The Centaur

MAY SWENSON
1956

INTRODUCTION

"The Centaur" is a widely anthologized poem by May Swenson that draws on her childhood experiences in Utah and explores the power of the imagination. First published in the Western Review in 1956, it was reprinted the following year in the collection New Poems by American Poets 2 and then appeared in Swenson's second book of poetry, A Cage of Spines, in 1958. It subsequently appeared in several other collections of Swenson's poetry, including the posthumously published Nature: Poems Old and New in 1994. In 2007, it was published separately as an illustrated children's book.

On the surface, the poem is a simple narrative account of how Swenson's speaker (really Swenson herself, according to an interview she once gave) spent the summer when she was ten. It describes a child's fantasy of riding a horse that is really just a willow branch and pretending to be the horse herself. The poem has been widely praised for its depiction of mixed identities (child and horse, boy and girl), its exploration of gender roles, and its evocation of childhood's imaginative play.

Swenson is generally seen as a poet interested in nature and in the mysteries of the universe. She is also known as the creator of riddle poems illustrative of her interest in looking at things from new perspectives, making the familiar strange, and taking note of the wonder of the world. Though not technically one of her riddle

poems, "The Centaur" raises various questions about identity and creativity in a way characteristic of the poet, and its focus on a horse, albeit an imaginary horse, is consistent with her interest in animals.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Anna Thilda May Swenson was the oldest of ten children of Margaret and Dan Swenson, Swedish Lutherans who converted to Mormonism and emigrated from Sweden to Logan, Utah, where May Swenson was born on May 28, 1913. Swenson drifted away from her parents' Mormon beliefs (poetry became her religion, according to Gudrun Grabher, writing in Body My House: May Swenson's Work and Life), but she maintained a strong attachment to Utah, which she visited often even after moving to New York City in 1936. When she died, she was buried in Logan, at her request, on the grounds of her alma mater, Utah State Agricultural College (now Utah State University).

When she was nine, Swenson's family moved to a new house in Logan, near the area that is said to be the setting of "The Centaur." According to R. R. Knudson, in her biography The Wonderful Pen of May Swenson, Swenson's first language was Swedish and she did not learn English until she began school. But she did well in school and began writing at an early age. In high school she won a prize for a short story, and at Utah State University, where she obtained a bachelor's degree in English and art, she wrote poetry for the college literary magazine, The Scribble, and also wrote a column for the student newspaper.

After graduation, Swenson worked as a reporter in Logan, then moved to Salt Lake City, where she did clerical work. When she later moved to New York City she also worked as a clerk. In the 1930s and through most of the 1940s she could not get her poems published, but she did get work as an interviewer for the Federal Writers' Project from 1938 to 1939. Her breakthrough came in 1949, when the Saturday Review of Literature published her poem "Haymaking." Four years later the New Yorker published one of her riddle poems, "By Morning," but gave away the answer to the riddle by changing the title to "Snow by Morning."

Swenson's first book of poetry, Another Animal, appeared in 1954, the same year she began working on "The Centaur." After its publication in Western Review magazine in 1956 and in the anthology New Poems by American Poets 2 in 1957, "The Centaur" appeared in Swenson's second book of poetry, A Cage of Spines, in 1958. Also in 1958, Swenson won the William Rose Benet Prize of the Poetry Society of America. She later won a Guggenheim grant, an Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship, and several other awards, including an honorary doctorate from her alma mater. In 1980, she became chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, a post she held until her death nine years later. She was also a writer-in-residence for a year at Purdue University and taught poetry at other universities as well as working as an editor for a New York publisher, New Directions Press.

Altogether Swenson published nine books of poetry during her lifetime, including the book of "shaped" poems called Iconographs, which won much attention when it appeared in 1970. She also published two books of riddle poems: Poems to Solve in 1966 and More Poems to Solve in 1971. Four posthumous collections were published in the decade after her death, along with Made with Words, a book of interviews, letters, essays, fiction, and a play script. In 2004, a three-day symposium on Swenson was held at Utah State University and led to the publication of a collection of essays on her life and work, Body My House, in 2006.

After two previous long-term relationships, the first with the Czechoslovak poet Anca Vrbovska and the second with the writer Pearl Schwartz, Swenson spent the last twenty-three years of her life with R. R. Knudson in Sea Cliff, New York. She died on December 4, 1989, in Ocean View, Delaware.

POEM TEXT

The summer that I was ten—

Can it be there was only one

summer that I was ten? It must
 

have been a long one then—

each day I'd go out to choose                   5

a fresh horse from my stable
 

which was a willow grove

down by the old canal.

I'd go on my two bare feet.
 

But when, with my brother's jack-knife,         10

I had cut me a long limber horse

with a good thick knob for a head,
 

and peeled him slick and clean

except a few leaves for the tail,

and cinched my brother's belt                   15
 

around his head for a rein,

I'd straddle and canter him fast

up the grass bank to the path,
 

trot along in the lovely dust

that talcumed over his hoofs,                   20

hiding my toes, and turning
 

his feet to swift half-moons.

The willow knob with the strap

jouncing between my thighs
 

was the pommel and yet the poll                 25

of my nickering pony's head.

My head and my neck were mine,
 

yet they were shaped like a horse.

My hair flopped to the side

like the mane of a horse in the wind.           30
 

My forelock swung in my eyes,

my neck arched and I snorted.

I shied and skittered and reared,
 

stopped and raised my knees,

pawed at the ground and quivered.               35

My teeth bared as we wheeled
 

and swished through the dust again.

I was the horse and the rider,

and the leather I slapped to his rump
 

spanked my own behind.                          40

Doubled, my two hoofs beat

a gallop along the bank,
 

the wind twanged in my mane,

my mouth squared to the bit.

And yet I sat on my steed                       45
 

quiet, negligent riding,

my toes standing the stirrups,

my thighs hugging his ribs.
 

At a walk we drew up to the porch.

I tethered him to a paling.                     50

Dismounting, I smoothed my skirt
 

and entered the dusky hall.

My feet on the clean linoleum

left ghostly toes in the hall.
 
Where have you been? said my mother.            55
Been riding, I said from the sink,

and filled me a glass of water.
 
What's that in your pocket? she said.
Just my knife. It weighted my pocket

and stretched my dress awry.                    60
 
Go tie back your hair, said my mother,

and Why is your mouth all green?
Rob Roy, he pulled some clover
as we crossed the field, I told her.

POEM SUMMARY

Title

The title "The Centaur" refers to a creature from Greek mythology that was half human and half horse. Interestingly, other than in the title, the term is not used anywhere in the poem. Rather than write about centaurs, Swenson's aim is to depict a metaphorical centaur, a girl who thinks she is part horse.

Stanza 1

The poem begins with an adult speaker reminiscing about her childhood, about the summer when she was ten. Right away there is wonder in her voice because she can hardly believe there was only one such summer. This attitude of wonder is typical of Swenson's poetry; so is her questioning, inquiring approach to life, indicated grammatically by casting the main part of the first stanza as a question. Another grammatical feature of the opening stanza is that it is largely a parenthetical aside; it is as if the speaker, or the poet, is so full of information and so alive to connections that she can hardly start in one direction without wanting to go in another, perhaps a bit like a wayward horse.

Stanza 2

Stanza 2 completes the parenthetical aside about there being only one summer when the speaker was ten. Of course, a literal-minded person would say, how could there be more than one summer for any year? However, Swenson and her speaker are poets; they say apparently impossible things to get at deeper truths, in this case the fact that the summer in question seemed very long. It must have been a long one, she says, which again literally makes no sense; summers are always the same length. This is a poem about feelings, though, and that summer felt long to the speaker, or perhaps she means that there were more summers like it. What should be noted is that the tone is not grumbling; this is not a complaint that the summer dragged on and on; it is a memory of a delightful time. There is an aspect of pastoral idyll here—a depiction of a simpler, ideal time. The tone of the opening establishes a positive attitude towards the events of that summer before the speaker even says what they were.

The second and third lines of the second stanza begin to recount what happened the summer the speaker was ten. She says that she would go each day to choose a different horse from her stable. A reader who stopped at the end of this stanza—and the stanza break does encourage such a stop—might think the speaker was wealthy, with a stable full of real horses to choose from. However, the lack of punctuation at the end of the stanza, the running on of the sentence from this stanza to the next, means that the reader will no doubt carry on without stopping.

Stanza 3

In stanza 3, the speaker reveals that there were no real horses; she was not the child of wealthy horse owners; her stable was actually a grove of willow trees down near an old canal. Paul Crumbley, writing in Body My House, notes that this was the actual canal near where Swenson lived as a child. This brings out the autobiographical aspect of the poem, but in the poem, the oldness of the canal coupled with the fact that the young girl had to go out to it suggests a movement away from the everyday to someplace that may turn out to be magical in some way.

