PFA Transcript for Episode 31: Jane Kenyon, “Twilight: After Haying” Joanne: Hello, I’m Joanne Diaz. Abram: And I’m Abram Van Engen. Joanne: And this is Poetry for All. Abram: In this podcast we read a poem, discuss it, learn from it, and then read it one more time. Joanne: Today, we will be talking about Jane Kenyon’s poem “Twilight: After Haying.” Abram, could you read this poem for us? Abram: I’d be happy to. “Twilight: After Haying” [https://poets.org/poem/twilight-after-haying] Joanne: That is a beautiful poem. Abram: I love it! Joanne: Jane Kenyon for the win, I love Jane Kenyon. [Abram Laughs] Ah, Jane Kenyon everybody. No, this is just one of dozens of beautiful poems. So, Jane Kenyon was an American poet who was born in 1947 in Michigan, she went to college at the University of Michigan, where she studied with the American poet Donald Hall and they ended up falling in love and getting married. And then, for decades they lived together in rural New Hampshire on a farm and wrote poems together all day every day. That was their life! Abram: That does not sound bad. Joanne: It was a wonderful life, they loved each other deeply and they were each other's' best critics and best champions, and it’s just wonderful, wonderful. But there was difficulty, too. So, Jane Kenyon was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and wrote about that and reflected upon it in some of her greatest poems. One of my favorites is “Having it out With Melancholy,” it’s a terrific poem. But she also had poems that were attentive to ordinary, daily life in New Hampshire, but also attentive to current events. She wrote about the first Iraq war, she wrote about the American Civil War. Her range of interests and influences is exhaustive, right, and even in this poem you can see some of those influences really popping through. Abram: Yeah, and one of her powerful influences was John Keats, whom we covered in the last episode and in fact that poem we covered, “To Autumn,” was deeply influential and moving to her. In fact, she wrote her own poetry in response to Keats’ “To Autumn” and others have compared her piece to Keats in many ways. And as we can see in this poem, there are a lot of commonalities, there are a lot of similarities, but there are also quite significant differences. And to think about what this poem is doing that Keats might never have done is one way to think about what is the tradition here that we’re dealing with and how is she both drawing from Keats and distinguishing herself. So last episode we talked about how Keats, in many ways, wanted to write a kind of field recording of autumn. The sights, the sounds, the feels, the taste, the touch, the smell of autumn was what he wanted to really get down in that poem without really coming in and making some grand proclamation or declaration. In many ways, this poem does that within the poem. But it also does more. So for those who don't have the poem in front of them, this poem has five stanzas and the second, third, and fifth stanza are really kind of Keatsian in that way, they’re very observational, they’re just looking at things, detailing things very carefully and precisely. The second stanza begins with “The men sprawl near the baler,” The third stanza is about “the moon comes to count the bales,” and the last stanza is: “The last, sweet exhalations of timothy and vetch go out with the song of the bird; the ravaged field grows wet with dew.” And that would be very Keatsian to leave it there but she doesn’t leave it there. She has a first stanza that starts with this “yes, yes” and this fourth stanza where she says “these things happen, the soul's bliss and suffering are bound together like the grasses.” So Joanne, when you look at that first stanza, how does it change your sense of the poem? Joanne: Well you know, when we chose this poem and were discussing it earlier, you had just a simple question which was “to whom must she be speaking?” It‘s hard to know, but it does seem like she’s speaking to someone and perhaps this is just an interior discussion, perhaps this is just the poetic speaker ruminating on what the world does without the body. But how interesting that it begins with “yes,” which feels so affirmative. Yes, long shadows go out from the bales, and yes, the soul must part from the body, what else could it do? There’s this repetition of the word “yes,” which feels affirmative but it’s a stanza about inevitability. It’s a stanza about endings even before the poem has really taken off! And so it feels like a provocation, maybe she is trying to reassure someone of this fact of life, and maybe that someone is herself. It feels like the poem is already grappling with our mortality in very immediate ways. Abram: Yeah, and I like what you say there, but how do you affirm the inevitable? I mean to not affirm it doesn’t change it [Laughs]. And so there's this aspect of emotional processing that seems to be going on. We’ve talked many times about the importance of repetition in poetry and here, the fact that there are these two “yes”’s, it feels like she is moving herself into an acceptance of what is, in fact, inevitable. So there are really different ways of reading this stanza. On the one hand, it’s just, “hey, look, this is a fact of life, get over it.” Or it could be, “I cannot quite accept this fact of life, but I’m trying to get there.” Joanne: That’s right. I love how you connected this poem with “To Autumn,” which we discussed last week with Brian Rejack and Mike Theune, and they brought up this idea of how attentive John Keats is in almost creating this “field recording” of the environment. And we spent a lot of time talking about the world without us. But this is, in many ways, a world with us. So after that sort of exclamatory question of “what else can we do?” Or “what else can the soul do without the body?” She then transitions to the second stanza, “the men sprawl near the baler,” you see that they’re sprawling, “too tired to leave the field,” what I love about that first sentence in the second stanza is that she’s focusing on the presence of humans in this landscape and their labor. They’re the ones who are exhausted. This isn’t automated or mechanized, repetitive baling of the hey, there’s the suggestion that they did hard work. Yes, she’s really being sensitive to the environment, but also the people and the labor that are in that environment. Abram: We were talking before about the sense of painterliness that she has, she’s in some ways a very precise painter. And here, you get this enormous sort of scene of a field, and yet she is very carefully putting the tips of the cigarettes into the painting itself. And the same thing happens in the next stanza: “The moon comes [out] to count the