If by chance you haven't read this poem be sure to do so before reading any commentary.

This is like standing (or lying) before a beautiful landscape painting, touched in with excellent point of view and perspective, composition, selection of details, precise and vivid rendering of those details, with eye-opening application of color.

This cosmos has become a favorite of many readers, and it’s so attractive that those of us who often return to enjoy it form something of a community, like the communities of poets and friends in long ago China (also a favorite cosmos) that are evoked by the place-title, the Taoist image of the butterfly that opens the poem, and the Taoist-Buddhist homely miracle of golden light near the end (which, as Thoreau said, “all things must live in”).

But the daylight does darken, and there’s a hawk overhead (doing what a hawk, or anybody, naturally would do--but contrast this take on it with Bryant's "Waterfowl", in another cosmos).

Of course there’s a running argument about that last line, that ending of the tale, which surely is prompted by the poet. I actually remember the first time I read the poem, thinking, What? No. Really? How? Hmmm. We’d be silly not to wonder (not to “ask ourselves” as in the Italian idiom). I think that’s part of Wright’s plan, though probably not in the immediate initial impulse. “You must change your life,” as Rilke put it.

Wright has provided a great opportunity for the fun of many lampooning parodies, and opponents say that the ending simply doesn’t make sense, it’s counter-prepared for, and isn’t logical (as is the ending of another well-loved poem and place by Wright, "Autumn Begins in Martin's Ferry, Ohio," with its syllogistic structure and inexorable cause-effect analysis—here the light blazing up from the uniforms of the players and cheerleaders, the heroes and hero-worshippers, the dreamers).

The reading of the ending that I like best, proposed by William Stafford among others, is that the “logic” is that of the emotions and intuition, imagistic, similar to the leap or “superimposition” as Pound calls it, of his Metro “language of color”. At any rate, it would be wasteful to fixate one’s reading on either the manic or the depressive view of life. We’ve had a wonderful day (or pomeriggio, at least) of lounging in the hammock on a friend’s farm—as with Thoreau, we don’t even have to feed the animals or worry over the bills—and now the day is closing, but there will be another, and what act can possibly follow this one?

Comments?

Tom Koontz, Editor
Barnwood magazine
Barnwood Press