AND THE DAYS ARE NOT FULL ENOUGH
And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass.
Ezra Pound
From Jane Hirshfield: Ten Windows:
This seems the plainest of poems: two declarations, one responding image. Yet its four lines feel to me almost bottomless. They raise both agreement and a depth detonation of "No!"; they raise bitterness but also some uprush of tenderness, soft as mouse fur or grass, that embraces mouse, grasses, Pound, the reader's own knowledge of unlived hours, the ground note longing for more that runs through all beings who hunger. It is very odd. A poem that seems to describe amplitude's failure and despair becomes, in the feeling through of it fully, its own reversal and antidote—a quiet multiplication of the world's largeness.
How does this happen? It must have something to do with the mouse-the reader both watches it go and goes with it-and something to do with the unshaken grass through which it passes. A great quotient of hiddenness lives in this poem, whose image carries, in its homely and small-footed way, the knowledge of all that takes place beneath visible surfaces-unseen, unrevealed, unspoken, yet there. The mouse is also a window image: in its small body, the weight of human concerns can slip away.
On This Day (10/01):
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