Twenty Poems about Silence (4 of 4) – Analysis and Commentary

Third post in the series:

https://poetryofgonzalinhodacosta.blogspot.com/2018/11/twenty-poems-about-silence-3-of-4.html

This last set of poems in the series I found surprising, exceptional, and memorable, by authors who are unknowns, practically.

SILENCE by Melinda Nugent

Silence is golden

I once heard it said

How often these words

ring thru my head

I miss the words

that trickle off tongues

and giggles and laughs

that with childhood come

the sounds of the birds

that float thru the air

I would cross the street

without a care

How often I feel

so sorry inside

for the part of my world

that so quietly died

what I wouldn't give

to hear one more song

If silence is golden

why do I long?

Sign language interpreter

This poem, originally published on the Internet on March 10, 2009, is no longer available. Despite my best efforts, I have not been able to locate or contact the author.

Playing on a well-thumbed proverb, the poem is poignant, clever, winning. Best of all is the surprise ending—the speaker is deaf.

I HAD A SUDDEN SCRUPLE by Ralph Wright, O.S.B.

I had a

sudden scruple

when writing

this poem

that what

I was saying

was worth

less

than silence

so I stopped.

Saint Benedict (2011) by David Holgate
Saint Giles Church, Norwich, UK

This poem dated May 1, 2001 was originally published on the St. Louis Abbey, Missouri, USA website.

See: https://www.stlouisabbey.org/words-for-the-journey/i-had-a-sudden-scruple

This poem is written by a Benedictine monk whose religious profession commits him to nurturing silence. When in the poem he opts for silence over speech, he implicitly invokes the spirit of his Rule, calling forth its organic meanings. This aspect of the poem makes it particularly curious.

“St. Benedict understood that silence is an essential element of monastic life. He outlined this throughout his Rule, but most especially in chapter six. Modern monks like to point out that first word in the Rule is to ‘Listen’, which can’t be done while talking! God gave us two ears and one mouth, so we should use them in that order. This emphasis on silence is so that we can learn to listen to God more acutely. God speaks to us in the Bible, but also in the depths of our heart and, as we begin to tune into him, we learn to be attentive to his presence in others.

“This kind of sensitivity and awareness makes it easier to pray at all times. So a monk seeks to practice a considerable degree of silence and recollection. In Benedictine life, there are times of silence (especially during the night) and there are places, such as a monk’s cell (his room), the library, the reading room, the cloister and the church, where he will be able to discover the solitude which is typical of monastic life.

“…a monk lives off silence, and a sign of a vocation to the monastic life is the ability to take to it and create it. The earliest monks went into the desert so that their lives could be dominated by this sense of God. In the Bible, the desert is the place where God met his people and made them his own. It is also the place where Christ was tempted, and a monk has to face up to everything in himself which would try to stand in the place where God belongs. People may sometimes feel lonely and for them silence is harsh, but instead of running away, a monk tries to find the silent place in his heart where he can find God. There is a world of difference between loneliness and solitude with God.

“Silence also helps build up a healthy community life in the monastery. What binds us together as a human fellowship is the knowledge that we are each trying to answer to God’s call to seek Him. Listening to each other helps us understand and support each other. It is a way of learning reverence for God’s presence in every other human being.

“…As St. Benedict wrote in chapter 42, we are called to strive for silence; as he wrote in chapter 4, we are called to have a love for silence; it’s incredibly healthy and spiritually beneficial! Most importantly, St. Benedict wrote that it is in this ‘School of the Lord’s Service’ that we are called to ‘Listen’ and grow closer to God.”

—Subiaco Abbey, Arkansas, USA

See: https://countrymonks.org/silence

AN AUTUMN STILLNESS by Robert K. Johnson

is nothing like the ones

that lumber into a week

in July, squat—stolid

as an invisible tank—

and weigh down the air with a heat

so heavy even the bees

linger on the nearest petals,

too exhausted to fly.

An autumn stillness comes

as a quick surprise. The breeze

suddenly turns quiet

while the trees’ fluttering leaves

lock in place and the leaves

that floated down on lawns—

as if on signal—stop tumbling

over the tops of the grass.

The stillness holds you, too,

although you know it soon

will break and re-enter time’s flow,

forcing you to do the same.

Autumn country barn

This poem was originally published in Poetry Porch (2015). 

