Kooser's "The Time of Their Lives"

Ted Kooser in The Poetry Home Repair Manual applauds the conversational opening that pulls the reader into the heavier depth of an awaiting poem. This is exactly what he does in “The Time of Their Lives.” The reader is pulled into the pastoral world of the ducks eating Jonathan apples, and is allowed to delight in the innocence of the ducks compared to “nuns on a picnic” and to delight in the Disney-notion of their laughter as they roll the apples around in the grass.

Even the second stanza where their awareness of the external world is heightened fails to alert the reader to the danger that lies ahead. The end sentence, “Their black eyes sparkle,” reinforces the duck-joy of the moment. It is only on a second read that the “papery rattle,” “sweat-bee,” and the leaf that “sifts the wind” have an ominous sound that the ducks in their glee miss.

The third stanza configures the turn in the poem in its graduated series of warnings. First, there is the “ice in the reeds,” a signal to any duck that the joys of summer are on the wane. Then, the narrator reveals his complicity in the scenario that is about to change the lives of the ducks when he talks of the cage he has built in the “dark garage.” The movement quickens with the reality of impending death with the entrance of the “hard young farm wife easy with killing.” Because the reader has been pulled into the perspective of the ducks in the beginning of the poem, he or she is trapped by the irony that when they are “packaged like gifts,” they are “heavy as hearts.” The reader suffers the heavy-hearted response that the ducks do not know to feel.

The complicity of the narrator in the natural design in which the ducks are trapped is established in the opening line of the last stanza by the “sturdy” cage, “quick to close,” and by the two concluding correspondences between the narrator’s carpentry and the reality of predators in the duck-world. The “hammer tapped” and the ducks listen to the passing of the “bull snake,” and the “cry of the table saw” is the background for the final sound that the ducks hear in the poem: “a hawk’s wings dust the blue bowl of the sky.”

The final image of the poem captures the reality to which the poem progresses. Happiness and pain are always only a hairbreadth apart. That close connection is configured by the hawk’s wings (the image of death/destruction) dusting the blue bowl of the sky (supreme happiness and joy). The title of the poem suggests the dual reality of the two halves of the poem. The first two stanzas suggest the colloquial meaning of the clause, an extraordinary good time. The last two stanzas suggest the temporal reality of the clause.

The Open Ending

In the Paris Review interview reprinted in Next-to-Last Things, Stanley Kunitz said that he liked “an ending that’s both a door and a window” (114). By this he means that he favors poetic closure that “bleeds out of its ending into the whole universe of feeling and thought” (114). By studying the ending of selected poems from the seventies to the present reprinted in The Collected Poems, the period following the statement, we can see just what the door and window metaphor really means.

In “The Portrait,” Kunitz tells his readers that his “mother never forgave [his] father for killing himself” (142). The heart of the poem narrates an occasion when the poet found a portrait of a man he did not know in the attic. When he brought it to his mother she tore the portrait up and slapped her son. The poem ends with “In my sixty-fourth year/ I can feel my cheek/ still burning” (142). In a sense, this final sentence throws open the door to understanding the emotional impact not only of the pivotal moment but of the burden the poet has carried throughout life for the father’s suicide before his birth, the mother’s refusal to acknowledge the man’s historical presence, and the confusion that the poet/boy endured. The present-time image sums up a life of experience and becomes a controlling metaphor for that experience. The placement of “still” before “burning” rather than before “feel,” a customary prosaic placement, provides poetic richness and, in fact, opens the window on the experience. The image becomes universal as it connotes the way those seminal experiences in life, seemingly insignificant, overshadow and inform the entire life.

“Quinnapoxet,” another poem treating the relationship to the father, juxtaposes an imaginative visit from the parents and a fishing injury. In the dream-like sequence, the mother chides the son for not writing, but he avoids her and centers on the father, “his face averted/ as if to hide a scald,/ deep in his other life” (191). To end the poem, the narrator touches his forehead with his “swollen thumb/ and splayed [his] fingers out--/ in deaf-mute country/ the sign for father” (191). The ending with its image of signing opens the poem to the sense of the silent father with whom the boy has imaginatively communicated all of his life. It reconfigures the pathos of the boy fishing alone with no father to instruct in the proper manner of extracting the hook from the fish. The “swollen thumb” mirrors the “scald” and connects boy and father in a world of the boy’s own making. The image probes the archetypal connection between fathers and sons.

