Jane Hirshfield | February 2011

NOTES

Many good poems have a kind of window-moment in them-a point at which they change their direction of gaze or thought in a way that suddenly opens a broadened landscape of meaning and feeling. Encountering such a moment, the reader breathes in some new infusion, as steeply perceptible as any physical window's increase of light, scent, sound, or air. The gesture is one of lifting, unlatching, releasing; mind and attention swing open to newly-peeled vistas.

Not every good poem contains a window, and it may be useful to begin by looking at one that does not-Leonard Nathan's "Falling":

Falling

Wherever you choose to stand in this world,
that place, firm as it feels,
is a place for falling.

In my own house I fell. A dark thing,
forgotten, struck my ankle
and I fell.

Some falls are so slow, you don't know
you're falling till years later. And may be
falling still.1

(From Tears of the Old Magician. Washington, D.C.: Orchises Press, 2003. Reprinted with permission from Andrew Nathan and Orchises Press.)

This poem, written by the poet in his eighth decade, allows no escape for the reader's gaze. Even its stanzas' progressively shortening line lengths reinforce the general experience of tightening, narrowing, and compression. These are words that enlarge in the way stepping off a precipice might: the poem's felt catharsis comes not from release into wideness but capitulation to an inescapable fate. The effect is like that of looking into the polished granite of Maya Lin's Vietnam War Memorial Wall, which presents loss as a historical fact-unchangeable as stone, beyond opinion-and then places upon and within that tally one's own reflection. Refusal to flinch before gravity and time, in both poem and wall, brings its own paradoxical consolations: full presence, agreement, and witness.

A "window," whether carpentered from the conceptual, imagistic, or linguistic, offers a different kind of plunging. In the swerve into some new possibility of mind, a poem with a window stops to look elsewhere, drawing on something outside its self-constructed domain and walls. A window can be held by a change of sense realms or a switch of rhetorical strategy, can be framed in a turn of grammar or ethical stance, can be sawn open by an overt statement or slipped in almost unseen. Whether large or small, what I am calling a window is recognized primarily by the experience of expansion it brings: the poem's nature is changed because its scope has become larger.

Oddly often, the device is accompanied by the image for which I've named it. One example is Philip Larkin's "High Windows"-a work in which the poet, meditating with some bitterness on changing social mores, suddenly turns to look out the windows from which he has taken his title.

This is surely one of the stranger epiphanies of modern poetry. The mind veers from obsessive internal invective into an uninhabited, exterior image as if it has suddenly heard its own voice and broken off mid-thought. The rhyme scheme's loose tether holds, but the last stanza goes, literally and figuratively, elsewhere, in a Hegelian-Houdiniesque?-urge to escape into a landscape devoid of connection, whether sexual, spiritual, or animal. There are no kids walking hip to hip down the street, no long slides, no birds, bloody or exultant, in Larkin's finally empty sky. The deflection can be read as a leap into some largeness beyond human dilemma or as something closer to absolution by erasure-I have read this poem, depending on my own state of being, both ways. In either understanding, the closing image casts the poem into a light and scale sharply altered: the mind freed of relation falls silent.

*

Another poem in which a window gesture occurs within its literal counterpart is Donald Justice's sonnet "The Pupil."

The window in this poem is not the poem's destination, nor its main point. This sonnet's major claim-stake on the attention is its acutely felt portrait of a young person's entrance into art and art's intentions. Another of its pleasures is the elasticity with which it inhabits its form and rhyme-scheme, echoing the elasticity with which a piece of music, in the hands of one who has mastered it, will be imprinted with that player's touch and no other. But reading it, I am always struck by the odd force of the one, seemingly casual line in which the poem steps out of its central focus and into the world of others: "(Outside, the traffic, the laborers going home)."

