Speaking of contraries, see how the brook
In that white wave runs counter to itself.
It is from that in water we were from
Long, long before we were from any creature.
Here we, in our impatience of the steps,
Get back to the beginning of beginnings,
The stream of everything that runs away …
(ROBERT FROST, ‘West-Running Brook’)1
Everything in this universe is driven apart by increasing entropy; yet everywhere matter seems to resist, reflecting the weird state of order still inscribed in it by the primal singularity, our unbroken cosmic egg, and falling into wave, sphere, orbit, season and pulse. We reflect it too, as members of the set of natural objects; and so in turn does our complex system of language, which is just as deeply wrought with those symmetric whorls and rhythms and patterns as we are. Poetry discloses all this; and in making explicit, audible use of the patterns which shape our speech, poetry also sings of the underlying unity – the same song that sings under everything, the concentric circles that miraculously appear in your coffee mug when you tap the desk. Nonetheless it’s a little sad to find yourself born into a universe founded on the principle of nostalgia. But it’s a good one, perhaps, for poets, who start elegising things before they have even begun.
1 Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (New York: Henry Holt, 2002).