I am sure most of you know, is a poem written in memory of one who has died. I choose this particular elegy for its energy, precise images, and delicate tenderness. "Elegy for Jane" gracefully captures the real girl Jane; in 22 compact lines, we almost see this flesh-and-blood girl and the love she brought forth. In animating Jane, the poem allows us to recognize Jane's beloved characteristics in those around us. She is, like all of us, and individual with universal traits.
Roethke reminisces about her (yes I am muddling speaker/author) personally, leaving the universal recognition up to the natural images and the readers. The first line, "I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;" demonstrates a very personal and even intimate view of this girl. He regards the nape of her neck, connoting vulnerability, and talks of her curls as soft, delicate tendrils. The connection with plants here rehearses the consistent twining of man and nature. In the next line, Jane smiles like a pickerel, a fish with a wide, oblong grin. The assonance in "quick look" heightens the energy in the poem, which again appears consistently throughout the poem. This energy reflects Jane's energy, and makes the thought of her loss even sadder. As if a light has winked out in the sky.
The next several lines, "how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her, / And she balanced in the delight of her thought, / A wren, happy, tail into the wind, / Her song trembling the twigs and small branches" again display natural imagery and energy. Because it shifts almost fully into a natural metaphor, the poem's universality comes through especially clearly. Perhaps I should pause and explain why natural imagery is universalizing. Excepting a few cases, a wild animal is not named. That is, one salmon, to the human eye, looks no different than any other salmon. "Salmon" or "wren" or "tendril" is universal, encompassing all salmon, all wren, and all tendrils. The natural metaphors in "Elegy" are tailored for an individual, Jane, so they are at once broadly relevant and personally applicable. The choice of a wren gestures that Jane was light, energetic, and graceful. Even the word "wren" sounds small and nimble.
Jane doesn't just inhabit natural images, though; she works in harmony with them, evident in the lines "the leaves, their whispers turned to kissing; / And the mold sang in the bleached valleys under the rose." Here, the environment also expresses the love felt for Jane. It was everywhere, in the leaves, the brooks, the flowers and even the mold. For those good and bad, her presence delighted.
But she was not always effervescent. Roethke writes, "when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth, / Even a father could not find her." Her emotions were strong and clear; I believe that this characterization also makes her more real. She is a creature of pure emotion, sadness or happiness, which makes her easy to imagine and even empathize with. We all, I expect, experience straight emotions from time to time.
The speaker's affection begins to seep into the poem in the next lines, "My sparrow, you are not here, / Waiting like a fern, making a spiny shadow." Affection and nostalgia, really. Again, too, we note the tender, universal/personal images and Jane's bubbly grace. When Roethke writes, "If only I could nudge you from this sleep, / My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon," and I want to nudge her, too. I want to nudge everyone who has ever fallen. This poem, for me, is so beautifully and powerfully loving. And I suppose that an elegy should be a form of love poem, though I haven't read enough elegies to recommend examples or counterexamples. I like the idea of an elegy as a love poem.
The poem ends with a line that could be construed as problematic: with the implication that a father (male) or lover (stereotypically male) should have rights over remembering her. It sidesteps controversy, though, because the narrator is (arguably) male and her teacher. I think that he is only referring, in the end, to his possible position to her. He would usually love a girl because he is (a) her father or (b) her lover. How do we reconcile being neither of these things? Perhaps we don't have to, the poem suggests. Love exists outside our typical models. And indeed, it can be surprising to find that you love someone when you have no "right" to. My stepmother told me that she sometimes looks at a stranger working away at his life and imagines that he is her son. I found that so beautiful, and have tried it often. It's amazing how easy it is to love people, if you only see them as lovable. I try to look at girls as if they were one of my sisters or best friends. They become so clear and pure. I think that looking at Jane in this poem provides that same experience. She is a stranger, but looking at her through loving eyes, we love her as well. By seeing another that loves her, we may love her too, in a way. The narrator's affections, cloaked in natural imagery, guide us to affection and tenderness. Surprising, no?
Monday, January 02, 2006
Poem of the Week 1/2/2006: A Little Moonlight
A Little Moonlight
I.
Given inconstancy, the resistless
affair that has been my body (as if
there were no place to go from anywhere except
deeper, into those spaces the hand makes by
tugging the flesh, where it is part-able,
more open, or as if I believed, utterly, what
legend says about violation — how it leads
to prophecy, the god enters the body, the mouth
cracks open, and a mad fluttering, which
is the future, fills the cave, which is
desire, luck and hazard, hazard and luck),
I should perhaps regret more. But it’s grown
so late: see how dark, outside?
II.
Suspecting, even then,
that the best way to avoid being
broken by flaw would be to shape my life
around it — flaw coming slowly
to define the self, as shells make of the glass
that holds them a little kingdom
of sea — I followed him, and have only once
looked back. Oh, I contain him
as the lion’s chest contains the arrow
that death displaces, effect always mattering
more than cause: pull the arrow free —
brandish it. By now it must weigh
almost nothing . . .
III.
I agree, to hope for a thing is to believe in it,
or at least to want to. When does belief
become expectation? Like committing
a crime, confessing to it, and thinking
confession might equal apology, mistaking
apology for to wipe clean away,
you turn your face to me. — What?
Trees in a wind. Their mixed
invitation of leaves flourishing as if unstoppable,
as if foliage were the greater part of it, the part
I could love best, or should learn to say I do
more often. Tell me why, when what I loved
from the start was how eventually each leaf must go.
Carl Phillips 2005
Starting a new year, intent is incredibly powerful. This week is a clear opportunity to reimagine, to say the things that have never been said, to look forward. And so with this Poem of the Week, I want to tell you all why I write an extra essay each week and offer you a poem that reflects the thoughtfulness occassioned by a new year. I will start with my intent. Number one, I have this blog because I enjoy it. It keeps me working through my Norton Anthology, helps me with my writing, and provides a low-pressure environment in which I can explore poetry. It's so easy to get caught up in whatever trivialities pull me away from my passion. The PotW helps me stay engaged.
More importantly, though, I want to share poetry. At a New Year's party yesterday, a man told me that he couldn't remember the last time he'd read a poem. I was so sad that I wanted to take a book off of the shelf right then and there and read one to him, but I supposed that presumptious and forward. Perhaps I should have, though; he was an english major in college long ago. It saddens me to hear to hear how little poetry most people have read. I of course don't expect most to feel as I do, but people don't have to totally comprehend or love an art form to appreciate its beauty. I hope that the PotW helps you register poetry's deepness and richness. I hope that it gives you a chance to slow down and contemplate in your busy life. I hope that it provides you with an extra spot of beauty. I hope that it makes poetry less scary. Even in some of my upper level lit classes, people were at a loss when confronted with a poem. But poetry ought not be scary. I hope that you can see that exploring a poem is as simple as slowing down, noticing the words on the page, and asking questions. A poem is not scary, but beautiful. I hope that it gives you some tools to approach a poem with, even if those tools are thought structures, ways of thinking about poems.
I originally hoped that it would be a forum for many to discuss, but I think that I have discouraged this by writing such long responses. Comment if you'd like, but I think that I instead hope merely that you react. This is not an academic blog wherein we are having a thesis-oriented, utterly informed discussion. The PotWs are my personal thoughts about a poem (and other ramblings that perhaps provoke you. Though long-winded, I intend it as a gift of beauty and an offering of what I love. All together, I hope that the Poem of the Week is a personal, stimulating, free-form, beautiful ramble for you and me.
So that done, we have the chance to look at this narrator's long, beautiful ramble. I see this poem as a collection of musings. The three section structure makes it light and pensive. Rather than preaching, it merely wonders, explores. I think that many can probably relate to these kinds of thoughts, for the narrator reflects on flaws, spirituality, hope and most of all growth. I get the sense here that these are little trains of thought that the narrator somehow chose to put into a poem form. They are ripples in the speaker's stream of consciousness, important enough to set apart in a poem. They appear to come from different sense of time; I suppose, then, that the question is whether they achieve unity or not. Let us look at each alone, and explore any sense of unity at the end.
The first section has a marvelous syntactical structure. Without the parentheses, it would read, "Given inconstancy, the resistless / affair that has been my body... I should perhaos regret more. But it's grown / so late: see how dark, outside?" He muses that he ought to perhaps regret more because life has been bumpy, not as expected. His response to his own question is so casual, so effortless that it reminds me of a dear, old friend so comfortable he doesn't need anything other than metaphors. It's too late to regret anything, he sighs.
If the frame-sentence structure is so casual, then, the parenthetic lines' strength makes them almost tangible. Indeed, the images unify emotional and erotic bodies, powerfully coiling body and soul. The first "as if" postulate, read with the body equating emotions, tells of acute introspection, as if looking inside is a physical act, pulling apart the flesh to see where the blood is flowing. This resonates deeply with me, for I think that introspection is difficult and essential and as literally vital as pulling apart one's flesh.
The second "as if" again splits between an emotional and a physical body, this time moving into a more erotic realm. By using the words "violation," "cave," and "desire," Phillips is almost explicitly sexual. The sexuality animates spirituality, though, again unifying body and soul. The violation brings on prophecy, which, god-like, "fills the cave." Thus, a mystic experience is as strong as rape, as climax, as the deepest physical intimacy.
I have a hard time reconciling these postulates with inconstancy. I suppose that introspection and spirituality are inconstant, for they have to be struggled with daily. This explanation isn't quite satisfactory to me; if you have any ideas, feel free to post a comment or email me!
The second part is my favorite for its empowerment. The speaker discusses how to deal with flaws, and his frank, refreshing answer is to embrace them. Deeply. Flaws, he implies, provide the structure over which we can grow and heal. Flaws are thus a kind of skeleton, but we must recognize them in order to develop around them. He confidently says that we, like shells in a fishtank, can make a "kingdom / of sea" by seeing the container, the flaw, as beautiful. Linking flaws and a fishtank, too, implies that a flaw is a sort of container, and, true, flaws often limit. Imperfections like fear, anger, defensiveness and more insulate us from one-another. Indeed, "limitation" is in the thesaurus under flaw.
The syntax, true to stream-of-consciousness, interrupts this section as well. Without the dashes, its first stanza reads, "suspecting, even then, that the best way to avoid being broken by a lfaw would be to shape my life around it, I followed him, and have only once looked back." Who is this him? I suggest that it is perhaps an inside advisor who makes mistakes, what my mom would call "the right mistake." It strikes me now that following one's flaws is another way of being true to oneself. Thus, the narrator talks of living and acting from truth. There are few greater lessons.
I love that this section is so empowered; the speaker equates himself to a lion, and bravely announces that one ought to brandish the flaw once one has internalized it. Be proud of what you are, good and bad! Brandishing a flaw also implies owning it and controlling it. When you go to wave the flaw to the world, then, the flaw is probably diminished. It is humble, too, expressed in the ellipses' trailing off and the fragmented syntax. I love this stanza; it convinces me that I would want to be friends with this speaker, whoever he is.
Beginning, "I agree to hope for a thing is to believe in it, / or at least to want to," the third section addresses the logical leaps we make in hoping, believing, apologizing, and redeeming. I write "leap" because these transformations are perhaps problematic. The speaker has a good point, after all. I know that I have jumped from belief to expectation before; this poem articulates a normal human tendency. By putting words to this action, "A Little Moonlight" rehearses another of poetry's functions. When it puts words to varying human tendencies, emotions, situations etc., it makes us aware of them, allowing us to move forward.
I want to finally notice, then, the great exhale ending this poem. The narrator's quiet thoughts about trees look with love and sweetness on death, on endings, on passing away, and I find this so appropriate for the beginning of a new year. We all have the chance to love our own little lives and selves even as they are passing away, or perhaps because they are. For me, I feel that I am growing, growing bigger, growing older, growing wiser and happier and sadder all at once; I am - we all are - growing away from who we used to be, but that is the thing to love most. Just like the beloved leaves that will tumble off of the tree, so we are tumbling into something new every second, and we can love the fluttering leaves and we can love the gusting wind. Love. The word falls onto the page.
I.
Given inconstancy, the resistless
affair that has been my body (as if
there were no place to go from anywhere except
deeper, into those spaces the hand makes by
tugging the flesh, where it is part-able,
more open, or as if I believed, utterly, what
legend says about violation — how it leads
to prophecy, the god enters the body, the mouth
cracks open, and a mad fluttering, which
is the future, fills the cave, which is
desire, luck and hazard, hazard and luck),
I should perhaps regret more. But it’s grown
so late: see how dark, outside?
II.
Suspecting, even then,
that the best way to avoid being
broken by flaw would be to shape my life
around it — flaw coming slowly
to define the self, as shells make of the glass
that holds them a little kingdom
of sea — I followed him, and have only once
looked back. Oh, I contain him
as the lion’s chest contains the arrow
that death displaces, effect always mattering
more than cause: pull the arrow free —
brandish it. By now it must weigh
almost nothing . . .
III.
I agree, to hope for a thing is to believe in it,
or at least to want to. When does belief
become expectation? Like committing
a crime, confessing to it, and thinking
confession might equal apology, mistaking
apology for to wipe clean away,
you turn your face to me. — What?
Trees in a wind. Their mixed
invitation of leaves flourishing as if unstoppable,
as if foliage were the greater part of it, the part
I could love best, or should learn to say I do
more often. Tell me why, when what I loved
from the start was how eventually each leaf must go.
Carl Phillips 2005
Starting a new year, intent is incredibly powerful. This week is a clear opportunity to reimagine, to say the things that have never been said, to look forward. And so with this Poem of the Week, I want to tell you all why I write an extra essay each week and offer you a poem that reflects the thoughtfulness occassioned by a new year. I will start with my intent. Number one, I have this blog because I enjoy it. It keeps me working through my Norton Anthology, helps me with my writing, and provides a low-pressure environment in which I can explore poetry. It's so easy to get caught up in whatever trivialities pull me away from my passion. The PotW helps me stay engaged.
