Logically or Poetically?

It is possible to think about the way we write and speak as the way we see the world. After all, we write and speak about something, and whether it’s ultimately true that there is an independent and real and lasting world outside our own minds (our commonsense notion which, surprisingly, not everyone has always believed), that is the view our language sets up for us: a noun as a subject confronts the world through a verb whose action pounces on another noun as object. According to this linguistic structure, every last person and thing and event stands in some kind of active or passive relation to some other agent.

So it is, then, that our prosaic world requires prose. Or could it be that we make the world prosaic with our prose? I might wish to tell you, for example, that the sun is rising, and if my intention is to say that there will soon be light enough to take out the garbage and feed the birds, then that simple sentence of subject and predicate gets the job of referring to such an ordinary routine done and done well. But at another moment, in another circumstance that is not quite so utilitarian, I might be wishing to turn your mind elsewhere to perceive realities our ordinary attention precludes. I might, for example, say not that the sun is rising, but that the sun, our light, is rising, and in doing so be evoking, and not simply indicating, realities that are more than sensible. There would be, after all, no reason to add the noun light if I wished you to see only what your eyes could see.

Language as fact, then, turns toward the logical, but language as evocative bends toward the poetic. But what does the logical or the poetic really mean? To our logical, reasoning, everyday mind, the world is made up of things. In such an indicative, factfinding configuration, our attention sees this thing and says that about it. We visually perceive the three dimensions of length and breadth and depth, but seem to register only two, length and breadth: the depth of things, where they resonate and produce their peculiar timbre, is often silent. Such would be the case if I told you that the weather is cold, the branches are bare, and the birds are gone, three thoughts across three clauses, each as frozen and frigid as the scene I see.

But if I stood before the same circumstance and bent instead poetic, I might, were I Shakespeare, say this of those cold, denuded trees as winter approaches: When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang / Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, / Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang (Sonnet 73). What has happened now to all the facts? The cold weather of my logical mind has become the time when yellow leaves hang on shaking boughs, and my factual bare branches without birds have become bare ruin’d choirs. All of this poetic language marks a poetic vision, a kind of sight, or more properly insight, which restores and resounds the dimension of depth which my logical, factual, indicative prose statement remained deaf to.

But where does this depth (and we could just as rightly call it height) lead? Or where does it originate? The poets will tell us they are still here with us in this familiar world, but seeing through it to something else, or, better, seeing the same familiar world from an angle different from the one which both they and we take while on our daily rounds. They will tell us they have to twist the language a bit in order to strike the spark from the stone. Where we must speak of dimensions, they will smile and tell us in so many words that what they can see from their poetic angle is right here—hidden or hiding, but right here nonetheless, an open secret published when nouns and verbs work together with a twist, which is to say with image and irony.

The poetic is the depth of prose, something we recognize because we too have known it. Poetry at its best, as the English poet John Keats said, should “strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.” And if we ask, a remembrance of what? we flump for a moment back down into prose, where all those ordinary things obscure our insight and leave our world bare again indeed.

***