The stanza ends with the speaker saying she would go barefoot to the grove. The fact that she was going barefoot suggests a movement, in this case away from society with its clothes and shoes and into nature with its lack of artificial coverings. That is probably the main sense that this sentence conveys on first reading, but in retrospect the reader might note that the speaker emphasizes that she walked on her own two feet; the statement is somewhat odd, for who else's feet might the girl have gone on? The reader soon learns who else's feet might have been involved.

Stanza 4

The first word in stanza 4 indicates some contrast with the immediately preceding statement that the girl went down to the canal on her own feet. However, it will be a few more stanzas before the point of the contrast is made clear; in the meantime the reader is left wondering why a contrast has been set up while the speaker plunges into a parenthetic clause about using her brother's knife to cut herself a horse. Here the reader learns, if it was not already clear, that the horses are just branches from the willow trees. At least, that is the reader's natural assumption, though the speaker does not actually say they are branches; she simply says that she cut herself a horse, making a sort of metaphor, except that this is less a metaphorical way of describing a branch as a horse than an account of a little girl who thought, or pretended to think, that her branch was a horse.

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

• "The Centaur," recorded on the long-playing vinyl record Some Haystacks Don't Even Have Any Needle and read by Anne Anglin, was released by Scott Foresman (1970).

Stanza 5

Stanza 5 goes into more detail about how the girl would transform her willow branch into a horse. Swenson was often praised for her attention to detail, and here she describes the peeling of the branch and the leaves arranged for a tail. The speaker also notes that she used her brother's belt (again something of her brother's) to gird around the branch, tightening, maintaining control. There are elements of both wildness and control. Traditionally, reason and the passions have been depicted metaphorically as a rider and his horse, with the rider needing to keep his horse under control, just as reason in a human being was expected to keep the passions under control.

Stanza 6

Stanza 6 continues the notion of control by explaining that the belt, when tightened around the branch, was meant to function as a rein, but the speaker no sooner finishes saying that than she talks of making her horse take up a moderate gallop, as if control had been forgotten and the main point is to give in to adventure.

Stanza 7

In this stanza the speaker says she would trot in the dust, which she describes by use of the word lovely. Why dust should be lovely is not clear, but perhaps it is because it is part of nature, and the idea here is to escape into nature.

In this stanza the reader also begins to understand why the sentence that began in stanza 4, and which is still going on, emphasizes the feet of the speaker. In this stanza the speaker describes how the dust hid her toes and covered her horse's hoofs. Though she arrived on two feet, she is now riding on four hoofs; a transformation is underway.

Stanza 8

Stanza 8 finishes the thought about the horse's hoofs, which are referred to as feet here. Perhaps this indicates that the transformation from human to horse is not complete. There is also another possibility. Swenson is often seen as a poet who describes blending, and the poem seems to display some blending between human and animal.

Stanza 9

In this stanza, the transformation from human to horse, or the blending of human and horse, continues. The willow knob, the speaker says, was part of the saddle and part of the horse's head. At the same time, she says her head and her neck were her own, and there the stanza ends; like most of the stanzas it ends in mid-sentence.

Stanza 10

In stanza 10, the sentence continues with another contrast. Although the speaker said in the previous stanza that her head and neck were her own, now she says that at the same time they were like a horse, and her hair was like a horse's mane, blowing in the wind. This could be considered a simile, but it is more a statement of transformation. The speaker remembers that as a girl when she went out on her willow branch she began to feel like a horse.

Stanza 11

Horse imagery continues in this stanza, with the speaker using the word forelock, a term for hair usually used only in connection with horses. Also, she describes herself as snorting and performing other actions that a horse might do.

Stanza 12

Stanza 12 continues the detailed description of the girl as a horse, but then there is a pronoun shift. She suddenly switches to the first-person plural we. It appears that now she is both girl and horse, understood as two separate identities that are nonetheless one.

Stanza 13

Here the speaker explicitly declares the merging of identities between horse and rider that was implied in the previous stanza. It is less that she becomes transformed from human to horse than that she conjures up an imaginary horse and partly becomes him while yet remaining herself. She is both the magical imaginary creature and the ordinary person riding the creature, so when she smacks his rear, she is also hitting her own behind, as she says at the start of the next stanza.

Stanza 14

The speaker finishes the thought about how slapping the horse's rear means hitting herself and begins the next sentence with a word that is a highly appropriate term to describe what is happening; she has become double—she is both herself and another.

Stanza 15

Stanza 15 explores the doubleness of the situation. The speaker says that she was both the one with the bit in her mouth, in other words, the horse being controlled by a rider, and yet at the same time the rider herself, sitting on her steed.

Stanza 16

Stanza 16 provides more detail about how she was the rider, pressing her legs around the horse's ribs, standing in the stirrups. The end of the sentence marks the end of the stanza. Instead of ending the stanza in mid-sentence and so carrying the reader on to the next stanza, as she has done in most of the previous stanzas, Swenson here orders a stop, marking the end of a section of the poem.

Stanza 17

Stanza 17 marks a change in tone. A calmness descends after the wild galloping, the snorting, the riding in the wind. Now the pace slows, literally, to a walk, as the speaker describes how she would return to her house, riding slowly up to the porch and tying her horse to the fence: an odd image, because she would have been tying one piece of wood to another. The wild ride is over; in a way, the reader only realizes its wildness retrospectively because of the contrasting calm introduced by this stanza. Now it is time to go back inside. The speaker describes how she would dismount, rearranging her skirt, a symbolic way of saying she was adjusting herself for domestic life again, if the skirt is interpreted to stand for all of domestic life.

Stanza 18

In this stanza the speaker describes how she would go inside, into a gloomy, dark hall, implying a contrast with the way things were outside in what presumably was bright sunshine, though she never mentioned that. It is an implied retrospective description through contrast.

The contrast continues in the last two lines of the stanza; she would walk on clean linoleum, leaving footprints, suggesting that indoors it is not only gloomy but sterile, as if the outdoors was much more alive. The ghostliness of her footprints seems to suggest a fading away, into a ghost, of her barefoot adventuring self, now to be replaced by a more conventional indoor self. Using the word ghostly to describe the footprints also suggests that her barefoot self had some magical or supernatural aspects.

Stanza 19

Stanza 18 having ended with a period, marking another break, stanza 19 introduces a new character, the speaker's mother, who promptly asks the girl where she has been, a typical maternal question. This is not like the musing, wondering question of the opening stanza, posed by the nostalgic speaker remembering a magical time with fondness. This is the voice of authority, of the established order, trying to bring a wayward child back into line.

The child answers with what might be considered the truth, saying she was riding, though of course it was just a fantasy ride. That the ride and the fantasy are over, and that life must now return to normality, is indicated by her getting a glass of water from the sink (not the place a horse would go for water).

Stanza 20

In stanza 20 the mother asks the second of three questions she will put to her daughter, asking what the girl has in her pocket. Again, this sounds like the voice of authority noting something wrong, posing a question that is full of interrogation rather than wonder. Interestingly, the girl answers that it is her knife, not her brother's knife, which it actually is. It is as if she has appropriated something, as if perhaps she has not completely returned to the normality of her role as a proper little girl. As if to reinforce this point, she says that the weight of the knife in her pocket has stretched her dress; here again a piece of clothing is used symbolically. By using her brother's knife and going out on a wild ride the girl has become something other than a normal little girl.

Stanza 21

The final stanza begins with the mother giving an order to the girl to tie her hair back. The reader may remember that the girl's hair has been flying in the wind like a horse's mane at the climax of her ride; now she is to tie it down, restore order, come back home. Then in one of the oddest moments in the poem, the mother asks her final question, wanting to know why the girl's mouth is green. The girl's answer is that Rob Roy, presumably the name she has given to her imaginary horse, has been eating clover in the field. This would mean that since she was the horse and since her mouth is green now, she was chewing on the grass herself. It is a final statement of how she blended with her imaginary horse, becoming a horse briefly, even bringing home the evidence.

Jean Gould, writing in Modern American Women Poets, notes that the final stanza is the only four-line stanza in the whole poem. Paul Crumbley, in Body My House, sees a rhyming couplet at the end, which emphasizes the last point of the poem, when the girl tells her mother this strange story about Rob Roy eating clover and thus causing her own mouth to turn green. Crumbley argues that this indicates acceptance by the mother, and perhaps it does, though her reply is not given and Swenson herself, discussing this poem in an interview reprinted in Made with Words, says that in the closing stanzas the mother is scolding the girl. However, the exchange does perhaps indicate that the girl felt confident enough to tell her fantasy, as if trying to bring the magic home and communicate what she had been able to imagine.

