Archaic Torso of...
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Lying In A Hammock At William Duffy's Farm In Pine Island, Minnesota Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly, Asleep on the black trunk, blowing like a leaf in green shadow. Down the ravine behind the empty house, The cowbells follow one another Into the distances of the afternoon. To my right, In a field of sunlight between two pines, The droppings of last year's horses Blaze up into golden stones. I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on. A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home. I have wasted my life.
In this one and vicious literary life, the one it takes i suppose - I have been made aware over and over and over again of the fact that James Wright modelled this famous post modern lyric poem after Rilke's more prosaic and formal lyric poem. Not being the one so good at critical thinking, I have made only a few connections between the two, the opening and the ending - which is free candy as far as intellectualism goes. brain fart rubbing itself like yellow smoke upon the windowpane of my carelesness. I have always taken great pleasure, however, in knowing for a fact my winkie is bigger than the one in the photograph included above which often acompanies Rilke's poem on the internet, and in some books of poetry and criticism. I never met james Wright when he was alive, and if I had, would probably not have had the opportunity to compare winkies. But Seeing as so much of modern poetry is masked in intellect, I have developed a theory all modern poetry does is give the male poetic voice a chance to talk about its winkie in esoteric ways. Both these poems address the value of conciousness, the knowing of oneself, and one's winkie, I imagine. Is Rilke saying to the reader, you must change your life because your winkie is smaller than the archaic winkie found in the bust of appallo, or is he reflecting more on the metaphysical undoing of self knowledge? Is wright admitting his life has been nothing more than obsessing about his winkie, or is there something more in divulging to the reader a feeling of having wasted one's life. Both poems juxstapose the sedentary - ie, a statue, fixed, and a man, fixed - both to the earth, while in one the poet speaks of the ethereal, and in the other, a man watches a hawk soar, perhaps looking down upon the field for a mouse, or more likely, trying to gauge the size of wright's winkie, though i am pretty sure the author is fully clothed while lying in the hammock, otherwise, the poem would be entitled, Lying In A Hammock At William Duffy's Farm In Pine Island, Minnesota while a hawk stares at my winkie. In any event, it has come down to this, has it really come dow to nothing greater than this, that we can pull from stone, profound shape and form, only to have it laid upon the wing's of a sentient rapture which is then led through time, eventually to soar in an ever widening gyre above a man who, among many things, understood the nature of profundity, life/death, and perhaps most of all, winkies. |
