SOURCE: "Form, Feeling, and Nature: Aspects of Harmony in the Poetry of Louise Bogan," in Critical Essays on Louise Bogan, edited by Martha Collins, G.K. Hall & Co., 1984, pp. 180-94.

[In the following essay, Moldaw examines Bogan's aesthetic principles and style.]

Like T. S. Eliot, and unlike William Carlos Williams, in answer to whom she wrote the essay "On the Pleasures of Formal Poetry," Louise Bogan believed that verse is never free. For her, the music and meaning of a poem are indissoluble, and the experience which inspires a poem must be transformed in order to become a work of art:

"unadulterated life" must be transposed, although it need not be "depersonalized." Otherwise you get "self-expression" only; and that is only half of art. The other half is technical, as well as emotional, and the most poignant poems are those in which the technique takes up the burden of feeling instantly; and that presupposes a practised technique.

Bogan felt that her own work expressed her personal experience without betraying it; experience pervades the poems, but is disguised. As she wrote in her journal, and to an admirer, respectively:

The poet represses the outright narrative of his life. He absorbs it, along with life itself. The repressed becomes the poem. Actually, I have written down my experience in the closest detail. But the rough and vulgar facts are not there.

with my work … you are dealing with emotion under high pressure—so that symbols are its only release.

Autobiographical veracity does not consist of "rough and vulgar facts"—these are replaced by, or released in the form of, symbols. Furthermore, "technique takes up the burden of feeling." In a sense this is incontrovertible, for emotion is always conveyed through the textures of the surface. But Bogan's phrase also signifies that feeling is problematic, a "burden," which it is technique vital function to express successfully. She has no sympathy for technique for technique's sake: "The fake reason, the surface detail, language only—these give no joy."

To describe what, beyond technique, a poem requires to be emotionally effective, Bogan used the term "the breath of life," which connotes both vitality and the rhythmic basis of human nature. In "The Pleasures of Formal Poetry," Bogan traces the pleasure of rhythmical utterance to physical activities, and finally to the human body and breath itself:

I want to keep on emphasizing the pleasure to be found in bodily rhythm as such…. We think of certain tasks, the rhythm of which has become set. Sowing, reaping, threshing, washing clothes, rowing, and even milking cows goes to rhythm…. Hauling up sail or pulling it down; coiling rope; pulling and pushing and climbing and lifting, all went to different rhythms; and these rhythms are preserved for us, fast or slow, smooth or rough, in sailors' songs.

How far back can we push this sense of time?… It certainly springs from the fact that a living man has rhythm built in to him, as it were. His heart beats. He has a pulse…. and man shares with the animals not only a pulse, but an attendant rhythm: his breathing.

Focusing on language as an accompaniment to and preserver of the rhythms of physical acts imparts an importance to form—sound, rhythm, rhyme—that is not dependent on words. Poetry's primary distinction here is that it combines words (descriptions, meanings) with rhythms which in themselves are firmly rooted in the human psyche.

Bogan often expresses her predilection for the rhythmical aspects of poetry through the metaphor of music. Music was one of Bogan's great loves. She once wrote, "you can have anyone who writes 'odic poems.' I'm going right back to pure music: the Christina Rossetti of our day, only not so good. My aim is to sound so pure and so liquid that travelers will take me across the desert with them…." Music is the central image of many of Bogan's poems. The titles reflect this: twelve poems are called songs, and other titles include "The Drum," "M., Singing," "To Be Sung on the Water," "Musician," and "Train Tune." Bogan also weaves sound into other images, often describing a motion along with its sound, as in "Betrothed":

       But there is only the evening here,
       And the sound of willows
       Now and again dipping their long oval leaves in the water.

The image of willows "dipping their leaves" creates a continuum of rhythmical motion while it refers to, and is meant to evoke, the sound which accompanies this motion. Further, the sounds of the words create the melodious sounds they invoke. In "Old Countryside" we experience the various seasons primarily through sounds:

       The summer thunder, like a wooden bell,
       Rang in the storm above the mansard roof,
 
                         .....
       … wind made the clapboards creak.
 
                         .....
       … we heard the cock
       Shout its unplaceable cry, the axe's sound
       Delay a moment after the axe's stroke.

