child, for Momaday, might represent not only a child filled with delight but, even more importantly, a child who embodies the whole concept of delightfulness. In relationship to the child, the backdrop of the high, rugged, ancient walls of the canyon are immense; and it is the immensity of the great walled canyon that intensifies the child’s smallness.

Those are the images that Momaday uses in the first stanza of this poem. These images appear rather obvious and are easily interpreted in a fairly straightforward manner. But something changes in the second stanza that makes continuing this simple interpretation a little more quizzical. At the end of the first stanza, Momaday switches his focus from the child to the natural setting. In the first few lines of the second stanza, he continues the same line of vision as he looks at the hills, noticing the shadow play of light and darkness in the drifting sand. What could Momaday be seeing? What do the sand drifts and the shadows mean?

He uses the word break in reference to the sand drifts. In the next line, he uses the word cleavage. These are rather harsh words in some sense of their definitions, but both words are also somewhat ambiguous. The poem says that the sand drifts “break and roll.” The word roll softens the “breaking” part of the image. Ocean waves break and roll, gently and smoothly. And the word cleavage has two opposite meanings: one, to cut away; and another, to cling to. Or maybe, as some interpretations have suggested, Momaday uses both the drifting sands and the light and shadow to represent the passage of time. This makes sense especially in respect to the last line of the poem.

In the last line, Momaday returns his gaze and speaks directly to the child. He tells the child, “You embrace the spirit of this place.” Is that why the child’s arms are outstretched? Is the child trying to wrap his arms around the trees, the rocks, the memories, the history and the spirit of Canyon de Chelly? Or does Momaday want to convey a different meaning of the word embrace, such as “to encompass”? Or does he use the word embrace to suggest that the child understands? And what is there to understand about the spirit of this place? What is the spirit of Canyon de Chelly?

The spirit of Canyon de Chelly is, like poetry itself, different things to different people. To some, it is a national monument in Arizona. It is a canyon with sheer walls that rise up a spectacular thousand feet to scenic overlooks. It is a quiet, beautiful place for tourists to hike, a place to spend a summer vacation.

To another group of people, Canyon de Chelly is an archeological site, where at one time in 1902 a man named Charles Day built a trading post and hunted the grounds, looking for ancient, Native American artifacts, which he then sold to museums. More recently the United States government has protected the area, and now, to a group of legitimate scientists, Canyon de Chelly is a place where they can uncover history.

To the Navajo people, Canyon de Chelly is home. It is on the valley floor of this canyon that the Navajo people farm the land and raise sheep and goats. The Navajo people have lived in Canyon de Chelly for over three hundred years, except for a dramatic period of six years between 1862 and 1868 when they were rounded up by Colonel Kit Carson and forced to leave the canyon. Carson then marched them on what has been referred to as the Long Walk, a four-hundred-mile walk to the Bosque Redondo in New Mexico. Many Navajo people died. It is estimated that twelve thousand Navajos began the Long Walk. Six years later only seven thousand Navajos made the Long Walk back home.

Prior to the Navajos, the Anasazi (a Navajo word for “ancient ones”) lived in Canyon de Chelly. They lived in and around the canyon area for a period of about two thousand years. The ruin of their culture and their dwellings is the reason the archeologists are there. It is also the reason that the canyon has been designated as a national monument.

Now, the questions that remain might go something like this: Is Momaday’s poem referring to all of these various definitions of the canyon? When he talks about the spirit of this place, is he referring to the spirits of all of these people and to all of their well-intentioned as well as ill-intentioned acts? Does this child who is running represent the Native American culture as well as the white culture? Is Momaday thinking about the ancient Anasazi as well as the modern tourists? Or is it none of this? Or is it more than this? And where are the answers to all these questions?

In an interview in the Journal of Ethnic Studies, Momaday says that most of us have come to expect answers. He then adds that “many things are not given us, and for the Western man this jars a little bit because we want to know. We expect to be told. We don’t expect loose ends in a story. But in Indian tradition, it’s not that way at all. There are always loose ends.” Despite his belief in loose ends, Momaday does offer some suggestions on how to find answers. In his book The Man Made of Words, he says, “Stories are pools of reflection in which we see ourselves through the prism of the imagination.” Momaday’s thoughts reflect a sentiment that is closely related to reader-response theory— if there are answers to be found, they are to be found somewhere inside the reader.

Since one of the major images of this poem is centered on the landscape, it is important to understand how Momaday looks at the earth:

“Very old in the Native American worldview is the conviction that the earth is vital, that there is a spiritual dimension to it, a dimension in which man rightly exists…. In the natural order man invests himself in the landscape and at the same time incorporates the landscape into his own most fundamental experience. This trust is sacred…. The Native American is someone who thinks of himself, imagines himself in a particular way. By virtue of his experience, his idea of himself comprehends his relationship to the land.”

