Angelina Ward Grimke — страница 6

  • Просмотров 1251
  • Скачиваний 9
  • Размер файла 26
    Кб

force of the smile, as it answers a question only with its own silent question, which might be any of many: "What do you think? Why do you ask? What difference would it make? Why ask me?" and so on. But the I, faced with this unanswering answer, as "unrippled" as the "glimmering waters" with their faint mirroring of darkness in darkness. But, because it wants to know "Would I be more?" the "I" is not satisfied with the easy destruction of its object, itself, and reels it back from "fort" to "da," to reconsider and yet only reiterate the question. Yet the form of the question shows a certain development of a capacity for deferral of the end, perhaps almost indefinitely, as "an ever-widening circle / ceasing

at the marge," ending only at the very brink at which the "I" stood wanting poise and hoping from which to cleave cleanly to the bottom of the strangely attractive "leaf brown pools" of the beloved’s eyes. And even here there is the inescapable finitude, death, for unless the pools were boundless in extent, the last inch of the last ripple would eventually hit the furthest shore and die. The "I" is asking about something like a legacy, a remembrance of itself after death, as much as it is asking about an extension of the process of dying, an extension that would prolong life. This escalated recapitulation of problem of the disturbance in the waters made by the once presumed to be undisturbing "soundless cleav[ing]" of the waters is

also then a failure, though a more ambitious one. The third question is the longest question, and the most troublesome. The sequence of questions escalates not only in scale of implication but, quite simply and correspondingly, in length: the first is a single line of eight words; the second is two lines, but still only eight words, and that equivalence may signal the special way in which the third instance, the repetition of the repetition, is something more than just another repetition in a sequence that could go on forever with equally important questions. The third is four lines, made up of seventeen lines: twice as many lines, an one more word surplus to doubling the number of words. If words were all of equal weight in the freight of potential meaning they carry, the

increase here would signal a categorical shift upward in scale, for it could not be accounted for even construing "repetition" as "repetition of all that came before," which would have yielded a quatrain of sixteen, not more, words. The third question is more troublesome than the first two for several reasons. It finally unequivocally indicates a fear of death as such. If one could assume that "deeply drown" were mere hyperbole, there is no mistaking "my white bones" as a sign of imagined real physical death, rather than simply some feeling of being overwhelmed, such as lovers often enough feel. (To argue that that feeling of being overwhelmed is also exactly equivalent to imagining real physical death, an argument I would assent to, seems

unnecessary here; and that argument would not entirely erase the difference between the indirection of "deeply drown" and the blatancy of "white bones" in any case.) The "I" is concerned about fidelity, in two senses. The bones are "white bones" and "my white bones" at that. Now, if the whiteness of the bones is significant beyond the fact that bones denuded of their flesh may be exposed as at least pale and perhaps bleached full white by the water, the specific form of the question the "I" asks may be important. "I" wants to know if "my white bones / Be the only white bones." (The undertow toward dialect use of "to be" enriches my speculation here.) First, consider "the only white

bones": Every lover wonders about being the only one for the beloved. Cultural imperatives may construct upon and within us a tolerance for infidelity, but the basic form of bondage that love involves requires an anxiety about the partner’s fidelity. (As an evolutionary psychologist might explain it, your DNA does not want anyone else’s DNA getting its resources, whether you are a man jealous of a woman, fearing she may have intercourse with another man and leave you to invest your resources in someone else’s offspring, or a woman jealous of a man who may be committing himself and his resources to the upbringing of his offspring, or a homosexual man or woman experiencing equivalent emotions about commitment from a partner.) If this is a lesbian love poem, directed at a