Moon, Star and Bird of Rhiannon ¬ demarcations dissolving ¬ out of the air ¬ making otherness thisness ¬ a visiting presence ¬ containing the darkness ¬ insistently clear.
Picture: detail from ‘Night Flight’ by Sarah Young
A March Evening
Moon, Star and Bird of Rhiannon ¬ demarcations dissolving ¬ out of the air ¬ making otherness thisness ¬ a visiting presence ¬ containing the darkness ¬ insistently clear.
Picture: detail from ‘Night Flight’ by Sarah Young
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A good poem, I wish I could offer you an educated critique, but I don’t know much about poetry, or anything else for that matter!!
ReplyDeleteThat said, the imagery is so ethereal, it’s like an airy sketch of monochrome in color. Night’s darkness as indigo, blackbird as bird of Rhiannon, those lines just bring a brilliance to the flatness of black. “Demarcations dissolving” could be about the repetition of “bright/brightness” describing both night and day, rendering both into a singular thing in a magical realist flourish, but at the same time reads to me as a reference to those strange colors, and the “presence / containing the darkness” may be the visitation of color within colorlessness, after the dusk burns off.
The final line, “insistently clear” is difficult for me to interpret. The occurrence of the odd sunset seems mystical and hazy, anything but insistently clear, much more dreamlike, if occasions could dream. Or maybe due to the reference of Rhiannon and her birds, who seem to have a habit of toying with time and space and biological senses, we’re witnessing some bit of Welsh enchantment.
Ultimately I think that the poem is impressive because it’s so difficult to capture the magic of the familiar in words without also destroying what makes the familiar familiar.
I hope I didn’t do your skillful poem any injustices with my interpretation. I enjoyed pondering it.
Thanks for your reflections on the poem. Such engaged interpretations are, of course, entirely justified.
DeleteInteresting that you should ponder ‘insistently clear’. I considered the possibility of ‘near’ as an alternative when writing it. The half-rhyme with ‘air’ to suggest a slight disjunction, but also wanting to get the sense very much of a clearly felt presence rather than anything misty or indistinct.