Poem, Reader, Interpretation

I. The Poem as Experience

The poem, once wrought, bears the lineaments of a singular moment in the
poet’s experience, or the singular course of an event, as lived or as imagined; of
course, in the following illustrative cases, we have rather arbitrarily disjointed the
elements (action, character, thought, emotion, attitude) of the experience as simu-
lated in the poem so as to focus on what appears to be its prominent feature ––
A feeling, mood, or emotional cry:
NVM Gonzalez, “Behold the bountiful land”
Behold the bountiful land,
the young hills and the corn;
in the green river’s womb
children are born;

Honey’s in the forest,

blue fish in the sea;
the ash-gray of the clearings
grows grain for me.

Or a thought or train of reflection:

Horacio de la Costa, S.J., “After Two Months in Prison”
Now I know the bitter tears,
The dull despair, the frantic rages,
The sleep-destroying hopes and fears
 Of fish in bowls and birds in cages.

Or an impression of a scene in nature:

Conrado S. Ramirez, “To Hitomaro”
In Nara still the herons fly,
A line of snow across the sky;
The morning-glory drapes the wall;
But though the pool knows not the rain,
The dead frog floods it still with ghosts of song.

Or a character in our day-to-day world:

Angela C. Manalang-Gloria, “Old Maid Walking on a City Street”
She had a way of walking through concupiscence
And past the graces her fingers never twirled:
Because her mind refused the heavy burden,
Her broad feet shoveled up the world.

Or an event / action:
Luis G. Dato, “Malolos”
The town is quiet, the houses still,
And dark the house of God;
The heroes slumber up the hill,
And in my heart their blood.

Again I see a gay procession,

And men in bright attire;
A hundred delegates in session,
And soldiers in the mire.
 Malolos, once you rent asunder,
A striding tyrant’s heels,
A day as this that sees us thunder
Down you with iron wheels.

Or a stance or attitude toward something or other:

Jose F. Lacaba, “Apologia pro Vita Sua”
Pardon me madam,
that love cannot madden
me –– I have phlegm for blood,
frenzy I forbid,

unless in darkness
where I can probe, dartle
and startle in passing.
A place for passion

and passion its place

is code of middle class,
and middle class I am
even in orgasm.

II. The Reader as “Literalist of the Imagination

Or an impression of a scene in nature:
Conrado S. Ramirez, “To Hitomaro”
In Nara still the herons fly,
A line of snow across the sky;
The morning-glory drapes the wall;
But though the pool knows not the rain,
2. The Reader as “Literalist of the Imagination”

To apprehend the poem’s form, the reader or critic needs to be “a literalist of the
Imagination.” We cannot over-stress this. Take Conrado V. Pedroche’s “River-Winds”:
In the evening
 The river-winds take the village
In their arms,
Whispering fragments of old lost songs;
And, pulling a blanket of dreams
Over the sleeping roofs,
Softly, softly move on …

Only by work of imagination on the reader’s part is that singular perception of an

evening in a riverine village made real, and it was the poet’s verbal configuration –– the
poem’s precise form or structure –– that made that realization possible.
Or take Carlos A. Angeles’s “Landscape II” (last stanza):
Now, while the dark basins the void of space,
Some sudden crickets, ambushing me near,
Discover vowels of your whispered face
And subtly cry. I touch your absence here
Remembering the speeches of your hair.
Only by work of the imagination (as it was with the poet) is the experience of a
lover’s desolation of yearning brought to life (or made real). It was the poet’s power of
expression –– those “twisting or turnings of sense and reference of words and utterances”
–– that now persuades and moves his reader. To read close and imagine well is to open the
text.

III. Interpretation: Two Poems by National Artist Edith L. Tiempo

Lament for the Littlest Fellow

The littlest fellow was a marmoset.

He held the bars and blinked his old man’s eyes.
You said he knew us and took my arm and set
My fingers round the bars, with coaxing mimicries
Of squeak and twitter. “Now he thinks you are
Another marmoset in a cage.” A proud denial
Set you to laughing, shutting back a question far
Into my mind, something enormous and final.

The question was unasked but there is an answer.

Sometimes in your sleeping face upon the pillow,
I would catch our own little truant unaware;
He had fled from our pain and the dark room of our rage,
But I would snatch him back from yesterday and tomorrow.
You wake, and I bruise my hands on the living cage.

Bonsai

All that I love

I fold over once
And once again
And keep in a box
Or a slit in a hollow post
Or in my shoe.

All that I love?

