Art’s brightness is a strangely untarnishing silver. One of the distinguishing powers of great art is its capacity to unseal its own experience not once, but many times. A Beethoven quartet many times heard, a painting by Bonnard looked at for decades, does not lose the ability to lift us out of one way of being and knowing and emplace us, altered, into another. A poem long memorized can raise in its holder, mid-saying, stunned tears. Pound described the paradox simply: “Poetry is news that stays news.” Why this is so, and how it is done, has something to do with the way good art preserves its own capacity to surprise.
The anonymous “Western Wind,” one of the oldest poems in English literature, provides a good starting point for investigating perennial newness:
Western wind, when wilt thou blow?
The small rain down can rain.
Christ, that my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again.
The poem is a small and intimate crisis, preserved intact through time by memorable sounds and by its expansion of the perimeters of existence in every direction: vertical and horizontal; interior and outward; emotional and spiritual. Its images cut through both familiarity and complacency. They are blades that feel freshly sharpened each time they are read.
Other conceptual realms are not like this. Even discoveries as revolutionary as those made by Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton are soon taken for granted. Impersonal, emotionally neutral, our comprehension of solar system or gravity is as calmly fixed in the mental landscape as a long-familiar chair or backyard rock. Science’s discoveries may—and do—raise wonder, but their usefulness does not depend on our astonishment at their existence. In art, though, this moment’s human response is the discovery. A work of art is not color knifed or brushed onto a canvas, not shaped rock or fired clay, a vibrating cello string, black ink on a page—it is our participatory, agile, and responsive collaboration with those forms, colors, symbols, and sounds.
We write or read poems because we need them. The first poems were work songs, love songs, war songs, lullabies, prayers—rituals meant to carry assistance. “Western Wind” carries in its lines primordial dilemma, primordial longing: here is a person far out to sea in terms of geography, weather, and condition of soul. A literal bewilderment holds the music of the first line, whose sounded “w” runs through each of the most basic English-language words of questioning: “what,” “where,” “why,” “when,” “how,” “who.” We hear also the open and permeable “O” of the line’s end word, an “o” we must commit ourselves to with the full breath in order to say at all. And we hear the narrower vowels the line must pass through before it, and the study in “a” sounds that follows. This poem’s music builds a suspension bridge between asking and answer.
The nameless poet speaks in the intimate grammatical voice of prayer and direct address. Yet his I/Thou isn’t turned to the divine, it is spoken to wind; the word “Christ” appears almost in passing, in a tone half prayer-invocation, half curse. The poem’s third line summons, in the course of eight words, spiritual life, erotic life, and their connection within the intensities of human longing. And then the last line arrives, which both sustains the poem’s emergency—the line is held in the grammar of wishing, not having—and resolves it without resolving, by tucking us safely into the longed-for bed with the rhyme-promise of “again” and “rain.” One must surely follow the other, the poem’s sound-murmur assures, though the rational mind knows well they need not. Even the rain itself may or may not come. In this way of multiplicity and music, poetry instructs in the navigation of essentially unnavigable circumstances and truths. We are going to die; we live now. We are solitary; we are connected to the beloved, to weather, to (perhaps) the divine. We despair; we hope. This quatrain’s mitered joining of the unresolvable and beauty crafts a vessel sturdy enough to have crossed a thousand years, but one also as fragile, fugitive, and significant as a puff of smoke.
Poems are like the emotions they awaken in us: not preservable object, but living event. Local and unextractable from the body, emotion is an experience that informs of current circumstance, current needs, and then disappears. “What is love, ’tis not hereafter; / Present mirth wants present laughter,” sings Feste in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, half courting, half warning. Even if we desire, grieve, or protest something remembered, it is this moment’s desire or sorrow, this moment’s anger, we feel. In the instant we cease to care, the past loses its sting.
Poetry’s words can be ink- and sound-stored stably, then, but the poem itself cannot. It is the score to a music for which we are instrument and audience both, held in the procedures of its making. The “meaning” of “Western Wind”—or of any truly good poem—is like certain chemical reactions: evaporative, volatile, and elusive. Its lines waver between what is here and what is not, between what the grammar tells us of truth and the music’s alternative promise. Poetic epiphany gives off a kind of protective mist; it exudes an amnesiac against general recall. The poem must be read or said through fully to be fully known. In this is perhaps the first explanation for the always-original brightness of good poems: what is impossible to remember will (re)appear as new.
