Unless the little clause, “they will find you,” has ominous possibilities as well as comfort. Maybe we need to think harder about who “they” might be. And what about that “black water”? Black isn’t necessarily inaccurate or impossible as a choice of color for water, but in an idyll, why choose black if the “messengers” are happy critters bearing only good news and sanguine feelings?
So by the time we get to the third stanza, where “. . . their cages rust,/the shrubs shiver in the wind,/squat and leafless,” we’ve been prepared, perhaps unconsciously, for a portrait of nature that is not simple-mindedly, childishly, one-dimensionally wonderful. Things rust and shiver; things are squat and leafless. Time and mortality are here after all; they were here all along, from the first stanza, even though the deer were pretty. This tension between perfect beauty and realistic earthly limits intensifies in the fourth and fifth stanzas, until the lovely messengers are bearing a message entirely different from what we wanted to and tried to expect at the beginning. The lovely geese, deer, and other creatures come before us in the end “like dead things, saddled with flesh.” And we humans are positioned “above them, wounded and dominant.” Why? How?
I’m not confident about this, but I think stanza four’s mysterious cry, which is, or which says, “release” means that we are releasing ourselves from delusions of immortality or perfection on earth and in time. Our attempt to find earthly creatures and scenes more beautiful and more graceful than ourselves is futile. In some kind of epiphany, we are released into that awareness, or even acceptance, of time and transience. We are released from seeking impossible permanence.
Of course, such a backward-feeling release would feel like a great gut “wrenching.” The moon—our romantic sphere of light and a symbol of love (as well as lunacy)—is ripped from the earth we know and rises in a circle of arrows. Literally, the “circle of arrows” is, for me, an impenetrable image. But figuratively, it's probably an allusion to the virginal Diana with her quiver of arrows, Roman goddess of the hunt, the woodlands, and the moon.
So the animals we hunt (as well as romanticize) are in the end merely creatures “saddled with flesh.” In “saddled” there is the suggestion that they are ridden. They are beasts of burden, and we, the hunters, stand “above them, wounded and dominant.” We are “wounded” by our knowledge of mortality and imperfection, which we cannot escape or avoid even if we try; our illusory moon of delusions is “wrenched” from us. (Clearly, I like that word, “wrenched”). We are left once again, where we always were, on and of the earth.
Louise Gluck has written a poem that is very impressive in playing an idealized world against the reality we all know, at some level, we must return to. We are buffeted by the conflict between what we wish were true and what we know to be true. In our knowledge, we are dominant, but our knowledge and dominance have wounded us with sadness.
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5 comments:
Some look upon humans as as a kind of top on the evolutionary tree (if one even accepts evolution). We now know that we are just a kind of "beast of burden" like everyone else, saddled with the knowledge to wipe out our own species. We are special due to our so-called intelligence, but not above anyone else.
RuneE, I wonder if we could say "so-called" and "our form of" intelligence are similar. A science-type friend once told me that the slowing-down a bird does with his wings in order to hover or land at a feeder is actually a pretty complex operation in the brain.
And consider what we're learning about dogs!
Oh, this poem is so sad.
I think every poet dreams of getting the kind of sensitive, intense readership like you've just demonstrated here. Rah rah! (and a thoughtful analysis of this interesting poem....)
AH, it is, isn't it. In a a sense, no winners.
Hannah, thank you! Something in the poem wouldn't let me quit on it, and I liked almost every new thing I discovered. The single exception, maybe, is the "circle of arrows." Even if my hunch about Diana is sound, a CIRCLE of arrows still feels iffy and awkward, at best.
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