Why, yes, but for the moment ––
And for all time, both.
Something that folds and keeps easy,
Son’s note or Dad’s one gaudy tie,
 A roto picture of a young queen,
A blue Indian shawl, even
A money bill.

It’s utter sublimation,

A feat, this heart’s control
Moment to moment
To scale all love down
To a cupped hand’s size,

Till seashells are broken pieces

From God’s own bright teeth,
And life and love are real
Things you can run and
Breathless hand over
To the merest child.

In the first poem, “Lament for the Littlest Fellow,” what the question is, and what
exactly the answer to it –– both “something enormous and final” –– we would have to
Infer from the imagery and metaphor, and the human situation they subtly limn. The sole
metaphor is, of course, the marmoset in a cage, a monkey whose name etymologically
suggests a “grotesque mumbling figure.” When the husband mocks his wife (the poem’s
speaker) as resembling a marmoset, which she proudly denies, the resemblance had
already been subtly fixed by her own perception of the marmoset as “the littlest fellow”
with “his old man’s eyes” which mark the animal as human. The husband taunts his
wife, enforcing the resemblance by setting her fingers around the bars as to simulate a
cage for her, and mimicking all the while the marmoset’s “squeak and twitter.” All male
banter or monkey business, if you will, for a moment’s merriment, but it provokes in the
wife a realization instantly suppressed because it is dark, “something enormous and
final.
For nights afterwards, whenever the wife would catch the image (marmoset) in her
husband’s “sleeping face,” she would only call it “our own little truant,” as though to make
light of it. Since in that past moment of truancy and banter in the zoo, she had repressed
a dark intuition, the image “had fled from our pain and the dark room of our rage.” In the
poem’s present, as she recalls that day in the zoo, their bedroom as private space of inti-
macy becomes a variation upon “cage.” For now, she “would snatch him back,” the marmo-
sit, “from yesterday and tomorrow,” because the image holds the truth: “You wake, and I
bruise my hands on the living cage.” At the poem’s end, we might also ask, “Why lament
”for? –– is it because the truth has been constantly denied so that its enormity (“the living
cage”) might be lightened?
But lightened, indeed, in a later poem, a later moment of enlightenment, where the
image of the poem’s insight appears only in the poem’s title, “Bonsai.”(We are of course
simply assuming that the speaker in one and the other poem is the same wife.) The poem,
“Bonsai,” is as it were a free form because that moment, where all love is gathered toge-
thered, is “all time.” In fact, it isn’t so much image (bonsai) as idea and feeling which the
poem’s words enforce. Box, or slit in a hollow post, or shoe –– it isn’t the image (like mar-
moset in his cage) which motivates the poem but rather, the idea of souvenir or memento
by which one cherishes and nurtures “life and love [as] real” –– as real as any material
thing like “a blue Indian shawl.”
This calls to mind Eduardo Galeano’s wondrous epigraph to his Book of Embraces
(1989): “Recordar: To remember; from the Latin re-cordis, to pass through the heart.” Be
it “Son’s note or Dad’s one gaudy tie,” or even the most ordinary things like “a money bill”
–– the revelation or insight about those mementos is the poem, and it would be the high
est art to state it quite simply, without that rhetoric of irony and ambiguity so cherished in
the New Critical modes:
It’s utter sublimation,
 A feat, this heart’s control
Moment to moment
To scale all love down
To a cupped hand’s size.
Yet, the irony and the paradox are there, in the very aptness of the words “scale”
and “cupped hand,” so carefully chosen that “life and love” as “real things” appear all the
more magnificent.
“Till seashells are broken pieces,” says the poet, “From God’s own bright teeth.”
This for me is the most remarkable feat in the poem’s making. It is, the poet had said,
“for the moment –– / And for all time, both”: this keeping of mementos, this folding over
and scaling down to keep easy and cherish. So then, “Till seashells …” encompasses
all time and, by invoking God, suggests a divinity in that simple yet mysterious affection
which sustains life and love as real. The image there, that of seashells glinting on a sunny
beach, evokes brightness and cheer, and so fulfills what the poet speaks of as “heart’s
control.”
But there is more: seashells are broken pieces like souvenirs; that is to say, they
are broken off, as it were, from those happy moments where “life and love are real”;
then, indeed, for they are deeply cherished, they are as things that are very light so that
“you can run and / Breathless hand [them] over / To the merest child.” And that truly is
the very sign that it Israel, for a child needs no further proof of love than love.

Gémino H. Abad
17 Sept. 2023