the operating system’s 5th Annual Poetry Month

BONUS! Day 31

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Nomi Stone on

Producing Awe and Terror in the Poem:

Trembling Awake in the Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Jorie Graham, and Paul Celan

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“Tintype”

Whole forests went to sea

disguised as ships.

Whole seas went to forest

disguised as time. –Joshua Poteat

Introduction

The forests process into the sea. Watch the treetops amidst the crests. No: they are vessels,

or masquerading as vessels. Wait: reset. Whole seas are swallowed within the forest, crumbling

into infinity. The imagination batters against Poteat’s propositions, producing an exquisite

vibration between awe and terror. Can the world’s immensity be rendered and what tools are

available?

In the American South, a soldier is roasting a pig on his porch until its sinews are tender. I

have been interviewing him for years and again he is telling me stories about Iraq. The American

occupying forces warned the Iraqi population to remain within Baghdad while homes were

searched. But many of them tried to cross the Euphrates River in the middle of the night. The

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soldiers waited above the bridge. “We told them not to,” he tells me. But they crossed, in droves,

slicing through the black water in the blackest hour of the night (“Whole forests went to sea”).

“We told them not to” (“Whole seas”) — “they were asking for it” (“to forest”). This is the

sensation as the tiny bullet enters the tiny body in the black night (“Disguised as time”).

Something has happened, but the interior cannot carry it; the imagination cannot bear it. Poteat

knows this; he renders the impossible moment as a tintype, an image on dark lacquered metal: it

is a human portrait of awe. That is, it is the winnowing of the experience into our representation

of that experience.

According to Immanuel Kant, it is not simply the exterior phenomenon in the world but

our struggling interface with it, which creates the sublime experience. For Kant, the Imagination’s

inability to wholly access a phenomenon produces a fluctuation between pleasure and pain. Yet

ultimately, in his Enlightenment construct, the “sublime” experience produces the “momentary

checking of the vital powers and a consequent stronger outflow of them” (102). In this outflow,

the painter ultimately captures the mountain in his frame; the atrocity in Iraq can be rendered. I

am inspired here by Kant up to a point. The poems herein are far less about heroic arrival points

and more about the trembling work of finding the tools to make the experience the poet feels

resonate through the body of the reader.

The poems herein are far less about heroic arrival points and more

about the trembling work of finding the tools to make the experience

the poet feels resonate through the body of the reader.

I examine here how awe and terror are produced in the poem, examining sonic qualities

in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “The Windhover,” syntax in Jorie Graham’s “Mother and Child (The

Road at the Edge of the Field),” and negation in Paul Celan’s “Psalm.” In Hopkins, I look at how

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sonic plosions and dizzying breath work in tandem with a potentially multiple metaphor to create

the sublime. In Graham, I show how the prolonged and indeterminate winding of syntax creates

an equally wonder-trembling height. And, in Celan, I show how the void itself, and the

manipulation of negation, might bring the reader to a similar nearly unspeakable location.

The poem in each case is a heady negotiation between the most virtuosic mastery of craft

and a mounting sensation that seems to nearly exceed language. A phenomenon in the world

exceeds itself, becoming the all. The violence of loss threatens to devour beauty. In the aftermath

of catastrophe, the forsaken world burns the glow of nothing awake. Furthermore, in each case,

the catalyst for the sensation is enormous, multifoliate: it can neither be read nor rendered in a

single way. Rather, there is uncontainability, multiplicity and ambiguity: our imaginations are

exceeded, we silver the sublime for a moment into our tintypes.

Sonics in Gerard Manley Hopkin’s “The Windhover”

In his journal in 1871, Hopkins wrote of the “inscape”: an entity of “simple and beautiful

oneness” that floods the observer, suggesting the object’s divine fashioning (520). He described

the “instress” as the process by which the observer perceived the inscape. He explains this

movement: “I saw the inscape…freshly, as if my eye were still growing” (Greene, Cushman, and

Cavanagh 708). “The Windhover,” through its sonic percussion (irregular meter, rhythm,

assonance, consonance, modulation of breath) and its metaphoric multiplicity, progressively

positions us within that exhilarating instress around the glow of a bird. I trace here how wonder

and awe are produced in the process, as the bird expands into a manifestation of the all: at once,

the godly and ever-living; the human and the ever-dying.

I trace here how wonder and awe are produced in the process, as the

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bird expands into a manifestation of the all: at once, the godly and

ever-living; the human and the ever-dying.

The “Windhover,” a modified sonnet, begins at a great height, which yet continuously

rises, ultimately bearing the reader into flight. The sonnet is generally composed of an octave and

a sestet, fourteen rhyming lines of iambic pentameter. I will examine here the unfolding of the

form and Hopkins’ departures and modifications of it, and how the poem’s sonic intensities press

on the valves of an unfolding and multiple metaphor, generating the reader’s awe. As the central

figure accrues melody and accumulates conceptual possibilities, it becomes more numinous for

the listening reader.

The poem is called “The Windhover,” referring to a kestrel, a kind of small falcon that

beats its wings rapidly, facing into and aloft upon the wind. It is dedicated to “Christ our Lord,”

preparing the reader for the possibility of (but not necessitating) the metaphorizing of the bird to

the divine. The first line of the poem is in regular iambic pentameter, offering the most

recognizable of rhythms.

Yet, still, from the outset, the line estranges and astonishes the ear,

through the use of a combination of wild sonic explosions and percussive

stresses.

Yet, still, from the outset, the line estranges and astonishes the ear, through the use of a

combination of wild sonic explosions and percussive stresses. A series of “m’s,” “n’s,” and “’o’s”

commingle creating an intensely pleasurable sense of tumbling, via internal sound and word

repetition: “this morning morning’s minion” in the first conjuring of the windhover. Thereafter

follows the hard consonant of the word “king-,” which ushers the reader to a cliff-edge. Brilliantly,

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the word is broken, thrusting the poem forward. Moreover, as I will next describe, the meanings

of the words send the windhover further aerial, into the space of the divine. From the very outset

of the poem, the bird is launched.

At the beginning of the poem, the language borrows from royal registers, insinuating that

the poet might be indeed be paralleling the windhover to Christ, the human instantiation of the

divine. The bird is a “minion” of the greater beyond, that king-dom, anticipating the princely

“dauphin” of the second line. Additionally, the “Falcon” at the end of the second line is capitalized,

adding a sort of aristocratic and royal weight to the naming of the bird. Moreover, a minion is a

favored courtier, implying the bird’s kinship with, but ultimately subordination to, a greater force.

Further, a dauphin is the eldest son and heir of the king of France, as Christ is the son of God.

From the outset of the poem, Hopkins locates the bird as a manifestation of divine creative

capacities on the earth: in this sense, the bird like Christ is an iteration of God — but, implicitly,

so is every embodied phenomenon in the lower world. For me, as the poem progresses, all

adjacent phenomenon of the earth — ocean, trees, and our own bodies, become animated proof

of the electric force that binds them. Yet, although Hopkins has positioned the reader to

anticipate the comparison of the bird to Christ and a subsequent allegory of the resurrection, the

reader’s awe is most masterfully induced when the object that inspires it exceeds tethering to a

single source, as that sensation rises into an undulation of sound.

Hopkins locates the bird as a manifestation of divine creative capacities

on the earth: in this sense, the bird like Christ is an iteration of God —

but, implicitly, so is every embodied phenomenon in the lower world. For

me, as the poem progresses, all adjacent phenomenon of the earth —

ocean, trees, and our own bodies, become animated proof of the electric

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force that binds them.

