No.56 - July 2022
Bio Note: Teachers often say that there’s no better way to learn something than to teach it. Since retiring from the classroom in 2016, I suppose that writing these columns about poetry has been my way to keep learning about this art that I haven’t retired from. I’m grateful to everyone who’s followed along as I’ve done so, with particular thanks to the late Firestone Feinberg, and later Jim Lewis, for welcoming me into the Verse-Virtual community.
For this third and final-for-now column on Robert Bly I want to move away from assessing his whole career or wrestling with his influence. Instead, let’s consider a single poem, one that has persistently intrigued me over many years. Which is to say it’s one of my favorites. The main reason I say so is because of the several invitations I see poem offering. The poem is “Snowbanks North of the House,” from his 1981 book The Man in the Black Coat Turns.
I borrow the term “invitation” from Padraig O’Tuama, host of the splendid podcast Poetry Unbound, who often speaks about poems offering invitations as opposed to fixed meanings. I find that a very appealing approach. To take a poem on its own terms, as you would accept an invitation into someone’s home, where you will no doubt do your best to learn and adapt to the host’s ways, slipping off your shoes, perhaps, or refraining from smoking. The host, meanwhile, tries to make you comfortable, inquiring about your dietary and other preferences. In the process of such an evening, very likely you both learn some things.
For me, the term “invitations” appreciates the way a poem’s meanings, plural, are made, as well as how they may adapt over time. It also recognizes how a poem’s effects can be formed or reformed in the interplay between author and reader. I think any honorable poem will invite a reader in. Billy Collins’s lovely word for this quality in a poem is “hospitable,” meaning that a good poem is not forbidding on its surface. Such hospitable poems are not necessarily simple or easy to understand; they may be challenging and elusive. But they do provide some orientation at the start, at least, some points of entrance.
What the reader makes of any invitation is another matter. Richard Eberhart, my college professor, once remarked that whenever someone inquired of one of his poems, “Did you mean X or Y?” he would invariably just smile and say Yes. He advised us to follow his example, and never argue with anyone’s interpretation of your work. We laughed, but I think he meant the remark seriously enough, and probably also as a point of pride, suggesting that his poems contained enough depth to allow any number of interpretations. I know that many poets, myself included, have discovered things in our poems that we didn’t consciously realize were there while writing them. Readers have on occasion helped me better understand my own themes. So I think of Eberhart’s attitude as coming from honest humility, too. The poem may indeed be smarter than the poet.
I sometimes think that poetry, maybe all art, necessarily involves such paradoxes as I see in Eberhart’s remark. To be successful, a poet typically embodies both Eberhart’s self-confidence as well as his touch of humility. A poet can be absolutely convinced, at the time of writing, that a given poem is worthy, has something important to say; but at the same time retain the modesty to remain open to revision and re-vision. Both in the writing and the reading, then, poet and reader can each allow the poem meanings beyond what was intended, or to veer in unforeseen directions.
High time we looked at Bly’s poem itself, though. By the way, I’m fairly certain Bly concurred with my high regard for it. After all, he placed this poem first in one of his strongest books, took his book title from it, and frequently performed it at readings (here’s a YouTube of him reciting it for Bill Moyers).
Perhaps as we look it over again it may present a fresh invitation to you, as it so often has done for me:
Snowbanks North of the House
Those great sweeps of snow that stop suddenly six feet from the house . . .
Thoughts that go so far.
The boy gets out of high school and reads no more books;
the son stops calling home.
The mother puts down her rolling pin and makes no more bread.
And the wife looks at her husband one night at a party, and loves him no more.
The energy leaves the wine, and the minister falls leaving the church.
It will not come closer—
the one inside moves back, and the hands touch nothing, and are safe.
The father grieves for his son, and will not leave the room where the coffin stands.
He turns away from his wife, and she sleeps alone.
And the sea lifts and falls all night, the moon goes on through the unattached heavens alone.