Finally, it is worth noting that the name the girl gives to the horse is Rob Roy, a common name for a horse, but also the name of an eighteenth-century Scottish hero and outlaw. This suggests that her adventure was of the outlaw kind, or at least one that pushed the limits of propriety.

THEMES

Nostalgia

The poem is in part a nostalgic evocation of childhood and the sort of thing a child might get up to. This at least is how the poem opens, with the adult speaker remembering the summer when she was ten, but though the poem develops several contrasts, this contrast between present and past fades away, and at the end there is no return to the adult's world and little sense of the adult looking back. In the opening stanzas the very tenses the speaker uses emphasize that she is looking back; she talks of what she would do each day in that distant summer: she would go down to the willow grove, she would ride her horse, and so on. But by the middle of the poem the speaker shifts to the simple past; her hair blew around like a mane; she shied and skittered, reared and galloped; and then she slowed to a walk and entered her house, at which point the conversation with her mother that ends the poem is presented as a specific scene that happened and then ended. There is no closing reminiscence, seeking to bring out a contrast between the adult of today and the child of the past; the nostalgia theme simply disappears.

Gender Roles

A persistent theme in the poem is the exploration of gender roles. The girl takes up her brother's knife to do what might conventionally be seen as a boy's task: cutting a branch from a tree to serve as her horse. She also takes her brother's belt to use as the reins on her "horse." Moreover, in the 1950s, some might have seen the riding adventure as too wild for a girl, bringing out her tomboyish side. At the end the girl calls the knife her own, as if she has appropriated this symbol of boyhood, which has stretched her dress, disordering the symbol of girlhood.

The end of the poem brings out some antagonism between the girl and her mother, with the mother intent on making sure her daughter is ladylike while the daughter wants to talk about her fantasy adventure. In a way, it is a depiction of childhood rebellion against parental authority, or perhaps more an attempt by parental authority to rein in an overly exuberant child who is impatient with conventional rules and roles.

Imagination

The poem is a celebration of the imagination, of the girl's ability to conjure up a fantasy about riding a horse that engulfs her so much that she becomes the horse while at the same time remaining the rider. There are moments when she seems all horse, as when she says that she snorted and pawed at the ground, but at other times there is a doubled consciousness, with the girl being both the horse with the bit in her mouth and the rider on top of the horse. This double existence is eerily magical. It seems in some ways a metaphor for the act of poetic creation. Swenson herself made the comparison when talking of this poem in the interview reprinted in Made with Words, saying what the girl does in the poem is what an artist does in her art, becoming what she creates. The theme is thus the power of the imagination and the mystical nature of creation, in which a girl can half become the horse she creates just as a poet can half become her own poem. It seems in a way an illustration of the famous line from the poem "Among School Children" by W. B. Yeats, in which he asks how one can differentiate between the dancer and the dance that he or she dances. This doubleness or uncertainty seems central to Swenson's poem, illustrating the process by which one enters almost completely into one's creation and yet remains still apart, a conscious mind guiding the unconscious spirit.

STYLE

Line Endings

The poem is written in free verse (a form of poetry in which no formal meter is used) without any rhyme scheme, though perhaps with a rhymed couplet at the end and some internal rhyme at the beginning, but it is not as free as in some of Swenson's other poems. There is enjambment, meaning that sentences carry over from one stanza to another, creating a feeling of movement in the poem, but most lines end with the end of syntactic units; phrases generally are not broken over two lines, but come to an end when the lines end, so there is regularity as well as movement, order as well as wildness, reflecting the content of the poem.

Metaphors, Symbolism, and Synecdoche

"The Centaur" might be said to contain metaphors, in which one thing is described in terms of another: the willow branch is a horse; the girl's hair is a horse's mane; and the girl snorts and paws the ground in a horse-like manner. However, these are not true metaphors used to describe the girl or the branch but signs of a transformation going on in which the branch becomes a horse, and the girl becomes a centaur. However, the whole poem can be seen as a metaphor for poetic creation.

The poem uses real objects such as the knife and the dress to symbolize larger things, in this case boyishness and girlishness. This could also be called synecdoche, in which a part of something, for instance the dress, stands for the whole of something, in this case female identity.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

• Research the history and beliefs of Mormonism. How did the Mormons come to be in Utah? How are Mormon beliefs different from and similar to the beliefs of various Christian denominations? Write a report detailing your findings, including the role of Mormonism today.
• Explore the writings of Emily Dickinson and compare them to those of May Swenson. What topics did they have in common? How were their techniques and form similar or different? Write an essay outlining their similarities and differences.
• Think of a time in your life when you enjoyed playing games based on fantasies of being something or someone else. Write a short account (a story or poem) about what that was like.
• Look at the new children's picture book version of "The Centaur," illustrated by Sherry Meidell. Are the illustrations what you would have expected? Also, do you think this poem is too difficult and complex for young children? Can young children enjoy the poem on one level while teenagers and adults enjoy it on another, in the same way that both children and adults can understand and enjoy books like Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels? Create a poster showing images of the centaur from children's books, Greek mythology, and art. Give a presentation to the class about the various representations of the mythical figure, and lead a discussion about whether or not the poem is appropriate for young children.
• Organize a debate in your class about whether parents try to control their children too much. Should parents allow their children to spend more time on their own doing what they want, or is it better that they learn in a more formal and structured manner? Conduct some research into different theories of child rearing, then divide into debate teams and present the different arguments.

Pacing

In the middle of the poem, Swenson carries the reader along for the ride, moving from the nearly

stationary (the girl cutting the willow branch) to the beginnings of serious motion as the horse canters and trots. Her choice of words increases the sense of acceleration as she describes the horse's feet as swift and has the girl's hair blow in the wind. Then the rider and horse wheel and gallop. The words create a sense of speed, which suddenly stops as the rider and horse slow to a walk. Swenson's control of the language enables her to make the reader feel part of the ride as it begins, gathers speed, then slows.

Heroic Quest

The poem might be seen as enacting the heroic quest, a story structure that is common in literature. In the poem, the hero, in this case the ten-year-old girl, leaves civilization, that is, her house, to venture into a magical realm, in this case the willow grove by the canal, where willow branches can change into horses. She takes part in a magical transformation, becoming a centaur, at least figuratively, getting so caught up in the fantasy that she even gets her mouth green, presumably by eating grass or at least miming the action of eating grass. Then she returns from her heroic adventure and brings news of it to the representative of everyday life, in this case her mother. It is true that she slays no dragons, since this is not a violent quest; however, it still contains elements of heroism, the courage to enter a zone of personal transformation

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The Mormons and Utah

Swenson's parents converted to Mormonism, more properly known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a religion founded by Joseph Smith in 1830 and established itself under Brigham Young in Utah later in that century. The Mormons dominated Utah in Swenson's childhood, and the rest of her family was strongly devoted to Mormonism, but even as a child Swenson did not feel strongly connected to it. Part of what the girl in "The Centaur" may be escaping is Mormon rules of propriety. According to R. R. Knudson, in her biography The Wonderful Pen of May Swenson, Swenson as a child liked to play cards and later took up smoking, even though both activities were frowned on by Mormons. The Mormons also had strict notions of gender roles, again something that the girl in Swenson's poem seems to be escaping, or subverting. It is not that Swenson, in this poem or others, attacked the Mormon religion; it is more that she simply looked elsewhere for spiritual and moral guidance.

COMPARE & CONTRAST

• 1920s: Children are left free to amuse themselves with games such as marbles or skipping rope, without parental supervision, during their playtime.

  1950s: With the appearance of books such as Benjamin Spock's Baby and Child Care, after World War II, parents begin to become more involved in their children's daily activities.

  Today: There is increasing concern in some quarters that parents are over-managing their children, over-structuring their lives, and preparing them too early for the adult world.

• 1920s: First-wave feminism, through the women's suffrage movement, challenges the male monopoly on political power. However, it pays less attention to domestic and labor roles, and in these realms, clearly demarcated spheres for men (the workplace) and women (the home) persist.

  1950s: Although the necessities of World War II sent women out of the home to do work formerly seen as male, in the 1950s, gender roles revert to the traditional division of family labor, at least in middle-class families. However, the women's liberation movement of the 1960s and beyond would later overturn many assumptions about women's capabilities and break down the notions of male and female spheres.

  Today: Because of the impact of nearly fifty years of feminist activism, women now lead countries, hold executive positions, and do many other things once seen as the province of men alone.

• 1920s: Children entertain themselves with simple games and toys. They often make their own toys from natural objects. Children also spend most of their recreational time outdoors unless bad weather prevents them from doing so.

