Fern-Beds in Hampshire County

Although from them

Steep stands of beech and sugar-maple stem,

Varied with birch, or ash, or basswood trees

Which spring will throng with bees,

While intervening thickets grow complex

With flower, seed, and variance of sex,

And the whole wood conspires, by change of kind,

To break the purchase of the gathering mind,

The ferns are as they were.

Let but a trifling stir

Of air traverse their pools or touchy beds

And some will dip their heads,

Some switch a moment like a scribbling quill

And then be still,

Sporadic as in guarded bays

The rockweed slaps a bit, or sways.

Then let the wind grow bluff, and though

The sea lies far to eastward, far below,

These fluent spines, with whipped pale underside,

Will climb through timber as a smoking tide

Through pier-stakes, beat their sprays about the base

Of every boulder, scale its creviced face

And, wave on wave, like some green infantry,

Storm all the slope as high as eye can see.

Whatever at the heart

Of creatures makes them branch and burst apart,

Or at the core of star or tree may burn

At last to turn

And make an end of time,

These airy plants, tenacious of their prime,

Dwell in the swept recurrence of

An ancient conquest, shaken by first love

As when they answered to the boomed command

That the sea's green rise up and take the land.

-Richard Wilbur

Questions:

1 Develop the simile between ferns in a forest and rockweed in the tidal zone.

2 Recalling "Hamlen Brook," how does the variety of ferns and trees in the forest "break the purchase of the gathering mind" or "leave us dumbstruck with an ache nothing can satisfy"?

3 How are the ferns spreading of seeds "sproadically" like a smoking tide beating sprays through pier stakes?

4 What is the Biblical connection between the sea and the land? How is Wilbur blending Creationism and Intelligent Design and Evolution?

5 What is at the core of star or tree that makes them want to burn or branch apart?

6 Develop the final simile: how is the seed dispersal of ferns compared to God's command to create the land?

Mayflies

By Richard Wilbur

In somber forest, when the sun was low,

I saw from unseen pools a mist of flies,

In their quadrillions rise,

And animate a ragged patch of glow,

With sudden glittering - as when a crowd

Of stars appear,

Through a brief gap in black and driven cloud

One arc of their great round-dance showing clear.

It was no muddled swarm I witnessed, for

In entrechats each fluttering insect there

Rose two steep yards in air,

Then slowly floated down to climb once more,

So that they all composed a manifold

And figured scene,

And seemed the weavers of some cloth of gold,

Or the fine pistons of some bright machine.

Watching those lifelong dancers of a day

As night closed in, I felt myself alone

In a life too much my own,

More mortal in my separateness than they -

Unless, I thought, I had been called to be

Not fly or star

But one whose task is joyfully to see

How fair the fiats of the caller are.

ZEA

Once their fruit is picked,

The cornstalks lighten, and though

Keeping to their strict

Rows, begin to be

The tall grasses that they are—

Lissom, now, and free

As canes that clatter

In island wind, or plumed reeds

Rocked by lake water.

Soon, if not cut down,

Their ranks grow whistling-dry, and

Blanch to lightest brown,

So that, one day, all

Their ribbonlike, down-arcing

Leaves rise up and fall

In tossed companies,

Like goose wings beating southward

Over the changed trees.

Later, there are days

Full of bare expectancy,

Downcast hues, and haze,

Days of an utter

Calm, in which one white corn-leaf,

Oddly aflutter

Its fabric sheathing

A gaunt stem, can seem to be

The sole thing breathing.

Seed Leaves

Why is it important that the speaker does not know what the seed will become? How does this universalize the moment?

What is the implied metaphor of “the toothless and fat” young plant?

Explain the paradox projected onto the plant “This plant would like to grow / An yet be embryo”. How does this capture the human experience of desiring new knowledge / experiences yet desiring to hold onto innocence?

Why is there a “doom in taking shape”? for the plant? For the human?

Look up the allusion to the tree Igdrasil: how does this help you understand that the poem is about faith?

How is it a human desire to want to go to the tip end of time and fill all of space...boundless?