More importantly, though, I want to share poetry. At a New Year's party yesterday, a man told me that he couldn't remember the last time he'd read a poem. I was so sad that I wanted to take a book off of the shelf right then and there and read one to him, but I supposed that presumptious and forward. Perhaps I should have, though; he was an english major in college long ago. It saddens me to hear to hear how little poetry most people have read. I of course don't expect most to feel as I do, but people don't have to totally comprehend or love an art form to appreciate its beauty. I hope that the PotW helps you register poetry's deepness and richness. I hope that it gives you a chance to slow down and contemplate in your busy life. I hope that it provides you with an extra spot of beauty. I hope that it makes poetry less scary. Even in some of my upper level lit classes, people were at a loss when confronted with a poem. But poetry ought not be scary. I hope that you can see that exploring a poem is as simple as slowing down, noticing the words on the page, and asking questions. A poem is not scary, but beautiful. I hope that it gives you some tools to approach a poem with, even if those tools are thought structures, ways of thinking about poems.
I originally hoped that it would be a forum for many to discuss, but I think that I have discouraged this by writing such long responses. Comment if you'd like, but I think that I instead hope merely that you react. This is not an academic blog wherein we are having a thesis-oriented, utterly informed discussion. The PotWs are my personal thoughts about a poem (and other ramblings that perhaps provoke you. Though long-winded, I intend it as a gift of beauty and an offering of what I love. All together, I hope that the Poem of the Week is a personal, stimulating, free-form, beautiful ramble for you and me.
So that done, we have the chance to look at this narrator's long, beautiful ramble. I see this poem as a collection of musings. The three section structure makes it light and pensive. Rather than preaching, it merely wonders, explores. I think that many can probably relate to these kinds of thoughts, for the narrator reflects on flaws, spirituality, hope and most of all growth. I get the sense here that these are little trains of thought that the narrator somehow chose to put into a poem form. They are ripples in the speaker's stream of consciousness, important enough to set apart in a poem. They appear to come from different sense of time; I suppose, then, that the question is whether they achieve unity or not. Let us look at each alone, and explore any sense of unity at the end.
The first section has a marvelous syntactical structure. Without the parentheses, it would read, "Given inconstancy, the resistless / affair that has been my body... I should perhaos regret more. But it's grown / so late: see how dark, outside?" He muses that he ought to perhaps regret more because life has been bumpy, not as expected. His response to his own question is so casual, so effortless that it reminds me of a dear, old friend so comfortable he doesn't need anything other than metaphors. It's too late to regret anything, he sighs.
If the frame-sentence structure is so casual, then, the parenthetic lines' strength makes them almost tangible. Indeed, the images unify emotional and erotic bodies, powerfully coiling body and soul. The first "as if" postulate, read with the body equating emotions, tells of acute introspection, as if looking inside is a physical act, pulling apart the flesh to see where the blood is flowing. This resonates deeply with me, for I think that introspection is difficult and essential and as literally vital as pulling apart one's flesh.
The second "as if" again splits between an emotional and a physical body, this time moving into a more erotic realm. By using the words "violation," "cave," and "desire," Phillips is almost explicitly sexual. The sexuality animates spirituality, though, again unifying body and soul. The violation brings on prophecy, which, god-like, "fills the cave." Thus, a mystic experience is as strong as rape, as climax, as the deepest physical intimacy.
I have a hard time reconciling these postulates with inconstancy. I suppose that introspection and spirituality are inconstant, for they have to be struggled with daily. This explanation isn't quite satisfactory to me; if you have any ideas, feel free to post a comment or email me!
The second part is my favorite for its empowerment. The speaker discusses how to deal with flaws, and his frank, refreshing answer is to embrace them. Deeply. Flaws, he implies, provide the structure over which we can grow and heal. Flaws are thus a kind of skeleton, but we must recognize them in order to develop around them. He confidently says that we, like shells in a fishtank, can make a "kingdom / of sea" by seeing the container, the flaw, as beautiful. Linking flaws and a fishtank, too, implies that a flaw is a sort of container, and, true, flaws often limit. Imperfections like fear, anger, defensiveness and more insulate us from one-another. Indeed, "limitation" is in the thesaurus under flaw.
The syntax, true to stream-of-consciousness, interrupts this section as well. Without the dashes, its first stanza reads, "suspecting, even then, that the best way to avoid being broken by a lfaw would be to shape my life around it, I followed him, and have only once looked back." Who is this him? I suggest that it is perhaps an inside advisor who makes mistakes, what my mom would call "the right mistake." It strikes me now that following one's flaws is another way of being true to oneself. Thus, the narrator talks of living and acting from truth. There are few greater lessons.
I love that this section is so empowered; the speaker equates himself to a lion, and bravely announces that one ought to brandish the flaw once one has internalized it. Be proud of what you are, good and bad! Brandishing a flaw also implies owning it and controlling it. When you go to wave the flaw to the world, then, the flaw is probably diminished. It is humble, too, expressed in the ellipses' trailing off and the fragmented syntax. I love this stanza; it convinces me that I would want to be friends with this speaker, whoever he is.
Beginning, "I agree to hope for a thing is to believe in it, / or at least to want to," the third section addresses the logical leaps we make in hoping, believing, apologizing, and redeeming. I write "leap" because these transformations are perhaps problematic. The speaker has a good point, after all. I know that I have jumped from belief to expectation before; this poem articulates a normal human tendency. By putting words to this action, "A Little Moonlight" rehearses another of poetry's functions. When it puts words to varying human tendencies, emotions, situations etc., it makes us aware of them, allowing us to move forward.
I want to finally notice, then, the great exhale ending this poem. The narrator's quiet thoughts about trees look with love and sweetness on death, on endings, on passing away, and I find this so appropriate for the beginning of a new year. We all have the chance to love our own little lives and selves even as they are passing away, or perhaps because they are. For me, I feel that I am growing, growing bigger, growing older, growing wiser and happier and sadder all at once; I am - we all are - growing away from who we used to be, but that is the thing to love most. Just like the beloved leaves that will tumble off of the tree, so we are tumbling into something new every second, and we can love the fluttering leaves and we can love the gusting wind. Love. The word falls onto the page.
Monday, December 26, 2005
Poem of the Week 12/26/2005: A Plain Song for Comadre
A Plain Song for Comadre*
Though the unseen may vanish, though insight fails
And doubter and downcast saint
Join in the same complaint,
What holy things were ever frightened off
By a fly's buzz, or itches, or a cough?
Harder than nails
They are, more warmly constant than the sun,
At whose continual sign
The dimly prompted vine
Upbraids itself to a green excellence.
What evening, when the slow and forced expense
Of sweat is done,
Does not the dark come flooding the straight furrow
Or filling the well-made bowl?
What night will not the whole
Sky with its clear studs and steady spheres
Turn on a sound chimney? It is seventeen years
Come tomorrow
That Bruna Sandoval has kept the church
Of San Ysidro,** sweeping
And scrubbing the aisles, keeping
The candlesticks and the plaster faces bright,
And seen no visions but the thing done right
From the clay porch
To the white altar. For love and in all weathers
This is what she has done.
Sometimes the early sun
Shines as she flings the scrubwater out, with a crash
Of grimy rainbows, and the stained suds flash
Like angel-feathers.
Richard Wilbur 1956
*Peasant woman (Spanish); also, midwife, god-mother, neighbor. Plain song: or plainsong; the unisonous vocal music of the early Christian Church; also, any simple melody.
**Village in San Diego County, near the Mexican border.
What a remarkable story this poem tells; what a difficult and singluar thing this Bruna Sandoval has done! To keep the church sparkling and alive, to keep her faith and holiness intact for seventeen years, why, are truly admirable. Why, you might ask, is this so striking? I would answer that change is so constant, so inevitable, that maintaining stability is a feat. "A Plain Song..." discusses weighter issues than mere constancy; rather, it addresses true holiness and devotion in both cosmic and personal terms.
It begins generally, putting forth the abstract (but very real) idea of truly holy things. Human conditions fail; our unseen parts (beliefs, emotions, trust, etc.) "may vanish," and our insight and rationality may disappoint, evoking in doubter and downcast saint the same complaint. I take this complaint to be the complaint of avbsence, of Godlessness. Because their flimsy human intuitions fail, they lose faith in God. The narrator then rejects their faithlessness, asking, "what holy things were ever frightened off / by a fly's buzz, or itches, or a cough?" Authentic holiness is not so fragile.
Holy things are, instead, "more warmly constant than the sun," prompting the elements of nature to reimagine themselves "to a green excellence." Here the poem nods to inevitable trials en route to holiness, noting the "slow and forced expense / of sweat" and the dark that comes "flooding the straight furrow / or filling the well-made bowl." Importantly, the darkness interacts with the artifacts of human toil, the furrow and the bowl. The poem achieves a wonderful balance between a cosmic sanctity and a personal simplicity. The next lines mingle the two, stating, "What night will not the whole / sky with its clear studs and steady spheres / turn on a sound chimney?" Planets and chimneys sit side by side in the poem's vision of holiness, perhaps signifying the spirituality in everyday things.
I have talked a lot about holy things without actually discussing what they are, though I hinted that they might be the simple things in life, the relics of our hard work. Enter Bruna Sandoval, seventeen year church caretaker, and example of one who lives in holiness. Her spirituality is not in question; the final lines establish it in stating "Sometimes the early sun / Shiines as she flings the scrubwater out, with a crash / Of grimy rainbows, and the stained suds flash / Like angel-feathers." We may look at her specific case, then, to uncover what constitutes holiness and perhaps what we can do to capture it as well.
She is holy simply and purely by seeing things "done right;" sweeping the altar, cleaning the saints, polishing the candlesticks, and doing the laundry. She has not had any prophetic visions to solidify her faith, and so we should not expect any, the poem perhaps implies. What we have, then, is a surprisingly simple vision of holiness: hard work and faith. An acceptance of the simple things. A revaluation of space. She sustains a constancy by appreciating her space; I suggest that she sustains this holiness by folding it into her surroundings. She has done this "For love and in all weathers." Simply remarkable.
Finally, then, I question whether this is possible; I would answer yes, but, like for Bruna Sandoval, it takes a lifetime of hard work, love, and meditation. More purely, it requires a faith and appreciation of our surroundings difficult to find. I think that it admires a way of life that most cannot fulfill. Positively, though, it suggests that, with work similar to Bruna's, we can find some kind of this balance, if internal. I would actually argue, too, that the crucial pieces of Bruna's constancy are internal: the kind of peace that comes with a job well done and a reinvigoration of space. These are the truly holy things in our lives. They are perhaps not the only ones, but "A Plain Song for Comadre" concerns itself with them so that we may as well.
Though the unseen may vanish, though insight fails
And doubter and downcast saint
Join in the same complaint,
What holy things were ever frightened off
By a fly's buzz, or itches, or a cough?
Harder than nails
They are, more warmly constant than the sun,
At whose continual sign
The dimly prompted vine
Upbraids itself to a green excellence.
What evening, when the slow and forced expense
Of sweat is done,
Does not the dark come flooding the straight furrow
Or filling the well-made bowl?
What night will not the whole
Sky with its clear studs and steady spheres
Turn on a sound chimney? It is seventeen years
Come tomorrow
That Bruna Sandoval has kept the church
Of San Ysidro,** sweeping
And scrubbing the aisles, keeping
The candlesticks and the plaster faces bright,
And seen no visions but the thing done right
From the clay porch
To the white altar. For love and in all weathers
This is what she has done.
Sometimes the early sun
Shines as she flings the scrubwater out, with a crash
Of grimy rainbows, and the stained suds flash
Like angel-feathers.
Richard Wilbur 1956
*Peasant woman (Spanish); also, midwife, god-mother, neighbor. Plain song: or plainsong; the unisonous vocal music of the early Christian Church; also, any simple melody.
**Village in San Diego County, near the Mexican border.
What a remarkable story this poem tells; what a difficult and singluar thing this Bruna Sandoval has done! To keep the church sparkling and alive, to keep her faith and holiness intact for seventeen years, why, are truly admirable. Why, you might ask, is this so striking? I would answer that change is so constant, so inevitable, that maintaining stability is a feat. "A Plain Song..." discusses weighter issues than mere constancy; rather, it addresses true holiness and devotion in both cosmic and personal terms.
It begins generally, putting forth the abstract (but very real) idea of truly holy things. Human conditions fail; our unseen parts (beliefs, emotions, trust, etc.) "may vanish," and our insight and rationality may disappoint, evoking in doubter and downcast saint the same complaint. I take this complaint to be the complaint of avbsence, of Godlessness. Because their flimsy human intuitions fail, they lose faith in God. The narrator then rejects their faithlessness, asking, "what holy things were ever frightened off / by a fly's buzz, or itches, or a cough?" Authentic holiness is not so fragile.
Holy things are, instead, "more warmly constant than the sun," prompting the elements of nature to reimagine themselves "to a green excellence." Here the poem nods to inevitable trials en route to holiness, noting the "slow and forced expense / of sweat" and the dark that comes "flooding the straight furrow / or filling the well-made bowl." Importantly, the darkness interacts with the artifacts of human toil, the furrow and the bowl. The poem achieves a wonderful balance between a cosmic sanctity and a personal simplicity. The next lines mingle the two, stating, "What night will not the whole / sky with its clear studs and steady spheres / turn on a sound chimney?" Planets and chimneys sit side by side in the poem's vision of holiness, perhaps signifying the spirituality in everyday things.
I have talked a lot about holy things without actually discussing what they are, though I hinted that they might be the simple things in life, the relics of our hard work. Enter Bruna Sandoval, seventeen year church caretaker, and example of one who lives in holiness. Her spirituality is not in question; the final lines establish it in stating "Sometimes the early sun / Shiines as she flings the scrubwater out, with a crash / Of grimy rainbows, and the stained suds flash / Like angel-feathers." We may look at her specific case, then, to uncover what constitutes holiness and perhaps what we can do to capture it as well.
