A dark mirror: one that reflects obscurity, full of shadows, a magic mirror in a particular way…. A dark mirror when you look into it may show you something altogether other, and darker, than the familiar daylight reflection you looked for.

Muriel Rukeyser, to me, is like this: beyond the apparent, some other appearance, almost an apparition. (p. 51)

In a long series of poems and clusters of poems such as we have [in The Collected Poems of Muriel Rykeyser], one looks especially for recurring themes, and intimations of method. It has become customary, almost obligatory, to use the term "development" in such an inquiry, with its attendant context of "evolution." Yet what is most fascinating in truly directed works and lives is how much they begin as they mean to go on, advancing not so much by development as by repeated metamorphosis of a vision and a self already fully present from the beginning. You do the work and then you have to do it again and again, splitting and shedding the skin season by season, the whole yet reappearing again each time, renewed but fundamentally unchanged. So in Muriel's first book of poems, Theory of Flight, the life-work as theme and method is already there, to be confirmed and carried forward in her second volume, U.S.I., and thereafter.

To take the themes first: there is the interest in, and identification with, science and technology; a note of the Thirties in some ways, the "pylon poetry," but leading, with her, into the whole process of discovery and exploration. Then America, vast subject and appearing in so many forms—landscape and city, the lives of men but then increasingly the lives of women and their significance, war, democracy, the social struggle, labor, the South…. (pp. 52-3)

[But my reading of her work becomes less concerned] with themes as such than with method, though the two are never easily divisible, particularly in the work of a poet such as this. There seemed to be four aspects to this method: more than one voice in the poem (or call it dialogue); a narrative quality or a giving of information; a tendency toward lists; a recurrence of brightly colored and vivid images.

Early, middle, and late these come. What are we to make of them, the mind asks—are they unified in some way, or just coincidental? (p. 54)

In many of the poems dialogue broadens out into larger forms, as for instance in the courtroom transcriptions in "The Book of the Dead" from U.S.I., so quietly arresting, or appalling, as they piece out the story of a silica mine in West Virginia where workmen died in droves for the Company, with glass dust in their lungs. Later there are voices from other courtrooms, and from jail, the draft protesters, the demonstrators, in the collections of the late Sixties and early Seventies. One could think of this device of hers as an element of drama entering constantly…. Associated with this must be narrative, information, juxtapositions of images: it is not easy to keep these facets of her method separate, but we will go on to the second.

Narration, story-telling, the handing-on of information: one recalls her long career as a teacher—brilliant and highly unconventional as one of her students told me. Many of the poems tell stories, short or long. All of the "Lives" poems come in here, as does One Life, the biography (if that is the right word for it), part prose, part poetry, of Wendell Willkie…. Whatever this method of hers is, it is common to both poetry and prose.

Third, there is a constant use of lists or catalogues or series. Some of the poems which most struck me [such as "For My Son" and "Woman as Market"] were constructed almost entirely in this way…. (pp. 54-5)

Fourth …, single instances or whole successions of strong, sharp images, emblematic and brightly colored, "the roaring flowers of the chimney stacks … at their lips in fire" ("The Book of the Dead"), "Will see these trees as they were in spring, wild black rooted in light, / root-deep in noon, the piercing yellow noon of mustard-blossom" ("The Children's Orchard").

In close adherence, it seems to me, to this fourfold method which emerges out of her work lies the poems' excellence and strength. Where other modes are assayed, the poetry falters. Where teaching becomes preaching, as from time to time it does, in "Despisals," for example, in Breaking Open; where dialogue gives way to monologue, sapping much of the energy which carries the reader forward, as in the Fifth Elegy in A Turning Wind; where the colorless hollow words of much of our daily living encroach so much that one comes upon "erotic" twice over in one love poem, "sexuality" in another, "values" in a poem on what we believe. Sometimes lines of prose shoulder their way in, unburnished and untransformed … lines exhibiting an absence of music which is almost palpable, a positive non-music of expression of thought. Actually Muriel is not, I believe, a musical and consequently a lyric poet, and the numerous short songs in her work, "sex-songs, love-poems, freedom-songs," as she characterizes them for another culture in "The Lost Romans," even the poems of passion and dream from her own intensely lived experience, do not to me represent her at her very best. Where, then, if not in these quintessentially poetic modes as one might suppose, does her undeniable poetic power lie?

