Castaway poet Katharine Towers chooses poems by Wallace Stevens, Alice Oswald and Elizabeth Bishop
It goes without saying that there are innumerable poems that I would wish to keep close to me if I had to go away. The reasons differ in each case; some are like music and I love them for their shapes and sounds which seem to belong somewhere inside me. Others I love because I have learned something from them – whether about poetry or about the world and its haphazard marvels and truths. And there are some that I simply feel to be wonders – poems that exist in a way that I cannot entirely understand, like a Gothic cathedral or a coral reef. I want to go into such poems and gaze around and be astounded.
The three poems I have chosen here display these qualities to different degrees. I wouldn’t say they are my ‘favourite’ poems as I don’t think I have favourites. They are simply poems that I cherish and am grateful to.
They are simply poems that I cherish and am grateful to
My Wallace Stevens Selected Poems says ‘Sheffield, 1992’ on the title page, so I must have known ‘The Snow Man’ for a long time. It’s a small poem of 15 lines – a single sentence that unfurls in a slightly convoluted, slightly sinewy series of statements, opening with the proposition that: “One must have a mind of winter / To regard the frost and the boughs / Of the pine-trees crusted with snow”. Read ‘The Snow Man’ on The Poetry Foundation.
What is a “mind of winter”? This is one of those lines in a poem which is opaque when we apply our understanding to it but which seems to have a meaning if we just listen to its sounds, the lovely humming of the ns. We feel what it means but we couldn’t put it into words, we couldn’t translate it into our own language.
The mind in question seems to have undergone some sort of alienation from ‘usual’ human responses. For example, one must have a mind of winter “not to think / Of any misery in the sound of the wind, / In the sound of a few leaves”. Something akin to the pathetic fallacy is hovering behind the poem – or rather something that is its mirror image. The mind of winter seems to be a mind that is entering into the landscape’s own consciousness. Here is a mind making itself wintery so it can feel what it is like to be a juniper receiving wind and ice and snow in a bare place. How much more interesting than the converse!
The poem has a sparse shivery quality. It’s almost severe in tone. This has something to do with the slight awkwardness of the syntax – like the twists and angles of a tree’s branches when they are bare. Also, there are no adjectives. How marvellously plain!
Stevens makes us turn slightly effortful corners and isn’t afraid of repeating the same words, but I find these negotiations immensely satisfying – in fact, one of the chief pleasures of the poem. It’s rather like jazz, the way he riffs on the same words, phrases and sounds and can’t quite bring himself to leave them alone:
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
The final tercet takes these ploys even further. The word ‘nothing’ appears three times in the last two lines. Once, nothing is the nothing. The listener listens! It transpires that the listener is part of the general nothingness and is present simply to witness: “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” This is one of Stevens’ marvellously high-flown flourishes – only he could put something like this in a poem and get away with it. It whisks us up and away into the metaphysical in a rather fanfare-ish manner. It might almost be funny were it not for the fact that we can hear and feel the wind whistling around the bareness and emptiness.
A final thought: it’s possible that the poem is merely about itself. We enter a sparse architecture of words in which we shiver and stare for a while before being shown to an exit where we’re asked to consider whether we’ve experienced anything at all. Perhaps Stevens is having the last laugh. Whether or not this is the case, I find the poem compelling and enjoyably resistant to being fully understood.
It’s possible that the poem is merely about itself
I have to have a poem by Alice Oswald with me, and I’ve chosen ‘Fox’ from her 2016 collection Falling Awake: twenty very short lines with a relaxed, barely perceptible rhyme scheme that feels almost casual. The poem is so light and airy as to be almost not there, a will-o’-the-wisp that arrives and floats off again without seeming to ask anything of us other than to look and listen. Read ‘Fox’ on the Poetry Foundation.
The speaker is roused from sleep by a cough which is not a thief but a fox. Cough rhymes with fox which rhymes with across which is the grass where the fox steps “in her black gloves” (which are not socks, which would also rhyme – but that would be too much). The poem is another single sentence and has no punctuation apart from a colon at the beginning of the final stanza – a caesura of sorts as if to motion that there is soon to be an ending.
