Modern American Poetry

(^92) Thomas R. Whitaker
of a “A Coronal,” which frames in repeated motifs of “new books of poetry,”
postal delivery of “other men’s business,” and autumn leaves, a glimpse of
something quite different:
But we ran ahead of it all.
One coming after
could have seen her footprints
in the wet and followed us
among the stark chestnuts.
Anemones spring where she pressed
and cresses
stood green in the slender source— (CEP,38)
As a love poem that delicately moves toward personal mythology, “A
Coronal” evokes that immediate contact with the “source” which poetry may
freshly record but which it too often merely falsifies by means of an autumnal
ritual. As Williams said of Marianne Moore’s work: “If from such a flight a
ritual results it is more the care of those who follow than of the one who
leads. ‘Ritual’ connotes a stereotyped mode of procedure from which the
pleasure has passed, whereas the poetry to which my attention clings, if it
ever knew those conditions, is distinguished only as it leaves them behind”
(SE,127).
In “Queen-Ann’s-Lace” the montage may seem at first an ordinary
analogy:
Her body is not so white as
anemone petals nor so smooth—nor
so remote a thing. It is a field
of the wild carrot taking
the field by force; the grass
does not raise above it.
But the introductory negations, which give the speaker’s meditative distance,
have yielded quickly to the pseudoredundancy of “field ... taking / the field
by force,” which suggests passionate involvement. As the passion described
and felt increases, the speaker’s analogy gains in points of reference.
Finally—
Each part
is a blossom under his touch