The correlation between the rhythmical natures of the aesthetic and natural worlds and the human psyche is at the heart of Bogan's poetry. To a large extent the poems are about poetry and the aesthetic process. Many images central to the poems are of sound and rhythmical motion, two fundamental elements of poetry which also emphasize its connection with human life. The poems most expressive of spiritual peace, like "Song for a Lyre" and "Night," are those in which images of natural rhythms dictate emotional rhythms. The awe and harmony embodied in these poems emanate from a vision of the natural and changing world, and the poems end with a declaration drawn from human experience. The appeal is to a world in which rhythms and form embody otherwise inexpressible emotions. The most peaceful world is neither rigid, with too much form, as in "Sub Contra," nor chaotic, as in the beginning of "Baroque Comment," but fluid, ordered to the point where patterns are discernible.

"Sub Contra," which uses as metaphors the techniques and forms of music, expresses the desire for a pattern that will fulfill passionate demands. The poem exists in an aesthetic vacuum, without a surrounding world. No person is explicitly present: the ear, brain, heart, and rage take the place of an individual. The poem asks technique to "take up the burden of feeling," but technique alone, "like mockery in a shell," is inadequate, until the emotions provide impetus and direction. "Sub Contra" is about the discovery that a good poem "cannot be written by technique alone. It is carved out of agony, just as a statue is carved out of marble":

       Notes on the tuned frame of strings
       Plucked or silenced under the hand
       Whimper lightly to the ear,
       Delicate and involute,
       Like the mockery in a shell.
       Lest the brain forget the thunder
       The roused heart once made it hear,—
       Rising as that clamor fell,—
       Let there sound from music's root
       One note rage can understand,
       A fine noise of riven things.
       Build there some thick chord of wonder;
       Then, for every passion's sake,
       Beat upon it till it break.

The desire for "One note rage can understand" is initially countered by a dispassionate tone and an emphasis on a controlled, contrived aspect of music. The first five lines describe the formation and reception of music's sound simply and meticulously, first deviating from exposition with "whimper," which is affective. "Whimper" usually suggests a quality of emotion emanating from the source of the sound—for instance a child whimpers to convey a need. Bogan, however, inverts this. The notes themselves do not whimper, the ear perceives the sound as such, and the passive construction of "Plucked … under the hand" de-emphasizes the musician's role. This inversion conveys the idea that the listener infers, or passively creates, the tremor of the emotional. The ear, "delicate and involute," appears more complex than the music.

Next, the notes are compared to "the mockery in a shell." The metaphor, predicted and supported by "involute," which suggests the shape of a shell as well as the ear, conveys both the emotionally neutral sense of being imitative, and the sense that the music is hollow, without real inspiration. The implication is that this music, like the sound of the sea heard from a shell, is not authentic.

Dissatisfied with this state of things, the poem from here on is exhortative, asking for a note, then a chord, then a rhythm, to inspire the brain in the way the heart once did. Although the music so far has been unsatisfying, the exhortation implies the heart's present inability to inspire the brain without assistance.

As the poem redefines the musical process outlined at its beginning, and shifts from "the frame of strings" to "music's root," the music evolves until it becomes adequate first to the demands of rage, and finally, "for every passion's sake." "One note" and "a fine noise of riven things" expand into "some thick chord of wonder"; and "beat," which suggests a drum, not a stringed instrument, replaces "plucked." The rhythm of the poem also becomes more insistent: the last two lines both begin and end on a strong stress. The hortatory subjunctive, "let," demanding something from no one in particular, delays the necessity of direct address until, at the poem's end, "build" and "beat" demand action from the musician, who had been portrayed as passive. Whereas the music at the beginning was only a mockery, this is meant to be emotionally authentic.

It is the demand, "Then, for every passion's sake, / Beat upon it till it break," which reinvigorates the poem and allows, finally, a cathartic release. The poem's frustration stemmed from its own inabilities—technique alone was inadequate, as was the heart. Only in combination, with directives from the emotions and ability from technique, can the poem achieve its desired resolution.

"Sub Contra" expresses the desire for an aesthetic form which will exemplify, or even create a heightened state of emotion. In contrast, "Baroque Comment" embraces the world and its aesthetic creations and embodies the human desire for harmony. Its theme is the already resolved coexistence of the world, form and symbolic expression.