The observation is held in parentheses, and, in poetry, the typographical impulse to recognize a thought as extraneous most often means that it is. Yet in this case, the poem would be sharply diminished without its conscious acknowledgment of all that lies beyond its own room. The inclusion of traffic and labor remind that art-making is luxury, not birthright. Many are tired. Many listen only to the grinding sounds of truck engines and the C# of bus brakes. The inclusion of this line reminds us of the cost at which the boy's search for beauty-and, by extension, the adult poet's life-have been won. An earlier thought foreshadows the theme: "Back then, time was still harmony, not money." The poem engages our relationship to beauty, but also to what is not beauty, in a life and in art-fear, hope, failure, the mysteries of sex, our relationship to the metronome, to economics, to obligation. The pupil in the poem awakens equally to text and windowed subtext, C# and C living side by side on the keys.

*

Sometimes a poem's window-opening can be so small as to be almost invisible, yet the chill air pours unmistakably through. A single word can be as consequential to the experience and meaning as a single link is to the integrity of a chain. This happens in Emily Dickinson's "We grow accustomed to the Dark-," in which a series of small readjustments and transitions of mind lead the reader to the point of vertiginous plunge.

419

We grow accustomed to the Dark-
When light is put away-
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Goodbye-

A Moment-We uncertain step
For newness of the night-
Then-fit our Vision to the Dark-
And meet the Road-erect-

And so of larger-Darkness-
Those Evenings of the Brain-
When not a Moon disclose a sign-
Or Star-come out-within-

The Bravest-grope a little-
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead-
But as they learn to see-

Either the Darkness alters-
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight-
And Life steps almost straight.4

(Emily Dickinson, # 419 "We grow accustomed to the Dark" from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. by Thomas H. Johnson, Boston: Little, Brown & Co, 1960-public domain.)

To feel the difference between other kinds of poetic transition and what I am calling a "window," it may be useful to read this poem closely, noticing how each of its elements informs, revises, and charges the experience it orchestrates in us. We recognize windows by their distinctive, precipitous feel as much as by any recognized shift of logic or ground; "transition" covers all of a poem's orchestrations of altered attention, large or small. These various forms of verbal unfolding create their effect whether we are aware of it consciously or not-they are the materials, stresses and counter-stresses, expansions and continuations and alterations, of which art's, and a life's, structures and comprehensions are made. To name them consciously is not necessary, and requires an almost seismographic alertness of attention. In this, we are like the character in Molière, surprised to learn he has been speaking prose all his life. But for a working writer, or a working reader, to undertake the exercise of making them fully conscious two or three times in a life, will give you a different relationship to your own experience and how it is made, and it will leave in your tool-chest a shining array of possible tools, when you find yourself in need of moving the reader or altering yourself.

This poem opens as do many of Dickinson's poems, with a general proposition: "We grow accustomed to the Dark- / When light is put away-." Next comes a simile, "As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp / To witness her Goodbye-." The line takes the opening abstraction and earths it in a particular situation and image: that of stepping from a house into darkness. Because it is a neighbor's door, and not one's own, the reader steps on physically unfamiliar ground, and so we enter into a subtly signalled inner displacement.

Disequilibrium is in the sound as well-"away" is a dissonant chiming against "goodbye." Dickinson's apparently native aversion to keeping her music overly neat was nonetheless actively chosen. Incisiveness, her poems prove, is not the same as keeping things tidy, and insight is not achieved by domestication. The lamp's "witness" is an act of personification that makes of light something explicitly active, social-and the speaker leaves it behind. Light is expansive, inclusive of others, and life; night is solitude, the unknowable, and death. A person is rightly sent out into the dark with the extension of blessing.

The second stanza continues the narrative that has been created. It works to consolidate the physical realm and make more fully real, and felt, the springboard image from which the poem's leap elsewhere will be made. That we are inside the grammar of simile has by now been forgotten: the reader feels her own feet testing unseen ground, feels his own body come into a surer erectness and stride, once vision adjusts. We are unbalanced only momentarily, then lulled: The night is only new; it seems a manageable darkness. But the poem's music signals different news, forestalling easy closure. "Erect" is the least audible rhyme of the poem, falling somewhere between the first line's "step" and the second's "night."