bales,” I mean, how much bigger can you get? This cold, distant, calculating moon counting bales, and then what does she do? She zeroes in on the bird, the one bird among the dusty stubble that is singing, that’s where our attention focuses next. Joanne: I’m intrigued by that word “dispossessed” and how still, against that dispossession, the bird continues to sing. Abram: And one of the things I notice about that “dusty stubble” is that it’s another place where the imagery of death is linked throughout this poem. So you could almost think about them as baskets of images about life and baskets of images about death and she’s kind of balancing them against one another. So you’ve got “cigarettes” on the one hand and “roses” on the other hand. That the “night air” is coming but things are blazing against it. The moon, which feels very cold and distant, is there, but then you’ve got this bird singing. And then you have this “dusty stubble.” So you have both images of death, right, on the one hand the “stubble” is what remains, and then the “dust,” right, “from dust you are and to dust you shall return.” And yet at the end, all of that is wet with dew. And what you have are timothy and vetch, which are basically wheat and tares. And the tares themselves are a kind of cover that replenishes the ground and makes it ready for the next season. Joanne: Yeah, so there’s a cyclical quality to everything that she’s describing and whether she is feeling an internal struggle as she meditates upon this or not, again that inevitability is what completes the poem. This language of this poem feels very accessible to me, I feel like I know what each of the words means, but that doesn’t mean that I actually am right [Both laugh]. So I looked up the word “bale” because, I think I know what that means, it’s a bale of hay, it’s like a tightly bundled package of hay. But bale can also mean injury or harm or suffering or grief and it seems really useful for her to use bales of hay as the sort of guiding metaphor for this poem. Especially when we look at that second to last stanza. So she looks at the moon, comes to counts the bales and the “dispossessed...stubble.” And look at that second to last stanza: These things happen. . .the soul's bliss and suffering are bound together like the grasses. . . It helps me as a reader to know that a bale is not just bound but tightly bound. And the tightness of that binding, of “bliss” and “suffering,” that is the human condition. Abram: And even as you’re talking about it, you can tell she’s binding the poem together with the sounds that she’s using, so: bale, bliss, bound. These words come together. So she is playing with sound in a way that makes sense within the poem itself. You know, sometimes you read a poem and you’re like “That’s just a good poem.” But then you gotta ask yourself “what makes it good, what makes it work?” Just listen to how she plays with sounds in the second stanza. “Tired, talk, and tips.” The K sound of talk fits with “smoke,” and then two lines later you get “like,” and then the like becomes “night,” and then night turns to “air” and then air rhymes with “aware” at the end of the stanza. And even that rhyme is so interesting. This is a free verse poem that does not rhyme and suddenly you have a rhyme in it and it’s a little bit surprising when you come across it. But what is she describing in that stanza? She’s talking about how the night air is settled among them unaware, so they are in effect surprised by the night coming and the rhyme itself almost surprises us when it shows up. Joanne: Yeah, I love it, and that one stanza, that second to last stanza that you describe with the sounds, it’s just one of many, many examples in her work. She has this beautiful, tight, lyrical stanza that she created many, many times over her career. It’s so controlled and careful and it seems quiet, but the longer you pay attention to it, the more you observe, the more you notice, and the more it makes you want to be the kind of person who notices so much detail with such precision and I love that about her work. Abram: Part of the detail of her poetry comes out in the very precise kinds of adjectives that she’s using and the way that they kind of balance against each other. So if you even look at that last stanza--“The last, sweet exhalations”--those words, “last” and “sweet”--are doing a lot of work! And then “exhalations” is a very carefully chosen word to describe “grasses.” That ties the whole poem of course back to bodies and souls, and then that ravaged field. So “last” and “sweet” and “ravaged” are the key descriptors in that last stanza, and then the whole thing at the end “grows wet with dew,” it’s turning over, it’s beginning again, the life is coming back. Joanne: That helps me understand why the poem ends the way it does. I feel like that final stanza provides a sort of resolution for whatever struggle she was sort of grappling with in the world of this poem. And in the second to last stanza: These things happen. . .the soul's bliss and suffering are bound together like the grasses. . . It feels like she was able to describe the exhalations as “last” and “sweet” precisely because she had that kind of aha moment in the second to last stanza. And I love how even as she has that moment, you can’t see this if you’re listening to the podcast, but she has these ellipses, so there you have that repetition again. “These things happen” dot dot dot. “the soul's bliss and suffering are bound together like the grasses” dot dot dot. It’s almost like she’s trailing off into thought. And that trailing off is...it’s time. Once again, she’s taking time to look and to meditate, and with that time comes her ability to arrive at the finality and the sweetness of Fall. Abram: This is, to be honest, one of the first poems I’ve seen with ellipses in it. And it’s interesting the effect of ellipses, just that small choice on a poem, but it feels as though it is again doing the work of the poem, where shadows are lengthening, the soul is gradually departing from the body, the night is very gradually setting among them, and the ellipses are sort of letting the thoughts dwell and extend. Joanne: Yeah, beautiful. Abram: So, with all that said, would you like to read the poem for us again? Joanne: I am always up for reading a Jane Kenyon poem, I love it, yes, yes, I will! [Both laugh] [“Twilight: After Haying”: https://poets.org/poem/twilight-after-haying] Abram: Mmm. So good. Joanne: Yeah. Abram: For more info about Jane Kenyon, please visit our website at poetryforall.fireside.fm Joanne: And you can subscribe to Poetry For All wherever you get your podcasts. Please be sure to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. Abram: Thank you for listening.