from Mont Blanc
Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni*
1.
The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark--now glittering--now reflecting gloom--
Now lending splendor, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters,--with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume
In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.
*Through the Chamouni valley flows the river Arve, which originates in a glacier on the mountain and empties into Lake Geneva, from which flows the Rhone, which reaches the Mediterranean.
Percy Bysshe Shelley 1816
This poem was shown to me about six months ago, and I haven't been able to get it out of my head since. It is one of the most beautiful pieces of writing ever, period. Please, I entreat you, read it out loud. Shelley is a master of language; the words will come out shaped like rivers. It is enough to merely read this stanza, for the words are beautiful without the meaning. On top of that, though, sits Shelley's theory of mind. He engages epistemological (the philosophy of how we know what we know) theory in his treatment of the river, using it as a symbol for the human mind.
The words reflect the natural phenomena they describe. The first line is expansive, but Shelley channels it "through the mind" in the next stanza by organizing "the everlasting universe of things" in a stream of thought. This river is vibrant and energetic, reflected in the repetition of the "r" sound, the round word "roll," and the iambic rhythm of "and rolls its rapid waves." Shelley then slows us down with three even dashes. In the third line, one senses a river's repeated leaps. The structure, like that of a river, is constant; there is a set of four "nows" and four stops, of which the first three are dashes and the last a comma. But just as a river's water is constantly replaced, so the description of the flow of thought changes. Dark and magical diction reveals that "the everlasting universe of things" is rich and varied, per a Romantic sense of mysticism. "Dark," "glittering," "gloom," and "splendor" emphasize a mysterious, glorious train of things through the mind.
The winding rhyme scheme also recalls the twisting of a river; "waves" and "raves" almost encircle the stanza, while "things," "springs" and "brings" bubble up within five lines. Shelley plays with rhythm in much the same way, darting between iambic (unstressed, stressed), trochaic (stressed, unstressed), and even spondaic (unstressed, unstressed) tropes.
The next three lines or so are syntactically twisted, as if caught in an eddy. Shelley creates a circle of language with the early prepositional phrase "from secret springs." He gives us an origin of water before even mentions water, tying the end of the phrase to the beginning. We thus have to untangle "Where from secret springs / The source of human thought its tribute brings / of waters." It becomes, "where it brings its tribute of water (gotten from the source of secret things) to the mind."
So here we are at the mind. This dynamic river is actually the mind, the flow of thought. Shelley is adopting, perhaps, Kant's epistemological stance: that there are indeed outside objects our senses percieve, but the mind sorts and organizes them into ideas of color, shape, texture etc. The first lines may be summarized more philosophically as "random and chaotic things in the universe enter our mind through the senses, which channels and sorts their infinite variety."
If the river is a representation of the mind, then the first half of the poem establishes the mind's power. It picks its way through an infinite sea of data, essentially constructing the world. This would seem to be an almost arrogant claim, in fact, were it not for the later half of the poem. Close up, it sorts infinity, but zoomed out this great faculty is merely "a feeble brook" among other natural elements. Notice how the earlier description "The everlasting universe of things / Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves." sits in comparison to "with a sound but half its own, / Such as a feeble brook will oft assume." The later description diminishes the river by dropping action and active diction. Shelley peoples the second phrase with small words like "but," "such as," and "oft," while the original look at the river incorporates eternity and infinity.
Our river is suddenly dwarfed by the chaotic energy of the surrounding mountains and waterfalls. It is a small flash among powerful forces. In the world outside the mind loom "mountains lone," towering over our little rill. Its dark eddies seem peaceful compared to the battle between expansive woods and gusting winds, and it appears a trickle when set against "waterfalls around it [leaping] for ever" or the vast river that "ceaselessly bursts and raves."
Of course, Shelley rhetorically packs the other elements of nature with energy as well. He repeats the "w" sound to create a whistling gale through the final five lines, again playing with rythmn to provide a chaotic drumbeat of nature. Then, too, verbs like "leap," "burst," and "rave" strain off the page, their aural impact leaping, bursting, and raving out of the poem. I repeat them because there is no better way to describe it - they are the best possible words, the ripest, the most energetic.
It's important to note that Shelley does not deny the mind its power, merely to put it in perspective. The elemental forces in the second half of the poem do not diminish the beauty of the first. In the poem as in life, mountains and tempests remind us that we are small, take us outside ourselves long enough to remember that there are more things on heaven and earth than are dreampt of in the philosophy of men.
Sunday, March 26, 2006
Saturday, March 18, 2006
Poem of the Week 3/20/2006: Ancestor
Ancestor
I was going to say something,
and stopped. Her profile against the curtains
was old, and dark like a hunting bird's.
It was the way she perched on the high stool,
staring into herself, with one fist
gripping the side of the barrier around her desk
--or her head held by something, from inside.
And not caring for anything around her
or anyone there by the shelves.
I caught a faint smell, musky and queer.
I may have made some sound--she stopped rocking
and pressed her fist in her lap; then she stood up
and shut down the lid of the desk, and turned the key.
She shoved a small bottle under her aprons
and came toward me, darkening the passageway.
Ancestor. . . among sweet- and fruit-boxes.
Her black heart . . .
Was that a sigh?
--brushing by me in the shadows,
with her heaped aprons, through the red hangings
to the scullery, and down to the back room.
Thomas Kinsella 1973
Two things strike me about this poem; the first is the portrait of the ancestor, and the second is the more universal feeling of grief, mystery, and respect for one's family history. Or perhaps family secrets. I guess that I'm interested in narrative focus right now; how does a poet balance a subject and speaker? "Ancestor" straddles narrator and speaker. Though we get a sense of the woman, we percieve the narrator just as acutely. Then, too, the poem deals with the past. What can we really know about those who came before us? The narrator carefully observes this woman, but says little about her. There are immense gaps in her person; we never learn where she was going or what she was thinking in this scene. With the present narrator's collection of observations and facts about his ancestor, Kinsella explores how humans sort and engage the past.
Kinsella starts this poem with a question for the reader, writing,"I was going to say something / and stopped." Why does the narrator stop, we ask? For me, this halt springs from the uncomfortable conundrum of wanting to know someone's secrets and simultaneously respect her privacy. I think that this is very human - do you know the feeling of intruding on someone's personal moment yet being unable to back out of the room for your fascination, fear that they'll notice you, or curiousity?
