Donna L. Potts II. "Spelling a World Unsaid":  Language as the Intermediary Between Mind and World

Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era traces modern poetry's growing awareness of the poetic potential of etymological study to the publication of several popular etymological dictionaries, including Walter Skeat's Etymological Dictionary (1882), and the New English Dictionary (1884-1928), which later became the venerable OED. In his demonstration of how the poet's attentiveness to the etymologies of words has made poetry a more efficacious conveyor of thought, Kenner cites the linguist, Richard Trench: "Many a single word. . . is itself a concentrated poem, having stores of poetical thought and imagery laid up in it." 

"Previous lexicography," Kenner notes, "had taught not roots and developments, but distinctions and discriminations." In fact, prior to 1822, when Grimm's Law was introduced, etymologists could not even determine the relationship between language families, nor did they understand the historical developments that languages undergo.

A century after Grimm's discovery, the work of Pound and Joyce suggests an assimilation of etymological theory that has since become one of the distinguishing characteristics of modernism. Ernest Fenollosa's draft of "The Chinese Written Character" reveals the extent to which the study of etymology had pervaded modernist thought:

Every word, a metaphor, perhaps several degrees deep, still has the power to flash meaning back and forth between apparently divergent and intractable planes of being. The prehistoric peoples who created language were necessarily poets, since they discovered the whole harmonious framework of the universe and the essential interplay of its living processes. We should find the whole theory of evolution. . .  lying concrete in our etymologies.^[1]

In Poetic Diction, Owen Barfield states his intentions in almost exactly the same terms that Fenollosa had employed years before: for Barfield, words are not merely storehouses for "poetical thought and imagery," but, even more importantly, they also embody the whole "evolution of consciousness" wherein lies the history of humanity.^[2]

Barfield prefaces his own etymological study, History in English Words, with an acknowledgement to Skeat and the OED for laying the groundwork that has made his book possible. Furthermore, he specifically recognizes etymology's potential contribution to modern poetry: "A very little practise in this method of concentration on the meaning of a single word will convince anyone who cares to try it of the insight which it brings into the beating heart of poetry."^[3]

As I explained in the first chapter, Barfield associates the second stage in the "evolution of consciousness" with the growing acceptance of positivist thought, which was inevitably accompanied by a waning belief in the power of language. He contends that while an earlier age would never have considered words apart from their spiritual connotations, the modern age tends to reduce words to mere tags for directly observable phenomena. For example, "Grammar" (grammarye) once had half-magical connotations, but was eventually reduced to its present meaning--the study of mere forms of words, with no attention to the semantic power that they wield.

In a 1964 review of Barfield's Worlds Apart: A Dialogue of the Sixties, Nemerov refers to Barfield's approach as, "Unbuilding Babel in the Common Tongue." The phrase expresses Barfield's belief that language is built upon the collective representations of human beings; therefore, attentiveness to the history of its development produces a clarity of vision that allows people to experience the "original relationship" they once shared with Nature. Although Nemerov's phrase was intended to describe Barfield, it likewise expresses Nemerov's own need to unravel myth and mystery, to re-embody language with its former significance and splendor, thus fulfilling Barfield's description of the poet's role.

Citing the modern inability to find the unity between states of mind and physical conditions (for example, people had once used the same word for "breath" and "spirit"), Barfield claims that,

. . .  we, in the development of consciousness, have lost the power to see this one as one. Our sophistication, like Odin's, has cost us an eye; and now it is the language of poets, in so far as they create true metaphors, which must restore this unity conceptually, after it has been lost from perception. Thus, the `before-unapprehended' relationships of which Shelley spoke, are in a sense `forgotten' relationships. For though they were never yet apprehended, they were at one time seen. And imagination can see them again.^[4]

Nemerov's first two books of poetry, The Image and the Law and Guide to the Ruins, show great sensitivity to the subtleties in language, yet only in his later books does he rely on the highly sophisticated word play that reveals a thorough familiarity with the historical developments of specific words. Nemerov obviously delights in drawing on the many connotations with which even seemingly insignificant words are laden. He uses words ironically, of course, often with a strong sense of the contrasts between their former and current meanings. He often imbues a word with more connotations than it could possibly bear in prose, leading us to question and reassess our own prosaic and simplistic approach to language and the world.

Language is for Nemerov what magic once was for the alchemists--the means for transforming the base elements of this world into gold. In the conclusion of his essay entitled "On Metaphor," Nemerov states that, "Poetry in the hands of the great masters constantly tends to a preoccupation with. . . . making statements about invisible mysteries by means of things visible. . . . Such poetry is magical, then, because it treats the world as a signature, in which all things intimate to us by their sensible properties what and in what way we are." ^[5]

Nemerov's use of language is in itself an effective means for refuting positivism; even the most common word is so carefully and deliberately placed that its concurrent application to both an inner and an outer state cannot be ignored. While positivism denies the necessity of any knowledge other than that which is empirically based, Nemerov is able to shape even the most common words into symbols that transfigure material existence.

In his poem, "The Loon's Cry," the poet watches the sun go down and the moon rise, reflecting that he is only capable of finding within the scene a "natural beauty," not theology. He then describes a time when spiritual truths were believed to be embodied in things:

I envied those past ages of the world

When, as I thought, the energy in things

Shone through their shapes, when sun and moon no less

Than tree or stone or star or human face

Were seen but as fantastic Japanese

Lanterns are seen, sullen or gay colors

And lines revealing the light that they conceal.

Nemerov uses contrasting visual and sensory imagery--light and dark, heat and cold--to recreate the scenario in Plato's allegory of the cave; his technique has its parallels in the work of both Proust and Barfield. Like the cave dwellers in the allegory, Proust's and Barfield's characters do not initially recognize that the images before them are dependent on the light, or Truth, that emanates beyond them.

In Remembrance of Things Past, the young Marcel learns that his own idea of a thing or event, whether it arises from anticipation or memory, overshadows the event itself, which illustrates Proust's belief that imagination inevitably supersedes empirical knowledge. Marcel says of his magic lantern:

In the manner of the master-builders and glass-painters of gothic days it substituted for the opaqueness of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many colours, in which legends were depicted, as on a shifting and transitory window. But my sorrows were only increased, because this change of lighting destroyed, as nothing else could have done, the customary impression I had formed of my room.^[6]

Marcel must concede that what he had considered to be real and permanent--his window, his room and the things therein--are merely transitory. His life is a process of abandoning each "customary impression" to which he had clung during his childhood. The flickering light of the magic lantern, representing art and memory and imagination, imbues the seemingly disconnected events of his life with unity and purpose.

