The Sublime Mundane in Conrad Aiken’s “Morning Song of Senlin”

Where the repetitions of ordinary life threaten to overwhelm any sense of the sublime, the poet Conrad Aiken seems to suggest that they can be transformed into a way of being connected to it. The mundane order is, after all, just a part of the cosmic. When we get ready to go to work, it is on a “swiftly tilting planet” that “bathes in a flame of space.” The sun is “far off in a shell of silence,” but its light decorates the walls of our homes. We might wonder, in light of modernity’s crisis of faith, if the sublime is meant to replace the divine, and if so whether what Aiken calls “humble offerings” to a “cloud of silence” are enough. Wes & Erin discuss Aiken’s “Morning Song of Senlin,” and whether humanity’s religious impulses can be fully compensated with an aesthetic or ironic relation to nature and cosmic scale. Thanks to our sponsor GiveWell, an organization that would provide rigorous, transparent research about the best opportunities for charitable giving. 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Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. 0:32 Wes: Where the repetitions of ordinary life threaten to overwhelm any sense of the sublime, the poet Conrad Aiken seems to suggest that they can be transformed into a way of being connected to it. The mundane order is, after all, just a part of the cosmic order. When we get ready to go to work, it is on a swiftly tilting planet that bathes in a flame of space. The sun is far off in a shell of silence, but its light decorates the walls of our homes. But we might wonder, in light of modernity's crisis of faith, if the sublime is meant to replace the divine. And if so, whether what Aiken calls humble offerings to a cloud of silence are enough. Today we're discussing Aiken's morning song of Senlin and whether humanity's religious impulses can be fully compensated with an aesthetic or ironic relation to nature and cosmic scale. This is Wes Alwan. 1:31 Erin: And this is Erin O'Luanaigh. 1:33 Wes: And you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, I didn't ask you before suggesting this episode. So I don't really know what you think of Conrad Aiken, how much you've looked at Conrad Aiken, what your experience is with Conrad Aiken. So I thought I'd just start out by asking that. 1:53 Erin: I'd never read anything by him until I read this poem, though I'd heard of him. And I also, I believe I took a picture of his bench in the Savannah cemetery for you. 2:03 Wes: Bonaventure. 2:04 Erin: Yeah, Bonaventure. Okay. Yeah. So I knew enough to know that he was from Savannah for some reason, maybe because of you. And I knew his bench when I saw it. And. Yeah, so this is my first encounter with his work. 2:18 Wes: Yeah, Conrad Aiken was a. Is from Savannah, my hometown, and he is a friend of a guy named Joe Killorin. Joe Killorin had gone to St. John's College and then Columbia University, where he's friends with Charles Van Doren, the guy who got into the quiz show scandal. They were both professors at Columbia at the time as well. And then when Van Doren was exiled, essentially because of that scandal, Killorin went back down south to Savannah to teach at a small community college. Is that what you call them? 2:51 Erin: It Depends. 2:53 Wes: Armstrong State College was the college he taught a sort of St. John style class. Great books, style, engaging for the students. And my mother and father met in one of those classrooms and both maintained friendship with Killorin throughout the years and kind of idolized Killorin. I think my older brother had a lot of respect for Killorin and was one of his students at one point. And this is the thing. This is really the reason I ended up going to St. John's and I kind of was imbued with the kind of educational, I guess, ethos that came from that. You know, it was reinforced at St. John's but it was there before I ever went to St. John's I was kind of raised to be a Johnny. And I think it's my bro. My older brother, really, I think, is the person I would hear from most about Conrad Aiken when I was younger. Which is not to say that I really read any of him when I was younger. And it was only later in life when I saw the poem we're reading for today in a Norton anthology, that I really read anything by him. And I liked it a lot. And you can see the influence of T.S. eliot. And those two were good friends as well. But, yeah, so I have a kind of a personal connection to him, which I probably colors my reading of his work. But, you know, what I've read I really like. I think if you look at some of the secondary literature, you know, if you look at criticism and commentary, you'll see that he's often accused of being a bit derivative, especially of, you know, people like T.S. eliot. And this poem in particular has echoes of the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock. But, yeah, I feel like he's a kindred spirit in a way. Just one other thing about his biography. He had this horrible thing happened to him when he was a child where. I don't know if you read about 4:36 Erin: this, but yeah, yeah, I did. 4:38 Wes: His father killed his mother and then committed suicide. And that was when he is 11 years old and he heard the gunshots and discovered the bodies. It was something that he generally did not talk about. And he briefly discusses it in an autobiographical. I think he originally called an essay, but something called Ushant. I don't know if that's how you pronounce it, but it led to, I think, quite a bit of soul searching. And so he was. He became interested in Freud and psychoanalysis, and I assume he had an analyst. Freud knew of him in turn and read some of his work and even offered to Analyze him, which Conrad Aiken turned down. But nevertheless, those type of psychological themes appear, are kind of a staple of his work. And we get maybe a bit of that in this poem. Anyway, what'd you think? 