Both Thomas Hornsby Ferril and Cecil Effinger are fascinating characters. Ferril was Colorado’s first poet laureate, holding that title from 1979 until his death in 1988. He was chosen to write the captions for the first-floor rotunda in the Colorado state capitol building in Denver, and his home in the Capitol Hill neighborhood is a historical and literary landmark. Effinger was a Colorado composer and contemporary of Ferril who should be much better known than he is, having written well over 150 works, including operas and symphonies. But his fame rests largely on the Pastorales, a fact that he was wont to get a little testy about at times. As he’s said, “I’ve got the Four Pastorales for Oboe and Chorus which has gone hog-wild all over the place! It is done time and time again, you know, and others that I think are just as good, somehow don’t find their way!”
I would love to know how Effinger chose these four poems; I thought at first that Ferril had put them together into a set, but that’s not true. The poems are from several different books of Ferril’s poetry and don’t have a unifying theme that I can see. I’m going to guess that these four just happened to catch Effinger’s eye. The suite has a lovely, haunting oboe accompaniment which adds to its evocative power and is probably one reason for its popularity. Here are the four poems with my attempts to analyze/explain them without ruining the poetry.
No Mark
Corn grew where the corn was spilled
In the wreck where Casey Jones was killed,
Scrub-oak grows and sassafras
Around the shady stone you pass
To show where Stonewall Jackson fell
That Saturday at Chancellorsville,
And soapweed bayonets are steeled
Across the Custer battlefield;
But where you die the sky is black
A little while with cracking flak
The ocean closes very still
Above your skull that held our will
O swing away, white gull, white gull;
Evening star, be beautiful.
You do have to know a few historical facts to make sense of this poem. Have you ever sung “Casey Jones”? Then you know vaguely that its narrative concerns an engineer who is killed in a train wreck. He’s actually a hero, as he refuses to jump off the train when he is unexpectedly faced with a stalled freight train on the track. Instead, he stays with it, straining to slow the train down as much as possible before impact in order to save the lives of his passengers. They find him, so the story goes, with his hands still clamped around the brake lever. He’s the only fatality in the accident. And the corn? That’s one of the items that the freight train was carrying. In Ferril’s poem, that scattered corn grows over the site of the tragedy. Nature takes over again at the site of the bloody Civil War battle at Chancellorsville. Stonewall Jackson was killed there, but now the stone that memorializes his death is overgrown by the forest. And the Battle of Little Big Horn, the site of the “Custer battlefield”? The only bayonets still there are from the spikes of the soapweed (yucca) plant. But now we come to “you”—clearly a fighter pilot, flying above the ocean, with anti-aircraft flak briefly blackening the sky around him. And then the water closes over him, “above your skull that held our will.” The wording is striking: the pilot’s skull holds his brain, the organ that made it possible for him to carry out the plans of those who sent him into battle. Ferril writes as an American; it’s “our” will that the war be won. This poem was written and published during World War II; I imagine that the pilot is in a dogfight with the Japanese over the Pacific Ocean. He’s denied even the transitory memorials that marked the other men.
And what of the white gull and the evening star? Well, I’m not sure of his exact meaning, and that’s just as well. As I’ve said in just about every essay I’ve written in explanation of poetry, if you could spell out the meaning exactly in some type of analysis, then there wouldn’t be any need for the poem itself. I’ll just tentatively say that Ferril may be asking the gull and the evening star to be the pilot’s memorial since he has nothing else. Or he may mean that nature again, even here, cannot be forbidden. Or he may simply be saying that even at this spot of tragedy and death there is still beauty. Or all of the above.
Noon
Noon is half the passion of light,
Noon is the middle prairie and the slumber,
The lull of resin weed, the yucca languor,
The wilt of sage at noon is the longest distance any nostril knows.
How far have we come to feel the shade of this tree?
Please don’t expect too much logical analysis here, folks. There’s no story or even necessarily emotion—it’s just pure imagery. Noon on the prairie, the day halfway over, the heat bringing out the scents of the plants, including “resin weed,” (which may or may not be marijuana) and yucca (which I don’t think of as having a smell, but maybe I’ve just never noticed). Sage, especially wilted sage, smells very strong, wafting over great distances to the nostrils. The speaker is sitting under a tree, maybe half asleep, looking out at the bright sun. How far did he have to come to get here?
Basket
Know me, know me, know me, know me then.
The children out of the shade have brought me a basket
Very small and woven of dry grass
Smelling as sweet in December as the day I smelled it first.
Only one other ever was this to me,
Sweet birch from a far river,
You would not know, you did not smell the birch,
You would not know, you did not smell the grass,
You did not know me then.
I find this poem to be almost impossible to interpret without trampling on its elusive meaning, so I’m going to tread lightly. Much of it is highly symbolic and impossible to explain anyway. Who are “the children out of the shade”? Are we talking about a real basket, or baskets, one made out of grass and one out of birch? Etc. If I were pinned to the wall I’d say that Ferril’s emphasis is on the profound effect that memory has, how much it shapes us, and how hard it is for people who haven’t lived through those same experiences to understand us. That much is clear. “You,” whoever that is, “would not know” because he or she “did not know.” “You can’t understand me now, because you haven’t shared my past.” There might also be a nod here to the role of objects in our memories: they have meaning because they evoke the past. Lastly, I’d point out that the main sense employed here is that of smell, the most evocative of the senses: “The sense of smell is closely linked with memory, probably more so than any of our other senses. Those with full olfactory function may be able to think of smells that evoke particular memories; the scent of an orchard in blossom conjuring up recollections of a childhood picnic, for example.” (Psychology and Smell: Fifth Sense) And with that I guess I’d better stop treading all over this little gem of a poem, lightly or not!
Wood
There was a dark and awful wood
Where increments of death accrued
To every leaf and antlered head
Until it withered and was dead,
And lonely there I wandered
And wandered and wandered.
But once a myth-white moon shone there
And you were kneeling by a flow’r,
And it was practical and wise
For me to kneel and you to rise,
And me to rise and turn to go,
And you to turn and whisper no,
And seven wondrous stags that I
Could not believe walked slowly by!
The opening line, “There was a dark and awful wood,” may be an echo of the opening of Dante’s Divine Comedy: “Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark.” Whether or not that’s the reference, this wood isn’t a lovely green place but a place of death. The leaves are dying and the deer are shedding their antlers. Dante says, “For the straightforward pathway had been lost,” and Ferril’s speaker says, “And lonely I wandered and wandered and wandered.” But the forest hasn’t always been dark and awful. Once the moon shone so brightly that it was like something out of a myth or fairy tale. And there “you” were, kneeling by a flower. Who is “you”? Someone he loved, someone to whom he knelt as she rose (because, after all, it was the only “practical and wise” thing to do). But perhaps she didn’t seem responsive to him, and so he rose and turned to go. And then she turned to him and whispered, “No,” meaning, “No, don’t go.” And what happens? “Seven wondrous stags” walk slowly by. The forest is filled with magic and beauty, all because “you” said, “No.” So as the speaker wanders in the now-dying forest he can at least remember that wonderful moment. What has happened since? We’re not told. My impression of the “meaning” of this poem was very much influenced by my stumbling upon the Dante reference, although I will say that I always thought the basic story was about a long-ago love.
And with that image of the seven stags these pieces end. Here’s a lovely performance for you to enjoy now that you’ve waded through all of my literary analysis:
Note: The poems are quoted here in full with my understanding of fair use.
