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W.S. Merwin’s “Rain Travel”

By on August 10, 2024 in Poetry, Writing

Here’s a clever and beautiful poem from 1993. I’ve added line numbers for convenience.

  1. I wake in the dark and remember
  2. it is the morning when I must start
  3. by myself on the journey
  4. I lie listening to the black hour
  5. before dawn and you are
  6. still asleep beside me while
  7. around us the trees full of night lean
  8. hushed in their dream that bears
  9. us up asleep and awake then I hear
  10. drops falling one by one into
  11. the sightless leaves and I
  12. do not know when they began but
  13. all at once there is no sound but rain
  14. and the stream below us roaring
  15. away into the rushing darkness

Setting: a dark bedroom in the speaker’s home. Visual gloom—dark, black, night, sightless—characterizes the first 11 lines, and after a transformation we return to darkness at the end, but now with a tremendous shout. From the outset the diction suggests passivity and slow motion—lie, asleep, hushed, dream—but after the fulcrum in line 10 (“drops falling”), the speaker rapidly wakens into the external environment, no longer merely remembering but swept up in sound.

So in the transition between darkness and darkness we’re launched into energetic activity in the form of the rain and stream roaring and rushing.

Notice the poem’s division into two (unpunctuated) sentences: l. 1-3 and l. 4-15. The first chunk serves as a kind of emblem (in the Renaissance sense), a throwing down of the gauntlet as if to stand for the whole. It establishes that the speaker will be going somewhere alone come morning–not on a routine journey but on the journey, something discussed, planned, large, almost mythic. Whatever’s at the other end, it’s not pleasant; he wishes he didn’t have to set out, but he has no choice. It makes me think of the hero’s journey in Joseph Campbell.

In the second chunk the “I” reappears, listening at first only to the narrow sounds within the room. Although in this longer chunk we have subordinating conjunctions, I’m struck by the lame or even dysfunctional coordinating conjunctions—”and you are still asleep,” “and I do not know”—as if the speaker, just coming into full consciousness, felt his accelerating thoughts tumbling forward. Which reminds me, I exaggerated when I said there were just two sentences. Line 9’s “then” turns this one into something very much like a run-on…which reinforces my point about the effect of and.

Merwin uses no end-rhymes here but leans into consonance and assonance within, most obviously dark/start (l. 1-2), lean/dream (l. 7-8), and rain/away (l. 13 and 15, helping convey a sense of closure). He also goes for the cute sight-rhyme bears/hear (l. 8-9), which actually does fall at the end of the respective lines.

So the loud sounds, first backgrounded then brought forward after the pivot point in l. 10, were always present; it’s the speaker’s attention that has shifted from the small to the large, from the internal to external world, from the private and intimate (someone’s sleeping next to him, after all) to the public. Evidently his journey will put him on display. He’s not headed for, say, a funeral or a conference where he would be nameless and faceless but for some kind of performance—maybe a teaching gig or a poetry reading or something equally unpleasant.

Feel free to let me know what you’ve seen that I missed.

How I Came to Cross the Jabbok

By on August 7, 2024 in Poetry, Writing

By midafternoon we’d come to the river

beyond which Esau’s henchmen lay,

The banks bright with chittering poplars

and a vista of wild olives and tulips,

pines and reeds. Gazelles nibbled

the grass while larks and finches fiddled

with their fledglings.

I stayed behind my entourage,

sent them all across in groups

by different routes in case my brother

and his hundred wolves should wipe out

my estate. I’d be safe; God loved me–

but I’d miss my riches.

Still, it was time to repair my wrong.

I’d cheated, lied, defrauded our dad

on his deathbed. Esau’s righteous wrath

had cause. And I had this:

Ewes with their lambs, goats with kids,

my camels, wives, donkeys, and sons.

servants, drovers, grooms, and goods:

my wealth obtained by stealth.

. . .

Jacob Epstein's "Jacob and the Angel"

The other I

By on August 5, 2024 in Art, Poetry, Writing

I think I mentioned my Biblical work-in-progress. I’m still circling and circling like a hawk watching Jacob and the angel brawling below me, but I need to get closer in order to finish the poem so my talented friend Simon Kaplan can perform it in a couple weeks.

