Maggie's Farm

The poem below is discussed in a review of Helen Vendler's The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar.

Somnambulisma

  On an old shore, the vulgar ocean rolls
    Noiselessly, noiselessly, resembling a thin bird,
    That thinks of settling, yet never settles, on a nest.

    The wings keep spreading and yet are never wings.
    The claws keep scratching on the shale, the shallow shale,
    The sounding shallow, until by water washed away.

    The generations of the bird are all
    By water washed away. They follow after.
    They follow, follow, follow, in water washed away.

    Without this bird that never settles, without
    Its generations that follow in their universe,
    The ocean, falling and falling on the hollow shore,

    Would be a geography of the dead: not of that land
    To which they may have gone, but of the place in which
    They lived, in which they lacked a pervasive being,

    In which no scholar, separately dwelling,
    Poured forth the fine fins, the gawky beaks, the personalia,
    Which, as a man feeling everything, were his.