What descriptions—or good ones, anyway—actually describe then is consciousness, the mind playing over the world of matter, finding there a glass various and lustrous enough to reflect back the complexities of the self that’s doing the looking.
Here, for example, is the Metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan, opening a poem called “To His Books”:
Bright books! the perspectives to our weak sights,
The clear projections of discerning lights,
Burning and shining thoughts, man’s posthume day,
The track of fled souls, and their Milky Way,
The dead alive and busy …
To use an exclamation—Bright books!—as the opening phrase of a poem is an energetic gesture; it promises that the following lines will, with equal élan, unpack that phrase, teaching us to read its implications. Bright is certainly not the first adjective that comes to mind when we think of printed volumes. Though of course the poet’s process is irrecoverable, I’m willing to bet that it was this phrase that came first, in a sort of (forgive me) flash. It’s a familiar experience to poets, that arrival of a phrase laden with more sense than we can immediately discern, a cluster of words that seems to know, as it were, more than we do.
In the lines that follow you can feel the muscular progression of Vaughan’s thinking: books are bright because they provide lights to our dim vision, and because they clearly project a lantern light that might help us discern our way in the world, or make difficult choices when it’s hard for us to see the right ones. But they’re bright too because of the incandescent energy of thinking and creating, the blaze of consciousness that has been inscribed upon those pages. And suddenly it’s as if Vaughan recognizes that since, in these volumes, thinking is no longer contained within the time-bound human body, it outlasts us, to become our “posthume day.” How lovely the notion that the light of books is the day of the afterlife, that a made sunlight shines past the grave.
But it’s the next, breathtaking line that wildly enlarges the poem’s scale; “the track of fled souls, and their Milky Way” makes these books a shining streak across the firmament, and invites us to consider the stars themselves as evidence of human passing, the still-burning traces of consciousness gone. We’ve traveled from library to cosmos in a flash, and in the process what has been lost to us is suddenly restored to life, in an unexpected resurrection. Here is how Susan Howe puts it, three hundred-odd years later:
I wished to speak a word for libraries as places of freedom and wildness. Often walking alone in the stacks, surounded by raw material paper afterlife, my spirits were shaken by the great ingathering of titles and languages…. While I like to think I write for the dead, I also take my life as a poet from their lips, their vocalisms, their breath.
Description is a mode of thinking; in generating appositives for “bright books,” Vaughan unfolds a metaphysic, an argument against the apparent erasures of our mortal condition. It’s a startlingly non-Christian afterlife. Do you want to live forever? Write! But I joke—in reality Vaughan is the most Christian of poets, though a subversive one, and he offers the afterlife of the book here as a kind of emblem, evidence of a faith in the soul’s persistence so deep that even the stars themselves might be seen as our lights.
George Herbert’s “Prayer” is structured in a similar fashion; the poem’s composed of a list of appositives or metaphorical equivalents for its title. In a sense it is nothing but a chain of descriptive phrases, but what a work of thinking and naming takes place here, an almost physically palpable process of argument as the poet works his way through a complicated notion of what praying is:
PRAYER the Churches banquet, Angels age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth;
Engine against th’ Almightie, sinner’s towre,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six daies world-transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear;
Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the souls bloud,
The land of spices, something understood.
Herbert simply suppresses the verb (Prayer is …) and proceeds with a supple chain of definitions of prayer. It is one of the most beautiful modes of description, this catalog of names; it’s the mode of the litany, a way of accumulating terms of praise.
But a list, as readers who have waded through some of Whitman’s less candescent moments know, can easily grow numbing. Herbert makes his accumulation of descriptive phrases a dynamic, forward-moving thing, one that includes evidence of struggle. This is especially clear in the second stanza, which startles after the trumpet praise of stanza one. It’s only when we come to “Engine against th’ Almightie, sinner’s towre” that we’re pushed back to the verb in the previous line: prayer is a swift mode of traversing heaven and earth, and its “plummet” leads into the depths of the stanza to follow. It’s extraordinary to think of railing at God—using words as engines of war, building a tower in order to thunder back at the old thunderer—as prayer. But to include that kind of outpouring as also being a form of colloquy with God widens Herbert’s poem, enlarging his discussion of what it is to commune with the divine.