       From loud sound and still chance;
       From mindless earth, wet with a dead million leaves;
       From the forest, the empty desert, the tearing beasts,
       The kelp-disordered beaches;
       Coincident with the lie, anger, lust, oppression and death in many forms:
 
       Ornamental structures, continents apart, separated by seas;
       Fitted marble, swung bells; fruit in garlands as well as on the branch;
       The flower at last in bronze, stretched backward, or curled within;
       Stone in various shapes: beyond the pyramid, the contrived arch and the
           buttress;
       The named constellations;
       Crown and vesture; palm and laurel chosen as noble enduring;
       Speech proud in sound; death considered sacrifice;
       Mask, weapon, urn; the ordered strings;
       Fountains; foreheads under weather-bleached hair;
       The wreath, the oar, the tool,
       The prow;
       The turned eyes and the opened mouth of love.

Unlike any other poem by Bogan, "Baroque Comment" has facets which recall Whitman: parallelism, long lines, and the listing of images. And, unlike many of Bogan's poems, this one contains no "I." Any emotive powers seem to emanate not from the viewer, but directly from that which is viewed.

In the first stanza the images reflect the chaotic organic world and the human destructive forces. Immediately, with the preposition "from," the poem asserts that this organic chaos is the origin of something else, the nature of which is not yet specified. The adjectives emphasize the natural chaos and lack of proportion. Sound, not merely present, is "loud." Chance, in direct contrast, is "still"—perhaps because it is abstract and insubstantial. The earth, "mindless," cannot function as the controlling center; nor can the "tearing" beasts, or the "kelp-disordered" beaches. Both "mindless" and "disordered" are privative, pointing to the lack of control, the lack of human influence, and indirectly introducing the idea of form.

The distinctly human faculties, "the lie, anger, lust, oppression, and death in many forms," each imply a morally antithetical partner. Without the existence of truth, calmness, spiritual love, justice, and natural death, there would be no vocabulary for the other; they are only in the context of what they are not. The line, which begins "Coincident with," also affirms that the aesthetic, spiritual creations which follow in the second stanza neither arise from, nor exclude, the humanly created chaos.

The second and last stanza presents that which emerges from the chaos; it does not ask how the transformation, or the impulse to transform, occurs. "Ornamental structures, continents apart, separated by seas" arise as if by a natural extension of human existence. They are the expression and symbol of the ordering human.

For the poem as a whole, what must be noted, besides the absence of the "I," is that the poem does not contain a complete sentence. The presence of a verb would presume to solve the question of how aesthetic objects or symbols are derived from the chaotic earth. Its absence avoids the question, and precludes the formation of a time sequence. The earth precedes aesthetic creation, but the process may have always been, and may still be occurring. The world is not devoid of disorder; "the lie, anger, lust …" have not been purged even though there are "palm and laurel chosen as noble and enduring." The relationship is posited as continual, and the transformed does not replace either its antecedent or that which is antithetical. However, out of the natural disorder, as though requiring it, comes that which is distinguished by harmony and form.

Some of the aesthetic images are in fact related directly to particular images in the first stanza. "The pyramid" inhabits an otherwise "empty desert"; "the named constellations" contrast with the "kelp-disordered beaches"; the leaves, "palm and laurel chosen as noble and enduring," give "mind" to the "mindless earth, wet with a dead million leaves"; "fruit in garlands as well as on the branch" also contrasts with the leaves' decay. "Speech proud in sound" gives dignity and order to "loud sound," as "death considered sacrifice" does to both "still chance" and "death in many forms."

These images harken to a sense of reason, harmony, and fulfillment: they order, elevate, and immortalize the natural world. The flower is "at last" in bronze—safe from death, consecrated in full bloom or in bud. The phrase "at last" is the most explicit hint of the all but untraceable tone of relief and peace which nevertheless dominates the stanza.

The images loosely follow a progression from the created objects to the implements of creation (themselves created) to the final declaration of the human, portrayed as one passionately receptive. But the nouns are generic, visually accessible only through their universality, and the adjectives and adjectival clauses do not help us see the images. Instead they stress the artifice, the difference between the humanly created and their organic counterparts. The adjectives are all participles, invoking the unmentioned creative force: "fitted marble," "swung bells," "contrived arch," "named constellations," and "ordered strings." Thus, while the created objects refer to the organic world, they have new symbolic connotations, as the fruit of the human impulse and ability to create, to shape objects of beauty and order.

