The Power of Logos in
the Poetry of W.S. Merwin and Brigit Pegeen Kelly
Words are magic. With the right words, the world will bend to the speaker’s will. Or the writer’s. Philosophers, theologians and alchemists once believed that as a gift from God language reflected the world, which He also created, and so language and reality are perfectly corespondent. Unfortunately, this true language was lost at Babel, and we are left forever groping to find words that truly name the world around us.
So it was thought, until sometime during the Elizabethan age when alchemy began giving way to science, and we found that the language we had inherited was not always adequate to the knowledge being created, that new language had to be created along with it. We learned that we could invent language, change the way it was used, and the world would not shatter. We were further stunned when the printing press, by allowing endless exact reproduction of language, separated it from the speaker and the writer, and allowed it to become a private revelation of the reader.
We were forced out of a logocentric Eden, into a world where language was slippery and not to be trusted. It became arbitrary and political. It is fortunate for us all that small sanctuaries, pockets of paradise, still exist in poetry. Because language can be invented and reinvented, poets can work their will on it, and they retain the magical ability of using language to shape the world. Poets, makers, in the original form, heal the breach between language and reality by creating a world in every poem that readers may dwell in for a while.
The natural world is for me the closest to heaven, and any poet who can show me a way out of the frenetic worry of the daily news, of strip malls, of congested intersections, will be a favorite. Two poets who use language differently, but who both remind me of how beautiful the world is in the truths they reveal, are W.S. Merwin and Brigit Kelly.
In many of her poems, Brigit Kelly reveals the beauty that lives inside darkness, whose wonder touches us even as we feel pain at the brutality of a deer’s death on the road, or the murder of a pet. Sometimes I need to be reminded how to see this redeeming beauty, and I am glad to have Kelly’s work as a token of memory. But today life seems very good and I don’t want to be reminded of pain, however beautiful; today I am happy to read of some mysterious cows.
Whenever I read Kelly's poem, "Song," I notice more, but I am always captivated by the cows, the strange contrast of their stupid eyes and their esoteric behavior. The horns of cows are a odd threat on the head of a creature so placid; the violence connected to cows in my minds is that of the blood sacrifice, when their horns availed them not. Once, wealth was measured in cattle, leaving us with the word “chattel” as a reminder of days when sustenance equaled wealth, equaled God. Once, a golden calf was worshipped by the Israelites. Once, a bull was slain by the god Mithras. Once, the world was churned out of divine milk. These fragments of memory drift through my thoughts as I read of these three, circling cows.
Kelly also thinks of the divine when writing of cows; she mentions four angels at four corners-- which happen not to be actual corners, but seasonal turnings. Later, she speculates that the cows with human faces have arms with hands under their wings. The cows are turning in circles and turning almost into angels. “A spirit was in that wheel...” Are angels as dumb as cows, both stupid and silent but for inexplicable groans? The cows watch a mother and her children playing what to them must be an equally mysterious game; would angels find us so puzzling?
The relations between humans and farm animals are strange, especially if the animals are raised to the slaughter, a mundane sacrifice. Not long ago, some cows got loose at the farm where I work. That in itself is not too unusual; the strange thing is that several of the cows, rather than wandering out of the barn to the grass, instead wandered into some offices, where they lingered until noticed, later, after the other cows were caught. All of them went meekly back to their pens, though they could have easily overpowered the people rounding them up. The reason for their obedience is this: cows are prey and we are predators, and they know it.
Kelly reminds me of the darkness that lies behind our thoughts of the divine, behind animals treated almost like pets, the darkness of a night full of unnamable things. But this is part of what it is to be human, to be full of paradox; to be protector, creator, mother, and at the same time, killer and consumer. When darkness falls in the poem, Kelly recaptures some of the ancient combination of fascination and fear we have for darkness, both inside and out:
The trees get bigger at night and shut out the light.