Kunitz opens the window or provides the key illumination in his poems with the turn his endings take. For example, in “The Unquiet Ones,” another family trauma poem, the parents are configured as lying in neglected graves apart from each other except in the mind of the poet. The poem ends with this sentence: “They slip through narrow crevices/ and suddenly blown tall,/ glide into my cave of phantoms,/ unwelcome guests, but not/ unloved, dark emissaries/ of the two-faced god” (213). Everything is predictable as a logical ending of the poem except the final phrase, “dark emissaries/ of the two-faced god.” This is a turn in the logic of the poem that opens a new door. The reader knows that the two are the unquiet ones as the title insists, the ones who continue to communicate to the son beyond their deaths, but the image of the “two-faced god” suggests a level of duplicity that is haunting as well as mysterious. Certainly, it is an image of the unresolved that each of the parents took to the grave, but it seems to question the nature of loving design in the universe as well.

The pervading presence of father and mother in the poetry of Stanley Kunitz cannot be separated from the poet’s sense of nature. Nature, in a sense, takes over the role of nurture that is somehow incomplete in the poet’s experience. “My Mother’s Pears” pulls the two worlds together, and its last line voices the imperative that results. The poem is triggered by the arrival of a box of Barlett pears, presumably the fruit of a tree mother and son planted at an earlier time. The poem modulates from present occurrence to remembered past and ends with the planting of the pear tree. The mother in the poem voices the conclusion, “’Make room/ for the roots!’ my mother cries,/ ‘Dig the hole deeper.’ (250). The command reverberates back through the Kunitz canon. On one level, it speaks of the wished-for, the preoccupation with understanding personal heritage. It voices the sanction the poet would have liked to have had from his mother to probe his paternal roots. It also suggests the inadequacy that seems to surround the son’s sense of fulfilling his mother’s expectations. Further, it suggests the life-long preoccupation of poet/gardener with caring for plants and it suggests the self-assumed responsibility that the poet takes for exploring the nature of reality. Written in the nineties, a late-in-life poem, the poem couches the final admonition in the context of the fruit of a career. The pear tree, after all, still bears fruit, and the son, after all, has done the mother’s bidding.

The cyclical intertwining of life and land is often underlined in the endings that Kunitz fashions to his poems. The “Snakes of September,” the poet’s description of a summer-long relationship with the snakes in his Provincetown spruce, ends with his sense that “the wild braid of creation trembles” (221) when he stokes the skin of the two remaining snakes at summer’s end. The conclusion is a statement of the universal complicity of man and animal in the natural world, and it carries a sense of the ultimate, awe-inspiring design of a created universe. The movement from one man’s touch to all of creation is a prime example of the “bleeding” principle that is the underlying dynamic in the Kunitz window/door ending.

“The Mulch” is an extension of this same cyclical sense of the interrelationship of man and nature. The burden of the poem can be seen in the repetition of “Repeat, Repeat” (173) as the gull drops the piss-clam and “Try! Try!” (173) of the blood beating in the narrator’s wrist. Both images underline the dominant action in the poem, the gathering of salt hay for the garden, and suggest that if life is to be sustained, there must be a keeping-on. The irony of the poem is contained in the reversal in its ending. The gatherer is working to sustain the garden “which prepares to die” (173). The ending doubles back on the title. Mulch is simple that—the dead that sustains the life.

In many ways, the ending of a Kunitz poem is a distillation of the heart, the major thrust of that poem. Each seems almost to be a poem within a poem. In a single phrase, an isolated line, a metaphor is floated that causes the reader’s mind to understand that the poem is more than he/she thought it was. The endings pull back the layers of the poem revealing yet another all important layer.

Celebration of Acceptance

Denise Levertov’s “Stepping Westward” is a poem that celebrates life in whatever form it is found. With the echo of Whitman’s “Song of Myself” reverberating in the first line and the parallel conditional propositions that organize the poem, the speaker sings of flexibility, stability, and durability. These seem to function as requisites for stepping in to the next phase of any pilgrimage. To journey in the fullest sense is to accept who one is and what one’s life is like.

The title suggests the sense of adventure, of passage, that the speaker is embarking upon. The present tense gives the poem a sense of immediacy and power. The movement westward in American literature has always suggested rebirth, the fresh start, fueled by the image of early trappers, gold-rushers, and homesteaders. The suggestion of the title is revisited in the last line with the speaker’s assurance that she can eat as she goes. “Step” and go are the metaphors for acceptance of what is.