  1950s: With the advent of television and the appearance of more elaborate board games such as Monopoly and Clue, many children begin to spend more time indoors and less time on simpler pastimes.

  Today: Many children spend so much time at their computers and watching television that a national advertising campaign is launched to encourage them to spend more of their time in active, outdoor play.

Feminism

The first wave of the women's movement, bringing voting rights and other basic civil rights to women, was in full force in Swenson's early years, and a second wave of feminism, focused on gender roles, gathered force in the 1960s, not long after Swenson wrote "The Centaur." However, Swenson shied away from movements such as this; she was not one to join protests or issue polemics. What her writing does illustrate, though, is a willingness to explore topics traditionally considered masculine, for instance astronauts and the space program and technology generally. Her writings, including "The Centaur," also explore gender roles. Alicia Ostriker, in Writing Like a Woman, states that Swenson did not write typical women's poetry, and Swenson herself disdained labels and did not like to be considered a feminist poet or a lesbian poet. She said that good poetry could combine male and female qualities, a principle embodied by the protagonist in "The Centaur."

The Beat Movement

Anticipating the counterculture of the 1960s, the Beat movement in poetry and other writing arose in the 1950s in opposition to the conformity and materialism of mainstream culture. Its leading members included Allen Ginsberg, best known for his poem Howl (1956), the publication of which led to an obscenity trial. Other notable Beats included Jack Kerouac, known for his novel On the Road (1957), and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a poet who founded City Lights Books in San Francisco. Swenson was aware of the Beats, but just as she would not associate herself with political movements, she kept her distance from this literary movement. According to her biographer, R. R. Knudson, in The Wonderful Pen of May Swenson, Swenson felt somewhat old-fashioned in comparison to the Beats, with their talk about nuclear war, poverty, racism, and other social issues. She did not feel she could be a protester the way they were, even though her writing tended to express the freedom from conformity that the Beats were advocating.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

When A Cage of Spines, the collection that included "The Centaur," was published in 1958, it was widely praised by critics and by poets, including Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Wilbur, and Robert Lowell. The success of the book led to poetry readings, and at one of these readings, Swenson was introduced as the poet who wrote about being a horse, obviously a reference to "The Centaur." The poem later became widely anthologized.

In general, Swenson has been praised for her verve, her detailed observations, and her use of rhythm. Ann Stanford, in an article in Southern Review, focuses on Swenson's powers of observation and her ability to describe the merging and transformation of objects that she sees. Stanford refers to "The Centaur" as an example of such merging involving a magical sleight of hand that allows the objects to combine and yet remain separate.

Idris McElveen, writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, follows Stanford in seeing perception as central to Swenson, and like Stanford she sees merging as the key to "The Centaur," in which she also detects erotic imagery. McElveen also reports that Swenson has been compared to Emily Dickinson, the revered nineteenth-century poet who is sometimes seen as standing outside the literary tradition. Swenson is nontraditional in the sense that she is highly original (as noted by Alicia Ostriker, for one, in Writing Like a Woman) and, in the view of John Hollander, writing in The Work of Poetry, hard to categorize. Hollander writes that Swenson's poems are "systematically ad hoc," adding that there is "no classifying term for [the] organizing principle" of her poetry; she puts her poems together, he states, according to personal principles.

McElveen also compares Swenson to the English romantic poet William Blake, in the sense that both of them composed poetry that works on several levels. Blake's "deceptively simple poems," McElveen writes, resemble Swenson's in the sense that Swenson's poems "are easy enough for children to read and enjoy," but both poets are also "often symbolic and visionary." She adds that even in the simplest of Swenson's poems "there are always many things going on, many interconnected levels and poems-within-poems beneath simple surfaces."

Cynthia Hogue, writing in Body My House, praises "The Centaur" for its portrayal of hybrid identity. She writes that the lines about the girl using her brother's jackknife "suggest a sly performance of the charade of masculinity," adding that "the girl in Swenson's poem crosses and confuses discrete categories of sexual identity." Michael Spooner, also writing in Body My House, sees "The Centaur" as being in the tradition of the French eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote of man's goodness when in the state of nature, before the creation of society: "One hears Rousseau … when she considers the green freedom of the natural world, as she does in ‘The Centaur’ and other poems."

In general, Swenson is seen as a poet of wonder and speculation, whose poetic explorations of the mysteries of the universe can make familiar objects unfamiliar and cause readers to think about things they have taken for granted.

CRITICISM

Sheldon Goldfarb

Goldfarb is a specialist in Victorian literature who has published nonfiction books as well as a novel for young adults. In this essay, he describes May Swenson's exploration of imagination in "The Centaur," suggesting that it reflects her beliefs about poetic creativity.

"The Centaur" begins with an air of nostalgia. An adult speaker looks back with some pleasure at her ten-year-old self and the joys of summer adventures. One might expect a sigh over remembrance of things past, but that is not the direction the poem actually takes. Instead, as the poem unfolds, the adult speaker almost disappears and is certainly not there to pine over lost pleasures. Instead, the poem focuses on a specific, though perhaps characteristic, incident that occurred when the ten-year-old girl went down to the willow grove to cut herself a "horse."

This is a quite magical incident that Swenson describes in characteristically full detail, making it come alive for the reader. The speaker's younger self, the ten-year-old girl, goes down to a willow grove near an old canal, turns a stick into a horse, and then follows up that trick by turning herself into a horse, or at least partly into a horse, creating a hybrid being, part human and part horse, the centaur of the title.

Instead of a sad evocation of vanished youth from the standpoint of middle age, the poem erupts into a celebration of youth that seems not to have vanished at all. The reader rides with the young girl as she canters and trots and finally gallops along the path, hair waving in the wind, arching, snorting, rearing even, and if we are to believe the poem's ending, stopping to eat some grass.

It is interesting that the reader does not get to see the "centaur" chomping on the grass; perhaps some things are too implausible (or magical?) to portray. In any case, the ten-year-old girl so loses herself in her fantasy that she seems a long way from the house she eventually returns to, with its linoleum and its sink, a perfectly normal house where a mother stands ready to call her daughter back from the magical land she has gone to.

The poem works on several levels and makes many points, one of which is that the magical land is never very far from the normal house. It does not require any grand journey or expensive apparatus to get there; all that is needed is a brother's knife and belt and a short trip to the willow grove.

In this magical land girls can act like boys, or like horses, or like a combination of a child and a horse. The poem on one level is an exploration of doubleness, of doubled identity, or interaction with another, with the "other." There is much play with rein and bit here; it is not all wildness and exuberance; there is an attempt at order and control, reflected in the relatively controlled nature of the verse form, with very little enjambment for a free verse poem.

Still, there is that wild riding, the bared teeth, the swiftly traveling hoofs traversing the dust. There is control and wildness, a delicate balance of what could metaphorically be the traditional pairing of reason and passion, reason being the rider and passion being the horse.

As critics have noted, however, it is misleading to speak of rider and horse in this poem as two separate entities; they are blended into one. There really is only one being here, a ten-year-old girl with her willow branch, and yet they are two as well; Swenson here is exploring the nature of unity and duality. To do so she has transported her heroine, and her reader, to a magical land where human beings can merge with animals, where wild animal natures can emerge and yet be controlled by human reason.

What this may represent metaphorically is the act of artistic creation. Here is a ten-year-old girl letting her imagination run free and conjuring up a centaur, an animal-human merger that she can even report to her mother, just as a poet can go into a trancelike state, call up a metaphorical canal in a metaphorical willow grove, and create a set of verses. A successful set of verses will plumb emotional depths and conjure up something out of the deepest wildness while being shaped, controlled, and structured by the poet's rational consciousness.

Swenson herself saw poetic creation this way and compared the act of imagination in her poem to the act of imagination that creates such poems. In an interview in 1977, reprinted in Made with Words, she talked about "The Centaur," first explaining its autobiographical roots. She herself was the ten-year-old in the poem; she would go down to an actual willow grove and cut a switch that became a hobby horse; and when she rode the hobby horse she felt she was riding a real horse and then felt herself to be the horse itself.

This is the act of imagination that she describes in the poem, and as she says, this act of imagination, this ability to become something else, an animal, a horse, or whatever, is the same sort of activity that a poet carries out in imagining a poem. The artist, according to Swenson, becomes her artistic creation; to write a poem you become the poem, trance-like transported to another world, just as the ten-year-old girl is transported into a world where she can become part of a horse.

What of the disappearing adult speaker in all this? Perhaps the reason this is not a poem about a sad middle-aged adult whose magic has disappeared is that, once she begins to describe the magic, it comes back to her. She has not lost it at all.

