Pablo Neruda’s ‘Walking Around’

My exposure to Pablo Neruda first came through Robert Bly, who deemed him a ‘wild romantic’ whose ‘love of life never falters.’ Yet his poetry is full of what seem like immediate contradictions to this sentiment. One of his more famous poems ‘Walking Around’ begins: ‘It so happens I am sick of being a man.’ This is Bly’s translation, though in several readings of the poem he prefers the translation of ‘man’ to ‘human being’, adding a particularly darker telos to the poem..

This poem encroaches on Whitman’s operatic line but never truly approaches it. Instead, it’s immediate Whitmanian likeness is its engagement in catalogue but with two important differences: the poet is having a negative response to the litany and there is no redemption through metaphysical unity or the more human notion of simple fraternity.

Here the litany acts as negation, a desire to opt into unseeing. His desire ‘to lie still like stones or wool’, already a kind of sensory erasure, is corrected and redoubled by the lines that end the stanza. ‘The only thing I want is to see no more stores’, etc. He seems put off by the notion of utility that stones, wool, stores, spectacles, and elevators have; in the Aristotelian sense, he is put off by the intrinsic telos of these objects, their existence as a means to an end.

The poem goes on in this realm of dark action: ‘it would be marvelous /… to kill a nun.’

This kind of action, a violence antithetical to the Whitmanian ethos, is one bereft of utility. But the poem takes an interesting turn. While impish to the point of murder, it comes to confirm a love of life, though through a back door. He states, ‘I don’t want so much misery. / I don’t want to go on as a root and a tomb, / alone under the ground…’ Death becomes rendered as a new kind of telos, it is this ‘go[ing] on’, presumably for infinity, that gives the poet his desire to live, with purpose or no. This desire to live necessitates an acute, poetic vision, however grotesque.

That’s why Monday…
pushes me into certain corners, into some moist houses,
into hospitals where the bones fly out the window,
into shoeshops that smell like vinegar,
and certain streets hideous as cracks in the skin.

There are sulphur-colored birds, and hideous intestines
hanging over the doors of houses that I hate,
and there are false teeth forgotten in a coffeepot,
there are mirrors
that ought to have wept from shame and terror,
there are umbrellas everywhere, and venoms, and umbilical cords.

On the surface, this poem seems to be functioning in opposition to his odes, and I believe Neruda wants to initially convince the reader of that. The colloquial, somewhat affected nature of ‘It so happens’ seems to be in direct response to an interlocutor. Perhaps it is a response to Bly’s assertion that he is a poet whose ‘love of life never falters.’ Or perhaps it is an attempt to get out from under the shadow of Whitman in the Bloomian sense. Neruda does seem to engage in an agon with Whitman. Maybe this is why, superficially, the litanies do not have a Whitmanian resolve; we do not end up in the ocean or some terrestrial, metaphorical equivalent, as so often happens in his odes. But I think that, thankfully, neither Neruda nor the poem can escape Whitman and life is affirmed.

Here’s the poem:

It so happens I am sick of being a man.
And it happens that I walk into tailorshops and movie houses
dried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt
steering my way in a water of wombs and ashes.

The smell of barbershops makes me break into hoarse sobs.
The only thing I want is to lie still like stones or wool.
The only thing I want is to see no more stores, no gardens,
no more goods, no spectacles, no elevators.

It so happens I am sick of my feet and my nails
and my hair and my shadow.
It so happens I am sick of being a man.

Still it would be marvelous
to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily,
or kill a nun with a blow on the ear.

It would be great
to go through the streets with a green knife
letting out yells until I died of the cold.

I don’t want to go on being a root in the dark,
insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
going on down, into the moist guts of the earth,
taking in and thinking, eating every day.

I don’t want so much misery.
I don’t want to go on as a root and a tomb,
alone under the ground, a warehouse with corpses,
half frozen, dying of grief.

That’s why Monday, when it sees me coming
with my convict face, blazes up like gasoline,
and it howls on its way like a wounded wheel,
and leaves tracks full of warm blood leading toward the night.

And it pushes me into certain corners, into some moist houses,
into hospitals where the bones fly out the window,
into shoeshops that smell like vinegar,
and certain streets hideous as cracks in the skin.

There are sulphur-colored birds, and hideous intestines
hanging over the doors of houses that I hate,
and there are false teeth forgotten in a coffeepot,
there are mirrors
that ought to have wept from shame and terror,
there are umbrellas everywhere, and venoms, and umbilical cords.

I stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes,
my rage, forgetting everything,
I walk by, going through office buildings and orthopedic shops,
and courtyards with washing hanging from the line:
underwear, towels and shirts from which slow
dirty tears are falling.

What Makes Walt Whitman Whitmanian?

