310 PART THREE
Nights” moves between solitary terror and—what? How do we get from holy
speech to yaw yaw yaw?
Starting in deep, Kinnell can’t explain why we might lie in terror, at night in
northern winter. Possibly Vietnam encroaching. Thank goodness for the stanza
break, because come morning we ’re out walking, alert to hibernating bear
breaths. But snake, earthworm, ant—can we hear them inside his three dots?
Life is stirring, waiting beneath us to awaken. Then crying from above—some
raucous spirit. Since tame crows are uncommon, the wild must really matter.
Nature, being indifferent, greets the poem’s prayer with a rawness caught in
roughhewn verse: “a wild crow crying ‘yaw yaw yaw’ / from a branch nothing
cried from ever in my life.” Desolation? Consolation? Both in one?
Frost ’s perfect anecdote now sounds a bit tame.
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
only changes “some part” of a bad day. His bleakest moment occurs in “The
Most of It,” when “a great buck” stumbles past him into the underbrush “—and
that was all.”
Bypassing platitude and piety, Kinnell runs awestruck into raucousness. What
convinces is his compact, concrete, startling touch. Swayed in his late teens by
Yeats, like Roethke and countless others, he worked away from lush language,
rhyme, and meter. Take “The Gray Heron”:
It held its head still
while its body and green
legs wobbled in wide arcs
from side to side. When
it stalked out of sight,the speaker followed and found only a large lizard
watching me
to see if I would go
or change into something else.Like George Oppen facing “the wild deer” in “Psalm,” Kinnell denies “we can
do whatever we wish with the other creatures.” We ’re “only one among the
many animal species,” each with “their intricate ways of living on earth.”
“Let the cow, the horse, the mussel, eel, the sting-ray, and the grunting pig-
fish—let these, and the like of these, be put on a perfect equality with man and
woman!” Whitman’s demand sounds right for Kinnell. Even pigs get the gift
of his gab, in “Saint Francis and the Sow,”