The absence of punctuation contributes to an atmosphere of furtive passage – the poem seems to sneak by in the dark, allowing itself to be only partially seen. The way the fox arrives and moves and barks is described as “just so abrupt and odd” which is beautifully natural and careless in a poem of such delicate crafting. It’s the moment where the poem draws close so it can whisper in our ear. We’re still being whispered to in the next stanza in a series of intimate ss sounds:
in such serious sleepless
trespass she came
a woman with a man’s voice
but no name
In this stanza the fox ‘came’ whereas in the previous one she ‘went’. Again, that sense of fleetingness – of not quite being able to catch hold of the visitation in language, the words coming and going in little flickers and glimpses. What the speaker’s eye gives us is not unlike what might be picked up by a night-vision camera. We must be very quiet as we watch and listen for fear of frightening the poem away.
And so to the final quatrain – one of those Oswald miracles that must have been hard-won but that arrives as if easily on the wings of the sounds of the letters l and f.
as if to say: it’s midnight
and my life
is laid beneath my children
like gold leaf
Life / leaf. Such beauty in that little echo, in those two little puffs. And where do the children come from – the children who are suddenly so perfectly right? We already know the fox is a woman. No surprise that the fox is also a mother.
Do we know what is meant by the gold leaf simile? The colour is almost correct for a fox, but not quite. The preciousness, we understand. It’s another case of feeling the truth of lines without being able to fully explain them to ourselves.
The poem is so light and airy as to be almost not there
My third choice is one of the first poems that really struck me. By this I mean that there was a sort of jolt when I read it – recognition perhaps or shock or just sheer pleasure. Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Sandpiper’ is rather well-known. It is a poem of twenty rhyming (abab) lines, that also feels something like a sonnet in its sidling, then bounding movement. It is a poem about a bird that skirts anthropomorphism by marvellously inhabiting bird-ness. Read ‘Sandpiper’ on Allpoetry.
The roaring alongside he takes for granted,
and that every so often the world is bound to shake.
Could there be a more deadpan and miraculous opening sentence? The roaring is the sea. The world shaking is a wave breaking. A bird knows only so much (in the way that the future will show that we know very little about our world and the cosmos). This partial view has its own coherence and meaning – its own sufficiency – and there is something beautiful in the bird’s understanding.
The bird’s world rhymes. The word ‘shake’ comes to rhyme with ‘Blake’ in the fourth line of the first stanza – Blake the poet of whom the sandpiper is a student. This is one of those lines that astound me. Again, I feel its true-ness, which is the true-ness of a line of poetry that seems always to have existed. The poem progresses mostly via a whole series of full rhymes (sheet / feet, goes / toes, drains / grains, tide / preoccupied etc) and this inclines us to believe what it says.
The sandpiper’s world changes from one moment to the next, governed by the rhythm of the breaking waves, the spray, the rustling sands, the tides going up and down. Such are the minutiae of being a bird on a shore. These are the daily matters of a bird’s life.
It is the final stanza and the movement into the final stanza that are the poem’s most extraordinary feats:
His beak is focused; he is preoccupied
looking for something, something, something.
Poor bird, he is obsessed!
The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray
mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.
Firstly, there is that repetition of “something”. Are we allowed to repeat words like that in a poem? Clearly, yes but it’s rather unabashed! And the word itself is so very … ordinary. The line mimics the bird’s obsession, of course, but it also contains the faint echo of a telling off. And now I realise that this is where Blake comes in – the bird’s questing after something other, which might be truth or knowledge, one might say the big picture. Of course, the bird doesn’t know what it is looking for and the poet doesn’t mind that she doesn’t know either (being a bird herself).
I could write pages about the last two lines – the way that the poem is quietly laid to rest in a statement of fact which is not even an image
I could write pages about the last two lines – the way that the poem is quietly laid to rest in a statement of fact which is not even an image. We are simply given a list of the colours of the sand-grains. There is a lovely slowing down of the poem into the monosyllables of “black”, “white”, “tan”, and “gray”. These are soft thuds. Then there are the colours of the quartz grains which are more beautiful – the monosyllable of “rose” and then the beat-beat-beat of “amethyst”. This makes me think of the “realms of gold”. There is something glorious and at the same time plain-spoken.
Amethyst does not rhyme with obsessed – and yet it does. There is a hiss to it and both words end with the same ‘st’ sound. This was one of the things that delighted me when I first read the poem. The rhyme which is not a rhyme … Some would call it a half-rhyme, but I feel it is far more mysterious than that.
What better way to end a poem about knowing and not-knowing and about being a bird than with a plain statement of fact that offers pleasure to the ear?
