CRWR 106

God goes, belonging to every riven thing

he’s made

sing his being simply by being

the thing it is:

stone and tree and sky,

man who sees and sings and wonders why

 

God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing

he’s made,

means a storm of peace.

Think of the atoms inside the stone.

Think of the man who sits alone

trying to will himself into a stillness where

 

God goes belonging. To every riven thing

he’s made

there is given one shade

shaped exactly to the thing itself:

under the tree a darker tree;

under the man the only man to see

 

God goes belonging to every riven thing.

He’s made

the things that bring him near,

made the mind that makes him go.

A part of what man knows,

apart from what man knows.

 

God goes belonging to every riven thing he’s made.

There is a music-like fluidity in this poem that makes it more and more beautiful every time I read it: Wiman’s use of repetition with the line “God goes belonging to every riven thing he’s made” and changing choice of punctuation in this sentence ( “God goes.”, “God goes. Belonging…”, “God goes belonging. To every…”) in each stanza is extremely effective in drawing the reader’s attention to not only the rhythm of his words, but the message within them. Wiman’s placement of the words “he’s made”, each given their own line in every stanza, also further draw attention to the very religious tones of this poem and work to glorify God as the creator. His use of the word “riven” also draws on religion, for God does not make broken things, yet he is belonging to them nonetheless. This word in this context seems to contradict one of the main principles of Christianity (that God is perfect and does not make mistakes), but offers comfort and a moment of deeper thought on the reader’s part: God will not deny or forget the broken because they are broken.

I also enjoyed the ryming couplets in each stanza, especially the last one “A part of what man knows, / apart from what man knows.”, as they added even more to the musical qualities of this piece. The last in particular, though, because despite the nearly identical wording, the lines mean far from the same things; the first drawing on man’s knowledge of the world and the second highlighting that there is still much to be learned, but ending with the same “God goes belonging to every riven thing he’s made” to once more showcase the knowledge that He is ever present and all powerful. All in all this poem is a beautiful testament of faith, in my opinion, despite whether or not the reader agrees with Wiman.

“I tore myself out of my own mother’s womb.

There was no other way to arrive in this world.

A terrified midwife named me Monster

And left me in the pine woods with only the moon.

My mother’s blood dripped from my treed head.

 

In a dream my mother came to me and said

If I was to survive

I must find joy within my own wild self.

 

A woman found me and took me to her mountain home

high at the end of an abandoned logging road.

We spent long winter evenings by the fire;

I sat at the hearth as she read aloud myths of the Greeks

while the woodstove roared behind me.

She sometimes paused to watch the wall of shadows

cast by my antlers. The shadows danced

across the entire room like an oak’s wind-shaken branches.

 

The woman was worried when I would not wear dresses.

I walked naked through the woods.

She hung the wash from my head

on hot summer days when I sat in the sun to read.

The woman grew worried when I would not shed

my crown with the seasons as the whitetails did.

“But I am not a whitetail,” I said.

 

When I became a woman

in the summer of my fifteenth year,

I found myself

suddenly changed in the mirror.

My many-pronged crown had grown

into a wildness all its own;

highly stylized, the bright

anarchic antlers were majestic to my eye.

The woman saw me and smiled. “What you are I cannot say,

but nature has created you.

You are fearfully and wonderfully made.”

 

When night came it brought a full moon.

I walked through the woods to the lake

and knelt in the cool grass on its bank.

I saw my reflection on the water,

I touched my face.

You are fearfully and wonderfully made.”

-“The Girl with Antlers” by Ansel Elkins

As someone who isn’t a huge fan of poetry, I was surprised how much I enjoyed reading this poem. The haunting imagery (“solitude’s blue woods”, “my treed head”, “bright anarchic antlers”) and just how surreal the narrative is in general made me really feel for the girl and her struggle–I wanted to hear more of her strange story. The final line “You are fearfully and wonderfully made.” evokes a feeling of triumph that our main character has managed to reach a certain level of self-acceptance. If you have ever faced ridicule for your appearance, or ever struggled with feelings of inadequacy or difference, you will definitely be able to connect with the girl on a personal level.

From Poetry:

Those Winter Sundays

 

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze.  No one ever thanked him.