The last five lines, shorter and more sparse, move in quick succession through the images (eight of them are nouns without qualifiers), and thus accentuate the fact that the objects are listed without explicit purpose. At the same time their simplicity de-emphasizes the baroque quality of the list and slows the pace. It is in these lines that the human figure is introduced, and the objects ("Mask, weapon, urn … / … / The wreath, the oar, the tool, / The prow") are closer to the human world. The centrality to human endeavours clarifies what the previous images only suggest: design and pattern, ordering and naming, are expressions of the human desire for harmony and for self-realization.

The ending line, "The turned eyes and the opened mouth of love," indirectly addresses the question of how the transformation from disorder to harmony occurs. As in "Sub Contra," authentic expression can originate only in the emotions. Love, at once spiritual and sexual, is the apex of humanness. The most natural of the poem's images, the eyes and mouth can be seen as the essential link between the natural world and aesthetic creations. It is typical of Bogan that the sensuous image, "opened mouth," also suggests the imminent acts of speech, song, or prayer: the beginnings of expression.

"Baroque Comment" acts as an elaborate reminder. As if arguing by example, it transmits, through images and abstract ideals, a vision of harmony. Unlike "Sub Contra," which arises from dissatisfaction and demands something missing from the poem, "Baroque Comment" posits no dissatisfaction. Lacking a verb, an explicit argument, and a specific persona, the poem affirms a world in which symbols "take up the burden of feeling instantly."

Like "the turned eyes and the opened mouth of love," many of the images which end the poems are of things caught in the midst of incipient, or endlessly recurrent, motion. This is another way that Bogan's poems convey the rhythmic and the emotional together: the motion symbolizes the point of change in both nature and the emotions; in itself it captures the essence of a situation.

"Winter Swan" and "Old Countryside" both end with images of arrested motion. "Winter Swan," which contains the challenge, "But speak, you proud!," poses the "leaf-caught world once thought abiding" as a "dry disarray and artifice," and ends with "the long throat bent back, and the eyes in hiding." "Old Countryside" recounts change in the guise of prophecy "come to proof." The last image, seen "far back … in the stillest of the year," is "the thin hound's body arched against the snow."

Like aesthetic objects, the stilled images bring the world into focus. Each image can be thought of as stilled only by the perceptions of the poems themselves. In the reality of the past they continue—the swan to sing its death song, the hound to leap, the human being perhaps to kiss—but in memory they are caught, and become significant, in these postures of incipient motion. They are cathartic because they direct the reader to the point of change.

Whereas a sense of freedom, or eternity, results when the stilled images seem to be part of a continuum, other images seem frozen in stasis. Stasis is the result of fear, and occurs when the elements of the self and the world cannot be integrated, as in "Medusa," or when the persona is stymied by her inability to perceive and feel fully, as in "Henceforth, from the Mind." These poems, and some of the early embittered love poems, disclose an imbalance between the elements of the self and the world—a desire to escape into a world wholly formalistic, without the dangers inherent in the chaotic physical world. The result is akin to the musical and emotional rigidity in "Sub Contra," which that poem ultimately overcomes.

"A Tale," the first poem in Bogan's first, fourth, fifth, and sixth books, ends with an image of the double. It initially presents the impulse to go past the contrived signs of change ("The arrowed vane announcing weather, / The tripping racket of a clock") and then to escape from the transitory altogether ("Seeking, I think, a light that waits / Still as a lamp upon a shelf"). The last two stanzas suggest that the end of the youth's journey is to be very different from the peaceful and domestic light he seeks:

        But he will find that nothing dares
        To be enduring, save where, south
        Of hidden deserts, torn fire glares
        On beauty with a rusted mouth,—
 
        Where something dreadful and another
        Look quietly upon each other.

The language describing the landscape indicates nothing in reality, but instead a mythic, or inner landscape—the dark regions of the self. Though the double figures confront each other "quietly," it is with the quiet of terror. Stillness is not, the youth discovers, synonymous with peace.