The first line of the poem, mellifluous and regularly paced, is followed by a line with six

successive “d” sounds: “dom of daylight’s dauphin dapple drawn dawn.” The sonic and metrical

effect of this line is stunning: the d’s create a stuttering forward, and an opening, through the “a”

sounds internal to those words. Moreover, after a first line governed by iambic pentameter,

Hopkins startles the reader with a new kind of line. In this, the second line of the poem, he

introduces us to what he calls “sprung rhythm” — a rhythm he describes in a letter to his friend

George Dixon as “haunting his ear” (Poetry Foundation, “Hopkins”). According to Hopkins,

sprung rhythm is more similar to the natural rhythm of speech and also carries more recurrent

stress than traditional iambic forms. The form is categorized by:

[s]canning by accents or stresses alone, without any account of the number of

syllables, so that a foot may be one long syllable or it may be many light and one

strong … One stress makes one foot, no matter how many or how few the

syllables. (Greene, Cushman, and Cavanagh 1354)

In “The Windhover,” Hopkins’ movement into sprung rhythm begins to mimic the gliding of the

bird. In the second through fourth lines of the poem, Hopkins (at least according to his own

scansion) creates a more sprawling-open sensation through the series of unstressed syllables,

charged with assonance and consonance (Hopkins’ stresses marked with bold): “dom of daylight’s

dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon in his riding/ Of the rolling level underneath him steady

air, and striding/ High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing.” While the lines

conform to Hopkins’ ongoing adherence to a pentameter line of sorts, they create a billowing

open effect, something akin to the airborne bird that the imagery evokes. Although the form of

sprung rhythm claims to generate only five feet per line, because of the supplementary unstressed

syllables borne along in Hopkins’ reimagined foot, the reader’s breath is tested. For example, in

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line two, even with the unstressed syllables, which would theoretically restore breath (such as “-

dom of ” and “con, in his”), the reader is still located within a dizzyingly long line with a stutter of

“d’s.” Similarly, in the third and fourth lines of the poem, Hopkins offers two tumbling “five foot”

yet 16- and 14- syllable lines. In the third line, he begins with successive quickly opening “l”

sounds (“rolling level”) and culminating in the repetition of slowing “st” sounds (“steady air

striding”), though relatively full of unstressed syllables (i.e. “neath him steady”) to offer the reader

brief reprieve for breath. In the fourth line, he offers a series of “r”s and near rhymes (rung upon

the rein) followed by repetition of “wi” sounds “wimpling wing.” In each of these lines, there is

both a relative spaciousness, due to the unstressed syllables, and a push forward, propelled by the

assonance and consonance: Hopkins has entered the reader into the quieter registers of flight.

Meanwhile, the dramatic situation of the poem, beginning with a prince-like bird coasting

atop the air, becomes multiple: “how he rung upon the rein of the wimpling wing.” In this

description, the bird rises yet further: the falcon gliding atop the air is paralleled at once to a

horse circling at the end of a long rein and to the ever-rising spirals of a trained bird poised

towards its prey. The “wimpling wing” evokes a wing possibly folded like a garment, curving

through the air. The sonic and textured reverberations allow us to hurdle onward, through these

long, breathy, and aerated lines, while allowing a potential metaphorical multiplicity.

This syllabic unfurling as the breath works alongside it might be felt as

the work of Hopkins’ “instress” in its movement towards the inscape:

that is the active enlargement of the eye and consequently the mind of

the reader, around the windhover.

Hopkins continuously uses sonic tools to enlarge our imaginative and metaphorical

possibilities for the bird. Indeed, from the very outset of the poem, Hopkins is attuning us not

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only to his masterful assonance and consonance, but also to an additional kind of sonic pleasure

— the susurration of the reader’s breath itself, trying to keep pace. This syllabic unfurling as the

breath works alongside it might be felt as the work of Hopkins’ “instress” in its movement towards

the inscape: that is the active enlargement of the eye and consequently the mind of the reader,

around the windhover. This sonic work conjuring the bird aloft, weaves between melodious

assonance, consonance, billowing and wind-filled long lines, and is the first step towards creating

an atmosphere for the reader’s awe. Meanwhile, Hopkins is at once attuning us to the possibility

of another metaphorical possibility for the windhover. The windhover is not only bird, and not

only analogy for Christ; the windhover is all living entities that billow and are carried by the air.

So too, in our oration of the poem, the air circulating through and expelled from our bodies,

carries the words, the poem’s song. With our reading of the poem, our breath is expended and

renewed. The bird, to be aerial, is carried by wind; likewise, the human body, in its life and in its

dying, is borne by that wind. Only four lines into the poem, metaphor opens, showing its

multiplicity, in tandem with Hopkins’ sonic work. Likewise, when an instrument is played,

columns of air vibrate and then produce sensation in the listener: that sensation, in this instance,

is the awe produced by a bird becoming multifoliate in our imaginations.|

Likewise, when an instrument is played, columns of air vibrate and then

produce sensation in the listener: that sensation, in this instance, is the

awe produced by a bird becoming multifoliate in our imaginations.

The first turn in the poem occurs in the fifth line: “In his ecstacy! Then off, off, forth on

swing,” when the sonic and metrical intensity in the poem are amplified. The wind seems to

intensify in the line, creating an added pressure against the bird’s wings, and launching into the

ecstatic push of three consecutive stressed syllables: “off off forth,” surging the windhover ahead.

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In a continuation of this propulsion, the flight of the bird is compared in the sixth line to a skater:

“As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding.” The line unfurls, with

relatively few stresses, through the whoosh of the “s” noises, arriving into this charged couplet of

verbs: “hurl and gliding.” This pair of verbs mimics the push-pull in melody, tempo, and stress in

the poem as a whole: the bird is both “hurled”—forcefully thrust forward—by the wind, and

“glides”. That force propels the reader into the beginning of the seventh line: Rebuffed the big

wind. My heart in hiding.” In a succession of stresses, the bird is able to get atop the wind, a

moment that makes the speaker’s heart emerge in the poem for the first time. As the seventh line

enjambs into the eighth (“My heart in hiding/ Stirred for a bird — the achieve of, the mastery of

the thing!”), the reader feels the speaker’s heart likewise whirl into the sky with the windhover.

We come to imagine that we have been following the heights of the speaker’s interior, itself a

rising bird before the divine, all along.

The final line of the octave is essential in closing the initial wager of the sonnet, and

coaxing its rhythmic and metaphoric possibilities to the fore. We enter another glorious moment

of metaphorical ambiguity at this juncture in the poem. What does Hopkins mean, when he

speaks of the “achieve of, the mastery of the thing?” Through the nominalization of the verb here

(“the achieve of ”), the act he refers to appears to be somewhere between an ongoing striving and

a sacred arrival point. Is he referring to the bird itself aloft into and against the wind, in flight?

Are we being asked to loop back into the poem’s dedication and consider the godly implications?

Has the divine achieved mastery in the making of this windhover? Or, another possibility: is

Hopkins referring to his own making of a poem? The repetition in the line, “the achieve of, the

mastery of” gives the impression of a labor, a continuous forging at the thing with one’s tools.

Indeed, the poem is a heady negotiation between the most careful mastery of craft

through tools of language (virtuosic sonic invention; a new meter that made breath itself

vertiginous) and a mounting sensation of awe that seems to nearly exceed language. Hopkins’

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invocation of “the mastery of the thing” widens the metaphorical possibilities of the poem yet

again, and the sensation of holding more than one seeing of the bird in the mind’s eye amplifies

awe. The octave thus ends with the reader’s sensation of wonder at an unprecedented height: if we

are beginning to zoom in on Hopkins’ inscape here, we are coming to rest on a bird that is

percussively ever-more-bird, and beyond-bird.

Indeed, the poem is a heady negotiation between the most careful

mastery of craft through tools of language (virtuosic sonic invention; a

new meter that made breath itself vertiginous) and a mounting sensation

of awe that seems to nearly exceed language.

Extraordinarily, the sestet of the poem sends the reader into a height even yet beyond,

through sonic, metrical, and metaphorical labors. The harsh “br” of the word “brute” perforates

the sestet open, into a thrilling opening series of sounds (“oh air….here”). Hopkins stressed the

poem accordingly: “Brute beauty and valour and act, oh air, pride, plume here.” However, I

would like to argue that my ear insists on more stresses at this juncture in the poem, reading

instead a clause with five consecutive accents: “oh air, pride, plume here.” The poem continues

its loping long lines, now considerably intensifying via the added stresses. This intensification in

sound and stress works as a readying for the second line of the sestet (the tenth line of the poem),

which is arguably its climax: the moment when the reader’s awe yawns open: as the possibility of a

suturing together into a whole and the possibility of a crumbling conjoin, forging a new height in

the poem.

