Final Study Poem - The Testing-Tree

OK - for the final 1L study poem, I have to pull out the stops.  While there are a lot of poems that turn on property, or what the ownership of private property does/means for our society, I think I'll have to post up one of my favorite poems in the English Language.  I give you "The Testing-Tree" by Stanley Kunitz, both for its gorgeous language and for the perspective I hope it may lend.   Those last 9 lines are amazing.

Stanley Kunitz was born in Worcester, Mass., in 1905. He's won the National Book Award,the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Pulitzer Prize,the Bollingen Prize, a Ford Foundation grant, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, Harvard's Centennial Medal, the Levinson Prize, the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award, a senior fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Medal of the Arts, and the Shelley Memorial Award. He served for two years as Consultant in Poetry (Poet Laureate) to the Library of Congress, was designated State Poet of New York, and is a Chancellor Emeritus of The Academy of American Poets. In 2000 he was named United States Poet Laureate. A founder of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass., and Poets House in New York City, he taught for many years in the graduate writing program at Columbia University. He lives in NYC and Provincetown.

He's also a genuinely sweet human being, one of our best mystic poets, and at 100 years, I hope he keeps rolling still.  The joke is that he was a very good poet until his 70s, when he became a great one.

Often, the "big names" of poetry cause people to clench up - to think, "my god, I've got to analyze and be clever from the get-go."  Relax.  There is no test here.  Read the poem aloud.  While normally I advocate multiple reads (as one would read a monologue in a play at least twice to become familiar with it), today I will give you a key: the poem, much like Galvin's, is in the voice of a mature speaker recalling his childhood.  The poem turns on a boy, somewhat alienated from society, making a bargain with the deity or with fate, tested and pr oven by throwing stones against a tree trunk (and it seems Stanley nailed all three in his own life).

Some of you might catch the parallels with Rousseau's "Confessions:"

One day, while musing upon this melancholy subject, I mechanically amused myself by throwing stones against the trunks of trees with my usual good aim, that is to say, without hardly hitting one. While engaged in this useful exercise, it occurred to me to draw a prognostic from it to calm my anxiety. I said to myself: "I will throw this stone at the tree opposite; if I hit it, I am saved; if I miss it, I am damned." While speaking, I threw my stone with a trembling hand and a terrible palpitation of the heart, but with so successful an aim that it hit the tree right in the middle, which, to tell the truth, was no very difficult feat, for I had been careful to choose a tree with a thick trunk close at hand. From that time I have never had any doubt about my salvation!

I tend to resist exegesis to a certain extent, but I believe the question the poem ultimately asks is were these the right things to bargain for, after a dreamlike sequence that mobilizes some dark themes.  The poem was written during the Vietnam war, if that helps any of you. I was hoping the poem might suggest our current testing is perhaps not the most important thing we are facing, nor should we think that the satiation of our individual selves are the appropriate end to the formation of our wishes.

Before the poem itself - a prose bit from Stanley, which I hope is also evocative and useful for frazzled law students, from the introduction to his book, "Passing Through:"

How true! And yet one finds to one's dismay that the poetic imagination resists being made the tool of causes, even the noblest of causes. The imagination lives by its contradictions and disdains any form of oppression, including the oppression of the mind by a single idea.

Poetry, I have insisted, is ultimately mythology, the telling of the stories of the soul. This would seem to be an introverted, even solipsistic, enterprise, if it were not that these stories recount the soul's passage through the valley of this life-that is to say, its adventure in time, in history.

If we want to know what it felt like to be alive at any given moment in the long odyssey of the race, it is to poetry we must turn. The moment is dear to us, precisely because it is so fugitive, and it is somewhat of a paradox that poets should spend a lifetime hunting for the magic that will make the moment stay. Art is that chalice into which we pour the wine of transcendence. What is imagination but a reflection of our yearning to belong to eternity as well as to time?

In an age defined by its modes of production, where everybody tends to be a specialist of sorts, the artist ideally is that rarity, a whole person making a whole thing. Poetry, it cannot be denied, requires a mastery of craft, but it is more than a playground for technicians. The craft that I admire most manifests itself not as an aggregate of linguistic or prosodic skills, but as a form of spiritual testimony, the sign of the inviolable self consolidated against the enemies within and without that would corrupt or destroy human pride and dignity. It disturbs me that twentieth century American poets seem largely reconciled to being relegated to the classroom-practically the only habitat in which most of us are conditioned to feel secure. It would be healthier if we could locate ourselves in the thick of life, at every intersection where values and meanings cross, caught in the dangerous traffic between self and universe.