Likewise, in Worlds Apart, Barfield initially relies on the metaphor of the magic lantern to convey the harmony between "inner" and "outer" worlds. Later in the book, he stages a reenactment of the famous scene in Plato's allegory of the cave, in which the characters, having ventured outside of the wall of the cave, find that their conception of reality has been dramatically expanded and transformed. Similarly, as Barfield's characters struggle to grasp the concept of polarity, the temperature rises until Burgeon notices that the room had "become so warm and moist and still that one had the feeling that almost anything could happen, though the most likely thing was thunder. I myself no longer appeared to have any separate existence inside my shirt."^[7] The restrictive modern notion of selfhood has given way to the more comprehensive concept of original participation.

Like Barfield, Nemerov views life as an endless process of alternately confronting and casting aside illusions about oneself and the world. In his essay, "The Miraculous Transformations of Maurits Cornelius Escher," he finds the visual counterparts to Proust's themes in the optical illusions of Escher:

. . .  in Proust, the relations of appearance and truth often have three stages. In the first, we believe what we see or are told. In the second, we see through that false appearance, of beauty, of idealism, of dishonesty, of hypocrisy, to the truth opposed, the truth beneath the surface. And we continue in our new wisdom, perhaps for twenty years, before one day discovering that the perception of the first stage was accurate, though perhaps not complete, and that it was our wisdom itself, our psychological penetration, our great diagnostic acumen, that was a folly and a delusion. . . . {Escher} too, is playing always, like Shakespeare, like Proust, with the simple but endless problem of true illusions. . . . he seems to say to us, Look! don't be so smug. Try to go at least one illusion beyond the illusion you have inherited or accepted by custom, by habit, by laziness; you will see that all things change their signs; it may be not a simple business of illusion and reality; it may be a more subtle business than that, and worthier of its playful creator.^[8]

After delineating the original relationship between thought and thing, "The Loon's Cry" traces the history of human consciousness to its second stage, in which we mourn the loss of light, or truth:

We'd traded all those mysteries in for things,

For essences in things, not understood--

Reality in things! And now we saw

Reality exhausted all their truth.

Here, "Reality" has become a disanimated term because adherence to "Truth" has been reduced to a mere business deal--a "trade-in" of essences for things. Whereas Plato had revered "Ideas," regarding them as real beings with existences of their own, which stood behind the physical phenomena rather than within them, positivism eventually put the mind "at the absolute disposal of matter." When mind "ceased to brood on what arose from within," it began to rely for information exclusively on the material processes of the outer world.^[9]

Despite his despair over this transition, Nemerov, like Barfield, recognizes it as a necessary stage in the evolution of consciousness. Thus, he continues in his attempt to reconcile the past vision of the world, in which everything signifies, with the modern concept of it, in which nothing does. In Poetic Diction, Barfield speaks of the necessity of maintaining both ways of seeing, one of which "is interested in knowing what things are," whereas the other "discerns what they are not."^[10]

Similarly, in "The View from an Attic Window," Nemerov presents these two ways of seeing in terms of the natural processes that he observes outside his window. The poet describes an afternoon spent looking through boxes of family heirlooms and photographs, and as he examines his own life in contrast to "the laced sway of family trees" in his attic, he begins to recognize the subtle relation between his ancestors' lives and his own. He becomes aware that like his ancestors, he is mortal, but will be granted a kind of immortality through his descendents, just as they were. This relation between mortality and immortality in turn corresponds to the intricate relation between order and chaos in the natural world:

. . . we live in two kinds of thing:

The powerful trees, thrusting into the sky

Their black patience, are one, and that branching

Relation teaches how we endure and grow;

The other is the snow,

Falling in a white chaos from the sky,

As many as the sands of all the seas . . . .

Although the poet, now middle-aged, had felt certain that he had established an identity apart from these long dead ancestors whose belongings are now stored in his attic, he finds that his life is inseparable from theirs; they share the same dreams and the same destiny. Language is the means by which he can represent the "branching relations," the concurrent unity and diversity, inherent in all things. Thus, Nemerov relies heavily on language that is pointedly multivalent: it is language about things, yet it is also language about language, suggesting that the world itself is similarly laden with possibilities that are not recognized by positivism.

Similarly, the poet's search for meaning in the loon's cry epitomizes the pursuit of meaning in the "language" that nature speaks:

I thought I understood what that cry meant,

That its contempt was for the forms of things,

Their doctrines, which decayed--the nouns of stone

And adjectives of glass--not for the verb

Which surged in power properly eternal

Against the seawall of the solid world,

Battering and undermining what it built.

Verbs can be said to be "properly eternal," first because the other parts of speech originated from them, and also because their capacity to depict flux and transformation allows them to provide a more accurate view of reality than do nouns, which falsely suggest permanence and stasis. Barfield contends that while most words have their origins in verbs, they were gradually debased into the weaker nouns and adjectives, robbing language of its original power to transform. In support of his theory, Barfield cites G. Rostrever Hamilton: "In modern English poetry, `verbs play a minor part as compared with nouns and adjectival phrases. . . . the intransitive verb is in high ratio to the transitive, and the participle is worked hard. . . .' It is thus peculiarly adapted to the poet's purpose of holding the mirror up to a world of bits and pieces. . . . `a feeble world falling apart in dissolution.'"^[11]

One of Barfield's chief objections to positivism is its insistence on viewing the world solely from the standpoint of archaeology, as a collection of "bits and pieces." In a discussion on archaeology in Worlds Apart, Burgeon remarks to Sanderson, 

When I compare the sort of theories that are put forward about the consciousness of primitive man with the indications you get, by pursuing a more internal route-- myth and the study of language, I confess that it has sometimes seemed to me that there must be a more satisfactory way of getting back into our own past than all this measuring of potsherds and arrowheads.^[12]

Barfield undermines the positivist notion that the kind of secondhand knowledge derived solely from the study of dead matter offers any permanent or accurate insights into early human history. He proposes that the study of the history of language actually provides a more immediate and comprehensive view of human history.

Likewise, in his poem, "To Clio, Muse of History," (subtitled, "On learning that the Etruscan Warrior in the Metropolitan Museum of Art is proved a modern forgery") Nemerov challenges archaeology's smug certainty about the "truth" of its discoveries. He observes that the huge effigy in the Metropolitan, which had long been associated with "the sexual thrust of power," has now become "another lie about our life." While Freud may be regarded as the specific satiric target of this poem, Nemerov suggests that the toppling of this "idol" is an indictment of any positivist interpretation of history.

The beautiful last lines of the fifth stanza, "As with a dream interpreted by one still sleeping,/ The interpretation is only the next room of the dream," suggest that any history that is grounded merely on physical evidence fails to offer us lasting truth about human nature. Nemerov's metaphor, reminiscent of Emerson's contention in "Self-Reliance" that the majority of men are sleepwalkers, implies that when we refuse to see any reality beyond our physical existence, we are figuratively "still sleeping."

