Essay on Mark Strand's Man and Camel

Of Men and Camels

“My kingdom is empty except for you, / and all you do is ask for me.” (3) Positioning this seemingly surreal line in a seemingly surreal poem of a king who has lost the desire to rule over his only remaining subject, Mark Strand begins his latest collection of poems, Man and Camel. The ending is, almost certainly, just as surreal, as the speaker commits himself to the keeper of what seems to be death at the end of “The Last Seven Words”. Between these two pieces, however, are twenty-one others that seemingly all address varying subjects from the moon, to the disappearance of a beloved, to Death waiting for its wheat. The subjects may vary, but there appears to be a general feeling that pervades all of the poems, from the first to the last. They all seem to reveal the ephemeral character of the subject upon which they shine their light; there seems to be an ever-appearing threshold between the existing and the non-existing, between the real and surreal, and the entire collection becomes almost a compendium of paradoxes, that Strand does not mind leaving unexplained.

In the first poem of Man and Camel, “The King”, Strand already introduces a series of contradictions that amplify the very unusual and enigmatic piece. The poem starts with the speaker walking “to the middle of the room” (3) and calling out to the king, whom he finds “in the corner”. This very subtle contrast in location begins the series of paradoxes. In this case, the reader already acquires the feeling that something is amiss if the subject is hiding in a corner, when the middle of the room is clearly open. The king is then described as “tiny” in “his jeweled crown and his cape with ermine trim”. The speaker here lists all of the usual garments of kings, with these garments naturally being symbols of potency and wealth, but the king is described as “tiny”, not “small” or even perhaps “short”, but “tiny”, almost a childish word that denotes something that is utterly minuscule with the additional connotation of weakness. The king subsequently provides another contradiction, that his “kingdom is empty except for you [the speaker]”, perhaps the most peculiar of them all, this line presents a situation that is quasi-absurd, that of a king who has but one subject. It is directly after this point, however, that the speaker places a transition from the real into the unreal, or perhaps, even better, from one state into another. The king “entered his dream like a mouse vanishing into its hole” with the words “’that’s more like it’”. Thus, the “tiny” king with but one subject enters with satisfaction into a different state of being. However, the reader knows nothing more from the author and here, Strand sets the trait that he will maintain throughout the collection, that “It never explains. It only reveals.” (84, New Selected Poems), to use the words of another one of his poems.

“I Had Been a Polar Explorer”, the second poem of Man and Camel, is another piece where Strand develops his poem very carefully, with very specific words to create an effect of alternation between various states of consciousness. The first sentence of the poem describes the bleak life of a polar explorer, “freezing in one blank place and then another.”(4) The sentence essentially revolves around the verb “freezing” to denote the exclusively painful aspect of the activity, and “blank” to emphasize the utter lack of beauty to perhaps compensate for the suffering. However, after the speaker quits his travels and stays “at home”, an absolute reversal occurs. He describes “a brilliant stream of light … passing through [him]”, that leads him to fill “page after page” with “groaning seas of pack ice, giant glaciers, and the windswept white icebergs.” These three quoted lines are all vivid, alive and almost hyperbolical in the way they describe the sensations of the speaker and simultaneously contrast the bland description of before. This is the first transition that occurs in the character, that which shifts between the past and the present, and here it seems to be the effect of memory, which reconstructs the former impressions in a somewhat different fashion. By the tenth line, however, another metamorphosis occurs as the speaker finds himself “with nothing more to say” and turns his “sights on what was near.” The explorer appears to have drained his past memories, or perhaps they have lost their importance as he starts to perceive the present that is around him. The remainder of the poem is an illustration of the gradual disappearance of the past that occurs in the mind of the speaker. He recounts that “Almost at once, / a man wearing a dark coat … / appeared under the trees in front of my [his] house,” but when he then gestures to greet him, the man “turned away and started to fade / as longing fades until nothing is left of it.” Thus, as the explorer stops writing of his previous adventures, a sense of longing appears but then quickly fades until it has entirely vanished. The transition portrayed in these last lines, along with the one at the beginning of the poem, serves as the primary focal point of the piece, as it divulges the changes that the speaker undergoes. Once again, Strand does nothing more than reveal these transformations, using but a very subtle simile to impart the evanescence of longing.

