Poetry cannot honor or condemn or recount anything or anyone that is not gone. As time passes, versions of people and places and things are shed, and poetry is acutely aware of its singular ability to recount these losses. However, one of the fallacies of poetry is that it can recreate moments or things or people. Nothing can hope to accurately reproduce an existence in its entirety. A piece of poetry about a child’s birth may mimic the feelings of happiness much like the rush of a child being placed in your arms. An ode to a friend may conjure up the, albeit eerily authentic, essence of that person. A funeral poem may even sound like church bells, or make you cry. But a poem is a poem. It is constricted by language. It is neither the baby nor the friend, nor can it raise a loved one from the dead. Both William Wordsworth’s “There Was a Boy” and contemporary poet Robert Hass’s “Meditation at Lagunitas” explore the shortcomings of language; the way it takes away presence, but gives us something else, as it replaces life with markers.
We enter both poems as though we have stepped into conversations that have begun without us. “There was a boy…” Wordsworth begins. This is a qualification– it reads as if it a specific example of a bigger story, something that has already been said of which we have not been privy to. We are only given this, and as readers, we are tasked with filling in the blanks; inferring the rest of the story, or more accurately, the rest of the life, to which the boy belongs. In the next few lines, Wordsworth goes on to describe the evenings during which the boy would mimic the hooting of the owls. Though he leaves unsaid the life in the opening line, he is not shy with descriptors here, and he uses six separate adjectives– “quivering peals,” “long halloos,”, “screams,” “echoes loud,” “concourse wild,” and “jocund din”– to describe the hoot of the owls. The sheer excessive nature of these adjectives gives the poem a compensatory quality, as though they are insufficient in communicating the grandiosity of Wordsworth’s intentions. Once the noise of the birds dies down, there follows “a silence that baffles his best skill”. The silence impedes his mimicry of the owls, because it isn’t complete silence– within it, there is something larger. As the poem progresses, he perceives “with a gentle shock of mild surprise … the voice of the mountain torrents”. It is this largeness that Wordsworth finds himself unable to conquer with mere words. Moving from the aural to the visual, the “visible scene enter(s) unawares into his mind”. Nature itself looms large, with “all its solemn imagery”. Here, Wordsworth posits that Nature is an image of something, yet he leaves unsaid what it is an image of. The last four lines are exactly that– four lines– yet they contain expressions of grief which go beyond their lines and spill across the page.
And through that churchyard when my way has led
On summer-evenings, I believe that there
A long half-hour together I have stood
Mute—looking at the grave in which he lies!
There is a massive discrepancy here between the everyday, brief nature of these words and the intensity of feeling communicated by them. Wordsworth does not say more – presumably because more cannot be said: language is after all limited in what it can directly express. Beyond what Wordsworth has already said, he is “mute”, as mute as he is by the boy’s grave. In “There Was A Boy” the mute looms large, so large that it seems it cannot be spoken about directly because our language is not designed to communicate such intangible concepts.
Meditation at Lagunitas, too, begins abruptly– “All the new thinking is about loss. / In this it resembles all the old thinking.” Here, Hass opens with a broad statement, leaving the readers to await the specific examples. He does not disappoint, and his specifics are beautiful and gentle, juxtaposing precise images like “the little orange-silver fish / called pumpkinseed" with the more general theme of childhood, as well as the wonder at his lover's presence with "a thirst for salt, for my childhood river." These juxtapositions focus on articulating the in-articulable, the “thinking about loss” Hass mentions in the first line. Beautiful as they are, they are unable to convey what Hass wants them to– this is highlighted when, after a list of specifics detailing the wonder he feels at his lover’s presence, he concedes– “ It hardly had to do with her.” The specific words he uses to resuscitate his lover both point to her and emphasize his separation from her. He realizes that “talking this way, everything dissolves.” In the face of what’s real and what’s not, from “justice” or “pine trees” to a “woman,” the everyday world becomes a conglomeration of large, abstract concepts instead of particular things. Thinking about how language works uncovers, for Hass, the concept that it doesn’t really, at all.
The idea that language takes away presence is one that both “Meditations at Lagunitas” and “There Was a Boy” deal with, however, in “Meditation at Lagunitas,” language transcends memory, creating a category of its own. Desire may be made up of endless distances, but in Meditation at Lagunitas, desire and distance are fused together to create something altogether new, a different way of relating to loss. Though language will not give you the moment again, it gives you something else; a treasured thing, a relic. In Hass’s poem, this can be traced through the evolution of the word “blackberry” throughout the poem. When it is first mentioned, “blackberry” is insufficient- “ each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea… there is in this world no one thing to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, / a word is elegy to what it signifies.” When it is first mentioned, “blackberry” is simply a particular that erases the clarity of a general idea. “Blackberry” is elegy to what it signifies. But the length of the poem travels such an incredible distance, moving from the abstraction of the beginning (“each particular erases/the luminous clarity of a general idea”) to the concrete nouns of the end (“shoulders,” “pumpkinseed,” “bread,” “blackberry”). It moves by turning inward—from the world of big ideas toward the most intimate world of private speech and feeling: first a personal talk with a friend, then the memory of an intimate love affair, and, finally, the self talking to the self in private revelations that send us back out into the world (“it hardly had to do with her.” “I must have been the same to her.”). When I read the poem, I feel that movement as a lowering of the voice, both the sense and the volume of my voice falling through the registers of sound and speech. The word “blackberry” has been transformed by the movement of the poem—by the end it is a platonic ideal, an intimate sensual object, a numinous religious relic; it is a word, a thing, an elegy and an immediate feeling, all at once. Hass does not choose between the particular and the abstract, but rather imagines a third, “numinous” kingdom, in which he is not forced to choose between the body and the mind. To try to articulate that world, all he can do is repeat a single word, the intense, fleeting heart of carnality: blackberry.
A piece of poetry about a child’s birth may mimic the feelings of happiness much like the rush of a child being placed in your arms. An ode to a friend may conjure up the, albeit eerily authentic, essence of that person. A funeral poem may even sound like church bells, or make you cry. It is true, a poem is a poem. It is constricted by language. It is neither the baby nor the friend, nor can it raise a loved one from the dead. But while “There Was a Boy” highlights the inadequacies of language, “Meditation at Lagunitas” posits it is our only chance.