In "The Loon's Cry," Nemerov's contempt for "Doctrines, which decayed"  is likewise due to their inherent misrepresentation of the world; whereas reality is characterized by ambiguity and change, doctrines confine our attention to a clear but artificial world view. Throughout his poetry, his critique of "doctrines" is most often manifested in his satiric attacks on the media, an institution whose admitted obsession with presenting nothing but "the facts" prevents it from recognizing the "original relation" between mind and the world.

In the last lines of "The Loon's Cry,"  Nemerov's attentiveness to the cry of the Loon represents humanity's unceasing efforts to find meaning in nature, which requires us to discover our own relationship to the natural world without losing sight of our unique position in it. Nemerov's indecision as to whether the final cry comes from the loon or the train signifies similar ambiguities in language. To what degree does language merely describe the forms of things, and to what degree can it actually capture their essences? The poem seems to suggest that although human reason may be capable of distinguishing between them, the two functions of language ultimately cannot be separated.

Attentiveness to the metaphorical nature of language is the only means by which the multivalence of reality can be rendered, for Nemerov writes that "Metaphor stands somewhat as a mediating term squarely between a thing and a thought, which may be why it is so likely to compose itself about a word of sense and a word of thought. . . ." ^[13] 

Notwithstanding the frequent connections that he makes between poetry and magic, Nemerov nonetheless concedes that the poet who "creates" the world through his description of it risks reenacting the fall of Adam and Eve, who mistook their power to name the beasts and birds for control over their own destinies. In short, the poet must remember that, "Whatever the mind invents, it also discovers."^[14]

In an essay on Wallace Stevens, Nemerov qualifies his analogy between poetry and magic: "To view the poet as magician is fair, if we remember that magicians do not really solve the hero's problems, but only help him to confront these; as Merlin may be said to have helped Arthur, not so much by doing magic as by being for him a presence and a voice, a way of saying which indicated a way of being."^[15]

Clearly, then, language is sometimes an inadequate bridge between thought and thing, deluding its users into accepting simplistic substitutes for Truth. In "The Swaying Form," he writes that "Language. . .  is the marvelous mirror of the human condition, a mirror so miraculous that it can see what is invisible, that is, the relations between things. At the same time, the mirror is a limit, and as such, it is sorrowful; one wants to break it and look beyond."^[16]

Through a carefully wrought analogy between writing and skating, Nemerov's poem entitled "Writing" attests to the beautiful configurations that writing produces, in which "world and spirit wed," and which even lead him to exclaim, "It is as though the world/ were a great writing." Yet its final stanza expresses the limitations of poetic language:

Having said so much,

let us allow there is more to the world

than writing: continental faults are not

bare convoluted fissures in the brain.

Not only must the skaters soon go home;

also the hard inscription of their skates

is scored across the open water, which long

remembers nothing, neither wind nor wake.

St. Paul's description of man in his present state of spiritual imperfection, "we see through a glass darkly," taken with the traditional description of art as a "mirror of nature," expresses Nemerov's sense of the poet's role. Nemerov's fourth volume of poetry, Mirrors and Windows, relies on the imagery of mirrors and windows to represent, respectively, art and nature.

Mirrors "exemplify," rearranging the ordinary perceptions of the observer, and thereby creating a new and dynamic relation between the observer and the observed. The opening poem in Mirrors and Windows is simply entitled "The Mirror":

O room of silences, alien land

Where likeness lies, how should I understand

What happens here as in the other world

But silently, the branch, the same leaf curled 

Against the branch, stirred in the same breeze,

And all those quivering duplicities

Rendered again under a distant light?

Now slowly the snow drifts down, and coming night

Darkens the room, while in the leaden glass

I watch with observed eyes the stranger pass.

The "quivering duplicities" produced by the mirror refer literally to its capacity to create our "double," yet there are also moral implications in the phrase: duplicity means dishonesty. The poet who has the power to render the world through language also has the power to deceive, by, for example, presenting the arbitrary events of his personal life as a kind of microcosm. Nemerov's disdain for confessional poetry is due to (aside from the self-indulgence and self-pity that he saw reflected in much of it) its failure to assimilate the pattern in the world; because many confessional poets never venture beyond self-consciousness, they wrongly depict a world in which isolation is the necessary condition of humanity.

In the third stanza, the drifting snow, combined with the "coming night" that darkens his room, signifies the speaker's growing awareness of his mortality. The mirror is now described as "leaden glass." Latent in this image are the old alchemical associations of lead with the body, and of gold with the spirit. In another poem, Nemerov's Mrs. Mandrill encounters death with the startled realization, "for though I knew the lead behind my looking-glass/ better than some, I was the more deceived/ by the way things looked."

Finally, the speaker's "mirror image" reflects nothing more than his physical presence, and thus it appears to him as a stranger. The image represents the alienation between mind and nature, underscored by Nemerov's opening description of the mirror as an "alien land."

In "Elegy for a Nature Poet," Nemerov delineates the way in which this alienation manifests itself in language. The poet in the poem, for whom "any old bird or burning bush" revealed "just another allegory," catches a catarrh because of his refusal to protect himself against the winter wind. His stubbornness has tragic consequences, as does, analogously, his denial of his relation with the natural world.  Because he has chosen to believe that he can control nature through language, he is not prepared to acknowledge its ultimate control over him. In the final stanza, his words fail him:

Rude Nature, whom he loved to idealize

And would have wed, pretends she never heard

His voice at all, as, taken by surprise

At last, he goes to her without a word.

Furthermore, this poet's death is emblematic of the death of a tradition: because the very meaning of "Nature" has changed, "Nature poetry" no longer has the resonance that it once had. "Nature," when used in the phrases "human nature" and "the world of nature," now has two entirely different meanings, accentuating the alienation of humanity from its environs. Nemerov suggests that the poet's task hence should be to search for the balance between thought and thing, resisting the positivist impulse to examine the material world at the expense of the spiritual one.

In "Runes," even the title suggests the poet's intention to find unity between material and spiritual worlds: "runes" were the pieces of stone upon which Germanic peoples wrote the characters of their alphabet; they were also believed to have magical properties, and were used to cast spells and predict the future. "Runes" is also the word used to describe Finnish and Old Norse poems. Nemerov thereby suggests that his series of short poems are themselves "runes," and function in much the same way as the ancient poetry from which he derives the title.

Appropriately, he opens the poem with a paradox for paradoxes always imply an underlying unity that may be overlooked by a superficial observer. St. Augustine's ". . . insaniebam salubriter et moriebar vitaliter" is commonly translated, "I was going insane healthy, and I was dying full of life."^[17]

Nemerov continues by recounting the paradoxes that abound in nature: "the stillness in moving things, /In running water, also in the sleep/ of winter seeds. . . " His use of alliteration and participial phrases recreates the sense of harmonious motion that characterizes natural processes. Although his subject is Nature, he uses diction that is commonly employed to describe language: "Where time to come has tensed itself, enciphering a script so fine. . .  only the years unfold its sentence from the root" {emphasis mine}.

