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Daniel Duquette

Professor Armstrong

ENG 470/570

7 May 2018

Remembering the World: Sensing Time in the Poetry of William Stafford

Judith Kitchen, in her book Writing the World: Understanding William Stafford, notes

that “time, for Stafford, is more a concern than a theme . . . Time is seen to be cyclical, and

layered . . . it is something we live within” (17); she describes his sense of time as Bergsonian,

where “inner duration is the continuous life of a memory which prolongs the past into the

present . . . (where) without that survival of the past in the present there would be no duration

but only instantaneity” (105). Stafford’s poetry exhibits this time and time again. Through his

observations and interactions with nature, Stafford both lives in, and contributes to, these

memories of the world.

Perhaps Stafford himself says best how he views time; in an interview in Courier, he

explains:

“For me, the past and the present and in fact to make a claim, the

future, all seem to be simultaneous. That is, writing is sort of

venturing forward easily in a welcoming way in terms of your

immediate experience, but that immediate experience carries

with it many echoes from the past” (Holden 2).

Stafford makes the simultaneous nature of time evident in the poem “Our Story,” from Stories

That Could Be True:

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Remind me again – together we

Trace our strange journey, find
each other, come on laughing.

Some time we’ll cross where life
ends. We’ll both look back
as far as forever, that first day.
I’ll touch you – a new world then.
Stars will move a different way.
We’ll both end. We’ll both begin. (TWII 49)

Here, “where life ends” in lines four and five is equated the first day in line six; “forever” (6),

generally a term reserved for the future, is a time to look back on (5), and the end is just the

beginning. This cyclical nature of time, here, is rooted in the physical world – in touch (“I’ll

touch you – a new world then”).

Sound, sight, and touch, to Stafford, are three of the most heavily relied upon senses.

Jonathan Holden, in his book Mark to Turn, notes that the sense of sound is often equated to

the imagination (Holden 27). He uses Stafford’s poem “Listening” as an example:

My father could hear a little animal step,

or a moth in the dark against the screen,
and every far sound called the listening out
into places where the rest of us had never been. (TWII 63)

“The word “listening” in the third line is here a metaphor for “imagining”” (27). Listening

provides the means for a person to engage with the world – to imagine and understand the

world as it is, not just as it seems. Understanding the world as it is means imagining it – hearing

it – as cyclical and layered, such as the speaker does in the poem “Deer Stolen”:

“Deer have stood around our house

at night so still nobody knew,
and waited with ears baling air.
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I hunt the still deer everywhere,

For what they heard and took away,
stepping through the chaparral,
was the sound of Then; now its Now,
and those small deer far in the wild

Are whispers of our former life.
The last print of some small deer’s foot
might hold the way, might be a start
that means in ways beyond our ken

Important things. I follow them
through all the hush of long ago
to listen for what small deer know. (TWII 140)

Here, the deer heard “the sound of Then” (7). This sound was transferred through the

air – “the hush of long ago” (14) – and taken with the deer. Thus, through interacting with the

natural, physical “Now,” the speaker can find “the way, might be a start / that means in ways

beyond our ken / Important things.” Ken, according to the Oxford English Dictionary is “one’s

range of knowledge or understanding.” Be referencing “our ken,” the speaker insinuates that

our understanding, as humans, in both connected and limited and that we can transcend this

limitation by “listen(ing) to what small deer know” (15).

Holden introduces the ear’s imaginative capabilities by noting the eye’s lack thereof.

One’s sense of sight is naturally restrictive: it’s finite in that it is confined to the physical world –

to the visible world. Stafford uses this restriction to set up a series of binaries that enable him

to transcend the visible; the most prevalent of these binaries is that of “light” and “dark.”

This binary, of ‘light’ and ‘dark’ can be readily observed in Stafford’s poem “Meditation,”

from the collection Smoke’s Way:

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Animals full of light

walk through the forest
toward someone aiming a gun
loaded with darkness.

That’s the world: God
holding still
letting it happen again,
and again and again. (TWII 151)

The “light” in line one and the “darkness” in line four could be understood as metaphors for life

and death. However, in a symbolic world where time is cyclical and layered, death itself is not

finite. In this way, “light” becomes symbolic shorthand for the visible, physical being.

“Darkness” is representative of the unknown – the invisible, the spiritual, but, as Kitchen notes,

“darkness is not seen as the negative of light, but as a positive force in which knowledge and

understanding can grow” (69). Holden comments that “dark,” in this way is also associated

with “deep,” as “the connotations of “deep” suggest, that which is “deep” is “dark” because it

cannot be visualized; it is written inside the natural world, “under” the surface where the eye

cannot penetrate” (12).

