I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore
There was a deep noticing
around the tent:
they say, for a transformation
to be made you’d have to
give up the gravity
of a broken self but that’s ridiculous;
if the mystery doesn’t want to be known
it sees you from the secret ground
as those seeds with
spiked tongues (or wings?) traveling
through the woods will be opened
only in the great fires—
After working so hard on a poem, the poet needs to stand back and let the poem breathe. A good poem is an invitation, not a tool for instruction. Yes, we can learn from poems, even change our lives because of them. But most readers want to live with a poem, not be lectured by it. They want the author to get out of the boat so they can spend some time on the poetic waves themselves.
I think of an invitational poem as a windsock. It’s anchored to something solid while given the freedom to fly in different directions depending on the weather’s mood. It is not a free-for-all feather on the wind nor an unchanging stone pillar.
The poet offers a structure from which it can move.
Some poems can be so obscure and stuck in the poet’s mind that the reader feels closed off. They feel as if they are left out of an inside joke. On the other hand, poems that do too much also close the reader out. If I’m being told what to think and feel, why even bother reading the poem?
The following poem was written during a time when such teaching was acceptable, even expected by the average reader, so my point isn’t to discount the nineteenth century poet John Greenleaf Whittier or his use of an extended metaphor.
He was writing for the times, and even “[w]hile Whittier’s critics never considered him to be a great poet, they thought him a noble and kind man whose verse gave unique expression to ideas they valued.” However, this poem exemplifies what many of us still feel the need to do today:
The Worship of Nature
John Greenleaf Whittier
The harp at Nature’s advent strung
Has never ceased to play;
The song the stars of morning sung
Has never died away.
And prayer is made, and praise is
given,
By all things near and far;
The ocean looketh up to heaven,
And mirrors every star.
Its waves are kneeling on the strand,
As kneels the human knee,
Their white locks bowing to the sand,
The priesthood of the sea!
They pour their glittering treasures forth,
Their gifts of pearl they bring,
And all the listening hills of earth
Take up the song they sing.
The green earth sends its incense up
From many a mountain shrine;
From folded leaf and dewy cup
She pours her sacred wine.
The mists above the morning rills
Rise white as wings of prayer;
The altar-curtains of the hills
Are sunset’s purple air.
The winds with hymns of praise are loud,
Or low with sobs of pain,—
The thunder-organ of the cloud,
The dropping tears of rain.
With drooping head and branches crossed
The twilight forest grieves,
Or speaks with tongues of Pentecost
From all its sunlit leaves.
The blue sky is the temple’s arch,
Its transept earth and air,
The music of its starry march
The chorus of a prayer.
So Nature keeps the reverent frame
With which her years began,
And all her signs and voices shame
The prayerless heart of man.
Clearly, this poet wants us to see the worship imagery in this poem. Rather than allow the images to suggest worship, however, which would invite readers to draw their own conclusions, a thoughtful and personal experience that involves connecting one’s own memories and experiences to the world of the poem, the poet helps a little too much. Do we need As kneels the human knee, or From many a mountain shrine to make those connections? In fact, what if we thinned out the poem, as an experiment, by deleting some lines?
Without concerning myself with the rhyme scheme or even sense, I cut out lines that I thought dampened the imagery with too much commentary or explaining. This is what I ended up with.
The Worship of Nature
John Greenleaf Whittier (modified by Tania Runyan)
The harp at Nature’s advent strung
The song the stars of morning sung
The ocean looketh up to heaven,
And mirrors every star.
Its waves are kneeling on the strand,
Their white locks bowing to the sand,
They pour their glittering treasures forth,
And all the listening hills of earth
Take up the song they sing.
The green earth sends its incense up
From folded leaf and dewy cup
She pours her sacred wine.
The mists above the morning rills
Are sunset’s purple air.
The thunder-organ of the cloud,
The dropping tears of rain.
With drooping head and branches crossed
The twilight forest grieves,
Or speaks with tongues of Pentecost
From all its sunlit leaves.
With those lines removed, the worship imagery is still clear, but we get to enter into the waves and leaves without being led by the hand by the author. Too much commentary screams, “The poet is here! Look what I’m writing!” The images themselves, many of them fresh and beautiful, invite me to engage my imagination with the world of the poem.
How would you revise this poem further to allow for mystery, suggestion, emotional work? Or, would you remove different lines? Add more? Try it here:
Now I will take a similar approach to my own poem.
Loch Ness Sculpture, Wyoming
Chomping on your chain-link kelp,
you bleed rust at the bolts of your neck pipes.
Kids scamper past the entrance to tiptoe
curbs like tightrope walkers
and flick shards of asphalt
at cars. The 100-degree sun
ignites your aluminum skin.
So much you know!
You’ve seen a new mom crumple
at the door of her Caravan,
an old man mutter into his taco,
stringy-hair tweens French-kiss
behind trees. But your face fades
in the summer fog like any forgotten
legend. In winter, your head barely shines
through the heaps of snow.
People slam car doors and skitter
over slabs of ice to their meetings.
I’ve lost your title, town, and sculptor’s name.
All legends are a grainy shot:
shadow shapes, black lake memory,
the wish to return
and never know the
truth.
Try it with your own poem. Remove lines that seem to overtell the reader what to feel or think. Experiment with removing every other line, even word, in order to create new questions or perspectives.
See Get Your Exercise near the back of the book for more practice creating mystery.