Chrysalis Unbound: Poems of Origin and Initiation
Poems of initiation are windows into the imaginative life of the poet and reveal how art constructs the poet. As an example of a poem of initiation, picture the following scene. It is the New York coast, the early 1830s. A young, preternaturally mature bo
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Chrysalis Unbound: Poems of O rigin and Initiation
If you survive your childhood, you have enough material to write for the rest of your life. —Flannery O’Connor
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oems of initiation are windows into the imaginative life of the poet and reveal how art constructs the poet. As an example of a poem of initiation, picture the following scene. It is the New York coast, the early 1830s. A young, preternaturally mature boy looks out onto the rolling Atlantic Ocean. He is alone; as one of eight siblings he craves solitude. He is well-dressed in a shirt and short pants. It is summer and the sun unravels onto him. As if in a trance, he is listening to a bird singing, and, suddenly, the boy has a random epiphany. He declares: “Now in a moment I know what I am for, I awake.” This line is Walt Whitman’s from his poem “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” The speaker, as a young boy, fashions his initiation into poetry as an awakening—getting up from a slumber of being lost to a sudden acquaintance with his artistic vocation. The trope of Whitman’s speaker’s awakening is a rich one and, together with images throughout the poem such as that of the cradle, suggests a kind of rebirth or second birth out of the commonplaces, out of the world around him, and into a world of metaphoric substitutions, of artifice, and of heightened poetic language. Poems of initiation thematize an entrance or an introduction into the poet’s personal or artistic identity.1 These poems often dramatize a specific revelatory scene, predominantly as a recollection of an event P. Nickowitz, Rhetoric and Sexuality © Peter Nickowitz 2006
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from early childhood. My concern in this discussion is with the figuration of childhood in poetic texts and not in the child. This distinction makes clear that I do not read the poems as biographical truths, but rather I discuss them as they represent tropologically the figuration of childhood. Poems of initiation describe a defining moment of a particular self-image and self-definition and are, therefore, especially useful material to examine the ways poets construct themselves in relation to their art. Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic work on personal development in “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” and “Female Sexuality” posits sexuality and the formation of one’s consciousness as a series of competing associations and repudiations.2 Freud, for example, theorizes that girls form an early attachment with the mother, whom they must later reject as a rival for the father’s affections. Boys also form an attachment to the mother and feel aggression toward the father as a rival. This dynamic of associations and repudiations informs the drama of self-revelation and of poetic initiation in two poems by Hart Crane, “The Broken Tower” and “Repose of Rivers,” two by Elizabeth Bishop, “In the Waiting Room” and “The End of March,” and two by James Merrill, “Scenes of Childhood” and “An Urban Convalescence.” These poems of poetic initiation invoke voices from each poet that are char
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