FOCUSED WRITING: THE VALUE OF DESCRIPTION

          Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It

should be precise about the thing and reticent about the

feeling, for as soon as the mind responds and connects with

the thing, the feeling shows in the words; this is how poetry

enters deeply into us.

                                                          --Wei T’ai (11^th century)

Good description is basic to poetry. Of course poets don’t merely describe, but description is an important element in all poetry. A poem like Matthew Arnold’s famous “Dover Beach,” with its descriptive visual and auditory details about the sea at night, off England’s southern shore, also contains ideas and feelings about love, about what he calls “the turbid ebb and flow of human misery,” about religious faith, and even about war. Those ideas and feelings would not be nearly as meaningful without the memorable description of the sea. Here are some lines from the early part of the poem, in which Arnold is setting the scene:   

          Listen! you hear the grating roar

          Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

          At their return, up the high strand,

          Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

          With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

          The eternal note of sadness in.

In these lines, the reader can almost hear the sea’s waves, with their “tremulous cadence slow” that “brings the eternal note of sadness in.” 

Here’s my point: whatever else you “say” in a poem, make sure that your descriptive details, however few or many, are “in tune” with the ideas and/or feelings you express.  

In this article I’ll discuss description in poetry, with examples from poems, and a couple from prose, since poets can also learn a lot about description from fiction and nonfiction writers.

         1. Philip Larkin—“At Grass”

Here are the opening lines of Larkin’s fine poem, in which the speaker watches retired race horses in a field:

           The eye can hardly pick them out

           From the cold shade they shelter in,

           Till wind distresses tail and mane;

           Then one crops grass, and moves about

           --the other seeming to look on—

           And stands anonymous again.

I like to call any effective description in poetry and prose focused writing. It’s the result of being alert to what is going on around you, moment to moment, and then choosing effective words and phrases to describe what you have seen, heard, felt, and so on. Larkin’s description here depicts something that’s on the one hand, static, and on the other hand, dynamic (“one crops grass, and moves about/--the other seeming to look on--,” an ironic contrast, since these horses, which were bred over generations for speed, will never be racing again.          

2.     Mary Oliver—“The Black Walnut Tree,” “The Hawk”                       

The opening lines:

My mother and I debate:

we could sell

the black walnut tree

to the lumberman,

and pay off the mortgage.

Likely some storm anyway

will churn down its dark boughs,

smashing the house.

In any description, verbs are key. “Churn” in the 7^th line is an excellent choice of a verb—it’s a word with visual, tactile, and even auditory qualities. “Smashing” is also the right word. When you have the right word, especially a verb or noun, you don’t need to load your line with modifiers and other words.  

The ending lines of “The Hawk”:  

                    . . . and that’s when it [the hawk] simply lifted

                              its golden feet and floated

                                 

into the wind, belly-first,

                       and then it cruised along the lake—

                                all the time its eyes fastened

                                    harder than love on some

                   unimportant rustling in the

                       yellow reeds—and then it

                           seemed to crouch high in the air, and then it

                                  turned into a white blade, which fell.    

Oliver couldn’t have written those lines without having seen a hawk “cruising along a lake,” and how it fell out of the sky toward its prey. The very ending phrase, “which fell,” is terse, quick, and final—like the fall of a guillotine blade—signifying the sure and precise action of the hawk.

3.     Cormac McCarthy--The Road (a novel)

There’s a paragraph in McCarthy’s novel that seems to take on a life of its own, as if it were inserted into the book from another context. This is pure speculation on my part, but as writers we all save scenes, images, descriptions, lines, and sentences that don’t seem to quite fit into the work at hand, let’s say, but we sometimes find a place for them in later works. An example of this is a line in Theodore Roethke’s poem, “The Meadow Mouse.” The poet is describing helpless things, like a field mouse trapped by the speaker and kept for a time in a shoe box. Roethke said he inserted the following line, which didn’t fit into any other poem of his:

The paralytic stunned in the tub, the water rising.

