Poetry and Directions for Thought
Eileen John
I take as my starting point a recent paper by Ken Walton, „Thoughtwriting—in
Poetry and Music‟.1 Walton wants to have a way to understand expression in poetry
and music that does not require positing an imagined persona as the subject or agent
of expressive activity. If we found that imagining such a figure was prescribed by all
expressive works (or at least by all that are not the expressive acts of real subjects), to
account for their expressive properties, we would have to count such works as
representational or, in Walton‟s view, as works of fiction at least in their expressive
capacity.2 Walton is perhaps most concerned to make sure a non-representational
account is available for music, but in this paper he also takes on what might seem to
be the hardest case, that of lyric poetry. It is the hardest case in that it seems most
obviously to provide, in Edward Cone‟s words (cited by Walton), „the illusion of the
existence of a personal subject through whose consciousness a certain kind of
experience is made known to the rest of us‟.3 I will not take up the case of music but
will focus here on issues that arise in relation to poetry.
Walton‟s alternative involves letting an expressive work abstain, as it were,
from being the expression of any particular subject, real or imagined. He casts this as
the possibility of poets being „thoughtwriters‟, their activity paralleling in certain
ways the work of speechwriters. „By thoughtwriters I shall mean writers who
compose texts for others to use in expressing their thoughts (feelings, attitudes)‟
Walton, 455). So, on this model, the poet makes words available for readers‟ use. This
might be a matter of readers „making the poem their own‟, using it for their own
expressive purposes (Walton, 462). Walton notes that prayers, songs, bumper stickers,
and greeting cards are forms of words that have established functions as things to be
appropriated for use by anyone who so chooses. And the practice of memorising and
repeating particular lines of poetry in one‟s own context allies poetry in that respect
with these other appropriative practices. Readers encountering poems that do not suit
their expressive needs might instead engage in a pretense in which they imagine
1
Kendall Walton, „Thoughtwriting—in Poetry and Music‟, New Literary History 42 (2011): 455-476.
Following the theory of representation developed in Walton‟s Mimesis as Make-Believe (Harvard UP,
1990).
3
Edward Cone, The Composer’s Voice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1974), p. 3 (Walton, p. 456).
2
1
themselves uttering or thinking these words „seriously‟. In either of these cases,
readers do not need to experience the poem by positing an expressive subject other
than themselves. Poets may or may not have this role in mind as their primary purpose
in writing poems, but „The words are there ripe for picking, no matter what the poet
was doing in writing them down‟ (Walton, 462). Neither politicians giving speeches
nor readers of poems need trace the words they appropriate back to any „serious‟ use
of those words, either by a real or imagined speaker or thinker. The words of a speech
might as well have „grown on trees or appeared in driftwood patterns on a beach‟, and
similarly for readers of poetry, „poems might as well be trees‟ (Walton, 461, 463).
One question concerns how the thoughtwriting model then accounts for
expression in poetry. If positing an expressive subject has been taken to explain or
make sense of expressive properties, it seems the thoughtwriting model has the
burden of offering an alternative explanation. Now, Walton does not think there are
likely to be many (and perhaps not even any) „pure‟ thoughtwriting cases in which a
poem only invites us to make the words our own (Walton, 466). Typically, perhaps,
we will take a poem to express the thought and feelings of an imagined subject, while
also taking it as a stretch of language available for our own use. So Walton could say
that finding a work to have expressive power typically does involve invoking an
imagined expressive subject. But it seems the „pure‟ thoughtwriting case needs to be
theoretically viable for Walton, even if non-actual—expression should not necessitate
positing a subject or this will not be a real alternative.