She is holy simply and purely by seeing things "done right;" sweeping the altar, cleaning the saints, polishing the candlesticks, and doing the laundry. She has not had any prophetic visions to solidify her faith, and so we should not expect any, the poem perhaps implies. What we have, then, is a surprisingly simple vision of holiness: hard work and faith. An acceptance of the simple things. A revaluation of space. She sustains a constancy by appreciating her space; I suggest that she sustains this holiness by folding it into her surroundings. She has done this "For love and in all weathers." Simply remarkable.
Finally, then, I question whether this is possible; I would answer yes, but, like for Bruna Sandoval, it takes a lifetime of hard work, love, and meditation. More purely, it requires a faith and appreciation of our surroundings difficult to find. I think that it admires a way of life that most cannot fulfill. Positively, though, it suggests that, with work similar to Bruna's, we can find some kind of this balance, if internal. I would actually argue, too, that the crucial pieces of Bruna's constancy are internal: the kind of peace that comes with a job well done and a reinvigoration of space. These are the truly holy things in our lives. They are perhaps not the only ones, but "A Plain Song for Comadre" concerns itself with them so that we may as well.
Monday, December 19, 2005
Poem of the Week 12/19/2005: Aubade
Aubade
Cold snap. Five o'clock.
Outside, a heavy frost - dark
footprints in the brittle
grass; a cat's. Quick coffee,
jacket, watch-cap, keys.
Stars blaze across the black
gap between the horizons;
pickup somehow strikes
its own dim spark - an arc -
starts. Inside, familiar
metal cab, an icebox
full of lightless air,
limns green with dash-light. Vinyl
seat-cracks, cold and brittle;
horn ring gleams, and chrome
cuts hard across the wrist
where the sleeve falls off the glove
as moon-track curves its cool tiara
somewhere underneath your sleep
this very moment, love --
Richard Kenney 1985
A friend asked me a disarmingly simple, interesting question yesterday: would I rather read a poem about something or experience that thing myself? It caught me so off-guard that I couldn't properly answer. I stuttered and incomplete and scattered thought, but left realizing that I hadn't actually given that issue any thought before. I love reading poetry, and that was enough for me. But reading critically means reading life carefully as well, and slowing down enough to notice whether our actions and assumptions are problematic. His question prompted me to think about whether it can be insulating to read. The question's, at its core, asks whether reading inhibits living, or perhaps substitutes for it.
All I could offer, at the time, was my idea about one of poetry's great faculties. Let's see if I can articulate this. Something happens; say, a child somersaults from an ottoman to the floor. If everything that happened that hour in that particular room, including the kid's acrobatics, was somehow translated into a physical loaf, and if you sliced infinitely thin pieces and peeled off one slice, you would have a complete, 3-D representation - complete with smell, sound and taste - of exactly what happened that moment. Are you following? Now, put a bunch of those together and you have my jelly-loaf.
Poetry can move in, take a slab from the loaf (i.e. from time and life) and compress it onto a page, leaving one chunk of time combed and waiting in front of one. The poem somehow translates the child's somersault to a page without changing its essence. Poetry, in that way, is life.
As such, I think that it can offer experiences that are lost to us, normally inaccessible, or especially revealing. By slowing down on times that often flit by too quickly to notice, poetry can allow us a kind of contemplation not usually possible. Then, too, it has a very selective lens; poets write about things that, even if common, have a special significance, even if it is the specialness that brings us a greater appreciation of our everyday experiences. If it portrays a "typical" experience, along the lines of "Aubade," it may also give us an opportunity to empathize with an Other, or connect our similar experiences to the Other's.
For "Aubade," I want us to notice how precisely the poem draws the morning. It immediately takes us into one moment, beginning with the statement "cold snap." An "aubade" is a morning song, often of a parting of lovers, and this is, to me, a wonderful example of this. There is no bittersweet denial of the dawn a la Romeo and Juliet; rather, this is a regular man going about his regular life, thinking of his love. The first five lines or so capture the chilly air and the surrounding environment. The choppy syntax (those five lines have eight caesuras - pauses in the middle of a line - not to mention three end-stops; punctuation at the end of a line) transmits the freezing air, as if it is so cold outside that the speaker can't quite put a sentence together.
One of the things the poem does brilliantly is relay early-morning mode. Many of you, I am sure, know the feeling: you are so tired that all you can do is mentally move from one thing to the next. It is not really possible to out-think oneself in the morning, much less think at all (for some haha). We also get the feeling that there is a kind of ritual in this man's morning. He does his usual "thing," checking his possessions off almost list-like, noting "Quick coffee / jacket, watch-cap, keys."* The next line, "Stars blaze across the black / gap between the horizons," hands us a new take on the sky; I have never heard the great scope of the sky described as a gap between the horizons. The unusual comment, though, lets us into someone else's way of looking at the world, if only for two lines.
If the earlier lines introduce us to the narrator, presenting us with artifacts from his world and his casual, everyday observations, the next outline his surroundings. The lines, "an icebox / full of lightless air, / limns green with dash-light" literally trace his pickup truck. To "limn" means to outline in clear, sharp detail (m-w.com). Again, Kenney is careful to etch the important details of this very normal morning.
The narrator, too, limns his pickup truck, again listing his possessions. I think that this is kind of like setting a stage with props; perhaps Kenney is implying, in having the narrator pay so much attention to his physical world, that space is important to who we are. I would agree with that whole-heartedly. Even if things don't make us, they can certainly make us comfortable. And I don't mean extraneous things, but one's familiar watch-cap, the known cracks on the vinyl, the aged and geometric metal cab of a pickup: these things serve as touchpoints in our day-to-day wanderings.
After the choppy lists and notes about the external, the syntax suddenly shifts in the final six lines. The only time the narrator leaves early-morning mode is thinking of the moon and of his love. The last lines are wonderfully constructed: layered, repeated images, balanced, tense emotion, and a remarkable use of enjambment roll the poem to its sudden and beautiful conclusion. It occurred to me about half way through this close-read that there are a lot of arcs in the poem, leading to the final (and privileged) arc of the moon. The final lines cycle these arcs, first in the gleam of the key-ring, then in the chrome cutting the wrist (a beautiful example of onomatopoeia, sound words), and finally in the moon-track's cool tiara. These arcs perhaps imply a sort of cradling, being held.
Then, too, the tenderness of the moon-track (what could be softer than a moonbeam?) contrasts sharply with the cold cut of chrome or even the chilly, fragmented opening lines. This gentleness sets the end of the poem apart as a special moment, a great in-breath. The final hyphen freezes it at that, then, crystallizing the emotion at it's peak, emphasizing the importance of the lover by having "love" conclude the poem, and truncating the slab of time very suddenly and specifically. It never exhales.
All of that said, we can return to the question with which I began this PotW: reading or experience? I know that, for me, there are times when I do hole myself up with books, when a paper world is easier to live in than my own. But I usually get uncomfortable after a day or so of that, and go back into an emotional world. My dad once told me that one of his worries for me was that I would learn that it is very easy to lose one's emotions in work; ever since, I have been attuned to my own experiences reading, writing, and working. I would never sacrifice my own life and my own experiences to stay in and read. At the same time, though, reading is part of my experience of living. I suppose that it's like most things, then; if you don't overdo it, it can be wonderful. Reading enriches myself and (I am confident to say) others. I certainly hope so, at any rate!
And if this Poem of the Week has been somewhat less thesis-oriented, I think I like it better that way. I realized that a close-read is a close read, but I don't want the PotW to be an extra essay a week. I want it to be a forum for thought, for communication, and wherein my appreciation for and love of these poems can shine through. So I appreciate all of you who read this every week, or at least when you can. It really does mean so much to me! I hope that you are all doing well.
*for a picture of a watch-cap, go to this website, a random google find: http://www.royea.net/twistedrib.html
Cold snap. Five o'clock.
Outside, a heavy frost - dark
footprints in the brittle
grass; a cat's. Quick coffee,
jacket, watch-cap, keys.
Stars blaze across the black
gap between the horizons;
pickup somehow strikes
its own dim spark - an arc -
starts. Inside, familiar
metal cab, an icebox
full of lightless air,
limns green with dash-light. Vinyl
seat-cracks, cold and brittle;
horn ring gleams, and chrome
cuts hard across the wrist
where the sleeve falls off the glove
as moon-track curves its cool tiara
somewhere underneath your sleep
this very moment, love --
Richard Kenney 1985
A friend asked me a disarmingly simple, interesting question yesterday: would I rather read a poem about something or experience that thing myself? It caught me so off-guard that I couldn't properly answer. I stuttered and incomplete and scattered thought, but left realizing that I hadn't actually given that issue any thought before. I love reading poetry, and that was enough for me. But reading critically means reading life carefully as well, and slowing down enough to notice whether our actions and assumptions are problematic. His question prompted me to think about whether it can be insulating to read. The question's, at its core, asks whether reading inhibits living, or perhaps substitutes for it.
All I could offer, at the time, was my idea about one of poetry's great faculties. Let's see if I can articulate this. Something happens; say, a child somersaults from an ottoman to the floor. If everything that happened that hour in that particular room, including the kid's acrobatics, was somehow translated into a physical loaf, and if you sliced infinitely thin pieces and peeled off one slice, you would have a complete, 3-D representation - complete with smell, sound and taste - of exactly what happened that moment. Are you following? Now, put a bunch of those together and you have my jelly-loaf.
Poetry can move in, take a slab from the loaf (i.e. from time and life) and compress it onto a page, leaving one chunk of time combed and waiting in front of one. The poem somehow translates the child's somersault to a page without changing its essence. Poetry, in that way, is life.
As such, I think that it can offer experiences that are lost to us, normally inaccessible, or especially revealing. By slowing down on times that often flit by too quickly to notice, poetry can allow us a kind of contemplation not usually possible. Then, too, it has a very selective lens; poets write about things that, even if common, have a special significance, even if it is the specialness that brings us a greater appreciation of our everyday experiences. If it portrays a "typical" experience, along the lines of "Aubade," it may also give us an opportunity to empathize with an Other, or connect our similar experiences to the Other's.
For "Aubade," I want us to notice how precisely the poem draws the morning. It immediately takes us into one moment, beginning with the statement "cold snap." An "aubade" is a morning song, often of a parting of lovers, and this is, to me, a wonderful example of this. There is no bittersweet denial of the dawn a la Romeo and Juliet; rather, this is a regular man going about his regular life, thinking of his love. The first five lines or so capture the chilly air and the surrounding environment. The choppy syntax (those five lines have eight caesuras - pauses in the middle of a line - not to mention three end-stops; punctuation at the end of a line) transmits the freezing air, as if it is so cold outside that the speaker can't quite put a sentence together.
One of the things the poem does brilliantly is relay early-morning mode. Many of you, I am sure, know the feeling: you are so tired that all you can do is mentally move from one thing to the next. It is not really possible to out-think oneself in the morning, much less think at all (for some haha). We also get the feeling that there is a kind of ritual in this man's morning. He does his usual "thing," checking his possessions off almost list-like, noting "Quick coffee / jacket, watch-cap, keys."* The next line, "Stars blaze across the black / gap between the horizons," hands us a new take on the sky; I have never heard the great scope of the sky described as a gap between the horizons. The unusual comment, though, lets us into someone else's way of looking at the world, if only for two lines.
If the earlier lines introduce us to the narrator, presenting us with artifacts from his world and his casual, everyday observations, the next outline his surroundings. The lines, "an icebox / full of lightless air, / limns green with dash-light" literally trace his pickup truck. To "limn" means to outline in clear, sharp detail (m-w.com). Again, Kenney is careful to etch the important details of this very normal morning.
The narrator, too, limns his pickup truck, again listing his possessions. I think that this is kind of like setting a stage with props; perhaps Kenney is implying, in having the narrator pay so much attention to his physical world, that space is important to who we are. I would agree with that whole-heartedly. Even if things don't make us, they can certainly make us comfortable. And I don't mean extraneous things, but one's familiar watch-cap, the known cracks on the vinyl, the aged and geometric metal cab of a pickup: these things serve as touchpoints in our day-to-day wanderings.
After the choppy lists and notes about the external, the syntax suddenly shifts in the final six lines. The only time the narrator leaves early-morning mode is thinking of the moon and of his love. The last lines are wonderfully constructed: layered, repeated images, balanced, tense emotion, and a remarkable use of enjambment roll the poem to its sudden and beautiful conclusion. It occurred to me about half way through this close-read that there are a lot of arcs in the poem, leading to the final (and privileged) arc of the moon. The final lines cycle these arcs, first in the gleam of the key-ring, then in the chrome cutting the wrist (a beautiful example of onomatopoeia, sound words), and finally in the moon-track's cool tiara. These arcs perhaps imply a sort of cradling, being held.
Then, too, the tenderness of the moon-track (what could be softer than a moonbeam?) contrasts sharply with the cold cut of chrome or even the chilly, fragmented opening lines. This gentleness sets the end of the poem apart as a special moment, a great in-breath. The final hyphen freezes it at that, then, crystallizing the emotion at it's peak, emphasizing the importance of the lover by having "love" conclude the poem, and truncating the slab of time very suddenly and specifically. It never exhales.
All of that said, we can return to the question with which I began this PotW: reading or experience? I know that, for me, there are times when I do hole myself up with books, when a paper world is easier to live in than my own. But I usually get uncomfortable after a day or so of that, and go back into an emotional world. My dad once told me that one of his worries for me was that I would learn that it is very easy to lose one's emotions in work; ever since, I have been attuned to my own experiences reading, writing, and working. I would never sacrifice my own life and my own experiences to stay in and read. At the same time, though, reading is part of my experience of living. I suppose that it's like most things, then; if you don't overdo it, it can be wonderful. Reading enriches myself and (I am confident to say) others. I certainly hope so, at any rate!
And if this Poem of the Week has been somewhat less thesis-oriented, I think I like it better that way. I realized that a close-read is a close read, but I don't want the PotW to be an extra essay a week. I want it to be a forum for thought, for communication, and wherein my appreciation for and love of these poems can shine through. So I appreciate all of you who read this every week, or at least when you can. It really does mean so much to me! I hope that you are all doing well.
