Jane Kenyon, The Subtle Stylist
The Subtle Stylist
Jane Kenyon, Otherwise. New and Selected Poems. Saint Paul: Greywolf Press, 1996
As a winter blast sweeps across the country, dipping down into the Asheville area, forcing those of us who have plants out to cover them, a spring poem might brighten our outlook and remind us of a poet who loved the earth and being in the garden or walking her dog up a muddy road in early spring. Here is “April Chores”
When I take the chilly tools
from the shed’s darkness, I come
out to a world made new
by heat and light.
The snake basks and dozes
on a large flat stone.
It reared and scolded me
for raking too close to its hole.
Like a mad red brain
the involuted rhubarb leaf
thinks its way up
through loam.
Jane Kenyon could modulate a moment with such simplicity, taking predominantly simple sentences and breaking them apart as one would peel back the rind of an orange and wedge apart the carpels, savoring each section. She rarely used hypotactic syntax with subordinate clauses. If she does, the sentence has a forcefulness that is both engaging and startling. She favors using independent sentences—paratactic syntax— each standing on its own. But, as she arranges them in a stanza and throughout the poem, they resonate quietly, offering a whole picture of life with each of its elements set like a table set for dinner, each settling meticulously arranged—knife, fork,spoon— in its place.
In this poem, the first stanza offers the contrast of the chilly dark of a shed and the heated light of day. In the second stanza, there’s an encounter with a snake who wakens to a threat. Syntactically, the stanza is balance with two verbs in each sentence—basks and dozes followed by reared and scolded. The last stanza describes rhubarb as a “mad red brain,” giving the plant a startling intelligence as it “thinks” its “way up/through loam.”
Any one of the stanzas, set off by itself, would be like a haiku, setting different images against one another to create an emotional afflatus. Yet there’s a satisfaction in the series of observations, an orderliness, each building momentum, adding to the other, so by the end, the moment is animated, come to life. Yet the “red brain” explodes the careful descriptions. Instead of experiencing the natural world as something observed, although with a little threat from the snake, we are thrown into a “red brain,” that is living and thinking. It intrudes into our normal expectations of what a rhubarb should be. We don’t imagine a rhubarb having a brain. Yet in early spring, when I look at the clustered, globular shots of rhubarb, that’s exactly what it looks like: “a red brain.” She just lets us see it anew as she does the whole April day.
Kenyon’s facility at making observations that, in turn, become metaphors that, as she accrues more details, add to and modify the metaphors, create a stunning world of their own. In another poem “The Guest,” she pays attention to a fly, which, lord knows, if most of us are looking at a fly, it’s with a rolled-up magazine to smash it. But not Kenyon.
I had opened the draft on the stove
and my head was tending downwards when
a portly housefly dropped on the page
in front of me. Confused by the woodstove’s
heat, the fly, walking ill-tempered, lay
on its back, flailing its legs and wings.
Then it lurched into the paper clips.
The morning passed, and I forgot about
my guest, except when the buzz rose
and quieted, rose and quieted—tires
spinning on ice, chain saw far away,
someone carrying on alone. . . .
Two stanzas. Four sentences. One simple declarative sentence. Three hypotactic with adverbial clauses and participial phrases. Nothing overly complex except seven lines that had enjambments, the rest end stops. The syntax, as in most of her poems, is plain and unencumbered. But if we look at the diction, she uses a few choice words to describe the fly. “Portly,” “confused,” and “ill-tempered” portray the fly as one would speak of the lady across the street. The narrator is sympathetic of its plight and in no hurry to swat it. In fact, she forgets about it. Until it lurches and then speaks “the buzz rose and quieted, rose and quieted,” letting us know it’s there, making its presence known. For many poets, such a moment would be an opportune time to do something radical, to enter into the mind of the fly, to change the narrator’s attitude toward the creature. But Kenyon doesn’t overreach. She lets the sound speak of the other world, the others outside, coping with the cold, wanting, just as the fly, to keep warm. She widens her circle of empathy by linking the fly’s buzz to tires “spinning/on ice, chain saw far away,” sounds that unite the insect and human life in a common task.