5:27 Erin: I really enjoyed the poem. I'm surprised that he's accused of being derivative. I mean, I don't, you know, I don't have much to go off of my understanding is that he has a huge body of work and of course this is just a tiny sliver of it. You know, there's another word for being derivative in poetry and that's just being allusive. And I would say that this poem is just highly allusive. And if he's also interested in psychoanalysis and various other things, then he's eating out of the same, you know, sources that everybody else in modernism is. So, you know, it would make sense that he would have these connections to Prufrock. I mean, of course the Prufrock is the first thing I thought of when I read this. There are plenty of other, I think, little Easter egg allusions as well within it and they're really cleverly done. And I also see this as being, you know, doing something, I think quite different from what Prufrock is doing. The way that it recycles certain images over and over again. And you know, the song quality to it, I mean, I think it's called. It was published separately as Morning Song. Morning Song of Senlin, is that right? 6:27 Wes: Yeah. So this is part of a. He published a book called the Charnel Rose and one of the poems is a 50 something page poem called A Biography. And this particular part of that longer poem is often. Yeah, I just, I think it's. It's taken out as an excerpt and called the Morning Song of Senlin. 6:47 Erin: I think, you know, it's. It's just more densely lyrical, I think, than Prufrock. I don't know if I could defend that, but yeah, the song qualities of it and the repeated lines and things that read as refrains. I think it just has a very different feel to Prufrock in certain ways. Even if thematically it might be exploring some of the same themes. 7:06 Wes: Yeah, I think comparison has been drawn between this character of Senlin and the character of Prufrock and maybe certain characters and other modernist poetry. You know, I suppose it's a very prototypically modernist character. It's Hamlet esque, maybe, or it's people who are indecisive, soul searching in some way, or maybe lost. So I suppose that sense comes across in this poem as well. Beyond the formal Similarities. Yeah. What do we make of the name Senlin? 7:39 Erin: Well, luckily, I have a note in my Norton anthology that tells me what to make of the name. The little old man that each of us must become. 7:48 Wes: Ah, yes. Okay. 7:50 Erin: Luckily, some of us are born little old men, but no. Yeah. So, like senile, right? Yeah. 7:59 Wes: Right. So it sounds like a. Yeah. Inversion of senile in a way. You know, it's funny, I didn't look at that note. We're looking at the same anthology. 8:07 Erin: Oh, yeah. And there's the note about morning song right there. I didn't think to look at that. Yeah, yeah. 8:12 Wes: I didn't look at any of these notes. You know, I think that. Yeah. So the name Senlin seems to take senile and jumble up the words at the end a little bit. You could think of it as getting old in the pejorative sense of the word or being old in the pejorative sense of the word. On the other hand, if it just connotes age, perhaps there's wisdom in that or perhaps one might just think of it in terms of senescence. Right. The process of dying and mortality in general. I think earlier on in the. You know, in Senlin a biography, he starts out younger. And so whatever. Whatever we want to say about age, it's more of a principle. Yeah. Maybe that's the way this note is put, this way in the anthology. The old man that each of us must become, or maybe one might say is inside of us or is the sort of telos or the end point to which our life is directed. The old human being. Shall we read it first and then. Yeah. It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning when the light drips through the shutters like the dew, I arise. I face the sunrise and do the things my fathers learned to do. Stars in the purple dusk above the rooftops pale in a saffron mist and seem to die. And I myself on a swiftly tilting planet stand before a glass and tie my tie. Fine leaves tap my window. Dewdrops sing to the garden stones. The robin chirps in the chinaberry tree, repeating three clear tones. It is morning. I stand by the mirror and tie my tie once more While waves far off in a pale rose twilight crash on a coral shore. I stand by a mirror and comb my hair. How small and white my face. The green earth tilts through a sphere of air and bathes in a flame of space. There are houses hanging above the stars and stars hung under a sea and a sun far off in a shell of silence Dapples my walls for me. It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning should I not pause in the light to remember God? Upright and firm, I stand on a star unstable. He is immense and lonely as a cloud. I will dedicate this moment before my mirror to him alone. For him I will comb my hair, accept these humble offerings. Cloud of silence, I will think of you as I descend the stair. Vine leaves tap my window. The snail track shines on the stones. Dewdrops flash from the chinaberry tree, repeating two clear tones. It is morning. I awake from a bed of silence shining. I rise from the starless waters of sleep. The walls are about me still as in the evening. I am the same and the same name still I keep. The earth revolves with me, yet makes no motion. The stars pale silently in a coral sky In a