Throughout my readings I have mentioned Walt Whitman with sweeping, vague references to his eminence and looming spirit. Sweeping because deeming something Whitmanian suffices as analytical synecdoche to say there is a strong sense of metaphysical unity in the poem; and vague because, to be honest, I don’t think I could define it, that is pinpoint it with accuracy. Whitman is a paradoxically elusive poet, burying his visionary power within his superficial simplicity (superficial meaning on the surface, nothing negative). I am no great reader of Whitman. I have glanced at his lesser works and have read “Song of Myself” several times. Strangely, I came to “When Lilacs Last in Dooryard Bloom’d” with some fervor after I lost my brother. It is his best poem, and that gentle elegy (for Lincoln) will haunt me when I venture to memorialize my brother in verse. The poem is especially significant today for not just myself, but the world, as we collectively mourn the assassination of John F. Kennedy 50 years ago, Friday. The poem remains important not only because of its strength, but also because it is an elegy for every one that has ever passed. Here we see that unity I mentioned (the initial ‘you’ is Lincoln. Also, a quick note that I have noticed confuses some new to poetry. When you see an awkward indent in verse, as we see at ‘and sacred death’, it is not the poet’s intended line break. The line is just too long for the page. In Whitman’s original text there is no break there: ‘For fresh…death’ is all one line):

(Not for you, for one alone,
Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring,
For fresh as the morning, thus would I chant a song for you O sane
and sacred death.
All over bouquets of roses,
O death, I cover you over with roses and early lilies,
But mostly and now the lilac that blooms the first,
Copious I break, I break the sprigs from the bushes,
With loaded arms I come, pouring for you,
For you and the coffins all of you O death.)

But where is the vision? And what makes it great? Why, when he writes, ‘I am to see to it I do not lose you’ (‘To a Stranger’) does it bear a heft as great or greater than a poetry well wrought and rife with, well, poetry; there is no ‘My life had stood—a Loaded Gun’, which we get in Dickinson, his withdrawn contemporary of equal eminence. I think his greatness is due to his self-regard, which stands separately from an egotism. He does deem himself ‘august,’ but he knows that any honor he is due is rendered wholly through his unbridled commitment to not only humankind but also the entire earth and cosmos. He is the paradoxical poet of expansion—manifested formally in what is called the operatic line due to its brea(d)th—as this expansion is only found in the psychological death-of-self. His self is selfless. He sings this self (which is not the Me Myself) only because it is the only way to appropriate and sing the entire world. (All italics are mine throughout.)

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

This is how ‘Song of Myself’ opens. Immediately he sees his presence in everything, every body, each gust of wind, and indeed every leaf of grass. I think the word assume here is often misread; Whitman’s stature is too large for him to admit that he is merely making assumptions and not stating universal truths. I read assume to mean take the shape of. So as we read his work we take the shape of the ‘the woman the same as the man.’ The truths are universal in that the truth he sings, the body, the body politic, and the nation’s body, are all literally the stuff of the universe, stardust smattered and strewn from the unifying explosion of our shared origin.

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the
stars,
And the pismire [ant] is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and
the egg of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d’œuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.

I find I incorporate gneiss [rock], coal, long-threaded
moss, fruits, grains, esculent roots,
And am stucco’d with quadrupeds and birds all over…

This ‘assuming’ continues throughout ad nauseam: ‘I am the hounded slave’; ‘I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person’; ‘I am the mash’d fireman.’

This is what makes Whitman a great poet and a visionary. At a time when the country was torn apart in ‘fratricidal war’ Whitman volunteered as a nurse and wound dresser in Washington D.C. What little money he received went to buying clothes, pens, and even ice cream for the wounded. He read and wrote letters for the newly blind and amputated. This is why when he states ‘I am to see to it I do not lose you,’ it is so impactful. And this is why he is the great American poet. He cared. He placed himself among the suffering, suffered with them and, as a great lover of America, strove for a unifying vision that would end the madness and create equality for all. He saw, as we see through him, each individual in utter communion with every living and inanimate thing. That is what it means to be Whitmanian.

I leave you with an excerpt from Song of Myself:

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands,
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than
he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green
stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and
remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the
vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive
them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out
of their mothers’ laps,
And here you are the mothers’ laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colourless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and
women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon
out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the
end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

Hart Crane’s ‘Voyages II’

Lately I have been bogged down in my thesis. I have delighted in my work on the poetry of Wordsworth and Keats but I am also constantly called back to the Modernists. (I use the capital ‘M’ to signify the High Modernists so that I don’t contradict myself, as Wordsworth was one of the most significant originators of modernism, after Dante.) I chose to write my thesis on Romantic poetry so that I might better understand the modes of thinking that led to Modernism. After reading so much of Wordsworth and Keats, it became clear that one of my truest poetic loves, Hart Crane, did not draw as much inspiration from them as he did from Shelley and Blake. In any event, I am not drawn to Crane because of his poetic allegiances but rather because, after traipsing through Wordsworth’s Prelude and Keats’s epic Endymion, the awe of Crane’s compression always makes for a great sabbatical for the analytical mind. And though much of Crane’s poetry is compressed, there is nothing quite like ‘Voyages II’ from his visionary six part poem. I think that it is best to read the poem first, this time.