What surprises, etymology tells us, is what is “beyond grasp.” Even the mind of the author cannot seem to keep what has been found: great poems exceed their creators. They are more capacious, capricious, compassionate, original, witty, strange, avaricious for beauty and range. The writer’s life, the historical times, do not make the art. Art makes art. Any real creative discovery is a leap inconceivable until taken—not least, as we will see also in a later chapter, because inconceivability is part of its nature.
Cognitive and creative discoveries are made in the same way as much of biological life is: by acts of generative recombination. Disparate elements are brought together to see if they might make a viable new whole. To explore how this happens, we must begin with cognition’s own beginnings, in the construction and discernment of patterns. From the infant’s “buzzing and blooming confusion,” in William James’s phrase, we assemble a comprehensible world by perceiving first what stays, what recurs. Only after such patterns are in place can we begin to recognize departures from the template, and to see which combinations are new and might newly inform. Creative epiphany is much the same: a knowledge won against the patterns of predictable thought, feeling, or phrase.
Surprise, then, is epiphany’s first flavor. It is the emotion by which we register shifted knowledge, in a poem, in a life. Good poems make self and world knowable in changed ways, bring us into an existence opened, augmented, and altered. To awaken into new circumference—as we see in stories ranging from Alice in Wonderland to Gulliver’s Travels—is to be startled. (In Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” Gregor Samsa’s utter calmness inside his new form is what most unsettles the reader.) And further, surprise not only signals the recognition that something has changed, it is part of the changing.
The bigger the leap of a new connection, the more surprise it will hold. The most profound discoveries—those described as revolutionary or “earth-shaking”—are those, like the Copernican rearrangement of sun and planets, that challenge and replace our most daily perceptions and unquestioned assumptions. In science, though, as we’ve seen, such surprises are soon integrated into different but now settled patterns. In the realm of art, the new is not object but process, and cannot be kept pinned down in the mind.
The Latin verb cogitare, “to think,” has at its root in the act of shaking things together, and the idea that agitation is needed to make something new is found both in myths and in social and political revolutions worldwide. The etymology of intelligo adds something different: intelligence involves sorting, intention, selection. This recalls Chekhov’s definition of talent: the ability to tell the essential and inessential apart. The third quality of creative making’s cognitive tripod is different again: counterfactual thought’s recombinant question, “What if?”
“What if” resides on a spectrum—it inhabits equally the scientist’s centrifuge and a child’s broomstick horse, though there is a difference between them. Play shakes things up, often quite literally, in new ways. But while the results of play both instruct and bring pleasure, they rarely jolt. Make-believe has an indispensable role in early life precisely because it doesn’t “count”: play is exploration free of repercussion. The researcher, meanwhile, hopes an experiment’s result might actually matter.
These distinctions clarify why some poems seem essential, while others, however accomplished and interesting of surface, do not. Deep surprise is the way the mind signals itself that a thing perceived or thought is consequential, that a discovery may be of genuine use. The experience itself, though, especially in responding to a work of art, may well be felt as some different emotion, the one that follows; surprise, neuroscientists report, lasts half a second at most; and so the reader may notice the powerful upsurge of grief or compassion or wonder a good poem brings, but not the surprise that released it. Surprise plays a major role in survival’s own sorting—what most surprises will be most strongly acted on, and most strongly learned. The poems we carry forward, as individuals and as cultures, are those that strike us powerfully enough that they call up the need for their own recall.
How is it that something that lasts a half second can be so essential, not only to art but to our very survival? Not least is the particular way startlement transforms the one who is startled. Among other things, surprise magnetizes attention. An infant hearing an unexpected sound will stop and stare hard—the experience of surprise is itself surprising. It is also, literally, arresting: in a person strongly startled, the heart rate momentarily plummets. The whole being pauses, to better grasp what’s there. Surprise also opens the mind, frees it from preconception. Surprise does not weigh its object as “good” or “bad”; though that may follow, its question is simply “What is it?,” asked equally of any sudden change. Startlement, it seems, erases the known for the new. The facial expression of surprise, according to one researcher, is close to rapture, to the openness of a baby’s first awakeness. Charles Darwin, in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, grouped surprise with astonishment, amazement, and wonder.
