VERSIONS

This is an earlier draft  on the topic of description, conected to the actual work on sketching. Sketching also happens in verse.

Meditation – The Tradition

(a chapter in a history of description)

Most religions have made the exercise of mental processes part of their practices. Mystic ecstasy, fasting, singing, dancing, vision quests or peyote cults are such exercises, much written about: mythography (Doty 2000, 123-302). Among those that do restrict themselves on perceptual and cognitive practices – keeping the body free from movement and intoxication – meditation play an important part in Hinduism and Christianity.

The Christian tradition of devotional practices developed in the Middle Ages and in the monasteries. During the Reformation it spread to the congregations and controversies began about its usefulness. Calvin and Loyola wrote about introspection and spiritual exercises, looking for support in Platon, Aristotle and Plotinus.

Rules and practices varied, but based on a traditional psychology of human faculties, writers distinguished four basic practices: cogitatio, meditatio, contemplatio, and oratio (Enciclopedia Universal Ilustrada 15, 147-9).

“Meditation” often referred to the study of holy texts, especially a verse from the Bible. It could by extended to more secular studies, based on the globe, geometric books, emblems etc.

“Contemplation” also used the eyes, but to focus attention on an object, mainly the cross, also a candle, a skull, a grave etc. By extension, nature could become an object of contemplation.

“Cogitation” happened in both, meditation and contemplation, but as an independent exercise it took place with both eyes shut. It concentrated the imagination and conceptual processes to rules of concentration.

All three, meditation, contemplation and cogitation, usually demanded silence. Oration meant prayer, speaking to God aloud, and thus involved the ear more than the eye. The use of oration, either before or after the other three practices, also depended on doctrine, whether you could find God by your own efforts, or only through his grace.

The Puritans

The Puritans settling in North America certainly believed in grace, rather than works, and thus seem to have discouraged formal meditation or contemplation (Pearce 49). On the other hand, they tried to formalize the conversion experience for their members and – with Calvin – encouraged self-inspection. The result was a compromise: poetry could be considered as a spiritual diary, and if contemplation followed the three steps of

• composition of place

• Examination of points

• Colloquy with God

There was little to object to (Parini 12-13). After all that three-part structure also ruled the Puritan sermon with its

• text explication

• proofs and reasons from doctrine

• final application to the congregation (Levy 81-97).

Indeed, this division of sermons came even closer to the meditation on a sacred text. Both divisions revealed the Christian tendency to divide things into three parts or to dichotomize them into two according to the logic of Ramus (Miller 120).

Poetic meditation. MARTZ

The claim made here is twofold. First, contemplation and meditation have remained one of the dominant conventions in Anglo-American poetry. Second, both have undergone structural and ideological modifications. The following outline shall support my claim. My examples come from the literary canon dominant until the 1960s. I will end with some examples for alternatives from more recent years.

The beginnings of the canonical convention lie with Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor. The first wrote contemplations, the second meditations.

Anne Bradstreet copied English models when she wrote “Contemplations,” probably in 1664/5, published in 1678. The first two stanzas provide the model for the whole poem and the poetic convention:

1.

Some time now past in the autumnal tide,

When Phoebus wanted but one hour to bed,

The trees all richly clad, yet void of pride,

Were gilded o’er by his rich golden head.

Their leaves and fruits seemed painted, but was true,

Of green, of red, of yellow, mixed hue;

Rapt were my senses at this delectable view.

2.

I wist not what to wish, yet sure thought I,

If so much excellence abide below,

How excellent is He that dwells on high,

Whose power and beauty by his works we know?

Sure he is goodness, wisdom, glory, light,

That hath his under world so richly dight;

More heaven than earth was here, no winter, and no night.

The contemplation focuses on an autumnal trees before sunset. The composition of place in stanza one proceeds orderly from season to time of the day to trees and leaves, then details their colors. The last line prepares the transition to the examination of points by turning us to the senses and feelings of the speaker: this is clearly a poem about visual pleasure.

The first four lines of the second stanza examine the points of the descriptive part. They summarize the visual details as “excellence” and examine their points in an analogy of below and on high, or earth and heaven. The poet admits to emotional confusion and casts her examination in form of a question. But the syntax of her question leaves no doubt, her thoughts are in perfect control: “I thought” rules a perfect Aristotelian enthymem:

We know God’s power and beauty by his works.

So much excellence abides below [his works].