Here is McCarthy’s paragraph from The Road:

In that long ago somewhere very near this place he’d watched a falcon fall down the long blue wall of the mountain and break with the keel of its breastbone the midmost from a flight of cranes and take it to the river below all gangly and wrecked and trailing its loose plumage in the still autumn air.

Do you agree that the passage reads like a poem? It’s mostly visual but has tactile qualities as well. It’s a powerfully observed moment, a superb piece of description. You might want to set the passage in free verse lines and see what it looks like on the page.

4.     James Dickey--“For the Last Wolverine”

Here are Dickey’s opening lines:

They will soon be down

To one, but he still will be

For a little while     still will be stopping

The flakes in the air with a look,

Surrounding himself with the silence

Of whitening snarls . . . .

Note, in Dickey’s description of a wolverine in its snowy habitat, the relationship between what free verse poets can convey just through the way they break their lines. Each line has its own meaning and yet it’s connected well to the other lines around it. The speaker is describing the last wolverine on earth. “They will soon be down”—“down” has its meaning of “dead” here, or something finished or done. Note the “They”—Dickey is speaking of a whole species, not just a single animal, though he is focusing on a single wolverine. 

Further:  “ . . . To one, but he still will be” (that is, still will exist) “ . . . “For a little while . . . still will be stopping” (again, “stopping” suggests “stopped,” pausing, inert. “ . . . “The flakes in the air with a look” (pay close attention to ending words and beginning words in lines (and the sentences of prose). Writers take advantage of beginnings and endings of lines and sentences, especially preferring verbs or nouns. “ . . . Surrounding himself with the silence”—again, taken as a single line standing by itself, the line has meaning—and again, it ends with a strong noun:”silence,”  once again suggesting the demise not only of the animal, but of the species.

If you haven’t read “For the Last Wolverine,” I highly recommend it. I think of it as one of the outstanding environmental poems by an American poet.

5.      Annie Dillard—“For the Time Being,”(an essay)

Dillard in the following excerpt is writing about the first time she saw the Terra Cotta warriors in Xian, China, which were discovered in a farmer’s field in the 1970s. Notice that as you read these descriptive sentences, it’s as if the speaker/observer were seeing all this from the point of view of someone who has no idea of what she’s looking at—observing it as a child would, with an astonishing innocence and freshness:

At my feet, and stretching off into the middle distance, I saw . . . what looked like human bodies coming out of the earth. Straight trenches cut the bare soil into deep corridors or long pits. From the trench walls emerged an elbow here, a leg and foot there, a head and neck. Everything was the same color, the terra-cotta earth and the people: the color of plant pots.

. . . A horse’s head and neck broke through sideways, halfway up a wall. Its eyes rolled. Its bent hoof and hind leg broke through, pawing a crooked escape. The soil, the same color as the horse, appeared to have contracted itself to form the horse in a miracle, and was now expelling it.

         

There, down a sunken corridor, I saw a man swimming through the earth. His head and shoulder and one raised arm and hand shot from the dug wall. His mouth was wide open, as if he were swimming the Australian crawl and just catching a breath. His chin blended into the wall.   The rest of him was underground. I saw only the tan pit wall, troweled smooth, from which part of this man's head and shoulder emerged in all strength and detail, and his armored arm and bare hand. He jutted like exposed pipe. His arm and hand cast a shadow down the straight wall and on the trench floor four feet below him. I could see the many clay mustache hairs his open mouth pulled taut, and beside them I could see his lower lip springing from the dirt wall.

         

At the far end of the same gallery lay great heaps of broken bodies and limbs.  A loose arm swung a bronze sword.  A muscular knee and foot pushed off from someone else’s inverted head.  A great enemy, it looked like, had chunked these men’s vigorous motion to bits.  Each tangled heap resembled a mass grave of people who, buried alive, broke themselves into pieces and suffocated in the act of trying to crawl up through one another.

         

. . . Deep in another trench, horses four abreast drew a wheeled chariot.  Tall honor guards accompanied them.  One of the horses tossed its head, and I could see red paint in a raised nostril.