Comparing “Seed Leaves” to “April 5, 1974,” how does the mother wit about spring’s renewal help us comprehend that the “doom” of taking shape in “Seed Leaves” is not doom.

Little Exercise

by Elizabeth Bishop

For Thomas Edwards Wanning

Think of the storm roaming the sky uneasily

like a dog looking for a place to sleep in,

listen to it growling.

Think how they must look now, the mangrove keys

lying out there unresponsive to the lightning

in dark, coarse-fibred families,

where occasionally a heron may undo his head,

shake up his feathers, make an uncertain comment

when the surrounding water shines.

Think of the boulevard and the little palm trees

all stuck in rows, suddenly revealed

as fistfuls of limp fish-skeletons.

It is raining there. The boulevard

and its broken sidewalks with weeds in every crack,

are relieved to be wet, the sea to be freshened.

Now the storm goes away again in a series

of small, badly lit battle-scenes,

each in "Another part of the field."

Think of someone sleeping in the bottom of a row-boat

tied to a mangrove root or the pile of a bridge;

think of him as uninjured, barely disturbed.

Questions:

1. In "Little Exercise," how does the title suggest both the triviality of what the poem asks and the notion that the speaker is speaking to a small child?

2. In "Little Exercise," break the simile of the storm and the dog down into its tenor and vehicle and write a statement that explains how the vehicle helps you see the tenor in a new way?

3. In "Little Exercise," break the simile of the palm trees and the fish skeletons down into its tenor and vehicle and write a statement that explains how the vehicle helps you see the tenor in a new way?

4. In "Little Exercise," how are the weeds in the sidewalks and the sea personified? How do all of the "little exercises" in ways of thinking about the storm emphasize the presence of nature, but deemphasize nature's danger? Do the "little exercises" work? Explain.

The Moose

From narrow provinces

of fish and bread and tea,

home of the long tides

where the bay leaves the sea

twice a day and takes

the herrings long rides,

where if the river

enters or retreats

in a wall of brown foam

depends on if it meets

the bay coming in,

the bay not at home;

where, silted red,

sometimes the sun sets

facing a red sea,

and others, veins the flats'

lavender, rich mud

in burning rivulets;

on red, gravelly roads,

down rows of sugar maples,

past clapboard farmhouses

and neat, clapboard churches,

bleached, ridged as clamshells,

past twin silver birches,

through late afternoon

a bus journeys west,

the windshield flashing pink,

pink glancing off of metal,

brushing the dented flank

of blue, beat-up enamel;

down hollows, up rises,

and waits, patient, while

a lone traveller gives

kisses and embraces

to seven relatives

and a collie supervises.

Goodbye to the elms,

to the farm, to the dog.

The bus starts. The light

grows richer; the fog,

shifting, salty, thin,

comes closing in.

Its cold, round crystals

form and slide and settle

in the white hens' feathers,

in gray glazed cabbages,

on the cabbage roses

and lupins like apostles;

the sweet peas cling

to their wet white string

on the whitewashed fences;

bumblebees creep

inside the foxgloves,

and evening commences.

One stop at Bass River.

Then the Economies

Lower, Middle, Upper;

Five Islands, Five Houses,

where a woman shakes a tablecloth

out after supper.

A pale flickering. Gone.

The Tantramar marshes

and the smell of salt hay.

An iron bridge trembles

and a loose plank rattles

but doesn't give way.

On the left, a red light

swims through the dark:

a ship's port lantern.

Two rubber boots show,

illuminated, solemn.

A dog gives one bark.

A woman climbs in

with two market bags,

brisk, freckled, elderly.

"A grand night. Yes, sir,

all the way to Boston."

She regards us amicably.

Moonlight as we enter

the New Brunswick woods,

hairy, scratchy, splintery;

moonlight and mist

caught in them like lamb's wool

on bushes in a pasture.

The passengers lie back.

Snores. Some long sighs.

A dreamy divagation

begins in the night,

a gentle, auditory,

slow hallucination. . . .

