Mary Archer

English 361 Stewart

16 Mar 2015

Midterm: Deception, Purity and Sight

Naomi Lizard’s “Ordinance on Arrival” plays like a jumble of dissonant impressions,

as if the “you” in the poem just heard the consoling, deadly decree of an office secretary and has

yet to digest it, like a daze of shock before the onset of rage. The first stanza reads like an ironic

congratulation, as the speaker praises the perseverance of the one being spoken to in surviving a

trip“statistics prove that not many do,” while implying in the second stanza that the perseverance

is due to dogged stupidity, because when someone says “It is not our fault you have been

deceived” they mean it is your fault for having a lack of discrimination. I take it by the reference

to “medical attention” and the orderly, bland way the speaker is soothing and devastating at the

same time that the location is a hospital and the speaker is used to dismissing those in the middle

of what must be critical condition.

The writer juxtaposes ordinary sounding lines that set up some expectation of eventual

relief, such as the mentioned “Some of you need medical attention,” and then in the very next

“None of this is available,” removes all hope in a fashion that mirrors magical realism, in that it

exaggerates emotional truth in what should really be more run-of-the-mill, but less truthful,

reality. As in, if someone says “Some of you need medical attention,” the correct response is “it

will be available shortly.” Unless, the patient’s condition is a state emotional or physical where

the doctors can be of no help, such as the condition of needing a new heart and fast, and then

finding out none exists in the necessary timeframe. The indention of the first line in the second

stanza, an indentation that is nonrepeated in the poem, is like a pause to let the utter futility of

bearing hope sink in, as the speaker says,

This is not

a temporary situation;

it is permanent.

The next line “Our condolences on your disappointment” reads as flippant, since

“disappointment” doesn’t cover the kind of loss the patient must feel because the journey to the

hospital must have been one of dire importance if the patient had to “survive,” or risk great

injury, to get there.

The word “condolences” when read has the feeling of significance as if it ties together

many words, and indeed it does. The first syllable “con” is similar to the second syllable in

“welcome” (line 1) and also syllable to the word “none” (line 9). As it turns out, the secretary is

really admitting no one to the necessary care they need, and the way the speaker deflects any

notion of fraud at the end is similar to the way a con-man might speak to the one he has just

conned. The first and second syllable taken together, “condol,” or to “condole,” is remarkably

similar to the word “control” in the second to last line. The line is, “For reasons beyond our

control / there is no vehicle out.” As it turns out, it is totally out of the hospital’s power to

condole, either. Another perspective is that by offering an image of being condoling, as the

speaker does at first, the hospital is controlling patients into the expectation of relief where none

in fact exists. And lastly, at this point of no further help, the only control the patient now has is to

condole their grief, and part of reconciliation with death is anger against it, an emotion this poem

seems to be leading up to next.

What the patient may rail against is the speaker’s insensitivity, engaging in small talk the

kind that seems to herald relief from some great, long struggle, as once a journey is completed

and the goal is in reach the person there ought to say “you’ve made it,” and here are your

comforts, like “a bath, a hot meal, a good night's sleep,” and instead the revelation is none will be

coming. What seemed to be a welcome to journey’s end was banal chatter to fill the banal air.

And to add insult to injury, the final word is the deception is “not [their] fault,” like the speaker

had just deceived the patient into hope. The reader on some level is aware of having at some

point been deceived, and a sense of bafflement and resentment arise while the nice wish of

“condolences” is said just as the speaker denies any sense of being the injuring party, and so the

poet, Lizard, recreates the sense of being a powerless patient unable to connect injury with the

one injuring because of the rhetoric. So the poem, at first seeming illogical because of the pairing

of phrases that don’t follow each other in practice, creates a deliberate sense of what it feels like

to be hoodwinked.

Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” at first glance bears similarity to “Ordinance on Arrival”

in the use of “you” to address the imagined audience of the poem. The audience seems to be the

universe at large, or whosoever is lonely in the boundaries of his skin and needs to be re-

welcomed into the body of the world, infinite in imagination and infinite in comfort for the one

who forgets he is rich in natural things, like his own unfailing beauty.

The speaker is one who says with kindness to reject the thought of inner lack of good,

with “You do not have to be good” meaning there doesn’t have to be a bad to be a good, that is,

good just exists alone. Oliver sees a simplicity in nature that has no concern with dichotomies, as

“Meanwhile the world goes on,” at home in itself, and the great gifts of “sun and the clear

pebbles of the rain” give of themselves unhesitatingly. The speaker finds strength in nature that

has been diluted by human concepts of worth that sees itself walking on knees“For a hundred

miles through the desert, repenting.” The central thought is that the world welcomes you, the

reader, and

“calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.”

The sound of the geese, “harsh and exciting,” is opposite that of a man when he is making

himself repent, a sound I think to be like a whimper alone in the “desert” of goodness suspended,

like rain not allowed to fall. Yet the bended knee of the repenting still finds echo in the arrow

geese make when they fly in flock; and still, the man in shadow is man in nature, as shadow is a

nature thing as well, like a painting is a family of shades.

