The Hermit's Scream

He said I had this that I could love,As one loves visible and responsive peace,As one loves one's own being,As one loves that which is the endAnd must be loved, as one loves thatOf which one is a part as in a unity,A unity that is the life one loves,So that one lives all the lives that comprise itAs the life of the fatal unity of war.Wallace Stevens, “Yellow Afternoon”I am a failure then, as the kind of revolutionary Anne-Marion and her acquaintances were. (Though in fact she had heard of nothing revolutionary this group had done, since she left them ten summers ago. Anne-Marion, she knew, had become a well-known poet whose poems were about her two children, and the quality of the light that fell across a lake she owned.)Alice Walker, Meridian (200–01)I've been haunted by a poem, as apparently simple as a ballad and with a ballad's appeal of timelessness. It's by Elizabeth Bishop, a white North American with middle-class roots. Orphaned and deracinated as a child, she grew up as a lesbian, a traveler-exile, living a significant part of her life in Brazil. She's not thought of as a political poet by most people who admire her; she's most often praised as a poet of minute observation and description. The poem is called “Chemin de Fer”: