Part VI
Annotations are below, matched to superscript footnotes in the text
Map of My Country
annotated by John Holmes
VI.
Clear afternoons when I was young,
The rounded arch of heaven hung
So lightly over me I knew
The earth turned over slow and true.
Men strode along my native street
On confident, habitual feet,
As if no almost visible line
Marked out direction's stiff design.– -
Look right, look left, direction said.
Unwavering, they walked ahead
As if, I thought, they walked inside
An endless tunnel shoulder-wide.
Rails went somewhere, double, bright,
Wires went somewhere out of sight,
And under trees that arched in files
Ran wheels unrolling a reel of miles.– -
If all my faith, when I was young,
Was given the laws I lived among,
To gravity, to air, to flight,
To the sense of touch, the sense of light,
It had been true a long time then
That builders were the wisest men. ³⁵
They knew that every living thing
Had skill of root, or leg, or wing.
They built that secret stone by stone,
To make a wall stand up alone.
They stripped that muscle almost bare
And left it tense and tall in air,
Clasping light, and not the soil,
In motionless and breathless toil.– -
A builder knew the sleeping strength
In idle stone or timber-length,
The wings in wood, the solid shoulder
Thrusting up in the buried boulder.
I needed a language all of signs
For surfaces and working lines.
Not names of things, but the way they look.
The nail. The wheel. The hinge. The hook.
Suddenly printed bright and bare,
The color of fire and fine as hair.
I sent my mind inside their minds
And found the thing a builder finds
Who watches men heave up a load,
Or lean to the curve along a road;
Who watches birds balance themselves
On lakes of air and airy shelves,
Or watches a tree grip soil and grow,
And guesses boughs of root below. ³⁶– -
I climbed a tree so high I weighed
In wind no more than leaves. I swayed
With the leafy boughs, alone and free,
Riding above geography.– -
I gazed from the street beyond my street
To where the sky and highway meet
Where the land rises like a wave in green,
And falls away, but falls unseen
On the further side of noon and here.
Then suddenly I looked down sheer
At roof-slope, sidewalk, backyard fence,
Roof, dormer, roof, and their difference.
I saw that tower, man, and tree
Rose parallel to gravity,
Although great shapes of windy air
Crowded against them standing there.– -
Look and come down. Deep grass received
A child who knew, but now believed.– -
Then I walked knowing I could feel
Earth rolling backward under heel,
Knowing forever I should know
That I must bear my part of snow,
My weight of darkness, rain, and light
Like any field or mountain height.
35) There is nothing in this section for footnoting in the sense of identification. I had no particular rails, streets, trees, machines, or back-yards in mind; I never did or watched any of the things mentioned. Yet this section of the poem is more fundamentally and inclusively autobiographical than almost any of the others, and harder to explain.
It was not written for inclusion in "Map of My Country," but from the first I knew that I would use it as the childhood part of the poem. Decision to insert other earlier and shorter sections came later, as the pattern grew. I could have tried to write a childhood section that would have recounted scores of names and places and activities, but for the map I wanted, out of all the possibilities, only the building, and the designing, and the laws.
My father was a builder of great dams, and I had always seen his blueprints and tracing-sheets, his diagrams, and the drafting tools he used were familiar equipment. His father was a builder, too, a carpenter, and I had some of that in me.
This poem is really about the kind of play I carried on until I was too big for floor-play, although actually I merely exchanged the wooden blocks and the structural toys for writing, or for editing and printing, or for building bookcases, or furnishing rooms. I had my own work-bench, and tools, and I built squadrons of ships with flat bottoms to push around on the floor. My brother and I constructed elaborate, and very systematic forts, docks, storage warehouses, lumber-yards, and military camps, either indoors or out in the grass and in the flower-beds. There was more fun in the organization and construction than in the playing, often; or construction was the play.
I was aware of balance, symmetry, of exact measurement, of proportion, and not only in mass, but in plane and color. Maps and plans fascinated me. Machines, but not machinery, fascinated me. I was not what is called mechanically inclined, and never understood electricity, and never the insides of a car, or of any simpler power-plant.
This sense of design might have made an architect of me, and late in 'high school I did think about it seriously. But I was impatient, if fussily methodical, and would always have been ignorant and lazy about the mechanical necessities of architecture. My feeling was a feeling, or imagination, and this, I discovered when I was in high school, could be satisfied with using words.
Walking around a large earth dam in northern New Jersey with my father one early evening in the summer of l925 (it was not our dam - we had driven over from the one he was building - but it was a dam) I heard him say, in effect, "All this was not here a year ago, and now it is here, and you can see it." He was not especially articulate, but in those words I felt his creative drive, and pleasure. I knew too that it was there, and had not been there, but he knew how it had been built there, every step of it, and I knew only the feeling.
When I was playing my ground-and-floor games, I was not aware - I suppose I mean not intellectually aware - of anything like glory and faith in the laws of gravity, but I was anything but unconscious of them. It was all a powerful pleasure, I shall say now, a deep satisfaction, that I wanted to prolong, repeat, and intensify. The boats that I painted battleship gray, the Richter Anchor Blocks, and the Meccano, the companies of lead soldiers, and the pulleys and derricks we were forever devising, gave me this pleasure.
I have realized now, as I write this, that the only alternative idea I had for a childhood section of the poem was to try to write about these games, this playing at building all those years. When I looked over the lines here included, I decided that I had gone beyond that sort of reminiscent-essay thing, and reached the truths of generalization I would have wished to demonstrate, so I used them as they stand. As for the notion of writing something about childhood games, it has become only a suggestion that now and then I wistfully try on my college students in composition, almost always without result whatever. This has baffled me, and I cannot think that my sort of play was so very unusual. But I do see it now as directly in my line of development: my father's engineering enlarged upon his father's carpentry; my mother's family's more-than-amateur artistic talents; my floor-games a combination of these two kinds of expression; the floor-games modifying gradually into word-construction; and then myself looking backward through these influences and activities for an explanation.
A little of the Robert Louis Stevenson guilt or necessity for apology is mixed in. While my father was sincerely happy and proud about my publications (a member of the family in the Atlantic Monthly!) it was pride; he understood less rather than more of what I wrote, or was unable to say so, if he did. He built his dams, and at home he built chests, bookcases, tables, and toys; he was a painstaking, unhurried workman in wood, scrupulous, foresighted, and honorable: he would not spare himself the making of a true joint or the careful sandpapering or painting of a surface merely because it was out of sight.
But I would, and did. My carpentry was never comparable to his, and I was often ashamed to let him see it. I wanted the quickest results, once I had visualized a cabinet or bookshelf. I suppose it is not possible to make a comparison, one of his dams against one of my poems, to see if I did my work as well as he did his.
36)There's the double root image again, or part of it, turning up here as a surprise as I copy the lines. This winter (1955) I came across a linoleum-block print I had cut about 1954, and entitled "My Home Among the Roots," showing the boughs, the ground-line, and the root-system, with a hollowed-out cave furnished with table and chair. But the fact is that years before that I had dreamed this double-root image, with the horizontal lines of a poem beginning at the leafy top, reading downward, and changing in tone at the ground-line and below. In a notebook I drew this, but could not recapture the lines or any meaning.