“Moon” is perhaps the poem that exhibits the most transitional character in that it alternates between various senses to eventually combine them into one ephemeral perception. The piece starts by already merging two contrasting elements: “the book”(30) and “evening”. Both are objects that are looked at but the words of the first and the sight of the second are inherently different. Strand combines them, however, in the gaze towards the appearing moon. Thus, already in the first stanza, the two lines provide an alternation: the first concerns itself with the book, the second, with the moon. This same pattern is present in the next stanza, but in an inversed form with the “two clouds” first and the “next page” second. In the mind of the reader, this creates a constant oscillation between the feeling of reading and the sight of the moon, almost creating a new composite sensation from the intermingling of the two. The third stanza then once again presents the moon in its first line, but in its second, it now presents something different. The moon “lowers a path / to lead you away” in a double sense; it leads the reader into his own reflections that evolve from the vision of the moon, and it also simultaneously leads the reader away from the alternation between the senses of reading and sight, and carries him into the new state of thought. The moon leads the reader “into those places where what you had wished for happens” and at that point everything else has been left behind for the sake of reflection, for the moon and the book were nothing more than an avenue to bring the reader into this next state which is autonomous of any external elements. Then, with the second line of the fourth stanza, the reader is brought back from his universe of thought into the two senses of reading and gazing which are here merged into one as the lone syllable is “like a sentence poised / at the edge of sense”, for this is indeed the edge of sense where it borders with sentiment. The line continues and now the reader is separating himself from the page as he himself says the name of the moon, closes the book and dwells “in that light, that sudden paradise of sound.” In this last line, the addressed person has finally detached himself from the material element that is the book and the synthesis of “light” and “sound” is what remains as a feeling. Simultaneously, however, these endless transitions from one sense to another create the extraordinarily ephemeral character of these perceptions, and the subtle “what it was like” in the second to last line already hints at the disappearance of this “paradise.”

The other poems in Man and Camel share the characteristics of the pieces considered above; they all have that same quality of portraying some subject and then showing its ephemeral quality, which is primarily uncloaked by the metamorphoses that the subject undergoes as the poem develops, and as the light under which it is examined gradually changes. The title poem, “Man and Camel” presents a supposedly absurd scenario that Strand portrays with perfect normality, and then gradually changes into something absolutely real yet unexplained, leaving interpretation to the reader. The poem “The Webern Variations” also surprisingly fits into the collection despite the fact that it is a commissioned poem. Its semi-autonomous quatrains that initially seem unrelated are in fact all variations on the same theme of “even the language of vanishing” leaving “itself behind”(35). The stanzas are essentially transformations of vanishment, portrayed from the perspectives of all of the senses, and the poem is thus perhaps the thesis of the collection. The poem, and thereby Man and Camel, portrays the temporary character of all things while not seeking to explain anything, and when it arrives to death, it says no more than it “is not for us to say.”

Works Cited

Strand, Mark. Man and Camel. New York: Knopf, 2008. Print.

Strand, Mark. New Selected Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. Print.

All parenthetical citations that do not specifically cite New Selected Poems are from Man and Camel.

Poetry Daily Blog Posting

"Memorising 'The Sun Rising' by John Donne" by Billy Collins

http://poems.com/poem.php?date=14954

After a good bit of reading, I chose Billy Collins’ “Memorizing ‘The Sun Rising’ by John Donne”. At first the title attracted me; I was interested in the idea of writing a poem about memorizing another. After having read it, the poem became even more appealing because of the way that Collins interlocks the speaker’s process of memorization with Donne’s original poem. Finally, the figurative language that is used throughout the poem to describe the process of memorization completes the beauty of the picture and unites the process of memorization with the original poem itself.

The intertwining of the speaker’s memorization of John Donne’s poem and of the contents of the poem itself give that sense remembrance that one has when the lines of a poem are twirling in one’s mind, thus in fact simulating memorization or active reading of poetry. Collins starts with the general statement that “every reader loves the way he tells off / the sun”. This first line has a double function: it firstly introduces Donne’s poem and it secondly introduces the speaker’s reaction to that same poem which will continue throughout the next eight stanzas. This interaction that the speaker has with “The Sun Rising” is best captured in the last line of the first stanza where he surmises that perhaps that day was “likely cloudy on that seventeenth-century morning”. This response is exactly what usually happens (to me at least) when one reads a poem; one starts thinking of the circumstances in which it was written, of what could possibly be added and so on and so forth. Thus, by capturing this response, Collins gives a sense of realism to the action of memorization that he is attempting to portray. The poem then transitions to the actual action of committing a poem to memory with “pacing the carpet and repeating the words” and then returns to Donne’s work in the second line of the third stanza. This continuing alternation once again recreates the sensation of memorization where one is constantly both in the poem and in the process of learning it.

Collins uses a great deal of metaphors to lend further detail to that action of memorization that the poem centers around. In the second stanza, the “syllables lock into rows” very much like soldiers in a line. This parallel clearly conveys the feeling of the rhyme that one gains as one memorizes more and more verses of a poem. In the third stanza, the first stanza is compared to “sky written letters on a windy day” to emphasize its fleeting quality when it is not yet entirely captured by memory. Collins continues this usage of metaphor throughout the poem until the very last stanza and in every case it serves to emphasize the qualities that he ascribes to the memorized poem.

In addition to the techniques that Billy Collins utilizes throughout the poem, I simply like the accuracy with which he describes the way he “works” with the poem. He attempts to memorize it stanza by stanza but with every new one an old one disappears, and so he takes it outside and then after “hours stepping up and down the poem” he is truly able to commit it to memory. Together with the process of memorization, there is also the constant remembrance of parts of the poem. It is as if the speaker remembers the meaning and perhaps some lines or words but cannot pull them all together until he truly immerses himself within the lines.