The initial lines introduce a declaration that establishes the major image of the poem—the “muscadine.” Using the stereotypical notion of “green” as uninitiated, innocent, and youthful, the speaker freshens the image with its completing qualifier: “What is green in me darkens.” The adverb “what” indicates an approximation of that which is green, that part that is darkening or ripening. The central image, the “muscadine,” represents the aging, the experienced life and initiates a sacramental sense with its suggestion of wine.

The poem is organized around three conditional statements, each beginning with the conjunction “if.” In the first two conditional statements, the speaker moves from the general to the specific, from the impersonal to the personal. These statements introduce polar opposite conditions and call both conditions “good.” There is the ring of Genesis and the creation myth just under the surface of this construction.

In the first of the conditional statements the rendering of “good” heightens the irony of the statement that reverses the conventional wisdom of constancy. The speaker embraces the “inconstant,” acknowledging faithfulness to “ebb and flow” and returns to the figure of the muscadine. The cyclical nature of the tides, the moon, and seasons of growth are acknowledged as the speaker asserts that this is a “time of ripening.” The muscadine and the woman are one in the fall. Again, Genesis and the creation myth are called into the equation of inconstancy, and the darkening of the green of the first assertion takes on a post-Edenic character.

The second conditional statement reverses the first giving the contrasting option “to be true” and introduces a second metaphor, the north star. The north star, according to custom, guided those at sea who held steady to her course. By measuring the angle between the north star and the northern horizon, the early navigator could determine the latitude of his ship. The north star almost directly above the earth’s axis remains stationary while all other stars seem to revolve around the axis. When she is constant, the speaker is always there, either she holds “steady in the black sky” or she burns “in blue above quilts of cloud.” The speaker nods to the paradox of the north star, suggesting that it seems to vanish yet is always there above the clouds. The use of “burn” juxtaposed to “quilt of cloud” furthers this paradox suggesting the two poles of temperature.

The poem gains much of its tension through the exploration of polar opposites—inconstancy/steadiness, hot/cold, dark/light, green/ripe, night/day, sun/moon, sweet/salt. The latter is used as an emblem of comparison in the celebration of acceptance. The speaker insists that “ to be glad to be” woman is a taste greater than the dualities of “sweet” and “salt.” Again, the speaker moves from the impersonal to the personal. Using the relative pronouns “what” and “who,” she distances the generic woman and then the self. This distancing sets up the notion of “shadow” and “thread of wonder.” As “shadow” she lengthens “as the sun moves” westward in the completion of its cycle, a lengthening that is “drawn out on a thread of wonder” even as the sun is “drawn out on a thread of wonder.” The equation of woman and sun through the ambiguity of “thread of wonder” reinforces the sense of the sacramental in the poem as well as the integration of woman and earth or a bid to the solidity and completion of the concept of earth mother.

The third conditional statement is a statement of transubstantiation. The “burdens” that she might bear become “gifts, goods, a basket of bread.” Again, moving from the indefinite to the definite, the “bread” comes in duality. It is an agent of pain, but it brings a sweet closure. The sensuality of the poem with its emphasis on taste, sight, smell, and the kinesthetic celebrates the vitality of the woman’s life. The smell of pain produces an energy that makes the going possible.

There is an incarnational quality, perhaps a progressive incarnational quality, in the poem that is realized in the assertion of self as shadow. The shadow is subject to the movement of the sun on its westward path even as the speaker is subject to being part of the “thread of wonder.” The sense of shadow, the unnamed earthly presence of the divine, is an integral part of the journey realized in the title of the poem. Eating the bread, then, becomes the ritualized sacrament commemorating shadow, suffering, the gift of life.

The Luminosity of Foreboding

In the Paris Review interview in 1977, Stanley Kunitz said that at his age he wanted to face the “great simplicities” of life in his poetry. Never tiring of “bird-song and sky and weather,” his purpose was to write poems that were “luminous, deep, spare.” A good example from this period in his writing is “Day of Foreboding.”

The nine-line poem rides on two major images that engender in the reader the sense of foreboding that the title suggests. The poem begins with a spare expository statement, “Great events are about to happen.” Evidence to support this assertion can be seen in the narrator’s eye-witness account that “unprecedented numbers” of migratory birds are “picking the margins clean” on the coastal plain.

