Poetry: Sounds and Silence

There’s a lot to say about silence.

In broad terms, silence has two meanings: the absence of any sound, and the absence of human speech.  There’s no total silence in the natural world, except in the vacuum of outer space, but there are many poems that capture deep stillness in an actual scene–“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” and Transtromer’s poem “The Couple,” below.

Given the number of poems about silence and the essays written about it, the two seem to go hand in hand.  If you search for it, dozens of poems about silence will pop up–ironically, many of them quite long.  Billy Collins’ poem “Silence” lays out examples of it.  Robert Bly titled a book of prose poems Silence in the Snowy Fields, and I’ve included his translation of Tomas Tranströmer’s poem “The Couple,” that vibrates with silence.

 What I’m most interested in, though, is how poems contain and convey their own silences, and I don’t think that’s possible without white space.  Most early Roman texts didn’t include spacing between words, and in those days (around the 5th century), people only read texts aloud.  When Irish monks translated those texts in the 7th and 8th centuries, they began to add spaces between words.  One author ties this to the shift to people reading silently, to themselves.  But white space isn’t the only element of a poem that creates silence–what are some others?

My first thoughts about silence have to do with its mystery and power:

Wisława Szymborska; “When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it.”

Spanish proverb: “Open your mouth only if what you are going to say is more beautiful than the silence.”

Bob Dylan: “Sometimes the silence can be like thunder.”

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec: “There are grammatical errors even in his silence.”

Allen Grossman: “Every poem is spoken into a silence that precedes it.”  I’d also say the silence that follows a poem is worth thinking about.

Glynn Maxwell: “Poets work with two materials…sound and silence.”

Someone once said Merwin’s poems seemed to have been written by a man walking across a glacier, sweeping away his footprints behind him as he went.

But of course there are also all the terrible silences–omission, suppression.  Silencings.  How do we speak of the unspeakable? One of the most exciting things to me about contemporary poetry is how much of it is speaking directly to and out of those silencings.

One of the poets most associated with silence is the German-speaking Romanian poet, Paul Celan, whose parents both died during the Holocaust.  His best-known poem is “Todesfugue.”  Over time, his poems got shorter, and filled more and more with silences and enigmatic, paradoxical imagery, before his ultimate silence, his suicide in 1970.  One of his poems is below.

Look back through some earlier posts: Bishop’s “Sestina,” Simic’s prose poems, Kay Ryan’s poems, many others.  I’m reposting Sylvia Plath’s poem “Axes” as an example.  It’s particularly striking to me, because many of her poems are almost desperately talky, and though this one is about words it also feels full of silence.  It’s one of the last poems she wrote.

Please add your own thoughts in Comments, and poems where silence is prominent.

 

SILENCE

Billy Collins

There is the sudden silence of the crowd
above a player not moving on the field,
and the silence of the orchid.

The silence of the falling vase
before it strikes the floor,
the silence of the belt when it is not striking the child.

The stillness of the cup and the water in it,
the silence of the moon
and the quiet of the day far from the roar of the sun.

The silence when I hold you to my chest,
the silence of the window above us,
and the silence when you rise and turn away.

And there is the silence of this morning
which I have broken with my pen,
a silence that had piled up all night

like snow falling in the darkness of the house—
the silence before I wrote a word
and the poorer silence now.

*

THE COUPLE

Tomas Tranströmer

They turn the light off, and its white globe glows
an instant and then dissolves, like a tablet
in a glass of darkness. Then a rising.
The hotel walls shoot up into heaven’s darkness.

Their movements have grown softer, and they sleep,
but their most secret thoughts begin to meet
like two colors that meet and run together
on the wet paper in a schoolboy’s painting.

It is dark and silent. The city however has come nearer
tonight. With its windows turned off. Houses have come.
They stand packed and waiting very near,
a mob of people with blank faces.

trans. Robert Bly

*

W. S. Merwin, from ASIAN FIGURES (versions of Asian short poems, riddles, and proverbs)

All dressed up
walking in the dark

Even if the sky falls
there will be a little hole
to get out through

Iron hinge
straw door

Clever hands
can’t hold water

*

#1188

Emily Dickinson

A not admitting of the wound
Until it grew so wide
That all my Life had entered it
And there were troughs beside –

A closing of the simple lid that opened to the sun
Until the tender Carpenter
Perpetual nail it down –

*

WORDS

Sylvia Plath

Axes
After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Echoes traveling
Off from the center like horses.

The sap
Wells like tears, like the
Water striving
To re-establish its mirror
Over the rock

That drops and turns,
A white skull,
Eaten by weedy greens.
Years later I
Encounter them on the road-

Words dry and riderless,
The indefatigable hoof-taps.
While
From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars
Govern a life.

*

by Paul Celan:

 

JANUARIED
into the thorn-covered
rock recess.  (Get drunk
and call it
Paris.)

My shoulder frost-sealed;
silent
rubble owls perched on it;
letters between my toes;
certainty

 

WORLD TO BE STUTTERED BY HEART
in which
I shall have been a guest, a name
sweated down from the wall
a wound licks up

 

THE BROACHED YEAR
with its mouldering crusts
of delusion bread.

Drink
from my mouth.