*for a picture of a watch-cap, go to this website, a random google find: http://www.royea.net/twistedrib.html
Monday, December 12, 2005
Poem of the Week 12/12/2005: Echoes
Echoes
There is a timbre of voice
that comes from not being heard
and knowing .. you are not being
heard .. noticed only
by others .. not heard
for the same reason.
The flavor of midnight fruit .. tongue
calling your body through dark light
piercing the allure of safety
ripping the glitter of silence
around you
...... dazzle me with color
...... and perhaps I won't notice
till after you're gone
your hot grain smell tattooed
into each new poem .. resonant
beyond escape .. I am listening
in that fine space
between desire and always
the grave stillness
before choice.
As my tongue unravels
in what pitch
will the scream hang unsung
or shiver like lace on the borders
of never .. recording
which dreams heal .. which
dream can kill
stabbing a man and burning his body
for cover .. being caught
making love to a woman
I do not know.
Audre Lourde 1993
Reason # 2 I am leaving Blogger come winter break: I can't put in the poetic forms with spaces - for some reason Blogger's programming language doesn't absorb the blank spaces I put in. So, if you will, please imagine that the ellipses are blank spaces. if this is hard to do, you could past the poem into Word and replace them yourself... The form is important for this poem, so I had to provide some kind of indication of it.
Alright, anyway. I can't spend too long on this poem because it's finals week, but I will put forth a few observations. (Please note that I am going to go back over winter break and fill in the PotW holes. I know that I have said this before, but it keeps being true!) This poem is, in its way, a love poem. It runs more deeply than a simple love sonnet, however. I want to offer you the fact that Audre Lourde has labeled herself a "black lesbian feminist warrior poet." Thus, the speaker is probably a woman, and the first stanza probably recalls a minority's experience. In this light, then, the poem takes on a weightier social significance - discussing the difficulties of being in a persecuted group of people, extending this to the individual (perhaps personal oppression by society has closed off the speaker's lover), and then making it relevant to the human experience.
The first stanza empathizes with perhaps a specific you (the lover) or the general you (any unheard person). It opens, "there is a timbre of voice / that comes from not being heard." I find that the choice of the word "timbre" is powerful, for it means pitch, though aurally sounds like "timber!" the logger's call for a falling tree. Thus, the voice, un-listened to, is both tremulous and destroyed. That only those who are unheard "for the same reason" can understand beings up the thought that only similar experience produces empathy. Maybe empathy is the wrong word. Understanding perhaps? In terms of empathizing with a minority - there are things one can and cannot understand, but at any experience's core, I sincerely hope that there is something any different person can pick out and empathize with. We are all in the minority in some way or another; for me, people often can't understand my complex family situations. I have had to learn, however, that it doesn't mean that they can't empathize with pieces of it. Specific experiences will of course never translate, but many of the broader emotions transcend divorces, children, or boarding school. I wonder if the thought that "nobody can understand me unless they have been through what I have" is problematic. It is self-righteous and insular, to be sure. I do not mean to devalue the importance of knowing people who *do* understand your experience because their own are common. This is essential. However, limiting oneself to those people (or perhaps opening oneself up to only those people) can be a problem as well. Is that making sense? I hope so. Email me if you want to talk more.
The second stanza moves out of this socio-emotional realm, then, entering a dark and sensual one. The "tongue / calling [her] body through dark light / piercing the allure of safety / ripping the glitter of silence" expresses the thought that intimate interaction breaks down these fear-barriers. It allows for some kind of speech, or perhaps a connection that, in the moment, does not require one. Sexual intimacy may provide a kind of communication that is easier for the lover to engage in. This stanza does not limit itself to sensuality, though; it also demonstrates the narrator's understanding of her lover. The speaker picks up on her lover's defense tactic of dazzling "with color / [so] perhaps [she] won't notice." The erotic connection is not pure and transecendant, for it, too, includes self-defense tactics.
The lover impresses herself on the narrator, seen in the lines "your hot grain smell / tattooed into each new poem." This narrator, we are beginning to see, is smitten. Even though the lover won't talk, her partner is listening. Their relationship is unsure, balanced on the thin path between desire and choice (presumably the choice about staying together).
The final stanza, then, is a question, voicing anxieties and guilt. I will have to go into this later, for finals call! But, I hope you all have a lovely rest of your day!
There is a timbre of voice
that comes from not being heard
and knowing .. you are not being
heard .. noticed only
by others .. not heard
for the same reason.
The flavor of midnight fruit .. tongue
calling your body through dark light
piercing the allure of safety
ripping the glitter of silence
around you
...... dazzle me with color
...... and perhaps I won't notice
till after you're gone
your hot grain smell tattooed
into each new poem .. resonant
beyond escape .. I am listening
in that fine space
between desire and always
the grave stillness
before choice.
As my tongue unravels
in what pitch
will the scream hang unsung
or shiver like lace on the borders
of never .. recording
which dreams heal .. which
dream can kill
stabbing a man and burning his body
for cover .. being caught
making love to a woman
I do not know.
Audre Lourde 1993
Reason # 2 I am leaving Blogger come winter break: I can't put in the poetic forms with spaces - for some reason Blogger's programming language doesn't absorb the blank spaces I put in. So, if you will, please imagine that the ellipses are blank spaces. if this is hard to do, you could past the poem into Word and replace them yourself... The form is important for this poem, so I had to provide some kind of indication of it.
Alright, anyway. I can't spend too long on this poem because it's finals week, but I will put forth a few observations. (Please note that I am going to go back over winter break and fill in the PotW holes. I know that I have said this before, but it keeps being true!) This poem is, in its way, a love poem. It runs more deeply than a simple love sonnet, however. I want to offer you the fact that Audre Lourde has labeled herself a "black lesbian feminist warrior poet." Thus, the speaker is probably a woman, and the first stanza probably recalls a minority's experience. In this light, then, the poem takes on a weightier social significance - discussing the difficulties of being in a persecuted group of people, extending this to the individual (perhaps personal oppression by society has closed off the speaker's lover), and then making it relevant to the human experience.
The first stanza empathizes with perhaps a specific you (the lover) or the general you (any unheard person). It opens, "there is a timbre of voice / that comes from not being heard." I find that the choice of the word "timbre" is powerful, for it means pitch, though aurally sounds like "timber!" the logger's call for a falling tree. Thus, the voice, un-listened to, is both tremulous and destroyed. That only those who are unheard "for the same reason" can understand beings up the thought that only similar experience produces empathy. Maybe empathy is the wrong word. Understanding perhaps? In terms of empathizing with a minority - there are things one can and cannot understand, but at any experience's core, I sincerely hope that there is something any different person can pick out and empathize with. We are all in the minority in some way or another; for me, people often can't understand my complex family situations. I have had to learn, however, that it doesn't mean that they can't empathize with pieces of it. Specific experiences will of course never translate, but many of the broader emotions transcend divorces, children, or boarding school. I wonder if the thought that "nobody can understand me unless they have been through what I have" is problematic. It is self-righteous and insular, to be sure. I do not mean to devalue the importance of knowing people who *do* understand your experience because their own are common. This is essential. However, limiting oneself to those people (or perhaps opening oneself up to only those people) can be a problem as well. Is that making sense? I hope so. Email me if you want to talk more.
The second stanza moves out of this socio-emotional realm, then, entering a dark and sensual one. The "tongue / calling [her] body through dark light / piercing the allure of safety / ripping the glitter of silence" expresses the thought that intimate interaction breaks down these fear-barriers. It allows for some kind of speech, or perhaps a connection that, in the moment, does not require one. Sexual intimacy may provide a kind of communication that is easier for the lover to engage in. This stanza does not limit itself to sensuality, though; it also demonstrates the narrator's understanding of her lover. The speaker picks up on her lover's defense tactic of dazzling "with color / [so] perhaps [she] won't notice." The erotic connection is not pure and transecendant, for it, too, includes self-defense tactics.
The lover impresses herself on the narrator, seen in the lines "your hot grain smell / tattooed into each new poem." This narrator, we are beginning to see, is smitten. Even though the lover won't talk, her partner is listening. Their relationship is unsure, balanced on the thin path between desire and choice (presumably the choice about staying together).
The final stanza, then, is a question, voicing anxieties and guilt. I will have to go into this later, for finals call! But, I hope you all have a lovely rest of your day!
Monday, December 05, 2005
Poem of the Week 12/5/2005: The Dowser
The Dowser*
With my forked branch of Lebanese cedar
I quarter the dunes like downs and guide
an invisible plough far over the sand.
But how to quarter such shifting acres
when the wind melts their shapes, and shadows
mass where all was bright before,
and landmarks walk like wraiths at noon?
All I know is that underneath,
how many miles no one can say,
an unbroken water-table waits
like a lake; it has seen no bird or sail
in its long darkness, and no man;
not even pharaohs dug so far
for all their thirst, or thirst of glory,
or thrust-power of ten thousand slaves.
I tell you I can smell it though,
that water. I am old and black
and I know the manners of the sun
which makes me bend, not break. I lose
my ghostly footprints without complaint.
I put every mirage in its place.
I watch the lizard make its lace.
Like one not quite blind I go
feeling for the sunken face.
So hot the days, the nights so cold,
I gather my white rags and sigh
but sighing step so steadily
that any vibrance in so deep
a lake would never fail to rise
towards the snowy cedar's bait.
Great desert, let your sweetness wake.
Edwin Morgan 1986
*Someone who searches for underground streams by holding a forked branch of cedar or hazel, which twitches when it is above water. A "water-table" (line 10) is the level to which underground water rises.
Oh isn't it exciting to find a poet one is drawn to? There is something about this poem that is mesmerising, though perhaps I am in a frame of mind to be lulled into a supernatural poem's world (I have the Rime of the Ancient Mariner perched atop my thoughts). This is another poem that would be helpful to read out loud; like P.K. Page's "Deaf Mute in a Pear Tree," "The Dowser" exists as an aural piece of art. My Norton Anthology tells me that Morgan has been noted for his creative use of form; I glanced at the MLA International Bibliography to see what kind of work is out there on him and found that he has written a lot of science fiction poetry. He is also a translator, which implies that he has a strong literary command of several languages.
I am interested, in this Poem of the Week, in discussing who the dowser may or may not be and how Morgan achieves the poem's rhetorical artistry. This control is achingly evident throughout the poem; the rhythm and rhyme shift almost organically throughout the poem, perhaps mirroring the seething desert sands. I will discuss this more at length.
In the title and the beginning, we learn that this is a dowser's take. He walks across the desert all day with a forked piece of cedar searching for underground water. Morgan, with the reference to Lebanese cedar, refers to the famous Cedars of Lebanon, out of which King Solomon's palace was entirely built. This helps establish a sense of place; this desert is Egyptian (a claim that the reference to pharoahs later confirms). So far, so good. He then refers to himself as a farmer; this could be confusing (I would hardly call dowsing harvesting water or growing it), but this may refer to the fact that his day to day job involves working with the land.
The next couple lines are perplexing to me. The dowser informs us that "I quarter the dunes like downs... But how to quarter such shifting acres / when the wind melts their shapes, and shadows / mass where all was bright before / and landmarks walk like wraiths at noon?" He first says that he quarters the dunes, digresses for a moment, and comes back asking *how* to quarter them. And then he never provides an answer, which indicates that he does not know how to geographically map the desert, or lay one's bounds across it. (This hole in logic is a good indication in any poem to keep that detail in mind. I usually take these little rends in the poetic fabric as indications that there is something that needs to be patched up. I will come back to this idea of "quartering" the desert). The land, like the dowser, thwarts its assumed identity, for it is a supernatural place. One might almost call it super-supernatural, for the wraiths here do not need the cover of night in which to wander about; they walk at noon.
What the dowser does know, however, is that beneath the sands, "how many miles no one can say, / an unbroken water-table waits / like a lake." Water, perhaps a symbol of fertility and life, exists in plentitude under the parched and choking surface of the earth. It is curious that he refers to the water table as "unbroken," for this means that he has actually failed at his job. If nobody has tapped this water table from the time of the pharoahs, he hasn't found an easy-to-tap place for the water, either.
The pharoahs' presence in the poem is a little odd, as well. After all, weren't we talking about harvesting water? I suggest that the dowser, in telling this story, reveals part of his function. The speaker appears to be an eternal, quasi-immortal being traversing a shifting, mysterious landscape. He is almost a catalouger of the desert, a historian of the sands. His reference to the pharoahs hints at the mythic, ancient knowledge he has of this place. Furthermore, he refers to his "ghostly footprints," and calls the desert to wake at the end of the poem. Thus, we may return to the idea of quartering the desert. To quarter something means to establish it, to find the way it lies. But, in an unstable landscape, this is not possible. Thus, its true shape may be internal, intangible. Thus, I suggest that "quartering" the desert means understanding it. His job is to search the desert, to experience it, and to recognise its value.
He describes his process of understanding the desert, saying "I put every mirage in its place. / I watch the lizard make its lace. / Like one not quite blind I go / feeling for the sunken face." He tracks the mirages and biological events in the desert, searching them out always with a belief in the sweetness, in the life-giving essence of the desert. Does this idea of his affection for the desert feel like a stretch? I think not - he accepts his trials there "without complaint", perhaps because he believes in the rightness of his actions. When he says "I tell you I can smell it though, / that water," he asserts his literal sensual belief in the goodness of the desert.
I am not sure if I would want to write a paper on this idea, but I have "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" on my mind, which is a poem of the imagination. One can't take it literally (I am having to learn), and so to read it, one has to simply open oneself up to it. This poem works in some of the same ways - we have a wandering, quasi-immortal creature telling us his lonely story and a spectral, shifting landscape. The way to take important thoughts away from it is to throw your imagination into it full-force. Imagine his steps sending out vibrations meant to wake the richness of the desert, the deep black of his skin against the whiteness of his rags, his hot and cold nights, and the well-worn cedar from far away he carries around. Even writing that, more questions come up - how did he get this cedar branch? How have his rags stayed white in the dusty, sweaty desert? Just somethings to think about.
I have a lot more to say about this poem - what if it is an allegory for love, for trying to get to know a person and loving them wholeheartedly? Morgan has a rich (and breathtaking) array of love poems - read "Strawberries" if you come across it - or email me and I will email it to you. At any rate, I have to leave this where it is for the shifting sands of calculus.