This passage suggests Momaday’s belief that man and the landscape are one. This concept, he claims, is more apparent, or more real, to Native Americans because they have lived on the same region for so many thousands of years. They are connected to the ancient ones through stories that have been handed down to each succeeding generation, and therefore their connection to the ancient ones and to their homeland is strong. Many Native Americans are aware of their lineage, knowing their ancestors’ names six or more generations back. Momaday has said that he is always surprised and disappointed to find out that many non-Native Americans know very little about their ancestry. He also questions the effects of the technological revolution, which has uprooted people from the soil. “We have become disoriented,” he says, and “[have] suffered a kind of psychic dislocation of ourselves in time and space. We may be perfectly sure of where we are in relation to the supermarket … but [it is doubtful] that any of us knows where he is in relation to the stars …”

Momaday’s connection to the land is sacred, and he has specifically referred to Canyon de Chelly as one of the sacred places on earth: “If you would know the earth for what it really is,” he says, “learn it through its sacred places.” When asked to define sacred, he responded, “Sacred transcends definition. The mind does not comprehend it … It is … to be recognized and acknowledged in the heart and soul. Those who seek to study or understand the sacred in academic terms are misled … It is beyond the mechanics of analysis.”

Momaday also says that poetry is the crown of literature. Maybe in some ways poetry is sacred. Maybe poetry is meant to stimulate the imagination and is meant to be recognized, not through rational thought, but through the heart and soul. Maybe the purpose of Momaday’s poem is to pose questions without giving answers, leaving spaces, like the spaces in Canyon de Chelly, for the imagination to run as freely as the child running with outstretched arms. And then again, maybe it’s not. Finally, Momaday says: “We are what we imagine ourselves to be.” Maybe the same holds true for Momaday’s poetry.

Source: Joyce Hart, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2001.

In “To A Child Running With Outstretched Arms in Canyon de Chelly,” N. Scott Momaday attempts, as writers always should, to give readers a full experience using a minimum number of words. The poem identifies a real place, that people could go to, walk through, and imagine a child running through as they study the walls. The last line refers to “the spirit of this place.” Readers sometimes feel that they might be missing out on some important aspect when they find out that the poem has a reallife point of reference. Knowing the canyon and its history helps a little, and readers who know the history of the Anasazi and the Navajo who have lived there might understand the aforementioned “spirit” better than those who don’t, but prior understanding is not required or even much of a benefit. This poem is not asking readers to come to it with a knowledge of the Canyon de Chelly, it is telling readers what the canyon is like: the canyon is like a child with outstretched arms, running.

Within the compact space of these eight short lines, Momaday has packed a world of information about geography, Native American history, and children, using each as a catalyst for understanding the others. The poem would not be able to give up any more information if it were twice or three times or ten times as long. This is the principle behind minimalist poetry and behind minimalist art in general: capturing readers’ full attention to each detail by giving little that will distract them.

Momaday’s poem looks like a little rectangle, a brick of words, but readers should not mistake its apparent utility for a lack of artistry. It is one of the most basic of artistic points, though often forgotten, that poetry exists to give some defined shape to the words that an author chooses to use to capture ideas. The words are, without a doubt, important, and a poet who does not radiate a love for the various ways meanings interlock cannot hope to keep hold of any reader who might happen by his or her work. But the poet’s love of wordplay is no more than the essayist’s, the novelist’s, and maybe even the journalist’s. Writers should love their tools; readers can tell if they don’t. Poets, in addition to caring about what their words amount to, care about how they are arranged on the page. N. Scott Momaday has written in many genres and has garnered critical acclaim for almost every style he has used. He knows when to express his ideas in quantity and when to express them with style. The striking thing about “To a Child Running” is that it makes its firm style practically inconspicuous.

With a long, epic poem, readers can marvel at the poet’s “grand scheme.” The talent on display is much more impressive when the scale is large, and thinking about the poet’s achievement is like ruminating over how architects fit the pyramids together to last. Even while considering a medium-sized poem, one can get lost in considering the myriad choices that the author has gone through. If the poem has a traditional structure, then the author can be assumed to have shaken and reworked all of the ideas and the words used for them to make the thoughts fit the prescribed boundaries. If the poem is in free verse, without rhyme or a set rhythm scheme, then an even greater question arises about how the author knew the right place to end each line.

More elusive, though, and more fascinating, is the poem, like this one, that lasts just a few lines and then is over, exerting its distinct style quickly and unforgettably. Like an eighteenth-century minimalist painter, the poet of the short form forces audiences to stop, stare, squint, and come back several times if there is to be any hope of taking in all of the implications that are presented. Momaday is working with just two simple items here—the child and the canyon—and to make readers consider the full implications of each, he has to convince them, consciously or not, that this piece is well thoughtout. He wins confidence from readers by exerting control. The lines all have six syllables, and the stanzas both have four lines. It is hard to feel that this is a poem that just fell out onto the page the way that it popped into the author’s head, and so readers sit up and take notice of every word.

When Momaday was a student at Stanford, his mentor, the esteemed poet Yvor Winters, encouraged him toward formal poetry, including syllabic poetry, which uses the same number of syllables in each line regardless of the rhythm formed by degrees of accentuation. In “To a Child Running,” syllable-counting offers just enough control to keep readers focused. With the readers’ minds engaged, Momaday is able to open up the possibilities that result from loving word play. For instance, in a longer poem, a word like “immense,” as a description of the backdrop, might be lost like just another cobblestone in the pavement; “cleavages” might just seem like a clever, but not a particularly poignant, way of describing the erratic pattern of sunbeams in a canyon; and the use of the word “this” in the last line might not draw so much attention to itself. In a longer poem, the four-line stanzas would just be taken for granted, and the poem would not be able to fold back upon itself, springing back to the “you” with which it started so quickly and so powerfully. A longer poem would also disperse Momaday’s use of rhyme across a greater area, diluting its effect.