The sense of foreboding is heightened by the narrator’s abrupt shift from the external to the internal. He bears witness to an unusual phenomenon in nature and then he moves to a metaphorical assertion about his own presence within this emotional complex. By juxtaposing “My bones” to the predatory picking action of the birds, the sense of foreboding is chilling in its suggestion of his own fate.

The personal, however, is extended to the archetypal as it pulls in a heritage of nomadic journey. The “bones” are compared to a “family in their tent huddled over a small fire waiting for the uncertain signal to resume the long march.” The words “huddled,” “small fire,” “uncertain signal,” and “long march” reinforce the sense of foreboding with its danger and doubt. The “bones” become the result rather than strength and structure of willful movement.

The poem has the same minimalist quality that Emily Dickinson achieves in her definition poems, poems that move from abstraction to the clarifying image as a method for defining the ordinary in an extraordinary way. Kunitz pushes past Dickinson in tapping the collective unconsciousness with his extended metaphor. Life is figured as both fragile and temporary.

Borrowed Form in "Raccoon Journal"

Until I listened to Greg Pape's lecture on analogue poetry, I had never really thought about the technique of borrowing a poem' s form from some other communications pattern. But Stanley Kunitz was thinking of just that when he borrowed the form of the naturalist's log notes for "Raccoon Journal." Stretching imaginatively over four months, the narrator chronicles the nocturnal visits of a family of five raccoons to town.

Starting with a dictionary definition, a technique that the analogue suggests, the narrator explains the meaning of the Algonquian Indian word from which the name raccoon comes--"he scratches with his hands." And with this definition, the narrator establishes the major motif used in the poem.

Raccoon actions are described with hand metaphors, metaphors that do what human hands are capable of doing. They "drop a calling card," open garbage cans, "scatter parts of chickens," drown a neighbor's dog, and they "dig, dig, dig" for the bonemeal and hook their "prehensile fingers" to the screen door. They've come to town "to inspect their properties" and finally to "take possession." The narrator's sense of their taking things into their own hands is woven through the poem as is the sense of these animals as prehensile beings, beings that can not only grasp things but ideas, beings that understand the meaning of ownership.

This gradual development of the hand motif moves from the innocent, the charming, to the insidious and stops just short of dangerous. At first the notion of coming to "inspect their properties" is humorous with their "swagger," nosiness, and precocity, and even the juxtaposition of "calling card" and "soft reddish scats" is the stuff of the country-come-to-town American jokester. The figure of "heavy sprays of territorial scent" mixing with the dew of the damp morning air suggests the ominous meaning that will later be revealed in the poem.

The image of "five pelts" seen by streetlight "paddling" up the lane promises a child's delightful story of teddy bear arrival until the garbage cans are plundered and a pet is lured to death. The bear-like lovability turns to a "grizzly old codger" with arms and hands that drag the Labrador retriever into the water and hold him under. In the last entry, the bear-like creatures are heard "half-churring, half-growling." They "lumber from side to side like diminished bears in a flatfooted shuffle." They have "snouts," "bandit eyes," and their "manic hoot….curdles the night air." They are shape-shifters, "libidinous beasts [that] assume familiar shapes."

They are monsters connected with "ooze" where they drown dogs. Describing them as "five pelts" and later as a "furpiece" hanging on the screen door runs counter to the urge to anthropomorphize and builds the mystery voiced in the indefinite "Something out there appalls." The raccoons are characterized as hedonists that live "promiscuously," "gorge" on the bounty of the garbage can, and are addicts wild for bonemeal, "a whiff of buried angel dust."

The narrator places himself with those on "this side of Gull Hill" who can no longer tangle with the lawlessness of the raccoons, those like his "superannuated cat" who can only put "on a show of bristling" at the mouse "racing round the kitchen. He is resigned to "paying [his] vegetable tithe" and coming to terms with the "wilderness of age," no longer able "to talk with animals in their own language." This self-referential section of the poem is tied to the ending where the animals no longer need be afraid of the man. The final line "they've come to take possession" suggests far more than it states. The raccoons morph into all those who have come to take the man's life into their own hands, all that threatens just outside the door of remember vitality.