Probably neither the adult speaker in the poem nor the middle-aged Swenson would go to a willow grove to create horses, but they may still conjure up magic. Swenson could still write poems. "The Centaur" is therefore not an elegy mourning the loss of magic, but a celebration of magic that still exists. In a century full of gloomy modernism and gloomy, linoleum-covered hallways, Swenson could still create a joyful poem celebrating the power of the imagination, a power this poem suggests need not fade with age. This is why the summer at the beginning of the poem seems so long: for Swenson and her speaker that summer of imagination never really ended.

When the Beat poet movement began in the 1950's, Swenson felt a bit old-fashioned, thinking at first she should be more like the poets in this new angry movement. But she found that she could not. She was not an angry protester; she was rather a celebrant of life's mysteries, exploring and stimulating. Of course, she wrote some sad poems too, exploring the anguish of life, but in "The Centaur" she tapped into the exuberant power that animated her own imagination and presented an explanation of the poetic process itself, with the poem being its own illustration.

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

• Poems to Solve, published in 1966, was Swenson's first collection of riddle poems. She included "The Centaur" in it, presumably because she considered it a sort of riddle poem.
• Iconographs, published in 1970, is a collection of Swenson's noted shaped poems, in which the way the words of each poem are arranged on the page is part of the effect.
• For a novel about an adventurous child, readers might enjoy The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, published in 1876. In this novel, Twain portrays a clever child who delights in being outdoors, but unlike the girl in Swenson's poem, Tom interacts with other children, often in a mischievous way.
• For another poem about creativity and duality, see "Among School Children" by W. B. Yeats, first published in 1928. It is available in any collection of Yeats's works.
• For another account written in the 1950s about growing up in the 1920s, see Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing by Robert Paul Smith, published in 1957. In this book Smith warns against over-managing children and advocates letting them be free to do more of what they want.

Here in this poem is the poet plunging into the magical realm where poems are made, showing the reader how it is done. Just as the girl in the poem comes back home from her adventure with a tale to tell, so does the poet come forward with her poem, shaped from the magical materials she collected while giving full rein to her imagination. Thus "The Centaur," while being a poem about gender roles and hybrid identities, nature and the outdoors, and the relationship between mothers and daughters, is above all a poem about the power of imagination and the ways of poetic creation.

Source: Sheldon Goldfarb, Critical Essay on "The Centaur," in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2009.

Priscilla Long

In the following excerpt, Long praises the poems of Nature: Poems Old and New, including "The Centaur," for their musicality and insight.

May Swenson was a visionary poet, a prodigious observer of the fragile and miraculous natural world, a poet who brought our deepest questions to the center of her work. By the time she died in 1989 at 76 she had published some 450 poems in ten books, including a few poems that rank among the finest composed in the late twentieth century. Nature: Poems Old and New contains 183 poems selected and ordered to emphasize her affinity with the out-of-doors. The poems are lush, delicious, witty, luminous and at times deeply philosophical.

Swenson was an unrelentingly lyrical poet, a master of the poetic line in which similar sounds accumulate and resonate so that the poem exists, beyond its meanings, as a rattle or a music box or, in moments of greatness, a symphony. Consider "The Beauty of the Head," a poem on the under-explored subject of defecation:

…. Lake is our bathtub, dish-sink,

drinking jug, and (since the boat's head doesn't work,

—the ice box, either—the bilge pump barely)

lake is water closet, too. Little I knew

a gale this night would wash, and then

wind-wipe my rump hung over the rail.

Listen to the jingle of short "i's" in dish-sink and drinking. Note the chugging of short "u's" in tub, jug, pump, rump, hung. Mind the alliterative whooshing of water, wash and wind-wipe.

Musicality informs nearly every line of every poem. It is grounded in Swenson's formidable powers of observation that in certain poems reach breathtaking virtuosity. In "Look Closer" description mounts to revelation as the chant "look closer" prompts another look at one particular plant….

I once heard a very good poet remark that a poet's strongest attribute may also be her weakest. Swenson's musicality and her observational genius give us her slight poems as well as her great ones. The least memorable are skillfully designed trinkets that don't reach beyond the observed to attain the metaphorical transformations of her greatest work. The literal, surface level of meaning is the only one. "October Textures" are October textures and nothing more: "The brushy and hairy, / tassely and slippery…. " I did not want "I want the fluffy stuff to keep coming down" ("The Fluffy Stuff").

Perhaps a great poem requires a great subject, a quintessential conflict. "The Snowy" addresses an owl in a zoo hunched on its "cement crag, black talons just showing…. " Building on the longer, more expansive line of Swenson's most metaphorically resonant work, the poem gains in descriptive power until the owl seems to represent wild nature itself, enraged, trapped in the small cement cell humankind has designed for it:

…. Elemental form simplified as an egg,

you held perfectly still on your artificial perch. You, too,

might be a crafty fake, stuffed or carved. Except your eyes. Alive,

enormous, yellow circles containing black circles, clear, slick,

heartstopping double barrels of concentrated rage pointed at me.

Perhaps a fourth of Swenson's published poems contain imagery unrelated to the natural world and, happily, her compilers have included a few here. "Feel Me," perhaps her greatest poem, certainly one of our greatest poems, explores a father's enigmatic dying words, "Feel me to do right." The poem simultaneously sinks and expands through layers of possible meanings.

…. Did it mean that, though he died, he would be felt

through some aperture ….

Or was it merely his apology

for dying? "Feel that I do right in not trying,

as you insist, to stay on your side. There is the wide

gateway and the splendid tower, and you implore me

to wait here, with the worms!"

The speculations on "our dad's" last loaded words continue until we arrive at the spectacular epiphany.

In the process of shaping a book, poets typically order and reorder their poems until the book becomes a macro-art form as the poems elaborate, contradict and mirror one another much as stanzas interact in a single poem. I would have appreciated some insight into the procedures and problems of doing this in the absence of the poet, and I also felt the need of a critical overview of Swenson's career. In the midst of writing this review I learned from another source that Swenson had composed some nine hundred poems but that despite her many honors, only something like half her work has so far been published. As Houghton Mifflin continues the vital mission of keeping Swenson in print, I hope the editors will consider sharing important information like this with her readers.

R. R. Knudson and Peter Davison (who are not identified) selected and ordered the poems topically in sections titled "Frontispieces," "Selves," "Days" and so on. I found some of their choices pedestrian. Should a poet's twenty bird poems written over a fifty-year period be gathered into a section titled "Feathers"? Doing so forced them to surround the strong poems such as "The Snowy" with incidental poems that also contain bird imagery. Grouping poems by image type—comets and moons under "Heavens"; waves and whales under "Waters"—highlights the obvious and produces an unnecessary glut of similar images. At some point deep in these poems, the method of presentation produced an overdose of petals and clouds. More intelligently designed groupings might have focused attention on Swenson's larger philosophical concerns—perception itself, the nature of identity, the relationship between subject and object.

In fact, the compilers shaped the most numinous section, "Selves," to do exactly this. The section calls attention to Swenson's metaphorical reach by grouping diverse poems that explore the boundaries of identity. In "The Centaur," Swenson's famous, superb poem about girlhood, the malleable boundaries of the self allow girl and horse to fuse: "My forelock swung in my eyes, / my neck arched and I snorted." Identity (gender?) is also the subject of the long and psychologically acute "Bleeding." The poem portrays an interaction between a sadistic knife-type and a submissive wound-type:

Stop bleeding said the knife.

I would if I could said the cut.

Stop bleeding you make me messy with this blood.

I'm sorry said the cut.

Stop or I will sink in farther said the knife.

Don't said the cut ….

This concrete poem—the caesura in each line makes a visual image of a jagged cut—is one of several that illustrate Swenson's lifelong interest in typographical experiments ….

This master of observation has put observation itself under her microscope. "Sleeping Overnight on the Shore" explores perception and its distortions: "Intermittent moon/ that we say climbs/ or sets, circles only." The poet's eye can see from the eye of an insect—"Am I sitting on your wrist, someone immense?" ("Alternate Hosts")—or from the moon where "there shines earth light/ as moonlight shines upon the earth … " ("Landing on the Moon").

As Swenson knew, we are in the process of destroying the world of plants on which we depend for food and air. The annual destruction of dozens of species amounts to a continuous, low- grade, full-scale catastrophe. In the world of Swenson's poetry, we look at these plants, these animals, with an eye that sees them on their own terms. We see what we stand to lose from " … steam shovel, bulldozer, cement mixer/ rumbl[ing] over sand … ":

There'll be a hotdog stand, flush toilets, trash—

plastic and glass, greasy cartons, crushed beercans,

barrels of garbage for water rats to pick through.

