Here is a poem that could fit snugly on the back of a postcard. It is a poem, though, and not a postcard. And we read it, and read it again, and again-for reading poetry is, in part, a process of clearing rubble. The postcard we would read once, for its sentiment or information; then, if its reverse appealed to us, we might fasten it to the bulletin board with a pin. But here is a poem, and something else is happening, something that, if we open our gates to it, pulls us in past sentiment, past information.
We read it through. "I have wasted my life," declares the poet, the speaker, the voice. We read it through again, more carefully. Something has happened and we are not sure what. There has been little, if indeed anything, to prepare us for that statement. When we move our eyes back up to the first line, it is with some of the wary watchfulness of a crack detective. Either we have overlooked something, or else the poet has tossed us a red herring. We go back through the lines, combing the language, rhythm, and syntax for evidence that will support the last declaration. The procedure is wrongheaded, ultimately-a poem is not the site of a murder, but of the most delicate nativity-but through such attentiveness we do, at least, engage it at the level of linguistic nuance that poetry depends upon.
A successful poem-or a great poem, or a "realized" poem- is an inexhaustible repository of sonic and semantic events/interactions. When we read such a poem we cannot err on the side of attentiveness; decrimination is too fine. This is not to say that the poet has consciously located subtle resonance: If all effects were conscious we could pull them out just as he put them in, and after a while we would have come to the end of it. But the language web extends past the shifting boundary of the field of the conscious, and the poem-making process depends as much upon associative marriages sanctified by a feeling of "rightness" as it does upon rational choice. And there is no limiting the effects produced by the unconscious interactions. They cannot be invalidated through any appeal to the poet's intention.
Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
We might begin by remarking the title, which is, at first sight, so long and unwieldy. Why didn't Wright just call his poem "Hammock," or "Lying in a Hammock"? Does it matter to us that the hammock was hung at William Duffy's farm, or that the farm was in Pine Island, Minnesota? No. We can only suppose that if the location does not matter to us, it did to the poet. And if we then suppose that the last line was hammered out in full seriousness (to decide otherwise is to render the poem irrelevant), then the titling confirms us. The precise location is given not to inform, but to memorialize a place and a time. The title is raised over the body of the poem like a marking stone: The scene that is described and enacted has assumed a great importance in the poet's life.
The title is important in another way as well. It signals to us that a tradition is being invoked. Opening my copy of Witter Bynner's collection of translations from the Chinese, The Jade Mountain, I find, quite serendipitously, a lyric ascribed to Hsü Hun:
Red leaves are fluttering down the twilight Past this arbour where I take my wine; Cloud-rifts are blowing toward Great Flower Mountain, And a shower is crossing the Middle Ridge. I can see trees colouring a distant wall. I can hear the river seeking the sea, As I the Imperial City tomorrow - But I dream of woodsmen and fishermen.
-"Inscribed in the Inn at T'ung Gate
on an Autumn Trip to the Capital"
Wright has clearly learned something from the procedure of the Chinese lyricists-a swiftness, a lucent detailing that is at once casual and highly purposeful, a way of modulating from outer to inner worlds that implies a continuum even as it marks off the vastly disproportionate scale. Nor is he denying the influence. He is, is anything, paying homage. (The first poem in The Branch Will Not Break-- from which "Lying in a Hammock'' comes-is entitled "As I Step over a Puddle at the End of Winter, I Think of an Ancient Chinese Governor.") The movement of the poem, the abruptness of its final line-these will make a good deal more sense if we keep in mind not only the Eastern lyric tradition, but also the spiritual assumptions that underlie it.
For the Chinese poets-and the chronomancy of the I Ching depends upon this as well-every passing moment represented a unique configuration of higher forces, forces that passed through both subject and object (to use the Western concepts). A subject could, by heeding the momentary alignment of external details (or the fall of the yarrow stalks), catch a glimpse of his own spiritual location. Thus, the Chinese poet very often announced in his title the place and occasion of the poem. He would then limn with a few precise strokes the particulars of his setting, and conclude with a line or two giving the pitch of his feeling. Continuity between self and surroundings was implicit: Description further characterized the feeling, while the feeling extended out into the landscape. "Lying in a Hammock" is, quite possibly, Wright's attempt to Americanize, or Midwesternize, clements of this tradition.
