The poet starts his double dealing almost immediately. Take the line "and when the garden began to grow/'twas like a garden full of snow." I suppose on a visual level this simile works. I can picture a garden so full of white flowers that it was a blanket of white similar to a blanket of snow. At the same time, however, the simile conjures up a dead garden, because a garden full of snow, is a garden in the middle of winter, suffocating and barren. Thus, the line negates itself, because the garden that grows is like a garden that dies. The man who deals double indeed. "Yet, when the snow begins to melt" is similarly double edged line. Melting snow suggests spring and rebirth. But if we're still talking about a garden so full of growth that it appeared covered in snow, melting snow means those lovely white flowers are dying. Thus fecundity and death are linked by the double dealer in the opening lines, but we still have to traverse the entire poem for this death to take on it's literal form

It seems to me the poet uses at least three techniques for driving us along this journey. All of them require confounding our expectations in the structure of the poem.

The first place we notice something is awry is when the 'twas stops referring back to the garden, which happens when the ship is compared to the bird. Prior to that a garden of seed was compared to a garden of snow. When the snow melts the garden is compared to a ship without a belt. (I'm not sure what this means, but I assumed that it was being compared to the garden, rather than the snow). Suddenly, we get a shift as the ship is compared to a bird, the bird to an eagle, the sky to a roar, and now we're really off the deep end.

Second, each 'twas line contains a double of nouns connected by a prepositional phrase. The poet alternates which noun drives the following "when" line. This creates a lilting tempo in terms of the rush of imagery and leaps of logic. When the noun modified by the prepositional phrase (the ship, the bird) make their leap to the following "when" line, one does not feel the ground shift under one's feet as much as when the noun in the prepositional phrase (snow, sky, door) leaps into the following "when" line. This is because the nouns like bird and ship are logically connected to the previous lines through simile, while the nouns like snow, sky, and door are modifiers connected only tangentially.

The third technique, used only once, is the play on the word crack, in which it goes from narrow opening when talking about the door to the sound of a stick across a back.

The overall effect is to feel oneself in constantly shifting terrain, as in a dream, as Pinsky suggested, or as in Robert Graves' "Warning to Children" where we are on a similar epistemological quest through shifting landscapes of imagery. There we double back on ourselves through never ending labyrinths. Here our journey comes to an abrupt and surprising end.

I would like to hear Mr. Pinsky's take on the line about the ship and its belt, if he is so inclined to share, both what the hell a ship without a belt is and how it works as a simile.

The first technique the poet uses is to alternate which noun drives the following "when" line.

Hi SV,

At first, I thought maybe the poet would alternate regularly between the two noun positions. But it seems to be a rather arbitrary thing, based, I think, on which noun the poet can use to his best advantage.

I would like to hear Mr. Pinsky's take on the line about the ship and its belt, if he is so inclined to share, both factually what it means and how it works as a simile.

Some versions of Anon's poem use "bell" instead of "belt," which is more understandable.

Pinsky said he'd comment more when he got back from a plane trip he took somewhere. However, he has already posted to several threads under a secondary name he's using on his trip.

MA

salut svs,

we had similar takes on several aspects of the poem (mine are spelled out in campion's thread and another one) ...

i see what made you think of the Graves' poem, which i tracked down - new to me - the recursiveness of things ...

As to ship's belt, the image I get is a vague memory of seeing - either in books or in my sailing days 3 decades ago - a ship's wooden hull "belted" with an iron (? or some such) strap as if to "hold it together" somewhere at or near waterline ... My image from the poem was of a ship without a belt trying to sail and being unable to withstand the rigors, the hull fragmenting into dysfunction ... like a bird without a tail could not navigate or balance aloft...

One other line: You state: "Melting snow suggests spring and rebirth. But if we're still talking about a garden so full of growth that it appeared covered in snow, melting snow means those lovely white flowers are dying."