For the ancestor is certainly looking inward. She is "staring into herself," "her head held by something, from inside. / And not caring for anything around her / or anyone there by the shelves." The diction here already begins to hint at the ancestor's current state: unbalanced and sad. "Perched" here seems to connote a precarious position, which the anxious image of "one fist / gripping" underlines. She is lost, unkempt, as evidenced by the faint, musky smell coming from her.
This smell also underlines the mystery attached to this ancestor. All the narrator gives us (and perhaps all he sees) are small facts and actions, scattered evidence of her interior monolouge's existence. He, out of respect or ignorance, leaves it untouched, unvoiced. I could list the facts (she carries a bottle, she is a maid, she holds her hand in a fist, she shuts something in a desk), and we could infer that this woman is alcoholic, poor, determined, and secretive. Every little detail has to serve as an window into her being, for we have neither word nor thought from her.
The ellipses in the fourth stanza encapsulate the fine line between respect and ignorance. On one hand, the narrator could be leaving a moment of silence within the poem; the ellipses perhaps provide a pause of respect for the ancestor. However, they also suggest that something is missing, that something is cut or unknown. What are these things? Who is this woman? There is no way to know for sure, though we could make up some story about her illict affair or her dark plot to kill her mistress.
At heart, this is a poem of questions, facts, and how to deal with the past. The narrator looks for any sign about her situation, asking "was that a sigh?" but we never hear the answer. Which brings us to the larger question: how can we ever know the past? Because the narrator's ancestor is so vague, we can never really know what happened, and this seems to be indicative of humans everywhere. Like the ancestor in this poem, perhaps all we have of others are actions and facts. We have to piece people together from the scraps that filter down to us, or the moments frozen in a snapshot, a memory, a dream.
I was going to say something,
and stopped. Her profile against the curtains
was old, and dark like a hunting bird's.
It was the way she perched on the high stool,
staring into herself, with one fist
gripping the side of the barrier around her desk
--or her head held by something, from inside.
And not caring for anything around her
or anyone there by the shelves.
I caught a faint smell, musky and queer.
I may have made some sound--she stopped rocking
and pressed her fist in her lap; then she stood up
and shut down the lid of the desk, and turned the key.
She shoved a small bottle under her aprons
and came toward me, darkening the passageway.
Ancestor. . . among sweet- and fruit-boxes.
Her black heart . . .
Was that a sigh?
--brushing by me in the shadows,
with her heaped aprons, through the red hangings
to the scullery, and down to the back room.
Thomas Kinsella 1973
Two things strike me about this poem; the first is the portrait of the ancestor, and the second is the more universal feeling of grief, mystery, and respect for one's family history. Or perhaps family secrets. I guess that I'm interested in narrative focus right now; how does a poet balance a subject and speaker? "Ancestor" straddles narrator and speaker. Though we get a sense of the woman, we percieve the narrator just as acutely. Then, too, the poem deals with the past. What can we really know about those who came before us? The narrator carefully observes this woman, but says little about her. There are immense gaps in her person; we never learn where she was going or what she was thinking in this scene. With the present narrator's collection of observations and facts about his ancestor, Kinsella explores how humans sort and engage the past.
Kinsella starts this poem with a question for the reader, writing,"I was going to say something / and stopped." Why does the narrator stop, we ask? For me, this halt springs from the uncomfortable conundrum of wanting to know someone's secrets and simultaneously respect her privacy. I think that this is very human - do you know the feeling of intruding on someone's personal moment yet being unable to back out of the room for your fascination, fear that they'll notice you, or curiousity?
For the ancestor is certainly looking inward. She is "staring into herself," "her head held by something, from inside. / And not caring for anything around her / or anyone there by the shelves." The diction here already begins to hint at the ancestor's current state: unbalanced and sad. "Perched" here seems to connote a precarious position, which the anxious image of "one fist / gripping" underlines. She is lost, unkempt, as evidenced by the faint, musky smell coming from her.
This smell also underlines the mystery attached to this ancestor. All the narrator gives us (and perhaps all he sees) are small facts and actions, scattered evidence of her interior monolouge's existence. He, out of respect or ignorance, leaves it untouched, unvoiced. I could list the facts (she carries a bottle, she is a maid, she holds her hand in a fist, she shuts something in a desk), and we could infer that this woman is alcoholic, poor, determined, and secretive. Every little detail has to serve as an window into her being, for we have neither word nor thought from her.
The ellipses in the fourth stanza encapsulate the fine line between respect and ignorance. On one hand, the narrator could be leaving a moment of silence within the poem; the ellipses perhaps provide a pause of respect for the ancestor. However, they also suggest that something is missing, that something is cut or unknown. What are these things? Who is this woman? There is no way to know for sure, though we could make up some story about her illict affair or her dark plot to kill her mistress.
At heart, this is a poem of questions, facts, and how to deal with the past. The narrator looks for any sign about her situation, asking "was that a sigh?" but we never hear the answer. Which brings us to the larger question: how can we ever know the past? Because the narrator's ancestor is so vague, we can never really know what happened, and this seems to be indicative of humans everywhere. Like the ancestor in this poem, perhaps all we have of others are actions and facts. We have to piece people together from the scraps that filter down to us, or the moments frozen in a snapshot, a memory, a dream.
Monday, March 13, 2006
Poem of the Week 3/13/2006: [And, the Last Day Being Come, Man Stood Alone]
[And, the Last Day Being Come, Man Stood Alone]
And, the last day being come, Man stood alone
Ere sunrise on the world's dismantled verge,
Awaiting how from everywhere should urge
The Coming of the Lord. And, behold, none
Did come, -- but indistinct from every realm
Of earth and air and water, growing more
And louder, shriller, heavier, a roar
Up the dun atmosphere did overwhelm
His ears; and as he looked affrighted round
Every manner of beast innumerable
All thro' the shadows crying grew, until
The wailing was like grass upon the ground.
Asudden then within his human side
Their anguish, since the goad* he wielded first,
And, since he gave them not to drink, their thirst,
Darted compressed and vital. -- As he died,
Low in the East now lighting gorgeously
He saw the last sea-serpent iris-mailed**
Which, with a spear transfixèd, yet availed
To pluck the sun down into the dead sea.
