'The Energy in Things Shone Through Their Shapes'

Some fugitive thinkers among us long for order in a manner almost nostalgic: 

“I envied those past ages of the world

When, as I thought, the energy in things

Shone through their shapes, when sun and moon no less

Than tree or stone or star or human face

Were seen but as fantastic japanese

Lanterns are seen, sullen or gay colors

And lines revealing the light that they conceal.”

 

We can read “the energy in things” as scientists do, I suppose, or mystics. Howard Nemerov weighs both understandings in “The Loon’s Cry.” He yearns for order in a fashion characteristic of the twentieth century. He can be neither devoutly religious nor vulgarly atheistic. He experiences no sense of conviction, unless uncertainty can be conviction. What animating principle orders the world? In a poem from a decade later, “Figures of Thought,” Nemerov sees patterns everywhere:

 

“To lay the logarithmic spiral on

Sea shell and leaf alike, and see it fit,

To watch the same idea work itself out

In the fighter pilot’s steepening, tightening turn

Onto his target, setting up the kill,

And in the flight of certain wall-eyed bugs

Who cannot see to fly straight into death

But have to cast their sidelong glance at it

And come but cranking to the candle’s flame—

 

“How secret that is, and how privileged

One feels to find the same necessity

Ciphered in forms diverse and otherwise

Without kinship-that is the beautiful

In nature as in art, not obvious,

Not inaccessible, but just between.

 

“It may diminish some our dry delight

To wonder if everything we are and do

Lies subject to some little law like that;

Hidden in nature, but not deeply so.”

 

Nemerov longs for pattern, some “little law,” but it remains elusive. Some choose to believe out of desperation and mundane impatience. Not the poet. Here, again, from “The Loon’s Cry”:  

 

“I simplified still more, and thought that now

We’d traded all those mysteries in for things,

For essences in things, not understood—

Reality in things! and now we saw

Reality exhausted all their truth.”

 

I first heard the cry of a loon more than thirty years ago at Pyramid Lake in the Adirondacks. It sounded mournful at first, like the call of a louder, more self-pitying dove. But then you hear a cry that might be the sound of a child being tortured. It’s bewitching after a while, once we stop anthropomorphizing. But the chill doesn’t go away, especially when heard in the middle of the night in your cabin on the shore. After hearing the loon’s “laughter of desolation,” Nemerov writes:

 

“A savage cry, now that the moon went up

And the sun down--yet when I heard him cry

Again, his voice seemed emptied of that sense

Or any other, and Adam I became,

Hearing the first loon cry in paradise.”