whistling void I stand before my mirror, unconcerned I tie my tie, There are horses neighing on far off hills, tossing their long white manes. And mountains flash in the rose white dusk, Their shoulders black with rains. It is morning. I stand by the mirror and surprise my soul once more the blue air rushes above my ceiling. There are suns beneath my floor. It is morning, Senlin says, I ascend from darkness and depart on the winds of space. For I know not where my watch is wound. A key is in my pocket, I and the sky is darkened as I descend the stair. There are shadows across the windows, clouds in heaven and a God among the stars. And I will go thinking of him as I might think of daybreak and humming a tune I know. Vine leaves tap at the window, Dew drops sing to the garden stones. The robin chirps in the chinaberry tree, repeating three clear tones. 12:18 Erin: It's very hypnotic. 12:19 Wes: Yeah, it really is. 12:21 Erin: So this is from a poem called Senlin, A Biography. And I was just kind of. I was reflecting on how I would categorize this poem. You know, I think you could call it a kind of a dramatic monologue. 12:32 Wes: Right. 12:32 Erin: Like Senlin is sort of speaking to us self consciously and the speaker of the poem is kind of. There's the speaker and then there's Senlin, and the two are kind of collapsed. Right. But it's very theatrical. I think there's a sense in which this is a character not giving a performance, but sort of performatively speaking to us and elucidating certain elements of his day that wouldn't ordinarily be spoken. So there's a theatricality to it. It's heightened, it's dramatic. But this character as a Kind of vehicle for Aiken or for Akin speaker, and the slippage between the two of them. And the use of the word biography is just interesting to me because it's a sort of, like, dramatic monologue which is quite different from a biography, you know, where we get the person actually speaking through the text. And it's also sort of autobiographical because the speaker, who is not Senlin, has, you know, perfect access to Senlin's consciousness. So I think this. How do I want to call it? Just this slippage, I suppose, between the speaker, Slash Aiken, and the Senlin character, I think, represents a kind of boundary slippage or the slippage of borders that seems to me to be such an important theme in the poem. 13:46 Wes: Tell me more about the slippage of. This is something I hadn't thought of, the slippage of borders being a theme. 13:51 Erin: I think I can kind of illustrate this better through examples within the poem. But basically there's a repeated idea of being encased in something. You know, there are a series of kind of sharp contrasts with. Right. Between what I call in my little marginal notes here, sort of like the indoor world, which I'm associating with the world of the domestic and the mundane, with the outer world, the world of the cosmos or even the world of nature. Right. And how those things switch with each other or permeate each other. Like they have a permeable membrane between them that seems to meet, for one, in Senlin's own consciousness. Right. So the very fact that he's in this interior world, tying his tie and yet having these kinds of, you know, grandiose thoughts about, you know, being on a marble that's spinning through a vast universe and is part of a vacuum. You know, like he's the sort of the meeting point between these sets of opposites. And so I see the blending and the ways in which different adjectives or nouns kind of shuffle and cycle through in different combinations as being also like a formal illustration of this kind of porous boundary. Things leaking into each other because you have different. Different ideas that get recycled but bounce off each other in different ways over the course of the poem. I guess the speaker and Senlin kind of being indistinguishable from each other or blending together and then kind of, you know, stretching apart and then coming back together seems to me to be part of that theme as well. 15:26 Wes: Yeah, I have this demarcated in a similar way, I think I was thinking they're kind of three domains. One of them is the cosmic, and one of them I call the mundane, which I think you're thinking of in terms of the interior, I guess, of the home. But, you know, we get these interesting contrasts, for instance, being on a swiftly tilting planet, for instance, while tying his tie. And that sort of contrast between the cosmic and the mundane comes up again and again. And the cosmic in turn, I think, you know, stars and things, sky and things at a large scale is associated with the divine. And then you get the natural world. And we'll have to see if we can figure out Vine leaves tapping on his window as if to remind him that, hey, here's. Here's life, here's living things. It's not just cosmos and tying ties, you know, and seem to be united in some way. And you. It's. There's something else here. I had a sense in several parts of the poem. I'm wondering is, you know, is this a God who doesn't know he's a God? He's narrating. When he says, Senlin says, it's Senlin saying, Senlin says, but he's slipping back and forth from the divine point of view and the human point of view. Maybe that's the slippage, but I don't know. That's pure speculation. I don't know if that works, really. 