the later books of Wordsworth’s Prelude. “Joy rivulets along the sand,” “what
happens” is “Always more heavily / laden,” the self is “only able to sink (albeit
also / lifting as in a / sudden draught),” and so on. True, these elaborate
phrases are punctuated by staccato, more colloquial ones like “I insist that
we ‘go in.’ We go in,” but its general tenor is one of high seriousness. Then,
too, the poet’s voice is carefully distanced by the use of the pronoun “One”
(¤ve instances) and “we” or “our” (six instances), as compared to only three
references to the ¤rst person, in each instance brought in only to qualify a
generalization about “one” as in:
The journey—some journey—visits one.
The journey—some journey—visits me.“Evolution” is an oblique and highly wrought poem, but its central mean-
ings are not dif¤cult to understand once we recognize that it uses the subject
of Darwinian Evolution as a pretext (that word again!) or occasion for a
meditation on what it means to be “human,” to have “evolved” from the ani-
mals into a “higher” species. Where does such evolution leave our powerful
sexual instincts? The poem’s dif¤culties are generated not by semantic gaps
and dislocations, as is the case in Armantrout’s lyric, but by circumlocution
and indirection. The ¤rst line, “One’s nakedness is very slow,” for example,
seems puzzling since nakedness is a condition and hence cannot be either
“fast” or “slow,” but what the poet is really saying here is that one’s acknowl-
edgment of one’s nakedness, or one’s awareness of one’s nakedness, is what
comes only slowly. And as the prosopopoeia of the second line suggests, we
are trained to regard the body as somehow outside the self so that “One calls
to it, one wastes one’s sympathy.”
As such locutions testify, in Graham’s poem the irony is multiplex. One
wants to live instinctually, the poem suggests, but “One cannot keep all of
it.” Then again, “what is keep? A waking good.” So, much as the “I” dutifully
insists “that we ‘go in,’ ” and “We go in,” one resists such rational behavior
and is “swept away” down “the incline.” Graham’s is in fact a latter-day “Dia-
logue of Self and Soul” (Yeats), a débat between the longing for “something
like joy” that “rivulets along the sand” and the recognition that “the eye’s
wild joy sucked down the slope the minutes wave by wave / pack down and
slick.” The Shakespeare echo (“Like as the waves make toward the pebbled
shore / So do our minutes hasten to their end”) paves the way for a mo-
ment of self-recognition. Facing oneself and letting go is hard: it is not dark-
ness but ironically “visibility” that is “blocking the view.” The future of
254 Chapter 13