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly, Asleep on the black trunk, Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
On the surface of it, these first three lines are straightforward enough-no oblique meanings or gnarled syntactic patches. The speaking voice has established a calm, descriptive tone. Repose is implicit, not least for the psychological reason that one does not remark details like the blowing of a butterfly when one is agitated or upset. A clear picture begins to emerge. Indeed, it is as though we were watching a painter at work. "Over my head" the vertical axis is drawn; "the bronze butterfly" dabs in the first color, which, with the wide brushstroke of "black trunk" in the next line, is brightened by contrast. Nor is it only a contrast of colors; fragility and massive solidity are immediately put into opposition. "Green shadow" then softens the contrast of bronze and black through chromatic mediation. What's more, it brings dimension in, reminds us that we are not, in fact, looking at a simplified color composition. And as the impression of environment begins to take hold, we realize that it is by way of word by-word widening of focus: A single butterfly is on a black trunk; the black trunk is bathed in green shadow...
Color and scale apart, there are a few vital, though in some cases subliminal, linguistic effects to note. First, Wright is using the definite article, "the"- not ""-with the butterfly. What we expect to, and perhaps do, read is the latter. The distinction seemis minor, but it is not. With the definite article, as with the specificity of the title, the poet is preparing us for the "moment of truth." By saying "the," he has excerpted the moment of observation from temporal flow; he has weighted it. It is "the bronze butterfly" rather than "a bronze butterfly" because the perception represents the first step in what will be an unspoken internal movement-the beginning of a psychic dilation that will culminate in the words "I have wasted my life."
There are other details. For instance, the mimetic rightness of both the sound and positioning of "Asleep." "A-sleep" sketches in the car the motion of a butterfly closing its wings. In addition, the sound of the word both suggests the whispery fragility of the insect and carries the hint of something sealed. The sticky / sound distinctly echoes its function in a word like "cling," where it contributes the phonic sense of adhesiveness. This is not arbitrary: The tongue has to adhere briefly to the roof of the mouth in order to make the sound.
So, we have the bronze butterfly asleep on the "black trunk." The latter is solidified by its strong double stress. (We may remark, too, a neighborly nod to Pound's famous "wet black bough.") Resting against that trunk, its wings closed, sealed, the butterfly not only blows like a leaf, it looks like one. That might be obvious. Less obvious is the back and-forth motion that is set up by the reversed accents of "Asleep" ( ) and "Blowing" (' ); the rhythmic pacing tells us that there is the merest hint of a breeze. Last, we cannot ignore the heraldic significance of the butterfly. The poem is, after all, the record of an existential transformation. How natural that the glance should be arrested first by those folded bronze wings.
The reader will perhaps have detected an echo between Wright's "green shadow" and Andrew Marvell's "green shade." Certain questions are raised. I doubt whether a poet of Wright's sophistication could have combined those two words without recalling Marvell's pastoral. But does the combination represent anything more than a passing verbal homage? In other words, dare we go so far as to call it a literary allusion-that creature so assiduously hunted by the scholar and the degree candidate? Who can say? We certainly would have no trouble setting out a network of parallels: In "The Garden," the soul, in rapt contemplation, has cast "the Bodies vest aside" and has mounted up into the branches of a tree. Wright's "I" is, if not in a tree, at least attached by rope to a couple. And, as the last line manifests, his soul, too, has been contemplating itself intently.
We enter upon that thorny terrain that is somewhere between the fortuitous and the intentional. If Wright was aware, as he must have been, of Marvell's poem, to what extent did he allow that poem to contribute resonance to his? That is, did he consciously write "green shadow" in order to secure an added layer of allusiveness, or was it merely a playful gesture? The question leads us to the heart of the issue-how much does the poet consciously control the process of composition, how much is he guided or controlled by unconscious impulses, and how much are we bringing to the poem that was neither consciously nor unconsciously available to him? In a case like this, where the odds are high that the poet was directly aware of the echo, we might venture the following that some unconsciously perceived similarity between his impulse and Marvell's poem generated the words "green shadow"; that the poet recognized their appropriateness and decided to use them; that, insofar as there is a similarity between poems, it was initially unconscious and, therefore, unpremeditated; that "green shadow" does not, in the intentional, Waste Land sense, function as an allusion: It does not point to a body of meaning outside the poem.*
* Though Marvell's poem is the first to come to mind, it is not the only relevant text. A friend has called my attention to John Clare's "Valentine-To Mary, which, in its Inst stanza, has the following lines..
