Commission (Sapling)
 

Commission to Paint a Sapling in the Park

I’ll have to go to Edvard Munch on this.
And Henrik Ibsen, channeling the North,
its atmospheric gestures, stony words
with adamant varietals for God
and Hell. I’ll have to lie down in the grass
and hide the sky behind a linden row
and dig it out and find a place for such
a tiny stalk, its yellow leaves turned down.
A daughter’s tree exulting in a time
before experience. A hidden lamp,
an April field that trails into the mist.
I must consult the masters, find the way
to render something chained to memories
that map upon a strange imagination.

__
Line 7--"dig it out" was "dig it up"
.

How could I not like a poem that pairs Munch with Ibsen. I would prefer Strindberg perhaps because he was at least as unstable as Munch. That’s conversation. I do like it. It has a mystery inherent. Maybe I like the first half a little more. It starts with a strong pace. But I’m picking out favorites in a fine poem.

I like this, Rick. It does feel strongly northern, although referencing Munch and Ibsen is going to do that, of course. And the linden tree always makes me think of Schubert, for obvious reasons, but that also - in a way - is sort of northern.

I particularly like the "adamant varietals". I only wonder, probably wrongly, whether you really need the last three lines.

A quick word from pedants' corner: Edvard, I think.

Cheers

David

I was all set with praise for “adamant varietals” and pedantry for “Edvard,” but David beat me to it. He and I are telepathizing again. “Hide the sky behind a linden row” is a delightful change of perspective, but I wasn’t quite sure what had to be dug up. First I thought you were planting a sapling and had to dig the grass up to find a place for it. Then it occurred to me you were digging the sapling up to take home as a model. I did get a bit tangled in the abstraction of the last three lines, though I don’t know how I’d feel about an 11-line sonnet.

Thanks folks.

I made a few nips and tucks--the d that was missing in Edvard is now there. My lay/lie problem has been pointed out on the sidelines and fixed. Thanks for those catches.

The narrator is painting a picture of the tree. I may need to change the parenthetical or shift to an epigraph. Or maybe keep it all as is. I'll be back for fuller response to comments.

RM

I like the breathlessness of the strong pentameter beat and enjambed lines.
I also like the strong evocation of Northern climes and cultures.
Two questions:
1. What is the antecedent of “it” in line 7? the sapling? the lindens? the grass?
2. In line 9, did you mean “exult” (intransitive verb) instead of “exalt” (transitive verb)?
Nice work.

Thanks folks.

I've written out the entire premise in the title. It was orginally "Commission (Sapling)


Thanks John and David. I can see how the shift in energy after the "volta" may cause a problem. I'm considering how "I must consult the masters" plays--it may be a bit pompous, but I mean for it to tie back to the opening.

Thanks Glen and Carl. It's the sky that has to be dug up after its burial. I think it works grammatically, but there is a lot going on in the sentence, and the sense of digging up the sky is a little strange. I'm hoping that clarifying the premise of the poem, a painter making a picture, might help here.

RM

The new title eliminates my planting scenario, but I think I’d still have to conclude you were digging the sapling up to take home as a live model—odd, perhaps, and probably illegal, but much easier to process than digging up the sky. At a minimum, I think you’ll have to replace “and hide” with “bury” to clue us in. (I thought “hiding the sky behind a linden row” meant finding a shady spot to lie down where the sky wasn’t visible.)

Hi Carl,

I'm thinking the sapling (stalk) isn't mentioned in the sentence until after "dig it up", so digging up the sapling wouldn't make as much sense as digging up the sky. If it were hide the ball and find it, "it" would clearly refer to the ball. On the other hand, I'm not sure I mind the ambiguity in that sentence.

Rick, for me it’s less a matter of grammar than of logic, of hunting around for an “it” that could be dug up. The sky is by far the least likely candidate (though for that reason the most interesting). If you don’t mind the ambiguity, you got it!

.