Well, I guess because the simile means (to me) that there are no flowers but rather their whiteness has "become" (via likening) snow, then I took the simile to mean we'd left the actual flowers that evoked snow behind ... [and, in life, they have died before snow comes, so i didn't see the melting snow as meaning white flowers dying - i think the white flowers only served the purpose of evoking snow for the poet-narrator ... it's a minor and rather hard-to-articulate distinction i'm seeing here, so really not sure it mounts to much... I'd say that it's the snow itself that - as synecdoche for winter - evokes death already in this outset though.

I enjoyed reading the convergences in our viewpoint ... i'm usually out on a limb here in my interps and always nicely surprised when another reads a poem similarly as i have ... And, meanwhile, vive la difference!

Ah yes somehow I missed your excellent post before I posted. Apologies.

At first, I thought maybe the poet would alternate regularly between the two noun positions. But it seems to be a rather arbitrary thing, based, I think, on which noun the poet can use to his best advantage.

But the question is advantage to what end? In your post, you imply that the end is simply his own showmanship and the delight it provides for the audience, but I think that in addition to the delight he aims for, he also uses it as a tool to control the speed at which we rush headlong towards the poems conclusion. As Julian23 pointed out after the eagle line, the leaps become more and more outlandish. It is not a coincidence (at least to me) that after this line, the "when" lines only contain the second noun, the one I describe as less rooted to the simile.

One technique of shipbuilding uses a cable ("belt") wrapped laterally around the planks of the hull to pull them together & help make them watertight.

The Roman poet Horace refers to these cables in an ode (i.14) of political allegory ("the ship of state"):


ac sine funibus
vix durare carinae
possint imperiosius
aequor

and with no cables
your hull can't hold out long against
so imperious
a tempest


This ode also observes that

nil pictis timidus navita puppibus
fidit

a wary navigator does not trust
in gilded sterns.

Jim Powell, I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed your poem "First Light" here on Slate.

Mary Ann

Jim Powell has the clear, useful information about ships and "belts" that I was about to put as a more vague impression that some ships are held together that way.

Intuitively, the hard-rhyming word "belt" seems more satisfying to me because of its relation to the way things like gardens and birds are defective, or amiss, in this phase of the poem: the bird without a tail and the garden full of snow, the snow melting. Then the violence of roaring sky, lions, eagles returns to the defectiveness of the door, and, by the end, "death indeed." So the "bell" in some verisions looks to me like a rationalizing--too rational-- emendation, Mary Ann.

In other words, Jim Powell's information confirms my sense that "belt" is in the spirit of the poem.

(And yes, I'm proud that "First Light" was published here.

Thank you Mary Ann & Robert Pinsky for the kind words.

If the poem dates from the 17th century it very likely that the author knew the ode I reference (nearly any literate English person would) & had it in mind in mentioning "belts". Which reinforces the sense that the poem is political.

I'm making my way through the final pages of Kipling's Complete Verse -- a poet so out of fashion as to be engaging -- and notice two poems that juxtapose well with "There was a man of double deed" and Horace's Ode 1.14 -- "The Vineyard" and "To The Companions". There is a prize of one spectral laurel wreath for the first person naming the topical occasion of each.

Here are the two Kipling poems I had in mind; I was misremembering the title of one.



The Portent

Oh, late withdrawn from human-kind
And following dreams we never knew!
Varus, what dream has Fate assigned
To trouble you?

Such virtue as commends the law
Of Virtue to the vulgar horde
Suffices not. You needs must draw
A righteous sword.

And, flagrant in well-doing, smite
The priests of Bacchus at their fane,
Lest any worshiper invite
The God again.

Whence public strife and naked crime
And - deadlier than the cup you shun -
A people schooled to mock, in time,
All law - not one.

Cease, then, to fashion State-made sin,
Nor give thy children cause to doubt
That Virtue springs from iron within -
Not lead without.



