The World Unseen
Sir Thomas Browne believed in his own salvation
as he believed in Constantinople,
where he had never been. Today,
my street is a Constantinople
of snow.
As though I’d failed to pay my bill,
the snow has shut off all connections.
Gone is the shape the world offers me–
the hiss of distant, rustle of nearby
leaves, the hammer’s crack
rebounding off successive roofs, lilac
scent that swells and then dopplers away.
Instead I have silence, cold,
the muffled uninformative
probing of my cane, and now
the scrape scrape, of a snow-shovel.
Hello, I say.
Nothing. The lift and toss,
the powder’s diffuse arc, must be inferred;
Excuse me, I call.
No response.
If the shoveler does not exist, it will
be necessary to invent him.
This must be how the dead persist,
bundled in their shrouds
of static, grasping at fragments,
trying to get the attention of a stranger.
| Roy White |
|
levelheaded: The World Unseen
With record temps up much of the East Coast this past week, it’s a special pleasure to read and reflect on this wintry poem – even with its weighty deliberations on life and afterlife. Let’s start, as the poem does, with a little of Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici:
Againe, I am confident, and fully perswaded, yet dare not take my oath of my salvation; I am as it were sure, and do beleeve, without all doubt, that there is such a City as Constantinople, yet for me to take my oath thereon, were a kinde of perjury, because I hold no infallible warrant from my owne sense to confirme me in the certainty thereof.
As Roy White’s poem implies, Browne proceeds to compare his faith in the existence of Constantinople to his faith in his own religious salvation. The speaker of “The World Unseen” identifies with Browne’s faith because his own experience of a snowfall relies on his own unprovable conviction that, despite fundamental changes to his perception of a newly snowed-in world, it remains the one he knew before. The poem’s reference to Browne is doubly appropriate because the poem extends the speaker’s experience of blindness on a particular snowy day into its final metaphor about “how the dead persist” in the memories of the living. In a sense, it continues Browne’s thoughts on salvation (though we doubt this speaker would use the world “salvation” to describe his version of the afterlife). But by using words like “dopplers” and “probing,” the speaker’s takes a tentative, speculative approach to the unknown. It’s like of the proto-scientific mode of Browne’s prose, but it lends a contemporary trustworthiness to the speaker. We trust self-doubt because we recognize self-doubt.
The speaker’s blindness is encoded in the “probing of my cane” and in the sounds concealed by the new snow (the leaves rustling, “the hammer’s crack,” the smell of flowers). But it also speaks to a more general incompleteness in our understanding of the world. Just as Browne may never have seen Constantinople, the largest swaths of the universe and the smallest nuances in personal relationships preserve their mystery. In the poem’s primary narrative moment for instance, the speaker’s failure to connect with “the shoveler” is independent of his blindness. He calls out to someone who doesn’t respond. It’s his failure to connect through the shoveler’s indiscernible motives that causes him to describe “shrouds / of static, grasping at fragments.” In this final stanza, there’s the feeling that loneliness is an unalterable fact of life. There’s the fear that loneliness will be what death is like. But then there’s the hope that maybe, just maybe, we can “get the attention of a stranger.”
Here’s to a snow day!?
-The Editors