So let‟s suppose we had a „pure case‟ of a poem that invites us to use its
language and does not invoke a real or imagined subject who is using the language
expressively. Perhaps attribution of expressive properties to the poem could wait upon
whether readers of the poem take it up and use it for purposes of actual or imagined
expression—the claim that the poem is expressive could come retrospectively, once a
reader had succeeded in putting it to that use. But it seems that the expressive power
of the poem might need to be acknowledged earlier in the transaction, to explain why
a reader would be drawn to use it in this way in the first place. Do we need to
experience the poem as already an expressive movement—as someone’s thought or
feeling, however vaguely specified that someone might be—in order to grasp it as
relevant to our own expressive needs? Compare Helen Vendler‟s view in her
discussion of Shakespeare‟s sonnets, as she initially articulates what sounds like
Walton‟s model:
2
The act of the lyric is to offer its reader a script to say. … the private literary
genres—such as the Psalms, or prayers printed in prayer books, or secular
lyrics—are scripted for repeated personal recitation. One is to utter them as
one‟s own words, not as the words of another. … It is indispensable, then, if
we are to be made to want to enter the lyric script, that the voice offered for
our use be “believable” to us, resembling a “real voice” coming from a “real
mind” like our own.4
On this view, it seems that a poem has to „earn‟ its ability to function as a script for
others by evoking a subject who is speaking or thinking in this way.
Walton remarks, in considering the case of music, that „One can hear a
musical work as a kind of psychological drama without hearing it as expressing a
succession of another person‟s psychological states‟ (Walton, 470-1). Taking the
emphasis here to be on a kind of psychological drama, it seems we could say the same
thing about a poem: a poem can express a kind of thought or feeling, the sort of thing
that could be thought or felt, but without presuming or imagining anyone to have
thought or felt it. In comprehending the words of the poem, the reader recognizes a
thought-kind that can then be instantiated in particular episodes of thinking.
Does recognizing something as a thought-kind simply mean, or incorporate,
recognizing a thinker or subject as sustainer of thought? It seems that if we refer to
something as a thought, we thereby conceive of it as the outcome of thinking, as
something thought. When we move to the level of kinds, if we do not incorporate
such a recognition, even very minimally and vaguely, perhaps we are just saying that
poems offer „brute content‟—stuff that can show up in thought, but is not itself
thought or the specification of a „thought-kind‟. Maybe Walton could say that in
recognizing a thought-kind, we also recognize a thinker-kind, the sort of being who
would sustain thoughts of that kind (and where this recognition is not a matter of
positing an actual or imagined subject of thought). Walton also refers to
thoughtwritings as „expressive-behavior indicators‟, and it may be that this phrase
aims to capture what it is like to function as an expressive kind (Walton, 470, 473).
We take up a poem as an indicator of how one could behave (speak or think)
expressively, though not as indicating that someone is behaving in that way, and we
can then proceed to appropriate it for ourselves or not. I do not have a clear sense of
4
Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Harvard UP, 1997), p. 18.
3
whether appealing to status as an „indicator‟ helps, and I also am not sure if Walton
would mind if it turned out that there is always at least a very attenuated positing of
an expressive subject, in the recognition of a poem‟s expressive potential. Maybe such
attenuation (e.g., in the notion of a „thinker-kind‟) can progressively minimise the
objectionable „fictionality‟ that would persist in identifying music or poetry as
expressive. The contrary intuitions would, I think, still hold that taking a poem found
to be expressive to offer a kind of expression that awaits expressive use is an
unsatisfying and inaccurate account of the poem‟s force. However, I will now retreat
from this (in my mind, fuzzy) point, even though it might seem to be a crucial
theoretical issue to square away. Maybe we do have to posit an expressive subject in
some way, but if so, it can be in such a minimal spirit that it does not induce an
implausibly fictional or representational status in the work.
Instead, I want to step back from that theoretical demand and think
speculatively about two other broad issues raised by the notion of poetry as
thoughtwriting. One concerns the relation between the words of a poem and the
thinking it prompts, and the other concerns what it takes to identify thought as one‟s
own. Putting these two concerns together will lead me to split some hairs by
suggesting that speechwriting is a more apt term than thoughtwriting for the kind of
poetic labour that Walton is considering. Speechwriting focuses on the words to be
said, it envisions an occasion of speech, and it accommodates or possibly expects
distance between what is said and what is thought by the speaker. In these respects it
seems to better reflect certain kinds of constraint and openness that matter to poetry.