16:45 Erin: I like that. 16:46 Wes: But that's just the sense I had at several points. And I don't know where that sense or that theme seems to have come up elsewhere in my reading, but I can't give any specific examples. But this idea of the God that doesn't know he's a God, or maybe there's a God, the God who's in doubt, he's a God. And maybe with Christ. And I think there are probably some references to Christianity or at least to the Trinity in here. Maybe one could think of Christ as a figure who doubts his own divinity. He's not ignorant of it. Right. But he can say things like why hast thou forsaken me? Or that's what you say. That's not what I say. Any case, I'm just speculating here. 17:24 Erin: Yeah, I took that Lonely as a cloud section to almost illustrate a kind of theology that's whatever the opposite of Deism is. So rather than a God that's unfeeling and kind of disconnected from us, like we're disconnected from him and we're the ones that are leaving him kind of out in the cold. But I like this idea. I like this. This connection to Christianity and I think too, the ways in which like a cloud is kind of in the medium place between. You know, I like what you're pointing out with the three domains. And I do think that nature, at some points in the poem, it adheres more to the cosmic, and at other points it adheres for me more to the mundane, domestic. And a cloud is a great image of something that is right in the middle space between those two spheres. Right. It's not cosmic, it's not outside the atmosphere and it's not on the ground, and it's not connected to, you know, things like vines and things that grow and things that are more, for lack of a better term, substantial. Right. Like visually, it occludes. And repeatedly in the poem, I think we get these images of light being partially blocked. So a cloud is like a giant diffuser of light. It's above us, but it's not all the way up into the realm of the sun, which there's a lot about the sun S U N in the poem as a kind of. Maybe that's kind of like God the Father. If that's how you were reading a sort of trinitarian symbology into the poem. 18:45 Wes: Well, the three. The repeating three clear tones from the robin's chirp. But I might be reading something into that. 18:51 Erin: Sure. 18:52 Wes: But I find that interesting, this bit about. So at a certain point he'll say, accept these humble offerings. Cloud of silence. 18:59 Erin: I know, Laugh out loud. 19:02 Wes: Which is great. God's silence. Of course, that's an. It's an ancient theme, and one might see it in a way as a central to faith, depending on your school of thought. But also this relationship between the divine and human beings. Right. So even in Medea, for instance, or at least in, you know, Euripides, one of his lines of thought was that, well, if the gods aren't well behaved, then what hope is there? You're supposed to be gods. You can't just have human passions. But the other one was pointing to the paradox in the idea of a God that needed human beings in some way, that needed their worship, or who in a way posits in creating human beings, Posits them or creates them as company for mere company. Right. So God becomes the one who's lonely and needs us. And this sort of paradox, of course, I mean, was a. Comes up in Christian theology as well. God cannot need or lack. God must be perfect. So what was the point of creation? Those sorts of questions. Milton plays around with this idea, I think, quite a bit the idea that the sensuous world, the perceptible tangible world, the spiritual world, was not enough. And that in some sense God needed the carnal or the. At least the sensuous material world. And that one cannot create that right without. Without evil, without fallenness, that creation is not complete without fallenness. But yeah, maybe we should go to the first stanza and go. I love this image of the light dripping through the shutters like dew, because normally we think of light as reflecting off of the dew in the morning, but dew itself is not like light. It's the product of the night. It's a product of condensation. So in a way we get something that is a product of the night off which light may reflect, identified with light. I thought that was very interesting. 21:02 Erin: Yeah, that's great. I just noted the fact that the, you know, the light is dripping and so it seems to become liquid. And this elemental slippage is another thing that I noticed happening where qualities of an element different to the one being discussed are used to describe that element. Right. So here we have, you know, light, which is, I suppose, most closely associated with air being described as water, as liquid. And then we get the shutters, which are as good an image as I could think of of the sequestered, mundane, domestic inside. Right. The thing that's mediating the glare of the natural world, of the sun, which, you know, will come to be associated with, like, grander things that we've already discussed, the cosmos and various other things. And so that's being blocked, not fully, but it's being sort of barred and blocked. So that Senlin, when he wakes up and he rises like the sun or in response to the sun he has, we can imagine he's not getting a full face of sun, as it were, because he's facing actually the shuttered window, Right. So there's actually probably an image of like, bars over his face. So occlusion or something of the inside world that's preventing the full light of the sun from being reflected on or in the room to him. So there's something about, like, custom, as he'll. As he'll say in the. In the next line, something about the domestic that maybe is preventing some sort of full, full harmony with the outside world. Like, understand, like, I'm not sure ultimately what. And I don't want to get ahead of myself. I'm not sure ultimately what the cosmos and what the natural world each are representing or if they're. They're representing sort of overlapping things. But there's something about the interior domestic world that prevents the full force of whether whatever that is from invading or from affecting invading is too negative of a valence, but from from affecting Senlin and his perspective or something. 