—And yet this great wink of eternity,
Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,
Samite sheeted and processioned where
Her undinal vast belly moonward bends,
Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love;

Take this Sea, whose diapason knells
On scrolls of silver snowy sentences,
The sceptred terror of whose sessions rends
As her demeanors motion well or ill,
All but the pieties of lovers’ hands.

And onward, as bells off San Salvador
Salute the crocus lustres of the stars,
In these poinsettia meadows of her tides,—
Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal,
Complete the dark confessions her veins spell.

Mark how her turning shoulders wind the hours,
And hasten while her penniless rich palms
Pass superscription of bent foam and wave,—
Hasten, while they are true,—sleep, death, desire,
Close round one instant in one floating flower.

Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.
O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,
Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.

When offering up a poem, I don’t usually like to piece the poem apart. I prefer to provide doorways into the poetry and for the reader to make of it what they will. But the diction is so tricky here that a close reading through the breakdown of the diction is necessary if we want to ‘understand’ the poem.

The dash that opens the poem tells us that it is a continuation of ‘Voyages I’, which ends: ‘The bottom of the sea is cruel.’ The ‘great wink’ then, is the ocean and the personification of the closed eye sets in motion Crane’s repetition of the curved, supple nature of the sea found in the ‘vast belly moonward bends’ and ‘her turning shoulders’. Here, contrary to medieval and romantic representations, the sea does not represent eternity but is itself merely a temporal aspect of it, as the ‘wink’ represents transience. Indeed ‘rimless flood’ sets up a difficult dialectic, as it seems to represent somehow the eternal in the temporal, as floods are a frightening actuality of humankind since Noah and ‘rimless’ would represent an infinite space. Likely, it is a metaphor for the boundless love he shares with Emil Oppfer, whom we meet in line five. (The term boundless is purposefully contraindicative of the poem’s finality.) Now, for one of my favorite parts. Crane calls the sea ‘Samite’, which is a heavy silk fabric still used in religious vestments. Thus, the sea is made holy. (Samite comes to us through the Greek hexamiton which means ‘six threads’ and Voyages is a six part sequence weaving in and out of time back onto itself etc. The analogy is there, do with it what you will.) The wonder of this metaphor is the way in which it obscurely grows. Samite was often interwoven with gold and silver, so when we get to ‘undinal’ there is something we can do with it. An Undine is a sea nymph, the root ‘unda’ is Latin for wave; the nymphs themselves are governed by the moon, so the ‘undinal vast belly moonward bends’. This is all well and good. However, what is more important is that for Paracelsus, a 16^th century alchemist, undines were the elements in water necessary for alchemy. Therefore, when we later see that the sea is made of ‘scrolls of silver’ in line seven, the metaphor is complete and the sea is indeed samite, or interwoven with gold and silver. Then the belly of the sea protrudes when laughing with ‘the wrapt inflections of our love”. Crane is doing a lot here with the word ‘wrapt’. The inflections of their love are wrapt by the sea; however the two lovers are also wrapping their hands together because their love is [w]rapturous. That their love is rapturous is a key characteristic and is the reason why the sea is not laughing at them, but rather delighting in their love and also why the final vision is exultant.I have always found these next two lines as a signifier of Crane’s whole poetic ability (though ‘The Broken Tower’ is an epitaph that announces the very fracturing of its power). There is such a wonderful in-folding here that echoes the enfoldings of the close of the previous stanza. A ‘diapason’ is a swell of harmony. Indeed this is what both love and a poem represent, and so for Crane it is no wonder that the knelling swell of harmony crashes into itself (imagine a wave cresting and falling back into its calm surface) forming ‘sentences’, just as when Crane’s consciousness reaches its diapason and the swell emerges in self-reflective poems made of swelling vestiges of that self. (This aligns with the sea as a flower of death later to come, which represents Narcissus’s plight.)

Take this Sea, whose diapason knells
On scrolls of silver snowy sentences

Then there is, I think, one of the most pathos-ridden turns in English poetry. As I have said, the lover here is Emil Oppfer, a Danish sailor. ‘Take this Sea’, beyond meaning merely ‘Take this sea, for example’ also becomes the Whitmanian proclamation to take the sea as a lover, an impossible sexual hubris. The poetic beauty of ‘sentences’ then immediately turns from its original meaning of poetry to mean being sentenced by a court, as the ‘sceptered terror’ symbolizes a type of damning aristocratic rule. Here the sea briefly transforms into something much larger, and more frightening: a society that reprimands their sexuality for religious reasons. But the sea (unlike humanity), whose mood (‘demeanors’) change at a moment’s notice cannot reprimand or sentence this love that was deemed true (or divine) when it was recognized as rapturous, and so there love is anointed by the holy samite sea despite what society thinks.

her demeanors motion well or ill,
[on] All but the pieties of lovers hands

There is no need to explicate the symbolism of the flowers in the following lines, though there is much here. It’ll suffice to say they prefigure the ‘floating flower’ in the penultimate stanza. What people have trouble with here is:

Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal,
Complete the dark confessions her veins spell.