Trumbull Stickney 1905
* A pointed stick for driving cattle and other animals
** In rainbow-colored armor
I think my time with William Blake is attuning me to apocalyptic poetry - poems that reach farther than a certain moment. Take this poem, for example. It is essentially Stickney's vision of the Judgment Day; one wonders what kind of vision he had that prompted him to write it this way. Though there are, I suppose, no real warm visions of the apocalypse, this is a particularly cold and lonely one. There is no visitation by a god, merely the wails of animals and a giant sea-serpent. Stickney also folds in imagery from Genesis, inverting it for the End of Days. We have all of the elements of a "typical" apocalypse - judgment, chaos, Biblical diction, but Stickney builds on it in his own way.
The first stanza, though, assembles traditional elements; it begins with "And," indicating that this is a continuation of some previously established story. The diction here is distinctly Biblical. "Ere," "the Coming of the Lord," and "behold" draw upon Biblical conventions. Furthermore, the syntax of "being come" is recognizably Old Testament, as well. This first stanza recalls earlier episodes in the Bible - we have a Man standing alone on the edge of the world, which conjures up the image of Adam cast out of Eden, or perhaps Satan standing on the brink of Hell in Paradise Lost. But this is neither Adam nor Satan; the Man waiting here is man with a capital M, the final representative of humanity, a figure vague enough to be any one of us.
The second stanza, then, begins to re-write the Apocalypse, for no Lord comes to judge, merely an "indistinct" wailing from all around. By withholding the source, Stickney puts the reader in the same, confused space as Man. All we know is that there is a roar coming "from every realm / Of earth and air and water." The internal rhyme between "come" and "dun," "water" and "louder," the mixed use of polysyndeton and asyndeton (excessive use of conjunctions, no conjunctions), and the structural rhyme in the stanza (a-b-b-a) build the roar's energy. Stickney rhetorically turns up the volume again with the diction - this noise is high and low; the use of "heavier" lends it an almost tangible quality.
It is no surprise, then, that the Man is terrified in the third stanza. He looks "affrighted round," and suddenly is surrounded by the noisemakers: "every manner of beast." Their wail is so constant that it becomes part of the scenery, blanketing everything like grass. We can't restrict the line "the wailing was like grass upon the ground" to that, however; like the word "heavier" the second stanza, this similie gives the cacophony a physical presence. If we could see it, it would ripple like grass, comprised of as many individual strands. Also, "grass" is usually a more peaceful image, conjuring fields and gardens. As such, it adds a note of hope to this din; this is perhaps the saddest part, I think, for it makes us remember what is lost forever. The Apocalypse is emphatically an end, which grass' peaceful connotations reminds us of.
Though we don't know if the animals are the only things producing this noise, we know that they contribute to it in force. Their presence contorts Biblical convention, twisting the naming of the animals in Genesis. This reference heightens the poem's terror, for it contrasts these tortured cries with Eden's scene of fecund delight. They have fallen far, indeed.
Then, too, the animals are the arbiters of judgment in Stickney's apocalypse. Because the syntax is so knotted in the fourth stanza (mirroring Biblical diction and the tortured scene at hand), it is hard to see the chain of causality. We may rearrange the lines to read "Since man weilded a cattle prod, and since he did not give the animals enough to drink when they were thirsty, the animal's anguish suddenly darts 'compressed and vital' into his side." Man is judged because he was controlling and cruel. Stickney draws upon Matthew 25: 30-46. (Matthew or Jesus or somebody - anybody know who?) says that the righteous will be saved, "(35) For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, (36) naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me." Those who treat Jesus' lesser creatures with respect will be saved, but those who trod upon those beneath them will be cast into hell. Stickney adapts this by eliminating God in the process; the animals are enough to judge Matthew.
As he dies, pierced by their anguish, he sees the final destruction of the world. Another animal - a sea serpent in iris armor - stabs the sun, bringing about the end of time. With the image of the sea-monster in rainbow armor, Stickney again inverts Biblical convention. In Isaiah and Job, the sea monsters Leviathan and Rahab exist as conquered beings. They represent God's power in His ability to destroy them. Since Stickney has, so far, effaced God from this Apocalypse, it follows that the final agent of destruction be something that could only exist if God didn't. Stickney again works against a concept of a loving, benevolent, God with the rainbow armor. The rainbow was supposed to be God’s covenant to protect man and beast. It signaled, even when a storm came, God would keep us safe. To put God’s symbol of protection on the monster destroying the earth openly mocks Gods’ promises and powers.
More than the religious elements, the most striking element of the poem's end is the breathtaking, apocalyptic diction. If this is the end of things, what a way to go. The final dawn is "lighting gorgeously" the East as the sea serpent strikes the sun, plucking it from its resting place. There is something etherial about the word "transfixed," and "gorgeous," and "pluck," out loud, are nearly corporeal. Their robust, sensibile aspect heighten the power of this last moment, especially in contrast with the flatness of "the dead sea." But that, too, is a flat explanation. I think that I can't explain why the last stanza is so moving. We talk in my aesthetics class about how. in all discussion of art, we hit this wall where words fail. The only way I can even begin do it justice, I think, is to say that it carries the grief and beauty and energy that I imagine death does. A burst of light, a streak of color, a motion, and that's it. Beautiful.
And, the last day being come, Man stood alone
Ere sunrise on the world's dismantled verge,
Awaiting how from everywhere should urge
The Coming of the Lord. And, behold, none
Did come, -- but indistinct from every realm
Of earth and air and water, growing more
And louder, shriller, heavier, a roar
Up the dun atmosphere did overwhelm
His ears; and as he looked affrighted round
Every manner of beast innumerable
All thro' the shadows crying grew, until
The wailing was like grass upon the ground.
Asudden then within his human side
Their anguish, since the goad* he wielded first,
And, since he gave them not to drink, their thirst,
Darted compressed and vital. -- As he died,
Low in the East now lighting gorgeously
He saw the last sea-serpent iris-mailed**
Which, with a spear transfixèd, yet availed
To pluck the sun down into the dead sea.