The darkness seems to leak out of them. It leaks
Out of the ground and out of the trees, and it
Is as beautiful and sharp-edged as the leaves
Of the mandrake flooding the swale at the hill’s base.
The dark was cold. Our shoulders were warm.
But the dark was cold. ( Song 81-82)
The darkness leaks out of the trees and ground, it grows out of them like leaves, blooming at night. The mandrake is magical and deadly, like the dark, and when Kelly describes its liquid movement round the bottom of the hill, I can imagine the dark flooding through the field, a rising river of shadow; the swimmer’s shoulders are warm in contrast to the chill water/darkness. This image is the more powerful because it reiterates the image Kelly introduced in the 9th through 12th stanzas:
And dusk
Was coming out of the ground. I heard a poet say this.
That darkness doesn’t come down, but rises up.
And he was right. It gets the ankles first. It circles
The ankles like flood water gradually filling
The basement of a house. Dark water full
Of unnamable things. It circles the thin trunks
Of the trees, a black current... (Song 79-80)
The equation of darkness with cold flood water suggests that darkness can also sweep away those caught in its path, that it can slowly fill a house, or a soul, soiling it with the unnamable. In dreams, water is sometimes said to represent a an unknown or a pre-conscious state, maybe the secret thoughts and desires of the dreamer. (1) Here its rising to re-absorb the hapless wader suggests how a return to the time before birth might be horrible, how rebirth might be terrifying.
In this poem and in many of the others in the book, I have the sense that one of Kelly’s desires is to recreate a world where everything is loaded with emotional and spiritual meaning. Where everything can be taken as a sign, as it once was, when words were magic. She cannot make everything in my world significant or symbolic, but she can show me what it might have felt like to live in such a world, where a game of stickball at dusk, played alongside some rather odd cows, awakens the old relationship between human, animal, and the divine. Through the use of very simple language, very simple images, Kelly casts me back through time to a different experience of what it was like to be human.
Brigit Kelly’s work uses a very dramatic tone, filled as it is with darkness, sacrifice, fear, and beauty, to create a certain reality. W.S. Merwin uses words to shape our reality in a different way. He also addresses the cycles of seasons, of days, of lives and deaths, but he speaks less explicitly of these issues, using a hand lens on the small details of the landscape and letting them speak for themselves. This attention to detail coupled with a complete lack of punctuation leads to a curious effect. Once I grew accustomed to it, I found this lack of markers affected my reading profoundly by preventing me from breaking up the poems into collections of discrete images. Instead, I had to read each poem as one, very complex scene. With each poem I had the same feeling as when I look at a quiet tree, blink, and suddenly see that it is teeming with birds, blink again, and again see the green stillness. I vividly experienced this shift in focus when reading “The Bird” and “Dry Ground”
“The Bird” starts in a dreamlike dawn, a “gray sheeted hour” that my mind makes over into “gray sheeted ghosts,” and “gray sheeted water.” This misty image gives way to mirrors, to a pewter river, as the sun rises and lends a shine to the world. This hour, no longer night and not quite day, is that when thoughts seem clearest and most fluid. This hour seems removed from the normal flow of time; boundaries soften, allowing the sun and stars to coexist. The scene comes in to focus as it lightens, and we read the small details of trees and herbiage brought into existence every morning, and a wren begins to call. This section of the poem captures the early morning feeling both in the images chosen and in the sounds of the words themselves; twittering whispering sounds, like “cowslip and mustard” or “shivering and the lights in.” Without punctuation to separate any of these sounds, they form a continuous stream, a dawn breeze, or the birds waking.
