One of the recurring emotional themes that is evident in the body of Southern Poetry we’ve read this semester is that of loneliness. The first book of poetry we read, Wildwood Flower by Kathryn Stripling Byer, set the tone for this with its frequent images of loneliness and loss. In general, the South seems to be engulfed in loneliness, with its mostly rural landscape and the sense of loss that can permeate allusions to the Civil War. In many ways, Southerners are the Other, particularly with Southern poets and artists, as evidenced by H.L. Mencken’s “The Sahara of the Bozart”. The Fugitive poets seemingly struggled to reshape the image of Southern poetry, but it’s this concerted effort to fight the stereotype that reiterates the sense of loneliness in Southern poetry. However, the primary image of loneliness is often more specific, relating to personal loss and sustained loneliness, and nature is often used to highlight or allude to the feeling. Byer’s “Lullaby” describes the pressing, smothering feeling of loneliness by relating it to the feeling of the snow pressing on the roof of the house. Winter presses on her from all sides, exacerbating her sense of aloneness.
In one of my favorite poems of this semester, loneliness is interwoven into scenes of wild and contained nature as it exists in suburbia. Natasha Trethaway’s “At Dusk” describes a cat wavering between the lure of “luminous possibility” as represented by a swarm of fireflies and the comforts of “the neat rows of flowers” and “steady circle/of light”. She transitions from this imagery into a heartfelt meditation on loneliness: “left me to wonder that I too might lift/my voice, sure of someone out there,/sent it over the lines stitching here/to there, certain the sounds I make/are enough to call someone home.” Nature here is used to suggest the choice between the risk inherent in opening oneself to the possibility of love (the seduction of the fireflies) and the safety and yet pain of aloneness (the neat hedge and porch). Human nature has a desperate need to control, to reform life and nature into chosen shapes and structures. We like to think we can predict and constrain the future, but it’s evident that we cannot, that nature or fate or God is infinitely more powerful. Fear or sway of that power is often what can lead to loneliness.
The idea of nature as both instigator and representative of loneliness is also present in Laura Riding’s “The Only Daughter”. The daughter is born and her natural nudity is immediately covered by fabrics, which continues in theme throughout the poem. She is covered in silks, and set apart from her family. Covered in green silk that “runs like water” over her, and is representative of her role in life. The watery silk is beautiful, “but it is dangerous to keep an only daughter/Like Atlantis or an isle/ Sunken in green water/Through which may rise a smile.” The loneliness comes from containing nature and setting a woman apart from the men as well as being illustrative through the forced covering of nature with silks and wool. The contrast of these two fabrics in texture, as well as the contrasts in the poem (summer winter, isle sunken, warm is chill) emphasizes the issue the speaker has with this isolation. Her nature is smothered and covered, and yet she's rejecting it, the natural contrasting imagery emphasize the disharmony.
Lullaby
Snow is lying on my roof.
I cannot breathe.
Two tons of snow lie on my roof
heavy as the sea,
the loft of grain,
the desert as it gathers sand,
and I have only two small flames
beside my bed. I hear the sea
when I lie down, the sea
inside my head.
The candles sputter when the wind blows.
Snow falls from the trees
like sacks of grain.
No seed can root in snow.
It cannot breathe.
My roof is like an unplowed field.
Who walks upon it?
Rafters creak
as if a wishbone cracked
and I had wished the sky to fall.
Kathryn Stripling Byer (Wildwood Flower, 15)
Natasha Tretheway (Native Guard, 15)
The Only Daugher
Under her gown the girl is
ANd alone as any lonely daughter.
She is kept in green because
Green silk is nearly water
And removes her as she is nearly white.
Mother slept through her birth.
Father was with the coals that night
At a study of sparks by the hearth.
It was forgotten she came naked.
In the morning she was put in wool.
Her face left bare but blended
With the house out the window cool.
She has grown and has been given
Day by day unknown and dressed
The quiet mysteries of woman
Unwitting of the rhapsodist.
But it is dangerous to keep an only daughter
Like Atlantis or an isle
Sunken in green water
Through which may rise a smile.
She smiles and she is golden
About her mouth waving.
Her smile only will be stolen
And the mouth not worth saving
Will spread smooth and green
Over no more hunger.
How warm is chill if seen
When the body is yet younger
Than a green gown and the gown
Ripples like a summer winter
As the lotus lilies drown
Of an only daughter.
Laura Riding (The Fugitive Poets, 97)
It is so true that most of the poetry that we have read thus far by Southern poets captures this notion of loneliness and isolation. While this can be seen to be native to the South with the rural and pastoral setting, it is also native to humanity. I think that all humans are on a quest to be independent and individual and this can lead to loneliness and isolation... even when surrounded by the hustle and bustle of the city life. I think that this isolation is more visible when accompanied by the physical landscape of barrenness and that is what makes the South such a clear depiction of how home can be the most lonely and yet most honest place of all.
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