Our awareness of the dual meanings of these words should likewise lead us to question the positivist tendency to reduce the  world to purely material aspects. History in English Words reminds us that despite the emphasis of post-Bloomfieldian linguists on the directly observable aspects of language, words do not have solely physical referents. The words with which we describe our language are, on closer observation, replete with other connotations that are inseparable from their functions as tags for concrete objects. Thus, Nemerov's time that has "tensed" itself alludes not only to verb tenses (listed as the primary meaning of the word in any dictionary) but also to specific physical and mental states: to be stretched taut, or kept in a state of suspense.

Nemerov states his theme in Rune I: "of thought and the defeat/ Of thought before its object, where it turns/ As from a mirror, and returns to be/ The thought of something and the thought of thought. . . ." Thought seeks its object, but is also the subject of itself. In "The Swaying Form," he indicates that poetry is the means by which this defeat, or paradox, can be resolved:

Poetry differs from thought in this respect, that thought eats up the language in which it thinks. Thought is proud, and always wants to forget its humble origin in things. In doing so, it begins to speak by means of very elevated abstractions, which quickly become emptied and impoverished. The business of poetry is to bring thought back into relation with the five wits, the five senses which Blake calls "the chief inlets of soul in this age. . . ."^[18]

Runes III-VIII depict such "emptiness of abstraction" through a series of metaphors which, true to Nemerov's purpose, engage the five senses and carefully replicate the natural process--the death of vegetation as autumn moves toward winter, the death of the body that follows a long process of aging, and which necessitates abandoning material possessions in much the same way that plants shed their seeds.

In Rune III, the sunflowers are described as "traders rounding the horn of time"; although they don't actually move, their faces follow the sun as it moves across the horizon (an oxymoron within an oxymoron, since the sun only appears to move). The sunflowers' helpless dedication to the sun suggests their subservience to time; by the end of Rune III, they are completely at its mercy: "It is on savage ground you spill yourselves,/ And spend the tarnished silver of your change." The imagery recalls Judas Iscariot's betrayal of Christ in exchange for thirty pieces of silver, and his violent death as recorded in Acts II. Given that "Runes" deals simultaneously with creation and procreation, Nemerov undoubtedly intends a sexual allusion here as well: in Genesis 38, Onan incurred God's displeasure when he "spilled {the seed} upon the ground" to avoid impregnating his brother's wife.

By punning on "traders" and "traitors" in Rune III, Nemerov also establishes a clear connection with the first two runes: "the thought of something and the thought of thought" were compared in Rune I to a "trader doubly burdened," and in Rune II, Ulysses functions as both trader and traitor. William Mills sees the trader imagery in the poems as an oblique continuation of Rune II; Ulysses is now "the daring trader moving around the horn."^[19] Yet Nemerov simultaneously depicts Odysseus as a traitor, "leaving the palace, planning to steal sheep." Odysseus's prolonged absence from Penelope and Ithaca has been construed by many critics and poets as a kind of betrayal--a shirking of his responsibility to both his kingdom and his family.

The "bare poles, raking out of true" describe both the sunflowers' stalks and the poles of the merchants' ship as it is led off course. Nemerov's many double entendres often compel us to search for the poem's deeper moral import. "Broken," as Julia Bartholomay has noted, has triple implications: the sunflowers are "broken on this quarter of the wheel," referring to the season of the year when they spill their seeds, the quarter of the ship's wheel, and also to the ancient idea of a wheel of fortune, a powerful reminder that monetary fortune was no substitute for virtue and no protection against death. All three images allude as well to the inevitability of our fate; the ship's wheel, overpowered by the forces of wind and waves that ultimately have a greater bearing on the course of the ship, has long symbolized our limited control over our own destinies.

Nemerov's description of the sunflowers as traders "rounding the horn of time" is an oblique continuation not only of the story of Odysseus, but also of the "wheel of fortune" motif. One definition of horn is "the end of a crescent," and the inevitable demise awaiting the travelers who "round" the end of the horn is reminiscent of the fate of those who go full circle on the medieval wheel of fortune.

Another kind of horn or crescent is also alluded to in Rune V: "the ram's horn sounded in the high/ Mount of the Lord." Yet the "rounding of the Horn" specifically refers to sailors' voyages around Cape Horn, the southernmost point of South America, a region notorious for its stormy weather. The Horn of Plenty, whose contents overflow, "spills" itself just as the sunflowers had "spilled" themselves in Rune II.  The biblical horn symbolizes "strength, honor and glory, which when excessive, lead to pride--and to a fall. . . ."^[20]

In Rune IV, Nemerov describes the basilisk, a creature who was allegedly produced from the egg of a cock hatched under serpents, and whose look caused instant horror immediately followed by death:

The seed sleeps in the furnaces of death,

A cock's egg slept till hatching by a serpent

Wound in his wintry coil, a spring so tight

In his radical presence that every tense

Is now.

Appropriately, the positions of the words in the first two lines of Rune IV reinforce the parallel between the sleeping seed and the sleeping egg. Seeds are the ovules of plants, and thus the counterparts to the cock's egg. The egg, like the cipher in Rune I, is another kind of nonentity that is coaxed by time into being. Throughout "Runes," Nemerov also puns on the verb form of "egg," to incite into action.

The use of the word "radical" in the above passage, complemented by the cyclical form of the poem itself, not only emphasizes what we know to be the truth about how nature works, but also reflects the nature of poetry. In Poetry and Fiction, Nemerov contends "that poetry wants an order other than the narrative order in which argument and reasoned discourse commonly proceed, that the poem must make this order by radical rather than linear progressions, seeking so far as it may to be somehow simultaneously present in all its parts. . . ."^[21]

Some lines from "The Swaying Form," quoted earlier in a quite different context, acquire new meaning:

Writing is trying to find out what the nature of things has to say about what you think you have to say. And the process is reflective or cyclical, a matter of feedback between oneself and "it," an "it" which can gain its identity only in the course of being brought into being, come into being in the course of finding its identity. This is a matter, as Lu Chi says, of how to hold the axe while you are cutting its handle.^[22]

That Nemerov's poem is also concerned with describing the nature and function of poetry becomes increasingly evident in his employment of many forms of the word "script." The "script" that is enciphered by Time in Rune I is the genetic pattern provided by Nature for the propagation of the species, yet it is also employed throughout the poem as a continual reminder that Nemerov is also writing about writing. Near the end of Rune IV:

         Out of this head the terms of kind,

Distributed in syntax, come to judgment,

Are basilisks who write our sentences

Deep at the scripture's pith, in rooted tongues. . . .

