Famously, or infamously—I can’t decide—Auden speaks of a poem as “a verbal contraption” that’s inhabited—by a person, a sensibility, presumably that of the contraption’s maker. The questions he asks, when reading a poem, are how does the contraption work, and what kind of person lives there? I myself define a poem as verbal patterning, which maybe overlaps with Auden insofar as a poem could be seen as a contraption made of words arranged in a particular way. But I also see poems as something more embodied—as bodies, almost, whose words suggest one thing, but whose way of deploying language—what we might call the poem’s nonverbal communication—often (maybe usually?) tells me much more, not in terms of the poem’s meaning but of what the poem is pointing toward. Which is also to say, I don’t read for the fixed meaning waiting to be unlocked or translated, if I’m somehow ‘smart’ enough. I want to know what a poem is directing me toward, in what order, and how—instead of how does it work, I ask myself how does this poem proceed; instead of wondering what its physical gestures mean, I prefer to ask what are their effects, how do I feel, after, and what does that make me think about?
Though it took me a while to realize it, John Clare’s “To the Fox Fern” isn’t a sentence at all, but a nine-line fragment: The active verbs that occur are all parts of subordinate clauses:
Haunter of woods, lone wilds and solitudes
Where none but feet of birds and things as wild
Doth print a foot track near, where summer’s light
Buried in boughs forgets its glare and round thy crimpèd leaves
Feints in a quiet dimness fit for musings
And melancholy moods, with here and there
A golden thread of sunshine stealing through
The evening shadowy leaves that seem to creep
Like leisure in the shade.
When we break it down into its parts, we basically have something like this:
Haunter of woods, et cetera.
Where X happens
Where Y does these two things
And with Z also happening.
Which is to say, the poem is more notational, the bare beginnings of an homage and address (“To the Fox Fern,” reinforced by the “thy” of line 4, making the implied first word of the poem You or Thou). Because sentence fragments lack a main verb, they tend toward stasis. Part of what sets this poem in motion from the start, though, is the order in which it presents its information. We begin with the largeness of landscape, then the second line focuses on the creatures inside that landscape, and the third line narrows the focus even further, to the small, individual tracks left behind by these creatures. This telescoping, at the level of imagery, brings us closer in; we move from openness to an intimate closeness to the fox fern—which is to say, we’re invited, brought into, an intimacy to which even the light barely has access. That’s the work, as it were, of the first three lines of Clare’s poem. The remaining six lines focus on the light’s limited powers: it’s less bright (“forgets its glare”) but it can feint—i.e., make a distracting movement in the dimness, and it can “here and there,” though only a thread of it, makes its way through the leaves, the fox fern’s leaves, I presume, whose ultimate domain is the shade that the poem ends with.
There’s no narrative, in the usual sense, in this poem; no story unfolds. But the poem’s movement toward intimacy—a movement that in reading the poem we ourselves become part of—is a gesture, a movement from something large to something small—also from something concrete/tangible (land, birds, wild things) to something abstract (light, dimness, and the melancholy moods that the dimness is “fit for”); so while the poem contains no story, its manner of proceeding is to bring us from the exterior to an interior, from what anyone can know to what only we can know, inside ourselves, about ourselves—that’s, at the least, a journey, and isn’t that what stories take us on?
I keep thinking, too, about the light, and how it only gets mentioned in the context of darkness. Clare connects dimness—and by extension the fox fern that thrives there—to mental activity (“musings and melancholy moods”); is the light, then, a welcome but elusive distraction from melancholy? Or, since the leaves’ movement is also associated with leisure, is the occasional bit of light an unwelcome interruption?
I don’t know what this poem “means.” But how it proceeds makes me think about interiority, intimacy, the tension between what’s public and what’s private, melancholy as a form of privacy that can be a place to retreat to but also as a space where I can dwell too long, for which reason I’m grateful, now and then, for the light, if only just a glint of it.
What does it mean, to “creep / Like leisure,” in the shade or otherwise? Unlike the other actions within the poem—the printing of tracks, forgetting glare, feinting in dimness, stealing through limbs—this last simile stands out for not making clear sense. Another way, then, in which this poem proceeds is from specificity to specificity until this progression almost becomes routine; at which point, the poem abandons specificity for mystery. Some things remain hidden, the poem seems to suggest, as maybe some things should. The fox fern among them. And perhaps our moods and musings too.
Often before I read a poem, I’ll consider how it looks on the page. My assumption is that a poem appears as the poet felt it must, and that its arrangement has something to do with what we’re supposed to get from the poem as readers. Jane Mead’s “By Reason of Light—” proceeds in tercets—each stanza has three lines of more or less similar length. We could safely say there’s regularity to the stanza pattern; we move down the page in steady, uniform chunks of information. But the tercet, because of being based on an odd number, is often associated with instability—as opposed to a two-line couplet or a four-line quatrain—it’s as if the tercet rebels against couplet-hood but refuses the symmetry or balance of a quatrain. Therefore, Mead’s poem has stability of stanza pattern, but the stanzas themselves are unstable. But one way to make a tercet more stable is to close it, i.e., to end each one with a period, as happens here, which prevents it from tumbling into the next stanza. If there is instability, it’s contained. We could say, then, that although we haven’t even read the poem yet, how it proceeds on the page, visually, already suggests a tug of war between stability and instability. I’m aware, though, that not everyone knows or stops to think about the tercet’s relationship to instability. But there are other, more obvious ways in which this poem is proceeding:
There have been many—
Who called in the ships.—
Ships in off the dark water.
Instinct one minute—
Satire the next.—
There have been many.
From one vision to the next—
It is a long distance.
You have to carry a moth through rain.
You have to sleep under an upturned boat.
You have to actually be there.
As in willing to die for same.
And you have to be willing to live.
As in I will trade you tomorrows—.
As in no known shore, no meaning.
The words of this poem say quite a lot. But what kept catching my eye when I first encountered it was its punctuation. In the first tercet, we begin with a dash, then a period followed by a dash, then a period. Meaning what? The way I understand it, a dash at line’s end suggests there’s something to follow, or there was, but the sentence got interrupted. A dash, then, represents possibility, the potential that we don’t get to see. A period, meanwhile, is for absolute conclusion, so a period followed by a dash seems a kind of middle ground—something has ended; and yet—