As always, I’ll first give it to you straight. Then I’ll present it again, with my comments.

*****************************

My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer

by Mark Strand

1

When the moon appears
and a few wind-stricken barns stand out
in the low-domed hills
and shine with a light
that is veiled and dust-filled
and that floats upon the fields,
my mother, with her hair in a bun,
her face in shadow, and the smoke
from her cigarette coiling close
to the faint yellow sheen of her dress,
stands near the house
and watches the seepage of late light
down through the sedges,
the last gray islands of cloud
taken from view, and the wind
ruffling the moon’s ash-colored coat
on the black bay.

2

Soon the house, with its shades drawn closed, will send
small carpets of lampglow
into the haze and the bay
will begin its loud heaving
and the pines, frayed finials
climbing the hill, will seem to graze
the dim cinders of heaven.
And my mother will stare into the starlanes,
the endless tunnels of nothing,
and as she gazes,
under the hour’s spell,
she will think how we yield each night
to the soundless storms of decay
that tear at the folding flesh,
and she will not know
why she is here
or what she is prisoner of
if not the conditions of love that brought her to this.

3

My mother will go indoors
and the fields, the bare stones
will drift in peace, small creatures —
the mouse and the swift — will sleep
at opposite ends of the house.
Only the cricket will be up,
repeating its one shrill note
to the rotten boards of the porch,
to the rusted screens, to the air, to the rimless dark,
to the sea that keeps to itself.
Why should my mother awake?
The earth is not yet a garden
about to be turned. The stars
are not yet bells that ring
at night for the lost.
It is much too late.

***********************************

This is a classic lyric. First-person. A private poignant moment evoked through many metaphors.

Yet despite its almost over-rich metaphorical content, the poem feels minimalist, its thin fraught lines conveying the poet’s impulse to say many things even as something holds him back.

The first stanza is one long sentence. It begins:

When the moon appears
and a few wind-stricken barns stand out
in the low-domed hills
and shine with a light
that is veiled and dust-filled
and that floats upon the fields,

The title tells us we’re in late summer, and the first lines tell us we’re in a beautiful rural setting in the evening. Already the feel is decidedly elegiac – end of the brilliant season (autumn approaching), end of the long summer day… Stricken inaugurates the parade of metaphors that stride this poem.

Indeed the poem, from the title on, is painterly, descriptive. Like many poems, it is essentially a list of physical features which, as the poem progresses, take on metaphysical implication. Elizabeth Bishop, UD thinks, does this sort of poem better than anyone else.

In this particular case, stricken (and similar words that succeed it) brings us to think about the mother’s increasing physical frailty, her growing proximity to death.

A note on style: There are few end rhymes in this poem (We do see hills and filled in this stanza.), but it’s nonetheless musical, lilting, a sort of chant, by virtue of assonance (moon, few), an almost constant recourse to monosyllabic words, and alliteration (few, filled, floats, fields).

******************************

I’ll post this much. More on its way.

******************************

Okay, I’m back. Those few stricken barns standing out amid the low-domed hills — This, let’s say, is his fragile mother standing out amid the world on this particular night, shining forth in her singularity to her son.

Yet her shine has dulled – veiled, dust-filled, floating already seem not merely words descriptive of the hazy summer night, but also figures for the mother’s indistinctness, her loss of firmness, as she ages.

my mother, with her hair in a bun,
her face in shadow, and the smoke
from her cigarette coiling close
to the faint yellow sheen of her dress,
stands near the house
and watches the seepage of late light
down through the sedges,
the last gray islands of cloud
taken from view, and the wind
ruffling the moon’s ash-colored coat
on the black bay.

Notice, first of all, how the poet has buried his mother in the middle of the stanza. This isn’t Poe, beginning his poem, “To Helen”

Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea…

Yadda yadda. The first word of the poem is Helen; it’s all about Helen. Mark Strand doesn’t even address his mother — the poem’s really, after all, about the poet’s distress at his sudden realization of her perishability — and he certainly doesn’t put her at the beginning of his lyric. She’s half-hidden in the middle of the first stanza, as if to acknowledge from the outset her low-domed, dust-filled, dimming existence.

And the rest of this stanza merely intensifies the theme of her dwindling, all shadow and smoke and faintness and seepage. The gray island of his mother will be taken from his view in the “seepage of last light.”

Although a summer poem, this writing is dominated by the gray moon, a lifeless pallid light.

Soon the house, with its shades drawn closed, will send
small carpets of lampglow
into the haze and the bay
will begin its loud heaving
and the pines, frayed finials
climbing the hill, will seem to graze
the dim cinders of heaven.

Carpets, finials, graze – light and trees take on modest domestic and agrarian values in this poem about a plain country woman. The haze remains in this stanza, but now there’s a shift to images of nature’s power – the loud heaving of the bay, and the pines so lifted up as to reach the stars.

That loud heaving intimates the suffering of the mother, to which the poet will now turn.

And my mother will stare into the starlanes,
the endless tunnels of nothing,
and as she gazes,
under the hour’s spell,

Starlanes is a neat neologism, sharing with finials and carpets the poet’s trick of almost comically domesticating the vast, powerful, and mysterious natural world. But there’s nothing funny about what comes next: the endless tunnels of nothing. Oldest poetic theme in the book, of course — grappling with your transience and insignificance in the cosmic scheme — but what matters is what poets bring to it. Strand, I think, brings something new.

she will think how we yield each night
to the soundless storms of decay
that tear at the folding flesh,
and she will not know
why she is here
or what she is prisoner of
if not the conditions of love that brought her to this.

It’s not merely the nothingness into which we disappear that the mother contemplates; it’s the idea of life itself as silent ongoing physical decay.

Worst of all is the not knowing — living out an entire life in ignorance of its meaning; and aware of having been trapped into a certain sort of existence, but not understanding how that entrapment took place. Maybe all we can say is that we’re here because our parents “clasped and sundered, did the couplers’ will.”

***********************************

Final stanza tomorrow morning.