Straws like tame lightnings lie about the grass
And hang zigzag on hedges. Green as glass
The water in the horse-trough shines.
Nine ducks go wobbling by in two straight lines.
A hen stares at nothing with one eye,
Then picks it up. Out of an empty sky
A swallow falls and, flickering through
The barn, dives up again into the dizzy blue.
I lie, not thinking, in the cool, soft grass,
Afraid of where a thought might take me – as
This grasshopper with plated face
Unfolds his legs and finds himself in space.
Self under self, a pile of selves I stand
Threaded on time, and with metaphysic hand
Lift the farm like a lid and see
Farm within farm, and in the centre, me.
– from his first collection Riding Lights (1955)
I can't help but feel this poem was somehow responsible for the later British trend of so-called Martian poetry in the late 1970s and early 1980s, named after Craig Raine's poem "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home" (See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_poetry)
The oxymoron of "tame lightnings" in L1 heralds the string of subsequent oxymorons/contradictions/paradoxes in LL4-8:
"Nine ducks go wobbling by in two straight lines." (L4) How can a straight line wobble?
"A hen stares at nothing with one eye,/ Then picks it up." (LL5-6) Well done, hen!
"Out of an empty sky/ A swallow falls..." (LL6-7) Well that sky wasn't completely empty, was it?
"dives up" (L8) How can anything dive upwards?
Then comes the contradiction of "I lie" (L9) and "I stand" (L13). This can only be explained by the speaker standing up in between the two stanzas. But the speaker doesn't say that he stands up. Once we understand that he has stood up, we look again to see what might have motivated him to do so. In S3 he's lying on the grass, and from close range he sees a grasshopper suddenly take off without any effort beyond uncrossing its legs. He has identified with this grasshopper - note that he describes it by way of the pronouns, "his" and "himself" (L12) - and he is inspired to copy his new companion. He unfolds his own legs and magically stands up.
By way of this action he has entered into the organic life/flow of the farm. S4 is the speaker's attempt to capture the revelation he then experiences, thus the final paradox of the "Chinese-box" metaphor.