Today’s Poem: Silence

Babette Deutsch’s darkly hinted wonder of things not spoken

Erik Abrahamson, Evening Sail, c. 1907 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Silence 

by Babette Deutsch 

Silence with you is like the faint delicious 
Smile of a child asleep, in dreams unguessed: 
Only the hinted wonder of its dreaming,  
The soft, slow-breathing miracle of rest.  
Silence with you is like a kind departure 
From iron clangor and the engulfing crowd 
Into a wide and greenly barren meadow,  
Under the bloom of some blue-bosomed cloud; 
Or like one held upon the sands at evening,  
When the drawn tide rolls out, and the mixed light  
Of sea and sky enshrouds the far, wind-bellowed 
Sails that move darkly on the edge of night.
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This 1919 poem by the American poet, novelist, translator, and critic Babette Deutsch (1895–1982) purports to turn the notion of the love lyric on its head. Deutsch’s speaker dwells on what goes unspoken between lovers: not the words they say, turning something ineffable into language, but their silences. These, the poem says, are large and full of mystery and, more significantly, freedom.

This may be the freedom of perfect refreshment and rest together, the freedom of not needing to speak — but as the final image suggests, there’s also, always, and perhaps more darkly, on the horizon of those silences, the possibility of freedom from each other.

But how does the poem represent all this unspoken possibility, except in language? How does it speak of silence, except to break silence? Even the form leans toward something that it deliberately is not. In twelve pentameter lines whose rhyme scheme approaches but avoids the predictable pattern (leaving some lines, such as the opening, unrhymed altogether), “Silence” shadows the sonnet form, which from its inception existed to articulate the mysteries of romantic love. This poem, however, resists the sonnet’s impulse toward the completion of a thought, choosing to speak of not speaking and, at the same time, implicitly to acknowledge the impossibility of its task.

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