The Catch in Reading Kunitz

"The primary responsibility of a poet is to speak the true word and to distill the complexity of sensitivity that enters into any human experience," asserts Stanley Kunitz in "The Web of Creation," one the essays in The Wild Braid. Certainly, it is the "complexity of sensitivity" that captures the mind of anyone reading Kunitz. For example, the short poem "The Catch" focuses on a slice in time when an adult and child sit beside a pond and catch a dragonfly. A simple scenario gives itself to distillation.

The poem begins with a visual picture of a darting dragonfly at sunset. The dragonfly which is never named specifically is characterized by mechanistic loom imagery. Called an "engine" and a "swift darning needle," it weaves "around a spindle of air" and is "fired by impulse and glitter." It is the "impulse and glitter" that moves the poem from the visual to its next level of sensitivity and names the dragonfly a "gossamer dragon." The words "impulse," "glitter," and "gossamer" evoking the sense of an imaginative fairy world are direct opposites to the laws of physics that customarily dictate the mechanistic realm. The narrator moves the real to the imaginary and evokes the mythic sense of imaginative extreme with the reference to "dragon." The verb "fired" takes on heightened meaning with the entrance of the "dragon" and the narrator's role of dragon slayer.

But the ten-line sentence doesn't stop with the description. Description moves to concept when the narrator suggests that the image is subordinate to "thought" and "the thought come alive." Resonant in the image is the art and craft of tapestry, the mythical history of good and evil, and the tradition of knighthood.

The poem comes back from its imaginative flight to the present with the capture of the insect and dialogue with the child. There is a curious impersonalising in the capture: "Swoosh went the net with a practiced hand." It is as though the action remains partially myth, an action heightened beyond the first level of sensitivity introduced in the poem. The child's "Da-da, may I look too?" calls the poem further into reality, but the final response of the adult moves the sensitivity to yet another level of complexity. The child is told of the price of looking at the slain dragon: "you wil pay all your life for the privilege." The import of this message, this complete distillation of sensitivity is reinforced with the repetition of "all your life" at the end of the poem.

The catch configured in the title is both temporal and timeless. It is both intentional and unintentional. It speaks of the action of swooshing with the net and it speaks of the ultimate paradox of knowledge.

I Favor Dominion

When it comes to snakes, I've always favored the notion of dominion, so I'm called up short when I read Kunitz in "The Snakes of September." The significant line in that poem is the isolated "After all" with its sense of summation. It calls the reader up short before it introduces the clincher: "we are partners in this land, co-signers of a covenant." The complicity of the fall narrative is reinforced by the contractual terms "partners," "co-signers," and "covenant." But Kunitz doesn't stop there. He moves to a deeper understanding of this complicity when he again references the human "touch," suggesting its ultimate relationship with "the wild braid of creation." Both "trembles" and "braid" figure collusion between man and nature that is both sacred and irrevocable.

The climax of the poem is heightened by the narrator's description of a summer-long cohabitation with the snakes. Using the playful verbs "rustling" and "outracing," the narrator suggests a comfortable game between the two parties. The repetitive nouns "whisper," "signal," and "shadow" are emphasized by placement and suggest the engagement with which the snakes play out their role in the garden.

The tension increases in the poem when the defiance of the snakes is introduced. Conventional wisdom suggests to the narrator that with the coming of fall the snakes should have disappeared, but these two have rejected the blood-call of hibernation for a very different stirring of the blood. In a "brazen love-knot" they dangle in the sun, "the deceptive balm of noon." The suggestion of the "deceptive" pulls the reader back to the violation of the common curse man and snake experienced in that other garden.

The narrative reaches its apex when the man reaches out to "stroke the fine, dry grit of their skins." He defiantly touches the seeming untouchable.

What the Snow Man Knows

Mowing my yard in scorching Louisiana heat, I think of Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man.” I try to develop the mind of winter, but my imagination flags and I feel only the sweat streaming into my eyes, the discomfort of a summer reality that my Missouri past resists. Later, with an ice cold diet coke in hand, my mind turns again to Stevens and I puzzle over the extended image which I take to be a comment on imagination.

The single sentence spread over the five tercets sets up three conditions for entrance into the state that is being configured in the poem. The person wishing to enter this state “must have a mind of winter,” must “have been cold a long time,” and must not think of the “misery in the sound of the wind.” To listen in the snow is to move into an imaginative plane that escapes the self to behold the “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

To become a snow man, a pun perhaps on no man, is to move into nothingness or the void out of which all real creation comes. It is rightly an act of self-denial. The image of the snow man haunts me with a sense both of the cost and the reward of the imaginative experience.