In poetry, surprise deepens, gathers, and purifies attention in the same way: the mind of preconception is stopped, to allow a more acute taking-in. A taxonomy of poetic surprise covers many levels—word, syntax, concept, image, rhetoric, any of these can present us with something unexpected. Disruption of pattern (overt or subtle) can take place in structure, rhythm, approach, meter, or rhyme. Surprise can rest entirely in a poem’s textural surface or in subtext alone. The unlikely thing may be the choice of what is looked at, and one subtle path to surprise is through the movement and refocusing of attention. Certain haiku, such as Issa’s “Don’t worry, spider—I keep house casually,” simply bring the unnoticed to notice. It is as if the walls of the room you are in were suddenly to drop away and the house next door—which, after all, you did know was there—were suddenly sitting companionably within view, except the neighbor is the spider, and the house your own.
Whether by means large or small, noticed or almost imperceptible, poetry’s startlements displace the existing self with a changed one. Even the fine-grained surprise of a single line’s enjambment is pause and question and revision of comprehension; as with puns, or Japanese poetry’s pivot words, two conditions of mind are summoned, each of which jostles the other. Keats pointed to these almost intangible transmutations of meaning and felt experience when he wrote that poetry “surprises by fine excess.” In the density of poetry’s rendering of attention, the world—and so the experiencing self—takes on a surplus abundance. It offers the same pleasure we feel before a discovered spring: we know thirst will be answered unmeagerly, with a generosity far beyond its own measure.
Surprise carries an inverse relationship to that which harnesses self and will: it is the emotion of a transition not self-created. Though infants can visibly surprise themselves by sneezing, there is no self-tickling. We tend not to laugh at our own jokes, at least when alone. Yet one of the reasons a poem—or any creative effort—is undertaken is precisely to surprise yourself by what you may find. Poems appear to come from the self only to those who do not write them. The maker experiences them as gift, implausibly won from the collaboration of individual with language, self with unconscious, personal association and concept with the world’s uncontrollable materials, weathers, events. Picasso said of his paintings, “I do not seek, I find.”
Insight’s arrival as if from outside the self has been described not only by artists but by biologists, economists, mathematicians. The early-twentieth-century mathematical prodigy Ramanujan claimed his theorems came to him from a whispering goddess. If you leave out the goddess, the description turns out to be not uncommon among mathematicians—many radically new propositions, it seems, are proven after, not en route to, their first appearance in the mind.
We are beings often skeptical of, made worried by, surprise; we are also beings who seek it out. Polynesian transoceanic explorers in hollowed-out logs, Atlantic City gamblers, and mountain climbers sleeping cliff-suspended, hung from a half-dozen hammered-in pitons, share the willingness to submit themselves to the unknown. Risk of failure—not unfamiliar to even the desk-bound—amplifies the exhilaration of success.
Surprise, as we’ve seen, is the gate through which the new must pass. If something in a poem startles others, it will have startled its maker first. Robert Lowell wrote (speaking in one poem about his others), “My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise.” “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader,” said Robert Frost.
When I began mulling over these questions, I raised the question of abiding surprise with a friend, while walking. We reached a ridge, and I said, “We’ve been here many times before, why is it always so new?” I myself was thinking of E. O. Wilson’s theory of sight lines and African savannah; of the complex textures of sky, leaves, and grasses; of the role of cloud and mist in Chinese paintings. She answered, “Because it isn’t me.”
The world’s beauty continually surprises in no small part because it is not controlled by self or what self knows. Even something as plain as a sand grain or pebble, considered closely, can liberate us from conscious mind’s constriction, the effect of ego’s dominance described earlier by Bashō: “If we were to gain mastery over things, we would find their lives would vanish under us without a trace.” A city would serve as well—say, Lorca’s New York. For Whitman, a country. Release of narrow view lies behind surprise in humor, intellectual riddle, tragic catharsis—why should it not lie as well behind the perennial and fugitive beauty of the objective world, which is not of our making and does not exist for our use? Astonishment’s other side is our powerlessness over the view.