See: http://www.poetryporch.com/johnsonone15.html

Dazzling, the way this poem transfixes in time an instant of furtive stillness. All of us have probably experienced a similar moment of unreality when the universe is at once petrified. In the poem, this moment occurs in fall, when the breeze vanishes in a wink and the tumbling leaves freeze. The vision contrasts with our experience of lumbering summer slowing making its way forward.

MINISTRY OF SNOW by Abigail Carroll

Listen: someone

is scissoring the clouds, snipping

the weather

into a dazzling squall of tiny white

vowels. The hills

have become an undulating clause,

contoured

by the going under of the light,

the distant hoo

of an owl’s lonely psalm. What

you once loved

about a dress—the delicate grammar

of its swoosh— 

you have come to love about the snow:

the way

the pointed ice-ferns lisp the air,

rewrite

the yard into a stark, unrippled

fiction,

the forest into a thousand intertwining

questions.

Shhh—this is the sky unknitting itself,

wrapping you

in a baptism of cold, the monologue

of the wind

publishing its feathered rhetoric

across the roll

and dip of the field, the frozen cat-

tailed marsh.

A cardinal. A buckthorn. A sentence

of red berries

interrupted. You have entered

a kingdom

of unknowing—Holy is the sound

of forgetting.

Falling snow

This poem was originally published in Ascent (August 20, 2014).

See: http://www.readthebestwriting.com/ministry-of-snow-abigail-carroll/

Threading together a succession of exquisite metaphors—“someone / is scissoring the clouds,” “the hills / have become an undulating clause,” “this is the sky unknitting itself”—the poem softly invokes the silently holy. Religious diction—“ministry,” “psalm,” “baptism”—mingling with metaphors denotes that more than mere description is involved here. The close of the poem intimates manifold meanings—“Holy is the sound / of forgetting.”

UNHEARD by Midge Goldberg

What is it that’s here that tramples unheard,

No singing or dancing or waving toy sword?

The jangle-less sound of piano unstruck,

Some rattling and slamming of nothing unstuck,

The pillow’s unslept on, the bed is still made,

The board game is bored, and the play is unplayed.

Words go unwhispered and latches stay hooked,

The window unopened, the mirrors unlooked.

The door’s not ajar, yet they’ve come, unafraid:

The footsteps of absence, and silence unstayed.

Empty children's room

This poem was originally published in The Lyric (Winter Issue 2012), page 17.

“What’s wrong with this picture?” we might ask, recalling the familiar brainteaser. A child’s vacant bed, the playroom untouched, silence where there should be laughter, noise, diversion, and cheer—we know things are not as they should be. Desolation, “silence unstayed,” paradoxically—the scene indicates a haunting or possibly some deeper underlying anomaly in the universe.

The lyric is written in traditional form, with regular rhyme and meter.

Three More Poems about Silence – Analysis and Commentary

Fourth post in the series:

https://poetryofgonzalinhodacosta.blogspot.com/2019/01/twenty-poems-about-silence-4-of-4.html

I would describe these poems as “Honorable Mentions.” They didn’t make my top twenty best poems about silence, but they are too good not to be featured on my blog.

THE LISTENERS by Walter de la Mare

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,  

   Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses  

   Of the forest’s ferny floor:

And a bird flew up out of the turret,  

   Above the Traveller’s head:

And he smote upon the door again a second time;  

   ‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.

But no one descended to the Traveller;  

   No head from the leaf-fringed sill

Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,  

   Where he stood perplexed and still.

But only a host of phantom listeners  

   That dwelt in the lone house then

Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight  

   To that voice from the world of men:

Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,  

   That goes down to the empty hall,

Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken  

   By the lonely Traveller’s call.

And he felt in his heart their strangeness,  

   Their stillness answering his cry,

While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,  

   ’Neath the starred and leafy sky;

For he suddenly smote on the door, even  

   Louder, and lifted his head:—

‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,  

   That I kept my word,’ he said.

Never the least stir made the listeners,  

   Though every word he spake

Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house  

   From the one man left awake:

Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,  

   And the sound of iron on stone,

And how the silence surged softly backward,

   When the plunging hoofs were gone.

Never the least stir made the listeners...

See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47546/the-listeners

A famous poem written in traditional style, with regular rhyme and meter—sustained, the narrative gradually, almost imperceptibly draws the reader into a mystery, phantom listeners who remain silent, unresponsive to the fraught, mystified entreaties of a solitary traveler. Tight, compelling, haunting, the story displays a satisfying aesthetic unity.