With my forked branch of Lebanese cedar
I quarter the dunes like downs and guide
an invisible plough far over the sand.
But how to quarter such shifting acres
when the wind melts their shapes, and shadows
mass where all was bright before,
and landmarks walk like wraiths at noon?
All I know is that underneath,
how many miles no one can say,
an unbroken water-table waits
like a lake; it has seen no bird or sail
in its long darkness, and no man;
not even pharaohs dug so far
for all their thirst, or thirst of glory,
or thrust-power of ten thousand slaves.
I tell you I can smell it though,
that water. I am old and black
and I know the manners of the sun
which makes me bend, not break. I lose
my ghostly footprints without complaint.
I put every mirage in its place.
I watch the lizard make its lace.
Like one not quite blind I go
feeling for the sunken face.
So hot the days, the nights so cold,
I gather my white rags and sigh
but sighing step so steadily
that any vibrance in so deep
a lake would never fail to rise
towards the snowy cedar's bait.
Great desert, let your sweetness wake.
Edwin Morgan 1986
*Someone who searches for underground streams by holding a forked branch of cedar or hazel, which twitches when it is above water. A "water-table" (line 10) is the level to which underground water rises.
Oh isn't it exciting to find a poet one is drawn to? There is something about this poem that is mesmerising, though perhaps I am in a frame of mind to be lulled into a supernatural poem's world (I have the Rime of the Ancient Mariner perched atop my thoughts). This is another poem that would be helpful to read out loud; like P.K. Page's "Deaf Mute in a Pear Tree," "The Dowser" exists as an aural piece of art. My Norton Anthology tells me that Morgan has been noted for his creative use of form; I glanced at the MLA International Bibliography to see what kind of work is out there on him and found that he has written a lot of science fiction poetry. He is also a translator, which implies that he has a strong literary command of several languages.
I am interested, in this Poem of the Week, in discussing who the dowser may or may not be and how Morgan achieves the poem's rhetorical artistry. This control is achingly evident throughout the poem; the rhythm and rhyme shift almost organically throughout the poem, perhaps mirroring the seething desert sands. I will discuss this more at length.
In the title and the beginning, we learn that this is a dowser's take. He walks across the desert all day with a forked piece of cedar searching for underground water. Morgan, with the reference to Lebanese cedar, refers to the famous Cedars of Lebanon, out of which King Solomon's palace was entirely built. This helps establish a sense of place; this desert is Egyptian (a claim that the reference to pharoahs later confirms). So far, so good. He then refers to himself as a farmer; this could be confusing (I would hardly call dowsing harvesting water or growing it), but this may refer to the fact that his day to day job involves working with the land.
The next couple lines are perplexing to me. The dowser informs us that "I quarter the dunes like downs... But how to quarter such shifting acres / when the wind melts their shapes, and shadows / mass where all was bright before / and landmarks walk like wraiths at noon?" He first says that he quarters the dunes, digresses for a moment, and comes back asking *how* to quarter them. And then he never provides an answer, which indicates that he does not know how to geographically map the desert, or lay one's bounds across it. (This hole in logic is a good indication in any poem to keep that detail in mind. I usually take these little rends in the poetic fabric as indications that there is something that needs to be patched up. I will come back to this idea of "quartering" the desert). The land, like the dowser, thwarts its assumed identity, for it is a supernatural place. One might almost call it super-supernatural, for the wraiths here do not need the cover of night in which to wander about; they walk at noon.
What the dowser does know, however, is that beneath the sands, "how many miles no one can say, / an unbroken water-table waits / like a lake." Water, perhaps a symbol of fertility and life, exists in plentitude under the parched and choking surface of the earth. It is curious that he refers to the water table as "unbroken," for this means that he has actually failed at his job. If nobody has tapped this water table from the time of the pharoahs, he hasn't found an easy-to-tap place for the water, either.
The pharoahs' presence in the poem is a little odd, as well. After all, weren't we talking about harvesting water? I suggest that the dowser, in telling this story, reveals part of his function. The speaker appears to be an eternal, quasi-immortal being traversing a shifting, mysterious landscape. He is almost a catalouger of the desert, a historian of the sands. His reference to the pharoahs hints at the mythic, ancient knowledge he has of this place. Furthermore, he refers to his "ghostly footprints," and calls the desert to wake at the end of the poem. Thus, we may return to the idea of quartering the desert. To quarter something means to establish it, to find the way it lies. But, in an unstable landscape, this is not possible. Thus, its true shape may be internal, intangible. Thus, I suggest that "quartering" the desert means understanding it. His job is to search the desert, to experience it, and to recognise its value.
He describes his process of understanding the desert, saying "I put every mirage in its place. / I watch the lizard make its lace. / Like one not quite blind I go / feeling for the sunken face." He tracks the mirages and biological events in the desert, searching them out always with a belief in the sweetness, in the life-giving essence of the desert. Does this idea of his affection for the desert feel like a stretch? I think not - he accepts his trials there "without complaint", perhaps because he believes in the rightness of his actions. When he says "I tell you I can smell it though, / that water," he asserts his literal sensual belief in the goodness of the desert.
I am not sure if I would want to write a paper on this idea, but I have "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" on my mind, which is a poem of the imagination. One can't take it literally (I am having to learn), and so to read it, one has to simply open oneself up to it. This poem works in some of the same ways - we have a wandering, quasi-immortal creature telling us his lonely story and a spectral, shifting landscape. The way to take important thoughts away from it is to throw your imagination into it full-force. Imagine his steps sending out vibrations meant to wake the richness of the desert, the deep black of his skin against the whiteness of his rags, his hot and cold nights, and the well-worn cedar from far away he carries around. Even writing that, more questions come up - how did he get this cedar branch? How have his rags stayed white in the dusty, sweaty desert? Just somethings to think about.
I have a lot more to say about this poem - what if it is an allegory for love, for trying to get to know a person and loving them wholeheartedly? Morgan has a rich (and breathtaking) array of love poems - read "Strawberries" if you come across it - or email me and I will email it to you. At any rate, I have to leave this where it is for the shifting sands of calculus.
Monday, November 28, 2005
Poem of the Week 11/28/2005: My Grandmother's Love Letters
My Grandmother's Love Letters
There are no stars to-night
But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is
In the loose girdle of soft rain.
There is even room enough
For the letters of my mother's mother,
Elizabeth,
That have been pressed so long
Into a corner of the roof
That they are brown and soft,
And liable to melt as snow.
Over the greatness of such space
Steps must be gentle.
It is all hung by an invisible white hair.
It trembles as birtch limbs webbing the air.
And I ask myself:
"Are your fingers long enough to play
Old keys that are but echoes:
Is the silence strong enough
To carry back the music to its source
And back to you again
As though to her?"
Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand
Through much of what she would not understand;
And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof
With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.
Hart Crane 1926
Hello Friends and Family - I am sorry that I never finished the last poem of the week; this one may not be completed either, for finals are beginning to bear down. But I will update you all over my Winter Break as to which poems I have finished (there will be many, I hope). Anyway, on to "My Grandmother's Love Letters". The poem is a journey rather than a circle, a process instead of a cross-section of time. This episode tells of a failure to connect with the past, or of a failure to hold on to a person. It deals with dissolution, though not harsh or nihilistic dissolution. Rather, it concerns a sad ending, something just out of reach. Also, I just noticed that the structure of this poem is rather like Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "conversation poems", wherein he begins discussing the surrounding natural world, goes into a thoughtful tangent, and returns to the natural world with a new perspective.
The first three stanzas establish the delicacy of the situation, the necessity to tread softly and carefully around the grandmother's precious memories. The narrator begins with a clean slate of sorts in discussing her surroundings. She contemplates, that "there are no stars" and that the rain gently encloses her. This establishes the privacy and openness needed to look so intimately into the past. (I am choosing a female narrator, but there is no indication one way or the other, so you are free to select whomever you like; I like the idea that these letters are a woman's inheritance, but it does not matter. Pick for yourself.) This kind of blankness, she seems to be saying, effaces the outside world, encouraging interiority. There is safety and gentleness in the image of a "loose girdle", as if the weather will clothe and protect the sensitive inner world.
This natural space, she notes, even provides enough breathing room for something very special, Elizabeth's love letters. Setting the name "Elizabeth" alone in its line emphasizes the grandmother's singularity and importance. One must hold on to the letters to hold on to her, at least while they survive. They are "liable to melt as snow", revealing the delicacy of looking at her grandmother's love letters. The diction here is again soft and careful and quiet. Words like "pressed," "brown," "snow", and indeed "soft" itself reiterate that this is a private intrusion.
The next lines, "over the greatness of such space / steps must be gentle", voices, refrain-like, this same idea. That there is a "greatness" to this space implies both a vastness and an extraordinariness to the past and, even more, to age. The next two lines are almost painfully aware of the grandmother's decrepit state; the "white hair" is an obvious link to old age while the trembling tree limbs connote muscular deterioration. These references to old age add another dimension; this situation is not simply delicate because it is so ephemeral, but perhaps because experience (of any variety) deserves respect.
***Alright - I have to leave you here. So that you have some clue to my thoughts about the somewhat surprising end of this poem, I will sum up the rest of my thoughts on "My Grandmother's Love Letters":
~The first part of the fourth stanza is odd, for it reads like a conversation while it is only one person. This approach reveals the narrator's self-doubt. Perhaps the love letters are too important to attempt to understand. Reading the letters *requires* so much imagination and such deep empathy that to fall short is to melt the letters like snow, to clomp and stamp all over a person's identity and life.
~The end of the poem, then, reflects this defeat. The narrator believes that she (the speaker) cannot let go of enough of herself to fully experience what her grandmother did. She would distort her grandmother's memory.
~Thus the rain, once a protector of the inner self, serenely mocks the narrator's self-ishness, not because the rain is bad, but because the narrator realizes that she cannot take advantage of the open environment.
Okay - pieces of that may change tomorrow, for I am very tired now, so until next update...***
There are no stars to-night
But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is
In the loose girdle of soft rain.
There is even room enough
For the letters of my mother's mother,
Elizabeth,
That have been pressed so long
Into a corner of the roof
That they are brown and soft,
And liable to melt as snow.
Over the greatness of such space
Steps must be gentle.
It is all hung by an invisible white hair.
It trembles as birtch limbs webbing the air.
And I ask myself:
"Are your fingers long enough to play
Old keys that are but echoes:
Is the silence strong enough
To carry back the music to its source
And back to you again
As though to her?"
Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand
Through much of what she would not understand;
And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof
With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.
Hart Crane 1926
Hello Friends and Family - I am sorry that I never finished the last poem of the week; this one may not be completed either, for finals are beginning to bear down. But I will update you all over my Winter Break as to which poems I have finished (there will be many, I hope). Anyway, on to "My Grandmother's Love Letters". The poem is a journey rather than a circle, a process instead of a cross-section of time. This episode tells of a failure to connect with the past, or of a failure to hold on to a person. It deals with dissolution, though not harsh or nihilistic dissolution. Rather, it concerns a sad ending, something just out of reach. Also, I just noticed that the structure of this poem is rather like Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "conversation poems", wherein he begins discussing the surrounding natural world, goes into a thoughtful tangent, and returns to the natural world with a new perspective.
The first three stanzas establish the delicacy of the situation, the necessity to tread softly and carefully around the grandmother's precious memories. The narrator begins with a clean slate of sorts in discussing her surroundings. She contemplates, that "there are no stars" and that the rain gently encloses her. This establishes the privacy and openness needed to look so intimately into the past. (I am choosing a female narrator, but there is no indication one way or the other, so you are free to select whomever you like; I like the idea that these letters are a woman's inheritance, but it does not matter. Pick for yourself.) This kind of blankness, she seems to be saying, effaces the outside world, encouraging interiority. There is safety and gentleness in the image of a "loose girdle", as if the weather will clothe and protect the sensitive inner world.
This natural space, she notes, even provides enough breathing room for something very special, Elizabeth's love letters. Setting the name "Elizabeth" alone in its line emphasizes the grandmother's singularity and importance. One must hold on to the letters to hold on to her, at least while they survive. They are "liable to melt as snow", revealing the delicacy of looking at her grandmother's love letters. The diction here is again soft and careful and quiet. Words like "pressed," "brown," "snow", and indeed "soft" itself reiterate that this is a private intrusion.
The next lines, "over the greatness of such space / steps must be gentle", voices, refrain-like, this same idea. That there is a "greatness" to this space implies both a vastness and an extraordinariness to the past and, even more, to age. The next two lines are almost painfully aware of the grandmother's decrepit state; the "white hair" is an obvious link to old age while the trembling tree limbs connote muscular deterioration. These references to old age add another dimension; this situation is not simply delicate because it is so ephemeral, but perhaps because experience (of any variety) deserves respect.
***Alright - I have to leave you here. So that you have some clue to my thoughts about the somewhat surprising end of this poem, I will sum up the rest of my thoughts on "My Grandmother's Love Letters":
~The first part of the fourth stanza is odd, for it reads like a conversation while it is only one person. This approach reveals the narrator's self-doubt. Perhaps the love letters are too important to attempt to understand. Reading the letters *requires* so much imagination and such deep empathy that to fall short is to melt the letters like snow, to clomp and stamp all over a person's identity and life.
~The end of the poem, then, reflects this defeat. The narrator believes that she (the speaker) cannot let go of enough of herself to fully experience what her grandmother did. She would distort her grandmother's memory.
~Thus the rain, once a protector of the inner self, serenely mocks the narrator's self-ishness, not because the rain is bad, but because the narrator realizes that she cannot take advantage of the open environment.