In the creakings and noises,

an old conversation

--not concerning us,

but recognizable, somewhere,

back in the bus:

Grandparents' voices

uninterruptedly

talking, in Eternity:

names being mentioned,

things cleared up finally;

what he said, what she said,

who got pensioned;

deaths, deaths and sicknesses;

the year he remarried;

the year (something) happened.

She died in childbirth.

That was the son lost

when the schooner foundered.

He took to drink. Yes.

She went to the bad.

When Amos began to pray

even in the store and

finally the family had

to put him away.

"Yes . . ." that peculiar

affirmative. "Yes . . ."

A sharp, indrawn breath,

half groan, half acceptance,

that means "Life's like that.

We know it (also death)."

Talking the way they talked

in the old featherbed,

peacefully, on and on,

dim lamplight in the hall,

down in the kitchen, the dog

tucked in her shawl.

Now, it's all right now

even to fall asleep

just as on all those nights.

--Suddenly the bus driver

stops with a jolt,

turns off his lights.

A moose has come out of

the impenetrable wood

and stands there, looms, rather,

in the middle of the road.

It approaches; it sniffs at

the bus's hot hood.

Towering, antlerless,

high as a church,

homely as a house

(or, safe as houses).

A man's voice assures us

"Perfectly harmless. . . ."

Some of the passengers

exclaim in whispers,

childishly, softly,

"Sure are big creatures."

"It's awful plain."

"Look! It's a she!"

Taking her time,

she looks the bus over,

grand, otherworldly.

Why, why do we feel

(we all feel) this sweet

sensation of joy?

"Curious creatures,"

says our quiet driver,

rolling his r's.

"Look at that, would you."

Then he shifts gears.

For a moment longer,

by craning backward,

the moose can be seen

on the moonlit macadam;

then there's a dim

smell of moose, an acrid

smell of gasoline.

Modern Concepts in "The Fish"

-Imagism

-Objective Correlative

-Momentary Stay against Confusion

Elizabeth Bishop

The Fish

I caught a tremendous fish

and held him beside the boat

half out of water, with my hook

fast in a corner of his mouth.

He didn't fight.

He hadn't fought at all.

He hung a grunting weight,

battered and venerable

and homely. Here and there

his brown skin hung in strips

like ancient wallpaper,

and its pattern of darker brown

was like wallpaper:

shapes like full-blown roses

stained and lost through age.

He was speckled with barnacles,

fine rosettes of lime,

and infested

with tiny white sea-lice,

and underneath two or three

rags of green weed hung down.

While his gills were breathing in

the terrible oxygen

- the frightening gills,

fresh and crisp with blood,

that can cut so badly-

I thought of the coarse white flesh

packed in like feathers,

the big bones and the little bones,

the dramatic reds and blacks

of his shiny entrails,

and the pink swim-bladder

like a big peony.

I looked into his eyes

which were far larger than mine

but shallower, and yellowed,

the irises backed and packed

with tarnished tinfoil

seen through the lenses

of old scratched isinglass.

They shifted a little, but not

to return my stare.

- It was more like the tipping

of an object toward the light.

I admired his sullen face,

the mechanism of his jaw,

and then I saw

that from his lower lip

- if you could call it a lip

grim, wet, and weaponlike,

hung five old pieces of fish-line,

or four and a wire leader

with the swivel still attached,

with all their five big hooks

grown firmly in his mouth.

A green line, frayed at the end

where he broke it, two heavier lines,

and a fine black thread

still crimped from the strain and snap

when it broke and he got away.

Like medals with their ribbons

frayed and wavering,

a five-haired beard of wisdom

trailing from his aching jaw.

I stared and stared

and victory filled up

the little rented boat,

from the pool of bilge

where oil had spread a rainbow

around the rusted engine

to the bailer rusted orange,

the sun-cracked thwarts,

the oarlocks on their strings,

the gunnels- until everything

was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!

And I let the fish go.

Elizabeth Bishop

1. Imagism : How is "an intellectual moment and emotional complexity" caught in the image of the fish and its five hooks in its wet, weaponlike jaw?