23:01 Wes: Yeah, let's take a moment to talk about our sponsor for this episode, GiveWell. How deep do you go to seek out an answer to a question? Maybe you've spent hours clicking the source links on an obscure Wikipedia page, or maybe you're even the type of person who checked out the entire shelf on the topic at your library. If you're nodding along, then check out GiveWell, an organization that researches questions about global health and philanthropy. 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Make sure they know that you heard about givewell from Subtext Literature and Film Podcast to get your donation matched. Again, that's givewell.org to donate or find out more. It's almost like, and there's a kind of condescending element to it which I think will come up in several places. Or it's something diminishing about it. It's like, oh, isn't that cute sun, the way you have the light drip through the shutters. I mean, later on he's going to say the sun, far off in a shell of silence, dapples my walls for me. Again, I am associating the sun with the divine here. And again we get the this concept of silence, which is kind of terrifying when you think about it. It's terrifying whether it puts you in awe of the divine or whether you make makes you think that there is no such thing. Whether it, you know, think of Pascal. The silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me. Thinking about the cosmic should produce awe at the sense of scale and power, at the questions of how, where does this come from? And why is it all of those questions? But he turns it in that later stanza, he turns the sun into an interior decorator. Dapples my walls. For me, it's a really interesting way of diminishing the power of any potential awe in the face of the divine or any crisis of faith or something like that. Yeah. 25:54 Erin: I mean, you don't think of that as being ironic, though. Maybe I'm reading him wrongly, but I think he's giving kind of proper. Due to this, not to overuse that word. I think he's giving proper credit to the sun's remoteness. And it's almost like this joke that it's dappling his walls. Right. I'm reading him as being almost like bemused by that. You know, the flame of space around the earth that comes up prior to that. 26:22 Wes: Right. 26:22 Erin: Is part of how I'm reading that, that, like, there are these terrifying. Right. The flame of space I read as a kind of terrifying image. And the mere fact that he would just construe like the, you know, the concentric circles of the earth. And then he's describing what I think is just like the atmosphere around it as being like a flame of space. If we could think of the earth as being surrounded by its blue atmosphere, which does. I suppose it might look like a flame if it were seen onto the right lighting or something like that. So I think he gives proper credence to the terror of that with the flame. You know, there's something funny for sure about dappling the walls, but I think he's being ironic and kind of almost making a joke out of the terror of that kind of accident. 27:08 Wes: Yeah. I think Flame of Space is an interesting image, just in the sense of. One might treat the nothingness of that as something that might burn or destroy, devour. So the earth could be right. It's bathing in that. It's green. But if it's bathing in a flame, is it, you know, why isn't it burning? So I think the. The question is, is there something reverent about this poem? Right. He stands before glass and ties his tie. The idea seems to be that the mundane perhaps could be a source of reverence. It could be a kind of prayer, maybe to do ordinary things, to descend the stairs, to tie your tie, or is it something that is irreverent? You know, I think that for me, is the question whether. Right. Dappling the walls. It's joke, it's ironic. But what is Senlin's attitude towards the divine? Does he want to Make a joke of it? Does he want to have an ironic relationship to it? Does he want to have a reverent relationship to it? Is the argument that all those things could somehow coincide in a weird way? Maybe we'll get more of that as we go through the poem. Unless you have other thoughts on that. 28:17 Erin: You're bringing to mind Wallace Stevens's 'Sunday Morning', which is something that should have been clued in with morning appearing so many times here, right? But the image in that poem of the sky as being unfriendly. I'm trying to remember exactly what he. But basically, like, if there is a God in the heavens, then the sky is a barrier, right, between us and whatever. You know, it's like a wall between us and the real reality of the Godhead of whatever is up there, so to speak. And so Stevens, of course, in Sunday Morning is advocating that we. We should think of the sky as friendlier than that, I. E. We should give up on an idea of God. And therefore the sky won't appear to us as a kind of a barrier. It'll just be the sky and it'll become more of a friend. I think that Senlin is. He would be what Stevens is trying to argue against, right? There is a kind of barrier here. Like, there is a blending, I think, that is happening here between these realms. But for the most part, there's sometimes a blending, but sometimes a juxtaposition whereby these two realms, like the inside of his room, his walls being dappled and the sun itself, are being put next to each other in this kind of hilarious contrast between something huge and vast and something, you know, mundane and small. And that's not quite a blending in that case, but it's showing, like, the difference and the sort of distance intellectually between these two things or the difference in scale between these two things. And so I think it gets at more of what Stevens is trying to say with how we shouldn't think of the divine. So I think, like, this is a believer who also, at the same time, is trapped in the very trap that Stevens points out, which is not feeling close to nature or God because of the sense of nature as being a kind of veil or concealment behind which God is hiding, if that makes any sense. 