In this turn, the poet first enumerates the bird’s noble attributes (beauty and valor), which

open into a fluttering of wing and sensation, in a series of sonically kindred words: “oh air, pride,

plume, here.” The line zings towards the word “here”, which does not readily announce its own

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lexical meaning. Is “here” referring to the present intensity; to the presence of the bird; to the

speaker’s own heart, recently concealed but now opening and aflamed; to a godly spark revealed

through the bird? We cannot be sure, but before any resolution, the line breaks — no, practically

gashes open into the verb “buckle.” The sheer force of the verb and its harsh sound are amplified

by its ambiguity. Buckling might denote a fastening together, a holding together of parts; it might

equally well mean its own opposite: suggesting a falling or acquiescence. So too, it might be a

careening forward, an arrival, a coasting. The metaphor of Christ again also resurfaces: “buckling

under” insinuates the bird’s apparent submission to the wind before he rises above it, evoking

Christ’s death on the cross. Meanwhile, “buckle” in the sense of fastening together evokes the

moment of the Incarnation itself, the conjoining of Christ’s divine and human natures. Indeed,

the dramatic and metaphorical action of the bird thus contains all these possibilities at once. The

windhover at once binds the air together and dives through and beyond it, becoming. The verb’s

possibilities, inducing something like a cresting and a diving at once, combined with what feels to

be an unprecedented sonic intensification, brings the reader into the most heightened moment

thus far in the poem.

As this charged line continues, it opens again into a moment of wonder-inducing

multiplicity. First, after the verb “Buckle!”, the poem’s height, Hopkins opens into the word “and”

in all capital letters. The moment of conjunction trembles the reader into an ecstatic elongation of

the word “buckle” and it’s multiplicity, before the next essential turn in the poem. In this turn, the

speaker addresses an Other in the poem directly: “AND the fire that breaks from thee then.”

Again, we are left to wonder if the speaker is addressing Christ, or the bird, or even his own heart,

in the act of making a poem. Amidst this first direct address in the poem, a narrative

intensification, the poet continues with percussive sonic repetitions (“buckle,” “break,” “billion”).

Indeed, subsequently, under the gaze of this transfixing other, this thee, even the most mundane

objects of the earth are intensified: “the fire that breaks from thee, a billion/ Times told lovelier,

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more dangerous, O my chevalier!” The comparative sentence structure and second direct address

here suggests that the “thee” is not just bird, but an entity more potent, and with whom the

speaker might merge. Indeed, at this juncture, “chevalier,” again an image of knighthood, of

grandeur, is pointedly made possessive, modified with a “my.” Pointedly, this is the second

instance in the poem with a possessive structure: in the second to last line of the sonnet’s octave,

Hopkins referred to “My heart in hiding/ Stirred for a bird.” In the first instance, the speaker

appears to hold claim to his own heart, via being shaken by a phenomenon of the world: the bird.

In the second instance, an unprecedented height in the poem propels the speaker into an

exclamation of merging: “O my chevalier!” The bird is the catalyst in the poem, continuously

exceeding itself in its glorious birdness and its sonic flowering, and enabling the speaker’s

transfiguration, towards a new becoming. Indeed, the chevalier might also be read as a knight

going into battle on behalf of his lady, just as Christ dies on the cross to remake a fallen humanity.

For the first time in the poem, the speaker tremblingly lays claim to the phenomenon that

triggered the wonder (bird, Christ, the mastery of the thing). The sensation is the “loveliest”

sensation — and it is the most “dangerous”— as we risk thereby being consumed, our bounded

personhood unmade and remade.

For the first time in the poem, the speaker tremblingly lays claim to the

phenomenon that triggered the wonder (bird, Christ, the mastery of the

thing).

In the last turn in the poem, its final three lines, Hopkins ushers us into an arrival point

for our wonder. The eleventh line of the poem has a heavier sonic resonance, appearing to

momentarily tether us to the earth: “sheer plod makes plough down.” The consecutive stressed

“p’s” slow us as we have been returned to an image of the quotidian here, the furrows in the land

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as the plough turns them over, however surprising the reader with the sonic startling: “sillion

shine.” The moment allows more than one reading, wherein either the earth or plough shines. In

the former reading, the glints of the earth are revealed through labor: the earning of the shine. In

the latter reading, the plough itself is burnished through the act of cutting through the earth: that,

is, through suffering tedious labors and trials like Christ, we too might ascend. The final two lines

of the poem, in my own reading of the prosody are intensely stressed (compared to Hopkins

slightly stressed readings of the lines: “Shine and blue-[bleak]-embers, ah my dear, / [Fall], gall

themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.” The bracketed words above indicate the words that I

myself have stressed — a scansion more contemporary readers would probably hear — but

Hopkins did not choose to stress. In my reading, six syllables in a row in the thirteenth line and

the subsequent two syllables in the fourteenth line are all stressed: a run of eight stressed syllables,

and a electrifying test of the reader’s breath. In the third possessive instance in the poem, the

speaker refers to “my dear”— the beloved bird, the divine, the glints that shine through amidst

the attempted mastery of the thing — creating another moment of merging. However, the sounds

in the final lines, remind us of the violent beauty of that act, in particular through the perforating

sounds of the “k” of “bleak” and the “g” of “gall” and “gashing.” The gashing here reprises the

through-line in the poem of Christ’s death and resurrection: we feel the visceral echoes here as his

body is punctured on the crucifix and the stinging vinegar mixed with the narcotic gall of the

vinegar Christ was given to drink. Meanwhile, in a virtuosic sonic turn, many of the other sounds

that are integral to the entire poem’s toolkit commingle: “m’s,” “b’s,” “s’s,” and “l’s” shatter across

this final couplet. This soundscape as an arrival point reminds the reader that all states of being

and imagination that colored the poem sonically now conjoin.

The poem’s intensifications continuously surprise the reader, forging a windhover that

refuses descent. Just when we felt the precipice had reached a critical mass, Hopkins asks us to

remain within an accruing vertigo for the duration. When the sonic turns ripple over our

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tongues and synapses, they keep pushing ever further. As metaphor becomes multiple, the reader

must try — try — and hold those glittering vectors of image/thought in the mind at once. As our

breathlessness grows, as we die-into-the-poem, we release ourselves into the phenomenon that

bore it into flight.

Syntax in Jorie Graham’s “Mother and Child (The Road at the Edge of the Field)”

While Hopkins’ primary tools for generating the sublime were sonic, Jorie Graham

equally masterfully manipulates syntax to similar effect. As in the case of Hopkins, Graham tests

and extends the parameters of what the reader can carry within their own interior, while bringing

awe and terror, and beauty and violence, into trembling interface. In “Mother and Child (the

Road at the Edge of the Field),” Graham positions her readers amidst the tendrils of grass, in an

ever-modifying sentence, which lasts across 120 lines. The dizzying additions she adds leave the

reader in a state of near vertigo, awaiting, and bracing for, an uncertain predicate.

The poem’s first sentence reads as a continuously billowing-open

dependent clause, which finally seems to possibly, ambiguously land. The

final lines of the poem, composed of short independent clauses, act as

the syntactic and emotive fulcrum of the poem: gathering the sensation

into a moment of sublime intensity.

The poem’s first sentence reads as a continuously billowing-open dependent clause, which

finally seems to possibly, ambiguously land. The final lines of the poem, composed of short

independent clauses, act as the syntactic and emotive fulcrum of the poem: gathering the

sensation into a moment of sublime intensity. In addition, Graham also controls and accelerates

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moments of awe through her shifting use of pronouns, image, and metaphor, which I discuss

along the way.

The title of the poem signals the reader is in the presence of a boundary zone. The mother

and child are at an entry point: there is a trajectory available; there is a choice. Will they enter this

field, and what seeing will the field bear? From the first three lines of the poem, a mode of

amplified, granular, and expanding seeing is established. Graham begins: “The grasses

midsummer eve when the stems grow invisible and the/ seemingly de-/ capitated heads like a

flock/ that is not in the end departing but is lingering.” This sentence begins as if it is a dependent

clause, where we watch the ongoing becoming and accrual of seeing, of the subject of the

sentence: the grasses. The first description of the grasses positions the bodies of those grasses as

seemingly severed from their heads, the pods they will seed. The shift between long lines that

carry through and short, justified lines, a pattern that is continuous through the poem, creates a

tension between rhythms as well as a tension between what the field holds and what it might lose

to the wind. The heads of the grasses, seeming to float above the blades like a flock of birds,

creates from the outset of the poem an intensification where beauty and violence are held

together in thrall. This all occurs within a sentence that has only just begun.

