Poem of the Week: The Man in the Wind by Anne Stevenson | hair

The man in the wind

The man is blown away
Which keeps us awake tonight
Not the Black Wind Monk
shrinks into nooks and crannies,
Or the white face under the streetlight
Stricken with the guilt of his noise,
Or the hand of the great wind
Hit and hit the rainy alleys
While the executioner continues the investigation
And the prisoner’s loud voice
It bleeds over the cymbals and drums.

He listens.
His dream is the wind
It is anger that controls his mind
And he wears his skin.
His cry is not what the wind says
But the fear in which he lives.
The wind is no less human because it is more brutal.
Or to be, as now, a roar, a continuous roar
Like a wave that has no shore,
Nothing, and there is no internal or vertical ground to obstruct it
Pour the dark water over more water.

And now our polite island is sinking,
Small free ports with their tell-tale spy lights,
Ships, towers, cranes, towers, towers
The annoying horizon disappeared with its last horizon
To a pure, clean end,
To the only end of this uncreated night
Where the wind was softened by his sleep
For its own strength,
Moves without meaning or existence –
A wave that started before it began,
Which will not end after the end.

From her 1982 collection Minute by Glass Minute, Man in the Wind sets out to find a figure not quite beyond myth, but without the power of myth to exercise the means of understanding and control. Perhaps the poet was initially challenging herself to find the visual equivalent of the pareidolic man in the moon, often associated in English tradition with Sabbath violators and drunkards. But there is no child-friendly reassurance or comedy in the images that Stevenson conjures in the first verse in order to dismiss them. The poem goes on to paint a more intense picture of the man in the wind, as the character retains political resonance, and his persona as a threat to the civilizational achievements and values ​​of “our polite island.” It becomes a force of a stubborn nature, “without meaning or existence.”

In the first stanza, “The Black Monk” may refer to the deceptive visionary in Chekhov’s short story “The Black Monk.” A “mirage” or “ghost”, always wrapped in black, this visitor convinces the story’s human hero, Kufrin, of his actual existence in nature, and convinces Kufrin of his super-human genius. (The entire story, translated into English by REC Long, can be read here.)

Stevenson found the monk to be a redundant embodiment of the wind. Also inappropriate are the politically weighty images of power and abuse, which develop from “the white face cowering under the streetlight” and culminate in the images and sounds of torture, when “the prisoner’s soaring voice bleeds out on cymbals and drums.” The speaker rejects both supernatural power and the denigration of man, though the afterimages of the stanza haunt the rest of the poem.

Rhythmically, the second stanza refers to a moment when the wind calms down and the noise is replaced by something else, perhaps the mind’s ability to hear its own thoughts. The (necessary) interpretation of the man in the wind is man himself, with all his “rage” and “fear” when the wind blows again, and lets out “…a roar, a continuous roar” that will become human.

One particular skill of the poem is the composition of its soundscape: the preservation of rhymes, the attention to assonance, the breath-like patterns of long and short lines that unconsciously reinforce natural vision, and the connection between wind and breath. The architecture of the poem insists on a certain interaction between beginnings and endings; It echoes the rhythm of the human mind, both in its line and its orientation toward understanding. Stevenson also keeps the larger wind flowing: she allows us to hear the syntax-defying roar, a sonic crescendo different from, though not entirely separate from, the “long, melancholy, withdrawing roar” of Matthew Arnold’s Sea of ​​Faith at Dover Beach.

This sound of the wind, in addition to comparing it to “shoreless waves,” shrinks the human time span, the entire hypothetical time horizon, and the myth of beginnings and endings. He brilliantly deconstructs the world, and makes us hear the terrifying, unchartered existential storm. Although the poem can be read, in part, as an American poet’s examination of the political climate of the Britain she adopted in the early 1980s, her reach toward the concept of nature is incomparably broader.