So excellent is He that dwells on high.

That is why the poet is so “sure” of her answer, God’ goodness and wisdom (last three lines). The colloquy with God has been replaced by intellectual insight into God through his works. More precisely, by a thought process in the poet whose wishes a re-confused but whose thoughts surely lead to God. Bradstreet calls this process, which she repeats several times in the poem “divine translation” (stanza 30). Indeed, the colloquy with God translates itself into an internal process of the contemplating person: her emotions and thinking are at odds and their conflict mirrors the colloquy with God. The dialogue, the question and its answer, clearly happens within the poet.

Before we proceed to the rest of the poem, let me formalize the three part of the contemplation as description (D), question (Q) and answer (A) and identify DQA as the canonical convention for the poetic contemplation. In other words, I wish to abstract from the composition of place (D), the examination of points (Q), and the colloquy with God (A) to be able to compare different contemplations. This translation connects examination of points and colloquy with as question and answer in an interior colloquy. Colloquy with God would cover question and answer as well as prayer (oration) and insight. In the orthodox form of contemplation, the answers would come from God, not from the poet.

But the interior colloquy in Bradstreet’s poem has not come to an end. The conclusion of the answer “More heaven than earth was here, no winter, and no night.” is contradicted by “autumnal” and “Phoebus” in the descriptive part (D): winter and night will come to New England, but for a moment the wishes of the poet win the upper hand: she has found the earthly paradise. Bradstreet lays the foundation for the American Dream, and Adam and Eve will appear in stanzas 11 and 12. This is not the last word, however.

The things to be contemplated follow this order of stanzas:

Autumnal Trees (1-2) DQA

The Oak (3) DQA

The Sun (4-8) DQA, A, A

The Grasshopper (9) DQ

The Past and Present (10-17):

Adam (11) D

Eve (12) D

Cain and Abel (13-17) D-QA

The Earth and Heaven (18-20) DQA

The River (21-23) D

The Fish (24-26) D

The Nightingale (26-28) D

Man (29-32) DA

Time’s Rust and the White Stone (33) A

Within the three-part divisions of the poem, the DQA structure varies: A can be omitted (9), delayed, repeated, and, starting with 21, direct address replaces the question, or examination of points. The poet directs herself to the river, the fish and the nightingale to discuss their point: apostrophe changes place with rhetorical questions, but the colloquy character remains. Nature stands in for God.

The interesting turn comes in stanza 10. After drawing out the spatial analogies between nature and God, the poet turns to the past:

10.

When present times look back to ages past,

And men in being fancy those are dead,

It makes things gone perpetually to last,

And calls back months and years that long since fled.

Fancy can substitute the object for contemplation, the recalled image brings back objects of the past, and the mind can establish relations between now and then instead of between earth and heaven: “Our life compare we with their length of days.” Adam and Eve after the Fall and their progeny Cain and Abel remind the poet of her own mortality and correct her wishes for an earthly paradise (12). The typological relations between the Old Testament and the seventeenth century work on the analogies just like the spatial analogies between above and below, but the points of examination apply to human beings not to God. The portraits of human beings replaces the description of nature, the points of comparisons become human vices and follies. Analogy rules all.

Contemplation thus has two ways of focusing on the object: perception through the senses, generally the eyes, or imaginative reconstruction of something once seen or read. In this last case, contemplation shades into meditation, because Bradstreet’s knowledge of Adam and Eve comes from Bible reading or Bible illustrations. I shall continue to call the imaginative evocation of the past a contemplation, though the dividing line between meditation and contemplation blurs here. Probably, the rise of the term meditation, and the decline of the term contemplation in poetry discussions, has to do with the rise of fancy in both.

If Anne Bradstreet is the mother of poetic contemplation, Edward Taylor can claim to be the best-known colonial example for poetic meditation. As his poems were not published until 1937, they cannot have had any influence before that. Emerson must have looked elsewhere. Here is Meditation Eight from the First Series:

John 6.51: I am the living bread.

I kenning through astronomy divine

The world’s bright battlement, wherein I spy

A golden path my pencil cannot line

From that bright throne unto my threshold lie.

And while my puzzled thoughts about it pour,

I find the bread of life in’t at my door.

