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.