Mona Van Duyn’s “A Time of Bees”: Manly Men in Half-Rhyme

Mona Van Duyn’s “A Time of Bees”:  The Half-Rhyme of Men Being Men

A Time of Bees by Mona Van Duyn : The Poetry Foundation

“A Time of Bees” by Mona Van Duyn (1921–2004, our first female Poet Laureate) might seem daunting as we look at it on the page. Her lines are long; there are two pages of them, and maybe there’s something a little intimidating about stanzas that are consistently (rigidly?) five lines long. It’s a good time to practice what I’ve preached before:  look for small gifts along the way, in single images, or find in single lines the hints of larger ideas, even if we must wait to see if they ever expand and cohere. All the while we’re hoping the whole is worth our patience. (Ditto the length of my post).

It would also be easy to overlook Van Duyn’s use of form in “A Time of Bees.” I first noticed the uniformity of the five-line stanzas. Then I saw that quite a few of the line breaks, the enjambments, came at odd places (emphasizing some interesting meanings in individual lines, apart from their meanings in the poem as a whole). In a few lines, chosen randomly, I counted syllables and listened to stresses, but found no consistent pattern. Eventually, however, I saw the half-rhymes, in lines 1,3,5 and sometimes in lines 2 and 4. Some are so subtle, so “halved,” that we might call them eighteenth rhymes; but the rhyme becomes more definite as the poem goes along, and it’s reasonable to claim a rhyme scheme of ababa.

Sneaky Crawling

Why does this matter? Rhyme and meter can be merely decorative, and they often create comedy, as in limericks. To a poet, they can be as much a risk as a weapon. But in the hands of serious writers,  they suggest the poet’s tendency toward perceiving and valuing order in her subjects and her world view. A sense of music is another likely result of rhyme and meter, but not so much when the form is as understated as Van Duyn’s, where the rhyme is hanging by a thread.

Half-Rhyme?

So is she just a sloppy, half-hearted formalist? I don’t think so. The poem centers on the menacing but perhaps alluring way men tear things apart as they pursue a prey, an enemy, in order to repair and make things right and safe. Yes, that sounds a little pre-feminist, but in casual conversation, I’ve heard a number of intelligent women confess to finding muscle, sweat, labor and combat appealing. Some brainy women like seeing the torque of a man as he rips at things in order to fix them—to build, make, create. Isn’t that the end to which he’s been evolving?

And maybe the sweaty stuff becomes more appealing as technology evolves away from our need for physical labor on the home front. Let the robot do it. Or let the men, women and children from afar do it. For better or worse, our airplane drones even show the potential for an evolution away from physical combat.

Wouldn’t the law of supply and demand tell us that, as hunks thin out in the work force, giving way to I.T. guys and lab techs, the appeal and the price of hunks will grow more dear? I’d guess gym memberships are at an all-time high and will continue to grow, unless some dire upheaval returns us to an economy of agriculture and heavy industry.

Frontal

So, as Mona Van Duyn’s speaker watches her husband rip up part of their home in order to destroy an animal-enemy, she loves him. She embraces his animal nature as protector of the home as she watches it emerge. His tearing into things becomes almost a paradigm of the erotic.

But she’s not a dumb woman, and she’s aware that this is something like a double-edged sword. Shall she be cold and mechanical about being rid of the nuisance bees? Or shall she sympathize with an animal that was only doing what it was designed to do? She is so honest that she does both:

                        they writhe, some of them, but who cares?

                        They go to the garbage, it is over, everything has been said.

                        But there is more. Wouldn’t you think the bees had suffered

                        enough?

          

Love, labor and war make tenuous what she thought she thought—and valued. She’s a bit uncertain, so there is in Van Duyn’s poetic structure an air we might call tenuously formal—rhymes that almost challenge the definition of rhyme. And her clinging to a symmetrical five-line stanza gives way at the end to a single line that highlights a “grubby softness” that “wants to give, to give”—which is surely a reference to women as well as infant bees.

Such a world, such a mind, an experience such as this bee hunt, is surely not as neat and orderly as tidy, self-conscious, exact rhyme or meter would imply. Yet there is some kind of order in Van Duyn’s world of partially-evolved cave dwellers. If someone wants to call her rhymes crude, it’s all right because the world she’s presenting and accepting is also crude—in part. Eroticism is crude. Survival is crude. It’s about tearing things up to get to the bottom of things, where enemies live.

Still, the couple reads “books on bees” and later they bring home a scientist friend, for “they need/the idea of bees” (what an expression, by the way!). But in the end, understanding is secondary to elimination. There are only two forces: the squirming of bees with some life left in them and, with a remarkable adjective, the “unpleading” male’s need to kill them all, permanently, to protect home and hearth. 

There is nothing to plead about here; he is doing the necessary work.

