For our Stanzas web feature, we ask writers to introduce us to their favorite works of literature by way of a brief excerpt of a poem. This week, Didi Jackson—whose poem “The World As It Was” appears in our Spring 2024 issue—considers “Winter” by Ruth Stone.
“Winter” by Ruth Stone is as equal in craft as it is in pathos when weighed on the golden scales of poetic excellence. In my belief, this is a rare feat. Too often, poems today are carried purely by their emotional context or are solely reliant on form, seemingly forgetting about the other side of the scale. Of course I want to be moved by a poem, and since I share a similar tragedy with Stone, I am especially taken by “Winter.” But for a poem to be memorable, it must do more than just evoke emotional distress or difficulty.
Lately I’ve been thinking about the metaphorical mind and what it means for a poet to experience it deeply or shallowly. Ruth Stone has such a mind for sure. In “Winter,” Stone’s emphasis on figurative language leads to a perfectly balanced poem.
She opens “Winter” thus:
The ten o’clock train to New York,
coaches like loaves of bread powdered with snow.
Steam wheezes between the couplings.
Stripped to plywood, the station’s cement standing room
imitates a Russian novel. It is now that I remember you.
Stone’s stirring uses of figuration in these first five lines establish the poem’s setting as a uniquely cold, dismal place. By imagining the train coaches like loaves of bread, she presents a vivid yet stark impression of the train’s arrival. The steam from the engine wheezes as if exhausted, and the train station itself is likened to a Russian novel in its austerity. In this created space of misery, Stone remembers her late husband, Walter, who took his life years earlier. He is the you of the poem. It is his “profile that becomes the carved handle of a letter knife” and his “heavy-lidded eyes that slip under the seal of [her] widowhood.” The dappling of s sounds—coaches, wheezes, snow, stripped, station, standing, Russian, eyes, slip, and seal—allow us to skid with her out of the “raw winter” where “starlings crowd the edges of chimneys” back to the time when Walter was alive, when he ran “beside the train waving good-bye.” Once on the train, she isn’t sure if she is going towards or away from his memory. Due to her intense grief, somedays he feels near, other days he is a faraway memory. Such is her potent portrayal of long-lasting grief.
In the poem’s final line, Stone alludes to Ezra Pound’s poem “In a Station of the Metro” as she describes the faces of people on the platform: “I feel their entire histories ravish me.” Ravish has two definitions: to seize and carry off by force or to fill with delight. These meanings couldn’t be more opposite. Nor could the emotions that mark such meanings be more contrary. Which is exactly why it is such a perfectly placed word. Stone is both forcibly carried back to painful memories of her younger self when Walter was alive, yet she is also delighted at the new lives of the “fresh people,” all full of potential for happiness and joy. Her daily existence and our experience inside this poem are both crowded with such contradictions. With these contradictions in mind, we are able to inhabit both the strong emotional truths and craftsmanship of the poem. And even more powerfully, we encounter Stone’s distinctive poetic vision.