“SHEEP”

From where I stand the sheep stand still
As stones against the stony hill.
The stones are gray
And so are they.
And both are weatherworn and round,
Leading the eye back to the ground.
Two mingled flocks—
The sheep, the rocks.
And still no sheep stirs from its place
Or lifts its Babylonian face.

I think that I have known this poem since my undergraduate days at Amherst, and I remain grateful for its perfection.

It is, if you look for tricks, a very artful poem indeed. Two motionless constellations of things—sheep and rocks—are being likened, and this is formally expressed by the linked twoness of tetrameter couplets, and of tetrameter broken in two to make dimeter couplets. By the time you get to the second line of the fourth couplet, a line which simply juxtaposes “The sheep, the rocks,” there are two mirroring monometers within the dimeter measure.

The first line of the poem is the only one, to my ear, which remotely threatens to run over into the next; elsewhere, pauses and punctuation give an even balancing movement to each couplet, and so enforce the idea of parallelism. There is balance or mirroring, too, in the words and sounds of the poem, most obviously in the stand/stand and stones/stony of the first couplet, more subtly in the way the first line's still reappears all the way down in the last line but one.

Each of the couplets ends with a full stop, and the effect of these repeated arrests is to keep the idea of movement from getting started, to stress the idea of fixity.

All of this formal appropriateness (so pleasing to experience, so dry to hear about) is there in the poem, and yet in fact the poem does not seem tricky. Why not? For one thing, the language and word-order are so plain and natural that the sheep and rocks seem almost unmediated. The reader has scarcely any sense of a poet standing between him and the scene, brandishing a rhetoric and offering clever interpretations. Because the poet thus effaces himself, because he writes so transparently, his formal felicities—though they have their effect—are not felt as part of a performance. The poem's first line—“From where I stand the sheep stand still”—very firmly begins this minimization of the poet's presence: it focuses the poem not on “I” but on the sheep, and it presents the poet not as a sensibility but as a mere locus or vantage-point.

A final effect of that line, of course, is to convey a sense of a fixed scene fixedly viewed. The witness doesn't move any more than the stones or sheep do. However, the mind of the poet shapes and moves the poem far more than his plain manner lets on. Each of the first four couplets states some resemblance between the sheep and the rocks: their stillness, their grayness, their rondure and texture, their flocklike arrangement. These statements have a cumulative force, but it also strikes me that, beginning with the modest simile of the first couplet, they grow progressively stronger in nature, until stones and sheep are “mingled flocks,” and the mirroring elements of the poem approach a state of fusion.

Fusion occurs in the word “Babylonian.” In this poem, what a word! “Sheep” begins with ten successive monosyllables, but here at the end we meet a grand five-syllable word with a capital letter, a word which suddenly flies off beyond the poem's preserve toward something far and ancient, a word with none of the plainness of what has gone before it, a word in which the poem drops all pretense that it is not a product of imagination. The effect is explosive, and then there is an immediate double-take as the reader sees that “Babylonian” is after all quite at home in this accurate poem, by reason of its evocative accuracy. The word asks us first and most importantly to combine sheep and stone by recalling Babylonian and Assyrian sculpture—in particular, I should think, those famous Assyrian bas-reliefs which represent men and animals in profile, and have a stylization of the hirsute which renders the sheep an ideal and frequent subject. The line “Leading the eye back to the ground” compels us, by the way, to see Francis' sheep in a side view, as if they were posing for a relief.

The faces of sheep do, in fact, suggest the physiognomies of Mesopotamia and the Near East, and I remember Umberto Saba's poem in which he describes una capra dal viso semita, a goat with a Semitic face. Finally, I believe, the poem asks us to think of how long—in the lands which the Bible mentions, and in others, and in unrecorded times and places—the sheep have been with us. At the end of Robert Francis' poem, the stillness of a New England scene partakes of the timelessness of art and of things unchanged.