Hiding Its Head in the . . . Sand?

Van Duyn denies us our penchant for simplistic dichotomies. She won’t let her gender, or any of us, say,  “I’m all brain, beauty, and spirit. I am not a savage. I am lofty. God made me in his image.”

To which Van Duyn calmly replies, “Don’t be silly. That sweaty, aggressive, murderous, rampaging, repairing man makes me aware of my own softness. I accept it. Maybe I even like it, and I’m honest enough to say so.”

“A Time of Bees” presents a rough-hewn, physical, even bestial world that continues to call to us, contain us, define us. It has a kind of order, but it’s a brutal order, and trying to prettify it with loud, exact rhymes or overly sweet music, would miss the point, would be a lie. 

A Time of Bees by Mona Van Duyn : The Poetry Foundation

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When a Snake is Just a Snake: Emily Dickinson and A.E. Stallings

Momentary by A. E. Stallings : Poetry Magazine

A narrow fellow in the grass by Emily Dickinson : The Poetry Foundation

"Momentary" by A.E. Stallings and "  "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass" by Emily Dickinson. 

Snake Cousin??

I was unable to read A. E. Stallings’ poem, “Momentary,” without thinking of Emily Dickinson’s famous “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass.” I’m assuming Stallings was aware of the similarities and contrasts between the two poems. In fact, exploiting that difference may have been Stallings' motivation for “Momentary,” and I applaud her bold decision as well as the poem itself. At first, however, I wondered why she would mess with an icon—not only Emily Dickinson, but also that particular, widely known poem.

First, let’s address sex and gender. Anyone doubting that Dickinson’s reptile is somewhat, or completely, phallic should reread the poem with a penis in mind. This might add a (softly or firmly) comic dimension to the poem—and I do hear a primarily bemused, curious tone prior to Dickinson’s dramatic last line. Although Stallings is still more understated, Dickinson is not exactly a hysterical, Victorian old maid concerning her (unconsciously sexual) serpent.

 

Eden??

I’m choosing the version of "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass" in Thomas Johnson’s Final Harvest--still the definitive edition of E.D.’s Selected Works, as far as I know. This is also the version at Poetry Foundation, except that they do not replicate Dickinson’s quatrains or her quirky punctuation and capitalization. In other versions of the poem, the “boy” is changed to “child,” and the time of day changes from “Noon” to early “Morn.” I don’t know who made the change or why they did it.

In the early version I’m using, Dickinson’s contrivance of a male speaker is a fascinating complication, but it probably boils down to the stereotype of young males as more likely to be barefoot and encountering snakes than girls would be in the 1860s. Even today, if I say, “A kid is fascinated by a snake,” don’t most of us hear that kid as a boy? And given Dickinson’s language, his adventure is an encounter with his own sexuality as much as the reptile itself.

Whether the boy is straight or gay is not as important as it might seem. Either way, an encounter with his sexuality is, or at least might be, a terrifying experience—a confrontation with magic and terror all at once. For that matter, girls might experience even more of that “Zero at the bone,” that freeze of terror, when they witness and unconsciously sense the snake of Eden and Freud.

If we go in that direction with Dickinson, we might wonder if A.E. Stallings, with her female speaker and lady snake, is suggesting lesbianism. Instead, I think Stallings is trying to remove the snake from the sexual and demonic components conferred upon it by the Judeo-Christian tradition. Her snake is more simply a beautiful, mysterious creature of nature, and Stallings is sharing that experience with us: the beautiful thing that flees when I appear. Sometimes a snake is just a snake. Without the comparison to Dickinson’s “A Narrow Fellow,” I don’t think I’d have considered anything sexual about Stallings’ snake, although her decision to make the animal female is counterintuitive, or at least untraditional, and thus invites speculation.

Killdeer or Quizzical Eve??

Each snake seizes its speaker’s attention and elicits compelling images. Dickinson’s narrow fellow is a “spotted shaft” and when he moves, he’s “a whip lash, / Unbraiding in the sun,” as he parts the grass like a "comb." Stallings’ snake skin is like valuable metal, “chain mail . . . / Aglint with pewter, bronze and rose.” It calls to mind a zither’s sound as well as a zithery, zigzagging motion when it “Quicksilver[s] into tall grasses” (Dickinson’s tamer “comb” of a snake might seem emasculated by comparison).

After disturbing it, Stallings can sight the snake’s movement “only by her flowing,” which strikes me as more graceful and mysterious than Dickinson’s grass-combing fellow—although the two poets’ perceptions are more alike than different. All of Stallings’ images have positive connotations: beauty, speed, grace and mystery—whereas E.D. is at least open to the argument that her snake is the “wrinkled,” terrifying, phallic, Satanic serpent of Eden.