In Bradstreet’s contemplation feelings created confusion, here the thought process itself is in trouble. Science, even the works of divine astronomy fail, where the gift of grace lies at his door. Bread of life translates the biblical metaphor of the living bread for Christ, and the image of the bread lying in the golden path and at his door promises an explanation. The explanation, the examination of the points of comparison between Christ and bread, turns into a story, a parable. The metaphor extends into an allegory. The remaining five stanzas develop the allegory: The soul (as a bird) is hungry, and cannot find terrestrian food. In this sad state, God has pity and kneads his own son into this bread of life and dishes it on the bird’s table. Then the story goes into questions: “Did God mold this bread in heaven” and What grace is this knead in this loaf?” And the answer comes from the bread itself in the last line of the meditation: “Eat, eat me soul, and thou shalt never die.”

The DQA structure is intact, instead of the description we get a homely parable about bread, but question and answer mesh in the colloquy, and God (as baker and the talking bread) has the final answer. The strains of the metaphor are dwelt upon rather than avoided (Heaven’s sugar cake, This bread of life dropped in my mouth does cry). They puzzle the thought and rely on the authority of John 6.51 and the church rituals. The meditation thus extends the metaphorical equation Christ = bread into an everyday story: God is the baker who advertises and delivers the bread, the Christian soul is the consumer who finds the bread at his door. It is a gift, and the customer needs help from the angels and Christ himself to understand. The questions pick out one of the points of the analogy, the knead in the bread as grace, an important doctrinal point, the rest of the allegory (field, empty barrel, world’s white loaf, bowels) remains without explanation.

Bradstreet’s contemplation and Taylor’s meditation share more than their structure. Although they differ in their estimate of the role of reason in the process of finding God, they both end on death words: “when all of these are gone.” In Bradstreet and “thou shalt never die.” The words gone and die gather further weight by universal expansion in all and never. These devices will stay with meditation and contemplation into the twentieth century.

Enlightenment

I have not found many examples for contemplation and meditation in the late eighteenth century. Philip Freneau combines meditation and contemplation in “The Indian Burying Ground” (1787). He takes his information about Indian burial postures from a book (the learned), but then turns to an epitaph-exhortation to the stranger to respect and imagine the dead. Hardly a classical graveyard contemplation, but the observation of the burial ground leads to a struggle between fancy and reason -–somewhat similar to the struggle of wishes and thinking, of viewing and recalling in Bradstreet:

And long shall timorous fancy see

The painted chief, and pointed spear,

And Reason’s self shall bow the knee

To shadows and delusions here.

Book meditation leads to an old opinion (stanzas 1 to 4), graveyard contemplations to delusions. There are no questions, examination of points, no colloquy with God, only shadows and illusions of timorous fancy. Locke and Hulme have done their work.

Even later poems on related topics like William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” (1817) or “The Prairies” (1832) show little traces of Puritan meditation or contemplation. The first is a colloquy with Nature, ending in stoic self-exhortation, the latter a vision peopling the wilderness with future settlement. Bryant fills absences with resolution and imagination, but he does not examine points to draw conclusions. Poe’s poems are even further removed from the Puritan tradition: a raven sitting on a bust would make a fine subject for a contemplation, but Poe turns the subject into an effective ballad, symbolic of mourning. Neither New York nor Philadelphia had much to contribute to the meditation between 1790 and 1830. Goldsmith, Wordsworth and Byron did not use the Puritan forms. They were resurrected in Boston by the Transcendentalists.

The Transcendentalists

Ralph Waldo Emerson, a former Unitarian minister, wrote both meditations and contemplations in the Puritan tradition. He also thoroughly transformed both. Here is his contemplation of a shrub:

The Rhodora

On Being Asked, Whence is the Flower?

In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,

I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,

Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,

To please the desert and the sluggish brook.

The purple petals, fallen in the pool,

Made the black water with their beauty gay;

Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,

And court the flower that cheapens his array.

Rhodora! If the sages ask thee why

This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,

Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,

Then Beauty is its own excuse for being:

Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!

I never thought to ask, I never knew:

But in my simple ignorance, suppose

The self-same Power that brought me there brought you.