Regarding ‘Adagios of islands’ Crane states explicitly in an essay called ‘General Aims and Theories’, that ‘the reference is to the motion of a boat through islands clustered thickly, the rhythm of the motion, etc.’ ‘O my Prodigal’ is a call to Oppfer; he is prodigal in that he is very giving of love but also because, in the second sense of the word, he often leaves home to sail. Crane likely feared the potential of Oppfer’s sexual encounters, or ‘dark confessions’, during these trips, which the sea (life) has written onto his body. However, instead of wallowing in what Oppfer may have done, Crane notices that time is slipping away (‘Mark how her turning shoulders wind the hours’), and so he asks that they redouble their love, and make its climax come about quicker—to move from the adagio of love into a prestissimo—as the sea is going to pass a second judgment or ‘superscription’ on them, which is death.

In the end, the wish is fulfilled; the lovers remain bound in time through boundless love, holding hands, and so they can never truly die. What is most important in the final stanza is the word vortex. It reminds us of the ‘calyx of death’s bounty’ and ‘The portent wound in corridors of shells’ from Crane’s ‘At Melville’s Tomb’. Here the portent is Crane’s suicide. But it is not so portentous or mournful as ‘The Broken Tower’, rather the death is an elation. I’ll leave you with Harold Bloom, who summarizes the conclusion best. ‘The prayer [to the seasons] is suicidal, prophesying Crane’s leap into the Caribbean seven years later, since the bodies of the lovers are not to be washed ashore until the seal’s longing gaze for the lost mother is answered “in the vortex of our grave,” which in the Blakean sense of vortex intimates a resurrection, in which subject and object, spirit and body, unite again. And yet the tonalities of this concluding stanza are not suicidal, because desire is exalted over sleep and death. “Bind us” remains the dominant yearning and the celebration of the erotic completion continues to be ecstatic.’ (The Art of Reading Poetry, 2004).

Emily Dickinson’s Neuroaesthetics

The process of reading as well as the effect it has on us as individuals is only just beginning to be understood. Recent instruments of brain imaging such as positron emission tomography (PET) scans and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have unleashed a bevy of information on our own neurology, bringing us closer and closer to understanding that slipping locus: mind. Floating within the liminal space between the empiric and the transcendent is art; at one point it seemed both fields grew parallel to one another, then they seemed to approach infinity asymptotically, now, in the field of neuroaesthetics, their paths will meet.

Emily Dickinson thrusts the entangled nature of art and science and the phenomenological experience of reading into our consciousness by disrupting or displacing it so that we consider our relation to not only what is being read but also our psychological self and our culture as a whole. Like many modern poets, Dickinson uses neologistic linguistic devices to corrupt language, so that we reassess our relation to it and the socio-cultural context in which it is placed. But her primary technique is elision, a method that demands we do not take her
language for granted and slip into negligent forms of reading or contentment with the world of her poetry. Jean-Michel Basquiat once said, ‘I cross out words so you will see them more: the fact they are obscured makes you want to read more.’ Through linguistic obfuscation or total elision, Dickinson accomplish the same thing, reflecting and elucidating the functions of reading language for the reader.

Stanislas Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention (2009) offers a relatively simple definition of the neurological complexities in the process of reading. Dehaene writes, ‘Written word processing starts in our eyes. Only the center of the retina, called the fovea, has a fine enough resolution to allow for the recognition of small print. Our gaze must therefore move around the page constantly. Whenever our eyes stop, we recognize one or two words. Each of them is then split up into myriad fragments by retinal neurons and must be put back together before it can be recognized. Our visual system progressively extracts graphemes, syllables, prefixes, suffixes, and root words. Two major parallel processing routes eventually come into play: the phonological route, which converts letters into speech sound, and the lexical route, which gives access to a mental dictionary of word meaning’ (9 [italics mine]).

The act of reading involves the process of encoding, retrieval, and decoding. Overtime our neurons become trained, internalizing graphic signs in constituent parts, i.e. phonemes and graphemes. Each time we look at a word, synapses fire in order for the brain to retrieve information from within memory banks and subsequently sift through their potential meanings. This process occurs within approximately a tenth to a half a second. The eye shifts back and forth intermittently, pausing at moments when the brain decodes small chains of language or when the eye must respond to changes in light or other external shifts in the surrounding environment. These movements of the eye are called saccades. Saccadic movement allows the fovea to scan lines of text, as the fovea is only wide enough to see six to seven characters at a time. The encoded graphic representations of language are then sent (primarily) to an area located in the occipital region of the brain where encoded language is decoded through a process Dehaene calls ‘neuronal recycling,’ allowing the brain to recall patterns and become attuned to the subtleties of language, such as homonym. All of this takes an incredible amount of neurological activity and thus energy and heightens the significance of language in the development of not only culture but also who we are as individuals.