Stallings’ female snake is entirely pretty and never menacing. When human and snake encounter each other, the snake flees. And in the final line, the speaker seems wistful that their meeting has amounted only to a “Momentary” experience.  She’s sad to see the snake go, its shiny “glamour” fading into a shadowy motion in the grasses, until the speaker regretfully concludes that all she can do is “recognize her going,” which she caused by disturbing it. 

By contrast, and before we ever get to Dickinson’s memorable conclusion, “Zero at the Bone,” her boy-speaker is spooked by a snake that “closes at your feet / And opens further on.” There is distance between human and reptile. 

Eve with Headless Mallards

This Victorian snake likes a “bog,” which conjures swamps—dirty, messy, dank, sludgy, even sinister. Bog might also suggest the primordial ooze from which we came, but that doesn't mean we like our origins. When the boy dares to stoop for the snake, trying to “secure it,” it “wrinkled and was gone.” Compare those actions to Stalling’s more positive, even magical quicksilvering and zithering motions. Both snakes disappear into the grasses, but the two speakers’ perceptions are rather different.

I hear wonderfully understated poetry in the final lines of both poems. In Dickinson’s haunting, supra-rational conclusion, the snake creates a deathly panic, and who but Dickinson would think to name that fear “Zero at the bone”? In any case, after a brief fascination with the snake, the boy seems glad to be safely rid of it, while Stallings’ speaker is left with admiration and a sense of loss as Lady Snake avoids her and escapes. 

Bog with Barn Swallow's escape, bottom right

To return to my original point about sexuality in both poems, I think Stallings might be gently trying for a correction of Dickinson’s repressed and therefore heightened sexualization of things, including a serpentine, Puritanical demon (though, I repeat, “Zero at the bone” is the only place where Dickinson expresses dramatic fear, or fear of any significance; in fact, her overall tone seems rather bemused). One could even argue that the two poems are models of nineteenth- versus twentieth/twenty-first century apprehensions of human experience.

Many humans (not me) see the beauty of snakes that simply do what they must as a species. Whether phallic or merely reptile, scaring humans is not their primary concern. Writing more than a century after Dickinson, Stallings can more thoughtfully and aesthetically appreciate Nature and its creatures. She can calm down, holster her Freudian gun, and paint us a snake at least as exotic as Dickinson’s. But it’s a snake that conveys grace and quiet avoidance of conflict. It deserves no demonizing or over-dramatizing. 

Momentary by A. E. Stallings : Poetry Magazine

A narrow fellow in the grass by Emily Dickinson : The Poetry Foundation

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"The River" by Gregory Orr and the Villanelle as Form

The River by Gregory Orr : The Poetry Foundation

Farmington River, Connecticut

I was looking for a poem to go with my kayaking photos and came across Gregory Orr's "The River," an impressively natural-sounding poem in a very demanding French form. The villanelle comprises five tercets rhyming aba and a concluding quatrain rhyming abaa. Mind you, that's two rhyming sounds in 19 lines, while the supposedly muscular sonnet has by contrast five or six rhyming sounds in 14 lines--wimpy child's play by comparison.

But wait! There's more. The villanelle also demands an exact- or near-repetition of Line 1 in Lines 6, 12, and 18, plus a repetition of Line 3 in Lines 9, 15, and 19. Most villanelles also follow a roughly iambic pentameter, which adds to the very musical effect of the whole (rhyme added to cadence tends to produce a sense of song). Next time you have five idle minutes, give it a try. Be sure you've got refills on all your meds.

The River by Gregory Orr : The Poetry Foundation

Villanelles, sonnets, ballads, sestinas--there are various kinds of cages poets build for themselves as a way of creating added tension between form and intellect on the one hand and passion on the other. The passion is surging like river rapids, trying to break the banks and smother us with the absence, or even the opposite, of thought and restraint. The brain says all that free-flowing turbulence won't do; there must a balance and blend of reason and passion. T.S. Eliot called it "Felt Thought."


If most of us tried to write about swimming naked with a lover in a river, near rapids, wouldn't we likely end up with soap opera or porn or some other hyper nuisance? Where would brain, judgment, analysis, restraint, decorum and good sense be if we let it all hang out?  I don't much want to read anyone's uninhibited emotions. In fact, I have, many times, and they are consistently puerile and narcissistic, not deep.

Gregory Orr has struck a nice balance in "The River." The demands of the villanelle keep a rein on his feelings, without strangling or sterilizing them. Beyond that, there's the content of the poem, irrespective of form, in which the speaker tries to understand as well as relish the natural, sensual delight he's presented.

The River by Gregory Orr : The Poetry Foundation

Why I Am Not a Painter by Frank O'Hara : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

Why I Am Not a Painter by Frank O'Hara : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.