Okay - pieces of that may change tomorrow, for I am very tired now, so until next update...***
Monday, November 21, 2005
Poem of the Week 11/21/2005: Losing a Language
Losing a Language
A breath leaves the sentences and does not come back
yet the old still remember something that they could say
but they know now that such things are no longer believed
and the young have fewer words
many of the things the words were about
no longer exist
the noun for standing in mist by a haunted tree
the verb for I
the children will not repeat
the phrases their parents speak
somebody has persuaded them
that it is better to say everything differently
so that they can be admired somewhere
farther and farther away
where nothing that is here is known
we have little to say to each other
we are wrong and dark
in the eyes of the new owners
the radio is incomprehensible
the day is glass
when there is a voice at the door it is foreign
everywhere instead of a name there is a lie
nobody has seen it happening
nobody remembers
this is what the words were made
to prophesy
here are the extinct feathers
here is the rain we saw
W.S. Merwin 1988
This poem is a reflection poem. It is meant to be read and meant to be thought about - one of those poems that follows you around and springs on you as you read the paper, as you sit in class, as you surf the internet. It has a clear and deep cry, one that resonates on many levels. I remember being much younger and being so happy to hear of the scholars compiling language tapes of dying languages. To me, for whom language is as important as almost anything (as it is, surely, to many; we learned in my AP Human Geography class that language is the #1 feature by which a culture identifies itself), the idea of losing my language is akin to losing an arm or a leg or a lung. On a little journaling explosion on Halloween, I thought a lot about what poetry means to me, and I wrote that sometimes, when I am reading, the poem fills me up until I can no longer tell what is hand and what is word. Even that thought spilled out as a jumble of poem and self - "You Begin" by Margaret Atwood is one of my deep-rooted poems, as I think I mentioned last time. But I am rambling.
The poem illustrates language as a key component of identity. Language, after all, provides structural expressions of our selves, our cultures, and our beliefs. In Merwin’s “Losing a Language,” the narrator reflects on language as spiritual, emotional, cultural, and personal. It ties humans to place; without it, life is dull, cold, and brittle.
The form, to begin, implies dissolution, endings, and disintegration. After all, Merwin uses no punctuation and no capital letters, save the first. This seems an almost half-hearted attempt to employ English grammatical conventions, a gesture that he is aware of them, even if they rust unused. His choice here reflects the grandparents' decision to not say the things that they know. The visual form even looks like it is falling apart. Made only of short, unrhymed couplets, the poem seems to be barely holding together, just as a language slips away.
The first line establishes language as a living being, or almost. Breath leaving a sentence at once implies a spoken phrase and a breathing, animate one. It is a delicate being, and suffers when the old choose not to say it. Merwin writes that they "could say" the words, signifying that they do not. The line "they know now that such things are not to be believed" is interesting, for it seems to say that language and meaning require faith; words here are almost a spiritual entity.
Then, too, that "the young have fewer words" implies that they have less; their language (and presumably lives) are streamlined. The third couplet builds on this thought, implying that, as language is compressed, certain elements of it are squeezed out. Since "many of the things the words were about / no longer exist," the death of language accompanies death of meaning, culture, and experience, listed in the next couplet. With the fading of the words, so, too, has the mystical experience of "standing in mist by a haunted tree." To me, this line connotes reflection, the unknown, deep-seeded faith, and a tingle of fear. It reminds me of a feeling I get in certain places, the sense that everyone who has ever walked across those bricks or laughed on that bench or waited beneath the tree is actually there, embedded invisibly in the place. Losing the experience of a place through language is to lose every story that has ever unfolded under the haunted tree.
The narrator next notes that that there was once a “verb for I”. Its loss implies a dissolution of a version of self wherein change is acceptable. And it provokes the thought of how one would use the verb for I. Could one "I" things? This action recalls the interior application of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: that, in experiencing things, seeing them, or interacting with them, one necessarily affects them, at least to the self.
Next, Merwin folds in a sense of disrespect in losing the language, writing that "the children will not repeat / the phrases their parents speak." We learn, however, that they are only following "somebody [who] has persuaded them / that it is better to say everything differently." It seems almost scornful to speak "differently," for "differently" implies that it is preferable to speak in *any* other way than in the ancestral language. Furthermore, the ambiguity of the noun "somebody" allows this convincer to be anyone from a child on the playground to the media to society itself.
The children listen to this somebody, then, "so that they can be admired somewhere / farther and farther away." To begin, this motivation seems hollow against the power and spirituality of the haunted tree and the verb for I. I find that the idea of admirability, or (more plainly) coolness, attached to linguistic pressure fascinating, because it touches on so much human motivation. We are social creatures, first and foremost; a child will adopt its peers' accent instead of its parents', if the accents are different. The narrator also suggests that coolness is insular, for it goes hand in hand with the kids being "farther and farther away." This is the first time, too, we get the sense of foreginness the end of the poem is so conscious of.
Before this continues, note that the the narrator is actually a "we", and not in the "royal we" sense of the word, but in the communal, societal sense of it. A group of people is relating its deep and ubiquituous ache. I know that the "we" could simply be one person telling her experiences, but the communal idea works well within the poem and, to me, has a stronger impact.
The line "where nothing that is here is known" moves the speakers to a foregin place. It reminds me of a line from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, where the wise, ancient character, when asked how he learned the news from far away, replies "Everything is known." To me, this has always meant (on one level, at least) that human knowledge is held in a larger consciousness, and, if we can teach ourselves to sense it, we may draw from it. In this sense, losing a language entails a diminishment of the human consciousness, for, with the loss of the verb for I and the haunted tree, for example, the amount known in the world lessens. Of course, that is a very personal connection; it was probably not an intentional allusion, but it works within the frame of the poem and enriches my read of it. Just a little justification.
At any rate, the next line "we have little to say to each other" shows that the connection within a community fail as does a language. Not only do the group-members (family, town, society, culture) have little to say to one another, content-wise, they have literally little language with which to say it. Only scraps of a foregin language remain for them to use.
The next two lines actually appropriate the new owners' language system, for the speakers call themselves "wrong" and "dark". Not only has language dissipated, but people's sense of self-worth has crumbled as well. Also, the word "owners" begs the question: owners of what? They may own language, power, the old culture, the sway of children's minds, the building in which the speakers live etc. Ownership implies a kind of slavery, almost; this read works well with "wrong" and "dark," and implies that their minds are now slaves to the new language.
I was talking with my housemate last night about the line “the day is glass,” and, having slept on the conversation, have come to the thought that this is the central metaphor for a life without one’s own language. Day is still visible and clear, but it is insulated, brittle, cold, and sharp. Gloria suggested that glass implies television, which in turn connotes passivity. The day is no longer a space in which to live; it is an ailing region in which life flies by without truth, without reality. Even the neighbors are estranged, for "when there is a voice at the door it is foregin", and "everywhere instead of a name there is a lie." With this line, I am imagining scraps of understanding fluttering overhear cloaked in the new language while the rest of life whirls about, blurred and confused.
The poem ends with a hearbreak like shattered glass, with the kind of knowing ending that is so tragic. The lines "this is what the words were made / to prophesy" tells us that this culture had an entire set of creation and apocalyptic myths. They new it was coming, and yet that doesn't make it any easier for the inhabitants. The end of the poem feels like a true end, and as wretched as one as well. Not all endings are grevious, of course; most lead into new and brighter things. With this poem, however, the end of a language is an extinction. It is the termination of a species, of thousands and millions of years of buildup, of consciousness, of experience and emotion and love. That the poem ends looking to the past, to "the rain we saw", signals that there will be no future. The language is lost, and a silent, aching grief has taken its place.
A breath leaves the sentences and does not come back
yet the old still remember something that they could say
but they know now that such things are no longer believed
and the young have fewer words
many of the things the words were about
no longer exist
the noun for standing in mist by a haunted tree
the verb for I
the children will not repeat
the phrases their parents speak
somebody has persuaded them
that it is better to say everything differently
so that they can be admired somewhere
farther and farther away
where nothing that is here is known
we have little to say to each other
we are wrong and dark
in the eyes of the new owners
the radio is incomprehensible
the day is glass
when there is a voice at the door it is foreign
everywhere instead of a name there is a lie
nobody has seen it happening
nobody remembers
this is what the words were made
to prophesy
here are the extinct feathers
here is the rain we saw
W.S. Merwin 1988
This poem is a reflection poem. It is meant to be read and meant to be thought about - one of those poems that follows you around and springs on you as you read the paper, as you sit in class, as you surf the internet. It has a clear and deep cry, one that resonates on many levels. I remember being much younger and being so happy to hear of the scholars compiling language tapes of dying languages. To me, for whom language is as important as almost anything (as it is, surely, to many; we learned in my AP Human Geography class that language is the #1 feature by which a culture identifies itself), the idea of losing my language is akin to losing an arm or a leg or a lung. On a little journaling explosion on Halloween, I thought a lot about what poetry means to me, and I wrote that sometimes, when I am reading, the poem fills me up until I can no longer tell what is hand and what is word. Even that thought spilled out as a jumble of poem and self - "You Begin" by Margaret Atwood is one of my deep-rooted poems, as I think I mentioned last time. But I am rambling.
The poem illustrates language as a key component of identity. Language, after all, provides structural expressions of our selves, our cultures, and our beliefs. In Merwin’s “Losing a Language,” the narrator reflects on language as spiritual, emotional, cultural, and personal. It ties humans to place; without it, life is dull, cold, and brittle.
The form, to begin, implies dissolution, endings, and disintegration. After all, Merwin uses no punctuation and no capital letters, save the first. This seems an almost half-hearted attempt to employ English grammatical conventions, a gesture that he is aware of them, even if they rust unused. His choice here reflects the grandparents' decision to not say the things that they know. The visual form even looks like it is falling apart. Made only of short, unrhymed couplets, the poem seems to be barely holding together, just as a language slips away.
The first line establishes language as a living being, or almost. Breath leaving a sentence at once implies a spoken phrase and a breathing, animate one. It is a delicate being, and suffers when the old choose not to say it. Merwin writes that they "could say" the words, signifying that they do not. The line "they know now that such things are not to be believed" is interesting, for it seems to say that language and meaning require faith; words here are almost a spiritual entity.
Then, too, that "the young have fewer words" implies that they have less; their language (and presumably lives) are streamlined. The third couplet builds on this thought, implying that, as language is compressed, certain elements of it are squeezed out. Since "many of the things the words were about / no longer exist," the death of language accompanies death of meaning, culture, and experience, listed in the next couplet. With the fading of the words, so, too, has the mystical experience of "standing in mist by a haunted tree." To me, this line connotes reflection, the unknown, deep-seeded faith, and a tingle of fear. It reminds me of a feeling I get in certain places, the sense that everyone who has ever walked across those bricks or laughed on that bench or waited beneath the tree is actually there, embedded invisibly in the place. Losing the experience of a place through language is to lose every story that has ever unfolded under the haunted tree.
The narrator next notes that that there was once a “verb for I”. Its loss implies a dissolution of a version of self wherein change is acceptable. And it provokes the thought of how one would use the verb for I. Could one "I" things? This action recalls the interior application of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: that, in experiencing things, seeing them, or interacting with them, one necessarily affects them, at least to the self.
Next, Merwin folds in a sense of disrespect in losing the language, writing that "the children will not repeat / the phrases their parents speak." We learn, however, that they are only following "somebody [who] has persuaded them / that it is better to say everything differently." It seems almost scornful to speak "differently," for "differently" implies that it is preferable to speak in *any* other way than in the ancestral language. Furthermore, the ambiguity of the noun "somebody" allows this convincer to be anyone from a child on the playground to the media to society itself.
The children listen to this somebody, then, "so that they can be admired somewhere / farther and farther away." To begin, this motivation seems hollow against the power and spirituality of the haunted tree and the verb for I. I find that the idea of admirability, or (more plainly) coolness, attached to linguistic pressure fascinating, because it touches on so much human motivation. We are social creatures, first and foremost; a child will adopt its peers' accent instead of its parents', if the accents are different. The narrator also suggests that coolness is insular, for it goes hand in hand with the kids being "farther and farther away." This is the first time, too, we get the sense of foreginness the end of the poem is so conscious of.
Before this continues, note that the the narrator is actually a "we", and not in the "royal we" sense of the word, but in the communal, societal sense of it. A group of people is relating its deep and ubiquituous ache. I know that the "we" could simply be one person telling her experiences, but the communal idea works well within the poem and, to me, has a stronger impact.
The line "where nothing that is here is known" moves the speakers to a foregin place. It reminds me of a line from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, where the wise, ancient character, when asked how he learned the news from far away, replies "Everything is known." To me, this has always meant (on one level, at least) that human knowledge is held in a larger consciousness, and, if we can teach ourselves to sense it, we may draw from it. In this sense, losing a language entails a diminishment of the human consciousness, for, with the loss of the verb for I and the haunted tree, for example, the amount known in the world lessens. Of course, that is a very personal connection; it was probably not an intentional allusion, but it works within the frame of the poem and enriches my read of it. Just a little justification.
At any rate, the next line "we have little to say to each other" shows that the connection within a community fail as does a language. Not only do the group-members (family, town, society, culture) have little to say to one another, content-wise, they have literally little language with which to say it. Only scraps of a foregin language remain for them to use.
The next two lines actually appropriate the new owners' language system, for the speakers call themselves "wrong" and "dark". Not only has language dissipated, but people's sense of self-worth has crumbled as well. Also, the word "owners" begs the question: owners of what? They may own language, power, the old culture, the sway of children's minds, the building in which the speakers live etc. Ownership implies a kind of slavery, almost; this read works well with "wrong" and "dark," and implies that their minds are now slaves to the new language.
I was talking with my housemate last night about the line “the day is glass,” and, having slept on the conversation, have come to the thought that this is the central metaphor for a life without one’s own language. Day is still visible and clear, but it is insulated, brittle, cold, and sharp. Gloria suggested that glass implies television, which in turn connotes passivity. The day is no longer a space in which to live; it is an ailing region in which life flies by without truth, without reality. Even the neighbors are estranged, for "when there is a voice at the door it is foregin", and "everywhere instead of a name there is a lie." With this line, I am imagining scraps of understanding fluttering overhear cloaked in the new language while the rest of life whirls about, blurred and confused.
