Modern American Poetry

(^172) Richard Poirier
resemblances, evidences in zones and demarcations for the human capacity
to make a claim on an alien landscape. What he discovers is sparse indeed,
his reassurance equally so, as we can note in his rather pathetic exactitudes:
It was a cord of maple, cut and split
And piled—and measured, four by four by eight.
And not another like it could I see.
No runner tracks in this year’s snow looped near it.
And it was older sure than this year’s cutting,
Or even last year’s or the year’s before.
The wood was gray and the bark warping off it
And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis
Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle.
What held it, though, on one side was a tree
Still growing, and on one a stake and prop,
These latter about to fall. I thought that only
Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks
Could so forget his handiwork on which
He spent himself, the labor of his ax,
And leave it there far from a useful fireplace
To warm the frozen swamp as best it could
With the slow smokeless burning of decay.
The poem here could be read as a commentary on the earlier “The
Tuft of Flowers” where, instead of a bird, a butterfly acts as a kind of pointer
who “led my eye to look / At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook” and where
these flowers, in turn, direct his attention to signs of work having been done
by another man with “A spirit kindred to my own; / So that henceforth I
worked no more alone.” “The Wood-Pile” is obviously a much starker poem.
The “tuft of flowers” was left as a kind of signature, a greeting and
communication; the pile of wood was simply forgotten by the man who cut
and carefully stacked it, as he went on to the distractions of other things. The
wood-pile cannot therefore prompt the gregarious aphorisms which bring
“The Tuft of Flowers” to a close: “ ‘Men work together,’ I told him from the
heart, / ‘Whether they work together or apart.’ ” Remnants of a human
presence in the swamp only remind the walker that he is completely alone in
a place that has been deserted. And his aloneness is the more complete
because there are no alternatives outside the present circumstances which
give him any comfort. Even when he thinks of a fireplace it is not with
images of conviviality but only with the observation that it would be “useful.”