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as you swung your blind head
toward us and laboriously opened
a bloodshot, glistening eye,
in which we swam with terror and recognition.Terror greets things that stagger knowing, but such recognition locks us into
contact, like Ted Hughes when an immense pike “rose slowly towards me,
watching.” Several years earlier Kunitz had said of poetry, “what we strive for
is to move from the world of our immediate knowing... into the unknown.”
A bitter thought ends “The Wellfleet Whale”: “You have become like us, / dis-
graced and mortal.” And yet the poet ’s voice reaches out to generations of whales
edging between the ice-floes
through the fat of summer,
lob-tailing, breaching, sounding,
grazing in the pastures of the sea
on krill-rich orange plankton
crackling with life.Writing a poem, he said, “I have the sense of swimming underwater towards
some kind of light and open air that will be saving.”
Human carelessness always angered Kunitz. “The War Against the Trees”
sees “bulldozers, drunk with gasoline,” attack
the great-grandfathers of the town...
They struck and struck again,
And with each elm a century went down.That striking resounds from a century earlier, the “strokes of havoc” in “Binsey
Poplars”:
O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew—
Hack and rack the growing green!No wonder his discovery of Gerard Manley Hopkins “overwhelmed me during
my college years.” Wherever possible—Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Whitman
—Kunitz finds a “root-purity of wonder” at the unspoiled world.
Most of all, Theodore Roethke showed him that purity. Around 1935 a “bat-
tered jalopy” arrived at Kunitz’s Pennsylvania home, and “a perfectly tremen-
dous raccoon coat emerged.” They talked all night, and until Roethke died
in 1963. This dear comrade ’s poems brought him “news of the root, of the
minimal, of the primordial”: “the stretching and reaching of a plant, its green
force, its invincible Becoming.”
Even in America’s backyards, Kunitz has an ear and eye for invincible
Becoming.