30:20 Wes: You know, I was thinking with this line about the stars in the purple dusk above. The rooftops pale in a saffron mist and seem to die. You know, again, with rooftops, we get an image of the mundane and the human and something associated with survival and shelter. And I don't know if the saffron mist has anything to do with chimneys, but it's as if the stars are being dissolved into the mundane or the mundane somehow. There's a risk that the cosmic and perhaps the divine will be dissolved into that, that they will disappear and that all we will have left is rooftops and tying ties and the rest of, you know, everything else that's merely mundane. 31:05 Erin: Yeah, that reminds me of 'Aubade' by Larkin. You know, the. 31:09 Wes: Yeah, I was reminded of that. Yeah, go ahead. 31:12 Erin: Yeah, yeah. And just the. You know, dusk is such a curious word here. I mean, time could be going quite speedily through. You know, we get many cycles, I think, of mornings here, so it could literally be dusk. Or it's. You know, he's describing what I think is the dawn, but he's describing it as a. As a dusk. Right. But it's dusk for the stars and that it's the end of their. You know, the stars are dying because it's the end of their. Their life cycle, as it were, the end of their day. They're being replaced by this light of the sun, which is a competing star. But also. Yeah, the saffron mist, which I love. The. The combination of the sort of synesthetic, like scent and sight combined in that. And I hadn't thought of chimney smoke, but that makes perfect sense. The. The artificial mist that's sort of blotting out the stars as the world is waking up and factories and various things are coming to life. 32:01 Wes: Yeah. And Prufrock, it's also yellow. Right. It's a yellow fog, something like that. 32:06 Erin: Right. 32:07 Wes: Doing the things my father's learned to do. So he arises and faces the sunrise, which is a. The phrase sun salutation immediately came to mind. 32:18 Erin: Yeah. 32:19 Wes: If you've done yoga, there's something, again, reverent, about that, potentially. And then doing the things his father learned to do will turn out to be tying a tie, I think, will be the example that we get. But of course, that's all of culture. Right. That's all of human intelligence as it's passed down from generation to generation. And at some point, those customs and morals and technology and all of that stuff reflects some sort of freedom of the human spirit to make an advance, to move beyond what it was at a previous developmental stage. So a tie, even though, you know, it's not like the most advanced sort of technology. And a lot of it is. A lot of it is. It's merely symbolic, but once it's been created, once it's been invented, then it just becomes a kind of Soup that we swim in and take for granted. And we, the ones who act out what we've inherited from the previous generations, aren't doing that intelligently. It's just road. It's just procedural knowledge. Habit. Right. So his father's learned to do certain things, but now he just does them. And that, you know, that goes for something like language, of course. Right. It's, you know, as an evolutionary product, it's a manifestation of an incredible leap forward and intelligence. But it also traps us in a way. We live within that structure and are heavily influenced by it, for better or for worse, whether it's language or any other cultural inheritance. It's the result of human ingenuity. And yet it can make us kind of. We just habitually follow along with it. 34:04 Erin: Yeah, I like that. That helps me understand that line much better. Because I was thinking about the idea of what my father's learned to do and this idea of convention and custom existing, I think, a bit in contrast to the rising with the sun, which feels much more organic and instinctual. 34:24 Wes: Right. 34:24 Erin: Rather than the learned custom of the tying the tie. And that contrast is kind of interesting. But anyway. Yeah, I really like that. 34:32 Wes: Yeah, I like the irony of. It's a wonderful irony, those last two lines. I find myself on a swiftly tilting planet. And I, myself on a swiftly tilting planet, stand before a glass and tie my tie. So again, cosmic and mundane. And the swiftly tilting planet just by itself is a great. 34:51 Erin: Yeah, I was like, oh, that's where this comes from. 34:54 Wes: Reminds me of Shakespeare's bawdy planet a little bit. And then. Right. But then once you start thinking about swiftly tilting planet, it becomes quite a puzzling image, unless I'm missing something. 35:05 Erin: 23.5 degrees constant. 