PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

I am not sure I can do this poem even the least justice in a comment, but I am going to try.  The first thing I thought of was the allusive title---Dialogue With Silence which, in my mind, alludes to Simon and Garfunkel's great song, The Sound Of Silence.  It also reminds me of some of those poems and tales that show us an altered perception of the Cosmos (I mean, verbally altered; the Poet picks certain details that, when included, also exclude others that are not picked):  I am speaking of, for example, Lord Dunsany's tales, that create a cosmic background in a different reality than that to which we are accustomed.  I think she is doing that same process in this poem.  (I do hope this is making sense, because I am really groping my way here in the face of this most challenging poem . . . but also, this most worthwhile poem.)  First, she gives us an East-West transit, or axis, and characterized by moaning gray and relentless oaks.  She has returned from a land of questions---implying a journey of sorts.  That land has been constructed out of chaos, and everything there is attempting to escape the loop of existence---which the Poet, with an insight perhaps not common to the land of questions, calls dazzling.  Even in chaos, she finds a sort of grandeur; like her great peer, Wallace Stevens, in his poem, "Chaos In Motion And Not In Motion."

  Apparently, while visiting the land of questions, she heard of a door of the unmanifest, which offers a solitude which will prove to be crowded.

  Now I take it that the crowding at that door is not to be interpreted negatively, because we see some interesting and positive processes going on---and we are, I think, at the poem's gravitational center.  We have, there, cleansing birds, audible stars, glass stallions, first love, a distant rebellion (which I take to be a rebellion against entropy), more vital and with more verve in them than what we now consider "human."  That verve and vitality can also be counted on to stay, to establish itself, to be consistent.

  Now she gives us another location, parallel to the East-West line at the poem's beginning:  its timeline is eternity past sundown, and it is sited a few steps past silence.  There, one thought stands between the void, and the All, which is what Poetry does.  And then, the speaker of the poem tells the silence to back off, while the speaker learns to breathe---breath, the process of inspiration.

    Like the greatst of Poets, of whom she is one---and this poem demonstrates this---she has created a mythic land, highly symbolic, not mundane.  I think of Eliot's great poem, Ash Wednesday; or some of Mallarme's poems; or Dunsany's tales, which I mentioned above.  And near to this land she has created is also the land of questions, and the encroaching silence with which she has had dialogue and which, at the end, she banishes.  

    This poem contains her usual depths of meanings---which this Poet always reliably and consistently delivers to her readers.  But this poem seems, to me, to make the reader work a little harder than usual.  This is not a negative criticism:  when I first read Stevens, I was told, "He makes you work, but he pays you back."  This poem fits that description perfectly.  The poem works hard to present its message successfully.  It, therefore, expects the reader to work hard, as well, in order to appreciate the activity of cleansing birds, audible stars, and glass stallions.  The effort the reader puts forth to interpret this poem is paid back exponentially by the poem's meaning.

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Having posted this, I must return to it with an amendment, as I have not done a complete job; and my mind is still busily trying to process this magnificent poetic accomplishment.  I realize, now, that this is a very Dantesque poem, in the way (if I may cite an example) that Eliot's "Hollow Men" is Dantesque.  Like The Divine Comedy, both "Hollow Men" and "Dialogue With Silence" create a symbolic geography, or terrain, or even a cosmos---which, although similar to the mundane world we inhabit, is still . . . somehow . . . different.  And this difference exists to allow the poem's processes to take place as we watch.  Eliot gives us a set of symbols as the coordinates of the strange place he wishes to describe in his poem.  Patriciajj gives us an entirely different, but just as active, set of symbols; especially clustered in the stanza that, as I suggest above, is her poem's gravitational center.  Like the Comedy, and like the broken jaw of the lost kingdoms of Eliot's Hollow Men, "Dialogue With Silence" is an account of a visit, a pilgrimage, an acquisition of knowledge obtained as she passed through the land of questions, the door of the unmanifest, and then to the place of the cleansing birds and audible stars.  In the very best of senses, this poem is very busy; and it will continue generating its effects, its impressions, its meanings to individual readers long after I have gone my way.