The toe of the shoe pivots
in the dust . . .
And the man in the black coat turns, and goes back down the hill.
No one knows why he came, or why he turned away, and did not climb the hill.
The Man in the Black Coat Turns. Dial Press, 1981.
I’d say the first, quite obvious invitation here has to do with those snowbanks stopping just short of the house—a sight anyone who’s lived in the snowbelt is familiar with. We are invited to interpret that simple natural fact. You can take this image as guiding metaphor for the first stanza at least, and maybe the whole poem, as it itemizes various instances of stopping short. Take “thoughts that go so far” as your frame for what this poem is “about,” and most of the images can be fit into it. The boy who abandons books after high school, son who won’t call home, mother who stops baking, wife abruptly falling out of love with her spouse, and so on—what might all these things have in common? They involve some sort of refusal, abandonment, or loss; and as the images, events, actions and reactions accumulate they create an overall mood that feels to this reader starkly melancholy.
A poem about missed chances, then, or the inevitability of loss? It seems significant that a thought that only goes so far should come in a variety of forms: the boy abandoning books could symbolize intellectual timidity or laziness; the mother setting down the rolling pin might point to a refusal of conventional gender roles; the minister falling down possibly stands for a loss of religious conviction (while the energy departing from the wine represents loss of faith in the Transubstantiation in the bread and wine of Communion). And the wife falling out of love with her husband is an obvious enough instance of stopping short, in this case involving another of the Sacraments.
And so forth: one can spin out such suggestions quite readily, since Bly is taking William Carlos Williams’s “no ideas but in things” quite seriously here, constructing his whole poem, not just the first stanza, rather like one of Whitman’s many pell-mell catalogs of items of disparate kinds: earthy, spiritual, earthy, cosmic, mundane. Like Whitman and Neruda, Bly is a poet of broad inclusions more than fine distinctions.
There’s a further detail at the end of the first stanza that’s puzzling. In the second of these lines, what does the “it” refer to?—
The energy leaves the wine, and the minister falls leaving the church.
It will not come closer—
the one inside moves back, and the hands touch nothing, and are safe.
What will not come closer? “Church” is the closest potential antecedent, but that doesn’t seem apt. Bly’s poetry may leap around, but churches generally stay put on their foundations. It is we humans who approach churches, or draw back from them. “It” cannot refer to the minister, who would be “he” or “she,” not “it.” That leaves “energy” and “wine” as possible antecedents. In both cases, it’s difficult to parse. How would “energy” move closer, exactly, and closer to what? Ditto for the wine, which doesn’t move of its own accord anyway. It goes where we put it. Furthermore, who is “the one inside”? Someone inside the church, perhaps? Is someone observing the minister’s fall, and refusing to offer help? Possibly refusing even to acknowledge the accident? Whoever is in that church is surely being a bad Samaritan in that case. Frankly, I confess that in forty years of reading this poem, I’ve never been able to satisfy myself on this point, and, for me at least, the “it” remains a floating reference, grammatically unconnected. And while the ambiguity seems intentional, I’ve never found a good way to understand that intent.
In any case, as noted the poem’s predominant tone so far seems to come from various images of emotional, spiritual, or intellectual disconnection or loss, even if they are not all spelled out. Thus it is not surprising, in the following stanza, to come upon that father grieving for his son, nor to understand how that grief might lead to estrangement from his wife.
Then the third stanza swoops through a single, Whitman-length line: “And the sea lifts and falls all night, the moon goes on through the unattached heavens alone.” Again, the image is neither introduced nor explained (not always true with Bly), but it clearly seems meant as a contrast to what’s come before. The contrast is between the human and nonhuman realms. The sea lifts and falls all night entirely apart from and indifferent to any human struggles or achievements, and the moon travels on “through the unattached heavens” whether we notice or not, whether or not we have an opinion about it. The heavens are unattached, I take it, not merely from religious significance, but from all human concerns. They’re like those snowbanks in the first line, in fact, entirely alien to human desires. Any symbolism we see here is of our own invention. I feel the line as sad, myself, and want to connect it to the other images above it, but actually it simply states elemental facts.
