Modern American Poetry

(^94) Thomas R. Whitaker
the snow
is covered with broken
seedhusks
and the wind tempered
by a shrill
piping of plenty. (CEP,200)
As the short lines imply, each word is to be carefully weighed. Step by step,
the poem makes its precarious affirmation. The connotations “gain” and
“fail” (“flight,” “small”), fail and gain (“cheeping,” “birds”), or momentarily
hover (“skimming,” “snow glaze”). The poem then moves through a more
ominously falling section to an enigmatic rise (“But what?”), to other
balancings (“harsh” and “rested,” “covered” and “broken,” “seed-” and “-
husks”), and then on to its paradoxical assertion (“tempered” by something
“shrill”!) of plenitude in poverty. With its delicate balance, the poem might
be set beside Keats’s “To Autumn” as a later and more thinly resonant phase
of the organic cycle.
A similar definition of the abstract, one disarming yet surprising in its
flat colloquialism, opens “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime”: “Sorrow is
my own yard ...” But that bare phrasing of the familiar, possessed, and limited
is at once given a paradoxical development:
where the new grass
flames as it has flamed
often before but not
with the cold fire
that closes round me this year. (CEP,223)
All freshness now means only the intense continuity of deprivation. The
speaker then moves toward her own heavily weighted climax of white desire,
in which a freshness beyond the edge of the known may image a final
deprivation and so a release.
In a very different poem of isolation and desire, “The Lonely Street,”
the concrete indirections are the observable data of local culture.
School is over. It is too hot
to walk at ease. At ease
in light frocks they walk the streets
to while the time away.
They have grown tall. They hold