1834. 1839

This is familiar. We have the description first, a detailed composition of place, followed by an examination of points, cast as an apostrophe to the shrub, and the traditional answer in the last line. Anne Bradstreet would have appreciated this, the beauty, the pleasure, the question. But there are subtle changes. Power could circumscribe God, but Beauty is also capitalized. The poet disparages the questions of whence and why with the sages. He poses as simple ignorance – the American Adam – of origins, and for him, the identification with the shrub is more important than the power (maybe the solitudes) that brought them there. Indeed, if we retrace the answer to the points, we discover the rhodora as a poet without audience (woods, nook, brook, pool, to please the desert) but with competitors (re-bird, rose). Something has changed the contemplation. It has not only turned away from God and to an identification with nature. It also has emancipated visual pleasure from theology: “if eyes were made for seeing, / Then Beauty is its own excuse for being.” Bradstreet’s wishes (no winter, no night) disturbed her thought, Taylor's hunger found no food on earth. We could read nature allegorically (The purple petals, fallen in the pool), but only bird and rose are humanized to point at the analogy between nature and a competitive poetry market in the 1830s.

Emerson’s contemplation has it both ways. It disparages the traditional questions, opposes the perceptive I to the sages, but answers the question however deviously in the end. Bradstreet was still worried about a worldly misreading of her autumnal trees: “The trees all richly clad, yet void of pride,” Emerson uses the Puritan contemplation, but encourages a reading in which competition for beauty also includes poetry. The choice of the object and its description are original, so are the points, and the answer subverts the very tradition it uses.

It is the colloquy with God that becomes problematic. The dialogical element involves the sages and the shrub. The sages become a subtitle to the rhodora, the apostrophe to the plant becomes an intimate advice (dear), the poet sides with the plant against the sages. But the sages are very much in the poet’s mind when he discovers the (feminine?) rhodora.

The future development of both, meditation and contemplation, will partly hinge on the question of how to handle the colloquy part, the interior voices struggling in the poet’s mind for an answer. Emerson clearly tries to secularize the Puritan tradition by substituting the power of Beauty for God or fusing both in Nature.

He tried the same for the contemplation of the past. Here is the beginning of “Hamatreya” (1847):

Bulkeley, Hunt, Wilard, Hosmer, Meriam, Flint,

Possessed the land which rendered to their toil

Hay, corn, roots, hemp, flax, apples, wool, and wood.

Each of these landlords walked amidst his farm,

Saying, “’Tis mine, my children’s and my name’s.

How sweet the west wind sounds in my own trees!

How graceful climb those shadows on my hill!

I fancy these pure waters and the flags

Know me, as does my dog: we sympathize;

And, I affirm, my actions smack of the soil.”

Where are these men? Asleep beneath their grounds:

And strangers, fond as they, their furrows plough.

The poet recalls the first Puritan settlers of Concord imaginatively (he has read their names somewhere), gives them voice to turn to the question ubi sunt? Like Bradstreet, he compares the dead with the living: both share the obsession with private property. The point and the question are answered by the Earth who sings: “Mine, not yours.” And then turns to the readers: “How am I theirs, / If they cannot hold me, / But I hold them?” She returns the question to the poet and he draws the moral conclusion “My avarice cooled / like lust in the chill of the grave.”

The moral is not far from Bradstreet’s lesson from Adam and Eve, or Taylor’s from the Bible: he poem ends on grave. But in other aspects, the technique of blending contemplation of the past with meditation derived from reading has changed. The source of the reading is from the sacred Hindu book Vishnu Purana, and the title “Hamatreya” designates a Hindu or Greek earth mother. The voices struggling for insight in the poet are fully exteriorized: the early settlers and the earth mother keep their colloquy to benefit the poet and the reader. Earth, no longer exclusively Christian, has the answer and all the good points. In other words, Emerson dramatizes the process of contemplation, and keeps the poet passively in the spectator seat. The doubts that Bradstreet and Taylor had about their own capacity of understanding is still there. The limitations of the poet appear in both, “The Rhodora” and “Hamatreya.” Emerson embeds Christian contemplation in aesthetic or non-Christian frames, but expands its firm morality without transcending it. Nature and traditional morality still seemed good antidotes to the beginnings of competitive industrialization. The ongoing secularization of meditation and contemplation would take steps beyond Emerson.

Realism

The next step comes from Walt Whitman, generally closer to the ode and hymn than to contemplation. But here is a very Emersonian part from Song of Myself (1855):

6

A child said What is the grass? Fetching it to me with full hands;

How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,

A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,

Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic ...

