Intricate Thicket by Scroggins Mark

Author:Scroggins, Mark [Scroggins, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780817388065
Publisher: University of Alabama Press

Of the seasons,

seamless, a garland.

Solstice

to equinox—

days,

measured a cock’s stride,

come full circle. (GM 11)

While the poem itself is structured around the seasons of a single year, however, it is by no means a simple record of Johnson and Williams’s year-long tour of Britain. (The “Spring” section, it is true, is largely a journal of their walking tour of Wales, but in the other sections of the poem there are various—sometimes radical—dislocations of sequence from the tour that gave rise to the work.) Instead, Johnson uses the handy armature of the four seasons, a circular, endless progression, as a frame upon which to build a poem that exhibits a remarkable degree of rather old-fashioned closure and coherence—remarkable, that is, for a poet as saturated in Olson as Johnson was early in his career. Each section is built around a particular figure and locale: “Winter,” the Lake District and Wordsworth; “Spring,” the Wye River in Wales and Francis Kilvert; “Summer,” Selborne and the recorder of its natural history, Gilbert White; and “Autumn,” Shoreham in Kent and its most famous inhabitant, the painter Samuel Palmer, a disciple of William Blake. Each of these figures contributes the epigraph(s) to his section, passages that prove to be crucial keys to the poems that follow.

At the book’s symbolic center is the overarching figure of the Green Man himself, a traditional English version of a broadly European nature deity. Johnson sees the Green Man, a human figure festooned with foliage, not merely in the carvings on countless English churches, but in Sir Gawain’s Green Knight, in the Jack-in-the-Green, in Archimboldo’s vegetable portraits, and in the mandrake, the plant thought to grow in the shape of a man. The Green Man will reappear throughout the poem as a figure for the interpenetration of the human and the natural, vegetative worlds. As Johnson writes, riffing on a passage of Whitman’s Song of Myself,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.