Times Square, New York City (illustration credit 7.1)
Lyric epiphany is democratic, equally intimate with Aeschylus and the stand-up comic. If poetry’s effects on us seem to link it more often to the former, its economy and means of meaning-making are nearer the latter. E. E. Cummings, when asked his technique in poetry, responded: “I can express it in fifteen words, by quoting the eternal question and immortal answer of burlesque: ‘Would you hit a woman with a baby? No, I’d hit her with a brick.’ ” He went on. “Like the burlesque comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement.” The joke’s technique recalls another, from Groucho Marx: “Outside a dog, a book is a man’s best friend; inside a dog, it’s too dark to read.” The mechanism of the gesture in both instances is sleight of hand, worked on a single word’s disparate meanings. Each turns on a preposition’s double reading: in the first joke, “with”; in the second, “outside.” English prepositions reify relationships that are more fluid in languages that use inflection, and rigidity always opens the gate to the comic. But the lesser joke quoted by Cummings rests on slapstick’s unjustified aggressions; Groucho Marx’s raises a reminder of isolation and friendlessness, of the depth of a night in which a book and a dog are the only two options and even they are then stripped away. His invention holds word-wit in its right hand; in its left, the sufferings of Jonah and Job.
Familiar jokes continue to make us laugh for the same reasons that known poems continue to move and surprise. We perennially fall for what enlists us into an experience so simply and seductively offered that we cannot refuse the offered, open door. Neither a poem’s nor a joke’s reason for being can be found without remaking the motions of mind that create it. A joke’s punch line, like a poem’s meaning, is not in its words, but in what we make of them—and they of us. As with poems, our amnesia to certain jokes is almost complete; when it isn’t, we sometimes laugh harder, at the inertia of our own prat-fallible mind. The performing arts—which include comedy, poetry, music, dance, and magic, as well as theater—ask of us not only the theater’s well-known suspension of disbelief, but also suspension of foreknowledge. All partake of something that lies at the core of ritual: the reenactment of and entrance into a mystery that can be touched and entered but not possessed.
The more surprise in good poetry is looked at, the more poetry’s work seems close to the work of the comic and trickster. Each unfastens those things we most think we know, and in humor, as in the arts and in science, it’s when fundamental and unexamined assumptions of mind and nature are most shaken that we are most moved. “Wit” was once a synonym for simple “knowing.” Groucho Marx’s words feel close to those of a poem not only in their undertow sadness, but in that undertow’s very existence, in its challenge to deep preconception. Jokes are supposed to be funny, are they not? Yet what makes a good joke good is precisely that it is not merely mechanically funny; it also shows us something both discomforting and true. We are alone. Inside a dog, and us, it is dark.
Against gravity and entropic loss, a poem proposes the levitations of fine excess and gratuitous beauty—soundtrance’s memorability; the aerial devices of implication; metaphor’s democratic conjugation with all existence; the praise of whatever is for what it is. In a painting, a small square of sunlight rests on the rounded shoulder of a glass vase, preserved impossibly against time’s passage; the pause in a piece of music by Mozart stops the heart for no reason except that it is there. Against transience, art provides a witnessing endurance; against the stringencies of survival, it offers the moment’s dalliance or chosen disappearance. The love poem born of unfulfilled desire embraces its own longing. The poem of love’s fulfillment carries somewhere within it, however lightly, the shadow of time and death. A painted apple cannot be eaten. As evolution’s creatures, we align with goal attainment, self-protection, and the useful. The part of art which is art, and not device, unshackles us from usefulness almost entirely. It emplaces us far into those impractical conditions that nonetheless feel to us somehow essential: laughter, contemplation, wonder, tears.
If we are to test these ideas upon poems, the recalcitrant case interests most, and so in place of more obviously strange or self-consciously new examples, I have chosen three works whose challenges to preconception both differ from one another and are not easy to name. C. P. Cavafy’s “Ithaka” is as good a place as any to start—a poem that retains through many readings the power to peel the soul freshly from sleep.
As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony.
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn’t have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
C. P. Cavafy
tr. by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard
Cavafy’s stamp of mind is hermetic, not martial. The self encountering “Ithaka” knows itself readjusted—yet it is difficult to articulate quite where the transformation lies. Modest of surface, perambulative, the poem’s language is plain, its tone unheated even when speaking of marvels; and though sufficient detail is given for the narrative, sensuous, and image-hungry mind to be fed, even these offerings are evocative but not detailed. Summer mornings, exotic places, mother-of-pearl, ebony, and perfume—these are semaphores for the sensory world, glittering samples flashed on a street corner to pull in a mark. On first look, the poem seems filled more with abstraction and the hypnosis of repetition than with any identifiable epiphanic revelation. “Full of adventure, full of discovery”; “with what pleasure, what joy”—such paralleled doublings with small variation are among Cavafy’s most frequent constructions, and the experience they offer is one of tellings, not showings. The poem refers to monsters and adventure, yet its terrors are so mildly murmured, they pass unfelt.