6.     Jane Kenyon—“Dry Winter”

Consider how in the following three-line poem, Kenyon makes a statement about her life, but makes that statement by way of a single descriptive detail:

So little snow that the grass in the field                                                        

like a terrible thought 

has never entirely disappeared . . .

         

The poet could have said: 

          Terrible thoughts

          never entirely disappear . . .

But that’s just a statement, not a poem. What she wrote is a poem. And it’s a good example of what the ancient Chinese poet Wei T’ai said about how poetry works: “Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling.”

7.     Robert Frost—“Dust of Snow”

The way a crow

Shook down on me

The dust of snow

From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart

A change of mood,

And saved some part

Of a day I had rued.

Just as Kenyon does in her poem, Frost presents an image, a “thing,” and then follows the image with an idea and a feeling. But the thing itself—the descriptive detail of a crow shaking down on the speaker some snow from a branch—is working here as something that wakes up the speaker, startles him into realizing that he no longer rues (or regrets) the day, which was evidently not going very well for him before the experience.

Also: this poem is traditional, with rime and meter: iambic di-meter, in fact (two-stress lines with an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable for each poetic foot: “The WAY a CROW . . . etc. But that word “Shook,” beginning the second line, is stressed strongly when you say the poem aloud. This is right, since the speaker is suddenly “shaken” out of his negative feeling by the bird on a branch.

So when you work with meter in a poem, make sure that what you are hearing comes from the way we actually speak, not from an artificially concocted rhythm, such as a metronome used in music.  

And notice too that the observation comes first, and then the response (the idea/feeling). This happens over and over in our lives every day. First, something happens to us, and then we reflect on it.   

8.     Li Bai (8^th century Chinese poet)—“The Birds have Vanished”

The birds have vanished into the sky,

and now the last cloud drains away.

We sit together, the mountain and me,

              until only the mountain remains.

Here is what the well-known poet and editor Czeslaw Milosz says about the poem: “Motionless sitting and meditating on a landscape leads to the disappearance of our separate existence, so we become the mountain we contemplate.” The power of this poem , just as in the Frost poem above. is in the brief, symbolic, descriptive details, followed by the poet/observer’s conclusion.

Seamus Heaney—“Sunlight”

The poem describes a woman working in her kitchen. The last stanza goes like this: 

And here is love

          like a tinsmith’s scoop

          sunk past its gleam

          in the meal bin.

I wonder if you agree with me that when you read these lines you are almost seeing that scoop’s gleam disappearing into the meal-bin.  

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For an interesting assignment for yourself, you might want to try the following:

Think of a particular, memorable experience you had recently or many years ago. Write about the experience in lines of free verse or with rimes and meter. Just put down some words and phrases and see where they take you—you might very well end up with a comment or idea as you write those lines, and maybe even end up with a poem.

Or start the other way: with an idea or feeling. Write it down, break it into lines if it’s long enough, and see if you can somehow come up with an image or an experience that you remember—something that the idea doesn’t necessarily have  anything to do with at first, and yet, as you work on it, maybe something will materialize. Experiment with images, details.  

SUGGESTED READING—Here’s a list of writers as well as anthologies that I hope will be useful to you. The poets and writers mentioned are ones who demonstrate in their work an excellent balance of the objective and the subjective: things and ideas (and/or feelings).

I.                  POETS, ANTHOLOGIES

Jeffrey Harrison, Incomplete Knowledge, other books

Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems

Miller Williams, Half Way to Hoxie

Jane Kenyon, Collected Poems

Ted Kooser, Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems, Delights and Shadows, other books

James Dickey, Poems: 1957-1967

John Stone (cardiologist, poet), Music from Apartment 8: New and Selected Poems

David Bottoms, Armored Hearts: Selected and New Poems, other books

Thomas Lux, New and Selected Poems

Czeslaw Miloz, Collected Poems

John Haines, Winter News

Stanley Kunitz, Collected Poems

Wistawa Symborska, Poems: New and Selected

Allison Hawthorne Deming, Science and other Poems

Elizabeth Bishop, Collected Poems

Linda Gregg, Things and Flesh

The New Book of Canadian Verse in English, ed. by Margaret Atwood

The Forgotten Language: Contemporary Poets and Nature, ed. by Christopher Merrill