In 1862 Dickinson experienced her greatest moment of personal and mental turmoil, however it was also her most prolific period in which she wrote 366 poems. Capitalizing on the somewhat vague understanding of Dickinson’s condition, psychoanalysts often studied this period of Dickinson’s work to show the significant fragmentation in the processes of thought during psychotic breakdowns. Perhaps her agoraphobia allowed her to regress into her interiority due to little contact with the outside world or maybe her anxiety was sublimated into art (likely both); whatever the cause of her creative energy, it is during this time that her poetry seems to focus most heavily on the manner in which body and brain receive information.

As we have seen in the brief introduction to the neurology of reading, the brain receives graphemes (and most information) in fragmented units and subsequently interprets coherent wholes out of them, oftentimes intercalating the missing pieces. Given that the mind only registers one or two words at each pause, Dickinson’s dash takes on great importance in regard to the way we read and understand her work. In implementing the dash, Dickinson is asking the mind to pause in order for it to register unconsciously what it has just encoded, allowing the decoding process to initiate before the movement to the next graphic chain, thereby providing a neurologic immediacy to the process of reading her work. This is an important aspect of Dickinson’s poetry as her elision often renders syntactical meaning perplexing. Through fragmentation, the brain slows and processes what it is reading, interpolates the elided information, and focuses on the language present. This seems counterintuitive to what the dashes and the abstraction of Dickinson’s work seem to be accomplishing (or not accomplishing) superficially. The dash does sometimes speed up the reader consciously but by placing this meaningless (meaningless in that it has no lexical meaning) graphic, the brain processes the information better. It is this type of poetic trickery or obfuscation that makes her poetry so immediate, so physical. Consider how important each chain becomes in ‘Departed – to the judgment –’(1862):

Departed – to the judgment –
A Mighty Afternoon –
Great Clouds – like Ushers – leaning –
Creation – looking on –
The flesh – Surrendered – Cancelled –
The Bodiless – begun –
Two Worlds – like Audiences – disperse –
And leave the Soul – alone –

She seems aware of the saccadic movement of the eye and the importance it has in reading and is therefore asking us to slow down, to encode/decode the unit before moving on to the next chain or line; she wants our attention to remain for some time on the segments delineated by the dash before continuing and she does not want to fill the space with conjunctions, prepositions or useless language.

The abstraction present in this poem is typical of Dickinson and furthers our desires to pay particular attention to the language. The poem seems to be about the soul’s state after death under that public eye of nature; it is a dying into nature whereby the body is surrendered and cancelled. The setting of the death is a storm. In a letter discussing her growing dependence upon her sister and her fear of being alone, Dickinson writes, ‘Vinnie has been all, so long, I feel the oddest fright at parting with her for an hour, lest a storm arise, and I go unsheltered’ (Letter 200). Storms become an important symbol and metaphor of psychological torment; read this way, the poem is enacting the psychological state of a panic attack. Anxiety is the term for a fear without a specific focus and patients describe them ‘as a simulation of death’ (McDermott). (Dickinson’s panic attacks were probably the reason for her obsession with death and the persistent placement of the speaker in the very act of dying or beyond the grave.) In the poem, ‘Two Worlds’ are leaving the ‘Soul – alone’, one is explicitly the body and so the second (because it cannot be the Soul which leaves the Soul alone) is likely the mind; thus the speaker is experiencing being both without body and without mind. During panic attacks, patients describe the feelings of being disconnected from their body and that they are ‘going insane.’ In this poem Dickinson is relaying through form the psychological distress of death or impending doom whose locus is indeterminate or abstract, hence the poem’s enigmatic nature. The form and content represent that ‘snarl in the brain’ present during her greatest moments of psychological torment.

The cryptic nature of Dickinson’s poetry is also due to the fact that she is often skeptical of religion, afterlife, and morality as well as the manner in which humans are able to receive and subsequently record external phenomena. In her poetry, this skepticism is often the result of the tender and quite capricious nature of the brain’s neurological makeup, which, according to Joseph LeDoux, is what makes the self: he calls this notion the synaptic self. It is clear that synapses allow us to be; the unconscious processes of synaptic firings allow us to breathe, sit, walk, think, speak, read etc. However, LeDoux argues that synapses are as important as nature (genetics) and nurture (or religion, culture etc.). An important aspect of this theory is that because we are consistently changing physiologically, our mindset changes as well. We are, by the very nature of our somewhat whimsical synapses, protean. Helen Vendler writes that Dickinson creates ‘structures that mimic the structure of life at any moment she conceives it’ and ‘[b]y those structures…channels our reactions, adjusts our pace to her and molds our thinking after her own’ (34). Dickinson discusses the manner in which our brains often run counter to ourselves (a theme taken up in my post on Frost’s ‘Spring Pools’) despite our desires to think differently in ‘I felt a Cleaving in my Mind’ (1864).

I felt a Cleaving in my Mind—
As if my Brain had split—
I tried to match it—Seam by Seam—
But could not make it fit.