Dammit! Tricked into liking another sonnet. (I love to hate sonnets.)

Putting aside my (partial) failure to understand the symbolism (Munch and Ibsen) that threads the poem, I am dazzled by the hallucinogenic quality of the imagery. I can't help but suspect the sapling as being something/someone other than a tree but I get nowhere by thinking that.

.
I wonder if hell should be capitalized?

I also wonder if you need to mention Munch and Ibsen specifically. Sometimes it seems like too easy a way of invoking something. Unless it's intrinsic to the poem's intent it could be construed as an easy way to convey something without having to say it in your own words. I'd like L12 to be the opening line.

L9-11 are the transforming part for me.

As for the mechanics/metrics/form of the poem, it's all invisible to me, which is the way it should be, imo — Although in my case the invisibility is due to my relative ignorance of such things. This poem flows. That's all I knows : )

The poem expresses the mindset of a painter who is searching for a vision to render something unique from something ordinary. It conjures atmosphere in order to transform the subject to be worthy of painting. But the poem is not written. The painting remains blank. The commission unearned. Instead, the poem stands on its own as an interior view of a painter's dilemma: how to deliver something of artistic value in order to earn a commission. It's an interesting dilemma.

It's a weird poem in all the ways a poem should be: phrasing, imagery, atmospherics. It always depends largely on my mood when coming to read a poem. Mornings are almost always best for me, but evenings can surprise me, too. This morning I woke up to the news that one of my grandkids was taken to the emergency room for trouble breathing. I waited in suspense for an update. It turned out to be croup and he got a steroid shot to help him recover. He's fine. I breathed easy. That's the way I came to this poem. It's something that all poems are subject to: where is the reader coming from at the moment they read the poem? Will they take the time to squeeze the juice from it? I don't know if I'm the perfect reader for this poem, but I get enough to quench my thirst for visions. And it was tonic for my tense heart.

.

Hi Carl,

Thanks. But doesn't the grammatical logic of "hide the ball and find it" serve as an example of how "it" refers to the sky? There is, of course, a great deal of resistance, logically, to any notion of digging a sky up... unless you're talking about a painted sky on a painting in progress.

Thanks for your generous interpretation, Jim. Yes, name dropping can be annoying, and usually turns me off as a reader. I'm considering how it's working here. Munch as a painter, I'm thinking, is important because I want his landscapes and paintings of trees (especially among his later paintings) to set the stage. With Ibsen, I get a similar psychological portrait, but also a second name drop. So... I'm thinking about it.

Rick

You’re right that both the grammar and the parallelism of the phrases point to “sky” as the antecedent of “it,” but logically it’s so improbable that readers will bend over backwards to find something else. I wavered between “grass” and “stalk,” and Glenn also considered the linden row, but the sky never occurred to either of us. How would you understand “I’ll put on my pajamas to wash the dishes and wear them to bed”? “Bury” would help, I think, simply because “bury” and “dig up” are a more natural pair, like “hide” and “find,” but you’d have to stomach the trochaic inversion.

Thanks Carl,

I realize this is kind of obnoxious, but I like it when readers will bend over backwards to find something else. That's kind of what I mean by ambiguity. I at least want them to recognize that grammatically, the sky is it. I'm digging in, I know..... I appreciate your coming back.

Rick

Another thing that I should mention, Carl, is that the closely related "dig it out" is a familiar phrase meaning something like "go hard", usually employed by a coach prompting an athlete to run faster or something like that. It can be applied to painting. I first commented here misremembering the line. I may change it from dig it up to dig it out.

I did.

.

You may have stumbled on a possible path to an alternative:

"Munch as a painter, I'm thinking, is important because I want his landscapes and paintings of trees (especially among his later paintings) to set the stage."

...as a painter... I want... landscapes... of trees... to set the stage.

(Stage = Ibsen)

Commission to Paint the Stage

Don't mind me. Just brewing...

.

For the record, the discussion of name dropping was between Rick and Jim, not me.