In the fourth line of the poem, Graham continues to modify the grasses with another set

of unfurling images: “golden with/ buttery flies then also aglow with/ orange ~ gnats/ hovering

their tiny solar system round ~ heads/ bending this way and that in/ unison glowing and not/

showing where they/ are attached to earth or what path has brought them to their status.” This

sequence of lines adds a blazing syntactic and imagistic accumulation to the grasses, where they

become something new: the field is now given color while the grass-heads become, implicitly, the

sun. Meanwhile, the wind motion that was implicit in the first set of images in the poem is now

compounded by the lit buzz of insects around the stalks. Next, Graham again describes the

grasses as “heads”—their capacity to be harmed becoming increasingly present. Yet, meanwhile,

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amidst the recent description of the gnats as a “solar system,” we also consider the other glowing

bodies that attend the grasses. Although the repetition of “heads” reminds us that grasses remain

the ongoing subject of this sentence, a sensation of momentary ambiguity begins to flare through

the sentence. Is Graham still describing the grasses? Yes; but where is the predicate? At this point,

the reader begins, rather than looking for the resolution of the clause, to instead let go into its

burgeoning syntactic flow. Meanwhile, the image is ever expanding: whereas the heads of the

grasses began as something like flocks, now they become even further aerial. The grasses gather

the outward flight of the solar system image describing the gnats. In the line: “not/ showing where

they/ are attached to the earth or what path has brought them to their status,” the sensation begins

to become cosmic. We are both in the field, as earth; and reminded of the stratospheres. By this,

the 12th line of the poem, Graham has thus already created, through syntax and line — through

an excess that cannot be resolved — an affective atmosphere that prepares us for growing awe,

intermixed with terror.

In the 12th line of the poem, Graham makes a syntactic move that offers a momentary

resting place for the reader, something like a breathing spot amidst the expanding arc of intensity

that grows through the poem. She writes: “they for whom stasis/ when it comes is the huge/

inholding of breath by the whole/ world …../~ albeit now in-/ visible ~” In this movement in the

poem, the initial “they” reinstates the grasses as the subject of the sentence, even as the succession

of modifying clauses (and the delay of the predicate) had begun to generate a distinct dizziness

for the reader. With that re-emplacement of the grasses, as our fragile and wind-blown line to

follow through the poem, we are put for a moment back on course. The new flood of images at

this juncture in the poem imagines the grasses for a moment at rest, requiring an “inholding of

breath by the whole/ world”: with this image, Graham mimics the reader’s own sensation by this

point in the poem. The lines tumble forward, in this extended seemingly giant dependent clause,

one image propelling the next, but never offering the solace of the predicate and/or the end of the

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sentence. The poem enacts the inholding of breath, an intensifying waiting. Indeed, one of

Graham’s characteristic moves, the breaking of a word into charged constituent parts, also comes

to the fore in her enjambment of the word “in-/visible.” In this instance, the “in’s” prepositional

and negational meanings are preserved, a reinforcement of the sensation of inholding of breath.

Yet, at the same time, by breaking the word in this manner, the stasis of the moment is both

“visible” and “invisible” at once: a charged duality and ambivalent that holds the reader taut.

Indeed, one of Graham’s characteristic moves, the breaking of a word

into charged constituent parts, also comes to the fore in her

enjambment of the word “in-/visible.” In this instance, the “in’s”

prepositional and negational meanings are preserved, a reinforcement of

the sensation of inholding of breath.

This moment of almost-pause is immediately counteracted with the poem’s essential and

ongoing tug: between the billowing forward towards the predicate and the push back, to

assimilate the growing heft of image into our seeing of the field. Syntax, enjambed line,

alternating line length and image together collaborate to create this sensation, where we are made

dizzy in our apprehension of the world. For example, the lines: “bees all molten/ with approach

and with-/drawal” and the subsequent line, describing the stars as “albeit now in-/visible,”

enjambment continues to create key effects: in each case, breaking at the pivot points internal to

those words, reminding the reader that the poem is moving back and forth between what is given

and what might be lost; beauty and the wrenching act of its withdrawal (i.e. “with” is the opposite

of “withdrawal.”). The movement between these modes creates ever-widening circles of awe and

terror for the reader, unable to tether the grass in any certain way to the earth.

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In the next turn, in the 20th line of the poem, the speaker manifests for the first time as an

“I.” Graham writes: “~ and I look up into the / sky to see/ beyond the foaming of / day’s end the

place where all in fact/ is, longed-for or over-/ looked altogether by the mind,/ human, which

can,/ if it wishes,/ ken them into view/ by imagination ~ there is no invention ~ or not ~ as long

as it/ exists, the mind can/ do this.” Amidst the swirl of accumulated smaller independent clauses,

all nested within a hitherto apparently dependent clause, a self looks up at the sky: the surprise of

that entry practically ruptures and stills the many branchings of syntax, the variable suspended

possibilities and descriptors of the grass. In that moment, that self engages in an instant of pure

seeing of “the place where all in fact/ is, longed-for or over-/looked altogether by the mind.” By

this juncture in the poem, given the continuous accumulation of modifying clauses, and the

seeking of a resting place for the subject of the sentence, there is an additional effect, at least for

this reader: the field comes into view, in part, via its perception and then re-assembly by the

human mind. There is a blurring that comes to the fore here, where the human mind is simply a

part of an unfolding dependent clause, in the epic sentence; but then, that mind appears able to

enclose the whole scene: “as long as it/ exists, the mind can/ do this.”

…ambiguity creates an added intensification in the poem, and a torque

moving the awe forward: the interplay between world and mind, between

the work of the imagination to create, and a perceived phenomenon that

is too large to fit within that mind is part of the push and pull in the

syntactic DNA of the poem.

The “it” in the sentence takes on a new ambiguity: is the “it” the mind itself, kenning the

perceived object into view through the imagination? Or might the “it” be a blade of grass, the

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object itself? Or is there a third possibility, “the place where all in fact is”— evoking a

transcendent space and the ground of all existence, something like the mind of God, or pure

emptiness from which all things spring? This ambiguity creates an added intensification in the

poem, and a torque moving the awe forward: the interplay between world and mind, between the

work of the imagination to create, and a perceived phenomenon that is too large to fit within that

mind is part of the push and pull in the syntactic DNA of the poem.

In the next movement in the poem, our awe continues to increase: as the speaker is at

once both an earthbound body with shears in her hand, standing in the field; and also a being

who floods her own bodily boundaries. This tension rises for the reader and is produced via the

continuously over-spilling line, as the sentence propels forward. The described-section reads:

“how many are the years you have/ say the grass-pointings/ which if I follow them up/ and up/

….but / nothing happened ~ the world opened its robe/ and you/ were free to look with/ no sense

of excitement, no song, it is so simple, your lungs afloat, your/ shears till there in your right hand.”

At this juncture in the poem, Graham continues to magnify the reader’s awe, by creating a

charged moment of ambiguity in the unfolding of the sentence and line and thereafter, by altering

her use of pronouns. The syntax pivots into a question: the grass-pointings themselves become

the speaker’s interlocutor, embodying a query about her own mortality. Crucially, we are set to

wonder if the grass-pointings positioned at this point in the poem are acting as the repeated

subject, seguing at last into a predicate: “the grass-pointings say.” Have we been waiting this entire

time for the grass to speak, or is this moment in poem again syntactically subsidiary — rather

than the offering a final predicate? In my reading, the line is yet another moment of modification

of the original subject, the grasses; however, much of the amplifying vertigo in the poem derives

from this ilk of charged potentiality as the sentence snakes through towards its conclusion.

After the grass-pointings embody the question that pulses through the whole of the poem

(acting as a moment of heightened intensity, whether it ultimately functions as the predicate or

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not), the blades of grass become for the speaker a map upwards. The syntax and lineation in this

section amplifies the sensation for the reader that the speaker exceeds her body and self. The

speaker traces the grasses upward, as they continuously eclipse the line that tries to hold them: “if

I follow them up/ and up/ make of my eyeing large spidery webtrails into/ the galaxy”: as we

anticipated in the early sections of the poem, the field itself takes on cosmic dimensions, through

the speaker’s “eyeing”— that is, through her perception itself. Indeed, even more crucial in this

movement is this enjambment: “the galaxy thank/ god, and all that outlives/ for sure the me in/

me.”