Just as the binary of “visible” and “invisible” is expressed through the metaphors of

“light” and “dark,” “deep” is contrasted with the more finite “surface” and is “implicitly

associated with time rather than space” (Holden 12). This implicit association is evident in the

last stanza of the poem “Bi-focal” (WOYC): “So the world happens twice – / once what we see it

is; / second it legends itself / deep, the way it is.” This not only connects “deep” with time, but

also with “the way (the world) is.” Here, there is an implication that underneath the world’s

surface, in the depths beneath the visible, there lies a universal truth that unites us all.
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Critic Peter Stitt alludes to this in his article “William Stafford’s Wilderness Quest” when

he observes that Stafford’s language seems to “promise that the avenue of touching the

physical world will lead somehow to a further world, a more than physical world” (Andrews

192). This sentiment is echoed by Laurence Lieberman who comments that “(Stafford) has

been training himself to hear and feel his way back in touch with distant places, ages, epochs”

(Andrews 36). Part of this training is evident, he notes, in the poem “Touches”:

Late, you can hear the stars. And beyond them

some kind of quiet other than silence, a deepness
the miles make, the way canyons
hold their miles back: you are in the earth and
it guides you; out where the sun comes
it is the precious world.
There are stones too quiet for these days,
old ones that being in the earlier mountains.
You put a hand out in the dark of a cave and
the wall waits for your fingers. Cold, that stone
tells you all of the years that passed without knowing.
You think of caves held in the earth, no mouth,
no light. Down there the years have lost their way.
Under your hand it all steadies,
is the world under your hand.

Stafford, here, incorporates all of his symbolic shorthand when conveying the interaction of the

senses with the elemental time. “you can hear the stars. And beyond them / some kind of

quiet other than silence, a deepness / the miles make” (1-3); Depth is brought to the auditory

experience that allows “you” to hear time. “You put a hand out into the dark of the cave and/

the wall waits for your fingers” (9-10). When “you” put a hand into the dark, “you” become a

part of the unknown, and touch the walls – the “stone that tells you all of the years that passed

without knowing” (10-11).

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The walls of the cave tell of the time they know – tell their memories. Memory, Kitchen

says, is “the only place to hold things that have gone “out of the world . . . Locked in the past,

people and places are perfected” (47). Stafford holds onto these memories in his poetry.

Kitchen alludes to this in her conversation with his poem “In Dear Detail, by Ideal Light,” that

begins: “Night huddled our town, / plunged from the sky. / You moved away. / I save what I can

of the time.” This function of memory, to hold things that have since gone, is not reserved for

the human mind. In the poem “Ceremony,” for example, Stafford writes:

On the third finger of my left hand

under the bank of the Ninnescah
a muskrat whirled and bit to the bone.
The mangled hand made the water red.

That was something the ocean would remember:
I saw me in the current flowing through the land,
rolling, touching roots, the world incarnadined,
and the river richer by a kind of marriage.

While in the woods an owl started quavering
with drops like tears I raised my arm.
Under the bank a muskrat was trembling
with meaning my hand would wear forever.

In that river my blood flowed. (TWII 61)

The speaker’s blood, here, becomes a part of the current, “rolling, touching roots” (7); in this

way he has contributed to the river’s being, making it “richer by a kind of marriage” (8) – a

marriage, he comments, that “the ocean would remember” (5). The speaker, through this

blood marriage, becomes a part of the river, a part of the river’s story: a part of the rivers

memory.
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Jonathan Holden, in his book The Mark to Turn, notes how the memories that make up

William Stafford’s poetry create a “haphazard mosaic, not a linear story” (2). This mosaic,

though, is not his and his alone. It is a mosaic to be heard, to be touched, to be felt. It is a

mosaic made up of the memories of time, held in stones and rivers – in the sounds that deer

hear, the “whispers of our former life.” Like the hand in “Touches,” and the blood in the

stream, we, in our time, become a part of the darkness, the depths of time waiting to be

touched themselves, waiting to tell their story.

WORK CITED

Kitchen, Judith. Writing the World: Understanding William Stafford. Oregon State University /

Corvallis, 1999.

Holden, Jonathan. The Mark to Turn: A Reading of William Stafford's Poetry. The University

Press of Kansas, 1976.

Lieberman, Laurence. “The Shocks of Normality.” On William Stafford: the Worth of Local

Things, by Tom Andrews, The University of Michigan Press, 1995, pp. 31–40.

Stafford, William. “Ceremony.” The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems, Graywolf Press, 1998. 61.

Print.

--- . “Deer Stolen.” The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems, Graywolf Press, 1998. 140. Print.

--- . “Listening.” The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems, Graywolf Press, 1998. 63. Print.

--- . “Meditation.” The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems, Graywolf Press, 1998. 151. Print.

--- . “Our Story.” The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems, Graywolf Press, 1998. 49. Print.

Stitt, Peter. “William Stafford's Wilderness Quest.” On William Stafford: the Worth of Local

Things, by Tom Andrews, The University of Michigan Press, 1995, pp. 165–202.