Poem of the Week 2024/49

Worship Service

In a snowfall

    that obscures the winter grasses

a white heron –

using his own form

    to hide himself away.

– Kigen Dogen, translated by Steven Carter

A few swift strokes, & an entire world is summoned. It is winter, obviously, as snow is falling. We are in a snowfall, but who is we? Is "we" even the right word there? The reader is not told who or what is in the snowfall: is it the writer, the reader, both of them, or just a place & moment we are suddenly being made aware of? "We" – poet & reader – are not actively present; this poem is about a level of perception that goes beyond (over or under) our conscious viewing.

The snow is heavy enough to obscure the winter grasses. It doesn't quite cover or obliterate them, but there is enough snow to make them difficult to see. Perhaps we simply know they are there, because we've seen them there before, though now the snow blankets them. Then in the middle of the poem, a striking appearance: a white heron. We are not told "then I saw" or "suddenly there was " or "and then I noticed" or anything like that: the heron simply appears. Again, neither poet nor reader is shown actively perceiving this relatively large bird: it simply manifests its presence. As something living amid the snowy scene, it catches our attention. Herons are graceful, striking birds. It must take a moment for "us" to realize it's there: the white bird against the white ground & the falling whiteness of the snow. There are fine gradations of white, little spots of color in the eyes, beak, & legs, even with snow falling around them.

After the perception that there is a heron there, we have a dash – that is to say, a grammatical break, which signals a change, a movement in our perception. The poem guides us to move from the scene itself to a realization about the bird: he is using his own form to hide himself away. What does this mean? On one level, it's just the camouflage effect of a white bird in a snowy landscape. On another, it's a comment on how we – poet, poem, reader – did not at first see, & then saw, & now perhaps are back to having trouble seeing, the bird in his stillness against the snow. But it's not just about our perception of the bird's existence, its aliveness in a chilly scene: the bird himself is trying to hide himself away. Why? How is he doing it by using his own form? Perhaps just by staying still, white against white, melding with the world around him. Why is the bird trying to recede from view? He doesn't seem to feel danger (if he did, he could fly away). The bird is simply being itself. There is a mystery in a living thing impenetrable by other living things. And this mystery becomes part of the landscape, & of our realization of our existence in the landscape.

Winter, snow piling up, whiteness: all frequent images of some sort of void, something beyond human life & even comprehension (think of Melville's chapter on the whiteness of Moby Dick). We have a living thing trying to hide his own individual existence in this mysterious void. By noticing & perhaps trying to understand what this alien form is doing, we also contemplate this void, this spiritual meaning that floats just above (or beyond or under or over) the surface of our world. This awareness of a spiritual significance to a pleasing but not unusual view is no doubt why the poem is titled Worship Service. Here we do not have a Mass or other ceremony; there are no official prayers being chanted, either by or to or for us; we are not in a church, or sanctuary, or even on some sort of sacred ground. There is only the ordinary (or "ordinary") world, & a moment of perception, that brings us beyond the visible world into a deeper consciousness.

I took this from Zen Poems, edited by Peter Harris, in the Everyman's Library Pocket Poet series. It's interesting to contemplate the subtle ways a reading of a poem can be changed by the context in which we find it: read as part of an anthology highlighting Zen poems, spiritually inclined perceptions are going to be topmost for the reader. But there are other possibilities, other shades of emphasis: in an anthology highlighting poems celebrating the natural world, or even specifically birds, the emphasis might be first on the scene presented, on the life rather than emblematic significance of the heron in the snow. Or it could be presented & read as one of the "Eastern" poems that influenced in English translation the Imagist School of the early twentieth century, or the beats in mid-century. A poem can be held to the light at many different angles.