In the first line in the sequence, “galaxy” and “thank” are adjacent on the line: the galaxy

produces the utterance that cannot represent it. The moment severs at the line break, another

instance where Graham separates words and phrases that are typically inseparable, leaving the

reader in that charged gap. The following line, “god, and all that outlives” is a gesture at

immensity, that which is beyond the speaker, which only arrives at fulfillment in the following

sequence: “for sure the me in/ me.” The “me in/ me,” breaks out of its vessel as the line breaks,

gesturing at the transience of the individual self. Rather, we come to feel that other forms of

selfhood are surging into the space of the field, those that are not bounded by the particular body.

As the line’s next movement confirms: “me in/me ~ a whirling robe humming with firstness

greets you if you eye-up.” Indeed, just as the self floods beyond the self, enacted through syntax

and line, Graham amplifies the effect by shifting from first to second person. The awe and the

terror in the poem intensify with this shift, as the self refigures into something both other and

beyond self.

Yet rather ironically, amidst this internal height, the speaker explains: nothing happened:

“in a letter home you would/ tell this whole story but/ nothing happened.” The sequence

represents the heart of this poem’s labors: a tension between the quotidian event (a nothing) and

the infinite currents of seeing; a tension between the tiny destructible self and the humming all

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that it might become. The poem continuously inhabits that boundary as well, between the road

and the field; between the outside phenomenon and the interior event, as it unfolds via the

winding sentence, which refuses to definitively conclude. The speaker is left holding the shears,

trembling.

The sequence represents the heart of this poem’s labors: a tension

between the quotidian event (a nothing) and the infinite currents of

seeing; a tension between the tiny destructible self and the humming all

that it might become.

The poem continues to enact these tensions syntactically, where the reader is positioned at

an edge with the speaker, as the sentence continues to hold us in thrall, still not yet definitively

landing and becoming a full, independent clause. Graham writes: “the hedgerow wild beside you

and how you can ~ yes ~ hear it/ course up through its million/ stalks ~ and also, closely/ now,

the single/ skinny stalk ~ and how it is / true, all is being sucked up by the soil into the sky, and

the sky/[…] and I talk to myself, I make words that follow from other words, they push from be-/

hind ~ into the hedge like this/ hedge but not of it.”

The syntax continues to tumble forward, the sentence ever-continuing, mimicking the

speaker’s riotous and intensifying interior, while she meanwhile stands, quite simply holding the

shears amidst the grasses. A new sensory impression is meanwhile added to the other impressions

of the grasses, giving the growing sentence-field yet more heft: the auditory. The speaker can now:

“hear it/ course up through its million/ stalks”— a sort of hissing impression, now, as the line

breaks at “million”— creating a feeling of infinite upward channels before sending the sound and

sensation through those rivulets of the stalks. Indeed, the next short line, “now, the

single” (referring still the stalk) begins to take on the resonance of juxtaposition: between the

! 23

speaker’s one body standing in the field and its trembling interrelationship to the all, referenced

immediately thereafter: “and how it is/ true all is being sucked up by the soil into the sky, and the

sky back down.”

Amidst this tension between the one body and the all, the poem’s ongoing jostling next

reveals itself more manifestly: Graham is trying to find language for her awe and terror. Through

a combination of manipulation of the line and another shift in pronoun, this struggle comes to

the fore. Again more re-embodied, again inside something resembling a self, “the shears/ in my

right hand grow warm,” the speaker is once more an “I.” She writes: “I talk to myself, I make/

words that follow from other/ words, they push from be-/hind ~ into the hedge like the/ hedge

but not of it ~no.” The enjambment here is especially key: “I talk to myself, I make”: such that

language is a making of nothing less than the self. Still Graham registers an ambiguity here

through the next two lines: “words that follow from other/ words, they push from be-/hind”: the

word “words” repeats at the outset of each line, and in the second line, one of the words, behind

breaks into “be-/hind”, a sort of floundering, and a reminder of the distance between words and

object.

Language does not and cannot emerge bare, unmediated out of the hedge;

rather, language is a product of the poet’s seeing and rendering.

Indeed, Graham considers this confusion through the use of a fumbling line: both its

broken word (“be-/hind”: is the “thing” behind the “word”?) and its series of negations:

“hind~into the hedge like the/ hedge but not of it ~no~not/ ever.” Language does not and cannot

emerge bare, unmediated out of the hedge; rather, language is a product of the poet’s seeing and

rendering. Yet: through language, through Graham’s syntactic manipulation and endless

withholding (most especially at the level of the sentence), the incandescently untenable and the

! 24

continuously losable physical world, becomes more manifest — as it refuses to be permanently

tethered.

Graham next parallels language to “phantoms” in a stunning metaphorical turn in the

poem which ratchets up its stakes and prepares the reader for the a kind of awe at the very end of

the poem which is equal parts terror. She writes: “~phantoms ~ as the calls/ of the disappeared in

the stadiums today are in-/ audible, the satellite’s announcement/ of capture inaudible, the

occupation of an/ other’s body, taken from its/private life its bed its/window its still half-open/

fridge, dragged down the stairs with everyone/screaming.” In this movement in the poem,

Graham dislocates the reader wholly from the space of the field, and places us instead within a

starker space: first in a description of a kidnapping and then in an execution. Language, the

speaking voice, has been continuously grasping, in this poem. At this juncture, we are asked to

imagine the human voice even as potentially irretrievable: “the calls/ of the disappeared.” Graham

segues from this comparison, of language as a disappeared body — harmed, terrified, ejected out

of its privacy — into a scene of an execution: “have you visited your/ loved ones/ recently says the

guard as he lets loose the filamentary/ shock of electricity through the body to the /heart whose

words/ will now/ cease.” The moment flutters between the metaphorical valence (the body of

language) and the physical (the actual body, the voice), but in both cases, the body is under

threat. Yet, what is most essential about this excursus in the poem, I will next argue, is that it

comes immediately prior to the syntactic reconfiguring of the entire poem.

The subsequent line in the poem is: “the grasses lean.” The moment in the poem

represents the first absolute pinnacle of awe in the poem for this reader, a function of a syntactic

billowing and release. Graham at last has delivered the predicate of the sentence, after a nearly

unbearable wait of over 120 lines. The moment comes after this elongated materializing the

electric presence of the field, and after a violent excursus bearing the knowledge that that which is

most beloved can be taken away. And it is at this moment, at last, that the syntax folds, finds its

! 25

waiting other half. Indeed, it is no surprise that under the weight of what they have now carried,

syntactically, that the grasses lean. The moment acts as a clicking together of parts, a making into

the field of a particular proposition. Indeed, their leaning comes “under the sway of difference,” as

the air shifts, impacting all equally: grass, self, guard, prisoner — again producing the poem’s

tension between the one body standing in the field and the whole that is reaches towards.

Meanwhile, although we have been offered the reprieve of “lean,” the poem’s single

sentence still continues to pivot and expand its way onward, again carrying the reader onward in

its syntactic momentum. The final 25 lines, I argue, act as the poem’s greatest and most essential

pinnacle of awe and terror for the reader, a crescendo where the two sensations become most

potently braided. First, after a more impersonal excursus with the bodies in the stadium, the

speaker steps back towards her own embodiment and standing within language. She writes:

“grass, I say/ grass, and rip a piece to hold out to you/ who stand beneath me not yet speaking.”

For the first time in the poem, a particular and personal “you” becomes the speaker’s interlocutor.

The speaker in the poem, now becoming for the first time, Mother, proffers a blade of grass to her

child. At this juncture in the poem, Graham uses the alternating single line, and cluster of lines

(or in some cases a single) justified line to particularly taut effect, making the reader buoy back

and forth between an attempt to domesticate terror through naming/language and images of

enclosure in the stand-alone line, followed by a sensation of accruing terror, springing forth in the

right justified line. For example, the first line in the sequence: “beneath them ~ grass, I say” is

followed by the line “grass, and rip a piece to hold out to you.” The first line in the sequence

renders the field for a moment tame, with the preposition “beneath” and with the domestication

of language (grass, I say). The second line then offers a more propulsive violence, as the speaker

“rips” the grass to offer it to her child. This ricochet continues through the section, for example,

with the stand-alone line: “and put the heads inside it and close it and I watch” followed by the

justified cluster of lines: “terror sprays from you in/colonies of tiny glances ~ everywhere but

! 26

where/ your hand is, and then.” In this instance, the stand-alone line again creates an attempted

work of enclosure, as the speaker closes her hand; in the following cluster of lines, terror exceeds

that attempt, “spray[ing]” from the child, unable to even look at her own hand.

