Robert Bly Poetry: American Poets Analysis
Since Robert Bly has habitually brought his wide-ranging interests in literary history, myth, fairy tales, philosophy, psychology, politics, social concerns, and poetry past and present into his own work, his poetry reflects these interests and is enriched by them. Furthermore, because he has been prolific and unsystematic, even at times seemingly self-contradictory, he is extremely difficult to categorize and analyze. Nevertheless, it is possible—indeed necessary—to consider Bly’s poetry in terms of the series of various phases it has gone through. These phases, although they are also reflected in Bly’s other writings and involvements, are most evident in his poetry.
Silence in the Snowy Fields
Bly’s first published book of poetry, Silence in the Snowy Fields, remains one of the best examples of his deepest obsession: the notion that a personal, private, almost mystical aura adheres to and inheres with the simplest things in the universe—old boards, for example, or a snowflake fallen into a horse’s mane. These things, observed in the silence of contemplation and set down honestly and simply in poems, may, Bly believes, inform human beings anew of some sense of complicity, even communion, they have always had with the world, but have forgotten. Bly’s focus has caused his work to be labeled Deep Image poetry. In a 1981 essay, “Recognizing Image as a Form of Intelligence,” he explained the term’s application to his work: “When a poet creates a true image, he is gaining knowledge; he is bringing up into consciousness a connection that has been largely forgotten.” In this sense, these early poems provide the reader with the re-created experience of Bly’s own epiphanic moments in the silences of “snowy fields,” and they become his means of sharing such silences with his readers.
The epigraph to Silence in the Snowy Fields, “We are all asleep in the outward man,” from the seventeenth century German mystic Jacob Boehme, points up both the structural and the thematic principles on which Bly builds his book. The three sections of the book suggest a literal and a mental journey. The second, central section, “Awakening,” contains twenty-three of the forty-four poems in the book and serves as a structural and thematic transition from “Eleven Poems of Solitude,” the first section, to the final section, “Silence on the Roads,” which sends both book and reader, via the central “awakening,” outward into the world. The solitude and contemplative silence of this first book, then, prepare both poet and reader for the larger world of Bly’s work.
The Light Around the Body
The way the world impinges on private life is immediately evident in Bly’s next book, The Light Around the Body. This is his most famous (or for some, most infamous) book. Like Silence in the Snowy Fields, The Light Around the Body shows the strong influence of Boehme (four of the five sections of the book have epigraphs from Boehme), especially in terms of the dichotomy of the inward and the outward person, the “two languages,” one might argue, of Bly’s first two books. If Silence in the Snowy Fields deals primarily with the inward being, clearly the focus of The Light Around the Body is on the outward being—here seen specifically in a world at war.
The Light Around the Body was published in the midst of the American obsession with the Vietnam War, and most of the poems in it are concerned with that war, directly or indirectly. The third section of the book (following sections titled “The Two Worlds” and “The Various Arts of Poverty and Cruelty”) is specifically titled “The Vietnam War.” This is...
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the most definitive, the most outspoken and condemnatory group of poems—by Bly or anyone else—on the war in Vietnam. Bly reserves his harshest criticism for American involvement in the war. He does not mince words, and he names names: “Men like [Dean] Rusk are not men:/ They are bombs waiting to be loaded in a darkened hangar” (“Asian Peace Offers Rejected Without Publication”).
Perhaps the most famous poem Bly has written is also his most definitive criticism of the Vietnam War. In “Counting Small-Boned Bodies,” the speaker of the poem has been charged with keeping the grisly count of war casualties to be reported on the evening news. Shocked by the mounting death tolls, he finds himself trying to imagine ways to minimize these terrifying statistics. The refrain that runs through the poem is, “If we could only make the bodies smaller.” The implication is that if the bodies could be made smaller, then people might, through some insane logic, be able to argue the war away. Bly’s poems in The Light Around the Body ensure that the war will never be forgotten or forgiven.
The last two sections of The Light Around the Body (“In Praise of Grief” and “A Body Not Yet Born”) move back “inward” from the “outward” world of the war, just as the first two sections of the book had moved “outward” from the “inward” world of Silence in the Snowy Fields. Since the war, however, this new inward world can never again ignore or fail to acknowledge the outward world. Therefore, Bly writes “in praise of grief” as a way of getting through, psychologically speaking, both outward and inward conflicts.
The first three poems of the fourth section of the book define a progression back toward a place of rest, calm, peace. In the third poem, the body is described as “awakening” again and finding “nourishment” in the death scenes it has witnessed. Such a psychic regeneration, which parallels the inevitable regeneration of nature after a battle, is what is needed to repair the damage the war has done if people are to be restored to full human nature. Thus, in the final section of the book, although the new body is not yet fully born, it is moving toward birth, or rebirth.