The Vineyard

At the eleventh hour he came,
But his wages were the same
As ours who all day long had trod
The wine-press of the Wrath of God.

When he shouldered through the lines
Of our cropped and mangled vines,
His unjaded eye could scan
How each hour had marked its man.

(Children of the morning-tide
With the hosts of noon had died;
And our noon contingents lay
Dead with twilight’s spent array.)

Since his back had felt no load,
Virtue still in him abode;
So he swiftly made his own
Those last spoils we had not won.

We went home, delivered thence,
Grudging him no recompense
Till he portioned praise or blame
To our works before he came.

Till he showed us for our good –
Deaf to mirth, and blind to scorn –
How we might have best withstood
Burdens that he had not borne!



Presumably the 1 million Americans imprisoned for getting high would agree that The Portent is prescient.

In response to your challenge (always love a challenge) was going to guess - but i guess i went to sleep instead - that "The Vineyard" might have been a timely (yesterday) response by Kipling to the outcome of WWI - where "he" in the poem might have been the United States and our late entry ... ??

Jim, Kipling's "The Portent" mocks those supporting the Volstead Act, which prohibited alcohol. But much as I'd like a laurel wreath, I don't deserve it, because it's only thanks to Google that I know the answer.

MA

and now your second would seem to be in "honor" of Prohibition. It had to be especially galling for Kipling to see the sun set on his British empire and then to also have the new "rising star" dare to suggest he shouldn't drown his deceptions in drink as well... and, from the title, it would seem that he saw in such laws as Prohibition a threatening self-righteousness which, I dare say, he rightly saw as well - he just needed to live long enough to see a tee-totaling alcoholic hit the White House to see that "portent" gain full sway (the irony being that it has been just another nation - for whom Kipling seems to have had particular pique - doing the reincarnated British-Empire thing, even retrodding the same 'colonial' soil... )

The Portent was occasioned by American alcohol Prohibition (Volstead Act) but addresses prohibitions more widely -- an expansion of the dimensions of concern characteristic of poetry, yes?

I found that the stereotype of Kipling as an "imperialist" did not survive a reading of his Collected Verse. Unlike the people who propagate this distorting, politically blinkered view of his work (mostly, I bet, without taking the trouble to develop an acquaintance), Kipling was capable of learning from experience, rather than contenting himself all his life with parroting what he was told by people who never read the book.

This process of pseudo-political distortion is a good example of what Julien Benda analyzes, demolishes & laments in The Treason Of The Intellectuals -- a book as valuable now as when Cocteau reviewed it, and as unread now as Kipling.

Meanwhile I'd like to hear more about the putative 17th-century topicality of There was a man of double deed.

Guilty as charged. I was indeed parroting "conventional wisdom" about Kipling without having read him myself enough to have gauged the validity of such a generalized interpretation of him. I was weaned on Jungle Book, Just so Stories, later "If," memorably saw the films of The Man who would be king, Gunga Din, Captains Courageous, Mowgli, etc. but it's true that "White Man's Burden" forever stuck as symbol of my overall read of him.

So thanks for the "tip." Without time to pursue it as would seem warranted, i do see now from the cybercheatsheet (i.e., wikipedia) that his life - and perhaps notably the death of his son in WWI - may have been the kind of thing you suggest - life experience - made him rethink things. I see that some think he was being ironic in such as White Man's Burden in the first place. But his greasing the skids to override his son's initial rejection from service in WWI and the alleged ensuing guilt over his death would suggest that at least he wasn't ironic back at the time of White Man's Burden about Britain's responsibility to save the world - or so it would seem. Do you see his poetry and point of view shifting pivotally after WWI ??

(I didn't know til now - also from wiki - or else had forgotten that he was the first British and the youngest ever - at age 42 - recipient of the Nobel Prize in Lit.)

As to the 17th-c. and Double Deed, see first the thread by BIlly Pilgrim and then the one of Paul Breslin's re the political reading of the poem.