A South Carolina guy, might be headed for the diner.




Today’s poem and comments began as a response to Barbaro’s recent response to my January 8 and 9 postings of Dickinson and Frost poems. Also, another regular, Gothpunkuncle, has in the past given me food for thought about the importance of context and culture compared to language (not that he’s choosing one over the other any more than I am). So after Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, I turn to Frank O’Hara’s “lunch poems.”

It all began like this, my attempt to respond to Barbaro on January 9:

Barbaro, your sentence on simplicity is LARGE. I agree, though I feel as if I’ve seen a lot of poetry that falls flat in the name of simplicity—which illustrates your very point.

Ditto your sentence on saying things wrong, more or less as a definition of creativity or originality. Didn’t you make a similar point about Bach a few months ago?

I can live without E.D.’s dashes, but I agree, it’s not the same. (By the way, did you see Paula and Gothpunkuncle’s important January 8 comments about Dickinson’s life and times? They gave me pause, not that I ever thought she was having a party for one up there in her Amherst room).

Thanks for the technical info too, Barbaro. At least on this reading, I had not noticed the sonnet biz in "Acquainted with the Night."

Do you think the experimental stuff in today's poetry—the stuff that seems to be re-examining language and old structures—ignores the endless possibilities of traditional forms? How many ways can you stretch a sonnet? More than a couple.

As you know, I’m not at all a bigot against free verse, and you might know I believe in the old saw, “If it works, it works,” for all the dangers there. But until the recent (and still minority) tilt toward neo-formalism (if that’s what they call it), I guess I assumed that some of the edgier poetry, the wilder, hipper-yet-more-talky voices out there, would have sent me to the children’s play room if I’d asked why they were transmogrifying poems into chatty prose, the likes of which I can hear at most diners.

Not that there’s anything wrong with diners. Some of my favorite food is served at diners--and certainly some of my favorite experiences. I often meet friends at diners. Our conversations can get pretty good, pretty deep, even pretty close to the bone. But I’ve never called them poetry.

Why I Am Not a Painter by Frank O'Hara : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

THE NEW CRITICISM, Part 3, The Biographical Fallacy

The Biography of the Nut? The History of This Nut's Species? The Context of the Nut? What the Nut's Team of Psychoanalysts Said about the Nut?

Or the Nut Itself--Taste, Smell, Touch, Sight, and even Sound?

Regarding The New Criticism--my version of it anyway--the history, context, and so forth, of the nut are of no use, are without nutrition, unless the user has understood and experienced the nut itself. Once the nut has been experienced directly, by one who knows nuts, those other factors might make interesting playthings, but they will not feed the squirrel--who, I repeat--can distinguish a good nut from a rock, without memorizing Herodotus on the Peloponnesian Nut Wars.

Here's some more on the quasi-academic way of saying that.

Surely the “biographical fallacy” is a self-evident truth: good reading does not inject details of the author’s life into his writing. The author or his biographer might have gotten it wrong, might not have understood where a particular creative impulse came from. Or he might lie about it!

Yeats’s love for Maud Gonne, Keats’s love for Fanny Brawne, Nietzsche’s apparently pathetic life in relation to his bold notions, including that of a superman—these putative facts about the author’s life, juicy as they might be, should have nothing to do with the way we interpret or evaluate his words on the printed page. We’ll never actually know the biographical details, so let’s just do the honest, sometimes difficult work of interpreting the text.

Of course there are some qualifications. For example, language has changed since Shakespeare’s time, so we need an occasional footnote about telling “a hawk from a handsaw” in Hamlet or “’Sblood” as a recurring oath. And in Macbeth, it helps to know we can reasonably assume that childless Lady Macbeth’s comment about “the babe that milks me” probably refers to a child who died, given the commonness of infant mortality in eleventh century Scotland. What we must not do is jump to the conclusion that a significant theme in the play is, for example, a Shakespearean obsession with abortion-related guilt or the bard’s mourning the death of his own lost child.

Even the facts about the actual Scottish king should have no bearing on the Macbeth in the play, who is a fictional creation. Shakespeare played fast and loose with the sketchy historical facts available to him, so why should we bring them to bear on his plays, his works of art?

All this seems so obvious to me that I do not understand why the New Criticism has fallen out of favor in the last few decades, unless its proponents grew so extreme that they became absurd. I’m aware that the New Critics are associated with formalism in poetry; but I don’t remember, or never knew, if that was a justifiable connection or one created by their detractors. I see no reason why a New Critic’s careful attention to text—including punctuation and line breaks—should be limited to rhymed or metered poetry. Surely good free verse requires, deserves, and should invite the same kind of scrutiny.

Next, I intend to get back to Mr. Gothpunkrocker. But this should be enough for one day. Enough of what? Be kind. (Rewind?)