It's very exciting to see so many posts on this thread! Petra, thank you for all of the links! And thanks, everyone, for posting complete poems; that is very helpful! Of course, the the category "poetry of quiet despair" is something that we are making up, so what fits, and what doesn't fit in it, is for all of us in this forum to decide.
Now, for something a little different. In planning this even, Tim and I sent each other three poems to comment on—these are early poems of his, apparently-- and, originally, I had planned on commenting on all three of his in one post. However, I am such a huge fan of “The Blind” that I want to go ahead and post the poem, and my thoughts on it.
The Blind
Gunners a decade dead
wing through my father's mind
as he limps out to the blind
bundled against the wind.
By some ancestral code
fathers and sons don't break,
we each carry a load
of which we cannot speak.
Here we commit our dead
to the unyielding land
where broken windmills creak
and stricken ganders cry.
Father, the dog and I
are learning how to die
with our feet stuck in the muck
and our eyes trained on the sky.
T rhyme scheme is very important in this poem: notice up front that both stanzas 1 and 4 have very strong leading rhyme schemes, stanza 2 has a more conventional rhyme scheme, and stanza 3, on the surface, has no rhymes, but on closer investigation, all of the words in this stanza rhyme, or slant rhyme, with words in other stanzas. Furthermore, the 1st and 4th stanzas both have one word that slant rhymes with a word outside of the stanza.
Stanza 1: Stanza 1 presents the father as an ex-military man burdened with ghosts who is “limp(ing) out to the blind,” the blind being, in this case, a structure of brush, or something similar, in which hunters conceal themselves.
Stanza 2: father and son are each carrying a load, as in rifles, other hunting gear, and not speaking, which is the obvious part of the “ancestral code,” but the son also feels the hidden pain, or quiet despair, within the father, and it is also crucial to the code to not speak of this.
In stanza 3, literally, the hunters “commit their dead,” or shoot down birds (I assume) to the “unyielding land” and in this way symbolically shoot at the gunners flying in the father’s mind. There is a wildness to this activity, a kind of insanity, and there appears to be a deliberate sense of wildness created by the lack of rhymes within the stanza. Granted, each word rhymes with another word outside of the stanza, but henceforth the rhymes within stanzas have been heavy, directing the reader, and suddenly the reader is adrift in an “unyielding land” where “broken windmills creep” and “stricken ganders cry,” with no strong rhymes to guide him.
In stanza 4, however, we come back to the strong leading rhymes, and there is the critical contrast between “our feet stuck in the muck/and our eyes trained on the sky.” Although the gunners that haunt the father have been dead a decade, the father has infected his child with his own trauma, so that the son is now, like the father, obsessed with death. To emphasize how far reaching this virus goes, Murphy adds the detail of the dog also learning how to die, as if any creature who stays close to the father will catch his illness. Also, perhaps, in the narrator telling the father that he is “learning how to die,” the narrator is, in a despairing way, asking for recognition from the father, as the father only appears to recognize the dead. We are left, ultimately, with the image of the son as a mirror image of the father, his “feet stuck in the muck” and “eyes trained on the sky,” and perceive that this is the only way that the son can bond with the father, in this exercise that the boy perceives as “learning to die.”
Finally, while this is obvious in its way, I have to point out that the title is wonderful in its suggestion of multiple meanings: the blind is, first of all, simply the place where hunters conceal themselves. Additionally, though, the “the blind” could refer to the father who is blind to his own son, and only focused on gunners that have lived only in his head for at least a decade. Furthermore, the narrator could be “the blind,” in that he is limited by his father’s vision, and thus “learning how to die.” Finally, the dead mentioned in the poem could also be “the blind.” Others may find more possibilities for meaning in the title—these are simply the ones that occurred to me.
Thanks for sharing this with me, Tim—I hope my exposition has done it some justice!
Jeff
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