Hi all,
It’s been a long time. Too long. Sorry about that. It seems, ever since graduating from college, that I no longer have a sense of time. Without deadlines, time seems to just blur together and weeks and months pass by without much to distinguish them from one another other than the coldening weather. It is snowing today, so I’ll be staying inside most all of the day which makes for a great opportunity to finally write and post this final installment in this miniseries on repetition.
The previous posts had plenty to say about different ways that repetition impacts poems: in essence, functions of repetition. This post will break from that slightly and discuss how poems impact repetition. As noted, there is a lot that happens with repetition; a lot that repetition does for a poem. But it’s not a one-sided relationship. The rest of the poem also does work for the repeated portions. This is where what I call “the hauntedness of repetition” comes to bear. There are a great many poems which I could point to in order to explicate this point: indeed, any poem with a refrain and especially those which are bookended by a set of parallel lines — such as (a personal favorite) Robert. W. Service’s “The Cremation of Sam McGee” which begins and ends with those lovely lines:
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.
And, indeed, any of these poems would likely suffice to get the point across, but I want to look at one particular poem by Ruth Stone in order to show what I’m trying to get at because I think her poem “Train Ride” really elevates this sense of hauntedness and makes what I’m saying seem a little less banal (I hope). Because I think when I say what I mean, it will, at least at first, seem fairly obvious, but I think there’s something deeper to it. At least I hope so, since it is precisely this particular meditation on repetition which kickstarted this entire series of posts.
Before I go into that, though, here’s the poem in full. As with so much of Ruth Stone’s work, it is a wonderful poem that I could ramble on about for quite some time for all sorts of reasons. I’ll try to keep my enthusiasm contained to the matter at hand, however.
Train Ride
All things come to an end;
small calves in Arkansas,
the bend of the muddy river.
Do all things come to an end?
No, they go on forever.
They go on forever, the swamp,
the vine-choked cypress, the oaks
rattling last year's leaves,
the thump of the rails, the kite,
the still white stilted heron.
All things come to an end.
The red clay bank, the spread hawk,
the bodies riding this train,
the stalled truck, pale sunlight, the talk;
the talk goes on forever,
the wide dry field of geese,
a man stopped near his porch
to watch. Release, release;
between cold death and a fever,
send what you will, I will listen.
All things come to an end.
No, they go on forever.
Okay fine, one side note before I get back on topic. If you didn’t read that poem out loud to yourself, please do. It’s so sonically dense. So sonically dense.
Now, back on track (ha! pun!).
What I think this poem exemplifies particularly well is the way that every repetition of a thing becomes haunted by the things that came before it. That is what I mean by hauntedness. Like I said, it sounds banal. But bear with me.
What makes Stone’s poem so compelling is that there is a sort of double action happening (or maybe triple). There are the things that go on forever and the things that come to an end. We can think of these things like a list. The list for things that come to an end starts with small calves in Arkansas and the bend in the muddy river. Later, the red clay bank, the spread hawk, the stalled truck, etc. are added to that list. These are not disparate groups, but, rather, one group being enumerated and added to on multiple occasions. The same thing happens for the things that go on forever. (The third action is not so much one of repetition, but of tension arising out of repetition, the tension between all things coming to an end and all things going on forever as the two clearly can’t both be true (at least in the same way at the same time) due to the Law of Non-Contradiction. (Damn Aristotle, he shows up in everything.))
This is the hauntedness to which I refer. Every time the phrase “all things come to an end” (or, “no, they go on forever”) is used, it necessarily calls back to the things that have been listed earlier in the poem. So when we get to the final use of the phrase, it calls back the rest of the poem and the phrase itself becomes far richer, deeper, expansive.
This hauntedness allows for an otherwise common or simple phrase to become intensely rich. And when enriched with all that precedes it, it bears a staggering weight. This, of course, is not necessarily unique to repetition. Repetition is simply one way in which phrases are so imbued. And this is also not unique to poetry. Consider, for example, Slaughterhouse Five and the phrase “So it goes.” Or the end of “Bullet in the Brain” with “They is. They is. They is.” But repetition is unique in that it carries a noticeable growth. Magnitude exists in all sorts of endings, but repetition allows us to see that magnitude develop over time.
After reading “Train Ride” we cannot (or, at least, I cannot) read or hear or think of those final lines, “All things come to an end. / No, they go on forever,” without thinking on the whole of the rest of the poem. As bookending parallel stanzas shovel weight onto the initial unenriched phrase, so do the repetitions throughout “Train Ride.”
Often, in creative writing classes, we talk of pieces “being in conversation with each other”. This is another way of talking about hauntedness. When we say “No Thanks” by Perry Janes is in conversation with “Thanks” by W. S. Merwin, it is because “Thanks” and all that that poem contains is present as a shadow in “No Thanks.” Knowing the poem “Thanks” adds to our experience of “No Thanks” because it is responding to it (even if Perry Janes say it is only “sort of” after “Thanks”). In this case, there’s a sort of thematic repetition/response, rather than a linguistic one. But if we take a poem like Kate Northrop’s “Lines” which directly quotes Theodore Roethke’s “Moss-Gathering,” there is a linguistic haunting as well as a conceptual one. This haunting, of course, relies on having read the piece that is referred to/quoted, which is the main difference between this sort of conversation between disparate pieces and the haunted repetition of a self-contained piece.
One of the most beautiful things about poetry (or literature, or life) is the degree to which interconnection happens. Our minds are fundamentally built on the ability to connect disparate things. Looking at poetry specifically, we see that the more poems we read, the more we see how they talk to each other. A good conversation about poetry will often include a sort of “poem-hopping” where poems after poems are referenced or quoted in relation to each other. Sometimes this conversation is obvious (like when poems directly quote or reference each other) and sometimes it is less so (like when talking about Sylvia Plath’s bee poems leads to James Wright’s “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” because “I am nude as a chicken neck, does nobody love me?” reminds us of “I have wasted my life.”). But, however it happens, these things build on each other to accomplish a great haunting.
Anyway, I think that’s all I have for today. May it not be so long next time.
Thanks for reading. Be well and be safe.
— D.C. Leonhardt
Today’s pen and ink pairing: Vintage Epenco (F, Model Unknown) and Vanness Fountain Pen Day 2020