SILENCE by Edgar Lee Masters

   I have known the silence of the stars and of the sea,          

And the silence of the city when it pauses,       

And the silence of a man and a maid,    

And the silence for which music alone finds the word,          

And the silence of the woods before the winds of spring begin,                

And the silence of the sick           

When their eyes roam about the room. 

And I ask: For the depths

Of what use is language? 

A beast of the field moans a few times     

When death takes its young.       

And we are voiceless in the presence of realities—    

We cannot speak.   

 

   A curious boy asks an old soldier        

Sitting in front of the grocery store,         

“How did you lose your leg?”        

And the old soldier is struck with silence,        

Or his mind flies away      

Because he cannot concentrate it on Gettysburg.      

It comes back jocosely         

And he says, “A bear bit it off.”   

And the boy wonders, while the old soldier      

Dumbly, feebly lives over 

The flashes of guns, the thunder of cannon,    

The shrieks of the slain,     

And himself lying on the ground,           

And the hospital surgeons, the knives, 

And the long days in bed. 

But if he could describe it all       

He would be an artist.         

But if he were an artist there would be deeper wounds        

Which he could not describe.       

 

   There is the silence of a great hatred,

And the silence of a great love,   

And the silence of a deep peace of mind,             

And the silence of an embittered friendship,   

There is the silence of a spiritual crisis,

Through which your soul, exquisitely tortured,         

Comes with visions not to be uttered     

Into a realm of higher life.             

And the silence of the gods who understand each other without speech,  

There is the silence of defeat.      

There is the silence of those unjustly punished;         

And the silence of the dying whose hand         

Suddenly grips yours.         

There is the silence between father and son,   

When the father cannot explain his life,          

Even though he be misunderstood for it.          

 

   There is the silence that comes between husband and wife.         

There is the silence of those who have failed;    

And the vast silence that covers 

Broken nations and vanquished leaders.         

There is the silence of Lincoln,   

Thinking of the poverty of his youth.    

And the silence of Napoleon          

After Waterloo.       

And the silence of Jeanne d’Arc  

Saying amid the flames, “Blesséd Jesus”—      

Revealing in two words all sorrow, all hope.    

And there is the silence of age,     

Too full of wisdom for the tongue to utter it     

In words intelligible to those who have not lived       

The great range of life.     

 

   And there is the silence of the dead.   

If we who are in life cannot speak            

Of profound experiences,  

Why do you marvel that the dead          

Do not tell you of death?   

Their silence shall be interpreted          

As we approach them.

Their silence shall be interpreted as we approach them.

See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=13043

The strength of this poem lies in its power to provoke the reader into thoughtful reflection. Many, we observe, are the occasions of perturbing silence, and with insight the poet strings together a notably long list of them using language that is spare, elegant, ironical, and understated. It is a tour de force that ends, appropriately enough, by remarking on the silence of death.

TAHIMIK ni Rofel G. Brion

Mananahimik ako

nang makapiling kita

at marinig ang iyong salita

sa hihip ng hangin

tikatik ng ulan

talilis ng alakdan sa damo

igkas ng sangang binitiwan ng bunga

ingit ng bakal sa kumikiskis na bato

maging sa hapdi ng sikat ng araw

at lamig ng sinag ng buwan

nang mahiwatigan ko

mabanaag

ang loob mo.

SILENCE by Rofel G. Brion

Original language Tagalog

Translated by Gonzalinho da Costa

I am quieted

when you are near

and I hear you speak

in the mouth of the wind blowing

soft incessant rain

scorpion hiddenly escaping in the grass

sprung branch suddenly letting go of fruit

rasping of iron on stone

transforming in prickly sunshine

and chill moonlight         

when I delicately understand

iridescent

your inner heart.

...scorpion hiddenly escaping in the grass

This poem in Tagalog was originally published in Antig, Issue No. 14 (December 2012).

Translation was originally published in New Asian Writing (July 20, 2014).

The original Tagalog poem has a delightfully onomatopoeic quality. I have tried to translate the poem as literally as possible with just a touch of lyricism.