2. Objective Correlative: How do the images of brown skin, rosettes of barnacles, tiny sea lice, green weed of the jaw, sullen face, yellowed, distant looking eyes, imagined flesh and packed entrails, and five hooks in its wet, weaponlike jaw juxtaposed with the rusted engine, bailer and sun cracked thwarts CORRELATE to one dominant emotion about the fish that leads to the victory of letting it go?

OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE- "No ideas but in things" (T.S. Eliot+William Carlos

Williams): T.S. Eliot's revisionist term in which "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of

events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion, such that when the external

facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately

evoked." (T.S. Eliot in "Tradition and the Individual Talent")

*An evocation of an emotion through associated images in a poem instead of a direct

statement of how the reader should feel. Like "show not tell," images in modern poetry

emphasize the primacy of detailed description and the attendant emotions implicit in

these descriptions over mere telling the reader how to feel.

William Carlos Williams believes that a modern poet must not express ideas explicitly to

the reader, but must imply them through a series of images: "no ideas about the thing, but the thing itself"

T.S. Eliot: "poetry amalgamates disparate experiences, always forming a new

whole"-"violent yoking of disparate ideas heterogeneously."

3. Momentary Stay against Confusion: What clarification about life, about the fish, about the power of the natural world as opposed to the human world is conveyed in the poem?

4. Use the criticism below and develop how it adds to your understanding of the speaker "letting the fish go":

David Kalstone (1989)

The poem is filled with the strain of seeing – not just the unrelenting pressure of making similes to "capture" the fish, but the fact that the similes themselves involve flawed instruments of vision, stained wallpaper, scratched isinglass, tarnished tinfoil. This is why, on some readings, the poem has the air of summoning up a creature from the speaker’s own inner depths – the surviving nonhuman resources of an earlier creation, glimpsed painfully through the depredations of time and the various frail instruments we devise, historically, to see them. The "victory" that fills up the little rented boat is one that more than grammatically belongs to both sides... the poem taps and identifies nonhuman sources of human energies. What makes it different from [Marianne] Moore’s animal poems is its interst in the difficulties of locating and accepting such energies.

From David Kalstone, "Logarithms of Apology," Chapter 4 in Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989), 87.

Jeredith Merrin

Throughout her work, she subverts the conventional Romantic trope of world-as-woman by insisting upon the indeterminate nature of nature--now female, now male, now ungendered other. And, as we might expect, Bishop is most subversive at her most Wordsworthian moments. In "The Fish," for example--strikingly Wordsworthian in its evocation of almost religious awe and joy in the presence of embodied nature--Bishop refigures the usual Romantic figure, making us see nature as a "He," a sort of finny five-star general:

[. . . .]

But even as she develops her own alternative figure, Bishop holds it up to question. She introduces this fiercely independent, masculine version of the fish with a contrasting version--domestic, and (as a result of the poet's sly adaptation of the timeworn girls-as-flowers trope) suggestive of the feminine:

[. . . .]

Determinedly "unpoetic" in her prosy rhythms, her patient agglomeration of seemingly random details and associations, Bishop here avoids poetic presumption, subjective sway. She acknowledges the tenuous relation of figurative language to reality with the tentativeness of simile ("Like medals"; "shapes like full-blown roses"; "like a big peony"). Humorously, she undercuts her own anthropomorphism ("--if you could call it a lip—"). And with a pile-up of arresting particulars, she tips the scale toward quizzical observation rather than controlling allegory.

Nevertheless, Bishop's frequently anthologized "The Fish" gradually accrues more allegorical point than most of her poems (one reason why it is a teachers' favorite). It slowly builds, as I have already suggested, toward a more Wordsworthian--more emotionally rounded, end-rhymed, and almost visionary--conclusion:

[. . . .]