"And so of larger-Darkness- / Those Evenings of the Brain- / When not a Moon disclose a sign- / Or Star-come out-within-" With these lines, the poem moves into changed terrain. The transition occurs by fiat, in the words "And so." The situation is altered, that is, because the poet declares it so. And even before we read the phrase that names this increased darkening as "Evenings of the Brain," the word "larger" hints the poet's true subject is about to emerge. (This odd, intuitively-recognizable logic in which interior life is vaster than the outer, physical world appears also in one of Dickinson's best-known poems: "The Brain – is wider than the Sky – / for – put them side by side / The one the other will contain / With ease – and You – beside.")

The poem's landscape is no longer one of neighbors and night but the psyche's depths, and so we find ourselves looking through the poem's first window-moment: not outward in this case, but inward. The meter has changed as well: the stanza speeds a little, moving from the previous alteration between tetrameter and trimeter into the purely three-beat lines that will be the poem's gait for its remaining stanzas.

Transformation of outer situation to an internal, metaphysical condition then further described in physical terms: the pattern runs so deep in Dickinson that it could be called part of her poetry's genetic code. Everything is both general ("a Moon," a "Star," "a Tree") and sharply specific, both abstracted and drawn from the real. Dickinson's idiosyncratic capitalizations raise for her figurative images some of the affection we bring to characters in children's books. Yet the things being said more often than not raise terrors knowable fully only by the fully grown. We go to certain good poems, as children go to certain stories, to be rightly frightened.
The third stanza unfolds a series of extensions that clarify, embody, and expand its introduced images. "Larger-Darkness" is revealed as "Evenings of the brain"; the evenings are then made more actual by being emplaced in the grammar of time with the word "When." Even the unfurnished moon and star work toward actualization: in the imagination's rhetoric, what is named absent is also present, because it's been called into mind. The further this poem travels into the psyche's interior, the more physical its describing seems to become.

The fourth stanza is in one way conceptually simple-the narrative simply continues into a particularly striking illustration. But the transition works in much the way a change of key in music might: the poem moves here from subjective "we" into the more objective voice of third person plural: "The Bravest-grope a little-." This grammatical stepping back into detachment works in the psyche much as physical sight works in the world. It invites objective wisdom into the poem. With distance, perspective increases.
The fourth stanza's image of forehead hitting tree is the poem's most vivid image, yet if you read the poem without these lines, its meaning does not change. Calamity in a life (we are still in the realm of metaphor, and sense what such an image must stand for) does not of itself teach to see, it merely embodies the penalties of darkness, the perils of blindness. What allows us to see is introduced by "But"-a word worth stopping a moment to ponder. "But," used in this way, signals changed knowledge. Its seemingly small demurral tells us that whatever it is we thought before may be true, but incomplete. We must-and, in a moment, will-think again, more fully. What this poem's particular "But" conveys is a complex and multiple truth: A person must be willing to venture into the dark, if he or she is to learn to see there. Actual night-seeing, though, arrives only in one of two ways: either outer circumstances will relent or the eyes and self will accommodate to an irremediable "Midnight."

And what of the music in this passage of the poem? "Tree" and "see" are the only full rhymes of the poem to appear in the expected position, and that solidity contributes to the image's impact. Yet there is also enjambment-the grammar carries over between two lines and two stanzas-which causes us to hear the rhyme more lightly than we otherwise would. It also causes the poem once again to quicken, as if stretching toward the broadened comprehension promised by "But." The conjunction is further emphasized by meter: both "But" and "Either" start their lines with trochee's strong downbeat, rather than the poem's more usual iambs.

I have called the third stanza the poem's first window, but for me, the true window in this poem is contained in one word: its quick, penultimate "almost." The effect is so disguised it is more truly trapdoor than window: "And Life steps almost straight." On this close to weightless "almost," the poem's assurance stumbles, catches. Its two syllables carry the admission that there are events in our lives from which no recovery is possible.
In the end, this poem's human news and that of Leonard Nathan's "Falling" are drawn, by different buckets, from the same well-each holds a devastating human vulnerability in a way that permits its acceptance. In "Falling," though, vulnerability is the explicit and undiluted message. Dickinson slips her abyss into a single, scarcely noticeable qualification, inside an overt statement of continuance. The difference is what makes the one poem windowless, the other windowed.

