Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

name and is no more than “air”—a ¤tting designation vis-à-vis the “earth”
of #1. Then, too, the dialectic between “wane” and “anew” is contained in the
morpheme end in “ascend” and foregrounded in “to the end.” No way to “as-
cend,” it seems, without the terminus of the “end” in sight. And that paradox
leads to the lovely ¤nal lyric that plays exquisite variations on two letters,
o and n:

on on on on o

noon on on on

on on on on o

noon on noon

on on on...

Johnson’s little ¤nale contains a Beckettian “on” (as in “I must go on I can’t
go on I’ll go on... ”), juxtaposed to the exclamatory particle o and the word
“noon,” with its paragram on “no one.” Indeed “no” is the mirror image of
“on,” and the poem asks to be read from both left and right.
But the lyric “On” has a clinamen that is especially interesting. It is the
only one of these lyrics that introduces excessive spacing (see line 4) so as to
make the sides of the square equal. This lyric is also the only one that has a
foreshortened ¤nal line, thus ful¤lling the promise of the “open open open”
of #6.
Commenting on the ¤nal bars of Mahler’s last song, Der Abschied (“The
Farewell”), Henry-Louis de La Grange remarks:

The dimension of “openness”... is preserved until the very end, when

the ¤nal C major chord upon which the ®ute and the clarinet obsti-

nately maintain a dissonant A instead of letting it descend to G, as tra-

ditional harmony would require. It imparts a sense of timelessness to

the ¤nal bars, in which the last two notes of the solo voice (“Ewig,”

E-D) are also not allowed to reach the tonic (C). Furthermore, three of

the four notes in this ¤nal chord are those of the main leitmotif of

the word—A-G-E. The movement ends in near-silence with the pianis-

simo tonic chord sustained by three trombones and woodwinds, and

brief arpeggio fragments plucked at by the harp, mandolin, and celesta.

(Mahler 468)

What interests me here is that although Johnson’s words are by no means
comparable to the formal diction of Mahler’s Lied (“Die liebe Erde allüberall/

Johnson’s Verbivocovisuals 203