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Each weekday in April, Poetry Daily brings its email newsletter readers a special poem, selected by a contemporary poet whose work has appeared on Poetry Daily, as part of its annual fund-raising campaign and in celebration of National Poetry Month. This year, Poetry Daily is presenting these poems and comments to its website readers.

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Rusty Morrison's Poetry Month Pick, April 15, 2009

"In the desert"
from The Black Riders
by Stephen Crane (1871-1900)

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said: “Is it good, friend,”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.”

Rusty Morrison Comments:
Hans-Georg Gadamer explains in Philosophical Hermeneutics that we become most aware of the language we use when it creates problems for us; in other words, we wake up to trouble. Another way to say this is we wake up to words when they demonstrate to us a limitation in our understanding. I’m offering this poem by Stephen Crane (1871-1900), “In the desert,” because it disturbed me when I first read it, and the trouble, the disquiet, has only increased with subsequent readings. Language as stark and direct as this should be conveying its message to me with squeaky-clean transparency. But the starkness seems instead to have such a glare that it hurts my eyes, and then mirrors back to me only every turn of my own reflected glance.

I have no desire to feel kinship with the portrayed character, for whom I feel mostly antipathy. Yet, as I read the last three lines, especially the words “But I like it,” and “because it is my heart,” I can’t help but recognize in the voice, at first, a child’s open, almost naïve, honesty, and then a sense of compassion for the heart, which feels courageous, a willingness to take responsibility for it—it is a leap that feels nearly redemptive. That recognition sends me back into the poem to try to understand the mixture of disgust and respect that I feel for this naked, bestial creature.

A closer reading shows me that even though the poem is brief, there is a doubling occurring at many points. In the second line, for instance, there’s the use of “bestial,” in addition to “creature,” which darkens, almost demonically, the re-emphasized creaturely qualities of the character. These are two very similar words that offer little actual description—nothing really besides “naked,” for my mind to use to particularize this creature. Though, by calling him “friend” (which I hear offered with compassion, and without irony), and then engaging with him in conversation, the narrator leaves me imagining the creature as human—a duality that one can’t ignore .

I find more doubling in the repetition of “bitter” in the seventh line, and the repetition of “because” with its attendant sentence construction in the penultimate and last lines of the poem. The sense of being caught in a small trap of language is hard to shake off; even though the scene should convey the expanse of a desert, it feels to me intensely claustrophobic.

Another paradox that comes out of a doubling, seems to occur in the fact that the “heart” continues to be consumed, even as it is held in the man’s hands—so it is both distinctly separate from the body, and consumed, or returned to the body. And here is the most troubling aspect for me—that this act of eating one’s own bitter heart, which sounds so destructive, may indeed be an extremely accurate allegory for describing the best way to change that bitter heart by reconstituting it, by grinding it up into something the body can use to satisfy its hunger and strengthen it.

Of course, this is a troubling reading. We certainly all know that the idea of chewing over problems is akin to exhaustively worrying them over in our minds, and that such obsessive behavior leads to more heart-ache, since bitter reiteration only feeds one’s grievances and thus lets them grow.

But could this allegory be taking such terms and turning them inside out, to create the opposite affect? If one has the courage to face, to eat one’s own bitter heart, then isn’t he actively reconstituting bitterness? We have also heard that denial is as dangerous to our emotional health as worry. Perhaps the way out of this “desert” is to find the courage to consciously “eat” up one’s own “bitter” heart, one’s own bitterness, and thereby no longer deny it or feed it.

About Rusty Morrison:
Rusty Morrison's first poetry collection, Whethering, won the Colorado Prize for Poetry (Center for Literary Publishing, 2004), and the manuscript of the true keeps calm biding its story was awarded the Alice Fay di Castagnola Prize for a work in progress from the Poetry Society of America. Morrison is co-publisher of Omnidawn Publishing.

 

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