The Journey of a Poem Compared to All the Sad Variety of Travel by Delmore Schwartz
A
poem moves forward,
Like the passages and percussions of trains in progress
A pattern of recurrence, a hammer of repetetive occurrence
a slow less and less heard
low thunder under all passengers
Steel sounds tripping and tripled and
Grinding, revolving, gripping, turning, and returning
as the flung carpet of the wide countryside spreads out on
each side in billows
And in isolation, rolled out, white house, red barn, squat silo,
Pasture, hill, meadow and woodland pasture
And the striped poles step fast past the train windows
Second after second takes snapshots, clicking,
Into the dangled boxes of glinting windows
Snapshots and selections, rejections, at angles, of shadows
A small town: a shop's sign - GARAGE, and then white gates
Where waiting cars wait with the unrest of trembling
Breathing hard and idling, until the slow~descent
Of the red cones of sunset: a dead march: a slow tread and heavy
Of the slowed horses of Apollo
- Until the slowed horses of Apollo go over the horizon
And all things are parked, slowly or willingly,
into the customary or at random places.
Like the passages and percussions of trains in progress
A pattern of recurrence, a hammer of repetetive occurrence
a slow less and less heard
low thunder under all passengers
Steel sounds tripping and tripled and
Grinding, revolving, gripping, turning, and returning
as the flung carpet of the wide countryside spreads out on
each side in billows
And in isolation, rolled out, white house, red barn, squat silo,
Pasture, hill, meadow and woodland pasture
And the striped poles step fast past the train windows
Second after second takes snapshots, clicking,
Into the dangled boxes of glinting windows
Snapshots and selections, rejections, at angles, of shadows
A small town: a shop's sign - GARAGE, and then white gates
Where waiting cars wait with the unrest of trembling
Breathing hard and idling, until the slow~descent
Of the red cones of sunset: a dead march: a slow tread and heavy
Of the slowed horses of Apollo
- Until the slowed horses of Apollo go over the horizon
And all things are parked, slowly or willingly,
into the customary or at random places.
I'm on my way to Wales this evening thus the departure from Mary Oliver Monday to offer up this lovely little poem about the journey of a poem. I find it interesting that the title and poem can be interpreted in many ways . . . is it the journey of a poem that is being written? Or the journey that a reader takes when encountering a poem for the first or even fifty first time? I like to read this literally. I picture the journey of the poem itself: written on a piece of paper and tucked in a pocket to be carried on a hike, in a book with others that have been tucked into a carry on bag and tossed into an overhead compartment, resting comfortably in the mind of a traveler and turned to for a bit of conversation as the landscape unfolds out a train window. |
| Interior of Gladstone's Library |
There's something about traveling to Wales that is so tied up with landscape and poetry in my mind that poem/journey/landscape form a kind of tangled trinity. It has me wondering how this trip will impact my own writing. Although the days are delegated to pilgrimage work, I've set aside the evenings for writing. I'm also looking forward to discovering some new (to me) poems and poets as I browse the shelves of Gladstone's library, so stay tune this week for more poems and perhaps even some pictures.
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