Well, if not “finish” then “bring to a resting place, like a man who needs to catch his breath after a wrestling match”

One pesky issue is voice. It began as a dramatic monologue in Jacob’s telling (“My hip was hurting pretty bad”), segued to the second person and back again (“Angels are over-rated”), and now I’m suddenly struck by the possibility of rendering it entirely from the angel’s point of view.
I could at last solve the ancient mystery of why they fight to a stalemate, for example. I mean, seems like any angel worth his salt, if he wasn’t just pretending to want to overcome his human opponent, would just carry him a couple hundred feet up and drop him. So why all the drama?
I could conveniently reveal God’s intentions without beating around the bush, which would likely mean all the poem’s surprises would have to come from Jacob.

Unfortunately he’s not terribly likable in the first place.

And I’m still dogged by my memory of that Jacob Epstein carving in the Tate…trying to squeeze the learning from it.


Give me a day.

More about hyphens

By on August 2, 2024 in Poetry, Writing

I continue to ruminate on yesterday’s Marianne Moore poem.

Although it’s not hard for me to see why other 20th century poets valued and imitated her on many fronts, clearly I’m both charmed and uneasy about one particular aspect of her technique–the end-line (and particularly the end-of-stanza) hyphens. I hinted at the reason in my last post: I want poetry to be performed, read aloud, interpreted orally. If you can’t do that it may still be poetry of course bu tI’m allowed to dislike it.

So what to do with these hyphens of hers–not the brilliant ones or those that make syntactic or metrical sense, but the others?

May I introduce Miss Emily Dickinson, whose famous “hyphens” or “dashes” almost need a name of their own, since all her poetry existed in (cursive or longhand) manuscript? Some look like full-stops or commas, but collectively they have confounded editors from the beginning. I’ll call them dashes for convenience, as the n-dash is often used when the poems get typeset. Since she often copied out a poem or two to send to a friend, it might seem weird that she frequently changed the punctuation even when she did not substitute a new word (though she often did that too). It’s as if each written “performance” was to her an oral performance: she was re-composing in real time. Nothing was ever finished, which is actually quite convenient for a poet or writer of any kind.

Check the penultimate line.

Some Dickinson dashes were clearly rhetorical, elocutionary, or syntactic, some a visual way of organizing, and some remain unexplained and perhaps inexplicable.

Beyond the obvious typology, I see some of them as tics, her mind and pen pausing to reconsider–and if as readers we likewise gift her an instant it forms a bond; and as musical directions, though not literally. Miss Emily played the parlor piano, so it’s possible that she internalized composers’ instructions such as ritardando/a tempo, crescendo/decrescendo, legato/marcato. Whether she did or not, in my mind these markings often constitute instructions to the performer.

People have written whole books on this, I my abandoned dissertation would have delved into Dickinson’s prosody at length.

For most of you this is old news, I know, almost ancient and irrelevant. Thanks for reading.

A cool line-break

By on August 1, 2024 in Poetry, Writing

I thrill to Marianne Moore’s animal poems, and I wish I’d discovered “The Pangolin” before including a pangolin character in one of my Christmas pageants a few years ago. (“My tongue is longer than my body! Wanna see?”)

However, Grasshopper, today’s lesson comes from Moore’s “The Buffalo” (1934), which has the unusually humorous line and stanza break


            ...Siamese-cat-

brown

It kinda slinks like a Siamese, doesn’t it? Here’s a longer excerpt.

But there’s more. When I read the poem aloud I have to linger slightly on that final hyphenated syllable, neither pausing as one would after a stanza with terminal punctuation nor racing right along as I might were there no stanza break, but rather stretching out the “a” of “cat” just the way, come to think of it, a cat stretches. Cats are deliberate and slow, then suddenly fast– stalkers and pouncers all– and here is one all wrapped up in a description of a color–which, by the way, is about an ox, not a cat. The ox is like a cat in such-and-such a way, and the syntax is like a cat too. Compression obsession! If her mind worked that fast in real time, I think she must have had trouble getting the left shoe on the left foot.

This instant feels like Moore the Genius. Mind you, her hyphen-and-leading strategy can look precious or affected in locations to which I quiver less sympathetically, which could be a failure of imagination or intelligence on my part.

In the same piece we have


            ...a kind of lion-

tail

and

            ...zebu-

shape

Well, as you see.