A few lines later, here’s the Milky Way again, now a part of what is surely one of the lovelier lists in the language. This bead string of phrases is energized by its variety of tone, its surprising mixture of nouns, and a lush sensory engagement in what is primarily an emotional and intellectual process—so that prayer brings with it the sound of bells, the scent of spices, the sharp tang of blood.
It’s unexpected, after all the poem’s sensory precision and clarity of expression, Herbert’s arrival at that final phrase: “something understood.” Something in lesser hands might seem vague and general, but here the nature of this understanding must be left open, undefined, because it’s the sum of all that has transpired across four stanzas of attempts to evoke prayer’s complex character. We arrive at an indeterminate term that contains all that’s come before and something else too, the language-resistant stuff of internal comprehension, the intuition of grace—here phrased, most tellingly for this poet, as “understanding.” Herbert doesn’t want to just feel holiness; he values the active work of understanding. It’s as if we’ve climbed a ladder of phrases, each in its shifting register of tone and associations, to arrive at this final rung, which turns out to be the simplest one of all, on the surface of it, but from which language can climb no higher.
In Gerard Manley Hopkins’s breathless sonnet “The Starlight Night,” a still more conflicted, wilder worshipper turns his attention to the heavens:
LOOK at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!
Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes!
The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!
Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!
Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!
Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.
Buy then! bid then!—What?—Prayer, patience, alms, vows.
Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!
Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!
These are indeed the barn; withindoors house
The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse
Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.
Hopkins seems madly in love with the surface of the world here, the night sky dazzle. His opening injunction repeats the same verb three times: look, look, look, as if to suggest that no one’s ever seen such a marvel. He offers us six lines of ecstatic description, figure upon figure flung back as if in answer to the splendor. They’re curiously pagan images for a Jesuit poet (fire-folk, circle-citadels, elves’-eyes), tinged with a sense of the Celtic myth world whose twilight the young Yeats will sing a few decades hence. Hopkins filled his notebooks with precise observations of the natural world, and probably the trees that enter the poem—whitebeams, abeles (another name for white poplars)—come right out of his daily walks; these are both trees whose leaves have whitish undersides, and in a breeze they’re spangled with white. The visual experience of their flashing, unsettled leaves seems to lead the poet directly to the next, unlikely image. How unlikely, and lovely, to think of stars as resembling scared birds flying up in a farmyard when a door or gate is opened! That scattter seems to lend the stars a sound as well as movement, and these birds are made all the stranger by being “flake-doves”—tiny, easily stirred by the least motion, sparks or bits of ash blown up from a blaze.
Just when it seems this dazzle of descriptors can’t be sustained another moment, Hopkins breaks his stride. “Ah well!” seems to suggest it’s impossible to continue, that none of these tropes can do the work the poet requires. What can be said save that it’s all desirable, all a prize to be won, but how can we own the world, how come to possess it? What do we have for currency to bid in the grand razzle-dazzle auction of starlight? Four one-word terms, the priest offers us: prayer, patience, alms, vows.
But just when the poem seems to set its course in the direction of spiritual advice, the celebrant of the world (who here, as elsewhere in Hopkins’s poems, struggles to reconcile the delights of earth with the demands of heaven) once more takes the stage and turns his attention upward.
I wonder if there’s another sonnet in English that uses the same verb seven times? Look, look, this passage begins, as if whatever the speaker might have said in the previous, rhetorical lines is entirely overwhelmed by physical reality. “May-mess, like on orchard boughs” provokes in me a state of happiness that makes critical discussion practically impossible. I’ll try: there’s the marvelous tension between the rest of the line and the entirely unexpected “mess,” as fine an example of polarity in descriptive speech as I can think of. There’s the alliterative pleasure of “May-mess,” a poetic device that seems to come from the same ancient realm of Britons as do the four trees the poem catalogs. There’s the pleasure of being told twice in this line to look at the marvelous parallel messes of orchard and stars, a doubling that intensifies our sense of the speaker’s character, his enthusiasm, his giddy pleasure in being overcome by what is, for him, the sensory evidence of the divine. We’re given one more tree, willows with their yellow early-spring catkins, and then the sonnet moves to its startling close. That farmyard back in line seven must still be lingering in Hopkins’s imagination, because it seems to lead toward the figure that provides the poet with his idiosyncratic revisioning of all the glories he’s been cataloging as—a barn? The stars in all their spangled fire are a barn to house the divine, merely the outer “piece-bright paling” that contains the true glory?
