One Word Makes A World
“Every word matters” goes the truism, which ought to prove true with the greatest poems (or at least the greatest lyric poems); but does it, if put to the test? Do no words tread water in, say, “Ode to a Nightingale?” Consider its eight trimeter lines, each taking the eighth spot in the ode’s eight dizains. Seven of them function, beautifully, as much more than transitions, each making a substantive contribution: spatially (“[i]n some melodious plot”); sensorially (“[a]nd purple-stained mouth”); emotionally (“[a]nd leaden-eyed despairs’); tonally (“[i]n such an ecstasy!”); temporally (“[a]nd mid-May’s eldest child”); and both spatially and temporally (“[i]n the next valley glades”). My personal favorite of these seven is the simplest: “[b]ut here there is no light,” a disquietingly plain report (and one reason why the Keatsian vintage doesn’t age). In the penultimate stanza, however, an inelegantly orphaned fragment delivers the compulsory trimeter:
. . . [p]erhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
Keats needed a rhyme for “path,” as well as a bridge between the “self-same song” Ruth hears and the desolate “faery lands” that bring the stanza up short on “forlorn.” “The same that oft-times hath” gets the job done, but that’s all it does. (Thanks to Lloyd Schwartz for pointing me to this uncharacteristically ore-deprived rift.)
I’ll dispense with workshopping Keats to explore a different, if related, question: in some poems, can a single word matter so much more than all the others that, without it, the poem becomes the diminished self of its former shadow? Of course, a particular word often enacts a crucial turn — “therefore” in James Wright’s “Autumn Begins in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio,” for example — or incites an unanticipated tonal cadence: “form” in the last line of Louise Glück’s “Celestial Music” behaves that way. In an issue of Plume, T.R. Hummer makes an eloquent case for the special role that “interpose” performs in Dickinson’s “I heard a Fly Buzz — when I died.”
But I’m thinking about writing in which one word releases an entirely new way of reading it, otherwise unavailable. I’ll first test this notion on a small scale: 28 words, including the title, by the Argentinian writer, Enrique Anderson-Imbert (1910-2000). To North Americans, Anderson-Imbert may be better known, if known at all, as a scholar who taught Hispanic literature at Harvard from 1965 to 1980. In his own country, he is in the same league as Borges and Cortázar, counted among the masters of the magical realist micro-story. In a wonderful, somewhat fugitive chapbook titled Cage with Only One Side (this time thanks to Todd Romanowski for the tip), Isabel Reade translates the example below:
TRAP
After the last birds died the cage took off from the patio and began flying toward heaven. “It’s coming to ask our forgiveness,” thought the unwary angels.
I first heard “Trap” at a presentation — the presenter’s name escapes me — and was one among many who asked for a pause to write it down verbatim. As far as I know, the only attention it’s received in print occurs in a 2006 interview with Heather McHugh in BOMB. Like nearly everyone who encounters “Trap,” McHugh fastens on that extraordinary, penultimate “unwary”: “Boom. Or rather, shhhh then boom. A fuse is ignited — the thing goes off a bit later, in the reader’s brain. The bombshell’s hidden in the humblest word — ‘unwary.’” McHugh is right: “unwary” completes “Trap” in a startling way (although the suburban setting lies dormant until “patio,” almost as miraculous a choice). What’s exceptional, irreplaceably so, about “unwary” involves how it turns a fable into a story, enlisting all the other words in its transformative project. Perhaps most obviously, it deepens the limited omniscient viewpoint established by “thought”: the cage acts, but the angels, the true protagonists, not only think but think naïvely. The word also discloses the cage’s sinister reason for flying to heaven in the first place; otherwise, the angels would have nothing to beware. And while we accept that these spirits, presumably unfallen, are blameless by definition, their innocence comes across as a kind of fatal complacency, which may have caused the extinction of their wingéd kin back on earth. The eerily circular storyline and forgone conclusion account for much of what’s disturbing about “Trap,” a title that characterizes not just the cage but also the ineluctable aftermath. Without “unwary,” however, we’d have an intriguing tale, but not the layered plot, or richly ironic narrative perspective, of “Trap.” And no synonym, at least in English, will do, as two other failed translations prove (neither of which, oddly, bears the title):
After the last one of the birds had died, the cage rose out of the patio, and began to fly through the sky. “He is coming to ask for forgiveness,” the surprised angels thought.
— translated by Armand F. Baker
After the last birds died, the cage took off from the patio and began to fly toward heaven. “It is coming to us to ask for forgiveness,” thought the angels, unaware.