Trumbull Stickney 1905
* A pointed stick for driving cattle and other animals
** In rainbow-colored armor
I think my time with William Blake is attuning me to apocalyptic poetry - poems that reach farther than a certain moment. Take this poem, for example. It is essentially Stickney's vision of the Judgment Day; one wonders what kind of vision he had that prompted him to write it this way. Though there are, I suppose, no real warm visions of the apocalypse, this is a particularly cold and lonely one. There is no visitation by a god, merely the wails of animals and a giant sea-serpent. Stickney also folds in imagery from Genesis, inverting it for the End of Days. We have all of the elements of a "typical" apocalypse - judgment, chaos, Biblical diction, but Stickney builds on it in his own way.
The first stanza, though, assembles traditional elements; it begins with "And," indicating that this is a continuation of some previously established story. The diction here is distinctly Biblical. "Ere," "the Coming of the Lord," and "behold" draw upon Biblical conventions. Furthermore, the syntax of "being come" is recognizably Old Testament, as well. This first stanza recalls earlier episodes in the Bible - we have a Man standing alone on the edge of the world, which conjures up the image of Adam cast out of Eden, or perhaps Satan standing on the brink of Hell in Paradise Lost. But this is neither Adam nor Satan; the Man waiting here is man with a capital M, the final representative of humanity, a figure vague enough to be any one of us.
The second stanza, then, begins to re-write the Apocalypse, for no Lord comes to judge, merely an "indistinct" wailing from all around. By withholding the source, Stickney puts the reader in the same, confused space as Man. All we know is that there is a roar coming "from every realm / Of earth and air and water." The internal rhyme between "come" and "dun," "water" and "louder," the mixed use of polysyndeton and asyndeton (excessive use of conjunctions, no conjunctions), and the structural rhyme in the stanza (a-b-b-a) build the roar's energy. Stickney rhetorically turns up the volume again with the diction - this noise is high and low; the use of "heavier" lends it an almost tangible quality.
It is no surprise, then, that the Man is terrified in the third stanza. He looks "affrighted round," and suddenly is surrounded by the noisemakers: "every manner of beast." Their wail is so constant that it becomes part of the scenery, blanketing everything like grass. We can't restrict the line "the wailing was like grass upon the ground" to that, however; like the word "heavier" the second stanza, this similie gives the cacophony a physical presence. If we could see it, it would ripple like grass, comprised of as many individual strands. Also, "grass" is usually a more peaceful image, conjuring fields and gardens. As such, it adds a note of hope to this din; this is perhaps the saddest part, I think, for it makes us remember what is lost forever. The Apocalypse is emphatically an end, which grass' peaceful connotations reminds us of.
Though we don't know if the animals are the only things producing this noise, we know that they contribute to it in force. Their presence contorts Biblical convention, twisting the naming of the animals in Genesis. This reference heightens the poem's terror, for it contrasts these tortured cries with Eden's scene of fecund delight. They have fallen far, indeed.
Then, too, the animals are the arbiters of judgment in Stickney's apocalypse. Because the syntax is so knotted in the fourth stanza (mirroring Biblical diction and the tortured scene at hand), it is hard to see the chain of causality. We may rearrange the lines to read "Since man weilded a cattle prod, and since he did not give the animals enough to drink when they were thirsty, the animal's anguish suddenly darts 'compressed and vital' into his side." Man is judged because he was controlling and cruel. Stickney draws upon Matthew 25: 30-46. (Matthew or Jesus or somebody - anybody know who?) says that the righteous will be saved, "(35) For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, (36) naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me." Those who treat Jesus' lesser creatures with respect will be saved, but those who trod upon those beneath them will be cast into hell. Stickney adapts this by eliminating God in the process; the animals are enough to judge Matthew.
As he dies, pierced by their anguish, he sees the final destruction of the world. Another animal - a sea serpent in iris armor - stabs the sun, bringing about the end of time. With the image of the sea-monster in rainbow armor, Stickney again inverts Biblical convention. In Isaiah and Job, the sea monsters Leviathan and Rahab exist as conquered beings. They represent God's power in His ability to destroy them. Since Stickney has, so far, effaced God from this Apocalypse, it follows that the final agent of destruction be something that could only exist if God didn't. Stickney again works against a concept of a loving, benevolent, God with the rainbow armor. The rainbow was supposed to be God’s covenant to protect man and beast. It signaled, even when a storm came, God would keep us safe. To put God’s symbol of protection on the monster destroying the earth openly mocks Gods’ promises and powers.
More than the religious elements, the most striking element of the poem's end is the breathtaking, apocalyptic diction. If this is the end of things, what a way to go. The final dawn is "lighting gorgeously" the East as the sea serpent strikes the sun, plucking it from its resting place. There is something etherial about the word "transfixed," and "gorgeous," and "pluck," out loud, are nearly corporeal. Their robust, sensibile aspect heighten the power of this last moment, especially in contrast with the flatness of "the dead sea." But that, too, is a flat explanation. I think that I can't explain why the last stanza is so moving. We talk in my aesthetics class about how. in all discussion of art, we hit this wall where words fail. The only way I can even begin do it justice, I think, is to say that it carries the grief and beauty and energy that I imagine death does. A burst of light, a streak of color, a motion, and that's it. Beautiful.
Saturday, March 04, 2006
Poem of the Week 3/6/2006: from The Dream Songs
from The Dream Songs*
4
Filling her compact & delicious body
with chicken pàprika, she glanced at me
twice.
Fainting with interest, I hungered back
and only the fact of her husband & four other people
kept me from springing on her
or falling at her little feet and crying
"You are the hottest one for years of night
Henry's dazed eyes
have enjoyed. Brilliance." I advanced upon
(despairing) my spumoni.--Sir Bones: is stuffed,
de world, wif feeding girls.
--Black hair, complexion latin, jeweled eyes
downcast . . . the slob behind her feasts . . . What wonders is
she sitting on, over there?
The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars
Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.
--Mr. Bones: there is.
*"[The Dream Songs are] essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry, a white American in early middle age sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second; he has a friend, never named, who addresses him as Mr. Bones and variants thereof" [Berryman's note]. These poems were written over a period of thirteen years. The Norton Anthology of Poetry, fifth edition.
John Berryman 1964
If you have never had a chance to look over John Berryman's Dream Songs, I highly recommend it. They are a strange collection of despairing poems, often broaching the rascist, the heartbreaking, the worrisome, and even the psychotic. You can see a little of that in this one; Henry's friend talks to the blackface incarnation of Henry Mr. Bones out of nowhere, and Henry frets to himself over his ideal woman.