The confrontation of the selves, inescapable and uncontrollable, can lead to spiritual death. Things are stilled, but this does not lead to an aesthetic focusing: stillness becomes their nature. Bogan returns to the double in "Medusa," "The Sleeping Fury," "The Dream," and "The Meeting." Like "A Tale," these poems do not exist in the natural world; they are part of myth, or abstract and symbolic. "Medusa" exemplifies the entrapment that results from confrontation with the other self. In the poem it is not, as in the myth, just the viewer who turns to stone; the entire perceived world is paralyzed:

        And I shall stand here like a shadow
        Under the great balanced day,
        My eyes on the yellow dust, that was lifting in the wind,
        And does not drift away.

Only in the poems "The Sleeping Fury" and "The Dream," where the speaker faces the double with "control and understanding," is the paralysis circumvented, and does "the terrible beast … put down his head in love."

"The Alchemist," "Henceforth, from the Mind," "Summer Wish," "Spirit's Song," and "Little Lobelia's Song" also embody the double theme. In these poems the persona is split, implicitly or explicitly, into two irreconcilable selves, usually a physical and spiritual self. "The Alchemist" relates the futile attempt to transmute the substance of the baser self into "A passion wholly of the mind" and finds

        … unmysterious flesh—
        Not the mind's avid substance—still
        Passionate beyond the will.

The rigidity in these poems stems from a denial of the natural—an asceticism or romanticism which will not, or cannot, accept the dangers perceived in the physical world. As in the beginning of "Sub Contra," the persona is resigned, or even wants, to exist in a circumscribed world. In "Henceforth, from the Mind," "joy, you thought, when young, / Would wring you to the bone, / Would pierce you to the heart" has as little effect as "shallow speech alone." In "Little Lobelia's Song," which is written from the perspective of a spirit "not lost but abandoned," the spirit wants to, but cannot, reenter the "blood and bone."

The only double which is positive for Bogan is that which reflects and expresses the real, as an aesthetic image does. The divided self is built upon fear and depends upon emotional barriers; the aesthetic object, like the images of things caught, focuses. It comes out of the natural world but creates something more and connotes peace and permanence. In "Division," the aesthetic double, the "replica," is the tree's shadow, and it is the shadow, not the tree itself, which is "woven in changeless leaves" and "clasped against the eye."

"Baroque Comment" is a full expression of the world divided into itself and its aesthetic reflection. Its underlying assumptions—that natural disorder contains the kernels of order, that the human destructive forces are akin to the creative forces, that created order referring back to the natural world epitomizes harmony—also underlie Bogan's life-affirming poems, such as "Song for a Lyre" and "Night," which address the problem of form in experience itself.

Emotions and insights, like aesthetic objects, and like the images of things caught, focus and order the world. Conversely, the world itself can be a source of inner exhaltation and freedom. Bogan broaches this in a letter to Morton Zabel:

concerning the heightening which comes to the artist when he acquires the habit of regarding life as mythical and typical. That's only another way of saying that when one lets go, and recognizes the stream on which we move as the same stream which moves us within—that it is time and the earth floating our blood and flesh, floating its own child—and stops fighting against the kinship, the light flows in; peace arrives.

In Bogan, the desire to duplicate things through description is countered by the stronger desire to duplicate and evoke responses to the things perceived. Thus, the poems are often written in the past tense, from the specific viewpoint of memory, and the claims which the past makes upon the present are equaled by memory's reevaluation of the past. Throughout there is a tension between sensuous particulars and the abstract.

In both "Song for a Lyre" and "Night" the speaker gathers strength from the rhythms of nature which, though not all exclusive to night, are perceived as night phenomena. Neither poem emphasizes the speaker's experience until the last stanza, but both return to the human element, with a clear sense of renewal that is caused by the perception of natural, continuous rhythms.

In "Song for a Lyre" the images of the leaves, the stream, sleep, and dream are repeated incrementally. The setting of night exists primarily on two levels—the night as present, and the night as future. The shift into the future is subtle: only the modal auxiliary "must" and the repeated adverb "soon" reveal the future tense. It is as if night is so completely imagined, and so like past nights of the same season, that it is present.

                    SONG FOR A LYRE
 
        The landscape where I lie
        Again from boughs sets free
        Summer; all night must fly
        In wind's obscurity
        The thick, green leaves that made
        Heavy the August shade.
 
