On Grief And Reason: Essays (Penguin Modern Classics) by Joseph Brodsky

Author:Joseph Brodsky
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780241962015
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2011-11-02T16:00:00+00:00

IV

By standing next to the woman, the man acquires her vantage point. Because he is larger than she, and also because this is his house (as line 23 shows), where he has lived, presumably, most of his life, he must, one imagines, bend somewhat to put his eyes on her line of vision. Now they are next to each other, in an almost intimate proximity, on the threshold of their bedroom, atop the stairs. The bedroom has a window; a window has a view. And here Frost produces the most stunning simile of this poem, and perhaps of his entire career:

‘The wonder is I didn’t see at once.

I never noticed it from here before.

I must be wonted to it – that’s the reason.

The little graveyard where my people are!

So small the window frames the whole of it.

Not so much larger than a bedroom, is it?

There are three stones of slate and one of marble,

Broad-shouldered little slabs there in the sunlight

On the sidehill. We haven’t to mind those.

But I understand: it is not the stones,

But the child’s mound –’

‘ “The little graveyard where my people are!” ’ generates an air of endearment, and it’s with this air that ‘ “So small the window frames the whole of it” ’ starts, only to tumble itself into ‘ “Not so much larger than a bedroom, is it?” ’ The key word here is ‘frames’, because it doubles as the window’s actual frame and as a picture on a bedroom wall. The window hangs, as it were, on the bedroom wall like a picture, and that picture depicts a graveyard. ‘Depicting’, though, means reducing to the size of a picture. Imagine having that in your bedroom. In the next line, though, the graveyard is restored to its actual size and, for that reason, equated with the bedroom. This equation is as much psychological as it is spatial. Inadvertently, the man blurts out the summary of the marriage (foreshadowed in the grim pun of the title). And, equally inadvertently, the ‘is it?’ invites the woman to agree with this summary, almost implying her complicity.

As if that were not enough, the next two lines, with their stones of slate and marble, proceed to reinforce the simile, equating the graveyard with the made-up bed, with its pentametrically arranged pillows and cushions – populated by a family of small, inanimate children: ‘Broad-shouldered little slabs’. This is Pygmalion unbound, on a rampage. What we have here is the man’s intrusion into the woman’s mind, a violation of her mental imperative – if you will, an ossification of it. And then this ossifying hand – petrifying, actually – stretches toward what’s still raw, palpably as well as in her mind:

‘But I understand: it is not the stones,

But the child’s mound –’

It’s not that the contrast between the stones and the mound is too stark, though it is; it is his ability – or, rather, his attempt – to articulate it that she finds unbearable. For, should he succeed, should he

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