The poem ends with a hearbreak like shattered glass, with the kind of knowing ending that is so tragic. The lines "this is what the words were made / to prophesy" tells us that this culture had an entire set of creation and apocalyptic myths. They new it was coming, and yet that doesn't make it any easier for the inhabitants. The end of the poem feels like a true end, and as wretched as one as well. Not all endings are grevious, of course; most lead into new and brighter things. With this poem, however, the end of a language is an extinction. It is the termination of a species, of thousands and millions of years of buildup, of consciousness, of experience and emotion and love. That the poem ends looking to the past, to "the rain we saw", signals that there will be no future. The language is lost, and a silent, aching grief has taken its place.
Monday, November 14, 2005
Poem of the Week 11/14/2005: From "Europe: A Prophecy"
From "Europe: A Prophecy", Plate 9(b)
There stand the venerable porches that high-towering rear
Their oak-surrounded pillars, form’d of massy stones, uncut
With tool, stones precious; such eternal in the heavens,
Of colours twelve, few known on earth, give light in the opake,
Plac’d in the order of the stars, when the five senses whelmed
In deluge o’er the earth-born man; then turn’d the fluxile eyes
Into two stationary orbs, concentrating all things,
The ever-varying spiral ascents to the heavens of heavens
Were bended downward; and the nostrils golden gates shut
Turn’d outward, barr’d and petrify’d against the infinite.
Thought chang’d the infinite to a serpent; that which pitieth;
To a devouring flame; and man fled from its face and hid
In forests of night; then all the eternal forests were divided
Into earths rolling in circles of space, that line an ocean rush’d
And overwhelmed all except this finite wall of flesh.
Then was the serpent temple form’d, image of infinite
Shut up in finite revolutions, and man became an Angel;
Heaven a mighty circle turning; God a tyrant crown’d.
William Blake 1794
I don’t usually choose poems that we are working on in class for the Poem of the Week, because it seems unfair, too easy. I don’t want to report on class, I want to look at them without any outside influence. This excerpt from Blake’s marvelous Europe: A Prophecy is an exception, though, because it is among the most beautiful things I have ever read, if not the most beautiful thing. Right up there with the end of The Great Gastby, the end of Love in the Time of Cholera, “You Begin” by Margaret Atwood, and the Thirteenth Book of Wordsworth’s The Prelude. I write those down because you should all take a look at those if you get a chance – they are all breathtaking, literally. When I first read this passage, I had to stop and read it five or six more times; I was awestruck, literally, but didn’t have an idea concerning the swirling celestial imager’s meaning. Thanks mainly to class and (to some extent) an accidental ownership of several critical works on Blake, I have basically been able to parse out what he’s saying. It is no less beautiful than the words themselves.
Here goes.
The poem opens discussing a Druidic temple in “golden Verulam”, a reference that I have not included above. Its specific character is relevant in discussing this small portion of text, and it may ease any confusion about what the “oak-surrounded pillars” and “venerable porches” refer to. The important piece to know is that it was built, if I am reading it correctly, when man was first brought into physical form. A translation of the first several lines would read “they placed in the shapes of constellations twelve stones of colors unknown to man at the time when the sensual world flooded man”. Blake uses the word “whelm” to point out that man was overcome with the five senses, losing his balance with the universe. They flooded him in a “deluge” and limited his sight. “Fluxile eyes” indicates that the eyes were, at one time, capable of seeing more of the heavens. Now, they are reductive and “concentrate all things”. This is, essentially, a description of the Fall from Eden.
Blake, we learned in class, read man’s fall from Eden as a tumble from the infinite to the finite. Our senses limit us, contain us, yes, though they are by no means bad, as a glance at this passage might lead one to believe. Rather, they can be expanded upon and taught to see, hear, feel, taste, and touch infinity in the particular. Organized religion, however, suppresses the senses’ capability to feel the joy dancing through all the earth. This passage clearly demonstrates that Blake appreciates the senses; nostrils have “golden gates” and the eyes are “orbs”. Sensuality seems negative here because it has been shut to the greater spiritual world, seen when Blake writes, “the ever-varying spiral ascents to the heavens of heavens / Were bended downward”. The onset of Druidic religion shrinks man’s world and stifles the infinite, that which is most awful (in the old sense of the word: awe-full).
That is the first stanza. The second is decidedly more obscure and difficult. Blake continues discussing Druidism, the senses, and infinity; looking at these elements can help us understand the second part. The infinite, in the first line, is turned into a serpent, “that which pitieth”. The serpent is a symbol of the Druids, and “thought” is presumably human thought following the fall into a finite sensual realm. Thus, Druidism is the product and symbol of the fall.
With the rise of religion, man flees and enters darkness. He takes himself away from higher thought and enters “the forests of night”. “Night” signifies an ending, a clot inhibiting higher thinking. Once he flees, then, the “eternal forests” get divided; the fall of the land follows the fall of man. That the earths spin in “circles of space” suggests containment, limits, and bindings.
The next piece, “That line an ocean rush’d / And overwhelmed all except this finite wall of flesh” treats the nature of man and recalls the flood-imagery from the first stanza. “That line” is necessarily ambiguous; to me, it implies a boundary line, the line drawn between infinity and the finite self, though it could be any number of different things. In class today we discussed that there is a kind of unknown sitting at the heart of Blake’s work that makes it so fantastic. I think that we get used to pinning things down and knowing for sure, so not-knowing and not being able to restrict ourselves to a single definition is an experience well-worth having. It requires a certain confidence in the self, I think, or perhaps a willingness to be small or insignificant. To acknowledge that one lies beneath greater understanding breaks down ego, allowing us greater mobility. Even seeing that one is in this cave, a metaphor Blake often uses, will allow one to discover exits or chinks in the ceiling.
The final three lines comment upon the negativity of man’s fall from grace. The temple formed mocks the fettered consciousness of man, standing as an altar to violence (the temple at Verulam was a sacrificial temple, so we learned in class today that Blake suggests that the fall somehow leads to sacrifice and thus violence). I don’t agree with the critics I have on hand about the he closing lines, “man became an Angel; /Heaven a mighty circle turning; God a tyrant crown’d.”. They claim that it simply extends the connection between the Edenic Fall and the rise of the Druids. I say that the final lines are much richer than this. Man becoming an Angel is not a positive comment that he is returning to a state of grace; Angels in Blake’s work are often agents of destruction and oppression (though they are by no means limited to that position). In this case, man would become an agent of his own destruction, for it is he who enacts the suppressive forces. More ominously, too, is the idea that Heaven itself gets constrained when turned into a circle. I want to point out here that heaven only seems a circle to man - the fall has made heaven like a circle, has made the eternal realm of God (is this what heaven is? any ideas?) finite as we percieve it. Instead of stretching endlessly, it twists back into itself, existing only as the tight circle that man’s puny senses can perceive. The fall perverts God for man as well; He is no longer a joyful loving creator, but a constructed “tyrant crown’d”. This label relates the corruption of organized religion permeating 18th Century Britain, for priests were easily as oppressive as the government.
Before I finish up, I think that I ought to clarify the view of the senses, for I have been rather vague about their position. The senses, to Blake, are God-given gifts, though they do evidence our separation from the infinite world. They ought to be rejoiced in, however, and only tend to limit us when limited themselves. Denying the pleasures of the body distances man even further from the infinite, and it is only in experiencing the world that we can reclaim part of our original heritance. It is poetry and the poet’s job to enlarge the senses; engendering paradox is one way of doing this, as is living with every atom, really feeling life.
If I am have rambled from time to time in this PotW, it is only because Blake, above all, invites us to think. This is, perhaps, our duty to the infinite, another way of embracing the joy of the senses. We can and indeed should experience the infinite through our senses. They perceive the “ever-varying spiral ascents to the heavens of heavens” and rejoice in them.
There stand the venerable porches that high-towering rear
Their oak-surrounded pillars, form’d of massy stones, uncut
With tool, stones precious; such eternal in the heavens,
Of colours twelve, few known on earth, give light in the opake,
Plac’d in the order of the stars, when the five senses whelmed
In deluge o’er the earth-born man; then turn’d the fluxile eyes
Into two stationary orbs, concentrating all things,
The ever-varying spiral ascents to the heavens of heavens
Were bended downward; and the nostrils golden gates shut
Turn’d outward, barr’d and petrify’d against the infinite.
Thought chang’d the infinite to a serpent; that which pitieth;
To a devouring flame; and man fled from its face and hid
In forests of night; then all the eternal forests were divided
Into earths rolling in circles of space, that line an ocean rush’d
And overwhelmed all except this finite wall of flesh.
Then was the serpent temple form’d, image of infinite
Shut up in finite revolutions, and man became an Angel;
Heaven a mighty circle turning; God a tyrant crown’d.
William Blake 1794
I don’t usually choose poems that we are working on in class for the Poem of the Week, because it seems unfair, too easy. I don’t want to report on class, I want to look at them without any outside influence. This excerpt from Blake’s marvelous Europe: A Prophecy is an exception, though, because it is among the most beautiful things I have ever read, if not the most beautiful thing. Right up there with the end of The Great Gastby, the end of Love in the Time of Cholera, “You Begin” by Margaret Atwood, and the Thirteenth Book of Wordsworth’s The Prelude. I write those down because you should all take a look at those if you get a chance – they are all breathtaking, literally. When I first read this passage, I had to stop and read it five or six more times; I was awestruck, literally, but didn’t have an idea concerning the swirling celestial imager’s meaning. Thanks mainly to class and (to some extent) an accidental ownership of several critical works on Blake, I have basically been able to parse out what he’s saying. It is no less beautiful than the words themselves.
Here goes.
The poem opens discussing a Druidic temple in “golden Verulam”, a reference that I have not included above. Its specific character is relevant in discussing this small portion of text, and it may ease any confusion about what the “oak-surrounded pillars” and “venerable porches” refer to. The important piece to know is that it was built, if I am reading it correctly, when man was first brought into physical form. A translation of the first several lines would read “they placed in the shapes of constellations twelve stones of colors unknown to man at the time when the sensual world flooded man”. Blake uses the word “whelm” to point out that man was overcome with the five senses, losing his balance with the universe. They flooded him in a “deluge” and limited his sight. “Fluxile eyes” indicates that the eyes were, at one time, capable of seeing more of the heavens. Now, they are reductive and “concentrate all things”. This is, essentially, a description of the Fall from Eden.
Blake, we learned in class, read man’s fall from Eden as a tumble from the infinite to the finite. Our senses limit us, contain us, yes, though they are by no means bad, as a glance at this passage might lead one to believe. Rather, they can be expanded upon and taught to see, hear, feel, taste, and touch infinity in the particular. Organized religion, however, suppresses the senses’ capability to feel the joy dancing through all the earth. This passage clearly demonstrates that Blake appreciates the senses; nostrils have “golden gates” and the eyes are “orbs”. Sensuality seems negative here because it has been shut to the greater spiritual world, seen when Blake writes, “the ever-varying spiral ascents to the heavens of heavens / Were bended downward”. The onset of Druidic religion shrinks man’s world and stifles the infinite, that which is most awful (in the old sense of the word: awe-full).
That is the first stanza. The second is decidedly more obscure and difficult. Blake continues discussing Druidism, the senses, and infinity; looking at these elements can help us understand the second part. The infinite, in the first line, is turned into a serpent, “that which pitieth”. The serpent is a symbol of the Druids, and “thought” is presumably human thought following the fall into a finite sensual realm. Thus, Druidism is the product and symbol of the fall.
With the rise of religion, man flees and enters darkness. He takes himself away from higher thought and enters “the forests of night”. “Night” signifies an ending, a clot inhibiting higher thinking. Once he flees, then, the “eternal forests” get divided; the fall of the land follows the fall of man. That the earths spin in “circles of space” suggests containment, limits, and bindings.
The next piece, “That line an ocean rush’d / And overwhelmed all except this finite wall of flesh” treats the nature of man and recalls the flood-imagery from the first stanza. “That line” is necessarily ambiguous; to me, it implies a boundary line, the line drawn between infinity and the finite self, though it could be any number of different things. In class today we discussed that there is a kind of unknown sitting at the heart of Blake’s work that makes it so fantastic. I think that we get used to pinning things down and knowing for sure, so not-knowing and not being able to restrict ourselves to a single definition is an experience well-worth having. It requires a certain confidence in the self, I think, or perhaps a willingness to be small or insignificant. To acknowledge that one lies beneath greater understanding breaks down ego, allowing us greater mobility. Even seeing that one is in this cave, a metaphor Blake often uses, will allow one to discover exits or chinks in the ceiling.
The final three lines comment upon the negativity of man’s fall from grace. The temple formed mocks the fettered consciousness of man, standing as an altar to violence (the temple at Verulam was a sacrificial temple, so we learned in class today that Blake suggests that the fall somehow leads to sacrifice and thus violence). I don’t agree with the critics I have on hand about the he closing lines, “man became an Angel; /Heaven a mighty circle turning; God a tyrant crown’d.”. They claim that it simply extends the connection between the Edenic Fall and the rise of the Druids. I say that the final lines are much richer than this. Man becoming an Angel is not a positive comment that he is returning to a state of grace; Angels in Blake’s work are often agents of destruction and oppression (though they are by no means limited to that position). In this case, man would become an agent of his own destruction, for it is he who enacts the suppressive forces. More ominously, too, is the idea that Heaven itself gets constrained when turned into a circle. I want to point out here that heaven only seems a circle to man - the fall has made heaven like a circle, has made the eternal realm of God (is this what heaven is? any ideas?) finite as we percieve it. Instead of stretching endlessly, it twists back into itself, existing only as the tight circle that man’s puny senses can perceive. The fall perverts God for man as well; He is no longer a joyful loving creator, but a constructed “tyrant crown’d”. This label relates the corruption of organized religion permeating 18th Century Britain, for priests were easily as oppressive as the government.
Before I finish up, I think that I ought to clarify the view of the senses, for I have been rather vague about their position. The senses, to Blake, are God-given gifts, though they do evidence our separation from the infinite world. They ought to be rejoiced in, however, and only tend to limit us when limited themselves. Denying the pleasures of the body distances man even further from the infinite, and it is only in experiencing the world that we can reclaim part of our original heritance. It is poetry and the poet’s job to enlarge the senses; engendering paradox is one way of doing this, as is living with every atom, really feeling life.