But look again: “As you set out for Ithaka, hope your road is a long one.” Odysseus’s journey was indeed long, but its ten-year duration was not (despite the lengthy interval with Circe) Odysseus’s desire. To make it so is Cavafy’s additive invention. Slipped in so simply and quietly that one hardly notices what it says, or that it is the only phrase the poem repeats exactly, the statement cuts sharply against the grain. Hope of delay and long travel not only inverts our usual cultural attitude toward pursuit and goal, it unravels basic dynamics of our Metazoan animal nature. Desire, ingenuity, and effort aim, in mammalian life, toward resolution, not their own prolonging. Even this poem’s relationship to its title embodies its central point: the city in Cavafy’s poem is never reached.
Cavafy is like the magician whose gestures are made so far out in the open they are almost impossible to see: each time, we feel their outcome as surprise. By this smoke-and-mirror invisibility, the central imperative statement skirts both the oppressively didactic and staling. Still, if the premise is true that a poem’s volatile effects on us stem from the reader’s inability to hold its full meaning entirely in mind, the overt statement cannot be the sole source of “Ithaka” ’s power. Nor is “Hope your road is a long one” the only triggering phrase by which I myself recall the poem. While there are other counter-wisdoms (most sharply the suggestion that all monsters are self-created), the plumb weight of the poem falls at its end. For me, the words by which this poem returns to mind are “Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey,” and what follows: “And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you. / Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, / you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.” The lines are a small brutality, chilling in their knocking aside of what once was desired. In this English-language translation, the feminine pronoun does its work as well. In it is the one reminder that Penelope is also by these words being dismissed, and with her all our felt, human connections to family and home.
A ritual must be passed through with the whole body, not glimpsed through a door. However efficient a poem’s any single syllable may sometimes be, “Ithaka” ’s entirety is needed to make its case and journey; this could not be a poem of five or seven lines. Ordinarily we think repetition must be antithetical to surprise or intensification—how can the already-known bring fresh news? Yet when a clown attempts and fails some task repeatedly, each time looking more puzzled, the audience laughs more loudly each time. Or we might think of Charlie Brown’s faith that Lucy will someday hold the football in place for his kick: the motif resides in the knowledge that the betrayal has happened so many times before. Repetition allows saturation, and its particular content’s meaning is not the same as a thing said or done only once. By “Ithaka” ’s conclusion, the effects of recurrence and allusion have deepened the poem’s revelation as long rubbing with sheep’s wool and beeswax deepens the grain and color of a table while giving it shine. The experience of recognition, of seeing fully what was always there to be seen—in life, as in the poem—is as much as anything “Ithaka ’”s, and poetry’s, surprise.
A different purchase on surprise can be found in Seamus Heaney’s “Oysters,” a poem that exemplifies the close-woven attention to experience and language which, fully followed, leads to a complex liberation for the writer, for the reader.
OYSTERS
Our shells clacked on the plates.
My tongue was a filling estuary,
My palate hung with starlight:
As I tasted the salty Pleiades
Orion dipped his foot into the water.
Alive and violated,
They lay on their beds of ice:
Bivalves: the split bulb
and philandering sigh of ocean.
Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.
We had driven to that coast
Through flowers and limestone
And there we were, toasting friendship,
In the cool of thatch and crockery.
Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow,
The Romans hauled their oysters south to Rome:
I saw damp panniers disgorge
The frond-lipped, brine-stung
Glut of privilege
And was angry that my trust could not repose
In the clear light, like poetry or freedom
Leaning in from the sea. I ate the day
Deliberately, that its tang
Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.
Seamus Heaney
We stand in this poem with a master of shaking things together—the personal with the historical, the local with the large, the life of the body that eats with the life of the feeling heart and thoughtful mind. Selective intelligence manifests as well—part of this poem’s specific gravity is its confident leaving out of the inessential. The resultant speed is discernible even in the first line: “Our shells clacked on the plates.” We notice first the sure onomatopoeia of “clacked” against “plates.” Less obvious is the way the sentence plunges the reader into its scene in medias res: the oysters have been already swallowed. The shells are “ours,” and empty.
