[1434] A Fine Thing

Guest poem sent in by Michelle Chapman <schelle@>

The recent Wallace Stevens poem entitled "The Snow Man" immediately brought
this poem to mind.

To be a scarecrow
To lean all day in a bright field
With a hat full
Of bird's song
And a heart of gold straw;
With a sly wink for the farmer's daughter,
When no one sees, and small excursions;
Returning after
To a guiltless pose of indolence.

A fine thing
to be a figurehead
with a noble brow
On a ship's prow
And a look to the end of the world;
With the sad sounds of wind and water
And only a stir of air for thinking;
The timber cutting
The green waves, and the foam flashing.

To be a snowman
Lost all day in deep thought
With a head full
Of snowflakes
And no troubles at all,
With an old pipe and six buttons,
And sometimes children in woollen gaiters;
But mostly lonely,
A simple fellow, with no troubles at all.

 	-- Rosemary Dobson

This poem may not show the same depth and complexity of Wallace Stevens, but
for me it raises the same themes... it has a gently nostalgic tone, it is
easy to engage with, and yet underneath the cheerful self sufficiency of its
images it, too, carries the same unspoken themes identified in the Wallace
Stevens poem: "the misery of human condition; the natural, emotional bond
between man and nature, the "emptiness within" of the twentieth century
man." Where the Stevens poem ends with a desolate, inevitable emptiness "the
same wind ... blowing in the same bare place", Rosemary Dobson's snowman is
an optimistic figure, untroubled by his loneliness. Satisfied to be nothing.
Wanting nothing more. A hopeful acceptance of the emptiness within which may
yet lead to ... something (as it does for the scarecrow)!

Rosemary Dobson is an Australian poet, born in Sydney in 1920. She has
published 13 books of poetry but is relatively unknown outside academic
circles.

Michelle

Sites on Rosemary Dobson:
  http://www.brandl.com.au/Authors/Rosemary_Dobson/Dobson.htm
  http://www.nla.gov.au/pub/rdobson.html

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[this poem is archived, accessible and awaiting your comments at]
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1434.html
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