With Apologies to Thomas Hardy

In order to gain greater understanding of what Hardy was about in "Darkling Thrush," I decided to use his poem for a pattern for an exercise in similarity.

Dark Green Billboard

I heard the cacophonous shriek,
the urban sound released
from motor pools, the grinding squeak
of metal throbbing beasts.
The steely crowd contained in lines
with surging tempers bared,
unending chouse for space designs,
reward for effort dared.

The road’s intense noise appeared
to sound disgust of all
who voice conflicted rage, adhered
to answers that forestall
the questions, counters, oppositions
of rational debate.
The asphalt bully verbally bludgeons
any word that would negate.

Then loomed above the angry throng
a billboard, stark, austere.
A darkened green released headstrong
its white letters up there--
Quiet--someone is thinking!
A bid to back our schools--
a child with books, a mind gleaning
ideas, disruptor's tools.

That billboard child may seem a fix
for our unwilling ears
to hear dissenting words, the bricks
we fling in homegrown jeers.
Difference we fear! The terror crack
the world has felt forecasts
the will we doubt that earth will lack
to stand its own sandblasts.

My first problem in using Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush" as a pattern to generate a poem of my own was to determine an issue that is as over-reaching in this age as the millennial issue was in his age. I decided that the current mania for the singular point of view, the resistance that can be seen in politics and religion, contemporary culture and private patterns of interaction, to entertaining or even listening to an alternate point of view was that issue. I then had to find a metaphorical framework to introduce the idea.

Road rage and the jockeying for the best advantage when driving in traffic seemed to carry the action and the emotion of the issue I chose. I liked the hyperbole that the discord of negotiating traffic brings to my issue. It seems to me to have the same emotional density that the comparison of the age to the crypt had for Hardy. Because this problem is peculiarly urban, the comparison needed to have an urban metaphor. The pathetic fallacy does not resonate with the dawning of the 21st century as it did with the dawning of the 20th, but the anthropomorphic "metal throbbing beasts" and "steely crowd" catches the mechanized age.

In the first two stanzas, I tried to unite sound imagery with my freeway imagery in a pattern similar to Hardy's uniting of death and brokenness to set a moment in time perceived by the alienated voice of the narrator. My moment is as starkly dynamic as his moment is sharply static and sterile. I wanted the dissonance of "cacophonous shriek" and "grinding squeak" to set the mood of discord that results from failed communication, and I wanted to draw a relationship between the willfulness of bucking the lines of traffic and the competitiveness of verbal aggression. In the second stanza, I tried to bring the tenor and vehicle together, climaxing with the image of the "asphalt bully." I think my instincts were right, but my execution of that stanza suffers. While Hardy's second stanza builds the sense of loss with his death vehicle and the stanza becomes stronger than the first, I lose the power of my vehicle, relying on statement of the tenor of the metaphor. When my message intrudes in lines 2-6 of the second stanza, my poetic power is diminished.

My third stanza is designed to carry the corrective that is housed in Hardy's thrush. The image of the billboard works as it successfully unites the urban scene with the opposing notion. The board communicates a corrective to the closed-minded in its argument for thought and its suggestion that ideas have another kind of integrity. The syntax is meant to be disruptive, to cause a halt to the flow of metaphorical traffic, but it risks being too awkward.

The final stanza tries to put the problem in a larger context with its suggestion that the phenomenon stems from a kind of shared global fear. It misses the tone of the Hardy poem in several ways. The movement from the singular narrator to the plural "we" takes on a preachy quality that plagues me. In fact, I did not realize that I had made that shift until I started analyzing the process. Then I had to recognize that I have a tendency to want to beat the reader over the head at the end of many of my poems. The subtle ambiguity of Hardy's last line is completly missed in my effort as is the lighter touch that frees the reader.

Adopting Hardy's rhyme scheme and metrical design may have been the easiest part of the exercise. To write with the restrictions of traditional patterns really becomes a generative structure for the mind. Searching for the right rime and the necessary number of syllables causes my mind to expand itself and embrace alternatives in a way that is oddly freeing.

Song in an Alien World

Thomas Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush" uses a first person narrator to deliver a kind of elegy or meditation on the death of an age. It's a millennial poem dated on the last day of the nineteenth century and first published as "By the Century's Deathbed."

