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Kizer's the Great Blue HeronDerek T. Leuenberger aa University of Nebraska-OmahaPublished online: 30 Mar 2010.

To cite this article: Derek T. Leuenberger (1999) Kizer's the Great Blue Heron, TheExplicator, 57:2, 115-118, DOI: 10.1080/00144949909596839

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Lowell saw Kennedy as a character from Plutarch, not because of Kennedy’s preoccupation with tragedy, as Beran puts it, but because he was actively and heroically engaged in his community, namely as a political being in the Aris- totelian sense and on the stage of history. Moreover, Lowell’s own life paral- leled not that of Kennedy, but that of Plutarch. Both Plutarch and Lowell were scions of distinguished families whose history spanned generations. Both were men of letters, and both were interested in men of destiny, so to speak. In Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, no poet or painter appears among his subjects. Fur- thermore, both men lived most of their lives on or near their ancestral soils. Lowell, except for his bouts of mental illness, lived out his life amid his books, writings, and various political interests, as did Plutarch. Thus, we can see that Lowell’s “Plutarchan bubble” was an idealized location in the “workroom” mentioned in line 1 where Lowell did his writing about men of heroic stature.

-MICHELE VALERIE RONNICK, Wayne State University

NOTES

1. Paul Mariani, Lost Puritan (New York: Norton, 1994) 363. I am grateful to Kathleen

2. Michael Knox Beran, ”Bobby’s Tragic Muse,” New Yorker I 1 May 1998: 70. 3. Ian Hamilton. Robert Lowe// (New York: Random House, 1982) 377. 4. See Thomas A. Vogler, “Robert Lowell and the Classical Tradition,” Pacific Coast Philolo-

gv 4 ( I 969): 59-64; Anthony Manousos, “‘Falling Asleep over The Aeneid’: Lowell, Freud, and the Classics,” Comparative Lirerarure Studies 21 (1984): 16-29; and George P. Clark, “James Russell Lowell’s Study of the Classics before Entering Haward,” Jahrbuch fur Amerikansrudien 8 (1963): 20549.

McNamee for stimulating my interest in this question.

WORKS CITED

Lowell, Robert. “For Robert Kennedy: 1925-68.” Notebook. IY67-IY68. New York: Farrar, 1969.

-. Selected Poems. New York: Farrar, 1977. 118.

Kizer’s THE GREAT BLUE HERON

In her poem “The Great Blue Heron,” from the collection Mermaids in the Basement, Carolyn Kizer deliberately eschews the somewhat typical poetic view of nature as the vibrant, richly spiritual partner of humanity.’ Rather than a depiction of nature as an idealized, benevolent entity, Kizer’s heron is a bale- ful image presaging her mother’s approaching death. Kizer’s choice of imagery sketches an account of a disinterested nature, taking a form dictated only by the narrator’s memory.

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As Kizer’s child persona stands on a deserted beach watching the heron, her physical description of the bird is telling. In the first stanza, she calls attention to the bird’s “tattered wings / He wore as a hunchback’s coat.” Later, Kizer describes the heron as it flies away, calling attention to the wings as “ashen things,” “grounded, unwieldy, ragged,” and “[a] pair of broken arms / That were not made for flight” (26-29). Rather than the more arche- typal image of freedom and natural grandeur, Kizer gives the heron the bear- ing of a carrion bird. Kizer’s unflattering adjectives are surprising when used in reference to a bird often thought of as elegant and graceful, but the por- trayal is fitting. As she stands in the “dusty light” of summer, the narrator’s remembrance of the day, and the correlative image of the heron, is darkened in memory; unknown to the child, but recognized by the adult, her mother is approaching death.

A sense of death and finality hangs over the poem as the heron is described in ghostly terms. The heron is a “spectral bird (22),” a “shadow without a shadow” (5). We sense that the heron is a herald of the future, a ghost of Kizer’s coming loss. As she observes the bird, she asks, “Heron, whose ghost are you?’ (15). The child is incognizant of what the bird represents. Her “mother knew what he was” (32), however: the Angel of Death, foreshadow- ing the end. The gaunt, ghostly heron is a macabre image of nature in an unac- customed role, harbinger of death.

Augmenting the poem’s morbid tenor as embodied by the heron, the por- trayal of the natural setting furthers the tone of desolation. The child stands alone on a “bare strip of shore” (41) marking the location of a “long-decayed resort” (1 1). Kizer mentions only a few distant pines in addition to herself, her mother, and the heron, but no other animals or vegetation, no water, little sug- gestive of life. It is a “canvas day” (7). a painting, unreal and lifeless. Kizer’s natural world is a realm of emptiness.

Rather than nature as green and vibrant, Kizer invokes the images of fire, ashes, and smoke. The “ashen” wings of the heron, the burned summer house, “[s]o many smokes and fires” (36) gradually darken Kizer’s view of the world. It is nature in the aftermath of catastrophe: charred, sterile, and forlorn. The child stands on the beach, “[iln the sudden chill of the burned” (17), sensing the ominous future in this barren place. In the last lines, Kizer acknowledges her mother’s fate:

When, like gray smoke, a vapor Floating into the sky, A handful of paper ashes, My mother would drift away. ( 15)

Here Kizer refers to her mother’s soon-realized death and subsequent crema- tion.* The fire and ash imagery brings to mind the phoenix myth. In Kizer’s version, however, there is no rebirth. There is no tone of redemption or hope.

