Poem of the Week 2024/36

Birth

Oh, fields of wonder

Out of which

Stars are born,

And moon and sun

And me as well,

Like stroke

Of lightning

In the night

Some mark

To make

Some word

To tell.

– Langston Hughes

There's a wonderful sense of possibility in this poem, suitable to its subject, birth. Hughes uses his characteristically clear & direct language, but his approach to his subject is oblique & indirect. Birth most likely makes us think of humans or other animals, or some sort of biographical or autobiographical impulse, but we start off, after the praise-giving interjection Oh, with fields of wonder. Why are we out in the fields? Where are these fields? What is a field of wonder?

A field is not only open land planted with crops or pasture, which is probably the first meaning we think of, but also a sphere of activity or interest. So immediately we think of the earth, & things growing out of the earth, but also what you might call a source of energy, the activity & interest of the second definition. Wonder is an emotion of surprise & admiration, but it can also mean to be curious & even doubtful about something.

Immediately, in the four-word opening line, the tone is set of acclamation & praise, of the marvelous potential of creation, of the power of our earth, & also of our curiosity (&, perhaps, buried in some deep way, our doubts) about all these things.

These fields seem much vaster & more connected to the larger universe than we may have first thought when we registered field. The crops are not wheat or corn, but stars, sun, & moon, giant planetary constructs – and me as well, we are told by the poet in a separate line (a line which end-rhymes with the final word of the poem, tell, giving a retrospective emphasis to the line that introduces the speaker & a subtle strength to the line that mentions the imperative to tell). He is connected with nature, but not in the mundane way of being linked to other mammals, or even some earthly ecosystem: he is connected with the biggest elements, at least one of which determines life on earth. It's an image of understated but definite power, yet it also has a slightly comic irony in the offhand way he adds himself (me as well!) after the celestial fires.

Though this poem doesn't sound at all like Whitman, I find in it the same sense of human connection to the larger natural world, & that connection as a sense of beauty & joy, but also strength & even divinity, an approach that can be traced back to the New England Transcendentalists.

The poet goes on to compare himself to some stroke / Of lightning / In the night; once again, he is comparing himself to mighty natural elements, but again there is a sober subtext that undercuts what might otherwise seem braggadocio: lightning is a powerful & potentially destructive force, but it hits where it hits (the lightning doesn't pick a target; the atmospheric events that produce it also direct it) & after a brief flash it is gone. The poet specifies the lightning hits in the night, in the darkness: dark before, then the brief flash, then darkness afterward. Underlying the dramatic image of the lightning flash is a poignant sense of the brevity of human life, & of how little we control the circumstances that produce & shape us.

The poem ends with the speaker, the "me" who is like a stroke of lightning, with Some mark / To make / Some word / To tell. The words fall with a strong rhythm, strengthened by their parallel structure. What is the mark? What is the word? We don't know, & we never find out; the infinitives – to make, to tell – here indicate future action. This is the moment of birth, of potential (I typed that word too quickly & it came out poetential, & maybe I should have left it at that), when we have our brief moment in which to try to express, if we can, what the lightning in us needs to say.

I came across this poem while leafing through my copy of The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersand & Associate Editor David Roessel. I liked this poem a lot, but something about it struck me as not quite . . . I don't know what. Was it, despite its underlying tenderness & potential sadness, just too optimistic & energetic for me? Then I noticed I had flagged another page in the volume, so I went there & found this poem:

Flotsam

On the shoals of Nowhere,

Cast up – my boat,

Bow all broken,

No longer afloat.

On the shoals of Nowhere,

Wasted – my song –

Yet taken by the sea wind

And blown along.

– Langston Hughes

It struck me that this poem, well over 200 pages later in the collection than the first one, formed an excellent companion to it (such are the rhythms in a poet's life's work). There is the same clear & direct phrasing, the same use of brief lines whose rhythm is strengthened by parallelism, the same connection of the speaker with greater natural forces. There are differences as well, of course, as the predominant mood of this poem is one closer to an exhausted end rather than an exhilarating beginning – there's the use of dashes to indicate broken phrasings, for example, & instead of fields of wonder, we are, twice, on the shoals of Nowhere (we're not even at sea, or on the sand, we're in that liminal limbo space designated a shoal). Yet just as the optimism of Birth is subtly undercut, so is the despair of Flotsam: though the poet says that his song (his word to tell, in the phrasing of the first poem) is wasted, yet it is taken up by the sea wind – taken up can mean not only carried along, but also promoted by, as if the wind is not just a neutral carrier but interested in this broken singer's song. Who knows where that song will end as the wind carries it over the sea, or whose ears it will end up falling into, & to what fruitful ends?