The substance of our joys hath been Their flowers have faded long But memory keeps the shadow green
And wakes this idle song What if Wright went through the same unconscious/conscious process, only with the Clare lines entirely blocking out the Marvell? Would we not have to acknowledge that the ghost of that all-important word "mcmory" haunted Wright's lines? Of course, we can never be sure. Perhaps we should count ourselves fortunate.
Down the ravine behind the empty house, The cowbells follow one another Into the distances of the afternoon,
Observe how the stress distribution in "Down the ravine" ( ) neatly enacts the descending movement, while the even, plodding jambs of the next line (
) give us the frank, four-footed progress of the cows. "Into the distances of the afternoon" (
- ), with its long stretch of unaccented syllables, rounds out the effect. The cows have gradually wandered out of hearing; a long time has passed. A subtle play of stresses has done the work of condensing time. The march of iambs in the second line disintegrates in the third- just as clear sounds are broken up by distance. A half hour, maybe more, has elapsed. Our vestigial nature clock, activated by rhythm, tells us that. The condensation is further secured by the combined metonymy/synesthesia: Cowbells are made to stand for cows, and the cowbell sounds are transposed from the auditory into the spatial sequence. The result is an almost imperceptible blurring of the space/time distinction and an enhancement of the subjective sense of reverie.
Time compression is essential to the impact of the poem. The final line-"I have wasted my life"-can register only if we have been persuaded that a prolonged period of brooding, conscious or unconscious, has preceded it. If Wright had not compressed time in this way, if he had just noted in quick impressionistic strokes the butterfly, the bell sounds, and so on, and then made his announcement, the result would have been comical.
Time in poetry is very different from time in most prose and all spoken discourse. Entering the language circuit of a poem, we leave behind time perceived as succession and participate, instead, in time as duration. (Henri Bergson, whose writings directly influenced Proust's conception of the duration experience-as indissolubly linked to the workings of the involuntary memory-devoted volumes to explicating these two different time perceptions.) Shedding our customary orientation, however, is not immediately possible-it is part of the rubble clearing operation that I spoke of. We have to relinquish the scheme of time expectancy by which we guide ourselves in our extraliterary commerce. Duration, simply put, is the subjective experience of time. It is selt time, time cut away from all measure, time lived without any reference to the idea of time: timelessness. Childhood, romantic love, sudden visitations of memory, and the crests of aesthetic experience all
aesthetic, seeks to immerse us in duration. Where prose tends to work gradually, inveigling us from sentence to sentence, poetry, with its exponentially greater linguistic density, plunges us in immediately.
The duration experience is intimately bound up with the nature of language and with our ability, or need, to find infinite resonances in the interactions of sound and sense. The more deeply and directly we engage the words, the more the sense contents are freed from the shell of the sign, the smaller is the breach between that cipher and our belief in its reality. As the eye through instantaneous inner transformation "hears," so does the ear indulge in a kind of "seeing." It does not merely receive sound: Working in concert with the other senses, it promptly attaches tactile, spatial, chromatic, and other associations to it. The sensory crossing that we can perform in a single line is remarkable; the evanescent "sightings" and "hearings" that happen at the threshold of our awareness are manifold. At one pole-reading the postcard, say—the eye moves quickly over words and picks up nothing but the sequence of designatory meanings. At the other pole, the awareness of reading a sign all but vanishes as the contents play upon the spume of our subjectivity. Our sense of a separate self disappears into this play; we forget that we are reading,
Poetry, through density, rhythm, and any number of concentrating devices, slows us down and, simultaneously, heightens our attentiveness. Words that we scarcely glance at in the morning paper become veritable combs of sensation. Poetry, wrote Mandelstam, "rouses and shakes us into wakefulness in the middle of a word. Then it turns out that the word is much longer than we thought, and we remember that to speak means to be forever on the road." This is a poet's capsule definition of duration, really. For to feel the word lengthening is also to abandon for a time the "objective" ordering grid that we are constantly superimposing upon our naked apprehension of the world,
Down the ravine behind the empty house, The cowbells follow one another Into the distances of the afternoon.