        Soon, in the pictured night,
        Returns—as in a dream
        Left after sleep's delight—
        The shallow autumn stream:
        Softly awake, its sound
        Poured on the chilly ground.
 
        Soon fly the leaves in throngs;
        O love, though once I lay
        Far from its sound, to weep,
        When night divides my sleep,
        When stars, the autumn stream,
        Stillness, divide my dream,
        Night to your voice belongs.

Here the moments of summer's passing and autumn's return revitalize both the world and the speaker. The recurrence of change is shared: the speaker "again" is in the particular landscape; summer "again," and inevitably, turns to autumn. The change cleanses and lightens the world: the "thick, green leaves" disperse; the "shallow autumn stream" awakens; the speaker is reunited with the memory of her lover.

The speaker's relation to this world is not as a participant, and not even fully as a witness, but as an anticipant—renewed by the signs of approaching change. Furthermore, the speaker is moved not only by the coming transformation of the earth, but by her awareness of the transformation; because the natural changes are foreseen, they occur first within the speaker's mind. Though the images refer to the landscape, they have their origin and effect almost equally in the imagination.

This imagination, however, is not severed from the world, but attuned to it; part memory, it needs only the intimation of seasonal change to infer the rest. The first inference occurs with the change from the present tense ("The landscape where I lie") to the future ("all night must fly"). The landscape is abstract to the point of being nondescriptive; suggesting only that the speaker is outdoors, it in fact encourages the idea that she is being metaphorical, and actually may be indoors. The full phrase ("Again from boughs sets free / Summer") inverts our usual conception of the relationship between the land and the season. Normally, the season is imbued with the power to affect and dominate the land; here it is the land which discards, "sets free," the season. Only with the shift to the future tense, "the thick, green leaves" which the imagination foresees, does the language become more descriptive.

The second stanza further emphasizes the description's imaginative qualities: night becomes "the pictured night," which suggests both night imagined and a night of dreams. The metaphor of the dream "left after sleep's delight" is extended to the stream, "softly awake," as if while dry it too had been asleep. As in "Betrothed," it is the sound that signals the stream's movement and motivates the more visually descriptive language of the "shallow autumn stream" and the "chilly ground."

Although the poem so far indicates the imagined and remembered aspects of experience, it is the external world which has been described, and described in terms of its motion. In the last stanza, the speaker is more prominent, as the awareness of the natural world and the continued remembrance of the lover inspire her.

Many of the images in the last stanza echo images in the first two stanzas, but they are woven together, and not merely reiterative. Even the repetition of "soon" is altered, by the lack of a comma, as if what was soon to arrive had drawn nearer; and that image itself, "fly the leaves in throngs," draws us deeper into autumn than does the similar image in the first stanza. "O love, though once I lay / Far from its sound, to weep," echoing the poem's first line, "The landscape where I lie," introduces the emotions directly, in the past tense.

The object to which "its sound" refers may be either the autumn stream or all the sounds of night. But revealing that the speaker had wept, and in her sorrow had excluded the world, the stanza concludes by capsulizing her revelatory experience. We are first given the conditions ("When night …" "When stars …") that evoke the lover's voice, and not until the last line are we introduced to love, the catalyst that brings the speaker out of herself and allows her to experience the world.

That the effect of the repeated images in the last stanza differs from their effect in the preceding stanzas is due partially to the introduction of the lover, and partially to the interweaving of images. The freed leaves, the returning stream, the stars and stillness are integrated to create a night fuller and more real. The images of sleep and dream, metaphorical in the preceding stanza, also now inform the speaker's reality. The poem has come full circle; from an emphasis upon a reality which the speaker creates, or anticipates, it moves to a reality which is bestowed.

The sense of fullness in this stanza also results from its formal divergence from the first two. It contains one additional nonrhymed line, and a different rhyme pattern, a b c c d d a, rather than a b a b c c. "Stream" and "dream," rhymed in the second stanza, are here a couplet, accentuating their partnership, while the last line's rhyme with the first envelops the two adjacent couplets.

"Song for a Lyre," initially describing seasonal change, ends with the correlation between the perception of the elements and the vivid remembrance of the lover. As such, the poem affirms the soothing power of evocation even as it affirms the soothing power of love.