The poem describes a presence that communicates from the heart in silence and through sensate events pregnant with significance, permeated with meaning. What or who is this presence? Evidently, it is a spirit, and a good fit for the identity of this mysterious presence is the Jewish and Christian God:

“Then the Lord said, ‘Go outside and stand on the mountain before the Lord; the Lord will be passing by.’ A strong and heavy wind was rending the mountains and crushing rocks before the Lord—but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake—but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake there was fire—but the Lord was not in the fire. After the fire there was a tiny whispering sound. When he heard this, Elijah hid his face in his cloak and went and stood at the entrance of the cave.” (1 Kings 19:11-13)

Three Poems about the Desert – Analysis and Commentary

The largest deserts in the world occur in the Arctic and Antarctic, North Africa and the Middle East, Central Australia, Central Asia, Southern Africa, Patagonia, and the Western United States.

Yet it is only in the Middle East that a very influential mythic literature of the desert dating from ancient times was written—the Bible. It’s a curious fact.

The motif of the desert is the opposite of the archetype of water, and, with the exception of frozen climes, of the archetypes of the sources of water in the desert—the rain and the river.

If water represents life, the desert stands for the converse, death. Water is a symbol of renewal and rebirth through cleansing. In contrast, the desert is a sign of water’s antecedent in the cycle of the spiritual life—spiritual death, or the purgation before rebirth.

Fraught with spiritual meaning, the desert is a central motif of the Bible, one of a handful of the most influential works of world spirituality.

Modern literature continues to feature the desert in its storied archetypal role, evoking emptiness and desolation, often indicating a spiritual quality.

In Wind, Sand and Stars (1939) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the author describes ten harrowing days with his mechanic marooned in the desert of Libya before he is rescued by Bedouins. In this narrative has been detected the germ of his celebrated novella The Little Prince (1943), a type of wisdom literature which to date has sold 140 million copies worldwide. The desert in Saint-Exupéry’s works is a place of spiritual discovery.

In Albert Camus’ existentialist classic The Plague (1947), a fictional tale about the protagonists in a cholera epidemic taking place at Oran, French Algeria, the desert stands for an existentialist universe—implacable, inert, utterly indifferent to the afflictions of a tormented humanity.

Although the desert is also expounded for its beauty, this perspective is relatively recent. John Charles Van Dyke’s The Desert (1918) or Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire (1968) come to mind. They celebrate the singular beauty, unspoiled, of the American Southwest desert.

The first poem featured here is from the Bible, Hosea 2:4-25.

Hosea, classified by scholars as a “minor” prophet, in contrast to “major” prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah, belongs to the early period of prophecy in ancient Israel, before the destruction of the Northern Kingdom by the Assyrians in 722 B.C.E. Hosea’s prophecy dates from 760-720 B.C.E.

Hosea prophesies the fall of the Northern Kingdom as a consequence of the nation’s infidelity to Abraham’s Covenant with Yahweh.

In Hosea’s allegory, Israel is a harlot who has given herself over to the worship of the gods of Canaan even as Yahweh remains faithful to her as spouse and lover. Yahweh says he will draw Israel into the desert and purify her there, speaking to her heart and renewing with her the everlasting covenant. He will restore his blessings toward her, blessings as in the days of her youth when she was liberated from the slavery of Egypt.

According to this prophecy Hosea recapitulates the desert as a place and symbol of purification and revelation during Israel’s forty-year sojourn before the nation entered the Promised Land.

The imagery is extraordinary and retains its freshness and power more than 2,700 years later.

Hosea’s words written down are the heritage of an oral tradition that directly originates from the prophet’s mouth.

Hosea 2:4-25 (New American Bible)

Protest against your mother, protest! for she is not my wife, and I am not her husband. Let her remove her harlotry from before her, her adultery from between her breasts,

Or I will strip her naked, leaving her as on the day of her birth; I will make her like the desert, reduce her to an arid land, and slay her with thirst.

I will have no pity on her children, for they are the children of harlotry.

Yes, their mother has played the harlot; she that conceived them has acted shamefully. “I will go after my lovers,” she said, “who give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink.”

Since she has not known that it was I who gave her the grain, the wine, and the oil, And her abundance of silver, and of gold, which they used for Baal,

Therefore I will take back my grain in its time, and my wine in its season; I will snatch away my wool and my flax, with which she covers her nakedness.

So now I will lay bare her shame before the eyes of her lovers, and no one can deliver her out of my hand.

