The poem “Snipe,” like many of my poems, is fueled by recursion: the speaker’s present observations of a landscape are imbued with his haunted past. He is in a field, watching a snipe (known also as a woodcock in America) fly over the rain-soaked terrain, singing, and this encounter triggers the speaker’s reflection on his parents’ divorce and its volatile yet tender aftermath. Ever since I started writing poems, I have noticed, with the help of astute readers, my tendency to use a mode that critics have called “the greater romantic lyric,” or, more simply, a kind of “out-in-out” structure. In this structure, the speaker begins by describing the outer world (either a landscape or an object), then turns inward to meditate, remember, and reflect, then turns back outward to the original scene. Having been transfigured by his psychological journey inward, the speaker views the original scene with fresh insight and clarity.
Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”—a foundational poem for me—is perhaps the paradigmatic example of out-in-out structure. In the poem, the speaker begins by describing the banks of the River Wye, which he visits after five years away. The cliffs, cottages, and rivers are beautiful and tranquil; however, shifting from description to meditation, Wordsworth remarks on the power of nature to offer us more than beauty, sustaining us on a spiritual and moral level as we mature. He also praises his sister Dorothy, who accompanies him, and hopes that she will also find the divinity and peace in nature that he has found. The poem ends with the speaker panning back out to the landscape, asserting that these “steep woods and lofty cliffs, / And this green pastoral landscape” will heal Dorothy as much as they have healed him.
While “Tintern Abbey” of course focuses on childhood, as my poem does, it also uses a similar technique of starting in nature, letting a memory intrude upon the landscape, then circling back to review a natural scene now imbued with richer personal and spiritual meaning. The poem therefore charts a journey in the speaker’s thinking, not erasing the speaker’s earlier, younger mindset, but rather showing the full scope of what he has learned from its deep-dive into memory. It also exposes the power of nature to plunge us into our deepest interiors: transfixed by what he sees in front of him, Wordsworth’s speaker cannot help but think, yearn, and remember at length.
In using a similar thought pattern in my work, I’ve tried to highlight, also, the searing power of memory to own and capsize the present. By this same token, since writing “Snipe,” I’ve thought about the special significance of memory to queer identity, as well as the queerness of the speaker’s movements in my poem. I find out-in-out structure to be an extremely useful means of conveying not only the wounded queer psyche, but also how we revisit trauma as a way to ultimately move forward. Because queer people tend to have had lonely, isolating childhoods, we tend to look outward—in this case, to nature—for a sense of self. We also tend to be haunted by the closet and its repressions, our adult present moments often imbued with that earliest shame and fear.
The snipe itself is an objective correlative that the speaker attaches to, a symbol of solitude flying alone through the marsh, and of discomfiture (his sound is “low”; he has “camouflage”; his movements are “stuttering,”). However, even in the first half of the poem, the snipe is also a symbol of freedom, as he flies toward the mountain undaunted, still using his voice. Thus, the snipe recalls the uneasiness of the speaker’s own childhood where he nonetheless moves forward, grows, and sings despite familial rupture and his own queer shame. Even if he “fumbles the chorus,” he nonetheless sings with his mother, trying to comfort her and express solidarity after witnessing her grief. And, even if the speaker’s childhood is tinged with trauma and loneliness, he still moves forward into adulthood, perhaps lonely, but not without his powers of observation to guide him.
The snipe and the landscape therefore come to represent the speaker’s limitations and sadness, but also the triumph of his flight, the original scene imbued with the speaker’s sense of his own survival. The speaker, like the snipe, might be “calling out to no one,” but he nonetheless “use[s] his voice to know that he is here.” He perseveres, the out-in-out form serving as a queer survival strategy. The speaker uses his present to come to terms with his past, learn from it, and connect more deeply with his present moment.
