the whole game finishes. What we get next, in
this book—and so many others like it plumping
the domestic, the filial, the ordinary and the
private—is not the shaping, visionary imagina-
tion—but after-images on the retina, the secon-
dary vision that sadness produces. What we get
is tragedy’s younger and flabbier brother nostal-
gia, that de-energized heir of late civilizations.
There are other problematic exclusions and
refusals in ‘‘The Last Hiding Places of Snow,’’
and most of these cluster around the treatment
of women and children. To take the women first,
‘‘The Last Hiding Places of Snow’’ steps uneasily
around the identification of woman as earth-
symbol; the mother-spirit issues from ‘‘a place
in the woods’’ which is at first quite a scary place;
then, while ‘‘mother love’’ is invoked, and per-
ceived as protecting the speaker, gradually, other
feelings emerge:
My mother did not want me to be born;
afterwards, all her life, she needed me to
return.
When this more-than-love flowed toward
me, it brought darkness;
she wanted me as burial earth wants—to
heap itself gently upon but also to
annihilate—
and I knew, whenever I felt longings to go
back,
that is what wanting to die is. That is why
dread lives in me,
dread which comes when what gives life
beckons toward death,
dread which throws through me
waves
of utter strangeness, which wash the entire
world empty.
In this stance, Kinnell is not Antaeus, deriv-
ing strength from a reaffirmation of the ground
of earth which is his being. While the lines
depend on a basic identification of woman as
earth-mother, they also follow the traditional
misogynist conflation of womb/tomb, where
the chthonic female is not muse, but instead the
fixedly mortal part: the dread mother who in
giving life beckons toward death. Kinnell’s
mother is a blurred, and softened, but still rec-
ognizable form of Blake’s Tirzah:
Thou Mother of my Mortal Part
With cruelty didst mould my Heart.
And with false self-deceiving tears,
Didst bind my Nostrils Eyes & Ears.
Didst close my Tongue in senseless clayand me to Mortal Life betray:
The Death Of Jesus set me free.
Then what have I to do with thee?
In Kinnell’s poem, while he has declined
both conventional Christian terms, as well as
Blake’s idiosyncratic enactment of the dialectical
struggle of heaven and earth, in its allegorized
reading of gender, he still makes use of this sig-
nificant convergence of symbols, womb/tomb,
but finally neither denies nor develops its misog-
ynist coloring Kinnell’s mother dread just sits
there.
Finally, the mother is absorbed into the
Empyrean, and her fearful parentage subsides
into the poet’s resolute acceptance of his own
parenting as a way of transcending despair and
discontinuity. Kinnell introduces, then backs
away from the explicit gender alignment and its
problems. Although in the poem he seems
uneasy about his inability to be there at the last
and say goodbye, the whole argument of gender
relationship in parenting, and what it negatively
represents, and negatively enforces, is slip-
streamed, or bypassed, as the poet simply wishes
to be blessed at his own deathbed by his child-
ren’s presence. Refusing to respond to the dread
that has broken loose, Kinnell dissolves the gen-
der issue into a spongy prose whose firmest and
most vivid moment is this image:... memories these hands keep, of strolling
down Bethune Street in spring, a little creature
hanging from each arm, by a hand so small it
can do no more than press its tiny thumb
pathetically into the soft beneath my thumb....
But implicitly, in the context of the poem,
Kinnell shows that the suicidal despair that the
earth-religion of the devouring mother evokes
can be turned aside, its energy blessedly recon-
verted into an unproblematic, non-smothering
father love. The female womb, and earth’s
asphyxiating ownership, however, explicitly put
in an appearance as the cause of death and failed
transcendence, as they did inThe Book of Night-
mares,where the womb/tomb of earth becomes a
shroud for the newborn. In two books, now,
fetal life, in agreement with Wordsworth’s ‘‘Inti-
mations Ode,’’ represents attachment to a pri-
mary great world of memory and being. Born,
‘‘memories rush out,’’ as the newborn
... sucks
air, screams
her first song—and turns rose,
the slow,
Blackberry Eating