Somewhere in a method is the only suggestion we have so far. But the question arises even more sharply when we turn to themes—America, woman, the poet's life public and private—because, if I am to judge by various statements made about her by others ("the relation of poetry … to political commitment," "among the greatest poets of human concern and compassion of our time"), her work at this point has come to be considered as her most shining achievement. Yet our affirmation of Muriel Rukeyser's courage and generosity may have had the effect of fusing life and work almost prematurely in this noonday light of public action, while something darker and deeper waits in the mirror for elucidation. (pp. 55-6)

Poems of engagement, political, social, religious, are, we all know, among the most difficult to write. It is a truism that noble and intense convictions do not necessarily produce good poetry, any more than the rightness of a cause as we see it…. I mentioned earlier "The Book of the Dead" from U.S.I. which is heavily political, and one of the reasons why that early poem interests me so much is that it is so unpredictably successful. Her four-part method can be seen very clearly in it, and perhaps the method upholds the subject matter in its weight and difficulty. But there is another reason, too…. (pp. 56-7)

In that long poem about an infamous mine in West Virginia the poet is everywhere, but nowhere very clearly and directly, present as herself. As over the years the long political struggle goes on—Pentagon, Hanoi, South Korea—her presence in the poems becomes intensified, and is matched by a similar increase in direct self-revelation of a more personal kind. In one of the "Clues," "The Poem as Mask: Orpheus," she seems to reject any kind of transformation or translation of the self. "No more masks! No more mythologies!" she cries…. Yet the refusal, even if only momentary, of mask and myth in this highly mythological and darkly reflecting poet seems perverse. Is she not at her best when most masked, as many good poets are, seen only in the dark and not in the clear looking-glass? The direct and apparently deliberate self-revelations in her work, up to and including the most recent, are not her most vital and beautiful productions. A distressing sprightliness, an overplus of personal references …, a degree of self-revealing which may tell us more than we desire to know—these seem to me to flaw the poems.

I am not arguing for any heavy mythologizing or striking of attitudes. But look at a marvelous poem such as "Foghorn in Horror," where she becomes the foghorn and it in its turn becomes a mythic figure blindingly revealed by the sheer grotesqueness of the mask…. The poem suggests that some at least of the great vital themes of hers and ours (for themes are coalescing with method here and it is becoming increasingly impossible to keep them apart) will be most clearly perceived when looked at indirectly, in the darkness of the mirror, the life fusing with method and themes and vanishing into them. (pp. 57-8)

A different term may be helpful here, one which Muriel herself uses …: the word is "system."… Muriel uses the word in a passage in The Life of Poetry in which she is trying to make modern poetry more accessible to the reader: "This gathering together of elements so that they move together according to a newly visible system is becoming evident in all our sciences, and it is natural that it should be present in our writing. Wherever it exists, it gives us a clue as to a possible kind of imagination with which to meet the world." A possible kind of imagination—it is a key phrase which recurs in another form later in the same book, "a clue to the idea of the unity of imagination, the meeting-place between science and poetry." The life of the imagination, of the mind thinking and exploring, of memory and prophecy—is this what we are looking for, at the heart of this poet's poetry? Something about her method may strike us here, for its aspects, dialogue, narrative information, lists, emblem clusters, is a curiously exact description of how the thinking and imagining mind works; I do not mean so much our day by day experience but something more strenuous and perhaps always hidden, though our ancestors knew more of it than we do and pursued some of it in the lost disciplines of Rhetoric or Topics out of which Invention comes, the life of discovery in poetry or science, seen as one. (pp. 58-9)