35:09 Wes: And it wobbles a bit, but it's basically constant. So you could say, well, the Earth is swift around the sun and it tilts. Or I can't help but associate to Don Quixote tilting at windmills. I don't know if he made the same association. But that also contrasts nicely with roteness and mundanity of standing there, tying one's tie. So there's an idea. It's almost as if the locus of vitality and idealism and energy and freedom is there in the planet as a whole, and perhaps it's there in nature as well. We'll have to figure out what nature is doing in the poem, but rather than in him. So you have this wonderfully energized little ball of earth going around a ball of fire, and then you have A human being standing there, tying their tie and presumably, I guess, getting ready to go to work. So it's this weird sense in which something so extraordinary contains something so ordinary and is the vehicle for that. Right. We are, in a way, riders. We ride the Earth maybe around the sun. I think that image will come up later with horses, but we are not the heroic ones. The Earth itself is in the heroic position. 36:31 Erin: Yeah, I really like that. You're making me think of the story that helps kids learn how to tie their shoes. Like, the bunny goes around the tree and whatever. There's almost something planetary going on with the tie tying here. Right. Because actually, I'm picturing the tie going around, like, rotating around, you know, the whatever. Like one. One part of it. I don't know what the parts of the tie are called, but, you know, like wrapping around and then being pulled through the knot. The knot. Maybe there's some. With the tying of the knot. Maybe there's some. Almost like a little joke there where there's this repetition of the extreme miniature of whatever is happening with the Earth and the sun. Yeah, yeah. Thinking about the sun dappling the walls and his rising up and facing the sunrise and then doing the things his fathers learned to do. You're helping me kind of see that the tying of the tie is intimately connected to. I mean, there's this hilarious, humorous difference in scale, which is almost ridiculous. And yet, at the same time, like, the rhythms of our day are at their foundations due to these planetary bodies that are 93 million miles away from us or whatever. And, you know, and we have a certain schedule. We have a certain, you know, we have a number of daylight hours that determines, you know, what we can get up to in the course of one of these cycles. You're kind of just helping me connect up this idea that, like, this is at once a kind of a joke. And at the same time, it's sort of very logical and serious that tying one's tie actually is deeply connected with the sun that is in a shell of silence millions of miles away from us. I mean, that's part of the cosmic terror and the cosmic hilarity of our situation is that, like, we do get up and tie our tie at a certain hour because of something millions of miles away from us, determining whether or not we get our coffee ready and get into our cars on time to go to work. Not a profound realization, but a realization for me, nevertheless. 38:34 Wes: No, no. So vine leaves tap my window. It's like in getting tapped on the shoulder almost. We get dew drops again. Dew drops have a few appearances. They sing to the garden stones here. Later on they'll flash from the chinaberry tree and play the role of the robin. Except instead of chirping, repeating three clear tones, they'll repeat two clear tones later on. And then the last stanza of the poem repeats this one verbatim, I guess nearly verbatim. 39:03 Erin: Tap at the window versus tap my window. So there's a little bit more of a rat, a tat. 39:09 Wes: Yeah. What is the stanza about? I kind of have it as nature reasserts itself. I don't know why I put in reasserts, but maybe that's because the natural world, I think, kind of gets lost in between. It's kind of an in between world, even though where the earth itself, as a green natural ball stands. It's. It's unclear. Right. Does it belong to the cosmic. Exactly. Or to the natural? But I think between the cosmic and the mundane, we get this natural mediator. Right. And. And if that's the case. Right. Then that stands in the same position as Christ does in Christianity, as mediator between the human and the human and the divine. But whereas there's the flame of space and silence and loneliness in the cosmic scale and at the mundane, you know, the mundane scale I see as kind of lifeless as. Well, here we get life and vitality inserting itself. 40:06 Erin: That's great. I. I had a similar reaction. The vine especially, you know, I think of Stevens's poem. I think it's Nomad Exquisite or exquisite or whatever, however he pronounces it. But the, the green vine angering for life. 40:20 Wes: Right. 40:21 Erin: Like there's something of that, I think, energy going on here. I think of this, you know, this one. And of course, when it's repeated in the last. This is the sort of like the sonic refrain. The emphasis on this is on sound verbs. Tap, sing, chirps. That doesn't always happen, right, because we get. We get flash later. So we get things that are more visual in the variation of this refrain. Thinking, though, about how the do first appears in the second line of the poem. And then we get these unevenly spaced stanzas of 8 and 4. 