Am I backtracking somewhat on all the symbolism I was finding in this poem? Or is Bly? Maybe. Partly. Or at least I’m seeing Bly’s initial invitation, those great sweeps of snow, as a bit deceptive, or perhaps self-deceptive. Ambiguous, at least. Now I’m beginning to wonder, in fact, if the poem as a whole isn’t akin to Frost’s great poem “Directive.” That poem conducts an imaginative journey into a nostalgic past, but undercuts its own vividly evocative power when the speaker casually confesses that he is a “guide” who “only has at heart your getting lost.” Not nostalgia, then. Or not simply so.
Likewise Bly is a little hard to pin down here—which, again, was not always true of his work.
The poem concludes with even more ambiguity, as I see it, an invitation perhaps to re-consider all that’s come before. It’s rather cinematic, the way the man in the black coat appears, unannounced and unexplained. For some reason I’ve always seen this concluding stanza as a scene from some classic Western, with the mysterious silent hero in his long black coat making his dramatic entrance. But then, of course, he just exits. No resolution. He simply turns and goes—another refusal. And a loss, I daresay, this time for the reader, who was probably hoping for or expecting something more in the way of a resolution.
So who was that masked man? What might the man in the black coat represent, given the images leading up to his appearance? Unacted desires? Refused love? Unfinished business? Roads not taken? Or is the man Death, as some have suggested, who may appear unexpectedly at any time, but for unknown reasons not today? Another possibility some have suggested is that he represents masculinity itself, a theme that Bly was to become quite obsessed with in later years. Certainly the rest of The Man in the Black Coat Turns hits the theme of masculinity hard. Some titles later in the book include “Fifty Males Sitting Together” and “The Grief of Men,” for instance. There is a poem about the prodigal son, another elegizing Pablo Neruda, one dedicated to Bly’s son Noah, and numerous references to Bly’s troubled relationship with his own father.
If the book has an overall theme it seems to have something to do with male identity and psychology, especially involving grief. Perhaps this poem opening the book serves to introduce that theme, and suggest that one problem for men that Bly sees is that we too often stop short of full engagement in our emotional and spiritual lives. We only go so far. The never-quite-arriving man in the black coat, then, could be the grief we men are afraid of, and don’t allow ourselves to feel. Perhaps even that wife who falls out of love with her husband connects to the theme; we know that many women complain about the emotional unavailability of men.
All fine and dandy. But not so fast, I want to tell my inner literary critic. Perhaps the man in the black coat cannot be so neatly identified or explained. It’s true he turns away, refusing to engage, and that could remind us of the way too many men avoid opening themselves up emotionally. We’ve all known such men. But let us remember that “no one knows why he came, or why he turned away.” Thus, if I want to pin down his purpose in coming and his reason for turning back, I am not merely interpreting a passage but contradicting what the author—who is our only source of information—explicitly states. After inviting us in and offering many disparate images, the poem quite starkly and deliberately ends on a mystery.
In fact, the more I sit with this poem the more it reads like a dream or fairy tale: evocative, strange, tantalizing, and finally resistant to tidy interpretation. It certainly isn’t making a rational argument or promoting any clear message. This is hardly surprising, given Bly’s promotion of surrealistic “leaping poetry,” and his intense and prolonged focus on myths, fairy tales and dreams, especially in the latter part of his career. Like a dream, this poem may seem to invite analysis, but at the same time it resists. Besides, dream analyses tend to differ widely, person to person, and none can ever be called definitive. What seems a little different here, as compared to some of Bly’s earlier work, is that I’m not sure the author wants his mystery interpreted. I am remembering an interview Bly once gave to storyteller Gioia Timpanelli (I can’t pin down a date, but I expect it was recorded well before Bly’s dementia. In any event, it was broadcast on North Country Public Radio on 3 January 2008).
