Hi OneArt,
Thanks for picking a Thursday poem for us. Sorry to clutter up Thusday OPP with the Strand poem. when i posted it last night, it was with little thought to weekday-- it's a good poem but it coulda waited till the weekend.
Onto May Swenson's Water Picture:
(Much like how 'a funny thing happened on the way to the Forum...") a funny thing happened to me when I hit line 8: down there in the sky. that line evoked the deity-as-disinterested-Watchmaker philosophy i.e., the deity who occasionally looks our way from a deteched perch in the heavens.
To my amazement, the next lines, drew an image of something very much like an all-seeing eye. The arched stone bridge / is an eye, with underlid / in the water. In its lens / dip crinkled heads with hats / that don’t fall off. Primarilly reflected in the all-seeing eye? People.
So the list of inversions continues, perhaps a little too long. Until the narcisistic swan swims in, whose neck, in reflection, forms the figure three, which seems a Trinitarian reference in keeping with the building theme of being one's own god. The swan demonstrates its egocentricity Fondly/ hissing, she kisses herself. (one of the better phases, here) and all the scene becomes troubled.
The bridge, which forms the eye, folds like a fan. It closes.
And that's it. This abrupt close (of both poem and eye) declares a finality. The god, who once may have been interested, now leaves man to his own favorite hobby-- perceiving himself as god.
My principal annoyance with this piece-- that there are too many examples illustrating the same issue of looking down into world-- bolsters my quirky interp in this: Creator, (disinteresed or not,) looking into the world would notice all the details.
Secondary complaints are these: the alliterations in this piece are too obvious and some even too cute i.e, pond/ park; bent/ bouncing; flag/ fishook; balloon/ bouy. dimpled/ doubled.
If, in order to reiterate the doubling images, Swenson meant for the interior rhymes to be as obvious as they are, that was a mistake: buildings/ wriggle; bouncing/ clouds; bunch/ munching; hissing/ kisses.
This one's unsubtleties make it less than satisfying to me.
monica