 

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

 

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Hayden gracefully depicts a moment in one’s life when one reflects on a time where he/she did not fully appreciate or understand the unconditional love of their father. The speaker of this poem is an adult who is reflecting back to their childhood, recollecting the ways in which they had not realized that love comes in many, unobvious forms. In the first line, the phrase “Sundays too” gives the reader the impression that the father worked endlessly, not only at his weekday job, but on Sundays too, when he would chop wood early in the morning to make sure his family stayed warm through the winter. The sentence before “No one ever thanked him.” is long and drawn out, but the short and dispassionateness of this sentence adds a harsh tone to the poem, and creates the feeling that the narrator condemns their past behavior by representing it in a sharp, short way.

 “Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well.”

The narrator realizes how apathetic it was of them to speak indifferently to their father after he had done so much for their family.

What did the speaker know about love? About unconditional love? About the love that never falters, even when it is not appreciated? At the end of the poem, the speaker reaches the point where they admit how their younger self was completely aloof to the ways in which their father expressed his love for his family. Hayden’s use of austere as it relates to love in the context of this poem works beautifully with the message he is trying to send. “Love’s austere” Relates the harsh conditions of winter to the strict and plain manner in which the father shows his love . It is apparent that the family lives a life under harsh conditions, a life without the comfort of luxuries. Love’s austere describes love as being ceaseless and matter-of-fact. The use of claiming love to have austere suggests that love itself is plain and ceaseless, much like the father. Thus, at the end of the poem, the narrator has realized that their father was always full of love and showed love to his family through simple acts of service. If one were to try and find an even deeper meaning behind Hayden’s relation between the austerity of love and the speaker’s father, one might even say that the speaker is at a point where they see their father as a visual representation of what true love is– the unconditional love of a parent.

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it
Moving beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices trying
His father’s tie there in secret

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

-Donald Justice

This poem seems like it’s about a man going through a midlife crisis. He is reminiscing on his time as a child and learning simple things like tying a tie and being able to slam doors without worrying about waking children up. The use of imagery made a very clear picture of what the man is going through. I think the author found a classy way of complaining about life. Justice is good at making his point clear in a few lines. If this poem were any longer, I’m afraid the subject would get repetitive and old.

Reviewing the poem again, it makes me think that this is a man looking back at his life and all the things he has done and accomplished, and what it has made him become. In the first stanza, I think Justice is alluding to the fact that during this stage of a man’s life he begins to close the doors to things in his past, or move on from a way of life that a younger, different version of himself would live. The tone seems to be more nostalgic than anything. Overall, this poem flows very peacefully and was a pleasure to read the second time around when I had a better understanding of how to analyze poems.

At last he sleeps, in fits and half-dreamed fears,
that love, and work, and life are passing vapor,
and all the wings he made, he’s made of paper. 

In “About Suffering,” Dave Lucas does an amazing job of using Icarus and his father to represent the tribulations of mankind in everyday life. We are bold and we are bright, as Icarus was. We are relentless workers afraid that life is passing us by, that we will never catch up, as is Daedalus. What will come of us and our contributions?  Suffering is of and apart of everyone. Lucas coveys this through his solemn tone,” Of course the world must break and scatter him along.” The soberness of this tone helps relate the reality of the world to the reader and solidifies the notion that suffering is for everyone, for the common man.  The dichotomy of Icarus and Daedalus represent the phases one can go through in life. Icarus is ” young and proud. He likes the sound of his own voice.”; he is who we are before anguish settles itself into the nooks and crannies of our soul. He is a novice and the world will best him. We are all bested at some point. Daedalus is “bent to an unforgiving craft in someone else’s labyrinth.” In our lives, we live routinely–we live comfortably. We become bested and still we work, we go to school, we live. Pain comes gradually and all at once, we continue.  We are both Icarus and Daedalus; hopeful and cautious. Optimists and pessimists, we live each day trying to remain upright. Hoping that what we do and experience means something.

Here’s the whole poem:

About Suffering

It’s never Icarus. It’s not that grand
gesture of feather, wax and atmosphere
in flux, it’s less than that, it’s lesser than—.
It doesn’t happen in pentameter:
suffering, failure, agonies in gardens,
but in the sideways-speak of bureaucrats
whose words, like these, disguise what they intend.
Under soft, fluorescent suns of waiting rooms,
physicians’ consultations, where the lungs
on the light box are spread out like wings,
all this illumination just to show
the dark spots slowly blotting out our names.
Sadder than tragedy, and silly, these cuts
that bleed you dry. I mean you. You know
as well as I—Icarus is not for us.
He flies and falls, that’s all. He doesn’t joke
to hide his fear, or seem ashamed, or wound
lovers with rusted, jagged-edged words.
He never sulks in tristesse after sex.
He’s young and proud. He likes the sound
of his own voice. Of course the world must break
and scatter him among the falling birds.
It’s never him. His father, Daedalus—
he’s our muse, bent to an unforgiving craft
in someone else’s labyrinth, the dark
exile in which he sets himself to work:
letting the candles gutter so the wax
spills, seals vane and down at quill and shaft,
working longer into the thankless night.
He has worked feathers into these wings for years.
He has slim hope, at best, that they will hold.
Come daybreak they will stand outside the gate
and test the wind. For once he will be bold.
At last he sleeps, in fits and half-dreamed fears
that love, and work, and life are passing vapor,
and all the wings he’s made he’s made of paper.