The word for script originated from the Greek "keiren," to cut. That Nemerov places his sentences "deep at the scripture's pith" suggests that he is aware of the ancient usage of this word: one gets to the core by cutting; one gets to the essence of the universe by piercing its surface through writing. The ancient method of writing involved actually cutting the words into stone or some other material, hence the runes. Furthermore, the use of the word "scripture," a term usually used in worship, is yet another reminder that writing was once regarded as a sacred act.

Julia Bartholomay notes that even the structure of the poem moves inward to a kind of core:

The form of "Runes" is organic, following the pattern of inversion and reflexion established by the imagery. A dynamic (or generative) and ritualistic effect is produced by the overall centripetal-centrifugal movement. . . largely achieved by the inverse arrangement of the fifteen poems of the sequence in respect to content and imagery.^[23]

The natural process is inseparable from the way we perceive it; thus, Nemerov's allusion to the birth of Minerva, the personification of wisdom, near the end of Rune IV, simultaneously conveys both the pattern of human development and the formation of individual perceptions. "Out of this head the terms of kind" refers to the myth that when Minerva was born, she leaped forth from Jupiter's brain, mature, and in complete armor. Nemerov's allusion is a reminder that something as seemingly intangible as thought is nonetheless the source of power and substance.

In the same passage, "kind" refers to the fine distinctions of which only the human intellect is capable, yet because it can also mean "progeny," "offspring," or "family," it is also the perfect complement to the "family tree" described later in the same stanza. Its other meaning, "that which is characteristic of," is a good description of the role of language in human life. Lewis Thomas, an author Nemerov greatly admires, writes that,

It begins to look, more and more disturbingly, as if the gift of language is the single human trait that marks us all genetically, setting us apart from the rest of life. Language is, like nest-building or hive-making, the universal and biologically specific activity of human beings . . .  We are born knowing how to use language. The capacity to recognize syntax, to organize and deploy words into intelligible sentences, is innate in the human mind. We are programmed to identify patterns and generate grammar.^[24]

In the last lines of Rune IV, Nemerov demonstrates that language is an innately human characteristic, further developing his metaphor for humanity. The "family tree" "shakes its heavy fruit, and each stone within the fruit then "bears the living word." The process is cyclical: "each word/ Will be made flesh, and all flesh fall to seed." Christ is described in the New Testament as "the word made flesh"; the interdependence of Christ's earthly and spiritual existences is likewise reflected in each of us. Moreover, Christ's humanity, like our own, insured that he would one day "fall," or die.

Rune V continues to describe the literal and figurative "fall" with which Nemerov concludes Rune IV, and which is the inevitable result of rounding the horn of time:

                                  you lift up your eyes

As though by this observance you might hide

The dry husk of an eaten heart which brings

Nothing to offer up, no sacrifice

Acceptable but the canceled-out desires

And satisfactions of another year's 

Abscess, whose zero in His winter's mercy

Still hides the undecipherable seed.

Here the sacrifice is reminiscent of Cain's in Genesis; when he learned that it had been rejected in favor of Abel's "fat of the land," he killed his brother. Thus, one sacrifice canceled out the other, and ultimately, one sacrificer was quite literally "canceled out" by the other. Appropriately, this rune ends with a series of hollow images: "dry husk," "eaten heart," "abscess," "zero," and "barren seed," all of which describe both the death of vegetation in autumn and the sudden awareness of human mortality produced by Cain's murder of Abel.

"Enciphering" is similarly imbued with meaning: while we often associate the word with writing, it is derived from the Arabic "sifr," meaning "empty" or "zero." To "encipher" is literally to translate into something that has no weight, worth, or influence. The paradox is, of course, that that which is superficially worthless contains boundless meaning and possibility. The seeds that seem worthless are full of the genetic information for propagating an entire species; mortals are capable of using language to create something of eternal value; and finally, the act of atonement, (which is in fact the subject of Rune V) "becoming as nothing," leads believers to life everlasting.

Furthermore, the usual interpretation of the creation myth in Genesis proclaims that "Creation ex nihilo," creating something out of nothing, was required; the idea perhaps undermines the positivist notion that anything without substance, anything that lacks directly observable physical qualities, is unworthy of consideration.

Nemerov has indicated in the opening lines of Rune I that time, "enciphering a script so fine," will eventually reveal a pattern and purpose, yet by the end of Rune V, they are still hidden: hence, "still hides the undecipherable seed." The play on the word "still," which allows it to mean at once "yet," "unmoving," and "always," perhaps sheds light on a phrase in the opening lines of "Runes," "the stillness in moving things." The phrase serves to describe the phenomena in Nature, such as a stream that "runs" while remaining in its banks, or a plant that reseeds itself; yet it could also be paraphrased as, "the immutability in mutable things," thus recalling St. Augustine's paradox, with which the poem begins.

Bartholomay has noted that nearly all of the imagery in Rune VI "is hexagonal or circular, and abstract in the sense that it is either formal or unsubstantial." Nemerov begins,

White water now in the snowflake's prison,

A mad king in a skullcap thinks these thoughts

In regular hexagons, each one unlike 

Each of the others. The atoms of memory,

Like those that Democritus knew, have hooks

At either end, but these? Insane tycoon,

These are the riches of order snowed without end

In this distracted globe. . . .

Nemerov here implies that his "mad king in a skullcap" has gone insane because of his obsession with abstraction--form without substance.

The mad king's thoughts are like snowflakes--"seeds mirroring substance without position or a speed/ And course unsubstanced." While the snowflakes' patterns are indeed as distinct as the seeds', they lack "substance," or purpose. Certainly the most potent dictionary definition of the word "substance" (and, most likely the one that Nemerov uses here) is, "the ultimate reality that underlies all outward manifestations and change." The very distinction between this definition of the word, and its more popular usage in designating purely physical properties (found in phrases like "substance abuse") seems to attest to the validity of Barfield's language theory.

Through the image of the mad king, Nemerov depicts the consequences of the modern dissociation between mind and matter. The king's insistence that the world is nothing more than an emanation of his own mind results in a world of order without meaning. Because the king has imposed on objects his own ideas about them, without taking into account the objects themselves, he is a solipsist who has not found the balance that, in Nemerov's view, is essential to an understanding of the world and of oneself.

That the mad king "thinks his thoughts in regular hexagons" is an allusion to the theory of "man as geometer" to which Nemerov often refers in his poetry. In short, the image represents the idea that humanity is capable of constructing a purely abstract system that has no relation to life. Barfield speaks correspondingly in Worlds Apart of the need for a balance between the two ways of knowing--knowing things through direct observation of them, and knowing about them through the power of reason.

