Modern American Poetry

(^44) Kenneth Burke
the plumet portrays
mythology’s wish
to be interchangeably man and fish.
What I am trying to do, in reaching out for these various associations,
is to get some comprehensive glimpse of the ways in which the one pervasive
quality of motivation is modified and ramified. I am trying, in necessarily
tenuous material, to indicate how the avowed relation between the visible
and the invisible finds variants, or sophistications, in “objectivist”
appreciation; how this appreciation, in an age of much querulousness, serves
rather to transcend the querulous (Selected Poems,p. 34: “The staff, the bag,
the feigned inconsequence / of manner, best bespeak that weapon, self-
protectiveness”); and how this same pattern takes form in the theme of
submergence, with its interchange-abilities, and so in the theme of water
rising on itself. At another point the motive takes as its object the motif of
the spinster (“You have been compelled by hags to spin / gold thread from
straw,” with incidental suggestions of esthetic alchemy, lines that appear in
“Sojourn in the Whale,” and so link with submergence, Ireland, and the
theme of spirited feminine independence, thus relating to kindred subjects in
the later poem, “Spenser’s Ireland”). I have also suggested that a like quality
of imagination is to be found in the intellectual ways of one who selects as
his subject not clocks, but clocks for clocks. (To appreciate just what goes on
here, one might contrast these contemplative clocks—serene in their role as
the motives behind motives—with the ominous clock-faces of Verhaeren, or
in the grotesque plays of Edmund Wilson, which no one seems to have read
but me.) From these crystal clocks, I could then advance to another variant,
as revealed in the treatment of ice and glass. These would, I think, be
animated by the same spirit. See for instance (in Selected Poems) the study of
the glacier as “an octopus of ice”:
this fossil flower concise without a shiver,
intact when it is cut,
damned for its sacrosanct remoteness.
“Relentless accuracy is the nature of this octopus / with its capacity for
fact”—which would make it a glacier with an objectivist esthetic. And two
levels of motive are figured in the splendid concluding vista of
... the hard mountain ‘planed by ice and polished by the wind’—the
white volcano with no weather side;