STANLEY KUNITZ—HIS NETTLED FIELD, HIS DUNE GARDEN 203An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.
I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones,
Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me
The song of my marrow-bones.
Blue poured into summer blue,
A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,
The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew
That part of my life was over.
Already the iron door of the north
Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows
Order their populations forth,
And a cruel wind blows.Nature ’s doings fill each stanza, while a few words pack in subterranean feel-
ings. But why “perturbation,” someone asked him, rather than “commotion”
or “flurry”? Because “There ’s more wingbeat in ‘perturbation’,” with its
beating stresses. And how can a field be disenchanted, or a silo blaze without
burning?
This sort of craft is “closer to biology than to mechanics” in the way a poem
sounds, “the way it lives from word to word, the way it breathes.” For instance,
“theunloved year” gets a startling stress on “un-,” then quickens a bit “on its
hinge” toward winter. Conjuring this poem “in the disenchanted field,” Kunitz
felt a need to leave his wife and young daughter to work abroad. So “the stubble
and the stones” sounds harsh, boring rhymewise into “my marrow-bones.”
With the geese gone, but not their perturbation, sharp change occurs. A
hawk broke out, in late sunlight a silo “blazed,” answering “amazed.” And
change, in him as in the weather, prompts a present tense: “the iron door of the
north / Clangs open.” “End of Summer” ends on its briefest line, held onto by
his spoken voice, “blo-o-o-ows.” Have the geese really gone? No, “their wings
keep beating, from the first word to the last.”
Wild geese and wild swans gripped Yeats, a “great master” for Kunitz, and an
earlier spirit hovers over “End of Summer.” Keats’s stubble fields and gather-
ing swallows bode loss and leaving in “To Autumn,” where Kunitz hears even
more: “Many poems, like the medlar pear, get rotten before they are ripe; this
one stays golden and does not turn.” Maybe he felt as much in getting “End of
Summer” written.
“Even in grade school I was rhyming—doggerel, mainly.” Kunitz was born