Although The Light Around the Body will no doubt be most often remembered for its overt antiwar poems, from the point of view of Bly’s developing poetic philosophy, it is best seen as a description of the transition from the outer world back into the inner world.
Sleepers Joining Hands
The psychological movement first suggested and then begun in The Light Around the Body is followed further inward by Bly’s next important book, Sleepers Joining Hands. This book contains three distinctly different sections. The first section consists of a series of short lyric poems. Beginning with “Six Winter Privacy Poems,” it comes to a climax with a long poem, “The Teeth Mother Naked at Last,” Bly’s final, psychological response to the war in Vietnam.
The second section of Sleepers Joining Hands consists of an essay in which Bly documents many of the philosophical ideas and psychological themes with which he has long been obsessed and which he has addressed (and will continue to address) both in his poetry and in his criticism. Bly here summarizes his thinking in terms of Jungian psychology, father and mother consciousness, the theory of the three brains, and other ideas that he groups together as “mad generalizations.” This essay, although it is far from systematic, remains an important summary of the sources of many of Bly’s most important poems and ideas.
Thus, although Sleepers Joining Hands does not contain Bly’s most important poetry, it does deal with most of the elements of the literary theory behind that poetry, and it is an extremely important book. In the central essay, Bly describes in detail the way in which “mother consciousness” has come to replace “father consciousness” during the last several centuries. Four “force fields” make up the Great Mother (or Magna Mater), which, according to Bly, is now “moving again in the psyche.” The Teeth Mother, one of these force fields, attempts to destroy psychic life. She has been most evident in the Vietnam War and has caused the “inward” harm that that war has brought to the world. “The Teeth Mother Naked at Last,” the climactic poem in the first section of Sleepers Joining Hands, like the earlier antiwar poems in The Light Around the Body, describes the conditions of psychic reality in terms of the presence of the Teeth Mother. It argues that once the Teeth Mother is acknowledged (made “naked at last”), she can be dealt with and responded to, and then the outward physical world can be effectively reconnected with the inward psychic or spiritual world.
“Sleepers Joining Hands,” the long title poem that constitutes the collection’s third section, is an elaborate and challenging poem, a kind of dream journal or a journey, with overt Jungian trappings. Thematically, it shifts back and forth between dreamed and awakened states. These thematic shifts are evidenced in the structure of the poem. The poem as a whole is a kind of religious quest based in large part on the Prodigal Son story—one of the great paradigms of the journey motif in Western culture. At the end of the poem, bringing to climax so many of his themes, Bly provides “An Extra Joyful Chorus for Those/ Who Have Read This Far” in which “all the sleepers in the world join hands.”
The Morning Glory
The next several books in Bly’s canon consist of prose poems. Bly believes that when a culture begins to lose sight of specific goals, it moves dangerously close to abstraction, and that such abstraction is reflected in the poetry of the time. Prose poetry, then, often appears as a way of avoiding too much abstraction. Whether this theory holds up historically or not, it certainly can be made to apply in Bly’s case, even if only after the fact—the theory having been invented to explain the practice. Certainly, there is ample reason to think that Bly believed that his own work, influenced by the events the world was witnessing, was moving dangerously toward “abstraction,” perhaps most conspicuously so in Sleepers Joining Hands. For whatever reason, then, Bly turned, in the middle of his career, to the genre of the prose poem. His prose poems of this period are extremely strong work, arguably some of his strongest poetry.
The two most important collections of prose poems are The Morning Glory (which includes as its central section the ten-poem sequence “Point Reyes Poems,” published separately the year before, and one of the most powerful sequences of poems Bly has written) and This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood. All these prose poems move “deeply into the visible,” as the old occult saying Bly quotes as epigraph to The Morning Glory demands, and they are poems written “in a low voice to someone he is sure is listening,” as Bly suggested they should be in his essay “What the Prose Poem Carries with It” (1977).
The Morning Glory, like Silence in the Snowy Fields, contains forty-four poems. It suggests of a new beginning in Bly’s career. These poems follow a rather typical pattern. They begin in offhanded ways, frequently with the speaker alone outdoors, prepared, through his openness to all possibilities, for whatever he may find there. The poems, then, are journeys; they move from the known to the unknown. Even so, what can be learned from them is often difficult to analyze, especially since Bly frequently only suggests what it is or might be. Indeed, often it seems to be something that the body comes to know and only later—if at all—the mind comprehends. In this sense these are poems of preparation, and they frequently imply apocalyptic possibilities.