Two rather different intuitions and experiences with poetry motivate concern
about the words-thought relation with respect to poetry. First, on the one hand, I find
poems to be partly „indigestible‟ as thoughts, not able to be taken up and transmuted
into thought. Helen Vendler refers to the „verbal deliberateness‟ of lyric poetry (in the
course of distinguishing the intimacy of the lyric from the intimacy of
analyst/analysand conversation), and that quality seems important: the words are just
so, and they cannot quite turn into the fluid, improvising, eroding, unevenly precise
stuff of thought.5 The structure and precision of a poem, even in more casual and
freely flowing verse, is a tremendously attractive achievement, but it is an
achievement that seems possible for verbal artefacts, not for thoughts.
5
Helen Vendler, Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery (Princeton UP,
2005), p. 7.
4
This sense of the poem as a deliberately formed verbal artefact shows up in
critics‟ attention to the specific words used, and the specific formations of words in a
poem. Here is Geoffrey Hartman singling out some words in the final stanza of
Keats‟s „To Autumn‟: „There is hardly a romance language phrase: sound-shapes like
sallows, swallows, borne, bourn, crickets, croft, predominate.‟6 The presence of these
„northern words‟, as he calls them, contributes to his larger argument about the poem,
so they have a role in the thinking he offers as appropriate to the poem. But it seems
the words themselves are not present only to be the vehicles or the substance of
thought; they are there partly to be words that have reached the poem from a different
historical path and with particular kinds of „sound-shapes‟. They need to remain
precisely what they are as tokens of linguistic heritage, and as they look and sound,
rather than just feeding into an occurrence of thought.7 Or consider Robert Alter on
Frost‟s „Once by the Pacific‟, which includes the following two passages:
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
...
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
Alter discusses the poem‟s „conspicuously colloquial diction‟ as
the matrix for a peculiar quality of Frost‟s poetry here and elsewhere that
might be called expressive vagueness, and that is felt … in his general
fondness for words like “something” and “someone.” … The source in spoken
English for this usage would be an idiom employed in a situation like the
following: an angry child says to another child, “Somebody better watch
6
Geoffrey Hartman, „Poem and Ideology: A Study of Keats‟s “To Autumn”‟, in The Fate of Reading
(University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 133.
7
Hartman also refers to Keats‟s poem as a whole in the terms of a physically palpable object—„The
very shape of the poem—firm and regular without fading edges but also no overdefined contours—
suggests a slowly expanding constellation that moves as a whole, if it moves at all‟ (Hartman, 127).
That description may merge qualities of the poem as an object—an object being something that will not
be fully accommodated in thought—with qualities of the thought appropriate to the poem. But there is
still the suggestion, I would say, that the poem has ways of having shape and firmness not only in
qualities of thought but in such things as its look and sound and the historical roots of its language.
5
out”—meaning, of course, you—or, “I‟m going to do something to you”—
meaning, whatever I will do will be so terrible that I would rather not say
exactly what.‟8
Alter ties these bits of the poem‟s vocabulary directly to expression, in referring to
their „expressive vagueness‟, but as with Hartman, it seems Alter is also pointing to
the words‟ „real life‟ as functioning things. „Someone‟ and „something‟ not only get
us to think of unspecified people and things, but they are words that people rely on in
certain ordinary contexts because of their vagueness in thought. Their colloquial tone
and function are part of what they are as things and they have to retain that identity in
order to be expressive in the poem.
Second, and on the other hand—still concerning the word-thought relations—
there is the sense of how very closely allied to thinking and consciousness these
verbal artefacts are. John Koethe spells out powerfully poetry‟s capacity to convey the
full range and movement of subjective life, to enact „the experience of experience‟.9
In the case of a substantial poem, I think one can have the further sense that it
conjures up the possibility of thinking that is not obviously accessible to us. One
reason for the sense of inaccessibility is that a poem asks for more thought, more
agility in consciousness, more simultaneously interacting lines of thought, than
anyone can actually sustain. That is to say the poem indeed points me toward
thinking—it is partly „digestible‟ or apt for appropriation into thinking, but it goes
overboard in relation to what episodes of thinking can be in beings like us.10 With
respect to an Elizabeth Bishop poem, „At the Fishhouses‟, that I will return to below,
the critical discussion of it convinces me that I could be bringing together, in my
engagement with the poem, perceptually vivid imaginings, the poem‟s changes of
meter, singing in general and the music of a Martin Luther hymn, „Wynken, Blynken,
and Nod‟, Bishop‟s roots in Nova Scotia, Wordsworth and Marianne Moore poems,
Latin and Portuguese words, death, beauty, the four elements, seal-human relations,
8
Robert Alter, The Pleasures of Reading (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), p. 43.
