Wordsworth, "The World Is Too Much With Us," More on Hirshfield and Romanticism

The World Is Too Much With Us by William Wordsworth : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.



“Most wild American Crows live for about 7–8 years. Captive birds are known to have lived up to 30 years.” (Wikipedia)

Jane Hirshfield’s “The Woodpecker Keeps Returning” has me thinking once again that seemingly over-simplified writing and/or flat language can be deceptive. There is an important difference between the merely descriptive word, “simple,” and “simplistic,” which judges something as over-simplified or simple-minded.

I’m not sure which word or concept describes Hirshfield in “Woodpecker” or elsewhere. I've also felt that the simplicity of Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver, for example, shifts from profundity and power in one passage to puerile self-parody in the next. Ditto the quality of their work from story to story.

I've often wondered about this business of simplicity as it relates to the ancient Eastern forms and the West's enchantment with them since about 1920 (William Carlos Williams and James Wright, to name two, and now Jane Hirshfield; but the list is much longer than that and includes some of nineteenth-century American transcendentalists.).

Some people say that to understand Nirvana we should think of still water and silence. OK. I kind of get that—the absence of conflict and complexity as a sublime. But if that's paradise or some such perfection, how is a writer supposed to convey it and make it feel desirable as an ideal rather than boring or dead?

Ditto, for me at least, Classicism’s ideals like order, symmetry, balance, rationality, restraint. That's why I've always been drawn to the Romantics and their passion for dynamism, tumult, eerie, scary mysticism, “the one soul within us and abroad.” That seems so much more alive than pale reason and order. But then I’ve never lived or taken part in a revolution. America’s mini-revolution that we call The Sixties had some admirable purposes, but also a lot of phony bullshit, as the advent of Yuppiedom has verified.

Similarly, those old English Romantics proved to be only a short step from Wordsworth's wind-baggery and others' emotional, spiritual quackery in general. Just around the corner was the late Romantic oozing into Gothicism, which could get downright silly. And what about our squeamishness over the question of just how noble the Noble Savage is? I think it was Joan Baez who wrote, “A hero’s a nuisance to live with at home.”

In any case we're back to Classicism and Romanticism—and that icky business of one’s way of being in the world. Once again, it’s not either-or, but in which ways is this or that person or characteristic Romantic and in which ways Classical? For example, most think of Keats as the most classically inclined of the major Romantic poets. Or maybe Picasso as cubist is Romantic in his revolutionary, individualistic new way of seeing the world, but in the geometric shapes he uses to portray what he sees, he is mathematical, precise, drawing between the lines—that is, Classical.

With that to chew on, I offer Wordsworth’s “The World Is Too Much with Us,” an orderly poem inasmuch as it’s a sonnet, with classical allusions, but a very Romantic celebration of the Natural, the definition of which might require a tome.


The World Is Too Much With Us by William Wordsworth : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

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Jane Hirshfield, "The Woodpecker Keeps Returning"

The

Woodpecker Keeps Returning by Jane Hirshfield : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

I’m pretty sure that in every encounter with a woodpecker, I’ve heard the bird before I’ve seen it, which leads to more careful observance of some grand trees. If I do sight the bird, it feels more special because it took patience.

Until last January, I’d never seen a pileated woodpecker, and I had no idea they were so large (like the crow, about 18 inches in length). Their attack on wood echoes; it sounds a lot more like a sledge than a tack hammer. Big bird, red crest, striped cheek, big drum: it’s almost too much drama to endure.

What if a woodpecker chooses the wood of your house for his searching, his hammering? Even the little Downy could become intolerable in no time. Jane Hirshfield’s short poem wonders about that and comes to a surprising conclusion in the final couplet.

Maybe the progression of experience goes something like this: Hear the bird, shoo the bird, surrender to the bird, become the bird—not only that bird but also his missing mate. And yet, at the same time, remain your human self. You and the bird are two ways of being in the world, but they can blend, become each other, at least for a time.

Surely this is connected to Hirshfield’s long and serious study of Zen Buddhism, but we don’t need to go there. An experience too big for logic has happened, but we don’t, or shouldn’t, need classes in Zen or biographies of Hirshfield to grasp it.

At the end of the poem, there’s something like an epiphany; by definition that’s more intuitive or even mystical than it is rational. I’m probably not supposed to be able to explain it all, but I want to.

For the sake of argument, let’s say my state of mind is representative of Hirshfield’s readers. Our uneasiness and feeling off balance—is that a good agitation, discomfort, dramatic tension for a reader to be left with, or is it just too open-ended, too much absence of resolution?

The poet James Richardson has said a poem should end by landing on one foot, not two. I like that metaphor. Does it describe the final couplet in Hirshfield’s “Woodpecker . . .” or does the poem not even land on one foot? I’m not being coy; I really don’t know what I think. Yet. So I'll come back, maybe several times. And that might be a statement of praise for the poem.

The Woodpecker Keeps Returning by Jane Hirshfield : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

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