By Carol Gilbertson, Dennis M. Jones Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Humanities, 2002-04
February
28 , 2003: "Rearrange Your Mind This Winter"
A. R. Ammons, "Bonus," "Small Song," and "Photosynthesis," from The Selected Poems: Expanded Edition, W. W. Norton, 1986.
Sample Section:
One of the best things about winter in Iowa is the brilliant sun. All through January Term, my students and I came into our east-facing classroom and, reluctantly, agreed to tilt the blinds to deepen the golden light so that we could see each other. When my family lived in Texas during a sabbatical year a few years ago, we enjoyed the milder temperatures but missed the sharp enlightenment of sun-streamed, subzero days, when the light multiplies across the plains of white snowdrifts.
Poets try to capture such visual impressions in the words of poems of all shapes, sizes, and lengths. One poet who masters the brief but highly suggestive poem is A. R. Ammons, whose poem "Bonus" (The Selected Poems: Expanded Edition, W. W. Norton, 1986) points us to poignant details of the winter sun's effects:
The hemlocks slumped
already as if bewailing
the branch-loadingshales of ice, the rain
changes and a snow
sifty as fogbegins to fall, brightening
the ice's bruise-glimmer
with white holdings:the hemlocks, muffled,
deepen to the grim
taking of a further beauty on.
The poem forces us not only to see a scene of natural beauty, but to move beyond a naive acceptance of its simplicity. A freezing rain repeatedly laminates its own layers of ice (like shale) until the evergreen hemlocks seem to "bewail" the heavy ice loading down their branches as the cold rain turns into a light snow. The ice has "bruised" the branches with its harsh weight, yet as the sifting snow lights on the trees and "muffles" the brittle, iced branches, the ice-bruise is what "glimmers" against the outline of bright snow. So the task that the already-beautiful hemlocks take on in accepting the ice and snow is a "grim" one, yet deep beauty emerges from their bittersweet reception. Beauty sometimes involves sadness and even suffering.
In "Bonus," the poet deepens for us the emotional effect of a natural scene. Sometimes the poet's touch is even lighter, as in the teeny poem "Small Song":
The reeds give
way to thewind and give
the wind away
Here the poet cleverly inverts and alters a repeated phrase to evoke the physics of wind pressure on reeds, and vice versa. The spare words suggest a symbiotic relationship: the wind delicately bullies the reeds, but the reeds get their own back. They lean to the wind's pressure but also channel and slow its trajectory through ever-so-slight friction. And the reeds exercise their autonomy by voluntarily deciding to offer the wind to other natural recipients of its air movement downwind.
In a more complex poem, "Photosynthesis," Ammons imaginatively constructs this complex natural process by which plants transform the sunlight's energy into organic compounds:
The sun's wind
blows the fire
green, sails the
chloroplasts,
lifts banks, bogs,
boughs into flame:
the green ash of
yellow loss.
Ammons figuratively blurs light waves and air movement so that the sun "blows" light into each plant cell, sending its chloroplasts "sailing" in the "sun's wind," metaphorically speaking. Pardon this nonscientist's explanation here: chloroplasts, as I understand them, are the miniscule organelles in green plant cells in which photosynthesis occurs. The chloroplasts' chlorophyll molecules--which produce a plant's green color--trap light energy and convert it to chemical energy to create organic matter. This is the process by which plants grow.
Just as blowing air on a fire will cause it to flame up, then, the sun's light, in the photosynthetic process, can be said to fuel a "fire" of greenness taking over in the natural world as the warmer days of spring come on. Just as actual fire seems to raise its combustibles slightly as they burn, the gradual emergence of new plant growth seems to lift riverbanks, sloughs, and tree boughs in its metaphorical flame. What results, as in fire, is the "ash" of what has been lost in this photosynthetic combustion.
Normally, we think of loss in the fall season, when dead brown leaves seem to be the "ash" of our lost summer green. But here, Ammons forces us to think about seasonal changes in new terms: what if we rearranged our thought to see nature's spring greening as a fire consuming the landscape, and a green leaf's budding not as a signal of our gain on summer but rather of our loss of late winter's bare branch and yellow leaf?
By helping us to re-envision natural
scenes and chemical and physical processes, poems--even those of barely a
few lines--enable us to think anew about the mundane world we see each day.
So when you feel winter's wind blasts or see the first spring leaves come
out, remember these poems. And rearrange your mind and its eye.
