Joseph Conrad said "My task, above all, is to make you see." Since the optometrist provides what you need to see correctly (or see the way you want, as with Hodgen's old woman), he might be ironically said to have a Conrad-like role. But obviously this is a joke. "Seeing" is a common synecdoche for "understanding", but seeing is by no means all of understanding and in fact is often not even part of it. (Old joke: "I see" said the blind man.)
Hodgens' poem is about seeing in this double sense. I have a feeling that the last six lines, which are the core, were written first. Their tone is different from the elaborate irony (and I would say archness) of the rest. The old woman wants to see everything in a certain way and goes to the optometrist to obtain the visual mode she wants,and he, like a poet in the double sense just discussed, provides it. (Actually the poet ought to provide more than just confirmation of what people want to see anyway.) Hodgens infers, from seeing her watch her husband mowing lawns, that her preferred way of seeing is in fact not just visual but emotional as well:
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... She watches him moving from row to row,
loves the ease with which he moves, sees the lawn changing right before
her eyes, like some eye chart of I's and E's slowly coming into view,
her love for him the one thing that is perfectly clear.
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It is in the last six lines that the larger aspect of the "vision" are spelled out:
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It is as if they live in some peripheral light that is always glowing,
that we can see sometimes, like a lark that flares up suddenly
out of the corner of our eyes, somehow always lifting
from this cock-eyed part of the world, away from the glare,
to some other place where everything is just the way we want it,
just a tranquil darker.
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The "peripheral light" is the happy resignation of a contented old age, which the rest of us see "sometimes, like a lark that flares up suddenly." (It's not for the woman to "Rage, rage at the dying of the light"; be quiet, Dylan Thomas.) This is the true way of seeing; the rest of the world is "cock-eyed", lost in "the glare", for not seeing. The woman wants her sunglasses to confirm for her the way she sees the world. Of course the sunglasses can only do this in a literal, not metaphorical, sense.
So far, I have explained less than half the poem. Why the references to Wordsworth, to "God himself, the great optometrist", the banana peel, the safe falling on us and so on? The old woman's misuse of the word "tranquil" calls to mind Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical Ballads:
"...poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion,similar to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind."
It is true that the kind of becalmed, quasi-philosophical view of the world the woman experiences is associated with Wordsworth's work, especially in "Tintern Abbey" and The Prelude. Hodgens' last six lines do in fact sound something like lines 85-100 of "Tintern Abbey".
But it's not enough to point out Wordsworth; Hodgens has to put him into the poem. This seems to mea mistake. He must assume a satirical tone, because turning Wordsworth into an optometrist is inherently odd. Likewise God is called
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the great optometrist, or at least that dim image
we strain to see of the omniscient god who mostly does not trifle with us.
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Do we all really try to "see" God in such a literal sense? The lines that follow make little sense to me. I suppose Hodgens is referring to the painful accidents of a life in which we do not pay attention to the right things because we are looking elsewhere, "as if" we were characters in New Yorker cartoons. To put it as politely as possible, this seems unduly contentious, making general statements about how "we" see the world and react which are simply not true. Some of us may feel ourselves damned, or some may think there is no heaven and we will be simply snuffed out. It's amusing to see the waiting room as full of old New Yorker mags with splendid poems in them but why are we characters in the cartoons? New Yorker cartoons are not about people slipping on banana peels.
Hodgens should have considered expanding his final six lines rather than grafting them on to something else that does not fit.