My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.
She locked his name
in her deepest cabinet
and would not let him out,
though I could hear him thumping.
When I came down from the attic
with the pastel portrait in my hand
of a long-lipped stranger
with a brave moustache
and deep brown level eyes,
she ripped it into shreds
without a single word
and slapped me hard.
In my sixty-fourth year
I can feel my cheek
still burning.

In the span of one hundred words Kunitz manages to take the reader through an entire lifetime of a child without a father: more specifically with the sentence “She locked his name / in her deepest cabinet / and would not let him out, / though I could hear him thumping.” The reader gets an image of Kunitz as a young boy, never having known the man that was his father, with a mother that refused to talk about him. The line “though I could hear him thumping.” gives a note of finality on the subject; although his mother wanted nothing more than to bury the memory of his father, Kunitz could not. Like an itch that would not go away and that he could not scratch without her help, he could get no instantaneous relief from forgetting the word; father.

In the next sentence “When I came down from the attic / with the pastel portrait in my hand / of a long-lipped stranger / with a brave moustache / and deep brown level eyes, / she ripped it into shreds / without a single word / and slapped me hard.” Kunitz uses generic descriptive words in an excellent way, I believe to showcase that though they were features one could find on any man on the street, they were all he had left of his father, and his mother slapped him for finding it. The harshness of his mother’s slap, and his vivid recalling of the incident in the line “In my sixty fourth year / I can feel my cheek / still burning.” allows the reader to come full circle with the knowledge that he is, in a sense, still the same young boy without a father; the issue is still unresolved. The writing is subtle in that it does not dramatize the situation- it is merely stating the facts of this man’s life.

My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.
She locked his name
in her deepest cabinet
and would not let him out,
though I could hear him thumping.
When I came down from the attic
with the pastel portrait in my hand
of a long-lipped stranger
with a brave moustache
and deep brown level eyes,
she ripped it into shreds
without a single word
and slapped me hard.
In my sixty-fourth year
I can feel my cheek
still burning.

I felt there were a lot of relatable aspects of the poem that were presented in a way that showed rather than said explicitly the complex feelings in dealing and going through life without a father, in this case, a father who committed suicide.  As someone who has a first-hand experience of not being able to talk about my father who was not in the picture, so to be able to read a poem that so accurately captures the complex terrain of this issue was enjoyable.  “My mother never forgave my father / for killing himself” shows the complex way that although the death of a loved is an obvious tragedy and hard thing to overcome, the intense love that one feels for their significant other can also cause feelings of betrayal and hurt to come into the picture in the way that the mother felt abandoned, left alone to raise a child, a normally considered joyous arc in a couples life.  The mother now has to contend with emotions of grief, well also being able to continue to care for herself and in the near future, her baby since it happened “when [he] was waiting to be born”.  “She locked his name / in her deepest cabinet / and would not let him out” is a good use of imagery to show how the topic of the father had become this forbidden and sensitive issue, that for all intents and purposes were trying to be buried and forgotten.  The phrase out of sight, out of mind comes is relevant here because it is often one of the biggest coping mechanisms is to push and bury and forget until you can pretend that nothing ever happened.  Although this doesn’t reconcile feelings of loneliness and grief, it does create a pathway to ignore such things and devote time and energy to other things that maybe matter more, like the start of a new family.  However, in cases like this, there can arise a discrepancy in the intent of a parent and the impact it has on a child, such that the child doesn’t always understand the meaning of designated taboo feeling sensitive issues evoke.  “though I could hear him thumping” is indicative of this in the way that the despite the child comprehending to some degree that the safely guarded and hidden away memory of the father was painful, the child still yearns to know of the memory of a man that should have been part of his life.  The painfulness of the subject is also once again reiterated with the lines “she ripped it into shreds / without a single word / and slapped me hard”.  In times like these words just tend to fall short or the emotions being felt are too strong to form coherent sentences, so it is much easier to act than to explain and provide a form of clarity.  “In my sixty-fourth year / I can feel my check / still burning” shows how the situation in terms of the issue of the father hasn’t changed much from before, and also shows how the event was monumental in the mother/child relationship as it left a mark on their relationship, enough for the memory and the repercussions it presented to last even into old age of the child

