Poem of the week: Mist by Maurice Rutherford

A haunting poem in which a mysterious backstory of private loss is bound with nature in a thickening mist and an absence of birds

Mist

Thought is reluctant today,
tentative for what we know
but cannot clearly see.
The low sky defies description,
telling only of absence;
the blank page its facsimile.

Not a bird sings or comes
to the sill where we sit
held in our own keeping.
Just now, I glimpsed her face
as it was, in your glance,
but dared not look again.

Outside, mist gathers its wrap
closer, becomes introvert.
We, too, keep our silences,
missing her – but unable to share
memories clearer than the day -
and all the draughts she made.

And there’ll be more such days,
dumb, listless, without view,
before wind and rain return
perspective, when necklets of mist
hang from the trellis, break,
fall, and stain an empty page.

Mist primarily looks inwards, into a room, and into the state of mind of a couple sitting by a view-less window. Unlike the trenchantly political The Autumn Outings, it denotes a private loss that includes being lost for words.

Absence and blankness are remarkably strongly registered in the poem’s four gracefully lineated, occasionally rhyme-haunted verses. Through moments of observation, and the reticent glimmer of a backstory, they insist on the centrality of that mysterious something “we know / but cannot clearly see”, without undermining the immediate, almost visible presence of unworded absence.

The first and last verses (the first particularly) evoke the “blank page” well-known to most writers. Interestingly, when the sky in verse one “defies description”, it’s not simply that the writer can’t get it down on paper: “telling only of absence”, the sky itself fails, as an artist might fail, to produce visual effects of its own. But there’s much more to the poem than the imaging of creative blankness. The collective pronoun “we” tells us the generative experience of the poem is shared with someone else (who in fact is the poem’s addressee), and that they are both unable to define their thoughts and utter them. Both are “held in our own keeping”, seeing the same cancelled view, but unable to communicate their heavily clouded memories.

The thickening mist and its effects – the “low sky”, the lack of sound and movement – have a metaphorical function, of course, but seem no less part of the physical actuality the poem wants to record along with the psychological dimension. In the final stanza, though, the imagined future is more dependent on metaphor. The mist, torn apart by wind and rain, will become fragmented and accessible, and “an empty page” will bear at least a trace of the delicate “necklets” of liquid blown from the trellis. The release of both tears and ink are implied by the significant verb “stained”.

We are told few details about the “story” at the heart of the poem. The second verse comes the nearest to disclosure, and does so with a palpable flinch: “Just now, I glimpsed her face / as it was, in your glance, / but dared not look again.” These are brilliantly suggestive lines. We learn from the next verse that, whoever has so painfully vanished, she had the energy to make plentiful “draughts”.

“Draughts” may include a pun on “drafts’”, and indicate a writer who was busily working at a time when it was possible to fill the page with ideas generated by a cherished and invigorating presence.

The shared absence the poem records is not necessarily the result of death. Perhaps a child has left home? That form of bereavement, popularly tagged “empty nest syndrome”, might have been quietly set up in the earlier reference to the birds no longer singing, no longer coming to the window sill to be fed. In its very reticence to describe the nature of the loss, the poem shows us it was a radical one. Wisely, the last verse doesn’t seek or foresee “closure”, but observes simply that after more “such days”, the weather will change, perspective will be returned. And so the scene is almost set for words to flow again.

Contributor

Carol Rumens

The GuardianTramp

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