Wm. Bliss Carman's poem 'The Blue Heron' from his Later Poems has left me unsatisfied in many ways. Perhaps some critic or scholar has noted its resemblance to both a triptych and to the 'Icarus' painting of the elder Bruegel ('Landscape with the Fall of Icarus'.)
The mower is 'among' the hay - not as an insect or frightened rabbit - and the horses are being worked in the heat of day, rather than mowing the hay in the morning and later afternoon. This is hay, not a cash crop in danger of frost. He may not have known the cycle of farm labour.
The meadow lilies may be there in July, but for me they are late July and August. And are they being mowed down, or does he take hay to be in a worked field, and not a meadow?
In July, the heron should have a mate and a fledged chick - it is not a loner soaring where the river may carry it. The patient stalker was not merely 'among the reeds'. Or are we to go from Moses to the shepherd and his flock? What were these trees in the Breugel?
These would not be concerns if it were not the argument of the poet which depends on his grasp of what is transpiring about him, both what is before him as evanescent and what is before him as cyclic, as unreal and as real.
The Breugel appeared in 1912 and this volume in 1922 (Auden on Icarus stems from 1938.)
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The Breugel has its own curiosities as the wax has melted, but is the sun not setting? Or only just rising? If setting, the breeze will be off the water and rising up the landfall - not filling the sails of the ship in the estuary(?) (from what I recall of living by the sea.)
ReplyDeleteSome sheep will fall into the sea - I think of the foam-flecked shorelines.
We suspend disbelief in face of the perspective faults in the Breugel thereby granting him poetic license, if you will. But I am struck by the veracity and poignancy of the Breugel in which - given my love of herons along Carman's home river - is lacking even in reading 'The Blue Heron' aloud to a sympathetic audience. As an editor I would 'blue pencil' his use of "among" until something is said or written to convince me that it be the apposite word.
ReplyDeleteWe sit forgotten among ...
We stand unseen among ...
We lie unseen among ...
but he has chosen see, hear and see - which has something of the text about it (an astute book buyer may smell a book for mold, feel the cracking binding, but those are the senses of the physical text, rather as is the haptic sense of its weight.)
I see
I hear
but then not "I stand among " - which perhaps he cannot as they lie mown in the meadow.
And yet I concede we have the sinews of the great bird rather as the lines held taut by a canvas not luffing in the wind ... and in a year when the age of flight was newly upon us.
Note: the lateen ('latin') sails of the twin-masted ships in the Breugel.
The cut hay will lie in the meadow like furrows, like waves on a rolling sea.
G_R_ What does the swimmer in the surf contribute to Bruegel's 'Landscape with the Fall of Icarus'? Is it not Icarus? How could the people in the painting not notice? And more than not notice. Note the shepherd studiously not observing the momentous event.
ReplyDeleteWhat say you to a heathen in this matter of extracting erudite insight?
RCR
G_R_
ReplyDeleteI add that one being does notice - a sheep
We see only the instant of his plunge into the waters of the passage into the port: one leg and and then he is gone. But who is the figure lower right?
ReplyDeleteI think that, to me, the ship had come down a river, as did the ships of the English fleet - but these three ships rigged with the lateen sails are coming into port (is not one barely visibile already in the inner harbour?
An imitation might be titled:
ReplyDelete"Lone Gray Heron"
The New Brunswick sky is more often gray than blue - as are the herons on the St John River - and I am yet to see a great white egret.
Perhaps an egret rising from a Minnesota backwater is my link from the Carman to the Breugel ... the egret swallowing and the troubled esophagus of Chrisopher Hitchens.
Note to grey 'a' - U Michigan has Carman's work as part of American poetry - and rightly so.
ReplyDeleteWhat does he call as he turns his team?
ReplyDeleteThis fall I heard herons call in late evening - soon there were three together along the shoreline of the river - and then off to roost - but where?
Lone Grey Heron
ReplyDeleteWe see a lone grey heron
Flapping to rise
And then afloat in the wind
A gliding sail, sinews taut
To the set of the stream
I say that racket will be
the mower from the grid road
now slicing at the brome
and trailing a wake of green
in rows awaiting another day
and the rake, the turn of the hay.
We climb the bank and find
a few early lilies far
from the clacking blades,
the shuttling ragged teeth.
The old Ford draws the mower
from edge to middle and again
inside an edge, I say.
The meadow lilies flecked tan,
Their heavy heads cast down
Near the cottonwood deep shadows.
And the few soft clouds,
Unheeded, to billow nimbus grey
Or fade unseen in the passing day.