So, goodbye, goldeneye, and grebe and scaup and loon.

Goodbye, morning walks beside the tide tinkling

among clean pebbles, blue mussel shells and snail

shells that look like staring eyeballs. Goodbye, kingfisher, little green, black-crowned heron,
 

snowy egret. And, goodbye, oh faithful pair of swans that used to glide—god and goddess
 

shapes of purity—over the wide water.

Forget my quibbles about selection and arrangement. The poems themselves are every reason to own this book, and to treasure it.

Source: Priscilla Long, "Poet's-eye View," in Women's Review of Books, Vol. 12, No. 4, January 1995, pp. 8-9.

Grace Schulman

In the following excerpt, Schulman discusses the themes of life and death in Swenson's poems, including "The Centaur."

The voice of May Swenson combines the directness of intimate speech and the urgency of prayer:

Body my house

my horse my hound

what will I do

when you are fallen

Where will I sleep

How will I ride

What will I hunt

Where can I go

without my mount …

The magic of that lament, "Question," from Another Animal (1954), is in its contrasts: while the details are specific, the central situation is a mystery that terrifies with each new speculation. Here as elsewhere in her poems, Swenson dwells on the living body with an immediacy that heightens the dread of its loss. Other gestures that recur in Swenson's poetry are the insistent, unanswerable questions, "what will I do." "How will I ride," "What will I hunt," "Where can I go," all of them precise, all ironic, because futile. Here they are enhanced by obsessive rhyme ("house," "horse," "hound," "hunt," "mount"). Their futility is emphasized by the absence of punctuation, and again by its sudden presence, in the final line. They are meditations. Admirable too, is the voice that is neither androgynous nor gendered, but one that encompasses both sexes in its fluid boundaries and essentially human dimension: "What will I hunt," the male speaker's question, modulates here, with no abrupt tonal change, to a woman's query, "With cloud for shift / how will I hide?"

Questions are the wellsprings of May Swenson's art. She inquires about simple things, such as "What is the worm doing / making its hole," and about principles such as "What / is it about, / the universe, / the universe about us stretching out?" or, considering the moon landing, "Dare we land upon a dream?" In her speculations and her close observations, she fulfills Marianne Moore's formula for the working artist: "Curiosity, observation, and a great deal of joy in the thing." In subject matter a poet who, like Donne, takes all of knowledge as her province, she is as comfortable with animals and flowers as she is with anti-matter, electronic sound, and DNA. Some of her chosen forms incorporate questions, such as her ballad, "The Centaur": "Where have you been?" "Been riding." Another is the ancient riddle, a form that enables her to concentrate on the object without naming it. "The Surface," for example, has affinities to Dickinson's riddles, and to her wit: "First I saw the surface, / then I saw it flow, / then I saw the underneath," the poet begins, and gradually unravels the answer, the image of an eye. Swenson riddles in a quest to find a higher reality obscured by conventional names, and to fathom what is deepest within the self. By rejecting ready-made definition—those designations that enlighten—Swenson sees in the dark. She derides the ordinary labeling of things with its consequent reduction of greatness:

They said there was a Thing

that could not Change

They could not Find

it so they Named

it God …
 

("God")

The poet's unnaming allows her to rename, in an effort to see things outside the context of common parlance. Continually the search is for a deeper meaning, the essence of the thing observed. In "Evolution," the first poem of her first book, she exclaims:

beautiful each Shape

to see

wonderful each Thing

to name

here a stone

there a tree

here a river

there a Flame …

May Swenson was born in 1913 in Logan, Utah, of a Mormon family, and educated at Utah State University. She was a New Yorker from 1936, and lived in Sea Cliff, New York, for twenty-three years before her death in Ocean View, Delaware, in 1989. In her lifetime, she published eleven books over three decades, nine of them poetry collections, from Another Animal (1954) to In Other Words (1987). Honored as she was during her lifetime, her books included only four hundred and fifty of the nine hundred poems she composed. Since her death, as new poems and new books continue to appear, it becomes apparent not only that her output is larger than readers have supposed, but that her stature is major.

Nature (1994), the newest of the posthumous books, contains some early poems, hitherto unpublished, whose dominant tone is awe: "Remain aghast at life," the poet resolves in "Earth Your Dancing Place," composed as early as 1936:

Enter each day

as upon a stage

lighted and waiting

for your step …

Wonder prevails in "Manyone Flying" (1975), another of the poems that appear posthumously in Nature. Here, the poet, in the guise of a high flying bird, considers the divisions between the individual and humanity:

Out on the edge,

my maneuverings, my wings, think

they are free. Flock, where do we

fly? Are we Ones? Or One, only?

if only One, not lonely … being Manyone …

but Who are We? And Why?

…The title of her 1967 volume, Half Sun Half Sleep, announces that division of what May Swenson once called, "the primitive bipolar suspension in which my poems often begin to form." Her theme of division is conveyed by many of her shaped poems, or those which contain visual as well as textual metaphors.

Actually, the poet's primary effects are her cadences. The impact of her poems lies in their urgent speech and incantatory rhythms, their music of charms, spells, curses, ritual dances. Never does the typography, however intricate, supersede the cadence. As in primitive poetry, word and appearance are fused for a total effect.

As if to demonstrate subtly that the shaped poems have an auditory life of their own, May Swenson chose to read aloud many of her typographical poems in 1976 on a Caedmon recording, which could not, of course, exhibit the visual pattern to her listeners. One of the poems she read was "The Lightning," which she referred to as a pivotal poem in Half Sun Half Sleep. Of its typographical device, the visual metaphor, she commented: "As seen on the page, there is a streak of white space that runs diagonally through the body of the poem and this even splits some of the words." The poem celebrates speech, and the white streak creates meditative pauses in lines, indicating the gap between word and event, between experience and its realization in the poem:

"The Lightning"

The lightning waked me. It slid unde   r

my eyelid. A black book flipped ope   n

to an illuminated page. Then insta   ntly

shut. Words of destiny were being   uttered

in the distance. If only I   could

make them out! … Next day, as I   lay

in the sun, a symbol for concei   ving the

universe was scratched on my e   yeball.

But quickly its point eclipse   d, and

softened, in the scabbard of   my brain.
 

My cat speaks one word: Fo   ur vowels

and a consonant. He rece   ives with the

hairs of his body the wh   ispers of the

stars. The kinglet spe   aks by flashing

into view a ruby feath   er on his head.

He is held by a threa   d to the eye of

the sun and cannot   fall into error.

Any flower is a per   fect ear, or else it

is a thousand lips   … When will I grope

clear of the entr   ails of intellect?

Swenson spoke, too, of a poem whose title is, antithetically, "Untitled," commenting on an earlier version she read on the recording. She described the visual metaphor created by the typographical appearance on the page, noting that "two black crooked lines pass through the text as if to x it out. The bipolar words ‘you,’ ‘me,’ are in the center as if entangled where the two black lines cross." Here, the spaces are between words, and they designate a meditative, almost painful effort at speech. "I will be earth you be the flower …," the poem begins, and the voice rises in passionate intensity as the lovers flail, boat and sea, earth and flood, desert and salt.

Utterance is the theme, too, of "Fountains of Aix," a poem from the 1963 collection, To Mix With Time. In it, the word "water" is split fifteen times from its lines, and poured, in effect, down the side of one stanza:

A goddess is driving a chariot through water.

Her reins and whips are tight white water.

Bronze hoofs of horses wrangle with water.

The streak of space separates the fountain's sculptures from the water spouting from their mouths. Here are dolphins and lions and bulls, and "faces with mossy lips unlocked," all uttering water, "their eyes mad / or patient or blind or astonished." She builds a metaphor of the fluidity of utterance, and thence of poetry. Swenson's pauses emphasize her wonder: In "Fire Island," from Iconographs (1970), the poet contemplates the miracle of beholding light and dark—milky foam, black sky—of solitude and the group—walkers on the beach and "other watchers"—while the two ends of the narrow island are splayed out in type above and below, creating pauses between the letters of the words "Fire" and "sight."

Typographical pauses appear throughout Swenson's writing career. Some are part of an intricate pattern, as in "The Fountains of Aix" and "The Lighting." Many occur in poems of two columns, and of those, some are read down the page, some across the page and still others across and down. Early and late, those patterned spaces between the words indicate opposites, ironies, reversals, paradoxes, ambiguities. For example, in a poem whose title conveys a moment in time, "While Sitting in the Tuileries and Facing the Slanting Sun," the poet ironically associates, and then divides by space a swaddled infant in Giotto's fresco, "Birth of the Virgin," and a mummy in the Vatican Museum ….