John Koethe, „Poetry and the Experience of Experience‟, in Poetry at One Remove (University of
Michigan Press, 2000). Poetry has „the imagistic and metaphoric potential to evoke perception and
sensation; the discursive capacity of language to express states of propositional awareness and reflexive
consciousness; the rhythmic ability to simulate the movement of thought across time; and a lyric
density that can tolerate abrupt shifts in perspective and tone without losing coherence‟ (Koethe, 82).
10
See Susan Stewart‟s comment that „poetic form relies on effects of meaning that, in their
metaphorical and imaginative reach, cannot be taken up completely in any single moment of reception‟
(Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 12).
9
6
knowledge, self-knowledge, and imagination.11 All of these have their own
proliferating possibilities. So the poem can occupy and guide thought in these
directions, and, I would say, it is an expressive poem, but there is also something
about these directions for thought that I cannot carry out. What would it be to put all
of that together, properly prioritized and interrelated? Maybe I can go slowly and
think or imaginatively experience one thing at a time, or perhaps two or three things
in relation to each other at a time, in a way that is called for by the poem, and
eventually do a pretty thorough job. But that would still not be adequate to what the
poem was doing in bringing these elements together, in getting them to connect and
reverberate. (And I do not take Bishop‟s poem to be unusual in this respect; it‟s
intended as a representative example.) Of course, we do think in response to poems
in ways that they call for—we do not throw up our hands at the impossibility of
thinking adequately in experiencing a poem. So I do not mean to say that poems
stymie thought, but that the thinking we do is likely to involve approximation, shifting
of tactics, reframing and revisiting, and hopeful attempts at connection.12 The practice
of critics reflects this, in part, in their own uses of figurative and expansive language.
Hartman says that „To Autumn‟ has „a westerly drift like the sun‟ (Hartman, 129).
David Kalstone writes of Bishop‟s „At the Fishhouses‟ that „the poem accumulates the
sense of an artistry beyond the human, one that stretches over time, chiselling and
decorating with its strange erosions.‟13 This kind of figurative criticism really helps
the reader, I think, but perhaps more because it acknowledges the expansive project of
thought than because it helps you know what is to be thought. So, along with
registering the verbal deliberateness of poetry, and the way poems thus resist being
only vehicles for thought, I think we need to register that there is often a call for
thinking that we cannot meet, because of an unassimilable complexity and
connectedness in what a poem offers. In relation to Walton‟s model, this is to say that
if I appropriate a poem for my own expressive needs, this may not be because I can
know, precisely, what it is that can be thought and felt by using this form of words.
11
See, for instance, Stewart‟s discussion of the poem (Stewart 2002, pp. 138-142), Anne Stevenson in
Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop (London: Bellew, 1998), esp. pp. 110-112, and various essays in
Harold Bloom, ed., Elizabeth Bishop (NY: Chelsea House, 1985).
12
Vendler makes reference to a Walt Whitman line, „Till the gossamer thread you fling catch
somewhere, O my soul‟, in speaking of lyric poems as flinging filaments that „catch at that
“somewhere” (or someone) implicit in all poetic address‟ (Invisible Listeners, pp. 7, 81n4). That
hopeful flinging seems apt for what the reader has to do as well.
13
David Kalstone, „Questions of Memory, Questions of Travel‟, in Bloom, p. 57.
7
Another reason for saying that a poem can set a problematic task for thought is
that the reader might in some sense get a good grip on what to think (at least with
respect to discrete components of a poem), but not on how to think it or why it should
be thought. This phenomenon leads into my second speculative concern, which is
about what it takes to identify thought as one‟s own. The notion that I can
comprehend what is to be thought, but lack something of the „how‟ and „why‟ of the
thought, points to aspects of thinking that matter to identifying thought as one‟s own.
I will circle back to illustrate this possibility in relation to poetry, by making a few
comments about Bishop‟s poem.
