Modern American Poetry

(^42) Kenneth Burke
rising water in the earlier poem, “Sojourn in the Whale,” its later variant has
a context almost exaltedly positive. And repeating the same pattern (of
affirmation in imprisonment) in another figure, the later poem widens the
connotations of the years thus:
... The very bird
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive
his mighty singing
says satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is mortality,
this is eternity.
The pattern appears more conversationally (What Are Years,p. 12) in
the suggestion that it must have been a “humorous” workman who made
this greenish Waterford
glass weight with the summit curled down toward
itself as the
grass grew,
and in “The Monkey Puzzle” (Selected Poems) we read
its tail superimposed upon itself in a complacent half spiral,
incidentally so witty.
Still, then, trying to discover what are years (or rather, what all are
years), we might also recall, in Selected Poems,the poem on “The Fish,” where
the one fish featured as representative of its tribe is observed “opening and
shutting itself like / an / injured fan”—in quality not unlike “The Student”
of What Are Yearswho
... is too reclusive for
some things to seem to touch
him, not because he
has no feeling but because he has so much.
As the poem of “The Fish” develops, we might say that the theme is
transferred “from the organism to the environment”; for we next read of a