[In the following essay, Hansen explicates the allusions and imagery of Bly's poem of otherworldly communion, “Surprised by Evening.”]

Robert Bly's book Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems (1999) contains a number of Bly's best-known poems. Some of the older ones, nearly a half-century old, are as evocative yet as elusive as when they were first published, in part because they are the earliest poems that evidence Bly's career-long fidelity to three things so idiosyncratic, at least in his hands, that they have become trademarks of his poetry: leaping association, the deep image, the transparent style. In most cases, what these poems say is clear. Sentence by sentence, they make sense. But what they mean, what they add up to in the final analysis, is difficult to ascertain, often because there is no final analysis—so completely has Bly concealed the subterranean foundation that even his early work is built on: Jungian thought, Western mysticism, and Eastern meditative traditions. One such poem is “Surprised by Evening,” originally published in his first book, Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962), and reprinted in Eating the Honey of Words.

The poem begins with “unknown dust … ! near us” and “Waves breaking on shores,” followed by a phrase that, when employed as a colloquial figure of speech, indicates someone whose life is more than half over. The poem concludes with the metaphorical water of night rising until our bodies are submerged. Taken together, these images are suggestive of death. However, the last two images in the opening stanza's list of four (“Trees full of birds” and “Nets drawn down with dark fish”) are suggestive of life. Although “drawn down” and “dark” might seem to harbor ominous implications, the frame of reference of this line is to commercial fishing. Those nets so full of fish that they are “drawn down” signal a good catch: food on the table and money in the pocket.

A similar but far more striking contrast is the movement from death to life in the concluding stanza where, though submerged in water and therefore presumably dead, we see—or, rather, “our skin”(!) sees “far off.” Although the belief that death is a portal through which we are conducted into an unimaginably different realm of experience is central to a great number of religious traditions, this poem is entirely earthbound. It makes no reference to a heavenly hereafter. True, the second stanza ends with a thinly veiled allusion to Jesus, but it is evening, not Jesus, who comes “Walking quietly over” the water. Still, the allusion imbues the ordinary with an aura of the miraculous. And the word “asylums” tells us that these are not the dangerous waters that moved Jesus to perform the two miracles to save disciples in Matthew. Quite the opposite. An asylum is a refuge: a place that opens its doors, takes one in, then closes its doors, in effect barring danger from entrance. Ordinarily, the asylum that water offers is illusory. Its welcoming arms are always open, its perfect embrace too often fatal. Here, however, it comes as a gift, in some way life sustaining and vision enhancing.

The action of the poem is the arrival of evening and the effect of that arrival, traced stanza by stanza, on sight. The first stanza, listing four things we are unaware of, implies that we are surrounded by a richness—on earth (line 1), in air (2), and underwater (3)—that lies beyond the limits of our ordinary vision. The second stanza, noting that evening has recently arrived, describes in lines 6-8 portions of its journey in a way that unobtrusively but unmistakably evidences a manner of seeing heightened beyond the ordinary—the starry nets of the dark above (6) counterpoising the watery nets of the dark below (4), the darkness “Walking” over watery “asylums”—and climaxes in the inexplicable seeing of the concluding line. Darkness, dimming ordinary vision, lights the way to extraordinary vision. But there is a precondition. We must drown. The night/water juxtaposition, perhaps implicit at the end of the first stanza but clearly explicit at the end of the second stanza, culminates in lines 11-12 as night metaphorically becomes a dark tide slowly rising around us. We must, it seems, die to air (daylight) and be born to water (darkness) in order to enter a state of oceanic consciousness—an altered state of consciousness of which Western literature contains numerous recorded accounts: for example, in works by Dickinson, Hart Crane, Ginsberg, Blake, Hopkins, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Goethe, Rilke, and, of course, Freud and Jung.

As for the poem's last line, its very inexplicability announces what this new, that is to say, unspeakably ancient, way of seeing does: It opens windows in what we had thought were solid walls. Here in the daylight world, operating quite efficiently in our business-as-usual, no-nonsense mode of consciousness, we see only the wall. The last line is opaque. We see nothing and will continue to see nothing, Bly seems to imply, until we step into those quietly rising waters of darkness. “Surprised By Evening” is a poem of the mundane sublime, conveying one of those ineffable moments when one senses the presence of another world concealed within this one.