This pattern intensifies through the sequence. The series of names (stalk, poppy, thorn,

hedgerose) in the stand-alone line are only just barely enough to keep the speaker from, in the

right line, “screaming”— because she is “old enough to hang on hang on.” The Mother clings to

this exercise of taming, of naming a word that is full of unspeakable beauty and violence. Yet

nonetheless, the child’s “small heart” “hears the cannibalizing crossed scream” in her Mother’s

offerings: to be alive, to be a bounded self with a body, is to be subject to the possibility of

obliteration. In this crucial moment in the poem, the pronouns again shift, from an “I” and a

“you,” to an abstracted figure of a mother, still addressing the singular child as you: “the mother/

stands beside you and she sees you stare at her and put/ your arm down and open your/ fist.” This

choice on Graham’s part makes her reader pan out to see the field again, watching the seeds fall

from the child’s fist to the asphalt, carried by the wind to the center of the road. And at this

moment, the poem’s first sentence ends.

After a sentence with dozens of branchings and modifications, to try to

describe that which was sensuous but ungrasapable, the grasses, Graham

next uses simple sentences to enter the reader into a pure state of

being, into a climate indexing the earth’s position in relation to the sun.

It is perhaps in the movement from that breathless sentence to a dramatically shifted

syntax in the final six lines that creates the poem’s crescendo, where the growing terror of the

most recent stanza commingles wholly with its other face, awe. After a 120 line sentence, in a

move of shocking and exquisite contrast, Graham places two short sentences, only four and five

! 27

syllables long, respectively, on a single line: “It is summer. It is the solstice.” After a sentence with

dozens of branchings and modifications, to try to describe that which was sensuous but

ungrasapable, the grasses, Graham next uses simple sentences to enter the reader into a pure state

of being, into a climate indexing the earth’s position in relation to the sun. The next line of the

poem is composed of an almost sentence, followed by the beginning of a new sentence: “diamond

of energy holds us. We.” The effect here is an amorphous orb of intensity, and of coherence —

holding the two figures, but also perhaps even holding the all. The poem’s final sentence spans five

lines: “We/ breathe, and what we call the next/ moment between us, where I take your empty

hand and/ we start home, emptied of/ attempt and emptied of survival skill, is love.” After a

virtuosic syntactic elongation in the poem when there was hardly room for breath, Graham

arrives, bearing breath. The Mother takes the child’s hand, in a moment that is an act of faith and

continuance against the ongoing possibility of coming to harm in the world. The seed has blown

to the asphalt; will it be blown again, will it cycle forward, or will it perish? The final turn in the

poem is not meant to act in any simple terms as a refusal of and respite from extremis; rather, to

love, as a naked and unsheltered body on this earth carries the reader across.

Negation in Paul Celan’s “Psalm”

Hopkins conjured the internal crescendos inspired by a bird that was ever more than bird,

a lower manifestation of the upper world; and Graham traced the awe and terror of this one

world’s savage beauty. Both began with the world’s profusion stabbing into the speaker’s seeing.

Celan’s rendering of the sublime begins instead from a forsaken and retracted world.

Celan’s rendering of the sublime begins instead from a forsaken and

retracted world. In “Psalm,” Paul Celan uses negation and markers of

temporality, as well as the tension of the line, to induce a sensation

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where the world blooms furiously and paradoxically through its very

unpetaling.

In “Psalm,” Paul Celan uses negation and markers of temporality, as well as the tension of the line,

to induce a sensation where the world blooms furiously and paradoxically through its very

unpetaling. I make use of the translation of John Felstiner, supplementing it in moments of

ambiguity with Michael Hamburger’s translation in order to arrive more closely at Celan’s original

poem. Thus, all instances where the poem is quoted are Felstiner’s translation, unless otherwise

specified. Celan positions the reader in an inversion/ reinvention of two sacred genres: the psalm

and the creation story. The genre of the psalm classically acts as a sanctification of god: either

through a benediction or lamentation, faith of god is reaffirmed. The creation story narrates the

emergence of the cosmos, as the roiling unities, that which is “formless and empty” separate: “he

separated the light from the darkness” (Genesis 1:3). As the poem unfolds, I am reminded of

Theodor Adorno’s post-Holocaust Earth that is “radiant with triumphant calamity” after an ever-

illuminated earth became an engine of the obliteration of life (2002 1). In this poem, instead, the

work of “nothing” and “no one” carries us back into the cover of the soil, into our first bright seed,

a terrifying mental act that requires the reader to winnow away the all into bareness.

The first stanza of the poem begins with a creation story retracted, through the repetitive

and variable use of negation: “No one kneads us again out of earth and clay,/ no one incants our

dust. No one.” The first phrase in the poem is “No one”— locating the reader in a void from the

beginning, while both invoking and refusing God’s creation of Adam. After the total annihilation

of the Holocaust, God cannot create mankind again. The use of the temporal marker “again” is

crucial here: at one time, there was an origin — humanity was sculpted out of the depths, an act

of hope. However, in this instance, the agent is revoked. The effect here, of the iteration of the act

only through its withdrawal and impossibility, creates something like the flare of light from that

! 29

which is absent.

The effect here, of the iteration of the act only through its withdrawal

and impossibility, creates something like the flare of light from that

which is absent.

The first stanza of the poem is marked by repetition of negations which each function

slightly differently. In the first sentence of the poem, “No one” begins as a capitalized entity,

paradoxically forging the nothingness itself — while leaving humankind unforged by not (again)

kneading us from the clay. In the next instance, the phrase “no one” comes as part of the parallel

structure on the subsequent line: following the same syntactic pattern, with subject (no one) and

verb (kneads/ incants) followed by object (us/ our dust). This syntactic repetition creates the

impression that we are indeed within a liturgical form; yet the second line, with the more

diminutive “no one” creates an impression of an already remote presence further receding into

the emptiness. The third occasion of repetition happens on the third line, where the line “No one”

is a full sentence, occupying its own line. Whereas the first two instances generated a sense of

progressive narration, similar to the movement of an inverted creation myth, this third time

creates a more decisive stamp, a shutting of the proposition. The nothingness of that third “No

one” yawns open, positioning the reader at the very edge between world and no world. Indeed, in

mystical Judaism, there is the concept of the tzimtzum, whereby God began the process of

creation only via contracting his infinite light, allowing room for the human and for the

possibility of wholly ethical choice. The poem, from its inception, thus creates the impression of a

glowing void that the reader must walk through, in order to see: the movement through that void

in this instance is the experience of awe and terror. Celan begins by creating a bare and nihilistic

emptiness that increasingly becomes mystical, a chasm larger than the imagination.

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In the second stanza of the poem, Celan continues to augment this sense of luminous

void, however next querying the possibility of bloom therefrom. Nonetheless, the terms of that

blooming are explicitly borne of an emptiness. He again repeats the same clause, “No one,” but

this time via syntactic inversion: “Blessèd art thou, No one.” The line becomes an invocation at

this point of the language of prayer, moreover with the stressed beat adding a liturgical formality.

By placing “no one” at the end of the line instead of at the beginning, as it was in the first stanza,

Celan continues the startling gesture he began in the first stanza: that is, the almost-offering of the

thing in the same breath as its withdrawal, leaving the feeling of a lingering afterimage. The line

begins as a direct address and benediction, and then effaces the object — the divine addressee —

leaving the reader at a loss. Additionally, this gesture of withdrawal plays out at the level of the

line’s relationship to the sentence. The first line of the stanza is a full end-stopped sentence,

offering the reader a ground to stand on; however the content of the line undoes that stability,

sending us back into the nothingness. In the duration of stanza two, there are crucial distinctions

between the translations of Felstiner and Hamburger, in some cases producing effects that are

products of the translation act itself rather than of the original poem; I will outline the effects

produced in each case.