The first stanza captures Henry's literal appetite for this woman. He describes her with food words - the choice of chicken paprika is no coincidence, for that is a spicy food, and this woman is hot. Then, too, instead of fainting with hunger, he faints with interest. Hunger is so important in this stanza that it leaves its usual part-of-speech, becoming a verb. Then, too, the diction is tense and energized. Words like "compact" and "springing" tighten the diction, while the interesting &s and à add visual stimulus. The genius in this first section, though, is how Berryman dismantles any real sexual threat. The word hunger itself avoids a hyper-masculine sex-drive, for to be hungry is to be weak. The, too, "twice" stands alone, its lowercase first letter meekly nodding to the value of those two glances.
Henry reinforces this servility when he talks of "falling at her little feet." There is something askew in his imagined plea to her. To begin, he is hyper-detached from himself, speaking in the third person and giving his adoration to his eyes. Instead of enjoying things himself, "Henry's dazed eyes" relish the woman. Then, too, he lists time in "years of nights," alluding to the years and years of nights spent eating alone and, presumably, sleeping alone.
Despite this sad picture, Berryman creates a moment of hope for Henry by placing a line break between "I advanced upon" and "my spumoni." At the edge of line 10, we hope that Henry will really go talk to her. Instead, he despairs, turning from the hot woman to his cold ice cream. Henry's absent friend then enters, trying to console him by saying that, essentially, there are other fish in the sea. But the friend doesn't get it - he says that the world is full "wif feeding girls" as if the only special thing about this one is that she is eating.
Henry barely hears the weak comment though. He is too lost in thought about this fantastic, "jeweled" woman. We follow his thoughts as they trail off in ellipses, giving us space to imagine this Venus, to think of Henry hungering for her. Henry shows the innocence of his longing when he muses about her He ponders her genitals, thinking almost sweetly of their wonders. The next line, "the restaurant buzzes," signals the beginning of the end for this poem. The word "buzz's" sharpness acts like an alarm, begin to shake the image of this restaurant loose from Henry's dream.
As the place begins to disintegrate, so do Henry's hopes. He despairingly acknowledges the truth - that "she might as well be on Mars" for all that he will be able to speak with her. His final thought swivels inward, and he turns her unavailability into something that disintegrates his self-worth. The line "there ought to be a law against Henry"'s depressing tone contrasts with the matter-of-fact way in which Henry says it. It's almost a throwaway, and we get the sense that he has been repeating things like this for a long, long time.
The final line, Henry's friend's answer "there is," compresses the tragedy. Even Henry's friend dully acknowledges that, yes, Henry as a human is forbidden from the pleasures of this world. He is indeed barred from contact. Despite the rippling, engaging diction, Henry is insulated. He disassociates himself by using the third person, of course, but he fades out of being by the last line. He is so unimportant that he doesn't get the last say in his own experience.
I didn't mean to pick such a sad poem for today - I happen to love this one for its tightly wound images and slightly psychotic tone. Henry is a fascinating man, sad and lovely. I hope that you all will take a look at more of the Dream Songs - you can pick them up one by one or chip away at the work as a whole. Henry is worth spending some more time with, I think.
4
Filling her compact & delicious body
with chicken pàprika, she glanced at me
twice.
Fainting with interest, I hungered back
and only the fact of her husband & four other people
kept me from springing on her
or falling at her little feet and crying
"You are the hottest one for years of night
Henry's dazed eyes
have enjoyed. Brilliance." I advanced upon
(despairing) my spumoni.--Sir Bones: is stuffed,
de world, wif feeding girls.
--Black hair, complexion latin, jeweled eyes
downcast . . . the slob behind her feasts . . . What wonders is
she sitting on, over there?
The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars
Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.
--Mr. Bones: there is.
*"[The Dream Songs are] essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry, a white American in early middle age sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second; he has a friend, never named, who addresses him as Mr. Bones and variants thereof" [Berryman's note]. These poems were written over a period of thirteen years. The Norton Anthology of Poetry, fifth edition.
John Berryman 1964
If you have never had a chance to look over John Berryman's Dream Songs, I highly recommend it. They are a strange collection of despairing poems, often broaching the rascist, the heartbreaking, the worrisome, and even the psychotic. You can see a little of that in this one; Henry's friend talks to the blackface incarnation of Henry Mr. Bones out of nowhere, and Henry frets to himself over his ideal woman.
The first stanza captures Henry's literal appetite for this woman. He describes her with food words - the choice of chicken paprika is no coincidence, for that is a spicy food, and this woman is hot. Then, too, instead of fainting with hunger, he faints with interest. Hunger is so important in this stanza that it leaves its usual part-of-speech, becoming a verb. Then, too, the diction is tense and energized. Words like "compact" and "springing" tighten the diction, while the interesting &s and à add visual stimulus. The genius in this first section, though, is how Berryman dismantles any real sexual threat. The word hunger itself avoids a hyper-masculine sex-drive, for to be hungry is to be weak. The, too, "twice" stands alone, its lowercase first letter meekly nodding to the value of those two glances.
Henry reinforces this servility when he talks of "falling at her little feet." There is something askew in his imagined plea to her. To begin, he is hyper-detached from himself, speaking in the third person and giving his adoration to his eyes. Instead of enjoying things himself, "Henry's dazed eyes" relish the woman. Then, too, he lists time in "years of nights," alluding to the years and years of nights spent eating alone and, presumably, sleeping alone.
Despite this sad picture, Berryman creates a moment of hope for Henry by placing a line break between "I advanced upon" and "my spumoni." At the edge of line 10, we hope that Henry will really go talk to her. Instead, he despairs, turning from the hot woman to his cold ice cream. Henry's absent friend then enters, trying to console him by saying that, essentially, there are other fish in the sea. But the friend doesn't get it - he says that the world is full "wif feeding girls" as if the only special thing about this one is that she is eating.
Henry barely hears the weak comment though. He is too lost in thought about this fantastic, "jeweled" woman. We follow his thoughts as they trail off in ellipses, giving us space to imagine this Venus, to think of Henry hungering for her. Henry shows the innocence of his longing when he muses about her He ponders her genitals, thinking almost sweetly of their wonders. The next line, "the restaurant buzzes," signals the beginning of the end for this poem. The word "buzz's" sharpness acts like an alarm, begin to shake the image of this restaurant loose from Henry's dream.
