Modern American Poetry

(^46) Kenneth Burke
I think we can make a point by recalling this earlier poem when, in
“Smooth Gnarled Crape Myrtle” (What Are Years), the theme of the
elephant’s trunk appears again, this time but in passing, contextual and
“tangential” to the themes of birds, union, loneliness:
... ‘joined in
friendship, crowned by love.’
An aspect may deceive; as the
elephant’s columbine-tubed trunk
held waveringly out—
an at will heavy thing—is
delicate.
Surely, “an at will heavy thing” is a remarkable find. But one does not make
such observation by merely looking at an elephant’s trunk. There must have
been much to discard. In this instance, we can know something about the
omissions, quite as though we had inspected earlier drafts of the poem with
their record of revisions. For though a usage in any given poem is a finished
thing, and thus brilliant with surface, it becomes in effect but “work in
progress” when we align it with kindred usages (emergent, fully developed,
or retrospectively condensed) in other poems. And here, by referring to
“Black Earth,” we can find what lies behind the reference to the elephant’s
trunk in “Smooth Gnarled Crape Myrtle.” We can know it for a fact what
kind of connotations must, for the poet, have been implicit in the second,
condensed usage. Hence we can appreciate the motives that enabled this
trunk to be seen not merely as a thing,but as an act,representative of the
assertion in “Black Earth.” And by reviewing the earlier usage we can know
the kind of volitional material which, implicit in the later usage, led beyond
the perception of the trunk as a thing to this perception of it as an act. At
such moments, I should say, out of our idealistic trammels we get a glimpse
of realism in its purity.
Or let us look at another instance. Sensitivity in the selection of words
resides in the ability, or necessity, to feel behind the given word a history—
not a past history, but a future one. Within the word, collapsed into its
simultaneous oneness, there is implicit a sequence, a complexity of possible
narratives that could be drawn from it. If you would remember what words
are in this respect, and how in the simultaneity of a word histories are
implicit, recall the old pleasantry of asking someone, “What’s an accordion,”
whereat invariably as he explains he will start pumping a bellows.
Well, among Miss Moore’s many poems enunciating aspects of her