Behind the sequential accounting of impressions, like the forest that we are constantly missing for the trees, is the timeless rustling of language. Three lines, eighteen words, but as we speak them slowly to ourselves we realize that there is no squaring the word count with the dilation of sensation-it will continue for as long as we permit. Opening onto the world, the words ultimately propose the boundlessness that belongs to their referent reality. And, truly, it feels as though we are taking forever to get through the syllables. "Down the ravine" the two stresses ( ) crowd us with the impressions of slow,
laboring animal life. We read through the whole next line under this retarding influence it is stress-enforced. But as we work through "Into the distances of the afternoon," we are conscious of a sudden rhythmic liberation. "In-"changes the pitch. The heaviness is turned into lightness and transparency, the plodding sensations are undone, rendered into the abstraction of "distances." Eighteen words, but the psychic shift we go through is considerable. It contributes to our feeling that time has elapsed.
We are six lines into the poem and we have come to a lull. The music is diminuendo. Rhythmic liberation notwithstanding, we are conscious of a waning, a tapering-off that threatens to bear the contemplative voice into the realm of Morpheus. "Into the distances of the afternoon" has entirely attenuated the rhythmic tension. But just as we are about to join the speaker for a nap in the hammock, the poem jerks us back:
To my right, In a field of sunlight between two pines, The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
Three rapid-fire syllables ring out against the long pauses of the preceding line. The speaker has roused himself, and us, into a renewed, and changed, attentiveness. The switch ends and thereby emphasizes-the lull that went before.
The sounds and stresses in the second line work topographically: The long open vowel of "field" is phonically wedged between the two + sounds-by proxy, as it were. In fact, it is the open "-ween"-the chime sound-that is wedged, but we automatically transfer the pictorial effect. We see the brightness of the field framed by the two pines. The shady darkness of the point of vantage is conveyed by implied contrast.
The quick succession of stresses in "last year's horses" has a double function. On the one hand, it hints at the dropping action of a horse; on the other, it tenses the ear to receive the full magnificence of "blaze," that brassy yellow verb. Note, though, that Wright does not speak of last year's droppings, but "last year's horses." The emphasis shift is almost inconspicuous. But it tells us a great deal about the subliminal activity of the speaker. It tells us, for one thing, that he is preoccupied with change and irrevocability. His perception is the result of an instant inner association from the sight of the droppings, to the ignition that they are old, to a summoning-up of horses that, in Heraclitean flux, are no longer the same. Implicit, of course, is the awareness that he is no longer the same either. In this light, "Blaze up into golden stones" carries an interesting double sense. Literally, it presents the gleaming of sunlight on dung. But the usage of "stones" is just curious enough-how can droppings blaze up into stones?-to prompt a metaphoric secondary reading. The stones can be understood to be grave markers or memorials-the glowing dung is all that remains to remind us of the horses as they were last year. We can more or less chart the unconscious drift of the reverie.
"Blaze up into golden stones" signals a surge of the psyche. It is the first direct metaphoric transformation in the poem and it has several effects. First, it introduces new energies and reorganizes the circuits. Until now the procedure has been one of notation. A change in linguistic pattern marks a change in the speaker: He has moved from passivity to activity; he is, imaginatively, at least, exerting himself upon his surroundings. Not dramatically, it's true, but the change of state is indicated. By shaking himself out of the self-containment of disinterested observation, he has taken the first-and for the poem, necessary-step toward self-assessment.
But there is an even more obvious function to the phrase. The metaphor, coupled with the directional "To my right," recalls the "I" to the reader and reminds him that the outward notations of the preceding lines have perhaps paralleled-or initiated-a psychic progression in the speaker. And, indeed, the "I" is now ready to claim the stage:
I lean back, as evening darkens and comes on. A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life
There is a steady escalation of momentum in these final lines. The caesura moves from initial to medial, tightening the tension. At the same time, we feel a vertical impetus; literally, through the placement of a hawk, and phonically, through the release from the slow, drawn out vowels of "evening darkens and comes on." We are still on an upward can't when the horizontal punch is delivered: "I have wasted my life."
The poem supplies an undeniable rhythmic satisfaction-it closes with an unambiguous, hard snap. Yet, as I read through, I find two patterns that are at first sight contradictory. If, focusing one way, we heed the larger units, the sentences as opposed to the lines, we experience a distinct loss of momentum. Three long sentences are followed by three short final sentences. It is almost as if the breath units have been arranged to mime the slowing of the hammock's sway. The arc dwindles as the recognition approaches. With the last line we reach inertia: The swinging stops. Sudden immobility fixes the revelation and closes the poem.
