The Binding

[Lykren]

I’ll look up to the utterly empty sky
I’ll see the good glow gleaned
‘til we are not lit by this
anymore.

Imprecise, wandering lives
will pray against the wall
in rhythm with their love
hand in hand and blind.

I’m free to sleep and walk away
blessed by the charitable remains,
but kept in part by forms of gratitude
loose within the endless earth.



Thanks for reading!

[blank|verse]

Hi Lykren.

As the title suggests, ‘The Binding’ is about being bound to different things, something that usually has negative connotations – being restricted, indebted, or even imprisoned. But arguably, the poem suggests that such bondage could be beneficial.

In the first stanza, the narrator and other/s (‘we are not lit’) are bound to the sunset, watching the fading light. Despite the sky being ‘utterly empty’, it still contains a ‘good glow’ (the sun), which not only appears attractive to the viewer/s, but is also fruitful and life-giving (something – a personified Night? – is ‘gleaning’ the glow, a rather archaic word that puts me in mind of Keats’s ‘To Autumn’; a gleaner would collect remaining crops after a harvest).

It also inspires art, in the form of this poem, the ‘artfulness’ of which the reader can’t ignore when reading the second line, with its jumpy alliteration. To me, this seems slightly out of keeping with the tone set in the first line; as well as being a bit of a mouthful, it’s also a bit too jolly.

I enjoyed the mirroring of ‘’til – lit’, although again, such joy in language seems against the tone of the poem, which wants to be more sombre. And to end the stanza, I think ‘anymore’ as a single line is quite weak. Perhaps it’s there to imitate the fading light, but the adverb is just not sufficiently strong to hold its own line (arguably you could cut ‘by this | anymore’ and lose no sense). If I’m honest, it’s here I start to get distracted with inconsistencies and contradictions, which I don’t think strengthen the poem, but the opposite.

Religion seems to be the binding force of the second stanza (the mention of praying against a wall brings the Wailing Wall to mind, of course). And again, appears to be a force for good, in that those with ‘Imprecise, wandering lives’ find meaning and solidarity with others (‘hand in hand’). However, they’re also ‘blind’, which could just suggest they have their eyes closed in prayer, but also has connotations of not seeing or understanding things fully, which prompts the question of whether or not their praying is a good thing. Maybe it’s both.

At the start of the third stanza, we have a clean line of iambic tetrameter (‘I’m free to sleep and walk away’), the metre we expect to find used in ballad quatrains. Interestingly, this made me think of how the theme of bonding relates to poetry – of course, poetry is another means in which boundaries can be beneficial – great art has been produced through adhering to restrictions. To this end, and even though the form is relatively controlled into three quatrains, it might have been even better to write the poem in a set form, like a ballad, thereby utilising form to reflect the content to a greater extent. It would be more difficult to write, but that’s one of the challenges of poetry.

The stanza itself suggests the narrator is bound morally to other humans, in a quatrain that contains several references to religion and morality – ‘blessed’, ‘charitable’, ‘gratitude’. (‘Alas! the gratitude of men | Has oftner left me mourning’ wrote William Wordsworth in ‘Simon Lee, The Old Huntsman’.) Again, though, this is ‘imprecise’, to use a word from the poem. The narrator is only held ‘in part’, and by ‘forms’ of gratitude – an abstraction of an abstraction – that are ‘loose’ on the ‘endless’ earth, which raises more contradictions, as the earth is finite and controlled by gravity.

So, a thought-provoking poem as always, mainly because there is thought behind the lines. The main issue is one of control, I would say. It feels as if the poem is in a hinterland between either wanting to be more direct and clearly expressed, or to be more evasive but more strongly imaginative, in the vein of Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery, and other contemporary poets. It’s difficult to put a finger on it exactly, but I feel that interpretations I read into the poem are coming more from me than the poem; because of the inconsistencies and little distractions of argument, as well as language and phrase here and there, it’s just not convincing enough in some ineffable way as a complete whole. Still, what we have is well-achieved.

However, as always, even though I’m not able to comment on all your poems, I’ve read enough of them to know they will always be worth reading. Best wishes, b|v.