The thought behind, I strove to join
Unto the thought before—
But Sequence ravelled out of Sound
Like Balls—upon a Floor.

For Dickinson, the fissure in the mind feels like it is a direct result of the brain’s being split: she initiates with the Whitmanian thesis: ‘[w]e do not have a body, we are a body’ (Lehrer). While this poem discusses cognitive disjunction known to everyone, the language chosen as well as the form into which it is placed heightens the problem of the poem by making that very problem latent in the diction and syntax.

In the process of reading, the visual recognition of word triggers myriad neurological circuits that have been conditioned and fortified through our environment, learning, and reading behaviors. With the recognition of a graphic form as a potential grapheme or word, we begin the process of decoding the smallest groupings of letters into potential words while simultaneously seeking in lexical and auditory memory banks, memories that we can apply to what is seen. The brain does not do this immediately, and so it must sequence patterns of recognition to seek out banks of possible auditory and lexical meaning. Overtime, through the process of reading and ‘neuron recycling,’ the brain becomes aware of homonyms and understands it must differentiate these twinned lexical graphics using contextual signs. However, this is not always immediately possible, and so meanings slide and we fall victim to innocent parapraxis while reading or speaking. In ‘I felt a Cleaving in my Mind’ the difficulty of the poem is substantiated by homonymic difficulties, echoing in the reader’s mind the struggle which Dickinson is discussing.

In the Oxford English Dictionary, the verb cleave has two separate meanings. The first is (1) ‘To part or divide by a cutting blow; to hew asunder; to split’. The second meaning is its exact opposite: (2) ‘To attach to.’ (Because the line break is accentuated by the dash, the brain may register this latter meaning first). At the close of the second line—with that hard split—the meaning becomes clear and the cleaving is a splitting. What makes this homonymic moment more impressive is the fact that Dickinson is lamenting the loss of the second meaning, she in fact wishes her mind would cleave (2) and not cleave (1). This would lack importance if it were an insolated incident within the poem, however Dickinson repeats the lexical trickery with the word ravel. Here ravel in fact has three meanings. (1) ‘To entangle; to confuse, perplex; to render incoherent or muddled;’ (2) ‘of a skein of yarn, a spool or reel of thread, etc.: to become unwound;’ and (3) ‘to knit or bring together.’ The superficial meaning is the first meaning (1): Dickinson cannot connect one thought to the next and is therefore confused. It is the last two meanings that perform the deception. Taking ‘Seam by Seam’ to be a knitting metaphor, ravel initially means that her thoughts are unwound; however, the secondary definition means that in its becoming unwound it is knit together, just as one must unravel a spool of thread to ravel (knit) an article of clothing. The sequence (patterning) ravels out of caterwauling auditory input (‘Balls – upon a floor’) and Dickinson is consciously unable to align her thinking patterns to that sequence; though subconsciously, on a neurological level, the brain is making meaning: on a superficial level the disparate meaning of lexical input is consciously rendered cryptic and yet meaning arises out of the mind’s ability to pattern properly, however unlikely it seems.

In her use of dichotomous language, Dickinson is lamenting not the fact that she cannot think properly but rather that this is in fact the process of thought, especially in times of psychological distress. The cleaving of the mind as a result of the brain’s splitting continues the theme of being disconnected from her body, and in that disconnect her thoughts become subject to the seemingly arbitrary will of synaptic energies, however it is those very energies that create the poem. Two years prior to the composition of this poem, and during a tumultuous time, Dickinson wrote on the notion of the brain’s arbitrary connections in ‘The Brain, within its Groove’ (1862):

The Brain, within its Groove
Runs evenly—and true—
But let a Splinter swerve—
‘Twere easier for You—
To put a Current back—
When Floods have slit the Hills—
And scooped a Turnpike for Themselves—
And trodden out the Mills—

This poem is attuned to LeDoux’s notion of the synaptic self whereby the self, as much at is informed by culture, religion, etc. is really dependent upon patterns of synapse. The brain is plastic and is changing constantly through synapses as we continue to change day to day. This plasticity not only literally reshapes our minds but also our personality, our thoughts and even our beliefs. Dickinson is stating, as countless neurologists have stated (and recidivists proven), it is easier to learn than it is to unlearn.

***

Works Cited:

Dehaene, Stanislas. Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention. New York: Penguin Books, 2009.

Dickinson, Emily. The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Eds. Thomas H. Johnson & Theodora Ward, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958.

Johnson, Thomas H. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1960.

LeDoux, Joseph. Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are. New York: Penguin Books, 2003.

Lehrer, Jonah. Proust was a Neuroscientist. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007.

McDermott, John F. ‘Emily Dickinson’s “Nervous Prostration” and its Possible Relation to Her Work .’Emily Dickinson Journal. 9.1 (2008): 71-86.

Vendler, Helen. ‘Emily Dickinson Thinking.’ Parnassus 26.1 (2001): 34-56.

