Three More Poems about the Mountain – Analysis and Commentary

First post on this subject:

https://poetryofgonzalinhodacosta.blogspot.com/2018/05/three-poems-about-mountain-analysis-and.html

PSALM 24:3-6

Who shall climb the mountain of the Lord?

Who shall stand in his holy place?

The man with clean hands and pure heart,

who desires not worthless things,

who has not sworn so as to deceive his neighbor.

He shall receive blessings from the Lord

and reward from the God who saves him.

Such are the men who seek him,

seek the face of the God of Jacob.

The mountain is a dominant symbol in the Bible—Mount Sinai, Mount Carmel, Mount Tabor, and more are places of dramatic encounter with God. Psalm 24—the entire psalter is poetry—interprets the mountain as a symbol of the divine. “Who shall climb the mountain of the Lord? Who shall stand in his holy place?” The poem answers the very questions it asks by setting forth an agenda for the virtuous life. The “man” with a “pure heart,” that is, repentant, converted from a life of intransigence, detached from the “worthless things” of the spirit of the world, who, guileless, does not “deceive his neighbor”—he will climb the mountain of God. Very few are strong—or should we say graced—enough to ascend the mountain of God. The vast majority of humanity, that’s us, mills about the plains below.

THE POEM THAT TOOK THE PLACE OF A MOUNTAIN by Wallace Stevens

There it was, word for word,

The poem that took the place of a mountain.

He breathed its oxygen,

Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.

It reminded him how he had needed

A place to go to in his own direction,

How he had recomposed the pines,

Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,

For the outlook that would be right,

Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:

The exact rock where his inexactnesses

Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,

Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,

Recognize his unique and solitary home.

See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57500/the-poem-that-took-the-place-of-a-mountain

Wallace Stevens has been faulted for obscurity. In this poem, he is, we might say, plainspoken enough. When we understand that the mountain is a metaphor for a poem—or is it the other way around, the poem is a metaphor for a mountain?—the figurative language falls into place. Thus “the poem” is a mountain that harbors fresh “oxygen,” and pine trees are “recomposed” like lines of verse. The poem engages us with curious, original turns of phrase, “he had needed a place to go in his own direction” or “he would be complete in an unexplained completion.” Touched by mystery, the poem closes by citing the view from an elevated vantage point, of a “unique and solitary home,” the sea.

EYESIGHT by A. R. Ammons

It was May before my

attention came

to spring and

my word I said

to the southern slopes

I’ve

missed it, it

came and went before

I got right to see:

don’t worry, said the mountain,

try the later northern slopes

or if

you can climb, climb

into spring; but

said the mountain

it’s not that way

with all things, some

that go are gone.

Many copies of this poem appear online. See, for example:

http://poetryeast.org/poem-samples/

This observant, almost nonchalant poem draws us in by its easy manner, so that, unawares, we are surprised by the epiphany at the conclusion—“some that go are gone.” The mountain in this poem is a symbol of human endeavor.

When I first read this poem, what entered my mind were the only lines of verse that I have ever been required in school to memorize, from Julius Caesar, Act IV, Scene 3, by William Shakespeare, where Cassius orates:

There is a tide in the affairs of men,

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat,

And we must take the current when it serves

Or lose our ventures.

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (c. 1818) by Caspar David Friedrich