Silence, Voice, Body and Earth

When I think about the things I most love—after my husband and children—they include walking, swimming, dancing, and poetry. For me, poetry is very much about being in the body, about listening to the body’s natural rhythms and connections with the world around–and within.

As Eric and I have been working on our upcoming Poetry of Silence and Voice class—often while we’re walking—we’ve talked a lot about the relationship between silence, voice, and the body.

Last month, when we sent out a survey asking what kind of poetry class people were interested in, the one that got the most interest was the Poetry of Silence and Voice, but many of you were also interested in Poetry of the Body and in Poetry of the Earth.

One thing that's wonderful about poetry is that there is a lot of interconnection among these different themes; when you’re focusing on the poetry of silence and voice, you are inevitably listening to and writing from the body, and also listening to and writing from the earth.

We're delighted to teach on these subjects! Join us for our free class that you can watch later this month on your own schedule!

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I also want to share a short essay that Eric and I wrote together that explores these connections through two poems we love.

Sky and Earth, Mind and Body, Silence and Voice: The Poetry of Connection

All poetry is partly rooted in listening to the natural world and to the body, but in the Western tradition, this focus was intensified in the Romantic period.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in the face of growing industrialization, European poetry, and poetry in English in particular, really brought its focus back to the natural world.

Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and other poets of the Romantic period in England were starting to listen far more than, say, poets like Alexander Pope or George Herbert in previous eras, to the natural world, to their bodies, and to the interconnection of all beings.

Today, we want to share two poems–one by Wordsworth and one by Linda Hogan–that explore the relationship between body, earth, and voice.

Though it was scorned and written off when it first appeared, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" became one of the most beloved poems ever written in English. You may know it. But as you re-read it, pay attention to the way the speaker's attention, first up in the airy sky, comes back down to the earth, and the way this brings him back to himself:

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

Given the poem's emphasis on solitude and, by extension, silence, it's perhaps ironic that the experience Wordsworth describes was one he had on a walk with his sister, Dorothy, and also that the poem's two most famous lines, "They flash upon that inward eye/ Which is the bliss of solitude" were contributed by his wife, Mary.

And if that makes you curious, I highly recommend Kathleen Jones's book A Passionate Sisterhood, which explores the sisters, wives, and daughters of the Lake Poets!

But beyond those ironies, which maybe just deepen the poem's meaning, this is a poem about the interconnection of sky and earth, mind and body. It’s about knowledge of the heart and the spirit that goes beyond mere "thought".

Wordsworth isn't quite fully in his body yet, perhaps, but he's getting there. And it’s exactly through his writing, his poetic practice, that he’s able to have this relationship to the inward eye.

So this kind of poetry–the poetry of silence and voice, earth and body—comes in part from Romantic English poetry.

At the same time, it’s also worth noting that, like the earlier Enlightenment period, the Romantic period itself came at least in part out of European encounters with Native Americans, whose culture has long had a deep understanding of the connections between body, spirit, and earth.

These connections are expressed clearly and beautifully in this poem by Linda Hogan, a contemporary American and Chickasaw poet and environmentalist:

When the Body

By Linda Hogan

When the body wishes to speak, she will
reach into the night and pull back the rapture of this growing root
which has little faith in the other planets of the universe, knowing
only one, by the bulbs of the feet, their branching of toes. But the feet
have walked with the bones of their ancestors over long trails
leaving behind the roots of forests. They walk on the ghosts
of all that has gone before them, not just plant, but animal, human,
the bones of even the ones who left their horses to drink at the
spring running through earth’s mortal body which has much to tell
about what happened that day.

When the body wishes to speak from the hands, it tells
of how it pulled children back from death and remembered every detail,
washing the children’s bodies, legs, bellies, the delicate lips of the girl,
the vulnerable testicles of the son,
the future of my people who brought themselves out of the river
in a spring freeze. That is only part of the story of hands
that touched the future.

This all started so simply, just a body with so much to say,
one with the hum of her own life in a quiet room,
one of the root growing, finding a way through stone,
one not remembering nights with men and guns
nor the ragged clothing and broken bones of my body.

I must go back to the hands, the thumb that makes us human,
but then don’t other creatures use tools and lift what they need,
intelligent all, like the crows here, one making a cast of earth clay
for the broken wing of the other, remaining
until it healed, then broke the clay and flew away together.

I would do that one day,
but a human can make no claims
better than any other, especially without wings, only hands
that don’t know these lessons.

Still, think of the willows
made into a fence that began to root and leaf,
then tore off the wires as they grew.
A human does throw off bonds if she can, if she tries, if it’s possible,
the body so finely a miracle of its own, created of the elements
and anything that lived on earth where everything that was
still is.

This strange and beautifully intricate poem starts off with the night and in the earth and with the feet. It compares the body to a tree, rooted in this earth, which is itself a body, carrying all of its ancestors and our own.

Then the poem moves to hands, that birth children, that touch the future.

It’s as if in reflecting on this future, Hogan wants to forget the trauma her body carries, but can’t.

Instead, she returns to the hands, which do not, despite what some people believe, make us separate from or better than other animals. Crows, too, use tools –in fact, perhaps even better than humans, because they can repair their wings and fly--what a beautiful, surprising image!

Then Hogan moves from the animal world back to the world of trees, and ends with another beautiful, surprising image. Hogan compares the broken and healing human body to a line of willow trees used as the posts of a barbed-wire fence. The tree's life force manages to tear off the wires--we, too, the poem reminds us, can grow through and beyond our bonds.

By the end of the poem, the speaker is able to hold past, present, and future, trauma and new growth: "...everything that was / still is." The final astonishing line break is an example of the way poetry can use the small silence at the end of the line as a brief, momentary, sacred pause.

In the free classes we're going to offer at the end of this month, we'll be looking at poems like these and learning from them in more depth. We'll learn from their rhetorical and poetic techniques and also from their power of listening, feeling, and connecting.

As we move towards the fall and the weather starts to turn, I hope you can be in your own body and feel your own connections between sky and earth and silence and voice.

And I hope you'll join us for our free classes later this month. The teachings will be available starting September 28 for ten days. Register here.

If you’d like to join us in the longer class we'll be offering that starts in October, you can secure your place and also get an in-depth early bird bonus: Surprises, Turns, and Powerful Endings ($299 value). You can access the class live and/or through recordings that you'll have lifetime access to. See more and enroll here to secure your spot.

As always, reach out with any questions.

with love and appreciation,
Nadia