Poets are always ready to talk about the difficulties of their art. I want to say something about its rewards and joys. The poem comes in the form of a blessing-"like rapture breaking on the mind," as I tried to phrase it in my youth. Through the years I have found this gift of poetry to be life-sustaining, life-enhancing, and absolutely unpredictable. Does one live, therefore, for the sake of poetry? No, the reverse is true: poetry is for the sake of the life.

S.K.
1995

**

The Testing-Tree

                                    1

              On my way home from school
                      up tribal Providence Hill
                               past the Academy ballpark
              where I could never hope to play
                      I scuffed in the drainage ditch
                               among the sodden seethe of leaves
              hunting for perfect stones
                      rolled out of glacial time
                               into my pitcher's hand;
              then sprinted lickety-
                      split on my magic Keds
                              from a crouching start,
              scarcely touching the ground
                      with my flying skin
                              as I poured it on
              for the prize of the mastery
                      over that stretch of road,
                             with no one no where to deny
              when I flung myself down
                      that on the given course
                              I was the world's fastest human.

                                   2

              Around the bend
                     that tried to loop me home
                             dawdling came natural
              across a nettled field
                     riddled with rabbit-life
                            where the bees sank sugar-wells
              in the trunks of the maples
                     and a stringy old lilac
                            more than two stories tall
              blazing with mildew
                     remembered a door in the
                            long teeth of the woods.
              All of it happened slow:
                      brushing the stickseed off,
                            wading through jewelweed
              strangled by angel's hair,
                      spotting the print of the deer
                            and the red fox's scats.

                  Once I owned the key
                          to an umbrageous trail
                                thickened with mosses
                  where flickering presences
                          gave me right of passage
                                as I followed in the steps
                  of straight-backed Massassoit
                          soundlessly heel-and-toe
                                practicing my Indian walk.

                                3

              Past the abandoned quarry
                     where the pale sun bobbed
                            in the sump of the granite,
              past copperhead ledge,
                     where the ferns gave foothold,
                            I walked, deliberate,
              on to the clearing,
                     with the stones in my pocket
                            changing to oracles
              and my coiled ear tuned
                      to the slightest leaf-stir.
                            I had kept my appointment.
              There I stood in the shadow,
                      at fifty measured paces,
                            of the inexhaustible oak,
              tyrant and target,
                      Jehovah of acorns,
                           watchtower of the thunders,
              that locked King Philip's War
                      in its annulated core
                           under the cut of my name.
              Father wherever you are
                      I have only three throws
                           bless my good right arm.
              In the haze of afternoon,
                     while the air flowed saffron,
                           I played my game for keeps --
              for love, for poetry,
                     and for eternal life --
                           after the trials of summer.

                              4

              In the recurring dream
                     my mother stands
                           in her bridal gown
              under the burning lilac,
                     with Bernard Shaw and Bertie
                           Russell kissing her hands;
              the house behind her is in ruins;
                     she is wearing an owl's face
                           and makes barking noises.
              Her minatory finger points.
                     I pass through the cardboard doorway
                           askew in the field
              and peer down a well
                    where an albino walrus huffs.
                           He has the gentlest eyes.
              If the dirt keeps sifting in,
                    staining the water yellow,
                           why should I be blamed?
              Never try to explain.
                    That single Model A
                           sputtering up the grade
              unfurled a highway behind
                    where the tanks maneuver,
                          revolving their turrets.
              In a murderous time
                    the heart breaks and breaks
                          and lives by breaking.
              It is necessary to go
                    through dark and deeper dark
                          and not to turn.
              I am looking for the trail.
                    Where is my testing-tree?
                           Give me back my stones!

    Stanley Kunitz

Comments

[msb]

hey you...i don't know if i'm doing this right...i thought i'd already posted a comment but it's not showing up. Anyway, thx for the email and good luck on your exams. i love this poem, and remember when you first showed it to me.

take care, michele

[James]

I love you.

[Thank you]

Thank's for the help on my report, even though it probably wasn't meant for that was it? Sorry about that last comment.

[1Lpoet]

found this just in time.