*

All writing holds such transitions, expansions, reversals, and alterations. Between the first word of a poem and the second, a tiny expectation rises in its listener, requiring fulfillment. An article leans toward its noun, a noun toward its verb; a preposition tells us the mind will be moved in time or place. Any statement made in the context of literature leaves us wondering why it was made, where it will lead; images and stories function as small, planted seeds. A poem's transitions pitch thought forward, sometimes explicitly, sometimes by verbally unsignalled changes of attention or image that simply happen, as a jump cut does in film. A "window," then, will always be in some way a transition; but a transition specific in effect, a place where something in the poem not only alters but breaks different ground. As with Dickinson's poem, a window can coincide with the poem's emotional center of gravity and pivot, but as with Donald Justice's poem, it need not. It will, though, be something more than the next step forward. A window will alter both room and view.

Wislawa Szymborska, the 1996 Nobel Laureate in poetry, is a poet not much given to lifting the sash or turning the casement's handle-but here is a poem in which that happens, in this case inside a subtle switch of grammar:

Some People

Some people flee some other people.
In some country under a sun
and some clouds.

They abandon something close to all they've got,
sown fields, some chickens, dogs,
mirrors in which fire now preens.

Their shoulders bear pitchers and bundles.
The emptier they get, the heavier they grow.

What happens quietly: someone's dropping from exhaustion.
What happens loudly: someone's bread is ripped away,
someone tries to shake a limp child back to life.

Always another wrong road ahead of them,
always another wrong bridge
across an oddly reddish river.
Around them, some gunshots, now nearer, now farther away,
above them a plane seems to circle.

Some invisibility would come in handy,
some grayish stoniness,
or, better yet, some nonexistence
for a shorter or a longer while.

Something else will happen, only where and what.
Someone will come at them, only when and who,
in how many shapes, with what intentions.
If he has a choice,
maybe he won't be the enemy
and will leave them to some sort of life.5

(Wislawa Szymborska, "Some People," from Monologue of a Dog, tr. by Clare Cavanaugh and Stanislaw Baranczak, Orlando, FL: Harcourt Inc., 2006. Reprinted with permission.)

Szymborska's work exemplifies Chekhov's craft-advice to his brother: "If you want to move your reader, write more coldly." In this she is not unlike Elizabeth Bishop or Philip Larkin, fellow practitioners of the school of chilled verse. It bears explicit noting that surface coldness, when found in good poetry, almost invariably is drawn over unbearable heat or unbearable despair. Restraint serves as protective carapace, a bulwark against reduction to pure weeping or rage. The underlying emotion is not invisible-we see it as we might see a corpse beneath a sheet. A writer of heat (Pablo Neruda, Walt Whitman, or Sylvia Plath, for example) gives passion outright, as outcry; such poets are partisans, choosing-or forced-to speak from inside the war zone's uncalibrating tongue. Szymborska, who lived through the Second World War and the long aftermath of Poland's Soviet occupation, is no less fully present, no less fully feeling, but her response to strong feeling takes the form of a scientist's acute observation and precise description. Her poetry's coolness is the coolness of hard data gathered in answer to harder life. In the temperature-calibration of Szymborska's writing, Dickinson's "almost" is close to boiling. Yet no alert reader could mistake Szymborska for a person actually cold.

The window-moment in this poem is a mirror reversal of the one in Donald Justice's sonnet. In "The Pupil," everything is personal, with the lens of vision held close, until our attention is brought by one quick swerve to the world of others. In "Some People," the lens's vision is almost entirely long, the description placed into the general. This distancing in itself grieves, given what is being described. We recognize in this poem the subtractive voice of news-reel knowledge, the journalist's indecently abbreviated glance into the tragedies of strangers. It presents the dehumanization of mass crises, individual fates surrendered to the language of "collateral damage" and recited numbers. The poem, though, is not without its abrading details-the chickens, the lifted child. When fire "preens" in a mirror, in one kind of language-choice, when invisibility would "come in handy," in another, the reader's alertness cannot help but rise to the poem's own. Even we who read Szymborska through her translators can safely trust: this is not the language of stupefaction.

