An Analysis of "The Seasonless" by James Wright
by Joshua Minton
I believe that reading poetry is the mark of the truly civilized man. And I'm not talking about just reading the lines and going onto the next mundanity in life. I'm talking about getting inside the poem itself. With a really good poem it's like standing inside a prism and looking at the world from a strange place.And for my money, there are three poets you need to know about. The first one is one of my college professors, George Looney, who writes some of the best poetry I've ever read. The second is Richard Hugo who was one of my professor's inspirations. And the third is this poet, James Wright. Wright was an Ohio poet and therefore writes for my heart.
I chose to analyze his poem "The Seasonless" because it appeals to my Mid-Western nature. I could not imagine living in a place where the winters weren't bitter one year, mild the next; the summers blistering one day and icicle monsoons the next.
I like to examine poems by breaking up the stanzas to analyze them. Here is the first stanza:
When snows begin to fill the park,
It is not hard to keep the eyes
Secure against the flickering dark,
Aware of summer ghosts that rise.
The blistered trellis seems to move
The memory toward root and rose,
The empty fountain fills the air
With spray that spangled women's hair;
And men who walk this park in love
May bide the time of falling snows.
So, obviously we're starting off in the beginning of Winter. And I really like the line about how it's not hard to keep your eyes secure against the dark because it's a strange way of saying that your sight is safe in this time of approaching death. The summer ghosts that rise are the memories of the beginning of the death of Summer (which is Fall) and the blistered trellis moving our memory back to spring when the rose grew from the root. And memory is played expressed fantastically here with the empty fountain filling the air with spray that spangled women's hair. But love is the one thing that draws the human mind away from the death all around them and even allows them to find comfort in the passage.
The trees recall their greatness now;
they were not always vague and bowed
With loads that build the slender bough
Till branches bear a tasteless fruit.
A month ago they rose and bore
Fleshes of berry, leaf, and shade:
How painlessly a man recalls
The stain of green on crooked walls,
The summer never known before,
The garden heaped to bloom and fade.
In this stanza we move from nature back to man in the eternal dance of death. What is interesting to me here is the phrase about the summer never known before because if you think about it, the life cycle of a rose is the season in which it grows and dies but man's cycle is longer and therefore allows for contemplation of the death going on all around him. This is the root cause for all of mythology--somehow making the death all around us right in our heads and in our hearts.
Beyond the holly bush and path
The city lies to meet the night
And also there the quiet earth
Relies upon the lost delight
To rise again and fill the dark
With waterfalls and swallows sound.
Beyond the city's lazy fume,
The sea repeats the fall of spume,
And gulls remember cries they made
When lovers fed them off the ground.
Now we've moved from nature to the city, the world of man which pumps on as if ignorant of death and cold to its natural fact. But we are reminded that this ultimate fate still underlies the immortal illusion of the city which is a jungle always waiting to creep back in and overgrow the city. And here we have nature remembering that it is fed off of human love. This is one of those chicken and egg things because it is humanity which has imbued nature with its beauty and is not something inherent outside of human reason and art.
But lonely underneath a heap
Of overcoat and crusted ice,
A man goes by, and looks for sleep.
The spring of everlastingness.
Nothing about his face revives
A longing to evade the cold.
The night returns to keep him old,
And why should he, the lost and lulled,
Pray for the night of vanished lives,
The day of girls blown green and gold?
Here is the ultimate surrender, the man who no longer evades the cold and is looking for the ultimate sleep. Here we have someone going gentle into the good night, but the poem ends on a beautiful vision of spring coming again with the feminine image of spring colors coming back into bloom.
What a fantastic poem. I like the idea of analyzing poetry every now and then on this blog--bringing some culture to you knuckleheads.
Links:
James Wright
George Looney
Richard Hugo
TAGS: Poetry, George Looney, Richard Hugo, Richard Wright
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