The "atoms of memory" in Rune VI refer to Democritus' theory that atoms had hooks at either end; in this Rune, the atoms connect past to future in the Euclidian world of cause and effect. However, in the world of Rune VI, there is no apparent relationship between phenomena--merely a chaos of order.

Significantly, Blake had associated Democritus's theory of atoms with Newtonian thought, which regarded nature as quantitative rather than qualitative:

The atoms of Democritus

And Newton's Particles of light

Are sands upon the Red sea shore

Where Israel's tents do shine so bright.^[25]

In Worlds Apart, Barfield asserts that nothing can ultimately be gained by dividing the object of inquiry into increasingly smaller parts, unless one pays equal attention to the object's relation to the world and to oneself. Burgeon's response to the scientific quest for smaller and smaller units of study is that, "Only a fool has to take a house to pieces to find out that it is made of bricks; and only a bigger fool gets so interested in the bricks, when he has done so, that he says they built the house."^[26] The world of Rune VI represents Newtonian theory carried to its extreme. Nemerov's response to theories that emphasize form at the expense of content is tantamount to Christ's injunction against heeding the letter of the Mosaic law while disregarding the spirit in which it was written.

In Nemerov's story entitled, "The Nature of the Task," a man goes mad in a room where he tries to count first flies, and then snowflakes on the wallpaper. Because he becomes so obsessed with quantifying these things, he loses his ability to discern their quality, much less, their relation to anything beyond his small room. Both the flies (the same "ancient black retainers" that symbolize physical corruption in Nemerov's "The Town Dump") and the wallpaper snowflakes hinder the man from noticing the real snow that falls outside his window, signifying his inability to acknowledge his own mortality.^[27]

Nemerov's idea of nature is more comparable to Einstein's universe, in which reality is total, dynamic and circular. William Mills has observed that this ready acceptance of a post-Cartesian world distinguishes Nemerov from most of his contemporaries: "he does not write as if he lived in a pre-Cartesian world or as if the Einsteinian world picture had not come along."^[28]

Rune VII alludes to Jacob's dying blessing to Reuben: "Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel." Bartholomay believes that, "The voice in these lines is not simply that of an irate father; it is the voice of a patriarch, the voice of Israel through whom God speaks--a thundering voice whose repercussions shake the synthetic posture of civilization. . . ."^[29]  Jacob believed his son to have "dignity and strength," yet also identified Reuben as the "defiler" of his bed. In scripture, the first born was entitled to both the birthright and the blessing of his father, and thus represents the dignity and strength of the family.

Lines 7-12 allude to Proust's "Overture" in the first chapter of Swann's Way, which delineates the principle of involuntary memory. Proust describes the Celtic belief that the souls of our loved ones are "held captive in some inferior being," and can only be freed, "when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison." He continues: "And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not expect."^[30] The brain surgeons in "Runes" fail to produce the "Proustian syndrome," because the very nature of Proust's "syndrome" (a clinical word that Proust would never use, suggesting Nemerov's disdain for the brain surgeons' sterile approach) of involuntary memory prohibits it from being captured, predicted, or analyzed.

Rune VIII again shifts the focus from civilization to nature, condensing imagery of water, seed, root, wood and shipping into the all-encompassing imagery of death:

To go low, to be as nothing, to die,

To sleep in the dark water threading through

The fields of ice, the soapy, frothing water

That slithers under the culvert below the road,

Water of dirt, water of death, dark water,

And through the tangle of the sleeping roots

Under the coppery cold beech woods, the green

Pinewoods, and past the buried hulls of things

To come, and humbly through the breathing dreams

Of all small creatures sleeping in the earth. . . .

The juxtaposition of death with sleep--"to die,/ To sleep in the dark water. . . " parallels the soliloquy in Hamlet--"to die, to sleep, perchance to dream. . . ." During Hamlet's figurative sleep, he ostensibly abandons his commitment to avenge his father's death, yet that "sleep" prepares him for a glorious rebirth in which he accomplishes all that he has resolved to do.

Rudolph Steiner is very frequently quoted in Barfield's Worlds Apart, and in fact, the character of Sanderson, the schoolmaster, often serves as a spokesman for Steiner's views. In The Evolution of Consciousness as Revealed Through Initiation Knowledge, based on a series of lectures presented in England, Steiner explains how humans can increase their comprehension of the world and of themselves. It involves a pattern of acceptance and negation that is quite similar to Nemerov's depiction of the natural process.

Steiner begins by instructing his audience to concentrate first upon an object about which they have formed no prior conceptions, but then, "to extinguish from consciousness the very thing we've striven for." He continues: "This empty consciousness (as when we're on the verge of sleep) must be brought about at will--and it becomes possible for the spiritual world to present itself to our own soul."^[31] Similarly, Rune VIII recreates the period of dormancy required in the natural process and in the pursuit of wisdom. 

In Rune IX, the plastic statues of Mary and St. Christopher continue the imagery in Rune VII, in which "The plastic and cosmetic arts/ Unbreakably record the last word and/ The least word, till sometimes even the Muse, in her transparent raincoat, resembles a condom." The Muse--the force that leads (even seduces) the writer to produce his poetry--has become a symbolic obstruction to productivity, or fertility. Likewise, the mustard seeds, which are associated in scripture with faith, are buried inside lucite lockets, thereby obstructing the seeds' productivity.

Through these parodies of planting and regeneration (the "plastic and cosmetic arts" can only "record" or duplicate; they cannot create), Nemerov suggests that the modern age has made a mockery of the sacred act of creation, whether it be the creation of a human life or a work of art. Nemerov describes his age as "dehydrated," beyond the reach of water's regenerative powers; yet he maintains at least a grain of hope: "There are still/ To be found, at carnivals, men who engrave/ The Lord's Prayer on a grain of wheat for pennies,/ But they are a dying race."

Rune X opens with an apostrophe:  "White water, white water, feather of a form/ Between the stones, is the race run to stay/ Or pass away?" Nemerov's diction indicates that he is referring not only to the course of the water, but to human destiny: to "pass away" is also euphemistic for dying. Thus, Nemerov's metaphorical question is whether life's only reward must be found here on earth, or whether there is reason to anticipate an afterlife. "Your utterance is riddled," is Nemerov's highly ambiguous answer; "utterance" alludes to the message concealed in nature, yet its archaic meaning is "uttermost extremity, bitter end," strengthening the poem's metaphysical implications. The water is "rainbowed," suggesting promise for the future, yet it still tastes of stone, and its course is shaped by stones.

Throughout Nemerov's poetry, stones--whether tablets of stone or statues of stone--represent law and history, tradition that restricts and shapes our present actions in conformity to a past that can no longer explain us. Yet in this stanza, history is depicted as a mere shadow of reality, and the regenerative associations of water--in sharp contrast with the mad king's icy abstractions in Rune VII--are predominant:

White water, and history is no more than

The shadows thrown by clouds on mountainsides,

A distant chill, when all is brought to pass

By rain and birth and rising of the dead.

