Print This PostWarning: mUutations are a project from my other site, . They are arbitrary interpretive readings that change the poems into something they’re not. Proceed at your own risk.
Here’s George Hitchcock’s “Dawn,” from his collection, A Ship of Bells:
Clouds rise from their nests
with flapping wings, they whisper
of worn leather, bracken, long
horizons, and the manes of dark
horses. In the waking stream
the stones lie like chestnuts
in a glass bowl. I pass the bones
of an old harrow thrown on its side
in the ditch.
______________Now the sun appears.
It is a fish wrapped in straw.
Its scales fall on the sleeping
town with its eyeless granaries
and necklace of boxcars. Soon
the blue wind will flatten the roads
with a metallic palm, the glitter
of granite will blind the eyes.But not yet. The beetle still
stares from the riding moon, the ship
of death stands motionless on
frozen waves: I hear
the silence of early morning
rise from the rocks.
Let’s take this one stanza at a time, paying attention especially to the imagery. The images of the first stanza, while figurative and surprising, mostly describe the concrete, especially visual, aspect of objects: clouds, stones, the harrow. (The clouds’ “whisper / of worn leather, bracken, long / horizons, and the mages of dark / horses” might be an exception, but these qualities could be taken as a figurative quality of their appearance). The images of the second stanza, even more so than the first, keep the reader off balance. “A fish wrapped in straw” whose “scales fall on the sleeping / town” is gross, yet somehow sublime. Similarly, the town’s “eyeless granaries / and necklace of boxcars” is both bizarre and attractive. It is a paradoxical effect. Lastly, the three images of the third stanza are psychological and symbolic. They describe a dreamy, night world. The language here moves the imagery toward abstraction, contrasting with the first stanza’s observational point of view.
Notice, then, that the first stanza, in other words, is functionally imagism, while the final stanza is archetypal and symbolic. The speaker, we infer, has gone from being an observer of the external world to a contemplative of the interior or mysterious world. In the midst of nature and experience, he contacts another world. This other world, noticeably, is static, and its temporal stillness cuts against the dawn, holding off the day’s progression and the “ship of death.” The other world is frozen and silent. It is an interior world, moreover, where the self reaches mysterious, mystical depths. He can clairvoyantly “hear / the silence” coming from rocks.
The shift from outer to inner world, from surfaces to types, passes through the strange imagery of the second stanza. The images of this stanza, such as the sun as “a fish wrapped in straw,” replace the initial, concreteness with a fanciful re-seeing of the landscape. Yet, the images are not sufficiently abstracted to achieve archetypal suggestiveness. They are surreal figurations, evoking concrete objects, yet obscuring matters by the incongruity of their parts. The sun and boxcars are rendered unfamiliar by catechresis. And although one might detect the appropriateness of “blue wind…flatten[ing] the roads / with a metallic palm,” this statement’s synesthesia (“blue wind”) and blatant semantic mismatch (“metallic palm”) maintains the tone of obfuscation.
Perhaps surprisingly, the middle stanza’s surrealistic rendering of the scene seems to create a seamless and gradual transformation from the outer world to the resonant, psychological interiority the final stanza. At the same time, it disrupts the poem’s semantic texture, reflecting a change in the lyric subject’s mind-state. Notably, the images of the final stanza, while distinct in psychological quality from those of the first stanza, have a restored simplicity and can be easily visualized. The first and final stanzas exhibit a degree of facticity (or sincerity) that is lacking in the second.
“Dawn,” then, performs the basic maneuver characteristic of deep image poetry of moving from external to interior subjectivity. To this extent it resembles the mid-century style of landscape lyric, with its two primary modes: impressionistic imagism and abstract symbolism, shifting from the former to the latter in a manner that achieves closure and resonance. (E.g., “Lying in a Hammock” by Wright, “The Celtic Church” and “A Month of Happiness” by Bly.)
But into this formula, Hitchcock inserts a third mode or style, the surreal, which functions as a go-between for the others. This has striking implications. For one thing, the poem asserts surrealism as a prominent mode of poetic utterance. Rather than a marginal or even a “separate but equal” mind-style, surrealism here seems intrinsic to the dialectics of lyric thought. If “Dawn” is an accurate representation of cognition (God help us), surrealism can be seen as a model of half-digested or “partially-interiorized” thought—sensory data that is not yet fully-formed as reflection or ideation. The conflation of this phase pushes the sensorium of the outer world into dark forest of the subconscious—but has little to show for it other than majestic absurdities. Most often called the “irrational,” poets have traditionally avoided it.
Secondly, this might be read a critique of the poem’s prototype, the deep image poem. The poem suggests that the dialogue between conscious and subconscious thought is more complicated than the liberated, unproblematic “leap” of the school of Bly. For Hitchcock, the arbitrary, distorted perspective of surrealism represents the turbulent middle ground between the two realms of consciousness. By passing through the chaotic zone between outer and inner consciousness, Hitchcock eschews the closure and distance often characteristic of Bly’s version of the deep image lyric. Rather than a luminous, mysterious “leap,” Hitchcock discloses the process and shows it to be subjective and fanciful. It is a darker but more honest form of meditation and mediation.