The concepts of the geese and repenting man is linked by repetition of words beginning

with ‘h’ in the lines “a hundred miles through the desert, repenting” and “meanwhile the wild

geese, high in the clean blue air, / are heading home again.” The ‘h’ words connote movement

through space, as the prostrated man drags his knees across the burning abrasive sand, alone, and

the wild geese move as one and cut the brisk air smoothly. The imagery is of heat and needless

self-punishment, and the other is of coolness and doing geese things.

The word “lonely” has the body feel of weight and depth like the inside of a tall drum.

The eyes are steady, they look forward, they see inward, they ask questions. The mouth is in

between the beginnings of a smile and the familiar crease of a frown. The chest takes breath, a

little more fully, carving out an inch more of space. Why does the “lonely” of this poem feel

lovely? First, it’s seen in the word “only:” “You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.” Here, “only” is used to allow, as “You only have to let.” The repenting man

would likely have said, “If only I had not transgressed,” and he would give the word “only” the

tightness a man fighting against himself would feel in his chest. Second, the word “lonely” has

the same ‘o’ sound as “home.” The home the geese head towards said in the line just previous to

the “lonely” line, is where the lonely one, whoever he is, would likely find the traces of a smile,

because he would be letting “the soft animal of [his] body love what it loves.” Lastly, the

“lonely” sound carries inwards to “over and over announcing your place.” The sense of “lonely’

is that no one is coming. The delight of “over and over” is that someone, in this case the natural

world, is already at your door and will persist in trying to call one back to all that’s “harsh and

exciting.”

When I reach the word “family” at the last of the poem, my mouth lifts, my brows unknit,

and overall a softening effect occurs. I think the word sounds like the “animal” in “soft animal,”

having all the letters besides ‘n.’ Also, the ‘f’ is both in the word “family” and “soft.” The word

“soft” has a special resonance in the poem and I think this in part may be why. By the familiarity

in sound, the words “family” and “animal” come to mean what is good and pure about the world,

as the associations of “family” as security and happiness transfer over to the word “animal” and

give the animal world the connotation of being a human home. Also, the concept of animals

being sinless and without evil carries over to the word “family,” and lends the pure essence of

animals to humans, who unfortunately thinks evil about itself.

Ranier Maria Rilke’s “Going Blind” is a poem about patience, as the speaker’s careful

observation cues him into the blindness of a woman at a party with the subtle difference in the

way she holds her cup. The speaker must give her notice, and pay attention to the area where

most would figure she was lacking, and find the sight within physically unseeing eyes. To this

end, Rilke gives a pair of blank eyes animation with the “light played as on the surface of a

pool.” By equating eyes with water, Rilke removes the hard edge, the cataract that may plague

her vision, and makes the blind woman less of an object to be looked at and more of a essence to

be known inwardly.

The verb “played” denotes quick movement, a freedom from constraint, a weightlessness

such as one feels floating on water. The “others” who sit with her laugh and talk and “move

through many rooms,” implying a quickness of pace in conversation and in gait that contrasts

with the woman’s “almost painful” smile and her consistent slowness, all except the dancing of

light upon her eyes.

Rilke keeps her pace measured. The length of time to drink what’s in her cup to the

measure of two glances. To allow the group to stand, “slowly,” and to disperse as leisurely as

“chance selected them.” To show how far she lagged behind by letting the last line of stanza 2

break the gutter and begin the next stanza:

and moved through many rooms (they talked and laughed),

I saw her. She was moving far behind

the others, absorbed, like someone who will soon

have to sing before a large assembly;

To describe the charged waiting of a singer before a “large assembly.” And then, just as surely

paced, state “She followed slowly, taking a long time, / as though there were some obstacle in

the way,” followed by the idea that she would soon fly.

The sound of the word “slowly,” repeated twice in the poem, is echoed in most of the

words in this line. The second syllable of “followed,” “long,” “though,” and the way the third

syllable in “obstacle” limits the flow of air through the lips. The last word, “fly,” is significant

because it feels the most emotionally freeing and on the “ai” sound in “fly” the mouth opens up

the widest, more so than any other of the last words in previous lines. The same “ai” sound can

be heard in the last word of line 14, “time.” So “flying” is just a matter of “time.” As, if the blind

woman’s eyes were as transcendent of form as water was, so would the “obstacle in the way” be

as lacking in solidity and in the resistance of solidity.

The deliberate pace reminds one of the butterfly emerging from its chrysalis only on its

own time; rushed with the help of human hands, the wings are too damp and too weak to bear the

body. The emergence of the butterfly is an inevitability that ought to be trusted. Rilke has the

same trust for his blind girl, that she when done with her chrysalis would exist in the same

radiant joy that touches her eyes. She would be light and play and knowing, and from her

knowing, laughter. She would move slow as knowledge moves slow, grounded in the center of

things.