          Rune XI alludes to Aaron's rod, which was used in Genesis to bring plagues upon the Egyptians, and later to obtain water for the Israelites, thereby making it a symbol for both destruction and regeneration.

. . . I began to dream

How from the tree that stood between the rivers

Came Aaron's rod that crawled in front of Pharaoh,

And came the rod of Jesse flowering

In all the generations of the Kings,

And came the timbers of the second tree,

The sticks and yardarms of the holy three-

masted vessel whereon the Son of Man

Hung between thieves. . . .

William Guild's Moses Unveiled, a seventeenth century typological study of the events in the Old and New Testaments, establishes the now traditional association between Aaron's rod and Christ. Thus, when a holy man advises Nemerov, "Split the stick, and there is Jesus," Nemerov writes that, "I saw nothing that was not wood, nothing/ That was not God": for in Christ's incarnation, spirit and matter, the divine and the human, are equally and completely embodied within the same substance.

The "splintery grain" inside the stick is also an oblique continuation of the preceding line's description of the blood of Christ, which "streamed in the grain" of Adam's "tainted seed." Nemerov's reference to the "dark marrow" of the stick reinforces the analogy with human life.  Because the "rod of Jesse" symbolizes the unbroken family line into which Christ was born, its sprouts convey tacitly the family tree that goes full circle from death to life.

The "Lance and ladder" at the end of Rune XI, like the rod that Moses and Aaron had lifted up in Egypt and the wilderness, are both familiar symbols of divine intervention. Jacob's ladder, with its "angels ascending and descending," provided a bridge between heaven and earth, thereby anticipating Christ's death on the cross for the redemption of humanity; similarly, Arthur's lance, Ron, was raised up to grant him the power of heaven to destroy his enemies and to restore his kingdom. These symbols therefore reflect the interrelationship between earthly and divine realms, and between mind and the world.

In Rune XII, the "seed lost by a bird" eventually produces a tree that provides shelter for that bird's descendants; thus, it recalls the reference to "Adam's tainted seed" in Rune XI, and intimates that humanity has reason for hope despite Adam's fall:

Consider how the seed lost by a bird

Will harbor in its branches most remote

Descendants of the bird . . . .

Within the tree, which is formed by "soft green stalks and tubes of water," "The water is streaming still." One of Nemerov's favorite passages of Walden is Thoreau's beautiful description of the human form, which emphasizes the strong unity between natural processes:

No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant by it. . . . When the sun withdraws the sand ceases to flow, but in the morning the streams will start once more and branch and branch again into a myriad of others. You see perchance how blood vessels are formed. If you look closely you observe that first there pushes forward from the thawing mass a stream of softened sand with a drop-like point, like the ball of a finger, feeling its way slowly and blindly downward, until at last with more heat and moisture, as the sun gets higher, the moist fluid portion, in its effort to obey the law to which the most inert also yields, separates from the latter and forms for itself a meandering channel or artery within that, in which is seen a little silvery stream glancing like lightning from one stage of pulpy leaves or branches to another, and ever and anon swallowed up in the sand.^[32]

Thoreau implies here that the consciousness that permeates natural processes accounts for the likeness between the formation of streams, of branches, and of blood vessels. Nemerov obviously sees the processes of nature culminating in the same kind of unity; at the end of Rune XII, all of the major images from the first eleven Runes are incorporated, "running in one direction":

Now does the seed asleep, as in a dream

Where time is compacted under pressures of 

Another order, crack open like stone

From whose division pours a stream, between

The raindrop and the sea, running in one 

Direction, down, and gathering in its course

That bitter salt which spices us the food

We sweat for, and the blood and tears we shed.

The water that streams through the plant's veins likewise courses through our own veins. Throughout his poetry, Nemerov's allusions to those Greek myths that describe transformation from one form to another--stones into humans, and humans into trees--form the basis for his belief in the deep interconnectedness of earthly things.

Seed that will "crack open like stone," recalls the stone that Moses struck to provide water for the Israelites. "Stone" is also a synonym for seed. Given Nemerov's frequent use of stones as symbols for history and fate, it is fair to say that the cracking of the stone suggests a simultaneous release from and reattachment to our destinies and our past. Appropriately, the images in this Rune are associated with springtime and rebirth: melting ice, sprouting seeds, "rain and birth and rising of the dead." Rune XIII begins with a reference to "Conrad's river," providing a link with Rune XII, and a continuation of the images of water which recur throughout the poem: "Runes" begins and ends with references to running water. Shipping was frequently the subject of Conrad's fiction, and here the water recollects Nemerov's shipping imagery in previous passages on Ulysses, the sunflowers, and Christ's crucifixion. "The rise and fall of empires," one of Conrad's major themes, is also analogous to the pattern of death and rebirth in the natural world; thus, Nemerov speaks of "the seeds of commonwealths" and "the germs of Empire."

Rune XIV concerns the kind of faith that allows us to accept polarity in the same way that the eye perceives the world. It continues the series of contrasts established in earlier Runes--water from a stone, a living plant from a dry seed, a spirit that has its home in a mortal body. Neither spirit nor body can be said to have originated first: but for the plant, the seeds would not exist; and but for the seeds, the plant would not exist.

A similar interrelationship between observer and observed is reiterated through another series of contrasts, all of which pertain simultaneously to physical and spiritual vision.

There is a threshold, that meniscus where

The strider walks on drowning waters, or

That tense, curved membrane of the camera's lens

Which darkness holds against the battering light

And the distracted drumming of the world's

Importunate plenty.

First of all, the passage literally describes the operation of the eye, relying on Sir Charles Sherrington's eye/camera analogy, which Nemerov had first encountered in an issue of Scientific American.^[33]

Yet Nemerov always manages to find imagery that conveys both the processes of the natural world and the spiritual truth that is embodied in them. The "strider" who "walks on drowning waters" represents Christ, whose miraculous ability to walk on water is described in the New Testament. His ability to walk on water requires an act of faith, or, in the secular terms favored by Nemerov, an adjustment of the perception that allows one to produce a correspondent adjustment in the laws of Nature. Furthermore, Nemerov's extensive knowledge of animal life, gained through his reading and through weekly visits to the Forest Park Zoo in St. Louis, indicates that he would be familiar with another "strider": the basilisk, which he describes earlier in the poem, is also known as the "Jesus lizard" because of its ability to walk on water.

Details throughout the poem are invariably scientifically accurate, yet are also replete with symbolism that reflects Nemerov's sense of the underlying purpose and unity in the world. Unlike A. R. Ammons, who also relies on science as a source for his poetry, Nemerov freely draws from science without ever feeling compelled to employ exclusively the scientific method. Indeed, even his most "scientific" poems devote time not only to describing the forms in the physical world, but also to capturing their essences. By combining analysis with analogy, Nemerov provides far greater stimulation for the imagination, and a more comprehensive depiction of reality.

