Chloe Honum, "Spring": Another Kind of Rebirth

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/238028

While looking for seasonal poems a few weeks ago, I came across Chloe Honum’s “Spring” (at Poetryfoundation.org, which just keeps on giving), and it’s a fitting poem with which to say goodbye to spring.

Depression and suicide are sadly common subjects among writers, but the first line of “Spring” still grabbed my attention. Even in its plainness it’s dramatic, and I wondered if the whole poem would prove overly dramatic? Will it be a confessional poem on steroids, trying to outdo Plath, Sexton, et al?

As for the poem’s relevance to spring, traditionally viewed as the season of birth and renewal, I wonder if Chloe Honum also has in mind T.S. Eliot’s “April is the cruelest month” and the fact (if it is one) that spring is the most common season for suicide? Whether or not that’s relevant, she is offering a new, tough, and imaginative take on old ideas. Also, her spring, unlike Eliot’s has at least as much pleasantness as darkness, in spite of the mother’s attempted suicide.

“Spring” is full of surprising images, which are expressed with leanness and torque. The opening juxtapositions tell us to fasten our seatbelts. Paraphrased, the first stanza gives us something like this:

         Mother attempted suicide.

         Icicles are dripping.

         Our house has a raincoat

         but we couldn’t make it wear that coat.

I feel punched—in a good way—by the unexpectedness of each new line and its connection (or apparent lack of it) to the surrounding lines.

The overall pattern of the poem also has movement and variety. After the uneasy opening, stanzas two and three are mostly homey and comforting—garden, birds, woods, daisy chains. However, we do have the combination of “bickered” and “prayed” to keep us off balance. (I might even hear an echo of Eliot’s “wept and fasted, wept and prayed,” but that’s probably far-fetched).

Then there’s a turn to a lyrical mix of philosophy and science in the final quatrain. What I hear at the end is that the mother, though alive, has fallen, and earth catches falling things; gravity is good. But it doesn’t catch moonlight, which goes right through cedar and rock, and moonlight might describe the state of the mother. She has only attempted suicide, not completed the act. It makes at least some kind of psychological sense to offer that she is (and the children are?) in a luminous state of dream or surrealistic drift.

The moonlight has “no pace to speak of.” What does that mean? Is  moonlight so outside our understanding of time, space and matter that its speed is incomprehensible? Again, we have probably entered a dreamy realm beyond logic and measurement. Is it a good thing if a human mind or soul passes through cedar and rock, avoiding collision and destruction? Or does that mean the mother keeps on dreamily falling forever? Or is it both?

Poetry has long offered the possibility of opposites coexisting (Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” is my favorite example; Keats’ “Cold Pastoral” is another). Scholars have posited that paradox is the very language of poetry; poetry must be allowed to transcend logic in order to offer the possibility of supra-rational ways of being.

Those ways might seem contradictory in our temporal, rational state, but what good is eternity or the sublime if they are bound by the same rules and restraints we find in our physical lives? And how is a poet to suggest such a realm beyond reason if not through paradox—which, we must remember, is only an apparent contradiction in terms?

“Spring” manages, in language accessible to sixth-graders, to present age-old complexities about states of being that whack science and philosophy upside the head.

And as we look at the poem’s particulars, how can we not be intrigued by a house’s raincoat?  “Birds flew from the woods’”—for a second that sounds ordinary. But we notice there’s also an apostrophe—these woods possess something, and that’s left dangling at the end of a poetic line. For an important moment we’re left hanging in the mystery of space between one line and the next  (“hanging in the enjambment”—that ought to be the title of a book).  We’re waiting breathlessly to find the mystery solved by the upcoming line, where we find “fingertips.”

Well, of course, the woods’ trees have fingertips! What is more fingertip-like than the tree-line of a woods in, say, early April? It’s a wonderful image, adding a lyrical originality to the familiar comparison between tree branches and fingers (or arms). And the birds—they belong in trees, of course, but when they fly from a tree’s fingertips, they become at least a little magical.

So does the entire poem, as it wonders just how to embrace or say farewell to a season full of images and contradictions that are all at once awe-ful, magical, mystical.


http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/238028