I articulate the detail to make something clear. A poem’s comprehension does not require conscious consent. We extrapolate the existence of the riddle, not just its solution, from the clues, in a process mostly beneath the surface of awareness. That this happens in itself surprises: what was the knowledge doing, and where was it doing it, before we knew it was there? Poems share the rhetorical strategies Freud pointed to in dreams: compression, displacement, metaphoric image, pun, and wit. Each relies on the mind knowing more than it knows, more than is outwardly given. And in the case of poetry, relies on the transmission of this surplus of knowledge from one mind into another so tactfully it need not break the surface of awareness to have its effect.
In its second line, “Oysters” turns to metaphor, a device that centers on some unexpected juxtaposition instantaneously and subliminally understood. Good metaphor renews, opens, and extends perception. The surprise of “My tongue was a filling estuary” lies in its joining of human body and body of water, distant in size and conceptual category both; its aptness comes from the recognition of likeness between tongue flooded with oyster brine and riverine inlet filling with ocean.
To read a poem is both to savor its particularities and to make of them a wholeness. On reaching the next unexpectable statement, “My palate hung with starlight,” the reader immediately reaches backward in time. We cast the filling estuary into darkness, then see the whiteness shared by both starlight and salt (a brine already present in the mouth, though itself not explicitly named until the following line). But we feel, beyond this, the poem’s precipitous increase in space and time, as its images move from shells and plate, tongue and palate, into the planet-scale largenesses of sea, earth, sky, and, finally, myth. We experience further one thing more that is quite counter to ordinary expectations: it’s the intimate interior of body and perception that expands to hold estuary and stars. Not only tongue but the self’s capacities are altered.
The second stanza exchanges pleasure for the violence eating also is: a rapacity multiplied beyond counting. “Alive and violated” is simple fact for oysters eaten raw, but the grammar governs not only the oysters: it is the Pleiades, the seven sisters pursued by Orion, who lie now as bivalves, opened on beds of ice. In a world whose beings live and die, the savoring of abundance isn’t far from the acknowledgment of grief. The stanza’s music holds the change as well. Long “i” sounds give way to a short-voweled, singleline abruptness: “Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.” Parataxis here is speech condensed by pain. By sound as much as meaning, the description foreshadows the anger that later enters the poem.
Next come flowers and limestone, friendship, memory, toasting—a day again close to Edenic. The crockery is unbroken, the thatch unburned. The fourth stanza, though, makes a turn of the kind made formal in sonnets: an addition that both quickens thought and brings a question needing answer. Imperial violence is a subject not broachable by a Northern Irish poet in the 1970s without calling to mind its more proximate history as well. The speaker’s welcome coolness under roof thatch now echoes that of the oysters hauled south, under their snow and hay.
The following upsurge of explicit anger brings to consciousness the poem’s dialectical range. The consuming of oysters is an act of human and ecological pillage; the communion of friendship in one place cannot erase suffering in another; if there are Pleiades, there is a pursuing Orion who drives them. And yet, consenting to the world we are given is what we do. And more than consent. The day’s tang is answered with what Heaney described, in a letter speaking of this poem, as “a certain ferocity or bite called for in our vocation.” The promise of the poem’s final word leads both toward the action of “verb” and toward what is verbal: a poetry alert to the work of witness, a poet unable to blind himself or be silent before what he sees.
In this example we can see that a good poem’s fracture of familiarity and assumption need not be located in a single, large countervalence. The unexpectedness in “Oysters” rests not so much in one extractable concept (though the conceptual and an evaluating moral presence are each sharply present) as in multiple movements of mind which, line by line, are agile leaps in directions impossible to predict, toward a whole not subject to easy summation. Its volatility lies in a balance precise and exacting, momentarily found amid imbalances, both social and personal, that are fundamental, insoluble, and seemingly without end.
The last poem I’d like to inquire of here for its surprises is Robert Frost’s brief, adamantine “Nothing Gold Can Stay.”
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
Robert Frost
Frost’s poem is not unlike Cavafy’s—a round-form poem in which the end and beginning (in this case the title) appear identical, yet whose readers, going from point A to point A, find it completely changed. As with “Ithaka,” the basic counterstatement is set down at the start so clearly and quietly the mind has trouble noticing that it is counter: we take in the title at face value, without protest. Yet isn’t gold—in myth, in ornament, in religious and cultural reference—the archetype of that which does in fact stay, untarnished, bright against time? The poem’s formal structure similarly belies its radical dismantling: four end-stopped and straight-rhymed couplets, mostly iambic trimeter, though the first and last lines each begin with the emphasis of trochee. It is a music of orderly, reassuring recurrence, a poem any child could be put to bed by. So, of course, is “Rock-a-bye, baby”—a lullaby of genuinely Frostian temperament, with its gleeful conclusion: “Down will come baby, cradle and all.”
