Poetry Now
A reference somewhere else prompted me to look into the poetry of Edward Thomas, the English writer who only started writing poetry at 36–and was killed in World War I combat by 39. It’s been a delight. Although his short time as a poet resulted in a modest body of work, his output feels larger because each piece holds me a for a while: I have not read very much, or have I read a lot? Thomas is one of those rare poets who manages to build both conceptual expansiveness and incredible specificity of observation into his verse:
The Bridge
I have come a long way today
On a strange bridge alone,
Remembering friends, old friends,
I rest, without smile or moan,
As they remember me without smile or moan.
All are behind, the kind
And the unkind too, no more
Tonight than a dream. The stream
Runs softly yet drowns the Past,
The dark-lit stream has drowned the Future and the Past
No traveller has rest more blest
Than this moment brief between
Two lives, when the Night’s first lights
And shades hide what has never been,
Things goodlier, lovelier, dearer, than will be or have been.
The poem is a rumination on time, on the reality of past and future. The present is never mentioned, but The Bridge could be a theory of the present. The bridge–and the stream beneath it–is a placeholder for that present. The poem works on the reader through the interplay of these temporal categories and the scene: a lone walker, on a bridge, over water. The stream is seen, the stream is: a thing that “runs softly” and is “dark lit.” We are at the end of the day. The audio-visual of the water rushing beneath the traveller’s feet loses its definition, merging with the spread of nighttime darkness. And the specific contents of the traveller’s past and future slide into wish and fantasy, without restriction or guilt (“what has never been/Things goodlier, lovelier, dearer, than will be or have been”)–and with a hint of some delight at their unreality. The anchor of the Present breaks down, the flight of the mind into reinvention–the unreality of time–succeeds.
The Bridge is one of the better examples I’ve seen of Thomas’ philosophical dimension. At other points–perhaps this is why he has been called a nature poet–his visual discernment dominates:
But, though I am like a river
At fall of evening while it seems that never
Has the sun lighted or warmed it, while
Cross breezes cut the surface to a file,
This heart, some fraction of me, happily
Floats through the window even now to a tree
-from Beauty
Reading these lines, I realize that I’d always seen the wind chop up the surface of streams. But now it exists. Thomas has finally given me words for it. Yes–“cross breezes cut the surface to a file.”
I’ve been reading a lot more poetry in the past few years–more, perhaps, even than when my daytime occupation was to study it and write about it. I do it because I’m drawn to lines and writers like these, by the greatest possible concentration of effort and intention in each unit of grammar. It also seems to me that while poetry is receding even further from its already marginal position in culture, it has never been more urgent. Poetry is now a form ethical and educational resistance to the devaluation of language. It’s hard to imagine when language–intentional, fresh, language struggled over by humans for humans–has ever been more devalued. In this situation anyone who cares about writing and speech has to hold onto what poetry is attempting to do.
If most of what is written on the internet–especially by bots–expresses some kind of happy medium, a composite of everything that has been said before on some artificially delineated “theme,” poetry is the opposite. What if this human observer, this formulation (“cross breezes cut the surface to a file”) has occurred once–exactly once? And what if the integrity–the reality–of everything else said and written depends not on the middle, but on what happens at these outer edges?