What it takes to find in the simple observation of a fly that wants to keep warm and, by patiently, keeping faithful to it, letting it speak with the “buzz” hard consonants and “quieted” soft vowels repeated like a litany twice, and, then, effortlessly extending those sounds to the “tires spinning,” with its harsh consonants and soft vowels and “chain saw,” with its long and short “a’s”—the mix of long and short, harsh and soft, is what makes her poems so quietly dynamic. On the surface, when you first read them, nothing much is happening. But if you wait awhile, read them again, the music begins to play, the artful use of parallelisms, the inflected sound repetition, the easy fall of an enjambment that carries you into the next line played against the end stops that signal a pause, a break to keep you focused on the images in the line—all of those subtle moves make her work seem effortless. But it isn’t effortless. It belies a deep sense of the craft and what subtle moves can do to make a poem work.
Most readers of her work know, of course, the poem “Otherwise,” which is heart wrenching. But she has so many others, equally powerful, about walking her dog up the hill, about clearing out her mother’s belongings after her death, about the change of season, about her loss of strength and loss of words as the leukemia drained her vitality. Take the poem “Ice Out,” and how much she yearns for life, how much she doesn’t want to lose it, and captures such a moment for us.
As late as yesterday ice preoccupied
the pond—dark, half-melted, waterlogged.
Then it sank in the night, one piece
taking winter with it. And afterward
everything seems simple and good.
All afternoon I lifted oak leaves
from the flowerbeds, and greeted
like friends the green-white crowns
of perennials. They have the tender,
unnerving beauty of a baby’s head.
How I hated to come in! I’ve left
the windows open to hear the peepers’
wildly disproportionate cries.
Dinner is over, no one stirs. The dog
Sighs, sneezes, and closes his eyes.
This poem has such a lush use of language. Who would have thought of a ice “preoccupying” a pond? Immediately, the ice is given intelligence, its being absorbed in and intruding on the pond. With the next quick sentence, the ice is gone. She rejoices in the end of winter, “everything seems simple and good.” The next stanza, a temporal shift, has her clearing out the oak leaves, often toxic, acidic, to let the “green-white crowns” that, once again, are given human qualities, their “unnerving beauty of a baby’s head.” As a gardener, she had an intimate relationship with her flowers. Since I’m also a gardener, I relish the breaking of the ground, the first flowers pressing upward. I know them, the spot they habituate, and count on them to come up. I want to make sure each of them had what it needs. My husband often has to call me in. “That’s enough. Listen to your voice. You’re tired,” he says. “Give it a break.” So it is with Kenyon. She even leaves the window open, letting the fresh, redolent air come in, too., along with the peepers’ cries. To close the poem, she lets her dog do all the work, his eyes closing the day.
Technically, what is apparent in this poem as in her other poems is a careful mix of long and short, Anglo-Saxon and Latinate words, and a fluidity of constant and vowel sounds rippling from line to line. The three and five syllable words are a cornucopia of vowels—the o’s in particular—that carry whole lines and contrast with the one and two syllable words that are packed with s’s, f’s, and g’s. She also mixes the line breaks, sometimes having what’s called an annotated break that severs a subject from a verb “dog/sighs) or a noun from a modifier (crowns/of perennials; leaves/ from) or a possessive noun from what it possesses ( peepers’/ . . .cries). She paces those breaks with end stop lines, two in the first and last stanza, one in the second. She also ends sentences mid-way through a line, so the momentum of the sentences is modulated with a mix of pauses.
She does this with an ease, letting the poem unwind image by image. What is so endearing about her poems is how laid back they are. There are no extravagances, no bombast, no language that calls attention to itself, no dramatic cries, nothing that would get in the way of seeing, listening, and being in the moment. Reading her poems feels like having her hold my hand and walk with her as she points to the first daffodils nudging into light or the peonies alive with ants and bees. In a time when language is often used to exaggerate and inflate someone, when political campaigns tout their candidates and denigrate their opponents, when fingers are pointed, when news program inflame the rhetoric, Kenyon is a perfect anodyne. I can slip into one of her poems as I do one of my garden gloves and poke around the living world, knowing if I can only do as she does, if I can look, hear, and be with what surrounds me, this land, this earth, I can find some truths that speak far louder than any candidate.
