David Wagoner's "To the Farmer," Continued

To a Farmer Who Hung Five Hawks on His Barbed Wire by David Wagoner : The Poetry Foundation

Here are some responses to visitors' comments last time.

Rune, yes, I hear the quiet. And the reversal you speak of. To me, it’s haunting.

Jean, thanks. I like it too, though I doubt it’s sharp enough. It was a lucky shot, and I’m surprised it turned out as well as it did, with the colors and textures, foreground and background.

And Jean, “elegant protest letter,” yes. But I wonder if the speaker has any thought of delivering it. He might get shot. That’s what I don’t like about the inevitable weakness (word choice?) of his position. And that ties into AH and Brenda’s points.

About AH’s point and quotation, which might be easy to gloss over—the farmer’s “strange appetites” and “funny quickenings,” which are not spoken to “the wife.”

I hear the speaker thinking of the farmer as a loose cannon (word play intended) in a number of ways. Maybe we’re to hear that the dead hawks are not merely a murderous display, but also a perversion, one of several perversions for Gunshot Guy. 

So, Jean, I wonder if the speaker would dare to deliver an actual letter to such a guy.

And all that is now making me wonder, even more than I was, if the poem is a character study of the speaker as much as the farmer. That in turn that might lead back to Rune’s point—taking the longer, broader view, the poem might be about more than these two guys. Maybe it’s a comment on two elements in human nature, the aggressor and the moral but silent (passive? frustrated? helpless? cowardly?) observer. 

Yellow-rumped Warbler

I wish I could feel more authorial control over that from Wagoner.  One old, old rule has always made perfect sense to me:  we must never mistake the author for a speaker or narrator. But I think this poem needs to make clearer that it’s about two kinds of human and the complications involved therein. I don’t feel Wagoner’s control over that; it’s too easy to assume he’s the speaker, when we need to feel him holding up both speaker and farmer for our study.  If there’s no difference between Wagoner and his speaker, then the poem really is an impotent tantrum. Moral and creative, yes, but in the end, an ineffectual rant.

So, Brenda, “bottled up” is key. Is it only the speaker who’s bottled up, or is it the author and therefore the whole poem as well? Your paradox of “by doing nothing, something is done”—could you explain that further?  The speaker has exposed the farmer even if he hasn’t stopped him, and that amounts to “something is done”? And dreaming of revenge is a higher road than actually, physically taking revenge? I think those ideas are promising, but intricate. Am I anywhere close to paraphrasing you accurately?

If I put together what all the visitors are saying with what I was saying, does it amount to the point that exposing corruption is often all we can do without becoming another corrupt psycho-aggressor ourselves? Morality is hamstrung by the necessary avoidance of fighting fire with fire?  We hand that job over to our professional warriors?

Does all this tie into a Zen approach or a Christian turning of the other cheek? And does Wagoner’s birthing of these ponderings mean the poem is excellent in spite of what might be its limitations?

 To a Farmer Who Hung Five Hawks on His Barbed Wire by David Wagoner : The Poetry Foundation