— translated by Carleton Vail and Pamela Edwards-Mondragón
“Surprised” and “unaware” ruin these versions, but for different reasons. The Spanish desprevenidos translates as “by surprise” or “unprepared” or “unaware.” Baker settles for the least resonant option, evoking a tepid, if airborne, surprise party (notice also the apathetic choice of “sky” for the Spanish cielo). Vail and Edwards-Mondragón’s “unaware,” its placement tongue-tying the rhythm, calls to mind an interrupted bong party, the edge of risk blunted. The etymological root system of “aware” and “beware” includes the Old English gewær (“watchful, vigilant”) and bewarian (“to defend”), a sense of urgency that “unaware” more or less leaves buried. Reade’s “unwary” is a triumph not only of diction but also of syntax, matching Anderson-Imbert’s original. Where else but in the penultimate place would that one word out of 28 merit the McHugh Shhhh-Boom Prize? Of course, the other words in “Trap” do more than sinecure work — try synonyms for “patio,” “forgiveness,” and especially the post-apocalyptic “last” and “died,” and see what you get — but “unwary” tells us that the fix is in. “The poor birds can’t even escape the cage by dying!” a student of mine once exclaimed.
Suppose the ratio were increased from 1:28 to 1:153 or 1:218. Can one word so outnumbered still generate a sovereign but illuminating world of implication otherwise nonexistent? Two poems provide fascinating test cases. Both are well-known; the first, by Seamus Heaney, world-famous:
DIGGING
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
Written in the summer of 1964, launching Heaney’s 1966 debut, Death of a Naturalist, “Digging” introduced Heaney’s matchless “music of what happens” to readers of poetry in English. Among those readers, I wasn’t alone in pausing awhile at the second line’s simile, awaiting the moment when that gun would return and, perhaps, go off. Instead, a primarily georgic and familial poem ensues. Adam Kirsch’s 2006 appreciation in Harvard Magazine gets the husbandry and genealogy right, but in eliding the firearm, neglects to notice the expectations it raises:
” ‘Digging’ … is [a] prescient statement of the themes that would dominate his poetry: his sensual love of his native ground; his fascination with work and all kinds of tools; his vision of poetry as a traditional, laborious, and sustaining craft, like farming … [I]t takes the form of a promise, a commitment from the poet to his father and grandfather, whose lives were spent literally digging the soil. Heaney acknowledges that he is not a farmer, and will not follow their vocation. But at the start of his career, he vows to translate their virtues into another kind of work.”
All true enough; and to be fair to Kirsch, his piece doesn’t purport to offer a close reading. But the question remains: how come the gun? In a 2018 Poem of the Week column for the online Yorkshire Times, Steve Whitaker says how come:
“[T]he double-edged presence of a gun image early in the poem strikes a deliberately discordant note … [It seems] likely that the “Troubles,” which began only a couple of years after this book was published, and continued for a further thirty, were stirring in the poet’s mind at the time of writing.”
Well said, but Heaney’s imagination needn’t have stirred so proleptically. “The Troubles” indeed postdate “Digging,” but The Border Campaign from 1956 to 1962 — attacks carried out by the IRA against British military targets in Northern Ireland, later on provoking an eponymous poem in Heaney’s Electric Light (2001) — was fresh enough in the young poet’s memory to unsettle him into his troubling simile.
But how does the gun’s discordant note, once struck, reverberate in the poem that follows? It doesn’t; or, rather, it does so by its silence. Disobeying Chekhov’s principle, the gun in “Digging” takes center stage precisely because it exits. In the penultimate line, the missing simile, like a phantom limb, haunts an otherwise exact refrain:
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests [ ].
This omission completes the “promise” that Kirsch only partially recognizes as a familial vow and Ars Poetica. Heaney explicitly chooses his pen over the farm implements of his forefathers; the poem itself renounces a second vocational option every bit as available as farming. “Digging” gives up the gun — a literally disarming slight-of-hand, all the more audacious because of its restraint. Is the repudiation of armed revolt shaded with temptation, a Yeatsian tinge of regret at not enlisting in the “the terrible beauty” of revolutionary action? The poem remains maddeningly, magnificently, silent on the question.
So, one way a world arises from a word requires that word’s conspicuous absence. Can a word also single-handedly extend a poem’s territory by its inconspicuous presence? Rita Dove wrote three lyrics about adolescence for her first book, The Yellow House on the Corner (1980); the third and best of them prompts that question:
ADOLESCENCE — III
With Dad gone, Mom and I worked
The dusky rows of tomatoes.