In "Bleeding," from Iconographs, a space through the center is a jagged, running wound, effecting caesuras of hesitation in a dialogue between the knife and the cut. The force grows along with the grim realization that bleeding is precisely feeling, in this devastating relationship:

I feel I have to bleed to feel I think said the cut.
 

I don't I don't have to feel said the knife drying now becoming shiny.

Like the polarized images found throughout Swenson's work, the contrasts created by her typographical separations have their roots in the love poems. There are the two columns of "Evolution" and "Facing" (both to be read down the page, rather than across), each indicating another animal, the lover who is an aspect of the self. Like all the love poems, these two praise opposite beings—flame and ice, sun and moon—who move forward to their destiny.

The love poems, with their high energy and "desert freedom," contain, as do the poems of Shakespeare and Sir Philip Sidney, the irony that vitality can emphasize its very opposite, the certainty of life's decline. From early on, May Swenson sings of life in death's shadow, as in "Question," quoted above, and in poems that have the word "Death" in their titles: "Deaths," "Death Invited," "The Shape of Death."

Did Swenson suffer great personal loss? Her biographer, R.R. Knudson, writes that the death of a beloved grandfather prompted May, as a child, to question the finality of loss. Then, as a teenager, May questioned Mormonism, and, in fact, normative religions with their conventional notions of God. It seems that later she was deeply saddened by the atrocities of World War II. Young May's lover, the Czech poet, Anca Vrboska, lost her family to the Nazi death camps. While Vrboska wrote of Auschwitz directly, Swenson internalized, objectified, searched, as always, for the essence of death:

I will lie down in Autumn

let birds be flying
 

swept into a hollow

by the wind

I'll wait for dying
 

I will lie inert unseen

my hair same-colored

with grass and leaves …
 

("I Will Lie Down")

Later still, in those poems whose titles say "death," Swenson plays on the Elizabethan paradox that tragic implications are perceived in the midst of life's personal, intimate experience. All are poems that embody contrasts, either in their divided shape on the page, or in their imagery, or both. A fascinating early example is "Death, Great Smoothener":

                      Death,

               great smoothener,

                maker of order,

  arrester, unraveler, sifter and changer

              death, great hoarder;

       student, stranger, drifter, traveler,

   flyer and nester all caught at your border;
 

                      death,

                   great halter;

             blackener and frightener,

                reducer, dissolver,

     seizer and welder of younger with elder,

                waker with sleeper
 

                death, great keeper

               of all that must alter;
 

                       death,

                 great heightener,

                  leaper, evolver,

                greater smoothener,

                  great whitener!

The poem's sheer energy cries of life even as it speaks to death. It has the sound of a pagan incantation, with its frightening direct address presented in clusters of heavy stresses. Swenson achieves her falling rhythm here, as in "Question," with reversed iambs, and depicts death in lists of epithets, enforced by rhyme: "order," "hoarder," "border." In contrast to the chant rhythm, the typographical shape on the page is that of an ornate Christian cross. The resonant epithets echo, for me, Caedmon's hymn, the legendary first song of our first English poet, a song of thanksgiving:

Nu sculon herigean heofonrices weard

metodes meahte and his modgethanc

weorc wuldorodur swa he wundra gehwos
 

now shall we praise heaven's keeper

the maker's might and his mind thought

father of the world as of all wonder …

Poetically, their techniques are alike: to sing of God. Caedmon takes epithets for the Anglo-Saxon warlords, such as ruler and father, and qualifies them with Christian adjectives such as … "eternal." Swenson chants death in life, and engraves a pagan rhythm in a Christian cross.

The poetry of May Swenson celebrates life's miracles even with death in view: the wonder of speech ("Fountains of Aix"); the grandeur of God. ("God"); the radiance of sight ("Fire Island"). In each of these three poems, typographical division—white streaks down the middle of text, make for breath-catching pauses that enhance the excited tone. The ambiguities and paradoxes of Swenson's poetry result from basic contradiction between our illusion of permanence and an underlying certainty of fatality. This contradiction is articulated explicitly in one of the love poems, "The Shape of Death," as it was printed, in Iconographs, with a white streak down the middle of the text:

What does love look like? We know the shape of death.

Death is a cloud, immense and awesome. At first a

lid is lifted from the eye of light. There is a

clap of sound. A white blossom belches from the

jaw of fright.

Then, in sharp contrast to those positive assertions about death, love is presented in a series of questions: "What is its / color and its alchemy?" "Can it be sown and harvested?" The resounding theme of Swenson's poems is there, in her concluding statement. Like life, love, though fatally transient, is "not alien—it is near—our very skin, a sheath to keep us pure of fear."

Source: Grace Schulman, "Life's Miracles: The Poetry of May Swenson," in American Poetry Review, Vol. 23, No. 5, September-October 1994, pp. 9-13.

Sue Russell

In the following excerpt, Russell identifies autobiographical elements of Swenson's works, including "The Centaur."

May Swenson, who died in 1989 at the age of seventy-six, was a lover of riddles. She liked to write them as well as to solve them—the harder the better. Like the riddle poems she assembled in two books for young readers, all her poems have the capacity to tease and delight. "A poem is a thing," Swenson tells us in her introduction to one of these collections, More Poems to Solve (1972). Often based on intricate mechanisms that are not easily replicated, Swenson's poems seem more to have been constructed than composed. Excerpting them is an extreme disservice, as it limits the reader's perspective of the overall design. The poems often take up space in every direction on the page, asserting their identity quite literally at every turn. Individual poems have the kinetic ability to spill over diagonally into stanzaic receptacles, embody the shape and spirit of paintings by De Chirico, and spin like a top around a still center. Although Swenson was clearly engaged in the experimental enterprise to a degree that would charm any scientist, her poetic experimentation was more a means than an end. A language poet before the phrase was coined, she surely would have disdained the label, for her poems are clearly "about" more than the words themselves….

While Swenson did not go out of her way to disclose her lesbianism, neither did she go out of her way to hide it. Relatively late in her life, she expressed her pleasure at the possibility of having certain poems understood in their proper context, but she was apparently less happy about the implication of being a "lesbian poet," with "lesbian" as the modifier or defining term. Swenson's poem, "To Confirm a Thing," dated 1957, appeared in Joan Larkin and Elly Bulkin's anthology, Amazon Poetry, the first major collection of its kind, which came out in 1975. Swenson accepted the editors' invitation to include a sample of her work and suggested this particular poem, which after its appearance in To Mix with Time (1963), according to Swenson, "has never been paid any particular attention that I know of." She notes as well in her reply to Larkin: "To me the statement it makes doesn't seem at all obscure, but perhaps the metaphors constitute a thicker veil than I expected" (letter 2 Sept. 1975) ….

The oldest child of ten born to Swedish immigrant parents who settled in Utah, she was raised with a rigid set of expectations of how boys and girls should behave. Having grown up in a family of practicing Mormons, it is certainly not surprising that Swenson would show an overactive attention to "delicious sin." The theme of the recalcitrant child is a strong presence throughout her work in poems like "The Centaur." Indeed, the word "tomboy" seems to have been created with Swenson in mind. Her boyish, close-cropped hair is a constant on the dust jacket of each new book. This healthy resistance to authority, however, did not stand in the way of her filial loyalty. From the stringencies of her family of origin to the self-made family of women implied in such poems as "The Beauty of the Head," Swenson seems to have negotiated the boundaries of her various worlds with remarkable grace.

Swenson's eight surviving siblings attended her memorial tribute, given in March 1991 by the Academy of American Poets, for whom Swenson had served as chancellor from 1980 until her death in 1989, replacing Elizabeth Bishop in that post. Swenson's sister, Margaret Swenson Woodbury, one of her younger siblings, was among the presenters who offered reminiscences and read selected poems from the body of Swenson's work. Woodbury read the poem "I Look at My Hand" (Iconographs, 1970), in which the physical inheritance from parents is literally traced down to the fingertips. In another poem, "Night Visits with the Family" (Things Taking Place, 1978), variant dreams are attributed to a multitude of family members all identified by first name, including May and Margaret.

The collective presence of the family group takes on added significance in the poem "Feel Me" (Iconographs, 1970), in which, through a combination of apparent autobiography and linguistic analysis, Swenson/the speaker recalls "our father's" last words and puzzles through several possible interpretations:

"Feel me to do right," our father said on his deathbed.

We did not quite know—in fact, not at all—what he meant.

His last whisper was spent as through a slot on a wall.