The narrator is a walker, a watcher, a thinker, a meditative person who employs the classical pathetic fallacy in his tendency to credit nature with human emotions suggesting that nature is as fervourless as he is. His meditation begins with a pause--he leans on the gate of a natural border, and surveying the landscape, he thinks of the correlation between the end of the age and the winter day. His reverie is interrupted by the song of the thrush, a song that calls him to a personal response. He acknowledges that the aging bird sings a song of a hope that alludes him.

The poem is a 4-stanza poem with a regular ababcdcd rhyme scheme. Each stanza has 8 lines of alternating iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter meter. The structure of the poem is based on a singular moment in time, and like a good lead for a news story, it provides the reader the five W’s of traditional reporting. The first stanza introduces the who and the when of the poem. The second stanza introduces the where, and the third follows with the what. The concluding stanza explores the why or the reason that the circumstance chronicled caught the attention of the narrator.

The tension in the poem is produced by the contrast between the images of death and brokenness and those of hope and joy and between the bird who knew and the man who didn't. The “spectre-gray” of the Frost, the “desolate dregs of Winter,” and the day’s “weakening eye” initiate a time nearing its end. The danger or warning in these signs of a dying age have caused “mankind” that had “haunted” the age to seek the comfort and warmth of “household fires.” Man in this figure has been reduced to a kind of universal ghost. The land is described metaphorically as the “Century’s corpse,” the clouds a “canopy” for its “crypt.” The funeral image is completed with the “death lament of the wind.”

Stanzas one and two have duplicate forms in that the first four lines of each stanza describe the setting in death imagery while the last four lines relate the setting—time or place—to its human inhabitants. The death imagery is continued but the images of brokenness that are entwined in the death imagery predominate. In each case lines five and six form a bridge between these two elements. In stanza one, an extended simile compares the metaphorical musical score that appears on the sky when one looks through the “tangled bine-stems” to the “strings of broken lyres.” The broken strings and the associated sense of cutting or scoring suggest the brokenness of the age that mankind confronts. Additionally, the musical imagery introduced here foreshadows the musical imagery that climaxes the poem. The suggestion is that when the song of life, the joy of life, is gone, man has little alternative but to retreat inward to the fire to warm his deathlike bones. In stanza two, the bridge lines introduce a complex synecdoche for the brokenness of life. When the narrator describes the “pulse of germ and birth” as shrunken, he is using “pulse” as a synecdoche, a part to signify the whole. Pulse, the heartbeat or life force of the world, has virtually lost its vibrancy, its vitality. “Germ and birth” function as two separate figures in much the same way. A single embryo and a single emergence of life are made to stand for the procreation of all life. To describe the pulse as “ancient” is to tap into the timelessness of life and suggest ironically that what has always been has ceased to be. The two stanzas are held together by the dual death images of “haunted” and spirit” used in the concluding lines as well as the return to the pronoun “I.” In this way, the narrator involves himself in the complicity of the death of the age.

Stanza three introduces a response to the first two stanzas with the song of the aged thrush using the same dominant image patterns. The first stanza is referenced with the "bleak twigs" and the "growing gloom." The joy of the "evensong" replaces the broken strings of the first stanza but retains a certain amount of ambiguity in the contrast between the bird and the song. The song is "full-hearted" and "illimited" but it is produced by an "aged" bird that is "frail, gaunt, and small," and the "ecstatic sound" of the fourth stanza contrasts with the "blast" that has beruffled its plume. That it has "chosen" to offer its very soul contrasts vividly with the soul that has been wrenched from the life of the dying age. The narrator sums up this condition with the assertion in stanza four that the "little cause for carolings" is literally "written on terrestrial things," and describes the hope in the bird's "good-night air" as having "trembled."

The darkling thrush is as alienated as is the speaker of the poem. There is a sense in which each is crying in the wilderness. After all, the speaker is the pulsing person amid the hard, dry pulse of the earth. The paradox of the poem is that the world seems to revolve around the speaker, but it ignores him. There is an intense inwardness about the speaker--all mankind has retreated from nature but him. He undoubtedly senses a connection between himself and the bird, yet even the thrush knows something that he has not known. Within the song there is a sense of hope, a voice of correction to the basic thesis of death in the land. That the speaker has not been aware of this hope does not diminish its existence however frail it is.