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Instead, Kizer can impart only resignation; the end is known, and reflection brings little comfort.

Although “The Great Blue Heron” is certainly portentous and stark, it is important to note that the poem’s emotional climate does not indicate a sense of anger or injustice. Elizabeth House points out that Kizer “never suggests that the bird is evil. As part of nature, he merely reflects the cycle of life and death that time imposes on all living creatures” (403). Instead, in the final stanza, Kizer describes the heron as “heavy upon my eye” and “denser than my repose,” never as evil or malevolent. Kizer pointedly portrays nature as the message bearer, not the agent, of death; she recounts the heron’s appearance only in terms of her own emotions.

However, Kizer’s portrayal of the heron’s role within the natural cycle does not indicate a harmonious coexistence with her narrator. After “fifteen sum- mers and snows” (48), the narrator, now a grown woman, asks, “Why have you followed me here, / Heavy and far away?’ (4546). Kizer’s persona still has not fully reconciled herself with the heron’s message. The cycle continues, per- petuating the uncomfortable relationship between individual and nature.

The natural world Kizer writes of is not the serene, benevolent world of Wordsworth. Nor is it the darkly beautiful world of W. S. Merwin, resplendent even at the moment of its destruction, and at its worst, exacting retribution from h ~ m a n k i n d . ~ Rather, Kizer leaves us with the sense that nature is in itself dispassionate. Neither benevolent nor malevolent, nature can only reflect; it gives form to perception and is molded by the passage of time.

-DEREK T. LEUENBERGER, Universip of Nebraska-Omaha

NOTES

I . The Romantics, as the clearest example of this view, paradigmatically portrayed nature as a setting of spirituality, conveying a harmonious and complimentary relationship with humanity. William Wordsworth, in the preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, states that the poet “considers man and nature as essentially adapted to one another, and the mind of man as natu- rally the mirror of the fairest and most interesting qualities of nature‘’ (76).

2. Disclosed in the poem “The Blessing,” Mermaids 1619. 3. Hank Lazer calls The Lice “an extended myth of uncreation, the story of the disappearance

of the animal world because of man’s arrogance and shortsightedness (262). See “The Last One” and “For a Coming Extinction” from The Lice as characteristic examples of Mewin’s treatment of nature (10-12.6849).

WORKS CITED

House, Elizabeth. “Carolyn Kizer.” Dictionary ofliterary Biography. Ed. Donald J. Greiner. Vol.

Kizer, Carolyn. Mermaids in the Basement: Poems for Women. Port Townsend: Copper

Lazer, Hank. “For a Coming Extinction: A Reading of W. S. Merwin’s The Lice.” ELH 49.1

5 . Pt.1. Detroit: Gale Research, 1980. 402-05.

Canyon.1984. 14-15.

(1982): 262-85.

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Menvin, W. S. The Lice. New York: Atheneum, 1967. Wordsworth, William. Preface. Lyrical Ballads. 1802. Ed. Michael Mason. Longman Annotated

Texts. New York: Longman, 1992.

O’Connor’s A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND

The Misfit, the bad seed in Flannery O’Connor’s short story, is commonly deemed a logician of no mean wit. He has been pictured as a modern Pascal who wagers wrong (Cobb), a rigorously empirical Doubting Thomas (Scouten 63), a mental “thoroughbred with a curious and active nose” (Currie 149), and an instinctive scholar plumbing reality (Jones 837). Other critics describe him as a rationalist who “has to know ‘why”’ (Feeley 75), a thinker “recalling age- old debates about theodicy” (Johansen 38), as possessing “credibility and authority” (Orvell 132), “a scholarly awareness of alternatives” (Montgomery 12), and steadfast “lucidity” (Gossett 8 1). O’Connor herself seems to have envisioned her felonious rube a thinking-man’s skeptic. The grandmother’s “wits are no match,” she said, “for the Misfit’s” (Mystery and Manners 1 1 1).

The story offers scant support for such grandiose assessments of The Mis- fit’s intellectual acumen. An enlightened skeptic can marshal arguments against theism undreamt of in The Misfit’s countrified musings. His skepti- cism has been greatly exaggerated. Belief is his dominant gene, doubt reces- sive, almost nil. He acknowledges the miraculous efficacy of prayer while dis- avowing any desire for it:

“If you would pray,” the old lady said, “Jesus would help you.” “That’s right,” The Misfit said. “Well then, why don’t you pray? [. . .I” ‘‘I don’t want no hep,” he said. “I’m doing all right by myself.” (Complete Stories 130)

When the grandmother mindlessly implores “Jesus, Jesus,” The Misfit tacitly affirms his belief in an immaculate Christ. “Yes’m,” he mused, “Jesus thown everything off balance. It was the same with him as with me except He had- n’t committed any crime [. . .]” (131).

Throughout, The Misfit remains essentially a lapsed fundamentalist locked into incarnational models of deity. His conception of God is circum- scribed by a primitive mindset: Deity is authenticated by magic feats. Like the character Hazel Motes in O’Connor’s Wise Blood, his cousin in escha- tological literalism, The Misfit thinks the theological crux is whether “what’s dead stays that way.” What impresses him about Jesus Christ is that he reportedly could raise the dead.

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