Forsyth, N.

Serveur académique lausannois

Yvor Winters: “The Slow Pacific Swell”(1931) Neil Forsyth (Université de Lausanne )Genre: Poem. Country: United States. Yvor Winters’s chosen home was Los Altos, near Stanford University, where he taught. He wrote many poemsthat take some part of California as their setting, and even sometimes their topic. In “On A View of PasadenaFrom the Hills” (1931) he recalls that he spent his childhood there in what is now “suburb after suburb”, thoughthe vast ravines of the landscape are still visible. He contrasts the sage brush as it used to break down “topowdered ash, the sift of age” with what he now sees: “Mowed lawn has crept along the granite bench”. But “thenaked salty shore” is still visible, “rank with the sea, which crumbles evermore.”In one of his best-known and most characteristic poems, “The Slow Pacific Swell” (also 1931), Winters thinksthrough what the presence of the sea has meant to him. The poem opens immediately after the title with abeautiful evocation of the name of this ocean: “Far out of sight for ever stands the sea,/ Bounding the land withpale tranquility”. In the first part of the poem the sea is distant, and he looks at it as he had when a small child.But, in the central part of the poem, the sea becomes fearful. In a semi-allegorical mode the poem expresses thepotential loss and slow recapture of intellectual control:Once when I rounded Flattery, the seaHove its loose weight like sand to tangle meUpon the washing deck, to crush the hull;Subsiding, dragged flesh at the bone. The skullFelt the retreating wash of dreaming hair.Half drenched in dissolution, I lay bare.I scarcely pulled myself erect; I cameBack slowly, slowly knew myself the same.One senses the deeply felt importance of the critical principles to which he had committed himself. A poem, hethought, is nothing less than “a method for perfecting the understanding and moral discrimination”. It can do thatbecause, as Winters defines a poem, it is “a rational statement about a human experience, made in such a waythat the emotion which ought to be motivated by that rational understanding of the experience is communicatedsimultaneously with the rational understanding: the poem is thus a complete judgment of the experience, ajudgment both rational and emotional” (FC 139). The sea in this poem threatened to “tangle” him and, indeed,he seems almost to drown, “Half drenched in dissolution”, and comes back only gradually, but wilfully, to therational control he craves. One of his favourite poems was “I started early, took my dog” by Emily Dickinson(FD 267-8), in which the sea is represented as a gentleman seducing the speaker almost to death, and Wintersmay well have been remembering it as he wrote his own poem. In his own generalizing mode, carefullydeploying abstraction, “… one may come / Walking securely till the sea extends / Its limber margin, andprecision ends.”The central passage represents the sea, and especially its grand, enormous inhabitants, as context for the writer’swork, a struggle that is both moral and intellectual.… From the ship we sawGray whales for miles: the long sweep of the jaw,The blunt head plunging clean above the wave.And one rose in a tent of sea and gaveA darkening shudder; water fell away;The whale stood shining, and then sank in spray.The rhymed couplets and the regular rhythm, especially the alternating long and short phrases, help in therecovery of the control threatened by the immensely powerful ocean: we have come a long way from its “baretranquility” in the opening lines. The passage recalls Winters’s sympathy for Melville, about whom he wrote aperceptive essay (DR 200-233) that includes related remarks about the sea: “The sea is the realm of the half-known, at once of perception and of peril; it is infested by subtle and malignant creatures, bent on destruction…”(212). The dominant emotion evoked by the whales in Winters’s poem, however, is admiration, and so quitedifferent from what Melville’s Ahab feels towards his whale. That is partly because the whales are in the plural,so that the description is generalized: “the jaw” and “the blunt head” belong to all the whales seen from the ship,not to one overwhelming monster. Nonetheless, there is still something threatening about that “darkeningshudder”.“Darkening” or its congeners is a recurring word in Winters, perhaps originating with his perception of themeaning of the opening of Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning”, in which “a calm darkens among water lights”.He was concerned to give both a precise explication of the “unforgettable” image (FD 274), and an account of itsmeaning. On any of the Great Lakes in winter one could see how a light wind creates ripples on the surface: theyglitter in the distance, a calm settles in the midst of the wind, and the glitter disappears. He is concerned to getthis right, since “I have met students who thought that Stevens was talking about artificial lights on water atnight” (FD 368). For the observer in the poem, a woman in a Sunday morning reverie, “the thought of death maydarken suddenly and without warning”. As the discussion continues, one realizes Winters is writing of himself.The mind perceives, as by a kind of metaphysical sense, the approach of invading impersonality; yetknowing the invasion to be inevitable and its own identity… the only source of any good whatever,maintains that identity in its full calm and clarity, that nothing may be sacrificed without need… Thecalm clarity of tone enables the poet to deal with a variety of kinds of feeling which would be impossiblewere the terror emphasized for a moment at any given point, were the complete and controlled unity ofthe experiencing mind for a moment disordered by its own perceptions. (DR 447-8)One may question whether Stevens’ woman is experiencing anything like terror, but that is certainly whatWinters feels, and in “The Slow Pacific Swell” we see what that experience was for him.The last image that now follows in the poem is both brilliantly descriptive and richly allusive:The slow Pacific swell stirs on the sand,Sleeping to sink away, withdrawing land,Heaving and wrinkled in the moon, and blind;Or gathers seaward, ebbing out of mind.The passage recalls the images of the sea on the sand in Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”, of which Winters wasimperiously dismissive except for a passage in the first stanza which reads:Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,Listen! you hear the grating roarOf pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,At their return, up the high strand,Begin, and cease, and then again begin,With tremulous cadence slow.Winters called this “one of the finest passages in the century” (FD 184). Winters’s own poem also echoes aGerard Manley Hopkins sonnet, “The Sea and the Skylark”, whom Winters both admired and attacked for hisrhythmic experimentation (FC: the above definition of poetry as “a rational statement” comes from his essay onHopkins). In Hopkins’s poem we find the sound of “the tide that ramps against the shore;/ With a flood or a fall,low lull-off or all roar,/ Frequenting there while moon shall wear and wend”.The personal struggle depicted in this poem explains, as Schreiber perceptively puts it, Winters’s impatience withwriters like Stevens, Frost, and Yeats, who in their different ways appeared to him to indulge aspects of theirnatures, the physical and the sensual, that he had ruthlessly suppressed in his own.Works CitedThe Collected Poems of Yvor Winters. Manchester: Carcanet/Swallow, 1978. Introduction by Donald Davie.In Defense of Reason by Yvor Winters. Ohio University Press / Swallow Press, [1947] 1987 [DR].Forms of Discovery. Chicago: Alan Swallow, 1967 [FD].The Function of Criticism by Yvor Winters. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1957 [FC].Schreiber, Jan. “The Absolutist: The poetry and criticism of Yvor Winters”, Contemporary Poetry Review:http://www.cprw.com/the-absolutist-the-poetry-and-criticism-of-yvor-winters Accessed February 11, 2015.Neil Forsyth (Université de Lausanne )First published 02 April 2015 Citation: Forsyth, Neil. "“The Slow Pacific Swell”". The Literary Encyclopedia. 2 April 2015.[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=35626, accessed 22 September 2016.]This article is copyright to © The Literary Encyclopedia.All entries, data and software copyright © The Literary Dictionary Company LimitedISSN 1747-678XPowered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

"The Slow Pacific Swell"

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