I began yesterday with some quotes from Frost's essay, “The Figure a Poem Makes.” Here's another, in which Frost imagines a self-indictment from what he sees as a misguided school of poets: “We bring up as aberrationists, giving way to undirected associations and kicking ourselves from one chance suggestion to another in all directions as of a hot afternoon in the life of a grasshopper.” For all that this was written seventy five ago, it may call to mind any number of poets currently in the throes. Some of them might enlist their “undirected associations” in the cause of radicalism, but how truly radical is a poetics that Milton’s Satan might have formulated as “Lousy, be thou my good?” “Theme alone,” Frost continues, “can steady us down.” A poem can have a salutary, even necessary “wildness,” he says, but can have as well—and this he calls one of poetry’s mysteries—“a subject that shall be fulfilled.”
The “steadying down” of a poem by a subject can be pursued to the point of near-stasis. And yet the result may be hugely, if quietly, dynamic. For an instance of this mystery, I’ll stay a bit longer with Frost (who once penned, in the margin of a draft, the self-injunction “quieter”):
Neither Out Far Nor In Deep.
The people along the shore
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.
As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull.
The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be—
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.
They cannot look out far,
They cannot look in deep,
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?
This poem gets by with mostly monosyllables, employed mostly in simple, declarative sentences. This stripped-down aspect contributes to the poem’s effectiveness: the bare, repetitive periods induce a kind of mesmeric hold. But there would be no effectiveness—in fact no poem—without the sub-surface thrumming of a subject. To say this subject is something like “humanity’s hopeless yet incorrigible search for meaning” is unfair to the poem’s subtlety and indirection, but for purposes of explication I see no way around it. Like a dynamo in the basement, this subject sends its charge up into the poem’s particulars. Even the second stanza's superb visuals, whose role might seem to be exclusively scenic, are informed by its master concern. The intermittent visibility of the ship’s hull suggests the impossibility of looking “out far;” the reflective glassiness of the “wetter” ground suggests the impossibility of looking “in deep.” Not for an instant does the poem lose its conceptual focus—a clear sign that it has a concept to focus on.
I love how that poem plays with perspective in each stanza, absolutely gorgeous!
Posted by: Patent Agent | January 16, 2015 at 05:49 AM