I’ve been considering a summer poem by Mark Strand.

Go here for the compete poem and a discussion of its first two stanzas.

Here’s the poem’s final stanza.

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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.
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.

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My mother will go indoors
and the fields, the bare stones
will drift in peace

The very simple narrative of this poem begins to conclude. His mother stands outside her farmhouse, smokes a cigarette, looks at the night sky… Then she goes inside. The sleep she will soon enter finds a correlative in the stones and fields that now “drift in peace.” But that phrase, given the death-hauntedness of this poem, drifts awfully close to rest in peace, especially when the poet makes them bare stones, so close to bare bones.

And there’s been a subtle temporal anxiety throughout the poem as well. Our lives seem peaceful drift, but actually, as the mother reflects in the second stanza, they are “the soundless storms of decay.”

small creatures –
the mouse and the swift — will sleep
at opposite ends of the house.

Again, note that though there’s little end rhyme in the poem, exact rhyme embeds itself in various lines (here mouse and house, drift and swift). And note that in a typical poetic move Strand veers away, as his mother prepares for sleep, from the mother herself, and instead projects her hiddenness and frailty onto the small creatures nesting in her house along with her.

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.

Like the bay, with “its loud heaving,” the cricket adds a clear, loud, disturbing voice to this otherwise drifty tranquil scene. These repeated sounds toll the bell of time and confusion and futility… Think of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” — we are here as on a darkling plain… I mean, read the whole thing. Very similar to Strand’s poem, including the sound of the ocean stirring thoughts of the turbid ebb and flow of human misery…

And now see how Strand, through the simple device of a repeated letter, hushes his poem towards its end, one soft R after another soothing us off to sleep:

the rotten boards of the porch,
to the rusted screens, to the air, to the rimless dark…

The sea that keeps to itself – Could we be any closer to Arnold’s lament? The sense of a strict separation between the natural and the human world, the natural world which almost seems to taunt us with its enigmatic subsistence, its arrogant sense of superiority, let’s say, to our poor passing selves… This takes us back to a phrase earlier in the poem: She will not know why she is here.

And the poet, fully in control of his dominant metaphor throughout, returns to the parallel between the slow invisible deterioration of the physical world, and the slow, increasingly visible deterioration of his mother. Rimless dark reminds us of the vast nothingness of the starlanes, and of his mother’s loss of firmness and presence as she ages.

And now we come to the paradoxical last lines of this poem:

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.

The poet makes his morbid meditation explicit. Let her sleep. She sleeps, through life, in vague veiled ignorance, and let her. After all, she is not yet dead, she does not yet have to anticipate with dreadful immediacy her death: The earth is not yet a garden about to be turned. The fields lie flat and tranquil, unshoveled yet for a grave. Let her be. The churchbells don’t yet ring for her. She’s like most people — occasionally chilled by long starlanes, but for the most part contentedly, dumbly, in the world.

It is much too late feels, as I say, paradoxical. Shouldn’t this be it is much too early? Too early for her to worry about her death?

But it’s the same paradox, I think, that we get at the famous conclusion of Eliot’s Prufrock:

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

The true waking, for lives lived in a fog, undersea, adrift, sleeping, is death itself. It is too late for the poet’s mother to awake to life; what she will awake to is death. She will awake from her rimless life into the stringency of death.