Stanley Kunitz: The Testing-Tree

I haven’t dreamed in months. My brain is numb with thinking, burned-out, gutted. I wake each morning to only the hoary, fragmented recollection of the pages I was reading before I fell into sleep, adrift in the glow of the kitchen light. I know that dreams had flickered and doused like lights in an electric storm, but they are impossibly distant (magic) lanterns and the mind’s nights are uneventful. So I have turned again to my dreamer, Stanley Kunitz.

Kunitz makes it into every important anthology and yet I’ve never heard his name murmured by graduates of verse in any New York City dive. Kunitz died in 2006 at the age of 100 and he racked up every important literary award and position along the way. His honors include the National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, the State Poet of New York, the Pulitzer Prize, and the United States Poet Laureate. But no one seems to be writing or talking about this contemporary of Eliot, Pound, Frost, Stevens etc. whose wide-reaching influence includes Theodore Roethke, W.H. Auden, Robert Lowell, and so forth and so on until the early 21^st century.

Kunitz’s ‘The Testing-Tree’ is one of his most visionary poems. In it, he progresses from a reflection on his childhood to, as he states, a recurring dream. In future, I will likely provide some entryways into the poem . But for now, I think it should only be read and read again. All I will say is listen to the voice. This is a voice that has lived. A voice that has loved and hurt, hurt and plunged, plunged and risen. It is an authoritative and chilling voice; a human voice whose heart ‘breaks and breaks / and lives by breaking.’ His is a voice that has dreamed and dreamed and dreamed.

Here’s the poem:

The Testing-Tree

On my way home from school
   up tribal Providence Hill
      past the Academy ballpark
where I could never hope to play
   I scuffed in the drainage ditch
      among the sodden seethe of leaves
hunting for perfect stones
   rolled out of glacial time
      into my pitcher's hand;
then sprinted lickety-
   split on my magic Keds
      from a crouching start,
scarcely touching the ground
   with my flying skin
      as I poured it on
for the prize of the mastery
   over that stretch of road,
      with no one no where to deny
when I flung myself down
   that on the given course
      I was the world's fastest human.

Around the bend
   that tried to loop me home
      dawdling came natural
across a nettled field
   riddled with rabbit-life
      where the bees sank sugar-wells
in the trunks of the maples
   and a stringy old lilac
      more than two stories tall
blazing with mildew
   remembered a door in the 
      long teeth of the woods.
All of it happened slow:
   brushing the stickseed off,
      wading through jewelweed
strangled by angel's hair,
   spotting the print of the deer
      and the red fox's scats.
Once I owned the key
   to an umbrageous trail
      thickened with mosses
where flickering presences
   gave me right of passage
      as I followed in the steps
of straight-backed Massassoit
   soundlessly heel-and-toe
      practicing my Indian walk.

Past the abandoned quarry
   where the pale sun bobbed
      in the sump of the granite,
past copperhead ledge,
   where the ferns gave foothold,
      I walked, deliberate,
on to the clearing,
   with the stones in my pocket
      changing to oracles
and my coiled ear tuned
   to the slightest leaf-stir.
      I had kept my appointment.
There I stood in the shadow,
   at fifty measured paces,
      of the inexhaustible oak,
tyrant and target,
   Jehovah of acorns,
      watchtower of the thunders,
that locked King Philip's War
   in its annulated core
      under the cut of my name.
Father wherever you are
    I have only three throws
       bless my good right arm.
In the haze of afternoon,
   while the air flowed saffron,
      I played my game for keeps--
for love, for poetry,
   and for eternal life--
      after the trials of summer.

In the recurring dream
   my mother stands
      in her bridal gown
under the burning lilac,
   with Bernard Shaw and Bertie
      Russell kissing her hands;
the house behind her is in ruins;
   she is wearing an owl's face
      and makes barking noises.
Her minatory finger points.
   I pass through the cardboard doorway
      askew in the field
and peer down a well
   where an albino walrus huffs.
      He has the gentlest eyes.
If the dirt keeps sifting in,
   staining the water yellow,
      why should I be blamed?
Never try to explain.
   That single Model A
      sputtering up the grade
unfurled a highway behind
   where the tanks maneuver,
      revolving their turrets.
In a murderous time
   the heart breaks and breaks
      and lives by breaking.
It is necessary to go
   through dark and deeper dark
      and not to turn.
I am looking for the trail.
   Where is my testing-tree?
      Give me back my stones!

W.B. Yeats: The Fascination of What’s Difficult

William Butler Yeats, Irish poet

I want to continue with the idea of modern difficulty but first, a digression. In my previous post I mentioned the irony inherent in W.H. Auden’s elegy to William Butler Yeats, ‘poetry makes nothing happen.’ (Link to Auden reading the first part of poem below.) The primary irony I was referring to was using a line of poetry to dismiss poetry. The second regarded the significance of the elegy. Yeats was an Irish Nationalist, however his active involvement in the cause varied through time. Despite this, he was a catalyst for the Irish Literary Revival and wrote some of the most significant elegies for the Irish political plight, immortalizing in verse the moment in time and those involved. This of course is not ‘nothing.’ In the poem, Auden questions the social viability of art but the irony is that he does it through poetry, or what he calls the mouth, perhaps the most viable option for change. The question to ask is how can poetry ‘make nothing happen’ while simultaneously being ‘a way of happening’? This is from part II of Auden’s elegy:

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

That’s the end of the digression. Some food for thought. Now let’s move on to Yeats’s poetics.

