Jane Hirshfieldexcerpt from "Kingfishers Catching Fire: Seeing With Poetry's Eyes"
A mysterious quickening inhabits the depths of a good poem--protean, elusive, alive in its own right. "Creative" and "creature" hold in their shared root a shared autonomy of being, and we feel something stir, shiver, swim its way into the world when a good poem opens its eyes. For the work of poetry is not simply to record perception, but to make by words the possibility of a new perceiving--to open us into the distinctive realms we see when we see the world by poem-light.Genuine art, we say, has "vision," and good poetry and good seeing quite literally go together almost always. Yet before the more literal seeing can liberate itself into that other vision we speak of, a transfiguration is needed: the eye must learn to abandon its long habit of useful serving and take up instead an active delight in its own ends. A painter conveys this perceptive delight through brushstroke and color. For a poet, an equally material pleasure transforms the engagement with words. Consider, for example, the enkindled and sensuous seeing-through-language to be found in Gerard Manley Hopkins. Even in the prose of his Journal, the voracious attention he gave to the shapes and forms of existence inhabits a honed, precisely tuned language. Here is the entry for February 24, 1873:
In the snow[,] flat-topped hillocks and shoulders outlined with wavy edges, ridge below ridge, very like the grain of wood in line and in projection like relief maps. These the wind makes I think and of course drifts, which are in fact snow waves. The sharp nape of a drift is sometimes broken by slant flutes or channels. I think this must be when the wind after shaping the drift first has changed and cast waves in the body of the wave itself. All the world is full of inscape and chance left free to act falls into an order as well as purpose: looking out of my window I caught it in the random clods and broken heaps of snow made by the cast of a broom. The same of the path trenched by footsteps in ankledeep snow across the fields leading to Hodder wood through which we went to see the river.The snow is observed with an intimate appreciation for its actual and detailed life. "The sharp nape of a drift" reveals an inescapable tenderness in its word-choice--it's as if the writer has reached out to touch that drift-nape and found it humanly warm. In the equally physical "trenched by footsteps," we not only see but hear the snow re-made by the vanished, repeated human passage through it. Each phrase bears the exhilaration of the senses made monarch, not slave.
And more: the snow is inquired of, seen deeply into, met with a full and thoughtful capacity for true response. Hopkins's mid-passage insight is startlingly contemporary. "Chance left free to act falls into an order as well as purpose"--this is a sentence with which current chaos theorists might well agree. But having struck this spark of abstraction from his snow-chilled flint, Hopkins does what poets do: comes back to the realm of things for test and confirmation. He returns to what the snow looks like, broomswept from the front door: an image that rhymes with, and so proves, the idea he has found in the natural realm. The whole passage, like many other descriptive entries in Hopkins's journals, could only have been written by a person willing to put himself into a condition of the most careful observation--a person who, it seems, lives almost entirely in the luxuriance of accurate sight.
Still, listen to this:
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;And this:
I caught this morning morning's minion, king- dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air...And this:
Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, / vaulty, voluminous,... stupendous Evening strains to be time's vast, / womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night. Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, / her wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height Waste; her earliest stars, earlstars, / stars principal, overbend us, Fire-featuring heaven.The gap between the descriptive voice of Hopkins's Journal and the voice of his poems isn't simply the difference between a rough diary jotting and a finished work, or even the difference between prose and verse. I'd like to suggest that what you've just heard is the distinction between a poet's seeing and poetry's seeing. One may help make the other possible, but they are not the same, in kind or intention--and the difference exists because poetry itself, when allowed to, becomes within us an organ of perception, pursuing its own kinds of passionate knowledge and its own subtle forms of discovery, unlike any other.
Hopkins's work is one of the great exemplars we have of poetry's knowing; the quality of an active and original perception emanating from the words themselves lies somewhere close to the marrow of his genius. Part of it comes from the marriage of vision and ear; the poet's desire to know the "dearest freshness deep down things" opened to him, and to us, a new music for English verse. The same desire to enter a wellspring-perception led the poet to recognize the core beauty of "all things counter, original, spare, strange." The resulting permeability to what comes, however "counter" or strange, sustains the intense aliveness we find in even the darkest of his works. An elixir vitae, the forms of knowledge inherent to poems are an infusion that works against whatever diminishes the soul, even despair. Seeing through poetry's eyes, we come to know ourselves as less tempered, more free than we were, and connected to--emancipated into, if you will--a larger world.
Jane Hirshfield's most recent books are The Lives of the Heart (poems) and Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (essays), both HarperCollins, 1997. A core faculty member of Bennington's MFA Writing Seminars, she was featured in two 1999 Bill Moyers PBS television poetry specials.