In Felstiner’s translation, the second line of stanza two, in contrast to the first line of that

stanza, begins with a less stable syntax, launching with a preposition and enjambing right at an

uneasy marker of temporality: “In thy sight would.” The line continues as a direct invocation to

the “no one” who has infused the poem thus far. By beginning with a preposition here, the reader

is positioned directly within the cascade of that absent agent’s sight: a sight which entails a

conditional proposition, a state of uncertainty and conjecture through the use of “would.” The

effect is a particular product of the translation, however, as the use of a preposition here is

mandated by the structure of English and would not be present in the German. In German, the

line begins with the indirect object form of “du” as in “I give you.” Hamburger’s translation, “For

! 31

your sake” instead positions the stress in the line more squarely on the divine rather than the

human inhabitation or eviction from divine sight. The sentence finishes in both translations with

flowering. Hamburger offers: “For your sake/ we shall flower” (39). Felstiner writes: “In thy sight

would/ we bloom.” The verb in German here — alternately rendered by Hamburger as “shall” and

Felstiner — is “wollen”— meaning “to want to” or “to be about to” engage in an act. In

Hamburger’s version, the tense of the verb “shall” creates a feeling of stronger possibility and

imminence, while still bucking against the liturgical resonance of the verb tense. Meanwhile,

Hamburger’s “shall” lacks the resonance of “wanting to”— which makes the action of flowering

perhaps too assuredly possible. Felstiner’s version conversely offers a charged conditionality: is

that blooming truly possible, and what are its terms, emerging as they are out of the void. Indeed,

Felstiner’s subjective “would” (whereas the German uses an indicative tense) tips the balance in

the other direction, insinuating that such blooming might be impossible.

The following two lines (“Dir/ entgegen” in the German) differ more distinctly between

the two translations. The word “entgegen” has multiple possible meanings in German, used

alternately as “against,” “contrary to,” “in opposition to” and “on towards.” Felstiner proposes: “In

thy/ spite,” whereas Hamburger proposes: “Towards/ you” (39). Does Felstiner’s choice add a

malice that Celan may not have intended? Perhaps only the original German word, which

embodies both propulsion and opposition in its own logic, suits. In Felstiner’s version, in any

case, the enjambment “In thy/spite” creates a sensation of unfulfilled longing: to be “in thy”—

within the shelter of God, would offer solace, and the dissolution of self into infinity that

mysticism mandates. However, instead, the line enjambs into “spite,” indicating that the entry into

“No one” is charged indeed with both longing and peril. In Hamburger’s version, this tension is

absent: instead the single word lines, “Towards/ You” create an intensification, as if each word is a

station moving towards entry (39).

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In the subsequent two stanzas of the poem (we return largely to Felstiner), having

prepared us to enter a shining void, Celan next builds the reader’s awe and terror to a climax. The

third stanza of the poem begins with a new form of negation, unprecedented in the poem, with

the phrase: “A Nothing.” The line forces a reckoning that beyond the possibility that there are No

Beings, there is not even a Thing — effectively a further backwards step, into the strange oceanic

dark that the poem has worked to create. The line enjambs, to announce that Nothing is the

condition we inhabit: “A Nothing/ we were, are now, and ever/ shall be.” In this movement, Celan

englobes the selves spanning all times and conditions: the self of the past and present and the

ever-more self of all imaginable futures, are all borne together into the Nothing. Effectively this

temporal move creates a collision of infinities: alltimes, allselves, are simultaneously submerged

into the condition of Nothing: this move creates a mental pivot so dizzying that the reader can

hardly catch up: a sensation of imaginative excess that the human mind cannot contain.

We come to understand that the very condition of being human now — in

a newly broken world — is an unfolding into and out of the Nothing;

that is the bloom we are left with and the bloom we must paradoxically

learn to embrace.

Yet just when it appears this intensity has reached a new height, Celan brilliantly pivots,

with the word “blooming”— into yet an even more profound pinnacle in the poem. This fourth

line of this third stanza ends with a colon, a pause in the work of the line, allowing us to imagine

that the lines that come subsequently are the very bloom itself. We come to understand that the

very condition of being human now — in a newly broken world — is an unfolding into and out of

the Nothing; that is the bloom we are left with and the bloom we must paradoxically learn to

embrace. Celan describes that dark flower as “the Nothing-, the/ No-One’s-Rose.” The moment is

! 33

essential in the poem, in particular, via Felstiner’s translation, and effect of how he renders the

composite words. The first descriptor, “the Nothing-,” paired with the hyphen, leaves the word

with a pang, a waiting. This is amplified by the dangling “the” at the end of an off-kilter line,

which is present in the German and thus not a particularity of Felstiner’s translation. The final

line of the stanza, “No-One’s-Rose” bears an astonishing sensation of fullness amidst the

emptiness, through the successive use of capital letters and hyphenated linking, making it appear

nearly to be its own sentence. Although the capitalization is the translator’s choice — all nouns in

German are capitalized — it’s a choice that I laud at this juncture, perhaps a way into capturing

how Celan conceptualized the bloom in the void. It becomes all the more apparent that the rose

belongs to no one; it is naked in the world, not shaped by another being, even a great artificer.

That rose perhaps bears responsibility for its own life, its own continuing, even amidst God’s

apparent withdrawal. This line sears through with a luminosity: a sort of ethical sublime. Both the

earth and the cosmos have become barren for Celan in the wake of catastrophic world events: yet,

even amidst this knowledge, there is a paradoxical vitality: the shimmering of the living thing that

is now under no one’s care.

The final stanza of the poem extends these intensities masterfully. The stanza is the only

single sentence stanza without any caesuras, and it indeed accelerates towards its final song. The

first line of the stanza is the single word “With”— a prepositional launching. In this instance, the

preposition is indeed present in the German and not an effect of the translation, and is

furthermore singled out on the line. This “with” for a moment appears to challenge the condition

established prior in the poem: that is, that one is naked in the world, and there are no necessary

adjacencies. Still, we are reminded that the poem has summoned a “we” from the outset, and the

possibility of a larger shared condition does thereby persist through the poem. The use of the

word “with” is a reinforcement that amidst the void, something — something must continue

through and beyond that state. That which follows the preposition shows us that the condition

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that comes along with us is one of dark splendor, a light-broke hour: “With/ our pistil soul-bright,

/ our stamen heaven-waste,/ our corona red.” These lines create a quality of language that nearly

exceeds language, as composite entities enfold the all. For example, the pistil, the ovule and

pollen-receptor of the flower, is “soul-bright”: it transcends its botanical body, ever-becoming

something else. Meanwhile, the stamen, that organ of pollen production and propagation is

“heaven-waste,” a surfeit from the clouds. At this moment, a flare of color, the first in the poem,

bursts forth with the flush of “our corona red.” We are, Celan means to tell us, a broken, blooming

body, carrying the hope of — but never certain about — our own continuance in an ever-ruined

world.

Our pistil is bright, our stamen is of the firmament — and both these

things might be directly a cause of and emergent from the purpleword,

a word dunked in the dark of living (“our corona red/ from the

purpleword”).

The final three lines usher us into perhaps the greatest burst of awe in the poem’s

trajectory. Celan writes: “from the purpleword we sang/ over, O over/ the thorn.” In this final

moment, the psalm actualizes. The genre of the psalm designates a musical benediction, and

many ancient psalms provide explicit musical instructions. Thus, the movement of the poem into

the act of singing is transforming the form into a psalm. Indeed, the syntax unfolds into its full

and potentially multiple meaning at this juncture, enlarging the sensation of awe. Our pistil is

bright, our stamen is of the firmament — and both these things might be directly a cause of and

emergent from the purpleword, a word dunked in the dark of living (“our corona red/ from the

purpleword”). That dark, ambivalent word might also be that which propels us next into song

(“from the purpleword we sang”). So too, the purpleword is also the blood that flows from the

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wound made by Christ’s thorns. A song and a creation parable of sorts come to the fore out of the

depths of our wounds. The phenomena of the world appear out of the purpleword, and out of the

purpleword, emerges song.