I will bring an end to all her joy, her feasts, her new moons, her sabbaths, and all her solemnities.

I will lay waste her vines and fig trees, of which she said, “These are the hire my lovers have given me”; I will turn them into rank growth and wild beasts shall devour them.

I will punish her for the days of the Baals, for whom she burnt incense while she decked herself out with her rings and her jewels, and, in going after her lovers, forgot me, says the Lord.

Therefore, I will hedge in her way with thorns and erect a wall against her, so that she cannot find her paths.

If she runs after her lovers, she shall not overtake them; if she looks for them she shall not find them. Then she shall say, “I will go back to my first husband, for it was better with me then than now.”

So I will allure her; I will lead her into the desert and speak to her heart.

From there I will give her the vineyards she had, and the valley of Achor as a door of hope. She shall respond there as in the days of her youth, when she came up from the land of Egypt.

On that day, says the Lord, She shall call me “My husband,” and never again “My baal.”

Then will I remove from her mouth the names of the Baals, so that they shall no longer be invoked.

I will make a covenant for them on that day, with the beasts of the field, with the birds of the air, and with the things that crawl on the ground. Bow and sword and war I will destroy from the land, and I will let them take their rest in security.

I will espouse you to me forever: I will espouse you in right and in justice, in love and in mercy;

I will espouse you in fidelity, and you shall know the Lord.

On that day I will respond, says the Lord; I will respond to the heavens, and they shall respond to the earth;

The earth shall respond to the grain, and wine, and oil, and these shall respond to Jezreel.

—1970 New American Bible translation

Stephen Crane is most renowned for his masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), a fictional account of a Union soldier during the U.S. Civil War written in the style of Realism.

He is less well known for his poetry. “In the Desert” comes down to us more than one hundred years later with all of its original energy, deriving principally from Crane’s precise description of his unusually powerful and striking vision.

IN THE DESERT by Stephen Crane

In the desert

I saw a creature, naked, bestial,

Who, squatting upon the ground,

Held his heart in his hands,

And ate of it.

I said, “Is it good, friend?”

“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;

“But I like it

“Because it is bitter,

“And because it is my heart.”

I would opine that this poem is best understood in the context of three influential Continental movements at the time—Realism, Naturalism, and especially, Symbolism.

Darkly, the poem in tone and feeling recalls the spirit of Realism and Naturalism, that is, their occupation with the sordid realities, especially the social afflictions, of the day.

Principally, the idiom of the poem is Symbolism—Crane invokes a fantastical image that communicates his inner subjectivity and at the same time elicits a strong emotional response from the reader.

TAKLAMAKAN DESERT by Ko Un

Original language Korean

Translated by Suji Kwock Kim and Sunja Kim Kwock

Why I’m going to the Taklamakan Desert:

the emptiness there.

Why I’m going to the Taklamakan Desert

at seventy-five, leaving all words behind: the cry

of the emptiness there.

Why I’m going to the Taklamakan Desert:

I can no longer stand

the world’s greed

or mine.

There, in the Taklamakan Desert,

the silence of a thousand-year-old skull.

Translation was originally published in Poetry (November 2014).

See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/57524/taklamakan-desert

The original Korean is available here:

https://hocopolitso.org/2015/11/10/manas-musings-lost-and-gained-in-translation/

—“Mana’s Musing: Lost and Gained in Translation,” Hocopolitso: Let There Be Lit, by Laura Yoo

“Taklamakan Desert” by Ko Un is notable because, among other reasons, it is a contemporary poem originally composed in Korean about a place most of the world population has never even heard of, much less visited.

Keen, minimalist in imagery and diction, the poem broadcasts a powerful statement—“I can no longer stand / the world’s greed / or mine.”

An important reason why the poem succeeds in English is because of the skill of the translators, who reworked the piece for “greater spareness,” among other attributes.

See:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/249042

—“Translator’s Note: Three Poems by Ko Un,” Poetry (November 2014) by Suji Kwock Kim

Incidentally, the author has been hailed as a frontrunner for the Nobel Prize in Literature. In my view his celebrity status is secondary to the merits of the poem in and by itself.

Recently, Ko Un was embroiled in a public scandal involving accusations of sexual harassment and abuse, and the imbroglio has affected his Nobel Prize candidacy.

Taklamakan Desert, Xinjiang, China