Today’s Poem: Fog

Robert Hillyer in a spot of thin time

Caspar David Friedrich, Sea Beach in the Fog, 1807 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Fog

by Robert Hillyer

Where does the sea end and the sky begin?
We sink in blue for which there is no word.
Two sails, fog-colored, loiter on the thin
Mirage of ocean.
There is no sound of wind, nor wave, nor bird,
Nor any motion.
Except the shifting mists that turn and lift,
Showing behind the two limp sails a third,
Then blotting it again.

A gust, a spattering of rain,
The lazy water breaks in nervous rings.
Somewhere a bleak bell buoy sings,
Muffled at first, then clear,
Its wet, grey monotone.

The dead are here.
We are not quite alone. 
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“Early in the Morning,” the summery nostalgic poem by Robert Hillyer (1895–1961) that longtime readers will remember from its appearance here last March, belongs to that loose poetic subgenre that Joseph Bottum and I have identified as the “Spot of Time” poem. But Today’s Poem, Hillyer’s 1921 “Fog,” evokes something actually closer to what Wordsworth envisioned as the “spot of time” — not merely a cleansing memory of joy, but the recollection of a moment when the natural world has impinged on human experience, not to comfort but to unsettle.

As its tense signals, “Fog” occurs less as a spot of time in memory than as an experience in the present. The poem’s speaker doesn’t look back on the dislocating view of a fog at sea, when the whole world seems liquified. To look back on this scene would be to make some meaning of it.

Instead he looks out at it from an unclear vantage point, presumably on shore — but who can tell? Even he, with everyone else caught in this fog, “sink[s] in blue for which there is no word,” an indeterminate, obfuscating element, neither certainly land nor certainly water. Even the two sails his eye picks out are “fog-colored,” on the “mirage of ocean.” In this moment, reality defies the mind’s attempts to pick out definite shapes or patterns, to perceive or impose meaning, even to locate itself in some certain place.

William Saphier, sketch of Robert Hillyer, c. 1921

The poem’s form, with its foglike movements, both enacts and resists the formation of a clear and consistent pattern. The first stanza begins with regular rhymes — abacbc — but in line 7 introduces a new end-word, “lift,” that never finds its end-rhyme mate, though it does echo “shifting” in the middle of the same line.

Even the most regular rhymes, too, set up expectations only to frustrate them. “Again” at the end of the first stanza could be understood as a slant version of the a-rhyme at the start of the poem — or else it’s a completely new end-sound that has to wait for resolution until the reader has passed the stanza break and arrived at “rain,” at the end of the first line of stanza 2.

Likewise, the final end-word in that stanza, “monotone,” has to wait for the end of the poem, the close of the two-line final stanza, to resolve itself in a rhyme that accompanies the poem’s one certain, if qualified, epiphany: “We are not quite alone.”

Metrically, too, the poem echoes the movements of the fog, with its obliterations and its sudden breaks. Beginning in fairly straightforward iambic pentameter (though the first line begins on a trochee, not an iamb), it contracts to iambic dimeter, with an extra unstressed syllable at the end — “mi-ràge of ò-cean” — in lines 4 and 6 (lines ending in the same feminine c-rhyme), and again to iambic trimeter in line 9.

In the second stanza, a single iambic tetrameter line — “Some-whère a blèak bell bùoy sìngs” — breaks through the already irregular pattern of pentameter, dimeter, and trimeter lines, just as the voice of the bell buoy, “bleak” though it is, sounds its clear note through all the unclarity of shifting vaporous air and water.

If there are “thin places” in the world, what this poem ultimately communicates is a thin moment, a spot of thin time. As long as the fog lasts, the speaker stands, apparently isolated, in a place between, not solid, not liquid, not determinate at all. In that place without clear boundaries, he perceives the presence not only of the living — the “we” who with him “sink in blue” — but of the dead. Although the fog obscures, separates, and isolates, in it we are almost, but “not quite,” alone.

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