The last two lines of the poem constitute its climax — the moment where the singing

soars, in spite of, and beyond, as Felstiner would have it, “thy spite.” Celan writes: “we sang/ over,

O over/ the thorn.” There’s an additional moment of multiplicity here that propels the reader into

further awe. Although this meaning is a product of the multiple meanings in the English

translation rather than proper to the German itself, I suggest that it thereby creates a

consequence, worthy of examining, perhaps borne out of the ethos of the original poem. The

word “uber” in German, meaning “over” does not bear the secondary meaning of “past” or “done

with,” as it does in English. Nonetheless the translation renders a version that perhaps creates a

new amplification of Celan’s poem. We might ask here, is the singing a catapult “over”— in the

sense of beyond, the thorn? Is that singing thus a form of redemption? Is the singing an attempt to

demolish the thorn, a prayer towards a better day? Do our wounds make our songs possible? Yet

the poem will not so easily settle the reader. Amidst these possible readings, another reading

surfaces, present at least in the English translation: “over, O over” — the world as it was once

known has been forever reconfigured. We cannot know another world, except this world that is of

and made by the thorn.

Yet, yet. Still, amidst this dark proposition, the poet addresses that void,

in the full stance of prayer. The poem at this moment opens into a

world where the Nothing that is left, the No One who tends to that plot

of land, becomes the poem’s dazzling afterimage. In the Nothing, Celan

lights a black flare.

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The human being is naked and wholly accountable, in the world that he has wrought; there is, the

poem tells us, neither divine plan nor divine agent. Or perhaps, the divine has simply withdrawn,

to allow the human being to live and let live, or let die. Yet, yet. Still, amidst this dark proposition,

the poet addresses that void, in the full stance of prayer. The poem at this moment opens into a

world where the Nothing that is left, the No One who tends to that plot of land, becomes the

poem’s dazzling afterimage. In the Nothing, Celan lights a black flare.

Each time we crane towards seeing through the poem — towards finding the way in to

that which seized us, we tremble awake, even as we almost disappear. Hopkins, Graham, and

Celan each masterfully use form to bring our Imaginations to that vibrating brink: through

sensuous crests of sound; through the extension of syntax to its breaking point; through the

verbal tools of nullification, they each paradoxically find means of representing the very feeling

itself of the unrepresentable, as it overcomes us. I mean here that in each poem, the world dwarfs

us: the world’s mountains and fish and birds and green fields and burnt fields and even its black

voids, its love and tenderness and hope, its nourishing of and then brutal undoing of every living

thing — come first. We cannot hold all of that world inside our bodies. That trembling awake is

the sensation of the poem not holding it — holding it — not holding it.

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Appendix

“The Windhover” by Gerard Manley Hopkins

To Christ our Lord

I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-

dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

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“Mother and Child (The Road at the Edge of Field)” by Jorie Graham

The grasses midsummer eve when the stems grow invisible and the seemingly de- capitated heads like a flock that is not in the end departing but is lingering, golden with buttery flies then also aglow with orange—gnats hovering their tiny solar system round—heads bending this way and that in unison glowing and not showing where they are attached to earth or what path has brought them to their status; they for whom stasis when it comes is the huge inholding of breath by the whole world as it is seen to be here, horizon to horizon stilling, down to this corner field of grasses held, bees all molten with approach and with- drawal—though of course there are still stars—albeit now in- visible—and I look up into the sky to see   beyond the foaming of day’s end the place where all in fact is, longed-for or over- looked altogether by the mind, human, which can, if it wishes, ken them into viewby imagination—there is no invention—or not—as long as it exists, the mind can do this —how many are the years you have say the grass-pointings which if I follow them up and up make of my eyeing large spidery webtrails into  the galaxy thank god, and all that outlives for sure the me in me—a whirling robe humming with firstness greets you if you eye-up, confess it— in letters home you would

! 39

tell this whole story but nothing happened—the world opened its robe   and you were free to look with no sense of excitement, no song, it is so simple, your lungs afloat, your shears still there in your right hand, the hedgerow wild beside you and how you can—yes—hear it course up through its million stalks—and also, closely now, the single  skinny stalk—and how it is true, all is being sucked up by the soil into the sky, and the sky back down into variegation and forking and fingery   elaboration at the core of prior elaboration—spotted, in- candescent—each about to be cast off by the one coming behind—it too shall contribute to thepossible—the world of the world—and the shears  in my right hand grow warm with the sun they’ve been hanging in, and I talk to myself, I make  words that follow from other   words, they push from be- hind—into the hedge like the  hedge but not of it—no—not ever—slippery against it where it never knows they are pressing, delirious accents trying to reach in, fit in—phantoms—as the calls of the disappeared in the stadiums today are in- audible, the satellite’s announcement of capture inaudible, the occupation of an other’s body, taken from its private life its bed its window its still half-open fridge, dragged down the stairs with everyone screaming—have you visited your   loved ones recently says the guard as he lets loose the filamentary shock of electricity through the body to the   heart whose words   will nowcease—what is cruelty—the grasses lean all one way now under the sway of

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difference, which evening’s drop of temperature brings on, which the guard and the prisoner feel as one, grassheads like spume on the thin shanks of stalk—their until-now right there beneath them—grass, I say, grass, and rip a piece to hold out to you who stand beneath me not yet speaking—everyone awaits your first word—and I open your hand and put the heads inside it and close it and I watch terror spray from you in colonies of tiny glances—everywhere but where your hand is, and then stalk I say, poppy, thorn, hedgerose—I am not screaming because I am old enough to hang on hang on but your small heart beating as of two years now hears the cannibalizing crossed scream in all my kindness—the mother stands beside you and she sees you stare at her and put your arm down and open your fist and we both see the seeds drop down onto the asphalt and the ground-breeze drag them a little distance to the middle of the road then stop. It is summer. It is the solstice. diamond of energy holds us. We breathe, and what we call the nextmoment between us, where I take your empty hand and we start home, emptied ofattempt and emptied of survival skill, is love.

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“Psalm” by Paul Celan, Translated by Michael Felstiner

No one kneads us again out of earth and clay, no one incants our dust. No one.

Blessèd art thou, No One. In thy sight would we bloom. In thy spite.

A Nothing we were, are now, and ever shall be, blooming: the Nothing-, the No-One's-Rose.

With our pistil soul-bright, our stamen heaven-waste, our corona red from the purpleword we sang over, O over the thorn.

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“Psalm” by Paul Celan, Translated by Michael Hamburger

No one moulds us again out of earth and clay, no one conjures our dust.No one.

Praised be your name, no one.For your sake we shall flower.Towardsyou.

A nothingwe were, are, shallremain, flowering:the nothing-, the No one’s rose.

Withour pistil soul-bright,With our stamen heaven-ravaged,our corolla redwith the crimson word which we sangover, O over the thorn.

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“Psalm” by Paul Celan, in Grimm and Hunt

Niemand knetet uns wieder aus Erde und Lehm,niemand bespricht unsern Staub. Niemand.

Gelobt seist du, Niemand.Dir zulieb wollenwir blühn.Direntgegen.

Ein Nichtswaren wir, sind wir, werdenwir bleiben, blühend:die Nichts-, dieNiemandsrose.

Mitdem Griffel seelenhell,dem Staubfaden himmelswüst,der Krone rotvom Purpurwort, das wir sangenüber, o überdem Dorn.

! 44

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. The Dialectic of the Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 2002. Print.

Celan, Paul. “Psalm.” Trans. John Felstiner. Poetry Foundation. Web.

----. “Psalm.” Nineteen Poems. Transl. Michael Hamburger. New York: Carcanet Press, 1972.

Print.

---. “Psalm.” German Twentieth Century Poetry. Eds. Reinhold Grimm and Irmgard Hunt. New

York: Continuum, Press, 2001. Print.

“Gerard Manley Hopkins.” Poetry Foundation. Web.

Graham, Jorie. “Mother and Child (The Road at the Edge of the Field)”. Lana Turner Journal 8

(2015). Web.

Greene, Ronald, Stephen Cushman, and Clare Cavanagh. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.

Hopkins, Gerard Manley. “The Windhover.” Academy of American Poets. Web.

Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgment. Trans. J.H. Bernard. New York:

Prometheus Books, 2000. Print.

Poteat, Joshua. The Regret Histories. New York: Harper Perennial, 2015. Print.