Whitman narrativizes the description, and it is the child who asks the poet (not the sages as in Emerson). Description and question take only one line, the rest is answer and examination of points. First the poet returns the question, then he hedges on all points with “I guess.” The allegoric single meaning of the object contemplated has disappeared. A Puritan meditation would have started with a verse like “all flesh is like grass” or would have located the poet in a grassy garden to contemplate the leaves of grass. Whitman omits this part, we can imagine him with a handful of grass while he tries to find an answer to the child’s question. Some of the answers could come from Bradstreet or Taylor (the handkerchief of the Lord could be a conceit from Taylor), others from Emerson (hieroglyphic is non-Christian), others seem allegorical (green = hope), others Darwinian (the produced babe of the vegetation). Whitman isolates semantic elements from grass (green, scented, vegetation, uniform) to compare it to other worldly objects. Only the handkerchief, scented and designedly dropped, ironically raises the question of ownership. The radical innovation of the contemplation is that the poet is guessing and one guess is as good as the other. Each answer or point only needs a shorthand sketch, the analogies have been used many times before. Whitman works in a well-worn tradition, and only a child can ask such a question. The catalogue goes on, and the readers are not tied anymore to one firm moral, Christian or Darwinian. Uniform means equality: “Growing among black folks as among white,” but Whitman finds still another answer which takes us back to the graveyard meditation (or contemplation): “And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.”

Whitman develops the points – he calls them hints – to a full-grown answer (“The smallest sprout shows there is really no death”):

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,

And to die is different from any one supposed, and luckier.

The dead enter the vegetation life-cycle and return as grass, this answer not only overturns the Puritan answer – this poem has death in its last line only to deny it – it enwraps all other answers (hope, gift, child, equality), even the Lord. Moving from one point to another may be more important than finding the answer, but Whitman`s contemplation of grass and his examination of points lead to a completely naturalist answer. There may be many answers to the childish question, the symbol replaces the allegoric image, but all answers and even the allegorical green become part of a more inclusive (maybe not final) truth.

Emily Dickinson is less optimistic in her graveyard contemplation “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” (1859). Above the graves of the meek members of Resurrection, galaxies scoop their arc and empires surrender, indifferent to resurrection (surrender contrasts with resurrection), all melts away. Above and below contrast like in Bradstreet, but the cosmos has replaced heaven. Had Dickinson read Humboldt’s Cosmology or Poe’s Eureka with his thesis of progressive collapse? Had she found an illustration of the alabaster chambers in a book?

Another short poem is more clearly Dickinson’s version of a meditation on something heard or read:

The thought beneath so slight a film –

Is more distinctly seen –

As laces just reveal the surge –

Or Mists – the Appenine – (1860?)

She meditates not so much on a thought, but on the perception of the thought. The very process of meditation - how to reveal a thought through images – becomes the topic. Dickinson keeps her spiritual diary in extreme shorthand: all she comes up with are three analogies film : thought :: laces : surge :: Mists : Appenine. All illustrate the perceptual problem: hiding something slightly leads to seeing it more distincly. The radical innovation in the poem is that the poet never tells us what that thought is. But we can apply the perceptual problem to the meditation itself: if thought corresponds to surge and Appenine what do they reveal about the thought? Lace has many meanings and so does surge. But their meanings interact and change with the progression from thought to Appenine. Surge and Mists give us water, surge and lace give us bosom. Confirmed by Appenine. Has this been an erotic thought, and can we see it more distinctly as such moving through its laces and mists? It certainly grows in size and distance form where the poet writes.

However the meditation reads – and as in Whitman there may be other readings – it activates our fancy to understand the semantic relations between images and concepts, the very stuff meditations are made of. It is as if Taylor had meditated on the form of the metaphor “I am the living bread.” instead of believing its content. Dickinson is more interested in fine perception, in focalization than in the supernatural. Her meditations often take us in the direction of a semiotics of passion (Greimas).

Modernism

Modernist anthologies abound with contemplations and meditations. They owe as much to Emerson, Whitman, and Dickinson as to Bradstreet or Taylor. Wallace Stevens echoes “Hamatreya” in his short poem “In the Carolinas,” “Song of Myself” is the not-so-hidden motto for many modernist meditations, and Marianne Moore picks up where Emily Dickinson has left off. Here is her meditation called “No Swan so Fine:”

“No water so still as the

dead fountains of Versailles,” No swan,

with swart blind look askance

and gondoliering legs, so fine

as the chintz china one with fawn-

brown eyes and toothed gold

collar on to show whose bird it was.