Timpanelli asks him directly, “Who is the man in the black coat?”
Bly replies “I haven’t the vaguest idea.” He continues, offering some speculation:
The soul decides what’s going to come next, without asking you your opinion. So, the father grieves for his son: that’s Lincoln, grieving for his son. . . . And the man in the black coat: I’m not sure who that is. I was wearing a black coat at the time. Maybe it’s me.
Well, I guess it’s interesting to know that the grieving father line was prompted by Lincoln’s loss of his son, but that doesn’t seem too illuminating a window into the poem’s larger meanings. What I find fascinating in this exchange is his confessed uncertainty about what the poem’s enigmatic ending is even about. It’s hard to imagine the Bly of, say, the 1960s and early 1970s, saying such things. Certainly the Bly I met in 1977 was full of forceful opinions on all manner of things, poetic and otherwise, and not shy about expressing them.
In a 1993 film (William Stafford and Robert Bly: a Literary Friendship) Bly and his friend and fellow poet discuss Stafford’s notion of the “golden thread,” which comes from his reading of William Blake’s lines from Jerusalem:
I give you the end of a golden string;
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate,
Built in Jerusalem’s wall
In the film Bly talks about Stafford’s well-known way of writing, which involved sitting down every morning and setting down whatever might pop into his mind. Just pick some detail and start. Bly reports asking Stafford, mock-incredulously, “Any detail? Every one of them will lead you into Jerusalem’s wall? You mean certain special ones, right? And he says, ‘No, Robert, every detail.’”
Following this little anecdote by Bly, Stafford smiles, and adds, “My faith is that any old thread will do. Any thread is golden if you don’t pull it too hard. And I don’t pull those threads very hard. I follow them.” He goes on, “Masterful people—watch out, Robert!—break that thread.”
Bly then wants to know what happens if you don’t quite reach Jerusalem on any given morning? Stafford is unruffled: “That’s pretty good. Any suburb will do.”
I mention this encounter because clearly Bly endeavored to follow Stafford’s advice, particularly in his later books, which as I have noted in previous columns strike me as a bit different from his early books: even wilder, with more humor, more surprise, more self-doubts, and often more delight in the tiny details of this world. He’s often less dogmatic. The Man in the Black Coat Turns finds Bly roughly halfway through his career, which began in the late 1950s and came to its Alzheimer-induced end with Talking Into the Ear of a Donkey in 2011. In 1997, several years after this film appeared, Bly published an extended homage to Stafford’s way of writing with his own Morning Poems, one of my favorite collections. In it he mimicked Stafford’s daily routine and let his mind roam very freely, looking to follow various golden threads, with a light touch that is at times almost Stafford-like in its subtlety and ambiguity.
What I am getting at is foreshadowed in Stafford’s canny remark, “Masterful people —watch out, Robert!—break that thread.” Bly was indeed a masterful personality, and I tend to agree with the implied criticism in Stafford’s remark: some of his weakest poems do break that golden thread with the sheer force of his personality and opinions. Yet as I see it, by 1981, Bly was less prone to his earlier hectoring and didactic tones, tempering his powerful mastery with more and more humility, playfulness, ambivalence, and occasional self-criticism.
So maybe the boldest invitation of all that this poem extends is to explore uncertainty and irresolution in our emotional lives. It shows in both the unadorned imagery and in the unstrident tone. He’s inviting a reader’s doubts and hesitations. Nearly every long life, besides its blessings, will contain a good measure of loss, heartbreak, uncertainty, self-doubt, regret. About the most significant events and their meanings, sometimes—perhaps often—“no one knows” what to think, or why something may or may not have happened.
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Note: If you missed Parts 1 and 2 of this series of essays on Robert Bly and would like to see them, here they are:
My Bly, Part 1
My Bly, Part 2
© 2022 David Graham
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