In her introductory chapter to the full-length study of the scientist Willard Gibbs she remarks, "… The poets and scientists, those who have given themselves most closely to the creation and description of systems … live conscious that their own nature is to be translated into the terms of the system of which they speak" (my emphasis). So the method is the life, and to this there now join themselves the very first themes we listed for her in this inquiry: science and technology, and discovery. If we think that in turning to such apparently abstract or intellectual matters we are losing touch with her other preoccupations—America, active politics, the public weal—we shall be going astray. We merely have to move further in.

Into the very center of Muriel Rukeyser's life and work, in fact, insofar as we can grasp that. An image there at the beginning, in Theory of Flight, will lead us; it becomes a poem, "The Outer Banks," in 1967, and then becomes a book which is classed as prose, The Traces of Thomas Hariot … but which I mean to classify here as a full-length poem.

The image is of a place, and of the people associated with it in time. "Kitty Hawk is a Caesar among monuments," it runs in "The Structure of the Plane," and a few lines later come Orville and Wilbur Wright. So science and discovery make their entry together, with, and as, a landscape. We are present at "the experimental trance of the Wright brothers, tracing the wingwork of gulls on the sky over Hatteras," as it runs in Willard Gibbs; and here we begin to see the doing and redoing of an initial or, more properly, initiatory theme over a lifetime which we conjectured earlier to be the poet's vocation. (pp. 59-60)

In The Traces flight becomes moon-flight, American once again though linked with Hariot's observation of the moon by telescope years after his return to England, and the delicately accurate drawing of its surface which he made. So the sea of this land-and-seascape is indeed the Sea of Time and Space in Blake's words, and takes us back to the era "when America stood to England as the moon stands to us" (Traces, introduction), yet real sea too to those venturing sea-captains, Drake and the rest who enter here, plying up and down these coasts, linked and kin to others, star-captains as Muriel calls them, Hariot among them, while Copernicus, Galileo, Bruno accompany her since her earliest poems. Here lies, between poetry and science, the veritable and unified landscape of imagination, of Ocean's Love to Cynthia, of myth and prophetic power. It must be plain by this time that this is where, as I believe, Muriel Rukeyser by right belongs. (pp. 60-1)

In The Traces of Thomas Hariot she speaks of the understanding that may be possible "once the buried history is lit and brought to the surface." In that same book she expands the phrase a little, "a history of the buried life of the imagination." We begin now to see more of what is buried in the depths of the mirror. Her chosen subjects, each a "hero of the buried imagination" …—Hariot, Gibbs, James Gates Percival the forgotten Nineteenth Century poet of science who figures at some length in Willard Gibbs and The Life of Poetry as do also, in similar vein, Whitman and Melville—each takes on the form of "lost poet of meeting-places." That meeting-place is the imagination where science and poetry meet and are one.

It is also the place of loss, of failure, and Muriel Rukeyser enters here as yet one more embodiment of this "buried life" and its history which she must both narrate, in others, and live, in herself. (p. 63)

What confronts us now, some part indeed of the buried life of the imagination, is that mysterious and compelling portent in a poet's life: its conformity, beyond all quotidian and practical detail, with its true and vital subject. So an earlier mythic poet says, "Such price the gods exact for song: / To become what we sing."…

The necessity of reuniting imagination as both poetry and science is, if I read it at all rightly, Muriel's most central, and most political, conviction. Without it, she warns, we are going to be left only with the "disease"—her word—of our institutions "which let the kinds of knowledge fall away from each other, and waste knowledge, and time, and people …".

It is in this wide context that I think the Collected Poems can best be read…. (p. 64)

Elizabeth Sewell, "Reflection in a Dark Mirror," in Parnassus: Poetry in Review (copyright © Poetry in Review Foundation), Vol. 7, No. 2, Spring-Summer, 1979, pp. 51-65.