The poem’s use of rhyme is somewhat like its use of rhythm but even less formal, helping to tie the whole together and to assure readers of the author’s control but popping up as a surprise when it appears. There are rhymes, but there is not an overall rhyme scheme. “Immense” at the end of the first stanza refers back to “intense” at the end of the first line. “Excitement,” in line two, is echoed with “delight,” in line three. The long “o” sound, as well as their places at the ends of a line and a sentence, bind together “roll” and “shadow.” The most conspicuous use of rhyme comes at the end of the poem, where the last two lines form a rhyming couplet, “embrace” fitting neatly against “place,” leaving readers with a greater sense of formality when they finish than the poem actually has. Throughout the poem, rhymes pop up occasionally, not unlike the way that coincidences pop up in real life, but in these final lines, there can be no mistake that the poet is manipulating his words to give a small snapshot of the large world.

Momaday is not really doing anything too new here. The model for minimalist poetry has to be Japanese haiku, whose practitioners have produced thousands of meaningful variations within one simple design. Staying within one form, haiku writers avoid the worry of teasing audiences to guess how they came up with any sort of new style. It could be argued that Japanese society was conducive to such a delicate and formal way of thought that could produce and appreciate such focus, especially in the Edo period (1600–1868) when the greatest haiku writers of them all lived. The Japanese patience and openness to subtle experiences is evident in other traditional art forms, including horticulture and Kabuki theater. This sort of immersion into the miniature is not a common part of American culture.

For an American poet, it is particularly unnatural to produce a short, tight poem, to aim for the pureness of artistry that a little piece entails. America is a country based on expansion, on working around rules, not within them. The belief in unlimited expansion, which started with the settlers’ move westward across the continent, continues today with the exploration of space and the growth of the stock market, which for some people confirm the hope that the best thing is to keep on the move, producing more and more. All people see things differently, but the general mood that defines this country has always been set by a belief in freedom rather than in self-control. In the arts, especially, intellectual boundaries are seen as extraneous rules to be broken, more than as challenges. American art of the nineteenth century was defined by its attempts to imitate European standards. In the twentieth century, when America developed a unique identity, structure became a thing defined by internal rules, not by such externals as meter and rhyme.

Historically, the link between the ancient haiku form and what Momaday does with predominantly free verse is probably the imagist movement, which flared up quickly at the beginning of the twentieth century and burned away just as fast, leaving a lasting impression on all of American poetry. Imagist poetry, which descended from the French symbolists of the 1800s, was concerned with, as the name implies, imagery. Japanese haiku had a marked influence in the way that it allowed images to speak for themselves without being explained. As a literary movement, imagism opposed the confining use of structured forms. Because they tried to get objects to speak for themselves, imagist poems are often brief, like William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow,” which is sixteen words, or Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” which is only two lines. There are examples of all lengths that represent this school of thought, though. In his book The Imagist Poem: Modern Poetry in Miniature, William Pratt defines the imagist poem as “a moment of revealed truth, rather than a structure of consecutive events or thoughts. The plot or argument of older poetry is replaced by a single, dominant image, or a quick succession of images: its effect is meant to be instantaneous rather than cumulative.” This certainly applies to the way that “To A Child Running” works its effect, although Momaday, writing sixty years after the imagist movement was at its prime, worked under newer rules that were not so strict about avoiding structure.

Imagism’s influence is still felt in almost all of contemporary American poetry. The American tradition of freedom is nicely served by the imagists’ movement against poetic rules; the emphasis on concrete imagery has come to be accepted as being what is poetic about a poem. As such, Momaday’s poem is a pure example of a late-twentieth- century American poem.

Momaday, unfortunately, is not usually one of the first people thought of when lists of American poets are compiled because he is usually hidden at the front of the folder reserved for the sub-category of Native Americans. This kind of stereotyping in the arts is a disservice to Americans, who need their country’s talent revealed, not hidden. It is a source of annoyance to Momaday, who has said that he would rather be thought of as a writer and as an Indian, but not narrowly defined as an Indian writer. “I don’t know what that means, exactly,” he told Dagmar Weiler in a 1988 interview, regarding the subject of being an Indian writer, “and I don’t identify with it at all.” People reading “To A Child Running With Outstretched Arms in Canyon de Chelly” may feel that they need to understand the people who have lived there in order to catch the poem’s entire spectrum, and this may be true, but such background knowledge is not absolutely necessary. Just as one does not need to know, when looking at a miniature model, whether the thing that it represents actually exists to marvel at the artist’s ability to create any form of reality on such a small scale, neither does one need to know the Canyon de Chelly or its history to grasp the power of what happens when this child and the canyon become one.

Source: David Kelly, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2001.