Today’s Poem: The Map of Places
Wherever you go, there you are, sort of
The Map of Places
by Laura Riding
The map of places passes. The reality of paper tears. Land and water where they are Are only where they were When words read “here” and “here” Before ships happened there. Now on naked names feet stand, No geographies in the hand, And paper reads anciently, And ships at sea Turn round and round. All is known, all is found. Death meets itself everywhere. Holes in maps look through to nowhere. ═══════════════════════
In Today’s Poem by the American poet Laura Riding (1901–1991), first published in the Nation in 1927, we might find a glimmer of premonition: the later poet Elizabeth Bishop’s enduring fascination with maps and geography, the human understanding of place and the way place itself resists the narratives by which human understanding seeks to render the topography livable. One point of commonality between these two 20th-century poets, as this poem, at least, suggests, is not only the idea of the map as an evocative poetic subject, but the way that scrutiny of a map becomes scrutiny of truth claims about what the map represents.
We might also discern in Riding’s work at least a glancing likeness to the poetic austerity of her contemporary Louise Bogan (1897–1970). But where Bogan, in her early poem, “The Alchemist,” mistrusted her own mistrust of the physical senses as reliable conveyors of truth, Riding’s mistrust of the sensory and sensual, including the “sensuous” language of verse, would lead her to renounce the writing of poetry altogether. Sometime between the publication of her Collected Poems in 1938 and her 1940 marriage to the literary critic Schuyler Jackson, she would conclude that poetic language was “incompatible with truth.” As Jerome J. McCann put it, in a 1992 essay entitled “Laura (Riding) Jackson and the Literal Truth,”
What had changed was (Riding) Jackson’s view of poetry and its relation to language. Whereas earlier she saw poetry as language’s best and most powerful mode of existence, later she came to see it as too sensuous and self-absorbed — as much (and perhaps more) a distraction from the truth as a revelation of the truth.
This was a striking reversal of position. Until that point of renunciation, her objective, wrote the critic Harry Mathews, had been “to make articulate in the experience of her readers a knowledge of life that is both true and nonconceptual . . . to initiate the reader . . . into an awareness of what she felt to be the pure, unmediated truth.” She trusted that poetic language was the proper conduit for this initiation, the connection between the reader’s intellect and that “pure unmediated truth.”
Even so, her notion of what constituted poetic language was not Romantic, to put it mildly. Robert Fitzgerald, reviewing Riding’s 1938 Collected Poems, observed with admiration her “severe” pursuit of this pure Platonic truth in her poems:
Her severity may be measured by the fact that not more than one or two of the poems describe any earthly landscape. There is little dilation upon local marvels, natural or human; there are few images of sunset or moonrise or men. Sensuousness is intensely intellectualized. The “pinch of glory” remarked by E.M. Forster in the poetry of T.S. Eliot is all that is permitted here . . . the country throughout is the country of the mind.
That phrase, “the country of the mind,” provides us with a suitable entry point for Today’s Poem. “The Map of Places” — an odd, redundant-seeming title, since “map” generally does imply “places” — interrogates the relationship between something real and its representation. This is a strange, ambiguous, even alienating poem, though perhaps it strikes us in this way precisely because, in its quest to discover a “reality concealed from the senses,” it refuses to anchor itself definitively in a physical world made recognizable by our common, if unreliable, human senses.
The poem also signals what we might understand as a desire to reorder its own identity as a specimen of poetic language, acknowledging its tradition but rejecting the impulse to anchor itself complacently in that tradition. Its macro-structure is that of a Petrarchan sonnet in reverse: a sestet followed by an octave. Further, the rhyming couplet that opens the sestet could scan as trimeter, though its second line could just as readily be tetrameter, depending — perhaps significantly — on how you read the word “reality.” If you do stress the final syllable in that word, making the line tetrameter, then the poem begins on another level of reversal, in backwards common meter.
