Volume 10 161
can end up determining people’s physical circum-
stances—the bloodless word “disturbances” trans-
lates to the narrator, in a jail cell, being vomited on
and seeing a pregnant woman beaten by police. In
her descriptions of the sensory details of the scenes,
she utterly omits her emotional or mental impres-
sions; she is simply a “tabula rasa,” a blank slate,
recording impressions but not reacting to them.
For all of the vivid physical details of the
poem, though, the narrator’s mind is constantly
drawn to a very abstract feature of the world—light.
Like a painter, Graham’s narrator notes the play of
light and remarks on how the light feel even as she
plainly and unadornedly describes the horrors of
the jail cell. “Once I watched the searchbeams play
on some flames. / The flames push up into the cor-
ridor of light.” she says in the fifth stanza as she is
in the process of describing the “swarm[ing]” po-
lice vans. Instead of giving her emotional impres-
sions of this scene, she tells about the meeting of
two sources of light. Where is the fear that she must
have had? Where is the disgust and anger and ter-
ror that she must have felt in the jail cell? Instead,
she tells about “the shadows as “I / see them still—
the slatted brilliant bits / against the wall.”
The poet’s concern with light and her detached
attitude toward her experiences comes to a climax
when she is released from the jail. As she leaves,
she notes that “the strangest part of getting out
again was streets. / The light running down them.”
Light now represents freedom, for it cannot be
curbed, cannot be held. This stanza ends with a
number of images of swelling and bursting, both
of air and of light.
The stanza that follows is the heart of the
poem. In it, Graham asks the unanswerable ques-
tions about the nature of the world that are always
on her mind. Her use of abstract language is con-
fusing, but can be pulled apart. She speaks of how
“the air filled—doubled—as if the open had been
made to render.” “Render” here is an important
word, with multiple meanings: it can mean to hand
over, to give up, to give back, to cause to be or to
make, to represent or depict, to prounounce or de-
clare, or even to melt down. In addition, the word
suggests another word, “rend,” which means to tear
apart. The open, or all that is outside the jail, is torn
apart, and the air and light spill forth, and this phys-
ical sense of “to rend” or “to render” is the primary
sense in which she is using the word. But she also
suggests that the open is handed over to her, that
it is pronouncing or declaring something, that it is
depicting something. Like air, like light, the open
is undefinable and cannot be captured or held.
Language works similarly. Using “render” for
all of its multiple meanings, Graham emphasizes
the tricky, inaccurate, but also open nature of lan-
guage. If it cannot ever express exactly what one
is trying to express, if it is insufficient to describe
sensory or emotional experience, it also can open
up infinite possibilities for meaning. Like the air,
which is filling and doubling until its “hollows spill
out,” language is so filled with meaning that its
richness must be explored for its own sake. “How
thick was the empty meant to be?” Graham asks of
space and of language. “What were we finding in
the air?”
Graham’s metaphysical concerns, omnipresent
in much of this volume, are muted in “The Hiding
Place,” but still traceable. The poem is suffused in
the physical details of a particular place and time,
but at this point the narrator’s mind slips into an
oblique musing about the nature of physical space
and of language—the kinds of thoughts expressed
by Augustine in the book’s foreword. Moreover,
like Augustine, Graham is sent into her metaphys-
ical musings by sensory input. In his Confessions,
Augustine frankly and at times humorously de-
scribes the sensual pleasures of the world that he
enjoyed before discovering the deeper and more
perfect world of God: he talks of the pleasures he
takes in tastes, in sights, and even in human touch.
As the narrator is released from jail, she enters the
narrow streets of Paris and observes “the light run-
ning down them./ Everything spilling whenever the
wall breaks.”
But, like Augustine, she is always aware of the
inability of language to capture the nature of God,
of the transcendent, of the infinite. Humans and
God are far apart, “in a region of unlikeness” as
Augustine says, and language, a human construct,
by definition cannot sufficiently describe God. The
physical world, the fact that objects have definite
shapes and ends, underscores the world’s separa-
tion from God. In the “things that are contained in
space,” Augustine writes, he “found no place to
rest.” As we are confined in space and in time we
cannot understand the nature of God,” he contin-
ues: “so it is with all things that make up a whole
by the succession of parts; such a whole would
please us much more if the parts could be perceived
at once rather than in succession.” And Augustine
also notes the futility of language: he I imagines
the Word of God comparing its nature to the na-
ture of human language and saying that “it is far
different. These words are far behind me. They do
not exist.” Language, working as it must by
metaphor and metonym and analogy, can neverThe Hiding Place