In the final lines, however, generalization lifts, and in that moment Szymborska shows both horror's blindfold and its removal:

Something else will happen, only where and what.
Someone will come at them, only when and who,
in how many shapes, with what intentions.
If he has a choice,
maybe he won't be the enemy
and will leave them to some sort of life.

"If he has a choice." With that line's grammatical knife-twist, certain kinds of awareness we were not even aware had been supressed rush back into the poem. Individuality enters. The reminder enters that war and its violence are acts of personal responsibility, personal choice. The slenderest blade-edge of hope enters. Do not hope for too much, the reader is cautioned-the last line returns to both bleakness and generalization. Still, with that small pronoun "he," human agency returns: the bedrock decision to harm or not harm rests always in individual hands, and cannot be disguised as something generic or collective. The window here (as in Donald Justice's sonnet) alters the poem's relationship to its moral dimension. It brings that realm, quite simply, into explicit and recognizable view.6

To remind us of the existence of others when we have fallen into the maze of interior, subjective life is one large part of the work of windows: they prevent us from stifling; they return the personal self to connection with what is beyond it, with the whole. In Act III of King Lear, another such window appears. Lear, Kent, and the Fool stand on the heath. First Lear addresses the storm, which he cannot keep separate for more than a moment from his self-created, subjective condition:

Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! spout, rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters:
I tax not you, you elements with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children;
You owe me no subscription; then let fall
Your horrible pleasure; here I stand, your slave,
A poor infirm, weak, and despis'd old man:-
But yet I call you servile ministers,
That will with two pernicious daughters join
Your high-engender'd battles against a head
So old and white as this. O! O! tis foul!

Soon after, standing outside the door of a hovel, Lear refuses to join the others in its shelter, saying the tempest's blows buffer even more painful thought. He then goes on:

Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel (...)

This recognition of the larger tasks of a king-the care of those of his subjects who are homeless, who are hungry-is a moment's sanity, releasing Lear from his entrancement in personal sorrow. The storm becomes real when the suffering of others is felt also as real, and vice versa. We too come for this moment to our larger senses, before plunging back into the tragedy's inexorable course. We are reminded that Lear's failure to hear the depth behind Cordelia's first, mild words is part of a more extensive narrowing of heart and vision, whose only cure is openness to exposure. In Shakespeare, abdication of rule and the failure to love are not different: both are shown as evasions needing correction.

*

The use of windows is not confined to poetry. They appear in prose as well, sometimes at the level of sentence or paragraph, sometimes in scene or chapter. Here is an example from Don DeLillo's Underworld, from a preliminary draft of its opening in which the final paragraph breaks haven't yet been put into place:

He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful. It's a school day, sure, but he's nowhere near the classroom. He wants to be here instead, standing in the shadow of this old rust-hulk of a structure, and it's hard to blame him-this metropolis of steel and concrete and flaky paint and cropped grass and enormous Chesterfield packs aslant on the scoreboards, a couple of cigarettes jutting from each. Longing on a large scale is what makes history.7

The window effect is immediate and profound. DeLillo's single-sentence shift from the particular to the abstract opens the book's voice to speak from a larger perspective, and to move from the individual boy to the larger, cultural exploration which will be the book's focus:

Longing on a large scale is what makes history. This is just a kid with a local yearning but he is part of an assembling crowd, anonymous thousands off the buses and trains, people in narrow columns tramping over the swing bridge above the river, and even if they are not a migration or a revolution, some vast shaking of the soul, they bring with them the body heat of a great city and their own small reveries and desperations, the unseen something that haunts the day - men in fedoras and sailors on shore leave, the stray tumble of their thoughts, going to a game.

