CARE IN SUCH A WORLD 7Old or recent popular and little-known poems will bring such recognitions.
“Something I cannot see puts upward libidinous prongs” as Whitman confronts
a sunrise. Seeing “a Whip lash / Unbraiding in the Sun,” Dickinson takes the
snake ’s measure in her “tighter breathing / And Zero at the Bone—” Seeing,
and hearing too. The peasant poet John Clare, around 1830, hears a nightingale ’s
song “Lost in a wilderness of listening leaves.” Waiting for pike to rise from
a deep pond, Ted Hughes hears “Owls hushing the floating woods.” We ’ve
heard of owls and woods, but “hushing”? “floating”? Moments like these have
stamped English and American poetry, and are there for us now.
Looking again can also mean regarding local ground. Wordsworth was “too
tame for the Chippeway” Indians, Thoreau declared. When Missouri-born T. S.
Eliot wrote The Waste Land (1922) from his adopted England, and famously
found April “the cruellest month, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain,” this
sent Williams to New Jersey stirrings in “Spring and All”:
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leafHe ’d just started a little magazine calling for “contact between words and the
locality that breeds them, in this case America.”
Also a lifelong family doctor, Williams felt the responsibility in poetry’s
crucial quickenings:
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.A deep claim, and half a century later this wake-up call resounds. Williams
lived to look again at his nearby river, fouled by industrial waste: “a pustular
scum, a decay, a choking / lifelessness.” Now ecologic losses are nearly beyond
repair and time is running out. As W. S. Merwin says about vanishing native
languages, “the things the words were about / no longer exist.”
Realistically, what can poetry say, much less do, about global warming, seas
rising, species endangered, water and air polluted, wilderness road-ridden, rain-
forests razed, along with strip mining and mountaintop removal, clearcutting,
overfishing, overeating, overconsumption, overdevelopment, overpopulation,
and so on and on? Well, next to nothing. “Poetry” and “policy” make an awk-
ward half-rhyme at best.
Yet next to nothing would still be something. The choices we make now or
fail to make, and those foisted on us, determine whether we will subsist on a