With the song of the wren, the focus shifts again, to a landscape of feeling in the speaker, which is also a borderland of "...doubting belief neither stranger nor true inhabitant neither knowing nor not knowing...,"
where the speaker’s feelings seem as misty as the “unfinished towers of empty mirrors” in the first scene. In the end, the focus shifts back to white blossoms, to the empty half of a shell, both the remnants of birth. The speaker began by talking of ghosts, of wrecked towers; the scene would be deathly but for one phrase, “like a winter.” Two lines later, it is spring and I am reminded that from the vegetal death of winter comes the resurrection of spring. The speaker seems to remembering this as well; when he speaks of the tallness of both the trees and the children, I feel he speaks from age, and the passing of many seasons.
I’ve spoken of scenes, of shifting focus, and as much as reading the poem is a linear process in time, these might be accurate ways of describing it. But the poem describes a moment, a drop of feeling, in which all of these elements exist simultaneously, and the lack of markers reinforces this feeling of a continuous stream that is also a moment. I am thinking of the light, which is both particle and wave; when the speaker comes to it at last, and recognizes that he is nearing another border in his life. In the end, anything, everything, is held “as uncertainly as the white blossoms...or this empty half of a bird’s egg”.
Later, Merwin moves from the misty cold of early April in “The Bird” to the dry heat of deep summer in “Dry Ground,” and in the bright light, he approaches the other end of the cycle, where growth leads to death. In the first lines, a root “reaches for receding water” which it depends on for life. Merwin weaves together images of floral life (and death), human life, and seasonal cycles, so that by line 6, I know that the speaker is concerned with death, and that it’s an immediate concern. The grass is dying and the trees, which rose from a seeming death in spring, may be truly dying now. The borderland between life and death is no longer an idea to consider from a distance; the speaker is faced with it at every turn.
Life seems to be yielding to death in lines 11-12 with the “shaking light” and the “parched shriek of the cicadas” catching both the image and the sound of that maddening vibration that always signals a great, dry heat. Light was welcomed in “The Bird” as an awakener; now it has become a destroyer, leaching life and even color from the land. The world seems barren until in line last line, the last word, it is redeemed.
The vines all but die in their effort to preserve their fruit, the seeds for next year. The “withered arms” of the vine suggest the aged dying to make way for and raise up the young. Except that grape vines, unlike most humans, will be reborn from their roots the following year. The vine has long been connected with sacrifice and rebirth, embedded in ancient Greek myths of Dionysus and representing the blood of Christ, who, like the tree he hung on, returned from a seeming death.
As I’ve read all of these poems, and considered the connections between life and death, the seasons, sacrifice, and our oldest beliefs about them, I happened across another book that seems important: Landscape and Memory, by Simon Schama. In his discussion of human relations with the land, he starts with the idea that “Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is a work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from the strata of memory as from layers of rock.” (pp. 7-8). Later, Schama points out that “...one of our most powerful yearnings (is) the craving to find in nature a consolation for our own mortality.” (p15). So that the world that we experience, that we care about and commemorate in poetry, is not simply a thing of matter, but of matter acted on by our perception. These are ideas that seem particularly appropriate to Merwin and Kelly, for whom the landscape is not merely background. For them, the natural world has shaped us as much as we have shaped it, and even in this electronic, post-industrial age, the natural world can still be found at the heart of our deepest beliefs.
Kelly reminds us of older feelings about life and death and the world, of a time when we feared and were fascinated by the dark, and by death. She lets me feel what that life might have been like, when the lines between human and animal and god were blurred. Merwin reveals connections of ephemeral human concerns, and endless seasonal cycles that shaped the ancient world, and are still with us. His work suggests that though our time may seem very different from that age-old existence, we can still connect to turning of the year. Advances in modern science don’t negate the old meanings, they are part of who we are as humans.
Originally, I felt that in some way, poets are able to repair the separation of language from material reality, restoring at least figuratively, the ability of words to change the world. They can certainly change the world within a reader. Considering the idea that the world finds its true existence through our perception, I realize that language has not lost its magic, rather, its power is complex, relying not the words themselves, but on the work of those who use them when they read and write. Without the writer to experience the world and the language, and the reader to work the spell (as it were) in reverse, the world would hardly exist at all.