Bishop avoids Wordsworth's egocentric, centripetal action by externalizing, focusing outward, as the title of her poem tells us, on "The Fish." Whereas Wordsworth internalizes and subsumes a naturalized human being (the almost moss-covered leech-gatherer), Bishop attends to a separate, natural creature: first by "catching" the fish both literally and figuratively (by hooking it and simultaneously "capturing" it with self-conscious anthropomorphic comparisons), and then by letting the fish--together with any suggestion of co-optive figuration--go. Her perceptions lead not merely to imaginative conquest or introspection, but to a sense of mutual "victory" and a specific action. She saves the creature's life. The undeniably serious conclusion with its Noah's Ark-like rainbow still has about it her very quiet, and very un-Wordsworthian, touch of humor (in what is, after all, a kind of elaborate "fish story").

From An Enabling Humility: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and the Uses of Tradition. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1990. Copyright © 1990 by Jeredith Merrin.

Sandpiper

The roaring alongside he takes for granted,

and that every so often the world is bound to shake.

He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,

in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.

The beach hisses like fat. On his left, a sheet

of interrupting water comes and goes

and glazes over his dark and brittle feet.

He runs, he runs straight through it, watching his toes.

- Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them

where (no detail too small) the Atlantic drains

rapidly backwards and downwards. As he runs,

he stares at the dragging grains.

The world is a mist. And then the world is

minute and vast and clear. The tide

is higher or lower. He couldn't tell you which.

His beak is focused; he is preoccupied,

looking for something, something, something.

Poor bird, he is obsessed!

The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray

mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.

1. As the speaker personifies the bird as a student of Blakean innocence and experience, of being obsessed with looking for meaning in the sand, how does the speaker drop this false personification of the bird, see what the bird sees, name it in human terms and revere its surface reality without a deeper meaning?

2. As opposed to Wallace Stevens's "The Snow Man" in which the speaker is more horrified by "the nothing that is there in the world," how does this speaker find inspiration that the space between sea and land is full of "millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst"?

3. How does the resistance to simile and metaphor in "The Fish" help you understand the relinquishment of personfication in "Sandpiper"?

4. How would you compare this poem to Dickinson's " A Bird came down the Walk "?

A Bird came down the Walk (328)

by Emily Dickinson

A Bird came down the Walk— He did not know I saw— He bit an Angleworm in halves And ate the fellow, raw, And then he drank a Dew From a convenient Grass— And then hopped sidewise to the Wall To let a Beetle pass— He glanced with rapid eyes That hurried all around— They looked like frightened Beads, I thought— He stirred his Velvet Head Like one in danger, Cautious, I offered him a Crumb And he unrolled his feathers And rowed him softer home— Than Oars divide the Ocean, Too silver for a seam— Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon Leap, plashless as they swim.

How to Regain Your Soul

by William Stafford

Come down Canyon Creek trail on a summer afternoon

that one place where the valley floor opens out. You will see

the white butterflies. Because of the way shadows

come off those vertical rocks in the west, there are

shafts of sunlight hitting the river and a deep

long purple gorge straight ahead. Put down your pack.

Above, air sighs the pines. It was this way

when Rome was clanging, when Troy was being built,

when campfires lighted caves. The white butterflies dance

by the thousands in the still sunshine. Suddenly, anything

could happen to you. Your soul pulls toward the canyon

and then shines back through the white wings to be you

again.

Traveling through the Dark

Anecdote of a Jar

I placed a jar in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill.

It made the slovenly wilderness

Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild.

The jar was round upon the ground

And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.

The jar was gray and bare.

It did not give of bird or bush,

Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Wallace Stevens

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Wallace Stevens

By addressing at least three poetic devices for each poem, compare and contrast the Romantic Frederick Tuckerman's "Sonnet" with the Modern Wallace Stevens's "The Snow Man".

By addressing at least three poetic devices for each poem, compare and contrast the Romantic William Cullen Bryant's "To a Waterfowl" with the Modern Wallace Stevens's "The Snow Man".

Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself

BY WALLACE STEVENS

At the earliest ending of winter,

In March, a scrawny cry from outside

Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,

A bird’s cry at daylight or before,

In the early March wind

The sun was rising at six,

No longer a battered panache above snow . . .

