Tag: Elizabeth Bishop

Trying to Name What Doesn’t Change

Roselva says the only thing that doesn’t change
is train tracks. She’s sure of it.
The train changes, or the weeds that grow up spidery
by the side, but not the tracks.
I’ve watched one for three years, she says,
and it doesn’t curve, doesn’t break, doesn’t grow.

Peter isn’t sure. He saw an abandoned track
near Sabinas, Mexico, and says a track without a train
is a changed track. The metal wasn’t shiny anymore.
The wood was split and some of the ties were gone.

Every Tuesday on Morales Street
butchers crack the necks of a hundred hens.
The widow in the tilted house
spices her soup with cinnamon.
Ask her what doesn’t change.

Stars explode.
The rose curls up as if there is fire in the petals.
The cat who knew me is buried under the bush.

The train whistle still wails its ancient sound
but when it goes away, shrinking back
from the walls of the brain,
it takes something different with it every time.

Hello Friends,

It’s a nearly universal experience to read or hear the same words over again, and have them mean something different to us, isn’t it? How human of us!

Something we didn’t touch directly on with yesterday’s “Vocabulary” poem is how the meaning of even a single word changes over time and in different contexts — context in sentence, in a room, in the mouth of a particular speaker, in the walls of the brain it reverberates in. You could make an argument that a word signifies something slightly different every single time it’s used — as Humpty Dumpty* argues in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass when he says (in a rather scornful tone), “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

Today’s poem, from the Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye in her 1995 collection Words Under the Words: Selected Poems, is in part about how much of a poem’s, a word’s, a sound’s, a train’s meaning — at the very least half — belongs to the listener, the reader, the audience.

You know that saying about the tree falling in the woods, whether it makes a sound or not if nobody hears it? Is it any less mysterious when the tree falls and people do hear the sound — how much the tree determines what the sound it makes sounds like, and how much the people listening determine that sound? And how much something so much bigger.

You think about that tree, or the train whistle, and don’t ever let anyone tell you that you got the meaning of a poem “wrong,” ok? It’s entirely possible for a poem to mean something to you that the poet never intended — you could argue it’s not only possible, but inevitable. But that doesn’t make the meaning you read wrong; it just makes it yours.

For what Edna St. Vincent Millay hears in the train whistle, see “Traveling.” And for another take on what doesn’t change when stars explode, see Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Shampoo.”

April is National Poetry Month, and I am celebrating with my own eclectic selection of 30 poems by 30 poets, and some of what they mean to me. Thank you again for letting me share this month with you.

— Ellen

* This is the same Humpty Dumpty who, when Alice asks him, “Would you kindly tell me the meaning of the poem ‘Jabberwocky’?”, replies, “I can explain all the poems that ever were invented—and a good many that haven’t been invented just yet.” One of the amusing things about Humpty Dumpty’s character is that when he’s the speaker, he attributes 100% of the control over language’s meaning to the speaker (or writer). But when Humpty Dumpty is the listener, he attributes 100% of the control over language’s meaning to the listener (or reader).