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.