“Nothing Gold Can Stay” wears the structure of logical syllogism. A poem of premise and conclusion, of data and proof, its first half establishes its bona fides, so to speak. Inarguable that new leaves, undeepened by chlorophyll and sun, are not yet green; that the first whorls of an apple tree’s foliage are shaped like an opening bud; that these things will soon change. Yet even these opening lines offer the small-scale shock we now recognize as a certain kind of recognition: a making conscious of what was already there to be seen. Frost then begins to quietly alter the contract. Or not so quietly—“Then leaf subsides to leaf” is a dazzling undoing. Its thought is the first to be held to a single, grammatically complete line, and the following rhyme word, “grief,” is prefigured by the pattern-breaking pause: diminishment is so strongly felt, no comment can follow. The parataxis, like that in “Oysters,” is pain-drawn. A statement that by ordinary logic should be without meaning instead holds perception of loss so large that only spareness can convey it. Yet by any usual assumptions and measure, “subsides” is wrong: the leaf is growing. It is by Frost’s measuring as poet, not farmer, that increase is loss.
Each of the following verbs echoes the downward direction of “subsides.” That Eden might sink to grief is plausible—the story is after all referred to as “The Fall”—but that dawn goes down to day is once again counter to any usual description. The conscious mind doesn’t register this as reversal; the heart does. “Inception is loss.” The thought is slipped in as only a very sharp knife can be, and one feels the effect only after. Cummings’s formulation describes well what this is: a precision creating movement. The poem’s change of grammar is also precise, and bifurcating. “So Eden sank to grief” moves from leaf-description to a description of suffering in the grammar of logical conclusion (if “so” is read as meaning “therefore”) but also in the grammar of example and illustration (if it is read as meaning “likewise”). In the first, the loss of paradise is the poem’s focus, in the second, it is no more important than a leaf’s change of form. The gesture repeats in the following line. And there is the music, here, too, to be noticed: the repeated, long “e” sounds of “Eden” and “grief” succumb to softly recurring “d”s against the shift of vowels in “dawn” and “down” and then the long-voweled “day.”
Nothing gold can stay. The statement’s proof lies first with a leaf’s small loss of shape and color, then with the fallen world; finally even the day’s ordinary increase of physical light is described as a failure, the radiance of all-things-possible becoming merely what happens. By the time the title line returns, the quantity of loss it holds is beyond reckoning. It is not just the outer; it is we ourselves who are dismantled of both our first brightness and the hope of lasting. We, not gold, are what goes. The devastation is beautiful and complete.
Beauty is what Frost, and poetry, leaves us. The surprising beauty of truth fully acknowledged, well told and also well tolled—as in, what a bell does; as in, a tally honestly exacted and paid.
While poetry reminds us of the uselessness of the useful, it reminds as well of the usefulness of the useless. It reminds, that is, that existence itself is sufficient. The reasoning of great poetry transcends reason because reason—a faculty rooted in the attainment of goal and its own perpetuation—cannot and does not encompass the whole of life. Through a good poem’s eyes and, ironically, by a good poem’s craft, we see the world liberated from what we would have it do. Existence does not guarantee us destination, nor trust, nor equity, nor one moment beyond this instant’s almost weightless duration. It is a triteness to say that the only thing to be counted upon is that what you count on will not be what comes. Utilitarian truths evaporate: we die. Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their own continually surprising and continually generative abundance, a path through the grief of that insult, into joy.
I began these considerations believing the transcending knowledge of poems is a singularly human liberation; that poetic epiphany, by loosening the psyche from the grip of expectation and purposeful pursuit, is a capacity of knowing entirely unique to our own kind. I still think this is so: if there is a poetry of dolphins, ravens, and elephants, it is not like ours. But something else seems possible as well—that the opposite is also true, that the peculiarly human phenomenon is the grip held on the heart by goal-seeking, end-wedded purpose, and that what good poems restore us to is something close to what is meant by “animal joy.” They allow us to see the leaf’s passage from gold to green and mourn neither, to taste an oyster for both the history of rapacity and its salt. Poetry’s surprisingly purposeless purpose, now as in Homeric Greece, is to restore to us the amplitude and exuberance of the Ithakan journey, even when knowing that inside a dog it is dark.
Dog (detail)