The Morning Glory ends with several poems that describe transformations. One of the most important of these, “Christmas Eve Service at Midnight at St. Michael’s,” involves the personal life of the poet, who, six months after his only brother has been killed in an automobile accident, attends a Christmas Eve service with his parents. He and his parents take Communion together and hear the Christian message. Coming so soon after his brother’s death, however, the message is “confusing,” since the poet knows that “we take our bodies with us when we go.” The poem ends in a reverie of transfiguration in which a man (both brother and Christ), with a chest wound, flies out and off over the water like a large bird.
This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood
The basic “religious” theme begun in The Morning Glory is continued in This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood. Here Bly writes overtly religious meditations, thus picking up again the aura of the sacred that has been important in his work since the beginning. Indeed, this book immediately reminds the reader of Silence in the Snowy Fields, both thematically and in terms of Bly’s basic source material.
There are twenty poems in This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood; they are divided into two thematic units. The first ten poems describe, often through dreams, visions, or dream-visions, “what is missing.” Not surprisingly, given this theme, Bly frequently uses the metaphor of sleep and awakening. Indeed, the first poem in the book begins, “When I wake.” This awakening is both a literal and an imaginative or metaphoric awakening, and it signals at the outset the book’s chief concern.
The second section of the book is filled with intensely heightened, almost ecstatic, visionary poems. The crucial transitional poems in This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood—which is itself a crucial transition in Bly’s canon—are “Walking to the Next Farm” and “The Origin of the Praise of God.” “Walking to the Next Farm” describes the culmination of the transition “this body” has been going through as the poet, his eyes wild, feels “as if a new body were rising” within him. This new body and the energy it contains are further described and defined in the other central poem, “The Origin of the Praise of God.” It begins with exactly the same words that begin several other poems in this book: “My friend, this body.” This poem, in the words of Ralph J. Mills, Jr., “a visionary hymn to the body, . . . dramatizes [the] experience of the inner deity” and thus is the paradigm of the entire prose-poem sequence. By the end of the book, this visionary, mystical, yet still fully physical body is finally fully formed and is “ready to sing” both the poems already heard and the poems ahead.
This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years
This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years is a second collection of “snowy fields” poems. Bly said that it should be understood as a companion volume to Silence in the Snowy Fields. In this sense, then, This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years is a specific, overt attempt on Bly’s part to return to his beginnings. Just as it is a return, however, it is also a new beginning in the middle of his career. Bly is clearly a poet obsessed with a need for constant renewal, and in many ways each of his books, although taking a different direction, also retraces each earlier journey from a different vantage point.
Perhaps it is not surprising that, although This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years is a new beginning for Bly, it is also a darker beginning, a darker journey than the journey he took in Silence in the Snowy Fields. Here the journey envisions its end. This, then, is the book of a man facing his mortality, his death, and walking confidently toward it. As Bly puts it in one of these poems, “there are eternities near.” At the same time, there is the inevitable paradox that poems outlive the poet who has written them—and, thus, even poems that speak of death outlive the death of their speaker.
The Man in the Black Coat Turns
Two later books may be seen as companions to each other: The Man in the Black Coat Turns and Loving a Woman in Two Worlds. Like This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years, these books circle back to Bly’s beginnings at the same time that they set out on new journeys. Furthermore, these books are among the most personal and private he has published, and thus they are particularly immediate and revealing.
The Man in the Black Coat Turns is divided into three sections, the central section, as in The Morning Glory and This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood, being made up of prose poems. The prose poems here, however, are different from their predecessors in being much more clearly related to Bly’s personal experiences; as he says in the first of them, “Many times in poems I have escaped—from myself. . . . Now more and more I long for what I cannot escape from” (“Eleven O’Clock at Night”).
More than anything else, the poems in The Man in the Black Coat Turns are poems about men. The dominant theme of the book is the father-son relationship. This theme and its association with the book’s title is immediately, and doubly, announced at the outset of the book, in the first two poems, “Snowbanks North of the House” and “For My Son, Noah, Ten Years Old,” as Bly works the lines of relationship through the generations of his own family: from his father to himself as son, then, as father, through himself to his own son, Noah. The third poem, “The Prodigal Son,” places the personal family references into a larger context by relating them to the father and son in the New Testament parable. In the final poem in this first section of the book, “Mourning Pablo Neruda,” Bly extends the father-son relationship again—this time to include one of his own important poetic “father figures,” Pablo Neruda, a poet he has often translated.
The final section of The Man in the Black Coat Turns draws all these themes together in “The Grief of Men.” This poem is clearly the climactic thesis piece for the whole book. There are, however, a number of important poems grouped together in this last section: “Words Rising,” “A Meditation on Philosophy,” “My Father’s Wedding,” “Fifty Males Sitting Together,” “Crazy Carlson’s Meadow,” and “Kneeling Down to Look into a Culvert.” In the last of these poems, via the account of a symbolic, ritualized sacrificial death, the poet completes his preparations for another new life.