The two types of vision are interdependent, and both require the faith of the perceiver, the active engagement between the observer and the observed. Thus, the water of the eye is compared to a stream, or to a thread that stitches figures "in a watered cloth." The eye is not portrayed merely as a passive receptor of sensory impressions, but rather as a formative agent of its images. Vision is compared to "a damask either-sided as the shroud/ Of the lord of Ithaca, labored at in light, Destroyed in darkness." Nature itself for Nemerov is "either-sided," half the time lush and green, the other half, gone to seed. The "spidery oars" to which Nemerov refers in this Rune suggest another famous weaver, Arachne, whose weaving brought about her destruction at the hands of Athena.

In The Odyssey, as long as Penelope continues working on Odysseus's funeral shroud, the suitors are obligated to keep their distance, for her act verifies that she still believes that Odysseus can return. In a certain sense, her work on the funeral shroud constitutes the act of faith required to keep Odysseus alive. Like Penelope's weaving, which effectively asserts Odysseus's existence while refuting that of the suitors, our vision allows us to focus on individual objects or ideas at will, thereby blocking out "the distracted drumming of the world's importunate plenty." Lewis Thomas contends that the rhythms of poetry and music are indeed our only protection against chaos: "we are saved by music from being overwhelmed by chaos."^[34]

Similarly, Nemerov implies that the rhythm of poetry may well be our only way of reaching the truth about the universe: "The universe itself . . .  may be not so much a meaning as a rhythm."^[35] Poetry is the same kind of supplication that Penelope offered for Odysseus's safe return. While it does not presume to grant our every wish, it imposes order on a world that would otherwise appear to us as chaos. While any language--whether it be the language of science or mathematics or psychology--may likewise function to bring order out of chaos, the language of poetry is best able to express the relationship between thought and thing, and thus to affirm a living unity only partially glimpsed by science.

Poetry, like weaving, takes a winding course to produce a coherent whole. Nemerov's poetry is generally formal, in part because his use of regular rhyme and meter, along with linguistic techniques such as alliteration, elaborate word play and carefully balanced lines, work together to establish unity in seemingly diverse subjects, thus revealing the underlying harmony in nature.

In his poem, "The Tapestry," the "right" and "wrong" sides of a tapestry are metaphors for the two ways of looking at the world, through the eye, and through the mind. The poem also illuminates Nemerov's recurrent use of weaving as an metaphor for language:

On this side of the tapestry

There sits the bearded king,

And round about him stand

His lords and ladies in a ring.

His hunting dogs are there,

And armed men at command.

On that side of the tapestry

The formal court is gone,

The kingdom is unknown;

Nothing but thread to see,

Knotted and rooted thread

Spelling a world unsaid.

The "right" side of the tapestry, characterized by order, harmony and hierarchy, represents language. It obviously "spells" the spoken world, or, one could say, allows the world to emerge by means of it. Without language, Nemerov suggests, the world would appear to us as chaos.

The "wrong" side represents the world, which is depicted as chaos, darkness and confusion. On the "wrong" side is "knotted" and "rooted" thread: through his metaphorical references to trees, Nemerov implies that while the wrong side reveals knots and roots, the right side provides the fruition. Although the wrong side represents our tendency to become mired in details that prevent us from seeing the whole picture, its knots and roots are ultimately essential to the pattern, the fruition, on the other side.

Thus, however confusing the wrong side may appear to the viewer, it is still inextricably linked to the right side. In the last stanza, Nemerov expresses the hopelessness of viewing either side without benefit of the other:

Men do not find their ways

Through a seamless maze,

And all direction lose

In a labyrinth of clues,

A forest of loose ends

Where sewing never mends.

When language is elevated to the exclusion of the world to which it should properly refer, the picture will be perfect, but perfectly pointless. On the other hand, a world that lacks the clarifying power of language would be nothing more than a buzzing confusion, a "labyrinthe of clues" with no unifying thread. Such a world would indeed be a forest "where sewing never mends." The search for that woven unity between thought and thing would be futile without language.

In a later poem entitled "The Makers,"^[36] Nemerov attests to the intrinsically metaphorical nature of language, which allows it to "mirror" mind and matter in the same way that each side of the tapestry mirrors the other. Like etymologist Fenollosa, and philologist Barfield, Nemerov describes language as primitive poetry:

Who can remember back to the first poets,

The greatest ones, greater even than Orpheus?

No one has remembered that far back

Or now considers, among the artifacts

And bones and cantilevered inference

The past is made of, those first and greatest poets,

So lofty and disdainful of renown

They left us not a name to know them by.

They were the ones that in whatever tongue

Worded the world, that were the first to say

Star, water, stone, that said the visible

And made it bring invisibles to view

In wind and time and change, and in the mind

Itself that minded the hitherto idiot world

And spoke the speechless world and sang the towers

Of the city into the astonished sky.

They were the first great listeners, attuned

To interval, relationship, and scale,

The first to say above, beneath, beyond,

Conjurors with love, death, sleep, with bread and wine,

Who having uttered vanished from the world

Leaving no memory but the marvelous

Magical elements, the breathing shapes

And stops of breath we build our Babels of.

 In "The Makers," Nemerov contends comprehensively that language has always reflected the sacramental nature of the world, and that poetry is still the means by which we discern "mind" in the universe. Language is simultaneously the portal to creation and discovery.

Nemerov's description of words as "marvelous magical elements" is juxtaposed with another equally compelling verity of language: words are also "the breathing shapes and stops of breath we build our Babels of"--much as music arises from stopped breath in wind instruments. The immortality of poetry is founded upon "stops of breath," or humanity's awareness of mortality. Human nature dictates that language contain not only the seeds with which the world is "worded," but also the seeds of destruction.

Thus, "The Makers" helps to illuminate Rune XV, in which "a locked box. . . the deathless thing which it is death to open" is emblematic of both life and language. Through the image of the box, Nemerov incorporates several related motifs: Pandora's box brought death and destruction into the world, and Adam and Eve's quest for eternal life paradoxically brought death into the world. St. Augustine's, "I was dying full of life," Nemerov's opening epigraph, is reflected throughout this Rune, and its universal implications become clearer. 

Finally, the current of water "to be combed and carded silver in the fall" provides an oblique connection with Penelope's weaving in Rune XIV. Nemerov concludes the specific Rune and the sequence with images of running water, connecting Rune XV to Rune I and bringing the overall poem full circle, in the same manner that life itself is brought full circle with each new generation, as Thoreau has proclaimed in the "Spring" section of Walden.