It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism

Of sleep’s faded papier mâché . . .

The sun was coming from outside.

That scrawny cry—it was

A chorister whose c preceded the choir.

It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,

Still far away. It was like

A new knowledge of reality.

Tea at the Palaz of Hoon Not less because in purple I descended The western day through what you called The loneliest air, not less was I myself. What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard? What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears? What was the sea whose tide swept through me there? Out of my mind the gold ointment rained, And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard. I was myself the compass of that sea: I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself; And there I found myself more truly and more strange....

Anthony Whiting

For Hoon, as for the Hegelian and Kierkegaardian ironists, the world is both created by and an aspect of his ego. "I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw / Or heard or felt came not but from myself" (CP 65). Nothing, as Bloom observes, is exterior to Hoon. "Seeing, hearing, and feeling find objects only from his own self, and nothing through which he moves is outside him." The sea sweeps through Hoon, but since he is the "compass" of the sea, its movement has direction only in relation to him. Whatever hymns he hears are hymns he creates. The sprinkling of ointment on his beard is a parody of the ceremony in which God's elect is anointed with oil or ointment. Hoon dissolves the distinction between anointer and anointed, elected and elector. "What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard? / . . . Out of my mind the golden ointment rained" (CP 65).There can be no distinction in Hoon' s world between himself and what he sees or hears or feels or between himself as anointer or anointed because, finally, everything is an aspect of his ego. Dressed in purple, the color of royalty, Hoon, like the romantic ironist portrayed by Hegel, is "lord and master of everything" (A 64).

Stevens describes Hoon in a later poem, "Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz," as

that mountain-minded Hoon,

For whom desire was never that of the waltz,

Who found all form and order in solitude,

For whom the shapes were never the figures of men. (CP 121)

For Hoon the shapes are never the figures of men because it is his will alone that is expressed in his world. Though Stevens describes Hoon as finding "all form and order in solitude," yet Hoon denies at the beginning of the poem that his solitude is a lonely one. "I descended / The western day through what you called / The loneliest air" (CP 65). "You" and not Hoon call the air "lonely." Part of the reason that his solitude is not lonely is suggested in Stevens' comment that for Hoon "desire was never that of the waltz." Desire, that is, has no social or interpersonal component. Though it is not directed outward toward another person or toward society at large, yet desire is not unfulfilled. Hoon finds the world as himself, and in doing so, desire is turned back to and finds satisfaction in the self. The air is not lonely to Hoon because the pleasure he takes in himself eliminates the need for anyone but himself. Hoon's enclosure and the sense of pleasure that he takes in discovering the world as the self recall Hegel' s description of romantic irony as a " concentration of the ego into itself, for which all bonds are snapped and which can live only in the bliss of self- enjoyment" (A 66).

Both the sense of creativity and the sense of pleasure expressed in "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon" differ from the kind of creativity and pleasure expressed in the irony of skeptical engagement. In the Ozymandias canto of "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction," for example, the mind marries the world through the fictions it creates. And because the process of creation is ongoing, the mind's experience of the world is seen as becoming richer and more diverse. To create in "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon" is to turn the world into the self and hence negate the world. This narcissism stands in opposition both to poems such as "The Man with the Blue Guitar," canto XXIV, where the self, through art, takes pleasure in reality, and to "The Snow Man," whose reduction of all fictions to "nothing," a reduction in which the self turns away from itself and beholds the universe at large, can be seen as Stevens' most severe criticism of the self-love expressed by Hoon.

from The Never-Resting Mind: Wallace Stevens' Romantic Irony. Copyright © 1996 by the University of Michigan.

The Solitude of Cataracts

He never felt twice the same about the flecked river,

Which kept flowing and never the same way twice, flowing

Through many places, as if it stood still in one,

Fixed like a lake on which the wild ducks fluttered,

Ruffling its common reflections, thought-like Monadnocks.

There seemed to be an apostrophe that was not spoken.

There was so much that was real that was not real at all.

He wanted to feel the same way over and over.