We Animals: Poems of Our World, ed. by Nadya Aisenberg

Poetry for the Earth, ed. by Dunn and Scholefield

The Oxford Book of British Poetry, ed. by Philip Larkin

Twentieth Century American Poetry, ed. by Gioia, Mason, and Schoerke

II.               PROSE WRITERS, ANTHOLOGIES

Loren Eiseley (anthropologist, poet, essayist), The Immense Journey, other books

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Henry Beston, The Outermost House

Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces, A Match to the Heart

Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

Ian Mc Ewan, Saturday (novel)

Richard Dawkins (evolutionary biologist), The Ancestor’s Tale

Barbara Kingsolver (biologist, essayist), Small Wonder: Essays      

David Quammen, Wild Thoughts from Wild Places, other books

Edward Hoagland, On Nature, other books

Scott Russell Sanders, Secrets of the Universe

T. C. Boyle, Tooth and Claw (short stories)

Edward Abbey (essayist), Desert Solitaire

Edward O. Wilson (sociobiologist) , Biophilia (see especially his chapter, “The Right Place”), The Future of Life, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, other books

Carl Sagan (biologist, astronomer), Pale Blue Dot       

The Norton Book of Nature Writing, ed. by Finch and Elder  

The Best American Science and Nature Writing (The Best American Series)

On Nature: Nature, Landscape, and Natural History, ed. by Daniel Halpern

10. POETRY AND SCIENCE

“No barrier stands between the material world of science and the sensibilities of the hunter and the poet.”

--E.O. Wilson                                                     

In my basement office I’ve got two large book cases within a few steps of my desk. One contains books on evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology; the other contains books of poetry—individual volumes by poets as well as anthologies of poetry.  Between those two book cases, I sometimes get echoes. For example, I’ll read a poem that reminds me of something I’ve read in a book by, say, an evolutionary biologist; or I’ll read something in a book on evolutionary psychology that reminds me of a poem.

It’s commonly assumed that the realms of understanding represented by science and literature have little or nothing to do with each other. A man who distinguished himself as an immunologist and a poet, Miroslav Holub, said this about his two professions:

I could never quite understand people asking, How can you do both things that are basically so different? They are technically different, technically at opposite poles of the application of language, but emanate from the same deep level of human urge, and the application of all available forces.

“Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science,” wrote Henry Beston in The Outermost House. Consider the following lines and phrases from poems, just on the basis of observation:

• Robert Jeffers describing an eagle, perched on a burnt tree limb after a forest fire: "Cloaked in the folded storms of his shoulders"
• Anne Sexton calling a moose's face "mournful as an ax"
• Richard Eberhart calling cancer cells under a microscope "a virulent, laughing gang"
• Karl Shapiro describing a fly as having "the fine leg of a Duncan Fyfe"
•  Dylan Thomas calling a shoreline in Wales a "heron-priested shore"

Of course poets don’t just observe and describe. They go a lot further. Here, in just two lines from his poem, “The Bloody Sire,” about how violence creates values, Robinson Jeffers captures the essence of an arms race between species over long periods of evolutionary time:

What but the wolf’s tooth whittled so fine

the fleet limbs of the antelope.

What follow are some connections I’ve been aware of by moving freely between scientific and literary sources.         

Several years ago I watched the British naturalist David Attenborough, on his public television show, speak convincingly of a connection between birds’ and other animals’ songs, and human music. Besides footage of birds and whales, there were scenes of Siamong gibbons attracting mates as well as announcing and defending territory; a painted, scary face of a rugby player on the New Zealand National Rugby team, in a game with territorial rituals that have their origins in a war dance; popular male rock stars displaying in front of thousands of young women; people singing national anthems, which also announce, defend, and celebrate boundaries between social groups.   