Loving a Woman in Two Worlds
The poems of Loving a Woman in Two Worlds are, for the most part, short—almost half of them contain fewer than eight lines, and eleven of them are only four lines long. Technically speaking, however, this book contains poems in most of the forms and with most of the themes Bly has worked in and with throughout his career. In this sense, the collection is rather a tour de force. Many of these poems of Loving a Woman in Two Worlds are love poems, and some of them are quite explicitly sexual. The book can be read in terms of the stages of a love relationship. These are poems that focus on the female, on the male and female together, and on the way the man and the woman together share “a third body” beyond themselves, a body they have made “a promise to love.”
This book thus charts another version of the “body not yet born” journey with which Bly began his poetry. In the final poem in Loving a Woman in Two Worlds, Bly, speaking not only to one individual, but also to all of his readers, writes, “I love you with what in me is unfinished.// . . . with what . . . is still/ changing.”
Selected Poems
In Selected Poems, in addition to poems from all of Bly’s previous major collections (some of the poems have been revised, in some cases extensively), he has included some early, previously uncollected poems. A brief essay introduces each of the sectional groupings of this book. Selected Poems, then, is a compact, convenient collection, and it succinctly represents Bly in the many individual phases of his work.
Morning Poems
Bly’s later collections continue to develop, without any loss of power, his distinctive vision and manner. Morning Poems is something of a departure, revealing a rich vein of humor and growing out of the discipline of writing a poem a day. These poems capture the speaker’s amazement at newness, the splendor of reawakening, but they also do their share of mourning. In an unexpected and powerful sequence, Bly presents an imagined interchange with Wallace Stevens, a somewhat surprising father figure for Bly.
The Night Abraham Called to the Stars
In The Night Abraham Called to the Stars, Bly employs the leaps of the ghazal, a poetic form developed in Persia and Arabia in the seventh century in which each stanza exists as an independent poem. At once seemingly and simultaneously opened to everything and closed upon themselves, these poems, with their leaping shifts of focus, underscore the great range of Bly’s curiosity, his reasonable argument against reason, his quest for a mystical simplicity and unity that does not deny the power of the particular. Biblical allusions permeate this collection, as do historical references and legends. As ever, Bly oscillates between the generic and the generative.
My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy
My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy continues Bly’s exploration of the ghazal. The ghazal consists of a series of seemingly discontinuous tercets that thematically turn the real into the surreal and often conflate the inward world of consciousness with elements of the outward world by forcing them to collide or collapse into one another. The poem concludes with a moment of insight or illumination. Since, traditionally, the poet’s name is mentioned at the end of a ghazal (usually in the penultimate line), the illumination that the poem elicits provides a eureka moment for the poet and for the reader simultaneously. As such, the ghazal, with its series of statements and questions—which often enough seem to be a series of non sequiturs—is an almost inevitable form for Bly. Indeed, it would seem to be the natural outgrowth of the kind of “leaping” poetry that has been his most conspicuous trademark since the beginning of his career.
My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy consists of forty-eight ghazals, each made up of six tercets. Keeping to the tradition of the ghazal, Bly includes his own name (typically at the outset of the final tercet) in one third of these poems. In addition to satisfying the demands of the ghazal, several of the poems also make use of conspicuous patterns of repetition. For instance, each tercet of “The Blind Tobit” ends with the phrase “so many times,” while in “Growing Wings,” nine of the lines (exactly one half of the poem) begin with the phrase “It’s all right.”
Bly weaves references to numerous literary and historical figures through these poems. There are explicit references to Plato, Paul Cézanne, Neruda, Anna Akhmatova, Freud, Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Rembrandt, Johannes Brahms, Søren Kierkegaard, Franz Kafka, Herman Melville, Johann Sebastian Bach and Robinson Jeffers, as well as many others. It is as if Bly wishes to include the whole of the world in this book and to stress the universality of these otherwise seemingly personal and private poems.
Ultimately, however, the vivid metaphors and all the allusions serve to support Bly’s overarching theme of the transience of life and the need for joy even in the midst of the pain and pitfalls of existence. This theme is perhaps made most obvious in two poems (“Brahms” and “Stealing Sugar from the Castle”), both of which directly allude to a well-known passage in Saint Bede the Venerable’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731). In it, Bede compares human life to the flight of a sparrow through a hall during a wintery day. The bird flies in at one door and out another, experiencing only momentary comfort and safety from the winter’s storm before it vanishes into the unknown from whence it came. In these short lyrics, Bly extends the “brief moment” of the ghazal to create a “sentence” that becomes the “thousand years of joy” alluded to both in his title and in the final line of the book.