As the place begins to disintegrate, so do Henry's hopes. He despairingly acknowledges the truth - that "she might as well be on Mars" for all that he will be able to speak with her. His final thought swivels inward, and he turns her unavailability into something that disintegrates his self-worth. The line "there ought to be a law against Henry"'s depressing tone contrasts with the matter-of-fact way in which Henry says it. It's almost a throwaway, and we get the sense that he has been repeating things like this for a long, long time.
The final line, Henry's friend's answer "there is," compresses the tragedy. Even Henry's friend dully acknowledges that, yes, Henry as a human is forbidden from the pleasures of this world. He is indeed barred from contact. Despite the rippling, engaging diction, Henry is insulated. He disassociates himself by using the third person, of course, but he fades out of being by the last line. He is so unimportant that he doesn't get the last say in his own experience.
I didn't mean to pick such a sad poem for today - I happen to love this one for its tightly wound images and slightly psychotic tone. Henry is a fascinating man, sad and lovely. I hope that you all will take a look at more of the Dream Songs - you can pick them up one by one or chip away at the work as a whole. Henry is worth spending some more time with, I think.
Monday, February 27, 2006
Poem of the Week 2/27/2006: Liquid Paper
Liquid Paper
Smooth as a snail this little parson
pardons our sins Touch the brush tip
lightly and abracadabra a clean slate
We know those who blot their brains
by sniffing it which shows
it erases more than ink
and with imagination anything
can be misapplied . . . In the army
our topsergeant drank aftershave squeezing
my Old Spice to the last slow drop
It worked like Liquid Paper in his head
until he'd glide across the streets of Heidelberg
hunting for the house in Boise Idaho
where he was born . . . If I were God
I'd authorize Celestial Liquid Paper
every seven years to whiten our mistakes:
we should be sorry and live with what we've done
but seven years is long enough and all of us
deserve a visit now and then
to the house where we were born
before everything got written so far wrong
Peter Meinke 2003
This poem mixes sadness and love, shock and whimsy, and aurally leads us every-which-way in its presentation of compassion. Its music is astounding; I highly encourage you to read it out loud to yourself, or at least pay attention when you are reading it quietly. Slam poetry seems to have informed it in cleverness, cadence and structure. Slam often tweaks a word or common phrase (herein, Meinke changes "with imagination anything is possible" to "with imagination anything can be misapplied"). Like "Liquid Paper," slam communicates form through alliteration, rhythm (not just end-rhyme, which is an old, used form, if that makes sense), volume, and pauses; on one level, the white, blank spaces on the page recall these gaps. On another, as my friend Dustin pointed out, they are like little whited-out spaces on their own, perhaps suggesting that the poet himself has been blessed with liquid paper.
Reading this poem several times will cast the first stanza differently. Read lightly, the image of a snail creeping across the page is sweet and whimsical, it being amusing to think of the squat Liquid Paper bottle as the plump priest come to redeem us. With a measure of sobriety, however, it turns into a quiet miracle-worker; "sins" conveys a moral flaw, something important and guilt-worthy. Then, too, the repition of the S sound in "smooth," "snail," "sins," and "slate," the P sound in "parson" and "pardon," and T sound in "touch" and "tip" add an aural intensity that oversteps the fanciful opening images. This edge hints at the next stanza's darkness.
Other than its rhetorical techniques, this section is clear, if somber. Meinke touches on the human capability to distort and destroy. Taken with the white-out's previous association with a parson, this capability appears more sinister; things that were light and amusing in the first stanza are suddenly fragile, corruptible. Humans can thus turn aftershave from something to save us from the horrors of stinging skin or smelling bad to something that saves us from the horrors of war. This leap from the micro to the macro is one of Meinke's most effective strategies. He funnels despair into everyday things. The consonance (repeated consonant sounds) in the final lines literally evoke what it is to be squeezed, pressed, compacted, drained.
Thus, the next line's slowness stops us in our tracks. The breaks between two and three-word groups slow the reading to a crawl, forcing us to think about what it is to have one's memories erased. The toxic smell of white out comes to mind, suggested by the earlier allusion to drug abuse.
Smooth as a snail this little parson
pardons our sins Touch the brush tip
lightly and abracadabra a clean slate
We know those who blot their brains
by sniffing it which shows
it erases more than ink
and with imagination anything
can be misapplied . . . In the army
our topsergeant drank aftershave squeezing
my Old Spice to the last slow drop
It worked like Liquid Paper in his head
until he'd glide across the streets of Heidelberg
hunting for the house in Boise Idaho
where he was born . . . If I were God
I'd authorize Celestial Liquid Paper
every seven years to whiten our mistakes:
we should be sorry and live with what we've done
but seven years is long enough and all of us
deserve a visit now and then
to the house where we were born
before everything got written so far wrong
Peter Meinke 2003
This poem mixes sadness and love, shock and whimsy, and aurally leads us every-which-way in its presentation of compassion. Its music is astounding; I highly encourage you to read it out loud to yourself, or at least pay attention when you are reading it quietly. Slam poetry seems to have informed it in cleverness, cadence and structure. Slam often tweaks a word or common phrase (herein, Meinke changes "with imagination anything is possible" to "with imagination anything can be misapplied"). Like "Liquid Paper," slam communicates form through alliteration, rhythm (not just end-rhyme, which is an old, used form, if that makes sense), volume, and pauses; on one level, the white, blank spaces on the page recall these gaps. On another, as my friend Dustin pointed out, they are like little whited-out spaces on their own, perhaps suggesting that the poet himself has been blessed with liquid paper.
Reading this poem several times will cast the first stanza differently. Read lightly, the image of a snail creeping across the page is sweet and whimsical, it being amusing to think of the squat Liquid Paper bottle as the plump priest come to redeem us. With a measure of sobriety, however, it turns into a quiet miracle-worker; "sins" conveys a moral flaw, something important and guilt-worthy. Then, too, the repition of the S sound in "smooth," "snail," "sins," and "slate," the P sound in "parson" and "pardon," and T sound in "touch" and "tip" add an aural intensity that oversteps the fanciful opening images. This edge hints at the next stanza's darkness.