A few days after the Attenborough documentary, with all that  astonishing music and color still in my head, some lines from a sonnet by Robert Frost (who, incidentally, was quite familiar with Darwin’s writings) came to me—a poem that praises a woman’s voice, which is so beautiful that it leaves the confines of the house where it originated and goes outside, where birds are singing. The poem begins:

He would declare and could himself believe

That the birds there in all the garden round

From having heard the daylong voice of Eve

Had added to their own an oversound,

Her tone of meaning but without the words.

Over time, the woman’s voice merges with that of the birds. The poem ends with this memorable couplet: 

Never again would birds’ song be the same.

And to do that to birds is why she came.

Another passage from a Frost poem occurred to me after I attended a lecture on bonobos by the well-known primatologist, Frans de Waal, who showed pictures of the animals on a wide screen behind him. He spoke of the power that female bonobos exert over males—for example, trading sex for food. What he said reminded me of some lines from Frost’s poem “The Pauper Witch of Grafton,” about a witch who has enjoyed, over her lifetime, great power over a succession of men. But she is old now, and can no longer command as she once did. Near the end of the poem she refers to one of the men she once controlled with her charm and beauty:

Up where the trees grow short, the mosses tall,

I made him gather me wet snowberries

on slippery rocks beside a waterfall.

I made him do it for me in the dark.

And he liked everything I made him do.

A poem I read recently in an anthology called The Poets Guide to the Birds reminded me of a book by the ethologists, Amotz and Avishag Zahavi called The Handicap Principle, in which they discuss signaling among various species. The Zahavis define the handicap principle this way: “if a given signal requires the signaler to invest more in the signal than it would gain by conveying phony information, then faking is unprofitable and the signal is therefore credible.” They go on to say that “the cost—the handicap that the signaler takes on—guarantees that the signal is reliable.”  So a gazelle that is stotting (taking intermittent, high leaps as it runs) is sending a message to a wolf that it (the gazelle) can afford to waste time and energy, and therefore is probably not worth pursuing. The handicap principle is applicable not only to predator-prey encounters but also in mate selection, as when a male peacock’s beautifully extravagant tail is fanned out and shivering before a female. 

The poem, “Songbird,” by the contemporary American poet John Brehm, is in one sense an excellent dramatization of the handicap principle. A skylark fleeing from “a falcon’s quick pursuit” begins to sing, “as if to say, being/eaten by a falcon is the last thing/in the world I’m worried about.” Here are the last two stanzas of the poem:

And the raptor knows

it’s true, knows that anyone

foolish enough to sing in such

a circumstance is quite beyond

ever being caught, and that for all

his hunger he’ll be given just  

a song, tumbling through the air, 

as the body he desires disappears.

While reading the poem I wondered whether the poet was aware of the handicap principle. I have a strong hunch that he was, since his first two lines are: “Even though I have not seen it,/ I know how it could be.” In fact, what the poem dramatizes is true (and the Zahavis confirm it in their book): Falcons are more likely to pursue skylarks that don’t sing while they are fleeing than those that do sing.

I appreciate the fact that Brehm’s fine poem agrees with facts established by scientific study—whether or not he was actually aware of those facts—and I enjoy the strictly poetic detail of the skylark speaking to the falcon, saying that the falcon may “well enjoy” the song, “before I vanish into air.”   

In my early 30s I wrote a poem I called “Football, which was published in a 1972/73 edition of a journal: 

Consider the stoning of beasts:

the peppered mammoth slobbering in the pit,

the stunned boar,

the bear with crushed face advancing, m

the crippled, skirling cat;

Consider the hands

groping along the hacked shores of rivers

how many dawns ago? for this shape of stone.

          In the first part of the poem I pictured the stoning of animals by ancient hunters. I was also suggesting a connection between one kind of violence and a tamer kind that takes place in modern American football, which is sometimes referred to as warfare with terms such as “bullet pass,” “defensive strategy,” “blitz,” “the bomb,” and so on.  I remember that around the time I wrote the poem I had read Konrad Lorenz’ book, On Aggression, and was struck by his idea that sports provide a safety valve for what he called our “collective militant enthusiasm.”        