A later poem, "Night," makes a similar correlation among the elements, perception and the human heart. In "Night," however, the speaker is not explicitly present, and the experience of renewal is more implicit in the imagery itself. Not written in a set stanzaic form, the overall construction relies, as it does in "Baroque Comment," on the suspension, finally the omission, of the main clausal verb. Like "Song for a Lyre," "Night" makes manifest the recurrent, eternal, and healing qualities of rhythmic motion:

                        NIGHT
 
       The cold remote islands
       And the blue estuaries
       Where what breathes, breathes
       The restless wind of the inlets,
       And what drinks, drinks
       The incoming tide;
 
       Where shell and weed
       Wait upon the salt wash of the sea,
       And the clear nights of stars
       Swing their lights westward
       To set behind the land;
 
       Where the pulse clinging to the rocks
       Renews itself forever;
       Where, again on cloudless nights,
       The water reflects
       The firmament's partial setting;
 
       —O remember
       In your narrowing dark hours
       That more things move
       Than blood in the heart.

The first three stanzas form the beginning of a periodic sentence that is never concluded. Because the poem's substance resides in the description of ongoing motion, the missing verb (which would act definitively) becomes superfluous. The parallel construction of the adjectival clauses, connected by "where," and the unremitted use of the present tense, indicate the continuity which informs the poem's peaceful mood.

Sensuous particulars relieve the initial abstractness of the landscape; the "cold remote islands" become accessible through images signifying recurrent motion—the "restless wind" and the "incoming tide"—which form the basis for the equally rhythmical, but more detailed, images in the following stanzas. Ending a line with the repetition of "breathes" (the two "breathes," with the pause between them, occupy over half the line, and all of its metrical stress) suspends the poem's motion. The following line, particularly in its lighter sounds and its more visual image, relieves the suspension, and, by giving the verb an object, unexpectedly carries the image forward. This pattern, which recurs in the next two lines (where "drinks" echoes "breathes" and "incoming tide" echoes "wind of the inlets"), evinces a calm, rhythmical, life-imbued landscape.

The expansiveness suggested in the first stanza is reinforced now by more specific images, each of which revolves around the tide or the moving stars. The poem embodies the idea of movement: nothing is static; no motion is concluded; the scene is not limited to any specific night, but is ever-present.

The insistence upon continuing motion is emphasized by the rhymes and sounds which reverberate throughout the poem. The irregular meter rests upon iambs and anapests; many lines end on a falling rhythm (islands, estuaries, inlets, westward, forever, setting, remember), intimating the next strong beat of the iamb. Within stanzas, and from one stanza to the next, words echo each other in sound. In the second stanza, for example, s's, w's, and strong open vowels are repeated, and there is one internal rhyme, "nights" and "lights," in the middle of consecutive lines. The words "wash," "stars," "weed," "swing," "set," and "behind" are echoed by "water," "dark" (and "heart"), "wind," "inlets," and "tide."

By the last stanza, rhythms, sounds, and images, focused on the recurrent motions of the sea and the night sky, have cumulated to the single effect of tranquillity. With the last stanza the poem interrupts itself, breaking the adjectival clause, and the poet addresses herself.

The last stanza brings the poem, for the first time, to the human world, only to remind us that the human being is enriched and strengthened by attending to the natural world. The underlying connection between "blood in the heart," which moves, and the seascape, its essence also expressed as recurrent motion, is that all life, and in particular the salt blood of the human being, originated in the sea. In asserting that to look beyond oneself is more self-sustaining than to dwell, in one's "narrowing dark hours," on "blood in the heart," the poem also suggests that it is the life-sustaining rhythmical forces which connect us to the origins, the essences, of our lives. Implicated in this scheme is poetry; its essence also rhythmical recurrence, it too unites the human with the fundamental forces of life.

Bogan called poetry "the heart's cry" and said that it "gives reality freedom and meaning." She made these aesthetic principles her subject, and took on the double task of "going back to pure music" and expressing "what I have become and what I know." One feels that the endeavours are not separable, but become part of each other in a given poem. Through image, sound, and rhythm, the poems express the desire for and the discovery of natural and aesthetic forms that uplift human consciousness.