He wanted the river to go on flowing the same way,

To keep on flowing. He wanted to walk beside it,

Under the buttonwoods, beneath a moon nailed fast.

He wanted his heart to strop beating and his mind to rest

In a permanent realization, without any wild ducks

Or mountains that were not mountains, just to know how itwould be,

Just to know how it would feel, released from destruction,

To be a bronze man breathing under archaic lapis,

Without the oscillations of planetary pass-pass,

Breathing his bronzen breath at the azury centre of time.

Young Sycamore

I must tell you

this young tree

whose round and firm trunk

between the wet

pavement and the gutter

(where water

is trickling) rises

bodily

into the air with

one undulant

thrust half its height-

and then

dividing and waning

sending out

young branches on

all sides-

hung with cocoons

it thins

till nothing is left of it

but two

eccentric knotted

twigs

bending forward

hornlike at the top

Questions:

1 Why is it important that the young sycamore grows between the pavement and the gutter?

2 Pick three words that gain emphasis by being placed at then end or beginning of the oddly enjambed lines and develop why these words are important to the poem.

3 What idea is conveyed by the "bending forward" of the young sycamore to the sky?

4 The description of the tree occurs in a subordinate clause and the tree is left without a verb. What idea about the tree is conveyed by this?

5 How does the poem hope to live the life of the young sycamore for a moment? Consider: " The use of tactile references here is characteristic: in a sense, the poet is trying to 'touch' the tree,and make us touch it - to achieve contact (an important word for Williams) and, for a moment, live the life of another thing. And equally characteristic is the pattern of verbs and verbals: Williams, like Whitman,sees life as process, constant motion. As in a painting by Van Gogh, there is a sense of the tree as animate life, thrusting towards the sky and continuing to grow long after the artist's imitation of it is finished."

6 Another critic suggests that Williams " must tell you / this young tree") exists in a world of process in which growth and decay, creation and destruction are simultaneous. Thus Peter Schmidt's interpretation indicates that - perhaps unintended but nonetheless present - the movement upward contains its inversion or counterpart:

A second reading ... will show that the poem is hardly without personification or metaphor, although they are implied rather than stated. Williams hints that Stieglitz's sycamore is also a tree of life, starting with youth's "round and firm trunk" and then "waning" gradually until the branches are "bending forward" like the bodies of the old. Both men and trees have offspring: seed "cocoons" hang from the leafless branches. The eye's movement thus merges with the inner eye's vision of time's passage. ("Modernist Pastoral," p. 391)

What is the implied metaphor in the poem?

7 How is this poem a modern organic transcendence? How does the speaker's self become the tree? Consider this critic's take on the embodiment of the tree:

Such a poem is, as Williams says, not opposed to nature but apposed (placed next) to it. The process of exploration and appropriation (of which the poem is an icon) and the involvement of several senses beyond the distancing sense of sight make of the poem a kinesthetic and synesthetic object in which the self relives or recreates the life of the tree, in a way that fully justifies Williams's dictum, "A thing known passes out of the mind into the muscles."

Spring

by Mary Olivrer

Somewhere

a black bear

has just risen from sleep

and is staring

down the mountain.

All night

in the brisk and shallow restlessness

of early spring

I think of her,

her four black fists

flicking the gravel,

her tongue

like a red fire

touching the grass,

the cold water.

There is only one question:

how to love this world.

I think of her

rising

like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against

the silence

of the trees.

Whatever else

my life is

with its poems

and its music

and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness

coming

down the mountain,

breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her -—

her white teeth,

her wordlessness,

her perfect love.

by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

by Mary Oliver

I have been thinking

about living

like the lilies

that blow in the fields.

They rise and fall

in the edge of the wind,

and have no shelter

from the tongues of the cattle,

and have no closets or cupboards,

and have no legs.

Still I would like to be

as wonderful

as the old idea.

But if I were a lily

I think I would wait all day

for the green face

of the hummingbird

to touch me.

What I mean is,

could I forget myself

even in those feathery fields?