If I am have rambled from time to time in this PotW, it is only because Blake, above all, invites us to think. This is, perhaps, our duty to the infinite, another way of embracing the joy of the senses. We can and indeed should experience the infinite through our senses. They perceive the “ever-varying spiral ascents to the heavens of heavens” and rejoice in them.
Monday, November 07, 2005
Poem of the Week 11/7/2005: Deaf-Mute in the Pear Tree
Deaf-Mute in the Pear Tree
His clumsy body is a golden fruit
pendulous in the pear tree
Blunt fingers among the multitudinous buds
Adriatic blue the sky above and through
the forking twigs
Sun ruddying tree's trunk, his trunk
his massive head thick-knobbed with burnished curls
tight-clenched in bud
(Painting by Generalic.* Primitive.)
I watch him prune with silent secateurs
Boots in the crotch of branches shift their weight
heavily as oxen in a stall
Hear small inarticulate mews from his locked mouth
a kitten in a box
Pear clippings fall
soundlessly on the ground
Spring finches sing
soundlessly in the leaves
A stone. A stone in ears and on his tongue
Through palm and fingertip he knows the tree's
quick springtime pulse
Smells in its sap the sweet incipient pears
Pale sunlight's choppy water glistens on
his mutely snipping blades
and flags and scraps of blue
above him make regatta** of the day
But when he sees his wife's foreshortened shape
sudden and silent in the grass below
uptilt its face to him
then air is kisses, kisses
stone dissolves
his locked throat finds a little door
and through it feathered joy
flies screaming like a jay
P. K. Page 1985
* Ivan Generalic (1914-1992), Croatian painter in a "native" or "primitive" stlye
** boat race
Hello! I was delighted last night to find P.K. Page in my Norton Anthology; I had read this poem before, but hadn't really appreciated it until yesterday. The music of the poem is round and thick and crisp, like a pear. Read it out loud - you are meant to feel the words come rolling off of your tongue.
This musicality, in fact, is somewhat ironic, as the narrator is discussing a deaf-mute. He could no more say these words than we could sit up and fly out the window. This tension indicates that examining tone will be fruitful for this poem, if you'll excuse the pun. The tone shifts from beginning to end, or at least appears to; whereas the deaf-mute is almost problematically represented in the first 15 lines or so, the narrator turns to him with more empathy in the final half of the poem by attempting to re-create and thus empathize with his experience.
Labeling him "deaf-mute" is akward right off the bat. After all, aren't we taught to look past people's physical characteristics and see what's inside? Naming him only as a "deaf-mute" seems to limit him. However, the view of this deaf-mute is more nuanced than an initial glance will reveal, even in the beginning. The speaker uses the words "clumsy", "blunt", "thick-nobbed", and "trunk" to describe him, which appear stereotypical and harsh. However, the poem's music softens these callous observations. By mixing "His clumsy body" with "a golden fruit / pendulous in the pear tree", he smooths out the label. Other lines reflect this technique. "Blunt fingers" move among "multitudinous buds" and his head is "thick-nobbed with burnished curls / tight-clenched in bud". We get images of primitivism mixed with those of fertility, richness and color. Though he moves "heavily as oxen in a stall", he uses sophisticated-sounding tools ("silent secateurs").
Part of me, though, wonders if the complicated language results from the narrator's childish desire to assert his own ability to say these words. These words do carry some kind of prejudice; it's odd that such a beautiful poem signifies bias. The tension sitting between the discrimination and the ripe imagery reflects the tension that appears at all levels of this poem. There is tension between the rich visual imagery and the word's aural cadence in "pear clippings fall / soundlessly on the ground / Spring finches sing / soundlessesly in the leaves". The lines, "small inarticulate mews from his locked mouth [sound like] / a kitten in a box" embody this contrast. On one hand, the narrator likens the deaf-mute to a soft, tender kitten, while on another he compares his attempt at communication to that of an animal. Thus, the deaf-mute is at once sympathetic and degraded.
The narrator's bias lifts somewhat as the poem continues, however; he begins to empathize with the deaf-mute by couching his observations in terms the man would understand and indeed by nearly swathing himself in the mute's consciousness. The line "A stone. A stone in hears and on tongue" represents the man's disability in a form he can understand. A stone, after all, exists as a visual and tactile object. It certainly makes no noise, linking it to his handicap. Again, though, we must ask ourselves if equating a man with a stone is problematic; stones, aside from being seen and not heard, are not intelligent. The phrase "dumb as a rock" springs to mind.
I would argue, however, that the view is not intentionally negative. Of course not; "Deaf-Mute in a Pear Tree" is, instead, about a "normal" human watching a liminal other. So of course there are positives and negatives; Page certainly picks up on the fact that the speaker is not trying to degrade the deaf man. There are indications in the second half of the poem that the mute has other, special perceptions as well. The narrator notes that the mute "knows the tree's / quick springtime pulse". The deaf man notices the smell of the pear tree's sap, a feat I doubt many could reproduce. More interestingly, though, is how images of water and sky are consistently mixed. The sky is "Adriatic blue" (in reference to the Adriatic Sea), "pale sunlight's choppy water glistens", and "flags and scraps of blue / above him make regatta of the day". The narrator, in imagining this other's senses, gains insights/perspective he might not have had without this encounter.
The speaker actually drapes himself in the deaf-man's consciousness when the wife enters. Before treating this, however, we must note the line "his wife's foreshortened shape"; this line could again encompass one of two views. "Foreshortened" may be a reference to how, from above (where the mute is standing), people look shorter. On the other hand, however, it could signify that the wife, too, is disabled. She doesn't uptilt her face, her shape uptilts "its face". This is precarious; the narrator straddles the line between empathy and prejudice.
While the previous line is potentially offensive, the line, "then air is kisses, kisses" is utterly empathetic. The deaf man's thought breaks through the narrator's, or perhaps occupies the speaker's consciousness, displacing it. It finally ascribes a delicate kind of beauty to the mute: a complex, bright emotion. That kind of tenderness truly humanizes him as well, making up for (in my opinion, though this is a value judgment) the previous references. It shows, to me, that the narrator has grown over the poem, to this point at least. The euphoric form at the end of the poem does persuade me some, though; the capital-less, cascading lines "then air is kisses, kisses / stone dissolves / his locked throat finds a little door" comprise the empathatetic pinnacle of the poem. They are as beautiful as the the emotion they describe.
The final couplet, needless to say, undermines this delicacy. Or rather, reimplements the tension found elsewhere throughout the poem. It is as if the narrator is shocked at the final sound, and his return to an animalistic description revives his prejudice. The period is absent, leaving the sentence hanging as are our jaws. The ending makes me wonder, is it possible to step outside of our prejudices (for they doubtlessly exist), to consciously shake them, or do we simply sedate them? Or is it that we have the tendency to be fascinated by monstrosity - the anthropologist/literary critic/professor René Girard would have something to say about prejudice. We are threatened by liminally similar others, as this disabled man is. He engenders both human and non-human qualities, making him threatening, according to Girard.
But - very few of you will care about/understand that thread, so I leave you here. Before I go, though, I want to say that I have been estactic to recieve feedback from you, either through email or comments. I am completely serious when I say that it makes my day. So thank you to all of you who read this and to those of you who commment (Tom and Gloria!).
His clumsy body is a golden fruit
pendulous in the pear tree
Blunt fingers among the multitudinous buds
Adriatic blue the sky above and through
the forking twigs
Sun ruddying tree's trunk, his trunk
his massive head thick-knobbed with burnished curls
tight-clenched in bud
(Painting by Generalic.* Primitive.)
I watch him prune with silent secateurs
Boots in the crotch of branches shift their weight
heavily as oxen in a stall
Hear small inarticulate mews from his locked mouth
a kitten in a box
Pear clippings fall
soundlessly on the ground
Spring finches sing
soundlessly in the leaves
A stone. A stone in ears and on his tongue
Through palm and fingertip he knows the tree's
quick springtime pulse
Smells in its sap the sweet incipient pears
Pale sunlight's choppy water glistens on
his mutely snipping blades
and flags and scraps of blue
above him make regatta** of the day
But when he sees his wife's foreshortened shape
sudden and silent in the grass below
uptilt its face to him
then air is kisses, kisses
stone dissolves
his locked throat finds a little door
and through it feathered joy
flies screaming like a jay
P. K. Page 1985
* Ivan Generalic (1914-1992), Croatian painter in a "native" or "primitive" stlye
** boat race
Hello! I was delighted last night to find P.K. Page in my Norton Anthology; I had read this poem before, but hadn't really appreciated it until yesterday. The music of the poem is round and thick and crisp, like a pear. Read it out loud - you are meant to feel the words come rolling off of your tongue.
This musicality, in fact, is somewhat ironic, as the narrator is discussing a deaf-mute. He could no more say these words than we could sit up and fly out the window. This tension indicates that examining tone will be fruitful for this poem, if you'll excuse the pun. The tone shifts from beginning to end, or at least appears to; whereas the deaf-mute is almost problematically represented in the first 15 lines or so, the narrator turns to him with more empathy in the final half of the poem by attempting to re-create and thus empathize with his experience.
Labeling him "deaf-mute" is akward right off the bat. After all, aren't we taught to look past people's physical characteristics and see what's inside? Naming him only as a "deaf-mute" seems to limit him. However, the view of this deaf-mute is more nuanced than an initial glance will reveal, even in the beginning. The speaker uses the words "clumsy", "blunt", "thick-nobbed", and "trunk" to describe him, which appear stereotypical and harsh. However, the poem's music softens these callous observations. By mixing "His clumsy body" with "a golden fruit / pendulous in the pear tree", he smooths out the label. Other lines reflect this technique. "Blunt fingers" move among "multitudinous buds" and his head is "thick-nobbed with burnished curls / tight-clenched in bud". We get images of primitivism mixed with those of fertility, richness and color. Though he moves "heavily as oxen in a stall", he uses sophisticated-sounding tools ("silent secateurs").
Part of me, though, wonders if the complicated language results from the narrator's childish desire to assert his own ability to say these words. These words do carry some kind of prejudice; it's odd that such a beautiful poem signifies bias. The tension sitting between the discrimination and the ripe imagery reflects the tension that appears at all levels of this poem. There is tension between the rich visual imagery and the word's aural cadence in "pear clippings fall / soundlessly on the ground / Spring finches sing / soundlessesly in the leaves". The lines, "small inarticulate mews from his locked mouth [sound like] / a kitten in a box" embody this contrast. On one hand, the narrator likens the deaf-mute to a soft, tender kitten, while on another he compares his attempt at communication to that of an animal. Thus, the deaf-mute is at once sympathetic and degraded.
The narrator's bias lifts somewhat as the poem continues, however; he begins to empathize with the deaf-mute by couching his observations in terms the man would understand and indeed by nearly swathing himself in the mute's consciousness. The line "A stone. A stone in hears and on tongue" represents the man's disability in a form he can understand. A stone, after all, exists as a visual and tactile object. It certainly makes no noise, linking it to his handicap. Again, though, we must ask ourselves if equating a man with a stone is problematic; stones, aside from being seen and not heard, are not intelligent. The phrase "dumb as a rock" springs to mind.
I would argue, however, that the view is not intentionally negative. Of course not; "Deaf-Mute in a Pear Tree" is, instead, about a "normal" human watching a liminal other. So of course there are positives and negatives; Page certainly picks up on the fact that the speaker is not trying to degrade the deaf man. There are indications in the second half of the poem that the mute has other, special perceptions as well. The narrator notes that the mute "knows the tree's / quick springtime pulse". The deaf man notices the smell of the pear tree's sap, a feat I doubt many could reproduce. More interestingly, though, is how images of water and sky are consistently mixed. The sky is "Adriatic blue" (in reference to the Adriatic Sea), "pale sunlight's choppy water glistens", and "flags and scraps of blue / above him make regatta of the day". The narrator, in imagining this other's senses, gains insights/perspective he might not have had without this encounter.
The speaker actually drapes himself in the deaf-man's consciousness when the wife enters. Before treating this, however, we must note the line "his wife's foreshortened shape"; this line could again encompass one of two views. "Foreshortened" may be a reference to how, from above (where the mute is standing), people look shorter. On the other hand, however, it could signify that the wife, too, is disabled. She doesn't uptilt her face, her shape uptilts "its face". This is precarious; the narrator straddles the line between empathy and prejudice.
While the previous line is potentially offensive, the line, "then air is kisses, kisses" is utterly empathetic. The deaf man's thought breaks through the narrator's, or perhaps occupies the speaker's consciousness, displacing it. It finally ascribes a delicate kind of beauty to the mute: a complex, bright emotion. That kind of tenderness truly humanizes him as well, making up for (in my opinion, though this is a value judgment) the previous references. It shows, to me, that the narrator has grown over the poem, to this point at least. The euphoric form at the end of the poem does persuade me some, though; the capital-less, cascading lines "then air is kisses, kisses / stone dissolves / his locked throat finds a little door" comprise the empathatetic pinnacle of the poem. They are as beautiful as the the emotion they describe.
The final couplet, needless to say, undermines this delicacy. Or rather, reimplements the tension found elsewhere throughout the poem. It is as if the narrator is shocked at the final sound, and his return to an animalistic description revives his prejudice. The period is absent, leaving the sentence hanging as are our jaws. The ending makes me wonder, is it possible to step outside of our prejudices (for they doubtlessly exist), to consciously shake them, or do we simply sedate them? Or is it that we have the tendency to be fascinated by monstrosity - the anthropologist/literary critic/professor René Girard would have something to say about prejudice. We are threatened by liminally similar others, as this disabled man is. He engenders both human and non-human qualities, making him threatening, according to Girard.
But - very few of you will care about/understand that thread, so I leave you here. Before I go, though, I want to say that I have been estactic to recieve feedback from you, either through email or comments. I am completely serious when I say that it makes my day. So thank you to all of you who read this and to those of you who commment (Tom and Gloria!).
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