Emily Dickinson noted that “We play at paste — | Till qualified, for Pearl —” so bear with me, friends.

Today we look at “On Winter’s Margin,” an early poem by Mary Oliver dating from the mid-1960s (her first volume having appeared in 1963).

You’re thinking of the Mary Oliver who more or less abjured meter, the capitalization at the head of each line, and what I’ll call legacy forms in her slim volume about writing poetry; the Mary Oliver who could write a stanza like

Finally,
the slick mountains of love break
over us.

The point I want to make is simply that “On Winter’s Margin” looks for all the world like an amalgam of a Spenserian and Petrarchan sonnet, albeit with 5- and 7 lines in the first two stanzas, respectively, which doesn’t quite fit either mold. Laying it out as she does with that concluding couplet constitutes an unmistakable nod to the sonnet tradition, at least. Something like iambic pentameter rules, and the ear responds with pleasure to combinations such as win/gin (l. 1), forged/flocking (l. 2), gar/char (l. 3), and so on.

One notices that stanza 1, with its imperative (“See”) is descriptive and objective; stanza 2 zooms in on the poet (or the poet’s puppet) with its threefold repetition of “I” — again reminding me of Shakespeare’s method of moving from the impersonal to the personal. The couplet, as we’d expect, brings it home with a breathtaking swoop — “They are what saves the world” — although ending with “squalor” suggests a more complicated view for which the poem has not necessarily prepared us.

Yes, I admire it.

Happily he did not send me to Sidney Lanier. At Jake’s suggestion I dived into Warren Zevon’s “My Ride’s Here,” the title track of his 2002 album. I figured that before analyzing the prosody I’d better listen to recordings, my favorite of which is Bruce Springteen‘s. He uses accordion and fiddle in an acoustic-ish version that gestures toward country more than Zevon’s own synthesizer-and-electric guitar orchestration does. Zevon’s rendering felt oddly like the sort of hymn you might hear in a megachurch (Zevon would hate that), what with the fourteeners he favors (pace Emily Dickinson). Given his references to the American west, where the poem is set, Springsteen’s choice makes good sense to me.

Not that it’s a my-wife-left-me-with-six children-and-my-truck-won’t-start whinge. Think mythic mashup with a half-dozen Biblical references (e.g., Jacob and the angel), a half-dozen popular culture references (e.g., John Wayne), and a half-dozen literary references (mostly name-dropping, though Shakespeare appears only in a silent nod. ‘Tis better so.). Zevon manages to turn this olla podrida into a meditation on death. We come to realize that the refrain—”My ride’s here”—refers to the speaker’s death and possible apotheosis into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He’s waiting for a chariot, after all.

So as you see I started trying to break down Zevon’s lyrics into their constituent parts. I’m not there yet, but it’s an interesting and I hope fruitful exercise for someone aspiring to write lyrics for an art-song.

It’s addressed to a woman dying of cancer who’s the namesake of the famous 17th century religious reformer—the one who got herself kicked out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Seidel makes hay out of the comparisons, quotations, and sly or obvious references to Anne the first, as you’d expect, though treatment of his friend remains respectful. Despite seeming not to share her religious devotion, he harnesses some gorgeous imagery to capture it.

Here’s one of my favorite tidbits, the end of the 9th stanza with the whole of the 10th. As he sits at his friend’s deathbed:

Between the unreal and the next world, stretched taut,
Anne, you are trying to talk, wide-eyed and hollow-eyed,

Bright starving eyes! Like sections
Of a tapeworm, the anacoluthons
Break off—fed
On your daily bread
Dread.

That creepy image of the tapeworm coming off in sections perfectly captures the horror of the patient’s inability to complete a sentence. She may be talking in monosyllables such as “Dread”—the work’s only such line.

“To My Friend Anne Hutchinson” is structured consistently with five lines per stanza, though if you try to scan them you go crazy: hexameters, trimeters, tetrameters, and that other thing I mentioned—yet within each stanza he’s highly attentive to rhythm. Each boat is on its own bottom except where the enjambment crosses over into a new stanza, when the rhythmic and aural relationship is tighter, as between stanzas 9 and 10.

He uses some internal rhyme and, unpredictably, a bit of end-rhyme, though often his focus on sound takes subtle forms. Consider again the lines quoted above: we have next/stretched, taut/talk, wide-eyed/eyed/eyes, tape/break, fed/bread/dread—and a bunch of consonance and assonance in which the sibilants s and st figure prominently, perhaps evoking the quiet hiss of hospital equipment. When I read it aloud, those esses elongate the words slightly, slowing me down in contrast to the cold-water shock of “bright / break,” which underscore the sense.

I mentioned his respect for her devotion. Here is the ending, the moment of death:

The mind stops . . . mind and body
Longing for order and mystery,
To be as a cloud, pure as a Taj Mahal
Of grief for a cherished soul,
Floating over beautiful wine-colored October. 

What a lovely tribute.