The second pattern, however, suggests a surfacing motion. The somnolent calm of the first six lines gives way to an accelerating surge. The tempo change initiated with "To my right" combines with the shortened sentences and the moving caesura to create the feeling of the sudden eruption of a long-suppressed emotion. "I have wasted my life" breaks clear of the surface described by the reticence of the preceding twelve lines. It pushes us out of the hitherto-closed circle and into a new direction..
Contradictory though the patterns may be, they can coexist within the poem. The image that comes to mind is of one of several tantalizing optical puzzles: the wine glass that yields the facing profiles, or the stairs that reverse direction at every blink of the eye. We cannot follow both through simultaneously; we cannot get both entropy and eruption in the same reading. But the fact that both are present confers an interesting dimensionality upon the poem. Every reading is shadowed by its rhythmic Other.
What, finally, is the sense of the poem? How are we to understand the shock of the last line? Is intended to be a surprise slap, or has the poem been subtly tending toward that moment? The calm of the speaking voice, the observation of pastoral detail-these have hardly induced in us any existential foreboding. "Precisely!" might run the predictable argument. "Wright is saying that man-or, at least, the speaker-no longer belongs to that order. The poem is about being cast out from Eden."
Sensible as such an explanation might be, it misses the mark. The poem must account for itself from within its own bounded order. We cannot import an explanatory idea in order to make it "work"-the idea itself must be in the poem. We must be able to derive it directly from the verbal complex on the page.
I have wasted my life.
The conclusion cannot be taken as something separate from the body of the poem. It has not been tacked on—it is integral. We have to believe that the narrator's psyche is a continuum, that nothing will manifest itself that has not been somehow introduced or predicated. Even if the line represents a sudden eruption from the unconscious, an eruption unexpected even by the speaker, the disposition of the details and the rhythmic movement of the lines have to have forecast it. Otherwise we are forced to deal with the specter of psychic discontinuity and a conception that poetry is, in the last analysis, nihilistic: Anything can be said at any time.
If we assume a psychic integrity for the speaker-that is, if we accept that the unconscious processes must in some way impinge upon the immediate conscious operations (the observation and reporting of external detail)-then we can look for the former by way of the latter. We cannot, however, as good students of Dr. Freud, expect to find any kind of straightforward mirroring. What the speaker observes is not going to translate directly into an image of what is happening in the deeper vaults of his being. No, repression, censorship, and the distorting stratagems of the ego almost never allow for such a simple mapping.
Our only evidence, really, if we hold to the idea of a continuum, comes with the occasional disjunction, the differently weighted word or phrase that breaks the flow of neutral observation initiated in the first line. The first such instance occurs in line 4: "Down the ravine behind the empty house." "Empty" is not the natural adjective. The narration has thus far been confined to surfaces and value-free descriptions. "Large" or "yellow" would have been more in keeping with the pattern; "empty" opens a chink into the subjective, bearing a literal and an emotional sense.
"Last year's horses" is the next such divagation. I have already discussed how it reveals the deeper preoccupations of the speaker. Finally, and most tellingly, we have the penultimate line: "A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home." A psychologist would call "looking for home" a clear instance of projective identification. Three shifted emphases. Any one, taken by itself, could not support the conclusion. But as we know from geometry, three points determine a plane. And "empty," "last year's horses," and "looking for home," when plotted upon the rhythmic structure, give us enough for a flash perception of the inner dynamic.
At the beginning of this essay, I remarked that this kind of detective work is ultimately wrongheaded. It may yield up insights, but it also takes us away from what really matters in the poem: the voice. The clues might line up perfectly, but if the whole is not sustained in every syllable by the felt pressure of a human soul, the search has been utterly irrelevant. The detective, after assembling all of his evidence, gazes into the eyes of the suspect; in films, if not in real life, he finally goes by instinct. If the voice is there, if we do feel that soul, then everything else is secondary. That is, we do or do not register the impact of "I have wasted my life" depending upon our belief in the real presence of the speaker. If his sounds and cadences have convinced us, we will follow the jump and trust its necessity-whether we understand it fully or not.
The critic can say only so much. Try as he might, he can never establish to another reader's satisfaction that this intangible "voice" in fact exists. Interpretation and enumeration must finally yield to the mysterious suasions of subjective reality.