Let me approach this concern slightly indirectly, however, by considering how
the issue of „ownership of one‟s thoughts‟ shows up in phenomena considered to be
disorders of thinking, such as the experience of „thought insertion‟ described by
schizophrenics. Thought insertion involves, roughly, thoughts occurring without the
thinker experiencing them as his or her own. Here are a few of the things that have
been said in trying to capture what is crucial to, or missing in, this „disordered‟
experience: it is thinking that is not „of our own making‟; there is a „derailment‟ of
thought—„a slipping of the train of thought into another direction or an irregular
progression of the train of thought‟; the “sense of effort and deliberate choice as we
move from one thought to the next” is lacking; or „what is imposed on them is
something that does provide the answer to a question, only that it was not a question
that they had formulated or that it was not them who arrived at the answer‟.14 The
broader experience of the schizophrenic has also been described as one in which
„everything is felt to be merely mental or representational‟, the thinking showing a
withdrawal from practical engagement with what to believe (Hoerl, 197). When we
put these descriptions in the context of thinking about poetry, I hope they sound
evocative. Of course the person experiencing a poem is doing so deliberately and
exercises volition and control in ways that the person experiencing thought insertion
does not, so I am not trying to collapse the phenomena. But we do have a long history
of thinking that poetry involves experiences of thought being „taken over‟, from Plato
in the Ion to Georges Poulet saying that, „Reading, then, is the act in which the
subjective principle which I call I, is modified in such a way that I no longer have the
14
I am taking all of this from Christoph Hoerl‟s „On Though Insertion‟, Philosophy, Psychiatry, and
Psychology 8(2/3), 2001: 189-200. (I‟m not here giving the detailed citations of whose views are being
referred to—will do this eventually when I have this section better in hand.)
8
right, strictly speaking, to consider it as my I. 15 The claim I want to make, briefly, is
that one of the things we seem to seek out in poetry is the experience of thinking that
can lack some of the markers of one‟s own thought. Irregular progression of a train of
thought, thinking the answer to a question I did not formulate, moving to a new
thought without deliberate choice, thinking in an intensely „representational‟ mode—
these all seem familiar to me as a reader of poetry. In such experiences it may be that
my thinking is, in its content, well directed by the poem, and yet if I lack a sense of
how I have gotten to these thoughts or why they should be thought, perhaps they are
not yet fully my thoughts.
Let me conclude with a sketch of an example. I have chosen Bishop‟s „At the
Fishhouses‟ because it has a particular quality of clarity. The words and syntax are
almost entirely familiar and straightforward, and the items in the depicted scene come
into sensory-imaginative consciousness very firmly. Anne Stevenson says of this and
a number of other Bishop poems that they begin „in a low-keyed deictic mood,
pointing at this and that. They go on so long, pointing and looking so intently that, by
the end, some more abstract impression has to be felt.‟16 The reader follows along, is
right there with the clear, firm sensations and remarks, but that transition Stevenson
points to, when „some more abstract impression has to be felt‟, is disorienting. Does
the reader know how and why the pointing and looking turn into something more
abstract? In the case of „At the Fishhouses‟, the pointing and looking changes
somewhat gradually, but also radically, in the following lines from the end of the
poem:
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
15
Georges Poulet, „Criticism and the Experience of Interiority‟, in Reader-Response Criticism, ed. Jane
Tompkins, essay trans. Catherine Macksey and Richard Macksey (Johns Hopkins University Press,
1980), p. 45.
16
Anne Stevenson, Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop (London: Bellew, 1998), p. 111.
9
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
The line, „It is like what we imagine knowledge to be‟, is the one where I most
immediately feel that I can think it, but I am not sure how or why I got there. J. D.
McClatchy says that this line is „at three removes from itself‟,17 and that is suggestive
of how it trips me up. The steady pointing and looking has now switched into
assuming I understand something about knowledge that I have never really thought
about (how we imagine it to be). And I need to appreciate the similarity between that
aspect of my conceptual territory and some hypothetical but finely articulated and
painful exposures to icy sea water. To spell out all the things I am uncertain of here,
including why there is a colon at the end of that line, would be difficult (and boring, I
expect!). And yet in reading the poem I acquire some of its momentum, and feel taken
up into some thinking I did not choose. There is a kind of lucky boost that can occur,
where having gone through the tubs lined with fishscales and the burning icy water, I
am more ready than I otherwise would have been, at any rate, to think about what I
cling to as a knowledge-seeker and what sort of flowing coldness I should brace
myself for instead.