Men at Forty

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it
Moving beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father’s tie there in secret

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

I found this poem to have a tone of gloominess. I think it is easily understood but uses a large amount of imagery. I think the door in the beginning is supposed to be a metaphor, maybe to closing the door on a younger life? …because this poem is about middle age. To me, the most powerful image is the one of the man looking in the mirror and seeing a boy learning how to tie. I think this image really captures what the point of the poem is, which is growing older. Powerful images like this can really separate a poem from be good and being great. This imagery took such a simple topic of ageing and made it complex. I think it is also important to make the point about how he ends the lines and alters the way the reader reads the poetry just from the way he writes each stanza. For example, in the first stanza, when you read it you pause after each line but the whole stanza is one sentence. It’s amazing technique that is used to put emphasis on certain words.

Autumn Day

Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by.
Now overlap the sundials with your shadows,
and on the meadows let the wind go free.

Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine;
grant them a few more warm transparent days,
urge them on to fulfillment then, and press
the final sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
Will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander on the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

In this poem, Rainer Maria Rilke effortlessly encapsulates the spirit of autumn. The final stanza evokes the cozy, comfortable feeling of relaxing indoors on a crisp autumn night: “Whoever is alone will stay alone,/Will sit, read, write long letters through the evening.” He manages to make solitude appear almost desirable when paired with the beauty of autumn: “Whoever is alone will stay alone…and wander on the boulevards, up and down/Restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.” His plea to God to initiate the shift from summer to autumn manages to, in just six short lines, perfectly capture the beauty of the season, the reason why Rilke is anticipating it so: “Now overlap the sundials with your shadows,/And on the meadows let the wind go free./Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine/Grant them a few more warm transparent days,/Urge them on to fulfillment then, and press/The final sweetness into the heavy wine.” The image of the autumn harvest (“Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine…and press/The final sweetness into the heavy wine.”) manages to conjure feelings of both nostalgia (for summer, now gone) and anticipation (for a season filled with abundance). Likewise, the first line of the final stanza (“Whoever has no house now, will never have one.”) evokes a feeling of melancholy, a sense of aloneness, of fear at what is to come in the following seasons–the darkness, the cold, the isolation.

The Heaven of Animals

Here they are.  The soft eyes open.
If they have lived in a wood
It is a wood.
If they have lived on plains
It is grass rolling
Under their feet forever.
Having no souls, they have come,
Anyway, beyond their knowing.
Their instincts wholly bloom
And they rise.
The soft eyes open.
To match them, the landscape flowers,
Outdoing, desperately
Outdoing what is required:
The richest wood,
The deepest field.
For some of these,
It could not be the place
It is, without blood.
These hunt, as they have done,
But with claws and teeth grown perfect,
More deadly than they can believe.
They stalk more silently,
And crouch on the limbs of trees,
And their descent
Upon the bright backs of their prey
May take years
In a sovereign floating of joy.
And those that are hunted
Know this as their life,
Their reward: to walk
Under such trees in full knowledge
Of what is in glory above them,
And to feel no fear,
But acceptance, compliance.
Fulfilling themselves without pain
At the cycle’s center,
They tremble, they walk
Under the tree,
They fall, they are torn,
They rise, they walk again.

-James Dickey

Dickey is extremely descriptive throughout this poem even though he uses minimal words in each stanza. The way in which Dickey uses imagery and metaphors when writing this poem makes this poem’s message much more powerful. In the first stanza, Dickey writes, “The soft eyes open. / If they have lived in a wood / It is a wood. / If they have lived on plains / It is grass rolling / Under their feet forever.”  In this stanza, Dickey is saying that looking into the eyes of an animal is like looking into the depths of their soul; you get a glimpse of where they’ve been and what they’ve seen and experienced without anything being said or communicated. I really liked how Dickey used the description of predators and prey in this poem and how they are both interconnected. For example, in the first part of this poem, Dickey describes innocence and the unsuspecting, which are typical characteristics of young prey. In the second part of the poem, Dickey describes slyness, cunningness, and wit, which are more characteristic of predatory animals. Dickey brings back the predator/prey relationship at the end of the poem when he talks about how although predators and prey are separate entities, they are a part of the same cycle: the cycle of life.