In the second part of my poem, I pictured hunters gathering stones on the shores of rivers, and here I was interested in the actual stones themselves. My lines imply that the shape of a stone used in hunting was similar to that of a football.

Many years after I published my poem, I read an article in Discover (June, 1986), with the title, “One, Two, Three Strikes You’re Dead in this Old Ball Game.” The article is about a scientific hypothesis regarding the shape of stones used by ancient hunters. It refers to some stones found by paleoanthropologists at early toolmaking sites, such as the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. These stones, the author said, are not the kind used for tools. Instead, they are shaped in such a way that suggests that they were thrown with a spin, like footballs, and that they were perhaps used for throwing at enemies or animals. The writer went on to say that modern sports that involve throwing might be a way of  channeling aggressive behavior—the same point made by Lorenz in his book.

In an interview in SKEPTIC MAGAZINE in 1996, the anthropologist Robin Fox was asked why people have such a “gut level” response to the matter of race, and he spoke of our innate xenophobia: 

. . . we have a similarity detection mechanism built into us—and even if nature doesn’t provide the cues to familiarity, like skin color, for us, we provide it for ourselves with things like costumes, haircuts,tattoos, headdresses, things through the nose, or anything that distinguishes who we are from who they are.

The us-versus-them dichotomy that Fox describes is expressed well in a poem by the contemporary American poet, Thomas Lux. The title, “The People of the Other Village,” is also the first line of the poem; here are the first eight lines:

hate the people of this village and would nail our hats

to our heads for refusing in their presence to remove them

or staple our hands to our foreheads

for refusing to salute them

if we did not hurt them first: mail them packages of rats,

mix their flour at night with broken glass.  

We do this, they do that.(3)

E. O. Wilson believes that human beings have an innate need to affiliate with other life, and calls the need biophilia. To him, “organisms are the natural stuff of metaphor and ritual,” the human brain has “kept its old capacities, its channeled quickness,” and “we stay alert and alive in the vanished forests of the world.” Poets of course have long been aware of our tendency to identify closely with nature.

The British poet John Keats, in a letter to friend in 1817, said: “. . . if a Sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.” And Loren Eiseley, the anthropologist/nature writer/poet, expressed an even stronger kinship with other creatures when he wrote, in the 1960s: “One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.”             

Anyone familiar with fairly recent American poetry about animals will probably have noticed a type of poem that describes and celebrates a particular species’ uniqueness. Ethologists speak of animals as possessing their own, species-specific way of perceiving and adapting , referred to by ethologists as a species’   umwelt. In the words of the well-known ethologist Nikko Tinbergen, “Though all share one world, all may be said to live in different worlds, since each perceives best only that part of the environment essential to its success.”

The recognition and understanding of an animal’s peculiar world informs some first-rate contemporary American poetry. Consider “Hermit Crabs” by Margaret Renkl:

Drop them on the dock, they lean

into cracks between the boards,

their shells large

and hard. Lift them in your hand,

their rough legs stab between

your fingers to grasp at water.

 Put them on the boat deck, they pull

forward, clawing polished wood,

formica, metal for any grip,

knowing water dull green then dark

then nothing, unerring

every time as though rehearsed,

every single time without a pause,

knowing what we know, faithful:

home the easy way. Down. 

What comes through strongly in Renkl’s poem is the umwelt of the hermit crab. For instance, given its habitat, surely this animal must have an “unerring” understanding of what it feels like to drop through water; in fact, crabs must no doubt always be, as the poet says, “grasp[ing] at water.”

I believe that all poets and writers could benefit from reading some scientific writing, whether it comes from scientists themselves—many of whom are writers as well as scientists (Darwin, E.O. Wilson, Steven Jay Gould, for instance)—or science writers. It’s good not to only look inside your heart and write, as a writer once put it, but to look outside your heart, at the actual, physical world that we all inhabit and share.