With that sketch in mind, how does it help us reflect on the notion of poets as
thoughtwriters? Experiences such as this one with Bishop‟s poem suggest to me that
thought that can be fully my own is perhaps quite rarely on offer in a poem. And it
isn‟t perhaps what I want out of a poem—I may indeed want some „derailment‟ that
means I end up separating out aspects of my thought (say, separating what I think
from the choice and explanatory control of that thought). In such cases, one might say
the poem is and is not functioning as a thoughtwriter for me. I said earlier that the
various concerns canvassed here have led me to find „speechwriting‟ more apt for the
phenomena. The general reason for this is that, despite the close alliance between
poetry and thought, it seems that the poem most importantly offers a form of words
that we can speak and perhaps take up into thought. In that way a poem can function
for us in the detached way that a speech written by another can. The poetic form of
17
J. D. McClatchy, „“One Art”: Some Notes‟, in Bloom, p. 156.
10
words cannot, however, simply become thought and leave its verbal deliberateness
behind, and it cannot necessarily direct us either to an accessible complex of thinking
or to thinking that is fully our own thought.
Robert Alter, The Pleasures of Reading (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989).
Harold Bloom, Elizabeth Bishop (NY: Chelsea House, 1985).
Edward Cone, The Composer’s Voice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1974).
Geoffrey Hartman, „Poem and Ideology: A Study of Keats‟s “To Autumn”‟, in The
Fate of Reading (University of Chicago Press, 1975).
Christoph Hoerl, „On Thought Insertion‟, Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology
8(2/3), 2001: 189-200.
John Koethe, „Poetry and the Experience of Experience‟, in Poetry at One Remove
(University of Michigan Press, 2000).
George Poulet, „Criticism and the Experience of Interiority‟, in Reader-Response
Criticism, ed. Jane Tompkins, essay trans. Catherine Macksey and Richard
Macksey (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 41-49.
Anne Stevenson, Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop (London: Bellew, 1998).
Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (University of Chicago Press, 2002).
Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Harvard UP, 1997).
_________, Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery
(Princeton UP, 2005).
Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe (Harvard UP, 1990).
_________, „Thoughtwriting—in Poetry and Music‟, New Literary History 42 (2011):
455-476.
11
At the Fishhouses
Elizabeth Bishop
Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,
and his shuttle worn and polished.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one's nose run and one's eyes water.
The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs
and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up
to storerooms in the gables
for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down
on.
All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,
swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,
is opaque, but the silver of the benches,
the lobster pots, and masts, scattered
among the wild jagged rocks,
is of an apparent translucence
like the small old buildings with an emerald moss
growing on their shoreward walls.
The big fish tubs are completely lined
with layers of beautiful herring scales
and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered
with creamy iridescent coats of mail,
with small iridescent flies crawling on them.
Up on the little slope behind the houses,
set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass,
is an ancient wooden capstan,
cracked, with two long bleached handles
and some melancholy stains, like dried blood,
where the ironwork has rusted.
The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.
He was a friend of my grandfather.
We talk of the decline in the population
and of codfish and herring
while he waits for a herring boat to come in.
There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.
He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,
from unnumbered fish with that black old knife,
the blade of which is almost worn away.
Down at the water's edge, at the place
where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp
descending into the water, thin silver
tree trunks are laid horizontally
across the gray stones, down and down
at intervals of four or five feet.
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
He was curious about me. He was interested in
music;
like me a believer in total immersion,
so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.
I also sang "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God."
He stood up in the water and regarded me
steadily, moving his head a little.
Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge
almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug
as if it were against his better judgment.
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
the clear gray icy water . . . Back, behind us,
the dignified tall firs begin.
Bluish, associating with their shadows,
a million Christmas trees stand
waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended
above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the
same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand
would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray
flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
12
To Autumn
John Keats
1.
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss‟d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o‟er-brimm‟d their clammy cells.
2.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap‟d furrow sound asleep,
Drows‟d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
3.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
13
Once by the Pacific
Robert Frost
The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God‟s last Put out the Light was spoken.
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