Here's a stanza from David Harsent's "The Garden in Dream" (from his new collection Night):VII
This flower's baby blue seems almost bland
except, when you hold it close, you get the true
depth; and when you look away, you're blind.
I'm struck by how this stanza seems to summarize the logic of a great deal of poetry. Perhaps if I highlight a few words, I can make my point clear:
This flower's baby blue seems almost bland
except, when you hold it close, you get the true
depth; and when you look away, you're blind.
The logic is that something seems to be one way, but a closer look reveals that it is not what it first appeared to be. (And as I type up this note I wrote the other day, it strikes me that I am using the same logic when I highlight those phrases: look closely and you'll see something else.)
What takes this stanza beyond the logic of "look deeper and you'll see the truth" is this: what is revealed is not something about the flower. In fact, what is ultimately revealed is not "the true / depth" but one's own blindness—as if the result of revelation were the impossibility of further revelation.
So maybe what this post reveals is also not something about the poem but something about me: I am always seeing the ways in which seeing becomes indistinguishable from blindness. (So what it reveals is that I read Paul de Man back in the day? Blindness and Insight and all that.)
3 comments:
I'm not quite sure what you're getting at, which also might mean I'm not sure what the poem is getting at. I think it has to do with the idea that if you regard something very closely, that thing you regard overwhelms your ability to look at something else. A bit like the light that remains on your retina after looking into a light. A flower can't do that, exactly, but the looking can: become so absorbing that you can't quite 'see' after such intense study. That I guess is the point in terms of poems more generally that you're making: if you look very carefully and closely you 'see' what blinds you to other seeing. And, if I try to recall de Man, it seems to me that the idea of 'insight' necessitates, he would say, a blindness elsewhere. If I see something true about Stevens, I miss something else about him that's equally true; and may also become so overwhelmed by the truth of Stevens I can't quite see the value of Williams, say.
Something like that?
For me, the moment that makes the lines in interesting is the shift from finding "true depth" in the flower to experiencing a blindness in oneself (caused, in a way, by the initial seeing). That's what you put so well in the middle of your comment, Don.
'A bit like the light that remains on your retina after looking into a light.'
Yes, that's what I took it to mean, and the metamorphic shift from birth (baby) to death (blind/dark, etc.) is in keeping with the ironic undertow that runs through the poem. I'm not sure what to make of it really; very much a wilted garden, one where Plath's acerbic voice might find a home, though Harsent's seems even more bitter and heavily sardonic.
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