‘Modern Poetry’ anthologies often begin with Yeats because he straddled the line between Romanticism and what we call Modernism. Yeats struggled with his position both temporally and artistically. In terms of the latter, he often vacillated (poetically and politically, Yeats was clearly indecisive). In any event, in his poem ‘Coole and Ballyhee, 1931’ he wrote, ‘we are the last romantics.’ (Most poets after Yeats will have you believe they had severed all allegiances to Romanticism—don’t believe them. Eliot himself was a covert Romantic.)

Yeats’s poem ‘The Fascination of What’s Difficult’ (1912) is an interesting poem regarding his liminal position between romanticism and modernism. He begins by stating that the admiration for ‘what’s difficult’ has left him empty of spontaneous poetic power (Yeats was interested in the occult, especially Hermeticism and automatic writing); he is both ‘rent’ (without) of ‘natural content’ meaning poetic power and material and ‘content’ meaning happiness. He is complaining about the movement toward modernism and how the pedantry necessary for it will take the joy out of writing. However, the poem is also about freeing the Pegasus, the colt that symbolizes poetry. There is a natural strain in Yeats’s poem; at once a freeing and a containing: the bounding colt now seems as though it ‘drag[s] road metal’ and is stabled.

During the poem’s composition, Yeats was running the Abbey Theatre (consider the theme of the stage in the last post on Stevens). Here it seems it is the ‘Theatre business, management of men’ that pulled him from romantic Irish mysticism to the world of modernity. This poem, through form and content, so cleverly portrays the inherent struggle with desiring to move forward while longing for the past. It is a nostalgia recollected at the moment of significant, positive personal change. Yeats sees and understands the fascination of what’s difficult. In pulling out the bolt he frees the Pegasus, allowing him to write however he wants. He refuses to give in to the pedantry of modernism, to ‘shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt’, and so should readers of modern poetry. Yeats was a modern poet but he never lost sight of the Pegasus. So take from all poetry what you see and capitalize on change but never compromise yourself.

Here’s the poem.

The Fascination of What’s Difficult

The fascination of what’s difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart. There’s something ails our colt
That must, as if it had not holy blood,
Nor on an Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,
Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt
As though it dragged road metal. My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day’s war with every knave and dolt,
Theatre business, management of men.
I swear before the dawn comes around again
I’ll find the stable and pull out the bolt.

Wallace Stevens: Of Modern Poetry

The question of the appeal of modern poetry is a very big concern among modernists and a common question among readers new to the genre. Many prefer the aesthetics of the Elizabethan’s, enjoying the sing-song simplicity and rhyme. Often, when I tell people that I am passionate about modern poetry they ask, ‘Why?’ Some objectors of the place of poetry even use (in so many words) W.H. Auden’s line in his elegy to W.B. Yeats, seemingly unaware of the contradiction: ‘poetry makes nothing happen.’

When I consider what people call the difficulty of modern poetry I think of two things, T.S. Eliot’s essay ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ and Wallace Stevens’s poem ‘Of Modern Poetry.’ Eliot writes, ‘Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.’ Here modernists might discuss modernism’s tearing into pieces of the interiority of humanity as a result of some great event, and I do not deny that modernism consists of the ‘refined sensibility’ reacting to that (or those) events. However, the events and the emotions tied to the events are seldom new (though the events may be more monumental, the emotions more intense); the difficulty is in the projection of a subjective interiority that has always existed and has always been complex.

Wallace Stevens’s ‘Of Modern Poetry’ begins with what I believe is a sense of Durkheim’s social Anomie. Modern poetry is the attempt to grasp and delineate something that cannot yet be understood by society at large. In this sense it is prophesying: modern poetry ‘has / To construct a new stage’ on which the norms of society will be played out after it is ruptured by anything: war, economic collapse, drought, etc. Stevens’s act of poetry, which is the act of the mind, is simultaneously solipsistic and intersubjective: it is for the self and the ‘invisible audience’ or collective consciousness of humanity. Stevens repeats what Keats wrote in ‘A Defence of Poetry’ [sic] : ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ (Anomie is from the Greek and translates to ‘without law’). In times of great variety and complexity, the mind will mirror that state. ‘The poem of the act of the mind’ is ‘difficult’ because it is the mapping of the intricacy of your (his, hers, theirs, our) mind. Poetry is there to recreate, to compose law, it is there to remind us of what it is that makes us human, and, more importantly, to remind us of what makes us a society.

Here’s the poem.

Of Modern Poetry

The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one. The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging
An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly
Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,
Beyond which it has no will to rise.
It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.

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