He left us a key, but how did it fit?…

The microscopic attention to a small syntactic unit here stands in for the larger emotional work of grief, as if to say, in the absence of any clear message, we fix on the little we have. One possible interpretation to which the speaker does not allude is that, instead of (or in addition to) addressing the family members in his presence, the father might be offering a prayer for God's grace. The implicit "you," in this case, would be God. "Feel me to [have done] right" (with my life) would then be the sense of his words. This seemingly intentional misreading reflects a narrowing perspective which sidesteps the extremity of the situation. If the father is talking to someone other than "us," "we" lose the exercise which gives meaning to "our" grief. Given Swenson's background, it seems likely that she assumes an implicit dialogue between "our father" on his deathbed and "Our Father," the heavenly maker, to whom the earthbound family members are denied access. In another family poem, "That the Soul May Wax Plump," Swenson writes: "Mother's work before she died was self-purification / a regimen of near starvation, to be worthy to go / to Our Father, Whom she confused (or, more aptly, fused) / with our father, in Heaven long since … " (Things Taking Place, 1978).

The internal dialogue was a useful strategy for Swenson in grappling with the important questions of her own life. In the previously unpublished poem, "Manyone Flying," she returns to a favorite visual format—the symmetrical arrangement of lines built around a narrow column of white space. In this instance, the structure suggests both the visual formation of birds in flight and the verbal precipice over which the speaker is poised. Swenson's notation on this poem tells us that she started it on a plane flight to Utah for a family visit. It is not surprising that this situation would evoke a soliloquy which traces the speaker's role as both loner and member of the flock, perpetually flying from one life to another and wondering at the need for such flight:

Out on the ragged edge flying lonely

Not all alone not that brave

or foolish or self-sufficient

or self-believing In the middle

In other poems, Swenson tackles metaphysical questions with an ironic spin that is gently irreverent. Just as "Feel Me" begins with a key that does not seem to fit in any known door, an earlier poem, "The Key to Everything" (Another Animal, 1954), looks at the hopeless task of the eternal seeker for answers. Here, Swenson uses breathless, unpunctuated verse paragraphs to characterize such an individual, "waiting for / the right person the doctor or / the mother or / the person with the name you keep / mumbling in your sleep …." This is the kind of poem one would love to thrust in the face of New Age friends, particularly for the impact of its final lines: " … no once you'd / get there you'd / remember and love me / of course I'd / be gone by then I'd / be far away" (New and Selected).

The first two poems in To Mix with Time (1963) are entitled "The Universe" and "God." As Alicia Ostriker has pointed out, there may be no other poet with the audacity to use such titles, and it may be the quality Anthony Hecht refers to as "calculated naiveté; " which allows Swenson to pull off the gesture. But Swenson is a child here in Blake's sense of wonderment before the infinite. And, like Whitman, her first poetic impulse is to celebrate. Her early short story, "Appearances" (one of two she published in her lifetime), sets up a dialogue between a physician and a visual artist that embodies Swenson's continuing stance. "‘After all,’" the story opens in the tired, paternalistic voice of the doctor, "‘we are no longer children.’" The artist, that callow youth, responds, "‘On the contrary, I believe that we are all still children.’" The artist then refines his position, exalting the role of the senses in coming to terms with "‘a mysterious and lavish power veining everything in nature, spilling free and raw from every stone and leaf’" (New Directions, 1951).

Peter Pan, both ageless and androgynous, remains the essential archetype, with nature a positive force that cannot be denied. It is that persistent spirit which leads me to resist a reading of Swenson's work and life that belabors the idea of internalized homophobia or self-hatred. Her absolute willingness to confound gender expectations for subject matter, genre, and style far outweighs her apparent ambivalence about being politically "out."

The first Swenson book I purchased was To Mix with Time, and this was long before I called myself a lesbian or saw her work collected in Amazon Poetry. I remember standing in the bookstore, transfixed by these lines from "Out of My Head":

If I could get

out of my

head and

into the

world.

What am I saying?

Out of my

head? Isn't my

head

in the

world?

That immediate move to stand the question itself "on its head," the refusal to separate "head" from "world," the enactment of this separation by means of a continental divide of white space—these are qualities that disarmed me then and now. As a teenager with a hyperactive intelligence and a bent toward poetry, I sensed in Swenson's work the possibilities of a future I did not yet have the words to imagine—one in which I could be "in my head" and "in the world" at the same time and in equal measure. This lesson, of course, is the opposite of what parents and teachers had to say to smart girls—that experience was something we had to go out there and "get" if we wanted to fulfill ourselves as women. Swenson's work and life palpably contradict the voice of authority. Somehow, finding out that she was a lesbian simply confirmed what I already knew. Swenson had an innate distrust for the separation of thinking and feeling states. What she recognized, instead, was the seductive energy of words and ideas, the sensual allure of exploration and discovery, the sexiness of a machine's (or a poem's) working parts. It is the word made flesh and the flesh made word—that moment of union protracted in a body of work. For these reasons, Swenson's readers tend to offer an unqualified admiration that is closer to love. We love the poet who brings us closest to our own true nature—who shows us, through her example, what it means to be truly alive.

Source: Sue Russell, "A Mysterious and Lavish Power: How Things Continue to Take Place in the Work of May Swenson," in Kenyon Review, Vol. 16, No. 3, Summer 1994, pp. 128-39.

SOURCES

Crumbley, Paul, "May Swenson and Other Animals: Her Poetics of Natural Selection," in Body My House: May Swenson's Work and Life, edited by Paul Crumbley and Patricia M. Grant, Utah State University Press, 2006, pp. 139, 140.

Gould, Jean, Modern American Women Poets, Dodd, Mead, 1984, p. 76.

Grabher, Gudrun M., "De-Cartesianizing the Universe: May Swenson's Design of Wor(l)ds," in Body My House: May Swenson's Work and Life, edited by Paul Crumbley and Patricia M. Grant, Utah State University Press, 2006, p. 82.

Hogue, Cynthia, "Material Girl: May Swenson's Logo-poetic Materialism," in Body My House: May Swenson's Work and Life, edited by Paul Crumbley and Patricia M. Grant, Utah State University Press, 2006, pp. 122-23.

Hollander, John, "May Swenson's Massive Panoply," in The Work of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 1997, pp. 292-93.

Howard, Richard, "May Swenson," in Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950, enlarged edition, Atheneum, 1980, p. 608.

Knudson, R. R., The Wonderful Pen of May Swenson, Macmillan, 1993, pp. 28, 34, 91-92, 100.

Kronzek, Elizabeth, "Mormonism (1815-1850)," in American Eras, Vol. 3, The Revolutionary Era, 1754-1783, Gale Research, 1997-1998.

Marc, David, "Beat Generation," in Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia, http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761553702/Beat_Generation.html (accessed September 8, 2008).

McElveen, Idris, "May Swenson," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 5, No. 2, American Poets Since World War II, edited by Donald J. Greiner, Gale Research, 1980, pp. 310, 312.

Ostriker, Alicia, "May Swenson and the Shapes of Speculation," in Writing Like a Woman, University of Michigan Press, 1983, pp. 87, 89, 90-91; originally published in American Poetry Review, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1978.

Spooner, Michael, "How Everything Happens: Notes on May Swenson's Theory of Writing," in Body My House: May Swenson's Work and Life, edited by Paul Crumbley and Patricia M. Grant, Utah State University Press, 2006, p. 160.

Stanford, Ann, "May Swenson: The Art of Perceiving," in Southern Review, new series, Vol. 5, 1969, p. 64.

Swenson, May, "The Centaur," in Nature: Poems Old and New, Houghton Mifflin, 1994, pp. 13-15; originally published in Western Review, Vol. 20, 1956, pp. 100-101.

———, "An Interview with Cornelia Draves and Mary Jane Fortunato," in Made with Words, edited by Gardner McFall, University of Michigan Press, 1998, pp. 113-14; originally published in New York Quarterly, Vol. 19, 1977.

Zona, Kristin Hotelling, "May Swenson's Performative Poetics," in Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and May Swenson: The Feminist Poetics of Self-Restraint, University of Michigan Press, 2002, pp. 123, 124, 134.

FURTHER READING

Arrington, Leonard J., and Davis Bitton, The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-Day Saints, University of Illinois Press, 1992.

This account of the Mormons was written by members of the Mormon church, but it is generally regarded as being objective.

Campbell, James, This Is the Beat Generation: New York-San Francisco-Paris, University of California Press, 2001.

This introductory account traces the lives of the leading Beat writers and describes the movement they created.

Evans, Sara M., Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America, revised edition, Free Press, 1997.

This historical study traces the role of women in the United States from the seventeenth century to the late twentieth century.

Koestler, Arthur, The Act of Creation, Penguin, 1990.

Originally published in 1964, this book is a classic study of creativity. Koestler explores true and false inspiration by, among other things, looking at accounts of how famous scientists made their discoveries.