One may even speculate this laudatory article may have
been left in the depot as late as 1922 (when this poem was written) for waiting
business travelers by an enterprising Chamber of Commerce to showcase the
progress the town was making (and to this day has yet to realize). For the adjacent
story in the issue was “Position of the Planets for June.” This is just the
type of non-linear combination of topics that could spark a frisson in our enterprising poet, and
result in a meditation on the relationship between the fixed stars and ever-industrious
humans.
The poetic meditation in question follows:
The lines are straight and swift
between the stars.
The night is not the cradle that
they cry,
The criers, undulating the
deep-oceaned phrase.
The lines are much too dark and
much too sharp.
The mind herein attains
simplicity,
There is no moon, no single,
silvered leaf.
The body is no body to be seen
But is an eye that studies its
black lid.
Let these be your delight,
secretive hunter,
Wading the sea-lines, moist and
ever-mingling,
Mounting the earth-lines, long
and lax, lethargic.
These lines are swift and fall
without diverging.
The melon-flower nor dew nor web
of either
Is like to these. But in yourself is like:
A sheaf of brilliant arrows
flying straight,
Flying and falling straightway
for their pleasure,
Their pleasure that is all
bright-edged and cold;
Or, if not arrows, then the
nimblest motions,
Making recoveries of young
nakedness
And the lost vehemence the
midnights hold.
The poem opens with a sharp demarcation between the stars
and humans. “The lines are straight and swift between the stars” refers to the
common experience of stargazers, who can almost literally see the mythical
facsimiles of lions, crabs, etc. outline the constellations. It’s easy, in
other words, to see an order in the night sky, even a higher astrological purpose.
The heavens, however, have limited impact on humans because the earth is our home:
“The night is not the cradle that they cry.” Double meanings here for the
words “cradle” and “cry” suggest both “the stars are not the protective crib
where we express our deep emotion” (such as making poems?) and “the stars are not
the originary force we declare them to be.” For we, “the criers,” can only
express ourselves under the limitations imposed upon us by our earthly home, “undulating
the deep-oceaned phrase.” Thus our relationship to the stars (and by extension
God and the heavens) remains vague and fanciful, however awestruck we feel and
however thoroughly the celestial bodies have been mapped out by the ancients: “The
lines are much too dark and much too sharp.”
“Herein” (in this earthly location) “the mind … attains
simplicity.” This is a clever reversal of the normal assumption that abstract reasoning
– the ability to link seemingly disparate phenomena into a coherent essence
that can be categorized as a whole – is a higher mental function. Instead, it
is human’s inability to do this – through being aligned to the earth and its
multiplicitous manifestations – that is the higher attainment. Thus, “there is no moon, no single, silvered leaf.” There
are so many phases and appearances of the moon, and so many distinct
appearances in all the illuminated branches in the forests that we can’t say it
is one connected thing, as we would say of a cluster of galaxies, for example,
that it is Canis Major.
We can't even accurately perceive ourselves. “The (human) body” is not a celestial body we
can see in the sky, in fact it can’t be seen at all since we are part of it. We
are only the Emersonian “eye” that sees what’s around – or, rather, doesn’t see,
but “studies its black lid.” As a night sky can be only faintly perceived, our “studies”
of what is around us are limited by the fact that 1), we can only sense ourselves sensing, and 2), our eyes are closed, aka we are living in a dream. This idea
of both waking and sleeping life as being equally a dream or illusion appears more
definitively in the poem “Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion,” written about the
same time.
This inability of humans to perceive or conceive of their
world should be a “delight,” somehow, to the “secretive hunter” introduced in
the third stanza. There are actually two secretive hunters. This
figure addressed as “you” is revealed to be Orion, one of the brightest constellations
periodically passing through our night skies, known, because of its bow and
arrow, as the hunter. There’s also the more earth-bound trapper of sustenance
referred to as “these,” who, observed from starry heights, go “Wading the
sea-lines, moist and ever-mingling,” an evocative picture of a fisherman breaking
the ripples of the ocean, his encroaching wetness part of merging with the
water.
Extending the description, the earth-bound hunter goes “Mounting
the earth-lines, long and lax, lethargic.” In case one was wondering what the
term “earth-lines” means, the poet helpfully supplies “long[itude]” and “lax[itude]”
to indicate we are talking about the imaginary lines
around the earth. “Mount” in this context suggests navigation – historically accomplished
by tracking the stars – something that all hunters must eventually do.
“Lethargic” is a curious word here until one considers its
Greek root of Lethe, the river of oblivion where the dead forget their earthly
life on the way to the Underworld. From a distance, humans seem lethargic –
like astronauts in space – because we wander around in forgetfulness, dreaming
and misperceiving the world. “These lines are swift and fall without diverging.”
The speaker speculates that the quickness, isolation and finality of human
lives are what would make them such a delight to the higher being looking down on human affairs.
The next stanza clarifies the relationship. As poets and
philosophers have noted from time immemorial, humans are inherently separate from
the earth that imprisons them in its bounteous life (“the melon-flower … dew … web”).
Nothing of nature is “like to these.” In contrast, humans are just like the mythological
archer, “a sheaf of brilliant arrows flying straight,” aiming at truth for
their Jovian pleasure. Unlike Orion’s cold and inaccessible lines to humans in
the night skies, the real and imaginary lines humans make are something the
observing hunter can genuinely relate to.
The poem progresses from alien stars and familiar earth to familiar
stars and alien earth so subtly one can hardly notice the play of imaginative
sympathy the speaker engages in to get there. Only by looking at humans coldly –
from a star’s eye view – can the stars themselves warm up, and the connections
between stars and humans be revealed.
The fifth and final stanza deepens the relationship further, to the point where the separate realms become interdependent. “Their
pleasure,” that of humans, is also “all bright-edged and cold.” But, no, those
aren’t actual arrows (for either side). The “nimblest motions” of humans are
instead a drive to recover something of their starry home. What is recovered is described in a flash
of poetry: “young nakedness / And the lost vehemence the midnights hold.” The
midnights are where the constellations reside, with their almost human passions
and drives, which they hold in continual, vehement expression.
The genius of this poem is to suggest the state of
unattainable wisdom the stars possess is ultimately the same as the pure state
of innocence (“young nakedness”) for which humans, far down the cosmic chain,
are prized by the Gods. Humans seek both equally, caught in a nether world
between the two, utterly unable to comprehend the simplest of facts about our
place in the universe, that, as TS Eliot wrote, “in the beginning is the end.”
The key is the word “lethargy.” We have forgotten, and
things like the imaginative transport of poetry help us at least to know we’ve
forgotten, and to comfort us, as all great poetry does, from our loss.
This obscure little poem set in a small town covers a lot of
ground, doesn’t it? How much can be made from a delay at the train station on a
magical night.