8 and 4, 8 and 4. It's almost like, with one exception, the dew. You can almost read this as a concrete poem actually, in which these. Maybe that's taking things a step too far, but in which the stanzas are like the shutters themselves and the dew is kind of like dripping through, you know, performing the action of that second line and dripping through the poem as it recurs, but the vine is tapping on the window, so it's also kind of overgrowing the window, like the shutter. But it's something that probably is letting more. I'm just picturing this one little strand of it. Right. So it's letting more light in. So there's still something. Yeah. Some mediating force between the natural and the. Or sorry, the cosmic and the human cultural. Right. And it's not as forbidding and closed as the shutters. You know, shutters being really a product of custom and convention and involving things like privacy. You know, things that only very advanced cultures tend to be concerned with. Right. In terms of, you know, like cavemen don't care about privacy. I don't think maybe they do, but the. The vine is like. It's cutting into some of the sunlight, but. But barely. And it's also reacting to the sunlight and growing with the sunlight and. And representative of. Of. As I think you said, of. Of a vitality that's kind of like, at cross purposes with human custom, which is more about, like, tamping down that vitality, like a shutter would, you know. So, yeah. 42:20 Wes: When you mentioned the sort of alternating between the longer and shorter stanzas, I'm actually reminded of Prufrock again, which does the same thing, although. Right. You get the longer stanza, and then you get, oh, do not ask, what is it? Let us go and make our visit. And then another stanza, in the room. The women come and go talking of Michelangelo. So a little bit more sing songy. And the four lines are kind of divided up, but quite similar in effect, I think. 42:43 Erin: You know, we just get other kind of synesthetic or personified effects here of. Of, you know, dewdrop singing. So there's a kind of transmutation and then the. I'm embarrassed to say I didn't realize it was chinaberry tree. I thought it was chinaberry tree. I'd never heard this said aloud, so. 43:00 Wes: Well, you might be right. Don't go by me. 43:04 Erin: Well, chinaberry. That seems like the way people in the south would pronounce it. 43:08 Wes: Right. 43:08 Erin: And it's an. It's an. Or it's in the South. 43:10 Wes: Yeah. Never. Never correct yourself based on something. Especially like. Especially. 43:19 Erin: Regardless. First of all, I like it because it's a compound word, and there are lots of compound words in the poem. 43:24 Wes: Yeah, you're right. It's chinaberry. 43:25 Erin: It's chinaberry. Okay. Oh, I like chinaberry. That's nice. 43:28 Wes: Yeah. Just. Just assume I'm wrong and correct. 43:30 Erin: Okay. Sorry. 43:31 Wes: On the Spot. 43:33 Erin: Well, I looked up this tree because I was trying to think, you know, what is the significance of this tree? And it's a kind of a. An interesting kind of oxymoronical kind of symbol, you know. So this is where I started really putting together this idea of, like, contrasts coming together, not just in the. His sort of interesting use of, like, clashing elements or verbs that don't quite belong with the proper sense of the noun. But its genus name is related to a tree that's called the flowering ash, which I really like, because when you think about it, that's kind of. Flowering ash is kind of. I mean, I know an ash is a type of tree, but if taken literally, that's almost a kind of an oxymoron. And then it's also linked to the name for free or noble tree. And it's looking this up. It's a tree that's considered both ornamental and an invasive species. And it's used for timber primarily, but its berries are toxic to humans, you know, so it has use in terms of timber, you know, but not the use that is right there hanging on the tree apparent to us. So it's a sort of a puzzle box of a little symbol. 44:37 Wes: Well, I think, yeah, the. The fact that the berries are poisonous must be significant here, maybe. That's really interesting. 44:44 Erin: Yeah. 44:45 Wes: Well, if the robin is chirping three clear tones, the robin sounds an awful lot like a prophet. But they're sitting on a tree with poisoned berries, which perhaps is evocative of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I don't know. Or it says something a bit sinister about what the prophecy foretells. Should we trust the robin? Or maybe we should go with the dew drops. The dewdrops are just minding their own business, singing to the garden instead of trying to be entertainers. The robin is being a busybody. It's my interpretation. 45:20 Erin: Well, this is what's interesting about repeating. Right. Because is the robin repeating? I mean, this could be read two ways. The robin is repeating itself over and over again. Or is it repeating? How I'm reading it is. It's repeating the dew drops, the plink, plink, plink. 45:34 Wes: Right. 45:34 Erin: That's how I would. onomatopoetize this. But, you know, the dew drops falls on the garden stones, making a plink, plink noise. I thought maybe the robin is repeating the dew drops. 45:47 Wes: Interesting. 45:47 Erin: I don't know. Yeah, so it's mimicking or something. 45:52 Wes: Right, Good point. So, yeah, we could make something of that transmutation Into. 45:57 Erin: Yeah, yeah. Like nature sort of riffing off of itself or learning from itself. In another 10,000, 100,000 years, Robin's going to write a remix of this. Learning the things its grandfather. 46:12 Wes: I mean, perhaps it says something about the origin, you know, life coming, the organic emerging from the inorganic. 46:19 Erin: Nice. 46:22 Wes: All right, on that note, on that. 46:23 Erin: On that tone. 46:24 Wes: Yeah, clear tone. Yeah. We are going to end part one right here. It only took us an hour to get through two stanzas. That's what we here on subtext. That's what we guarantee. We guarantee at least two stanzas per hour. 46:37 Erin: We'll be faster next time. 46:38 Wes: Don't go to one of those 1 stanza per hour podcast. That's usually what we do. 46:43 Erin: We've achieved some critical mass here. So now it'll be. 46:45 Wes: We have, and there is quite a bit of repetition and we've actually talked about other parts of the poem already. Otherwise, you can wait a week. Thank you, thank you, thank you. 47:08 Erin: And thanks to everyone who listened. 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