Other than its rhetorical techniques, this section is clear, if somber. Meinke touches on the human capability to distort and destroy. Taken with the white-out's previous association with a parson, this capability appears more sinister; things that were light and amusing in the first stanza are suddenly fragile, corruptible. Humans can thus turn aftershave from something to save us from the horrors of stinging skin or smelling bad to something that saves us from the horrors of war. This leap from the micro to the macro is one of Meinke's most effective strategies. He funnels despair into everyday things. The consonance (repeated consonant sounds) in the final lines literally evoke what it is to be squeezed, pressed, compacted, drained.
Thus, the next line's slowness stops us in our tracks. The breaks between two and three-word groups slow the reading to a crawl, forcing us to think about what it is to have one's memories erased. The toxic smell of white out comes to mind, suggested by the earlier allusion to drug abuse.
Sunday, February 19, 2006
Poem of the Week 2/20/2006: The Cold Green Element
The Cold Green Element
At the end of the garden walk
the wind and its satellite wait for me;
their meaning I will not know
until I go there,
but the black-hatted undertaker
who, passing, saw my heart beating in the grass,
is also going there. Hi, I tell him,
a great squall in the Pacific blew a dead poet
out of the water,
Crowds depart daily to see it, and return
with grimaces and incomprehension;
if its limbs twitched in the air
they would sit at its feet
peeling their oranges.
And turning over I embrace like a lover
the trunk of a tree, one of those
for whom the lightning was too much
and grew a brillant
hunchback with a crown of leaves.
The ailments escaped from the labels
of medicine bottles and all fled to the wind;
I've seen myself lately in the eyes
of old women,
spent streams mourning my manhood,
in whose old pupils the sun became
a bloodsmear on broad catalpa leaves
and hanging from ancient twigs,
my murdered selves
sparked the air like muted collisions
of fruit. A black dog howls down my blood,
a black dog with yellow eyes;
he too by someone's inadvertence
saw the bloodsmear
on the broad catalpa leaves.
But the furies clear a path for me to the worm
who sang for an hour in the throat of a robin,
and misled by the cries of young boys
I am again
a breathless swimmer in that cold green element.
Irving Layton 1940
Before I begin, a note about the form: the fourth line in each five line stanza is indented, though Blogger absolutely refuses to show it.
Irving Layton died earlier this year, but it seems that he was thinking about death long before that. Not that this should be surprising - I have heard it said that what defines humans is our knowledge of our deaths. "The Cold Green Element" deals with a dreamlike vision of death, moving through surreal images of death and sadness, fear and despair. There is not quite a cohesive plan; rather, the poem's consciousness moves like thought, flowing from one thread to the next, always retaining a consciousness of the whole. Layton preserves the hopeless tone through the various hallucinogenic scenes, emphasizing the fragmented tale of a lost young man.
Well, there's a question. Is this man lost? The first stanza, at a glance, indicates no, for he is clearly on a garden path. But humans are constantly on paths. Being lost is not knowing what path you are on, or perhaps if that path is the right one. This narrator recognizes the path but not the meaning, so I would argue that he is no less lost than you or I. Am I being broad and preach-y today? I have felt like that the entire day. Ah well.
As the speaker continues his narrative, he meets the first omen of death: the black-hatted undertaker. This undertaker is headed down the same road, suggesting that this path is indeed death. This undertaker saw the narrator's "heart lying in the grass," an image that accomplishes several things at once. It is first shocking in its frankness; we almost glide over this observation, accepting it as true. Then, too, it intertwines humans and nature, continuing the garden imagery and perhaps alluding to death's part in the natural order of things.
The next image is delivered just as casually and is perhaps even odder. Layton writes of a dead poet "who now hangs from the city's gates." Both the gate reference and the allusion to the Pacific evoke images of San Francisco, lending this poem its first definite sense of geography. The realism ends there, though. Crowds who, "if it twitched its feet in the air / ... would sit at its feet peeling their oranges" flock to see this poet. This strange scene relays a phobia, perhaps, of voyeurism, or an intense awareness of being viewed. The "oranges" inclusion lends the diorama a twist of suburban oddity. The people sit and eat their California snack watching a dead body like TV. It distills people's fascination with destruction and the grotesque.
More importantly, I think that the scene is one of defeat - the poet is dead out of water, perhaps lambasted by his peers - which would explain (in part) the next stanza. Because the narrator turns to the tree "like a lover," and because it has a crown of leaves, this stanza is positive. He may be turning to it in comfort, for it survived a shock of lightning just as he hopes to survive a shock of voyeurism, death, or humiliation.
It doesn't give him much comfort, however, for the rest of the poem is an agglomeration of fragmented, despairing images of fear and death. The narrator sees himself emasculated through old women's eyes. I choose the word "emasculated" because Layton employs old women and "manhood" in this stanza of loss. The crones seem to represent a loss of fertility, a deadening of sexuality. We again see the narrator's very human concern for his loss of virility, for he has of late "spent streams mourning [his] manhood."
The next line, "in whose pupils," could refer to the women's pupils or his manhood's pupils; in any case, the viewed image is one of blood and death. Layton again reveals a consciousness of man's eventual tumble into death by twisting the sun's rays, associated with life and growth, into smears of blood. Life turns to death, inevitably. The poem is fixated on this image; its reappearance in the seventh stanza underlines its thematic centrality.
The line "my murdered selves" is interesting, because not only does it again connote death, but it conveys the sense that this narrator has been thinking of his death for a long time. He has accrued possible selves that died in different (probably horrific) ways. These images bang together "in muted collisions / like fruit." Layton again mixes death and fruit, creating a tension between the morbid and the bright. It also again brings together an image of death with that of fertility, nodding towards the cyclical way of things.
This order is terrifying to the narrator, however. He sees death as a black dog with yellow eyes, forever pursuing him. This dog can smell his blood, we learn, because somebody inadvertently showed it the smeared catalpa leaves. You know how something can almost feel crueler when somebody didn't think about what they were doing than when they pointedly did it? That kind of coldness and utter disregard can (though of course won't always) cut deeper than calculated malice.
All of this said, the poem ends hopefully. Despite the path that fate clears for all of us, the narrator will sing even as he falls down into the abyss like the worm in the robin's throat. This recklessness is due to "the cries of young boys:" perhaps the childlike belief in immortality, or a kid's hope. There is a kind of desperate tenacity to the final lines, "I am again / a breathless swimmer in that cold green element."