“Piece-bright paling” requires a bit of unpacking. Paling is a row of upright, pointed sticks—a picket fence. When we repeat the familiar phrase that something is “beyond the pale,” we’re employing what Donald Hall has called a dead metaphor, using a comparison we don’t even notice anymore because it’s become a cliché or because the vehicle it employs to make meaning has lost its significance in contemporary speech. “Beyond the pale” means to go outside the fence, though I doubt there’s a living speaker of English who thinks of a fence as “a pale.”
“Piece-bright” suggests first the individual pickets, all agleam in their white paint, the shining enclosure of the heavenly host. But “piece-bright,” Paul Mariani writes, is also a term for money, taking us back to the poem’s middle lines about buying and bidding, and Hopkins must want us to hear the homonym “peace-bright” too. “Paling” also suggests the fading of the stars, at dawn, as the Son appears in the final line, and it also suggests that the stars themselves must pale beside the divinity they house. (It still seems odd, and deeply engaging, that Christ must here be figured as a sort of animal, since he dwells in the barn. Are we to think of the site of the Nativity? Or to think of him as some transforming beast?)
The stars themselves may pale, but it’s instructive to notice that they still get nine lines of this poem, lines sparked by eleven exclamation points! If the stars are merely the farm building in which the Hallows reside, it’s abundantly clear that this poet truly loves the barn.
Here is one more starry example of description as an active process of thinking. “Voyages,” Hart Crane’s great sequence, traces the course of an ecstatic union between two lovers. One is at sea, moving through “adagios of islands,” while the poem’s speaker bridges the distance between them with a potent metaphoric recreation of their passion—a total immersion in which the transmembering power of the sea brings them to an orgasmic moment when “sleep, death, desire, / Close round one instant in one floating flower.”
In section V, a crisis arises. The two seem to be together again, perhaps back on the Brooklyn rooftop of Crane’s apartment building, looking out toward the East River and the harbor, where “the bay estuaries fleck the hard sky limits.” And that hardness seems to have inflected and informed them; their intimacy has been compromised or diminished by some “piracy.” Now, Crane says, with his trademark density:
The cables of our sleep so swiftly filed,
Already hang, shred ends from remembered stars …
Though the poet does not mention Brooklyn, no reader of Crane can encounter these lines, especially after the poem has located us with what seems a splendid evocation of New York Harbor in winter, without hearing in those hanging cables an evocation of the bridge, which he elsewhere calls “harp and altar.”
The bridge’s cables seem to narrow as they descend, as if they’d been filed to sharper points, and if you’ve seen the bridge in fog it wouldn’t be at all unlikely to think of those hanging cables as “shred ends.” But these are the cables “of our sleep,” which seems to suggest a bridge between the lovers, or lines of connection binding them. Cables that hang in shred ends support nothing, of course; our mutual sleep is lost now. Since the context of the poem is nautical, and the beloved’s been away at sea, “cables” also suggests messages sent from shore to ship and back again, missives telegraphed between them. Such communiqués might be filed away, as old love letters sometimes are, no longer read, but too lovely or painful to discard. And what’s left now? Shred ends—of the nocturnal, wordless bonds, of the ties between them, of the bridge that might lead them toward one another or into the future—hanging from what can no longer be seen, the lights of heaven that can only be remembered, no longer useful for navigation, no longer guiding them forward.
Crane thinks, here, through description, twining strands of meaning, braiding together elements of his thinking and perception to make an image both elusive and unforgettable. He would, I think, agree with the notion that such imagery comes closer to being commensurate with reality than ordinary speech. Its density melds perception with thinking and feeling, making a new, generative reality: the poetic image alive in its multiplicity of meanings, unparaphrasable.