Hudgins and Transubstantiation

Andrew Hudgins ends his most recent book, Ecstatic in the Poison, with two autobiographical narrative poems. These are companion poems in the sense that one focuses the perspective upward into the sky while the other focuses downward into the earth. It is the first, "The Hawk above the House," that I find most compelling.

Hudgins uses the boy sitting on his father's roof to catch a moment in time that is emblematic of one of his major artistic preoccupations: transubstantiation. Whether it is the transubstantiation of the host or the longed-for exchange between the natural world and human experience, Hudgins is preoccupied with the alteration of substance within the static nature of appearance.

In the poem, the hawk considers a possible prey before it turns and flies away. The boy imagines himself in flight, looking down on the boy he was, wishing to think as the hawk thought. In his longing he feels only failure. The narrator, on the other hand knows, the power of imaginative transubstantiation and crosses time to tell the boy that he had not completely failed as he had thought.
The poem is divided into two free-verse stanzas of 19 lines each. The first stanza focuses on the immediacy of the boy’s experience watching the hawk while the second stanza reflects on the wish to fly.

The emotional energy is set in the poem by the way the spacing of the lines equates with the flight pattern of the hawk. In the opening lines, the hawk hangs in the air and is duplicated on the page in the staggered second, third, and fourth lines. In the fifth line, the arc of the flight is described with its instantaneous disappearance from view. The hang and glide dichotomy of the flight is maintained throughout the poem with modulation between smooth flowing syntax and the spatial pause.

The hawk is fully integrated into the elemental world of light and dark, space and time. The alliteration of "hawk hung low above the house" and the repetition of "prey" and "not" in lines three and four hold the hawk to the land, grounded in time, while the alliteration of "dawns and darkness" links the imagined experience of the boy to the agelessness of the hawk's pattern, the transcendence of the limitations of time. The soaring phase of that pattern is expressed by the "sun's arch," the "bright track," and the "sunlight above the stucco box." Through imagination, the boy is transubstantiated into hawkness and thus his orientation to time and space changes. From his new perspective, the house seems to be a stucco box that he sat upon, and the experience enables him to be both outside and inside his body as he watches "the boy who watched for" him.

In the second stanza, the compelling nature of the wish to fly is reinforced by the repetition of "he'd have given anything to fly" in lines one and seven. The synergy between predator and prey is echoed in the juxtaposition of the desire of the boy to fly like the hawk "exploding on the sparrow" and like the sparrow frantically "threading through the "black-green cedars." This same synergy exists between boy and hawk as the boy imagines "if he could imagine hawk thought." The boy's indecision is expressed in the repetitive form, the doubling of the negative, that duplicates the hawk's indecision about his prey in the first stanza, and the correlation is completed with the linking of "wings and cold predation." In that final realization of impossibility, the boy becomes prey to the hawk. He is vulnerable to the power of the hawk in the same way that the sparrow is. The repetitive wish links the hawk/sparrow synergy with hawk/boy synergy.

There is yet another level of transubstantiation worked out in this poem between the persona and the boy that he was. From the adult perspective, he is the same person he has always been, but he acknowledges substantive changes in his understanding of the imaginative experience. The shifts in point of view explore these changes. The first stanza told in first person explores the boy's pure experience of imagination. The second stanza moves to third person to explore the distancing of the core experience only to loop back like the flight of a bird to the immediacy of first person. The narrator transcends time to return and tell the boy that he has not completely failed "as he had thought." The boy who has become the man knows the reality of the imagined, that to imagine flight is to fly, at least on one level.

Stanley Kunitz and the testing-tree

When the poet Stanly Kunitz was a boy, he spent a great deal of time in the woods where he invented a game around a favorite oak tree. The object of the game was to throw three rocks at the oak. Hitting the oak with one stone meant that someone would love him, hitting with two stones meant that he would be a poet, and hitting with all three stones meant that he would never die. His poem "The Testing-Tree" remembers that experience and suggests that it is "necessary to go through dark and deeper dark" to continue the search for that tree and the stones that one must cast.

I've borrowed the Kunitz image of the testing tree for the name of this blog. It seems to me to be a seminal image for the education of a poet. In a sense, all of the best poetry written in the past becomes a kind of testing tree for the new poet. He or she must constantly work to understand the tradition, the legacy, all that has been done before. That tradition is the tree against which each new poet must toss his or her own stones.