Many of the chapters in Melville's Moby Dick can also be seen to function as windows, some looking into the sea or ship or the bodies of whales, others turned outward. One chapter, for example, lists all known paintings and images of whales, beginning with those in books and above pub doors, ending with whale-silhouettes found in mountain ridge lines and whale-shapes traceable among the stars. These departures from the central story throw Ahab's revenge-quest and constriction into sharp relief; they remind that what he cannot rejoin or even perceive is a world infinite, playful, various, and open without limits. Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse is multiply-windowed in the remarkable "Time Passes" section at the book's center. Time appears in falling plaster and loosening fabric; a marriage or death is telegraphed in a bracket-held sentence; the war's distant, thudding artillery trembles glass tumblers inside a cupboard. The last image shows one of a window's particular capacities: to reverse figure and ground, letting the large be known by its effect on the small. This of course is not only literary device; it is how we know life itself. Longing on a large scale makes history, which wears a fedora in one decade, a baseball cap in another.

*

Two British poems from the Second World War draw hard on the power of windows in similar ways. Each poem turns the eyes toward its subject all the more strongly by turning them also away. The oscillation may be the only way these poems could have been written, or can be read, at all. Experience must be lived through, yet its felt brunt is often avoided. Art makes experience unavoidable, not least by acts of stepping back in ways whose end-effect is the collapse of distance. The looking elsewhere of these poems is not evasion, not an armoring against presence. It is, like the heath scene in King Lear, the aperture through which exposure deepens.

First is Henry Reed's "Naming of Parts," the opening poem in a five-part series, "Lessons of the War."

Japonica blossoms, bees, the flowering almond, the meaning-doubled Spring-each breaks the poem from the mechanical death spell it chants. The fragrant surround releases the mind as if from a nightmare not acknowledged as nightmare, into an alternative version of what is possible: fumbling assaults undertaken for sweetness. The twice-named silence of the poem's trees may not be judgment, but it is measure: each time the mind moves from weapon to garden, from garden to weapon, we are reminded that the exchange of one for the other remains a human choice.
There is another fissure in this poem as well, found in the form of an absence. The reader can't help but notice one part the poem does fail to name. It is skipped over somewhere inside the phrase "to-morrow morning, / We shall have what to do after firing."

A good test for the effect of a poem's window-moments is to see what the poem is like without them. If read without its natural-world images, "Naming of Parts" can still turn on its ironies, on "the point of balance, / Which in our case we have not got." But the almost unbearable grief-sense is oddly reduced if the poem is stripped of its other, counterbalancing world, the one in which our human wars and fears hold no meaning or weight.
One of the most harrowing poems from a century of harrowing poems is Keith Douglas's "How To Kill."

Douglas died in the war, at age twenty-four. His poem's full-brunt knowledge is precisely what the drill-master of "Naming of Parts" attempts to forestall: the man is not supposed to be present, only the instrument-soldier whose tasks have been rehearsed to the point of automation. Douglas's windows-and this is a poem made almost entirely of glass lights and wooden muntin dividers-keep making humanness visible. His opening image of childhood throws a light that erases all distance between the speaker and the soldier he kills. Both are flesh, not implement; both are still boys. "He smiles, and moves about in ways / his mother knows, habits of his" is a sentence almost unbearable to read. It forces the gaze from battlefield anonymity into the roundness of life. The poem as a whole, for me, is almost unbearable to read. It is too fully conscious. It requires its reader to enter also into a state of damnation, recognizing our own failure in, and responsibility for, what it describes. And, with the same impulse as "Naming of Parts," this poem shifts the eyes to the natural world's coinhabitance of each of our moments, its alternate possibilities travelling alongside our own. Here, though, even the insect world is swept in: the mosquito becomes part of the total eclipse and obliteration that is war-death. In the end, only the poem itself stands as testament to what war has taken.

* * *

Every poem-every work of art-is already, as a whole, a kind of window: art is a way to release our attention from immediacy's grip into gestures that encompass, draw from, and remind of more expansive constellations and connection. This experience is not the only reason to want art in our lives, but it is a central reason. The windows that occur within the perimeter of a poem, piece of music, or painting, do the same work: they awaken and give entrance to what might otherwise not be recognized, felt, or known. Sometimes this is awareness of the moral realm, sometimes awareness that our fate is joined with the fate of others. Sometimes it is the recognition of our human vulnerability, sometimes of the replenishing housed outside the human. Sometimes the changed awareness is simply the knowledge that a different relationship to experience might be possible. Art's request and command is that we know our lives in their wholeness. Wherever the gaze goes, art will draw it elsewhere, will remind that there is always more. Alice does not stop and face her own reflection in the looking glass: she travels through it.

