T.S. Eliot has won a BBC-sponsored vote on England’s favorite poet.

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VIRGINIA

Red river, red river,

Slow flow heat is silence

No will is still as a river

Still. Will heat move

Only through the mocking-bird

Heard once? Still hills

Wait. Gates wait. Purple trees,

White trees, wait, wait,

Delay, decay. Living, living,

Never moving. Ever moving

Iron thoughts came with me

And go with me:

Red river, river, river.

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On the page the poem looks like a river, its banked lines holding the poet’s fluency as it moves down the white of the page — or, now, the screen. But the words don’t really move on the page, just as the river which the poet observes seems not to move.

His feelings as he faces the water’s impassive lines flow in the direction of the river’s paradox: Visually unmoving, it nonetheless, he knows, moves massively along to some mouth.

Slow flow heat is silence

The poet’s consciousness, his emotions, are aflame in the face of the river’s beauty and power; but his is a silent intensity — the first of many paradoxes to come in this impossibly compact poetic utterance. He crackles, but only within.

No will is still as a river
Still.

Willfulness suggests forward motion; yet the powerful will of the river is still. The second still carries another meaning: The river endures in a way the poet will not. The river’s will is still there; will always be there. And perhaps the secret of its longevity is precisely its self-stilled, silent trick – its way of being both powerful and impassive.

Will heat move
Only through the mocking-bird
Heard once?

Slow/flow, will/still, bird/heard — Within his narrow simple lines the poet’s wordplay is almost silly, almost infantile in its obviousness. The feel is that of a litany, a sort of chant or prayer, from a simple consciousness, or from a consciousness in search of a certain simple purity of call and response. Then too, like the river, the poem seems to progress; the rhymes aren’t static rhymes, they’re language moving forward by small substitutions of letters, small increments, to gather up more and more meaning as it goes, the way the river gathers up limbs and leaves and carries more and more of them forward as it goes. Content is beginning to accumulate so subtly, so slowly, that we barely register it.

As to a paraphrase of the poet’s question about the mocking-bird: Am I right to feel anxious and sad that my poetic inspiration seems so random and fleeting a thing – the mocking-bird heard only once? Does the earth offer me more enduring forms of bliss? Why does my experience of my life feel so mockingly brief and stingy?

Still hills

Delay, decay.

How shall we read this? Shall we say that the poet speaks to himself here, reminds himself that despite the apparent tumbling contingency of his world the deeper reality is that the beauty of the world awaits him, holding open for him its gates that disclose lovely purple and white trees and a vast patient landscape of creative richness? Shall we say the poet anticipates heaven’s gates, heaven which awaits him and is beauty’s only permanent place? Shall we read this instead as a kind of demand — Wait! Don’t change! Delay the decay (Again the river poem’s curious movement forward via one small new letter.) that moves, unnoticed but undeniable, within me; let me live longer in this world. Let me learn the river’s secret of endurance — a certain self-calming, self-quieting, self-slowing, underneath which persists the heat of life.

Living, living,

Red river, river, river.

Final paradoxes: The deepest form of life never moves; it lacks, let us say, the agitation of the poet, the agitation of the human being. The human being who comes at the world with anxiety and restlessness, with questions and insistences, with an absurd headstrong commitment to unnaturally rapid motion through the world… This is the wrong form of will, a will that has not grasped the enigma of stilled power. Ever moving iron thoughts… Iron’s the toughest word in this poem, the most obdurate and mysterious. The powerful hot flow of creative blood through the poet – inspired for a moment by the mocking-bird – is iron now: cold, unflowing. The poet ends the poem with a deathly final thought – my thoughts will die with me. They will never move, like a river, beyond me.

Yet iron is precisely why the river’s red, perhaps; iron in nearby rocks will redden a river’s water. So the purity of the river in comparison with the impurity of the poet isn’t quite what it seems. Both poet and river are stained by the world, stained into existence… The poet’s thoughts enter fully here into the paradox of the natural world: Their very redness — readness? — constitutes their ever-moving endurance.

Stain, taint
Of the world
Is on them.