There is more to the final resolution than some American beat-the-odds mentality, though. This poem was a personal journey to a fierce resolve, one filled with a kind of love, if that makes any sense. You may find that almost every poem in this blog has something to do with love, and this poem has a very strange form of it. I feel love for this narrator's will to overcome his fear, and I think that he loves himself, too, enough to try, at least.
At the end of the garden walk
the wind and its satellite wait for me;
their meaning I will not know
until I go there,
but the black-hatted undertaker
who, passing, saw my heart beating in the grass,
is also going there. Hi, I tell him,
a great squall in the Pacific blew a dead poet
out of the water,
Crowds depart daily to see it, and return
with grimaces and incomprehension;
if its limbs twitched in the air
they would sit at its feet
peeling their oranges.
And turning over I embrace like a lover
the trunk of a tree, one of those
for whom the lightning was too much
and grew a brillant
hunchback with a crown of leaves.
The ailments escaped from the labels
of medicine bottles and all fled to the wind;
I've seen myself lately in the eyes
of old women,
spent streams mourning my manhood,
in whose old pupils the sun became
a bloodsmear on broad catalpa leaves
and hanging from ancient twigs,
my murdered selves
sparked the air like muted collisions
of fruit. A black dog howls down my blood,
a black dog with yellow eyes;
he too by someone's inadvertence
saw the bloodsmear
on the broad catalpa leaves.
But the furies clear a path for me to the worm
who sang for an hour in the throat of a robin,
and misled by the cries of young boys
I am again
a breathless swimmer in that cold green element.
Irving Layton 1940
Before I begin, a note about the form: the fourth line in each five line stanza is indented, though Blogger absolutely refuses to show it.
Irving Layton died earlier this year, but it seems that he was thinking about death long before that. Not that this should be surprising - I have heard it said that what defines humans is our knowledge of our deaths. "The Cold Green Element" deals with a dreamlike vision of death, moving through surreal images of death and sadness, fear and despair. There is not quite a cohesive plan; rather, the poem's consciousness moves like thought, flowing from one thread to the next, always retaining a consciousness of the whole. Layton preserves the hopeless tone through the various hallucinogenic scenes, emphasizing the fragmented tale of a lost young man.
Well, there's a question. Is this man lost? The first stanza, at a glance, indicates no, for he is clearly on a garden path. But humans are constantly on paths. Being lost is not knowing what path you are on, or perhaps if that path is the right one. This narrator recognizes the path but not the meaning, so I would argue that he is no less lost than you or I. Am I being broad and preach-y today? I have felt like that the entire day. Ah well.
As the speaker continues his narrative, he meets the first omen of death: the black-hatted undertaker. This undertaker is headed down the same road, suggesting that this path is indeed death. This undertaker saw the narrator's "heart lying in the grass," an image that accomplishes several things at once. It is first shocking in its frankness; we almost glide over this observation, accepting it as true. Then, too, it intertwines humans and nature, continuing the garden imagery and perhaps alluding to death's part in the natural order of things.
The next image is delivered just as casually and is perhaps even odder. Layton writes of a dead poet "who now hangs from the city's gates." Both the gate reference and the allusion to the Pacific evoke images of San Francisco, lending this poem its first definite sense of geography. The realism ends there, though. Crowds who, "if it twitched its feet in the air / ... would sit at its feet peeling their oranges" flock to see this poet. This strange scene relays a phobia, perhaps, of voyeurism, or an intense awareness of being viewed. The "oranges" inclusion lends the diorama a twist of suburban oddity. The people sit and eat their California snack watching a dead body like TV. It distills people's fascination with destruction and the grotesque.
More importantly, I think that the scene is one of defeat - the poet is dead out of water, perhaps lambasted by his peers - which would explain (in part) the next stanza. Because the narrator turns to the tree "like a lover," and because it has a crown of leaves, this stanza is positive. He may be turning to it in comfort, for it survived a shock of lightning just as he hopes to survive a shock of voyeurism, death, or humiliation.
It doesn't give him much comfort, however, for the rest of the poem is an agglomeration of fragmented, despairing images of fear and death. The narrator sees himself emasculated through old women's eyes. I choose the word "emasculated" because Layton employs old women and "manhood" in this stanza of loss. The crones seem to represent a loss of fertility, a deadening of sexuality. We again see the narrator's very human concern for his loss of virility, for he has of late "spent streams mourning [his] manhood."
The next line, "in whose pupils," could refer to the women's pupils or his manhood's pupils; in any case, the viewed image is one of blood and death. Layton again reveals a consciousness of man's eventual tumble into death by twisting the sun's rays, associated with life and growth, into smears of blood. Life turns to death, inevitably. The poem is fixated on this image; its reappearance in the seventh stanza underlines its thematic centrality.
The line "my murdered selves" is interesting, because not only does it again connote death, but it conveys the sense that this narrator has been thinking of his death for a long time. He has accrued possible selves that died in different (probably horrific) ways. These images bang together "in muted collisions / like fruit." Layton again mixes death and fruit, creating a tension between the morbid and the bright. It also again brings together an image of death with that of fertility, nodding towards the cyclical way of things.
This order is terrifying to the narrator, however. He sees death as a black dog with yellow eyes, forever pursuing him. This dog can smell his blood, we learn, because somebody inadvertently showed it the smeared catalpa leaves. You know how something can almost feel crueler when somebody didn't think about what they were doing than when they pointedly did it? That kind of coldness and utter disregard can (though of course won't always) cut deeper than calculated malice.
All of this said, the poem ends hopefully. Despite the path that fate clears for all of us, the narrator will sing even as he falls down into the abyss like the worm in the robin's throat. This recklessness is due to "the cries of young boys:" perhaps the childlike belief in immortality, or a kid's hope. There is a kind of desperate tenacity to the final lines, "I am again / a breathless swimmer in that cold green element."
There is more to the final resolution than some American beat-the-odds mentality, though. This poem was a personal journey to a fierce resolve, one filled with a kind of love, if that makes any sense. You may find that almost every poem in this blog has something to do with love, and this poem has a very strange form of it. I feel love for this narrator's will to overcome his fear, and I think that he loves himself, too, enough to try, at least.
Sunday, February 12, 2006
Poem of the Week 2/13/2006: Canal Bank Walk
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! **
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! **
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.
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