Good writing will have points of view-but they will be in the plural. No truly good work of literature faces in only one direction, or looks at existence from only one angle, one theory. Theory, including literary theory, is the stance of argument, not of art. To live only in the socio-economic self is to starve the self of its capacity for purposeless joy. To live only in the ideological is to deny ourselves uncertainty, fragility, loss. To live only in the emotional and autobiographic is to ignore what transcends the personal story and ego. To live only in the intellect or narrowly spiritual is to miss the saturation of the senses. Let us close then with Czeslaw Milosz's "Winter," a poem which turns toward almost every direction of human life, whose fidelity is in the end simply to life-and whose mid-point turn to the vocative "you" is, I believe, among the most breathtaking transitions and window-openings to be found anywhere in poetry, in its intimacy and in what it summons.

Winter

The pungent smells of a California winter,
Grayness and rosiness, an almost transparent full moon.
I add logs to the fire, I drink and I ponder.

"In Ilawa," the news item said, "at age 70
Died Aleksander Rymkiewicz, poet."

He was the youngest in our group, I patronized him slightly,
Just as I patronized others for their inferior minds
Though they had many virtues I couldn't touch.

And so I am here, approaching the end
Of the century and of my life. Proud of my strength
Yet embarrassed by the clearness of the view.

Avant-gardes mixed with blood.
The ashes of inconceivable arts.
An omnium-gatherum of chaos.

I passed judgment on that. Though marked myself.
This hasn't been the age for the righteous and the decent.
I know what it means to beget monsters
And to recognize in them myself.

You, moon, You, Aleksander, fire of cedar logs.
Waters close over us, a name lasts but an instant.
Not important whether the generations hold us in memory.
Great was that chase with the hounds for the unattainable
meaning of the world.

And now I am ready to keep running
When the sun rises beyond the borderlands of death.
I already see mountain ridges in the heavenly forest
Where, beyond every essence, a new essence waits.

You, music of my late years, I am called
by a sound and a color which are more and more perfect.

Do not die out, fire. Enter my dreams, love.
Be young forever, seasons of the earth.10

(Czeslaw Milosz, "Winter," from The Collected Poems, New York: Ecco Press, 1988. Reprinted with permission.)

AWP

Jane Hirshfield's most recent poetry collection is After (HarperCollins), named a "best book of 2006" by the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and England's Financial Times. She is also the author of Nine Gates: Entering The Mind Of Poetry (HarperCollins, 1997), a collection of essays. A new book of poetry, Come, Thief, will appear in August 2011, from Knopf.

NOTES

1. Leonard Nathan, Tears of the Old Magician (Washington, D.C.: Orchises Press, 2003).

2. Philip Larkin, "High Windows," Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989).
3. Donald Justice, "The Pupil" Collected Poems (New York: Knopf, 2004).
4. Emily Dickinson, # 419 "We grow accustomed to the Dark-" The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. by Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown & Co, 1960).
5. Wislawa Szymborska, "Some People," Monologue of a Dog, tr. by Clare Cavanaugh and Stanislaw Baranczak (Orlando: Harcourt Inc, 2006).
6. The British philosopher Stuart Hampshire suggested, in Innocence and Experience, that moral sensibility depends less on divisions between what is thought moral or immoral than on whether any particular issue (slavery, sexual preference, certain uses of power) is perceived as being in the realm of morality at all. He offered, that is, the view that morality in our lives is a function of looking through a particular window.
7. From "Final Destination," by D.T. Max, the New Yorker, 6/11/07 http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/06/11/070611fa_fact_max (page 6 of 8); in the actual book, paragraph breaks have been inserted, somewhat changing the effect.
8. Henry Reed, "Naming of Parts," Collected Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991 (o.p.)).
9. Keith Douglas, "How To Kill," The Complete Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2000).
10. Czeslaw Milosz, "Winter," The Collected Poems (New York: Ecco Press, 1988).