Modern American Poetry

(^40) Kenneth Burke
“Surrounded with details appropriate to my present mood, with a background
of such items as go with matters to do with family, union, independence, I, an
Irish girl (while the birds are about—and sweetly) am dissatisfied.”
I won’t insist that I’m not wrong. But in any case, that’s the way I read
it. And I would discern, behind her “objectivist” study and editorializing,
what are essentially the lineaments of a lyric. But where the lyrist might set
about to write, “In the moonlight, by the river, on a night like this in Spain,”
I can think of Miss Moore’s distributing these items (discreetly and
discretely) among conversational observations about the quality of light in
general and moonlight in particular, about rivers mighty and tiny, in
mountains, across plains, and emptying into the desert or the sea, about the
various qualifications that apply to the transformation from twilight to
darkness, in suburbs, or over bays, etc.; and from travel books of Spain we
might get some bits that, pieced together, gave us all those elements into
which, in her opinion, the given night in Spain should be “broken down.”
We might try from another angle by suggesting that Miss Moore
makes “because” look like “and.” That is, the orthodox lyrist might say, in
effect, “I am sad becausethe birds are singing thus.” A translation into Miss
Moore’s objectivist idiom would say in effect: “There are such and such
birds—andbirds sing thus and so—andI am sad.” The scenic material would
presumably be chosen because of its quality as objective replica of the
subjective (as observed moments in the scene that correspond to observing
moments in the agent). But even where they had been selected because of
their bearing upon the plaint, her subsequent attention to them, with
appreciation as a motive, would transform the result from a purely
psychologistic rhetoric (the traditional romantic device of simply using
scenic terms as a vocabulary for the sympathetic naming of personal moods).
And the result would be, instead, an appraisal or judgment of many things in
and for themselves. They would be encouraged to disclose their traits, not
simply that they might exist through the vicarage of words, but that they
might reveal their properties as workmanship (workmanship being a trait in
which the ethical and the esthetic are one).
What are years? That is, if we were to assemble a thesaurus of all the
important qualifications of the term “years” as Miss Moore uses it, what
would these qualifications be? I suppose a title is always an assertion because
it is a thing—and every thing is positive. Years, we learn by her opening
poem of that title, are at least a quality of observation (vision), involving the
obligation of courage, of commands laid upon the self to be strong, to see
deep and be glad. And years possess the quality of one