Poems and Place

Having concentrated on basic forms of poetry, we now turn to basic relationships. In Lesson 5, a poet’s identification with the surroundings, particularly nature, takes center stage. After tracing the landscape poem and its cousin the pastoral, we’ll finish with a close reading of William Wordsworth’s great survey of the land.

There, There

What is the worst put-down of a city that a poet can make? Gertrude Stein’s famous dismissal of Oakland, California, still stings: “There is no there there.” It’s no wonder Stein was later at the center of a large group of American emigrant artists, all in search of a more significant place. Stein obligingly mapped it: “Paris was the place that suited those of us that were to create the twentieth century art and literature…”

Poetic Bearings

The View From Here

As we’ve kept stepping back to take in larger poetic design, we’ve started to bump up against larger questions. We started by asking ourselves, What is the purpose of this form? But by now a broader question has started to crop up: What is the purpose of a poet? Knowing the tradition of the ode can only take us so far in understanding Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” for example. In order to fully appreciate why Keats chose that form — and how he exploits it — we’re going to have to adopt a broader perspective.

Now that we’ve reached the midpoint of the course, we’ll turn to fundamental concerns of poetry — its reasons for existing. Don’t worry, we’ll still pay close attention to form and its effects. No survey of poetry would be complete without introductions to the pastoral (later in this lesson), the elegy (next lesson), and the good old love poem (Lesson 7). But we’ll now fit these forms of poetry into the larger purposes they serve, beginning with the exploration of “place.”

Keeping Perspective

The connection of words to place is fundamental in poetry, both technically — as we’ve seen when it comes to meter, rhyme, and the like — and thematically. Just as rhythms in poetry can be complicated, the engagement of a poem with the real world can vary substantially.

Consider the four poems we’ve read as case studies. All these poems, at crucial times, highlight the struggle to accurately represent actual places in the world:

• Prufrock led us around foggy slums, but sometimes, abruptly, we were “among the porcelain” — in some drawing room, presumably. We had to guess, because the poem is so fractured and so hallucinatory. The disorienting jumps between these two settings gave us a good sense of Prufrock’s own inability to relate to his surroundings.
• Hart Crane’s ode kept its sights trained on the Brooklyn Bridge but jumped all around trying to describe it. There was no dominant perspective: we looked at the bridge from above (with seagulls and stars), from on the bridge itself (parapets to street level), and from beneath (Wall Street and the East River). The vastness of his subject literally overshadowed our poet: “Under thy shadow by the piers I waited; / Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.”
• The Shakespearean sonnet seems our best candidate for a “placeless” poem. It describes no landscape at all. Still, our speaker refers to dramas that do, after all, “take place.” The recurring deceits, the obsession about truth and age: these might be offstage, but they bear out the truth of what he says. The poem asks us to imagine what really happens underneath words and, in fact, ends with a specific scene: “I lie with her and she with me.”
• Finally, Keats’s ode charted two very different, contrasting places. The space of the urn had a landscape: boughs with permanent leaves, a green altar, a little town with silent streets, trampled weeds. But this was a space our speaker couldn’t enter; he was stationed “above,” in the realm of “breathing human passion.” The lack of description of this other space (a museum? a library?) is a pointed contrast: here “on earth,” impermanence wipes out details.

Comparing these poems directly is unwieldy; they are, after all, quite different. But all four reflect a fundamental concern: how does poetry represent actual places?

The connection of poems to reality is never more important than in nature poetry. By looking at verse that tries to connect to a landscape, we can see all the complications of “place” in the four poems above — but on a simplified and interactive plane.

Let’s start out our study of nature poems by considering how the description of a purple flower, for example, can take on cosmic importance.

Outside the Church

Emerson was ordained as a pastor, but soon resigned his charge because, he said, he could not believe in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. But Transcendentalism, the influential American movement he founded in the 1830s, is full of religion-inflected mysticism and worship. “Nature,” Emerson maintained, “is the incarnation of a thought.” Another time he asked, “What is a farm but a mute gospel?”

Philosophy and Nature

An Old Argument

One of the oldest and most powerful attacks on poetry was launched by the Greek philosopher Plato, who regretfully, but firmly banished poets from his ideal state in The Republic. This was because, in Plato’s view, a poet revels in the world of appearances and is not really interested in reality, which is only dimly reflected in nature; “he is an imitator of images and is very far removed from the truth.”

Defenders of poetry, including Plato’s student Aristotle, have always had to wrestle with this charge. Part of that defense has been to insist that a faithful imitation of nature is truth. This philosophical showdown involves an argument about where reality is located: in an unchanging realm of ideas (Plato’s “forms”) or within the concrete processes of nature?

It’s a long and lively argument, and we can hardly hope to do more than touch on it here. But an outcome of it has been an avalanche of philosophizing about “nature” and the poet’s role in it. Awareness of this debate helps us ask interesting questions of poems whose purpose is to represent the world — especially nature poems. Why is the poet describing this scene? Is she imposing herself on it? Is she bringing out a truth that nature can’t express on its own?

For the rest of the lesson, we’ll be looking at some ways poets have grappled with these questions. First, let’s turn to a hopeful view of a poet’s fit in nature. It comes to us from a philosopher-poet, a hybrid that seems to suit many who address nature directly.

Ministering Beauty

Take a look at Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Rhodora” (AFP, p. 91). It’s a lovely little poem about a fresh flower brightening up the woods, sparely and effectively combining the colors black, purple, and red.

But what is the purpose of the poem? To document that Emerson saw a pretty flower? He risks imitating the bird cooling his plumes nearby, who “court[s] the flower that cheapens his array.” Our poet turns and answers our questions head-on:

Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why This charm is wasted on the earth and sky, Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing, Then Beauty is its own excuse for being: Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose! I never thought to ask, I never knew; But, in my simple ignorance, suppose The self-same Power that brought me there brought you.

Poets see for us: they are part of nature’s own self-interpretation. The writer of “The Rhodora” leaves no doubt that he is faithfully documenting what would otherwise go unseen.

Even in such a confident interaction with nature (“dear” indeed!), we can see traces of doubt. Faced with beauty, the poet feels simple and ignorant. His intimation of connection is only supposed. Next we’ll turn to poems that share Emerson’s hopes, but also develop his hints of anxiety.

Assignment: “Tintern Abbey”
Pick a long sentence in Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” (one that is more than six lines long) to answer the following questions. How does Wordsworth use meter and line structure to convey a reaction to nature?

1. Is there any rhyme, off-rhyme, or repetition within the lines? If so, what is its purpose?
2. In the passage you chose, does Wordsworth try to convince the reader that he is describing a real landscape? How?
3. What pastoral fantasies can you trace in these lines?
4. Does Wordsworth complicate his hopeful vision of nature in your lines? How exactly?
5. And finally, why is the sentence as long as it is? Why does it end when it does?