This couplet consists of two end-stopped declarative sentences, arguably in slant rhyme, and dealing with with the unreliability of what we accept as real, on the basis of our sensory experience. The only truly solid particular in the entire poem is that paper map, but the “reality of paper tears.” In the four lines that follow, with a shift into relatively straightforward common meter, one rather strange sentence breaks over a series of end-rhyme — or else one end-rhyme that unites the whole quatrain. These end-words, “are/were/here/there,” juxtapose two sets of opposites, temporal and spatial.
This group of rhymes, each disrupting the forward momentum of the sentence, forms a disorienting incidence of unity and discord, progress and stoppage, which echoes the disorientation that those four lines enact. Things, in this case “land and water,” are “where they were” when “words read ‘here’ and ‘here’ / Before ships happened there.”
Again, in this early phase, more than a decade before the great renunciation, Riding still believed in the sufficiency of poetic language — which here seems to mean the structures of poetic form rather than the impulse toward the metaphorical or “imitative” — as a conduit of truth. What’s fixed, therefore, in the vague landscape beyond the map, as well as on the vague and transitory map itself, are not so much the “land and water,” but the words for them, which are the most starkly minimal, non-descriptive, un-sensual words possible: “land,” “water.” Then there are the words that designate their position and their relation to each other: “‘here’ and ‘here” — but that position and relation are “only what they were” when the words to designate them came into existence.
Those words seem to matter more than the actual discovery of those geographical features by the “ships” which “happened there” in the stanza’s last line. The ideas of “land” and “water” are more real, the poem suggests, than their physical representations, either on the map or in the landscape itself. The slippage of tenses in those four lines, shifting from present to past in such a way as to make “read” in line 5 temporally ambiguous at first glance, amplifies the sense that things are unreliable. The real country, the country worth mapping, is that “country of the mind.” And that country’s only true outline, as the reader experiences it, is the poem’s formal structure itself.
In the second stanza, the octave, following on all the sestet’s disorientation, the rhyme scheme falls tidily into couplets that shrink and expand: the first tetrameter, the second a line of trimeter and a line of dimeter, the third trimeter and tetrameter, the closing couplet tetrameter again. In this stanza, even the map and the “geographies” that have provided the reality of language prove unreliable. “Feet stand” on “naked names,” more solid than the ground itself, but the physical means by which we know those names decay, and slip out of date. Paper “reads anciently.” Meanwhile, the material world, through which explorers are guided by these maps and geographies, overwhelms in its directionlessness. There’s nothing to say, reliably, that a ship isn’t simply going in circles instead of getting where it’s going — that there is a there at all, at which it would be possible to arrive.
The poem culminates in a startling and, again, disorienting set of assertions. Ships at sea “go round and round,” not knowing which way is “north” — or finding that while the word “north” is perfectly reliable, the actual vistas of the sea, as the eye feeds their images to the mind, are not. Yet somehow everything “is known, all is found.” There are, at least, names for things, which perhaps, instead of beauty, are “all ye need to know.” Wherever you go, in the country of the mind, there you are — sort of, as long as you can keep the forms of whereness and thereness in some kind of focus.
If anything endures, it is the mineral of that country, the pure substance of idea. In a time-ruled world, meanwhile — a world requiring maps — in which slippage occurs between the idea, the word for it, and the material object which is the idea’s poor shadow, “Death meets itself everywhere.” The map disintegrates. The names that define reality fade. The map’s holes, eyes without a mind — illustrating the disconnect between sense and sentience — “look through to nowhere.”
The subtitle of the essay has the last word.
Not one of her easy ones- all though with Laura Riding there aren't actually any easy ones... Here's what I make of it. Maps are more 'real' for us than the land and sea being represented; whether that's paper maps or the structures and systems we use to make sense of the world - the mental maps. And I think the poem is about that particular sort of being lost - when the structures and systems we use to make sense of the world start to fracture and fail.