When Van Gogh

preached to the poor

of course he wanted to save someone--

most of all himself.

He wasn't a lily,

and wandering through the bright fields

only gave him more ideas

it would take his life to solve.

I think I will always be lonely

in this world, where the cattle

graze like a black and white river--

where the vanishing lilies

melt, without protest, on their tongues--

where the hummingbird, whenever there is a fuss,

just rises and floats away

by Mary Oliver

Now I see it--

it nudges with its bulldog head

the slippery stems of the lilies, making them tremble;

and now it noses along in the wake of the little brown teal

who is leading her soft children

from one side of the pond to the other; she keeps

close to the edge

and they follow closely, the good children--

the tender children,

the sweet children, dangling their pretty feet

into the darkness.

And now will come--I can count on it--the murky splash,

the certain victory

of that pink and gassy mouth, and the frantic

circling of the hen while the rest of the chicks

flare away over the water and into the reeds, and my heart

will be most mournful

on their account. But, listen,

what's important?

Nothing's important

except that the great and cruel mystery of the world,

of which this is a part,

not to be denied. Once,

I happened to see, on a city street, in summer,

a dusty, fouled turtle plodded along--

a snapper--

broken out I suppose from some backyard cage--

and I knew what I had to do--

I looked it right in the eyes, and I caught it--

I put it, like a small mountain range,

into a knapsack, and I took it out

of the city, and I let it

down into the dark pond, into

the cool water,

and the light of the lilies,

to live.

by Mary Oliver

I thought the earth remembered me,

she took me back so tenderly,

arranging her dark skirts, her pockets

full of lichens and seeds.

I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,

nothing between me and the white fire of the stars

but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths

among the branches of the perfect trees.

All night I heard the small kingdoms

breathing around me, the insects,

and the birds who do their work in the darkness.

All night I rose and fell, as if in water,

grappling with a luminous doom. By morning

I had vanished at least a dozen times

into something better.

by Mary Oliver

Every year

the lilies

are so perfect

I can hardly believe

their lapped light crowding

the black,

mid-summer ponds.

Nobody could count all of them --

the muskrats swimming

among the pads and the grasses

can reach out

their muscular arms and touch

only so many, they are that

rife and wild.

But what in this world

is perfect?

I bend closer and see

how this one is clearly lopsided --

and that one wears an orange blight --

and this one is a glossy cheek

half nibbled away --

and that one is a slumped purse

full of its own

unstoppable decay.

Still, what I want in my life

is to be willing

to be dazzled --

to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even

to float a little

above this difficult world.

I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.

I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing --

that the light is everything -- that it is more than the sum

of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

by Mary Oliver

Some kind of relaxed and beautiful thing

kept flickering in with the tide

and looking around.

Black as a fisherman's boot,

with a white belly.

If you asked for a picture I would have to draw a smile

under the perfectly round eyes and above the chin,

which was rough

as a thousand sharpened nails.

And you know

what a smile means,

don't you?

*

I wanted the past to go away, I wanted

to leave it, like another country; I wanted

my life to close, and open

like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song

where it falls

down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;

I wanted

to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,

whoever I was, I was

alive

for a little while.

*

It was evening, and no longer summer.

Three small fish, I don't know what they were,

huddled in the highest ripples

as it came swimming in again, effortless, the whole body

one gesture, one black sleeve

that could fit easily around

the bodies of three small fish.

*

Also I wanted

to be able to love. And we all know

how that one goes,

don't we?

Slowly

*

the dogfish tore open the soft basins of water.

*

You don't want to hear the story

of my life, and anyway

I don't want to tell it, I want to listen

to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.

And anyway it's the same old story - - -

a few people just trying,

one way or another,

to survive.

Mostly, I want to be kind.

And nobody, of course, is kind,

or mean,

for a simple reason.

And nobody gets out of it, having to

swim through the fires to stay in

this world.

*

And look! look! look! I think those little fish

better wake up and dash themselves away

from the hopeless future that is

bulging toward them.

*

And probably,

if they don't waste time

looking for an easier world,

they can do it.