I was really fascinated to go down the rabbit hole of the arrangement of these three poems in Ransom's first book --- I'd read this particular poem before but really not paid attention to its placement and the obviously sequential connection that the repeated form signals.
It's interesting to consider this poem beside Frost's "Acquainted With the Night" --- which I obviously didn't do here, but have been turning over in my mind a little. Frost's poem (which is later) is a lot more ambitious in its reach, especially in its conversation with Dante, but also maybe more purely materialist? Anyway, having just written about that poem, it's hard not to read this one in its shadow!
I don't believe I commented on "Acquainted with the Night," but it was a revelatory analysis. It got me to thinking about the earlier analysis of Frost's "The Road Not Taken" and Edward Thomas. The circular walk in "Acquainted with the Night" is another way of thinking about the paths we take to walk in the world, beginning with the forked road in the Choice of Hercules (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_at_the_crossroads) and the straight and narrow path of the Gospels. A French poem of Rilke ("Chemins qui ne mènent nulle part") has another variant, where the path is not a way to get somewhere:
Lovely analysis and introduction to a poem I didn't know.
I was really fascinated to go down the rabbit hole of the arrangement of these three poems in Ransom's first book --- I'd read this particular poem before but really not paid attention to its placement and the obviously sequential connection that the repeated form signals.
It's interesting to consider this poem beside Frost's "Acquainted With the Night" --- which I obviously didn't do here, but have been turning over in my mind a little. Frost's poem (which is later) is a lot more ambitious in its reach, especially in its conversation with Dante, but also maybe more purely materialist? Anyway, having just written about that poem, it's hard not to read this one in its shadow!
I don't believe I commented on "Acquainted with the Night," but it was a revelatory analysis. It got me to thinking about the earlier analysis of Frost's "The Road Not Taken" and Edward Thomas. The circular walk in "Acquainted with the Night" is another way of thinking about the paths we take to walk in the world, beginning with the forked road in the Choice of Hercules (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_at_the_crossroads) and the straight and narrow path of the Gospels. A French poem of Rilke ("Chemins qui ne mènent nulle part") has another variant, where the path is not a way to get somewhere:
Paths that lead nowhere
between two meadows
but seem like artful detours
away from their goal,
paths often with no place
before them but what’s ahead,
nothing but pure space
and the season.
More fascinating connections!