Lodged in the Louis Fifteenth

Candelabrum-tree of cockscomb-

Tinted buttons, dahlias,

sea urchins, and everlastings,

it perches on the branching foam

of polished sculptured

flowers – at ease and tall. The king is dead. (1932)

Moore annotates her readings: “There is no water so still as in the dead fountains of Versailles.” Percy Phillip, New York times Magazine, May 10, 1931.” And “A pair of Louis XV candelabra with Dresden figures of swans belonging to Lord Balfour.” She takes her texts from the newspapers not the Bible. But the procedure is like Taylor’s or that of Dickinson. She matches the sentence by Phillip with one of her own, a parallel one about the swan. No water so still :: No swan so fine. But her swan sentence elaborates ornately its points: look, legs, eyes, collar. The next stanza composes its place on the candelabrum-tree. No questions asked, we a re-invited to match fountain and swan, still and fine, Versailles and Louis XV. Then comes the clinching answer. The king is dead, his fountains and swan are not – Moore rejects Phillip. Fountain and swan are works of art, we are to induce, and they do not die. They could be destroyed, though.

Moore not only meditates on an article on Versailles, she recreates the swan in her poem and in our minds. No live swan (with swart blind look) can compete with this chintz china one, Moore’s two long sentences create our delight with startling adjectives and compounds and sculpt the bird anew as verbal artifice. The swan is the poem. The king is dead. Like Dickinson, Moore uses shorthand: she does not give the full answer (the fountain is not), she does not moralize (art is not private property), she puns on everlastings and relies on modernist montage and the reader to make the connections. The elaborate analogies, the stretching of metaphors into allegories, the questions or even the hints have become a thing of the past in modernist writers like Moore. And like Dickinson, meditation is a pleasurable mental activity, rejoicing in its own infinity of new neuronal connections and reflecting upon itself. Beauty has become its own excuse for being. Art outlasts life.

Modernist contemplation also clips the answer and does not dwell too much on the points. Here is Louis Zukofsky’s “Cars once Steel, and Green, now Old”:

Cars once steel and green, now old,

Find their grave at Cedar Manor.

They rust in a wind

The sky alone can hold.

For the wind

Flows heavily thru the mind like cold,

Drums in the ears

Till one knows its being which soon is not.

This is a modern graveyard-contemplation in shorthand. The first four lines compose the place and raise the point of the wind. Zukofsky relies on minimal signals to the convention (green, now old; grave-sky), skips the questions, and transforms the divine translation into a message of the wind. For marks the turn to the abstract answer: being which soon is not. This includes the wind, no divine afflatus, the reader can catch the parallel between mind and car without further help. The poet as in Moore remains implied, but reduced to mind and knowing. Since Emerson things increasingly reveal truths and relegate the meditating voice to the act of registration. The verbal artifact represents the thing, the thought. Its title is its first line.

One more step, and the verbal artifact turns on language and itself.

Postmodernism

If meditation takes a text for its object, why not meditate on somebody else’s meditation? If Dickinson had meditated on her reading of Charlotte Bronte (1859), Ronald Johnson chose Leaves of Grass for his text. In his “Letters to Walt Whitman” he meditates on single lines taken from Whitman. In his second letter he chose the following four lines (Carruth 701):

Unseen buds, infinite, hidden well,

Under the snow and ice, under the darkness,

in every square or cubic inch,

Germinal, exquisite, in delicate lace, microscopic ...

Johnson meditates on the “vast organic slough / of the earth,” elaborates the composition of place, “seeding itself on air.” And turns the images back on poetry: “Poems beginning germinal in the instant / - reeling out, unravelling, tendrils & silken into the air – “ then quotes from Whitman again (under the darkness) to elaborate new secondary meanings (Argus-eyed & insistent). Johnson rereads Whitman’s organic images as a rhizom for the meanings of poems: the infinite associations Argus-eyed readers might develop from Johnson’s meditations find a model in Johnson’s own insistent reading of Whitman. And maybe a reader of Johnson will continue to rewrite Whitman into an endless trace of meanings.

Once we have freed ourself from fixed analogies between heaven and earth, the natural world offers infinite possibilities to connect everything with everything, and each poem creates its own universe. Only all the words have appeared in somebody else’s poem (take “lace,” for instance; Dickinson also has a poem on microscopes, Germinal has in the meantime become the title of a novel by Zola etc.), and eclecticism and double coding seem to be the only way out to postmodernists.

This also holds for contemplation. John Ashbery, more than anybody else has deconstructed this convention. ...