As they glowed orange in sunlight
And rotted in shadow, I too
Grew orange and softer, swelling out
Starched cotton slips.
The texture of twilight made me think of
Lengths of Dotted Swiss. In my room
I wrapped scarred knees in dresses
That once went to big-band dances;
I baptized my earlobes with rosewater.
Along the window-sill, the lipstick stubs
Glittered in their steel shells.
Looking out at the rows of clay
And chicken manure, I dreamed how it would happen:
He would meet me by the blue spruce,
A carnation over his heart, saying,
“I have come for you, Madam;
I have loved you in my dreams.”
At his touch, the scabs would fall away.
Over his shoulder, I see my father coming toward us:
He carries his tears in a bowl,
And blood hangs in the pine-soaked air.
“Adolescence — III” richly portrays the sheer impatience of sexual awakening, especially under the pressure of a parent’s absence. We don’t know whether Dad is AWOL, on temporary leave, divorced, or dead, but we know he’s gone throughout the girl’s puberty. As antidote to a drab farm life of clay and chicken manure, her imagination invests evening skies with the gossamer touch of a lightweight fabric. Trying on her mother’s dresses, she “wraps” her scarred knees as if they need bandaging, and she imbues the icons of erotic fantasy — perfume, lipstick, carnations — with religious awe and prom-night bliss, her hallucinated Prince Charming part Arthurian, part Harlequin. But when her romance novel reaches its climax — her tomboyish scabs erased by a touch — sensual reverie turns into anxiety dream. Dad returns, bearing grief by the bowlful — whether out of guilt for his truancy or fear for his daughter’s chastity, we can’t stay. The blood that reddens the scent of the pine trees completes a color scheme begun by the tomatoes and carried through the presumably scarlet lipstick and the girl’s skinned knees. As with the onset of female puberty itself, menstruation “spots” the poem.
If our responses to “Adolescence — III” ended there, we’d have a fine poem, somewhat like “Digging” without its gun (although all the rot, scars, scabs, clay, and manure suggest, if not poverty, at least a farm childhood far drabber than Heaney’s). The word that’s hard to miss — although I confess I did at first — is “hangs.” Once we permit its connotations to work on us, we can’t help glimpsing, almost subliminally, the hateful spectacle of a lynching, as the poem’s fever dream wakes bolt upright into the nightmare of American racial terrorism. The word doesn’t solve the father’s unexplained absence. His spectral return may represent a visit from the dead, and strange fruit may indeed bleed from the pines soaking the air with their scent—the line shares much of the eerie surreality of Abel Meeropol’s great poem of a song — but Dove’s combustible word choice ignites the poem’s atmosphere with a distinct sense of horror; it does not supply a clear-cut backstory. Like Anderson-Imbert’s modest-seeming “unwary” and the strategic bluff of Heaney’s “gun,” Dove’s charged use of “hangs” creates a new angle of inference. It’s not the code to a combination lock.
New Critical purists may object to my approaches to “Digging” and “Adolescence — III,” which depend on at least a few details from the poets’ lives. Nothing in “Digging” pegs Heaney as an Irish poet acutely alert to his nation’s sectarian upheavals, although “Toner’s bog” pretty much clinches the speaker’s nationality. “Adolescence — III” nowhere identifies Rita Dove’s adolescent speaker as Black, and “hangs” would lose its connotative force without that knowledge. My whole interpretative edifice may rest not only on a lone word, but also upon extraneous biographical evidence. Except, I’m not a New Critic! The great deal known about Heaney and Dove — both very publicly laureated — long ago rang a bell impossible to unring. If ringing it adds to the pleasure of understanding, but breaks a law, I’ll take pleasure over legality.
I’ve tried to think of other poems in which a single word functions so autonomously, but thus far have come up short, or just short of short. Maybe “drive,” in Robert Creeley’s “I Know a Man,” fits the bill, because it alone demystifies “the darkness [that] sur-/rounds” the speaker and his pseudonymous buddy, in one stroke plunking them down into a speeding car’s interior. Witty as it is, Creeley’s punchline doesn’t quite rise to the level of “unwary,” “gun,” or “hangs” — words fundamentally “self-regulating,” but also contributing worlds of implication we’d otherwise miss. Do other instances exist, or have I unearthed three curious, but ultimately inconsequential, specimens? If readers of this essay know of poems eligible to join the club, I’d love to hear about them.