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