The Fallow Deer at the Lonely House
One without looks in to-night
Through the curtain-chink
From the sheet of glistening white;
One without looks in to-night
As we sit and think
By the fender-brink.
We do not discern those eyes
Watching in the snow;
Lit by lamps of rosy dyes
We do not discern those eyes,
Wondering, aglow,
Fourfooted, tiptoe.
– Thomas Hardy
Sometimes poets make you read a ways into the poem before its subject is revealed (Emily Dickinson, for example, wrote a number of what you might call riddle poems, in which you have to deduce the subject from the description – see for example this poem, which does not include the word snake). Here, Hardy lays it out right in the title: a fallow deer, a lonely house. (A fallow deer is a species of deer now widespread in the United Kingdom.) The deer brings us to a wild, or at least semi-wild, part of nature; the house must mean that people are or have been there, but it is a lonely house (an adjective that casts a shade of melancholy over the possible inhabitants), a house isolated from others (again, the situation of the house, physical & emotional, reflects on its inhabitants), bordering on an area untamed enough to include wandering deer, deer who have not yet learned to flee all signs of human habitation.
One reason to spell out where we are & who is involved is that the striking first line would be pretty creepy otherwise: who is this person staring in! a thief, a stalker, some yet unimagined criminal sort? Instead we know that it must be the deer who is outside, drawn (by curiosity, by the light, by who knows what fallow-deer thoughts) to look through the small gap in the curtains. The poet does not begin with his discovery of the picturesque animal staring in, but outside, with the fact of the animal.
The animal is on a sheet of glistening white: an as-yet pristine snowfall. (The second stanza confirms that the white is snow, & not, say, moonlight.) Sheet is interesting, as it can refer to human-made domestic bedding as well as to "an extensive unbroken surface"; this gentle poem puts us into a sort of hazy space between the "civilized" & the "wild", in which human & non-human are distinct but adjacent, curious about each other, open to each other.
The first line is repeated as the fourth line, a pattern that will recur in the second stanza; the lines fall lightly, perhaps like the snow that whitened the grounds outside of the house. It's nighttime, & the repetition gives a bit of a drowsy feeling to the lines. The last two lines of the first stanza bring us indoors to the human half of this encounter: but who is we? Two friends, a couple, one lone person speaking grandly & inclusively in the royal pronoun? Whoever we are, their activity is thinking by the fire (fender-brink, I assume, is the low grate in front of a fireplace), which is a mode suggestive of rumination, contemplation, reverie, rather than active planning.
The first stanza opened with the fallow deer looking in on those inside the house; the second opens with those inside the house perceiving the deer nuzzling up to the window. But this moment of closeness between human & animal can only go so far; we cannot discern those eyes; just as the repetition of one without looks in tonight emphasizes the inside/outside separation, so the repetition of we cannot discern those eyes emphasizes the unknowability of the deer. On one level, discern means something like to make out clearly, but it also suggests discriminations, usually of a moral nature, some fine-grained reading like connoisseurship. The eyes, in the common phrase a window to the soul, are, in this animal, beyond our comprehension; we cannot grasp the thoughts or soul or whatever it is that's there behind them. Nonetheless the two isolated beings, the people inside & the fallow deer outside, can exist together in a state of mutual & benevolent curiosity, a moment of grace.
Lit by lamps of rosy dyes: presumably this is the fire, glowing reddish & orange. That seems to be the only light on in the house, adding to the air of reverie; if the house were brightly lit, could it be described as lonely? Would a lone deer wander up to it out of curiosity? The lit by lamps line falls in between lines about the deer watching in the snow & the line about the inhabitant's inability to see the eyes; grammatically, given the semicolon before the lit by lamps line, it seems to refer to We, perhaps explaining why we cannot discern the eyes: is the light too dim? Are "we" half-drowsy? (There is something dreamlike in a pleasing way about the mysterious apparition at the window.) But the grammar of the line is flexible enough to cast a rosy glow back on the creature in the snow. A rosy glow is usually an optimistic one, & it seems to be so here. But its likely cause, fire, is a destructive element, the controlled use of which sharply separates humans from other animals. Again, the poem gives us a lovely view of two disparate creatures brought together, but at the same time reminds us of the unbridgeable gap dividing them.
Just as the first stanza ended with two lines describing the house's inhabitant(s), the second ends with two lines about the deer outside, as imagined by the house's inhabitant(s). The first of these lines – the two words wondering, aglow – seem to be what the inhabitant is imagining about what might be seen in the deer's eyes. But we also know that the inhabitant is wondering, & even, given the lamps of rosy dyes, aglow, giving us another suggestive link between the two beings. But then the final line reminds us of the gulf between them: it's possible the inhabitant might occasionally rise to tiptoe, but fourfooted is an indelible marker of difference, despite the peace & fullness of this momentary encounter in the solitude of a snowy winter night.
I took this from the Complete Poems by Thomas Hardy.
No comments:
Post a Comment