Robert Hass's Meditation at Lagunitas

Robert Hass's poem Meditation at Lagunitas explores the limits of expression in language through the development of personal connotations in contrast with standard denotative meanings.

Lines 1-2 introduce two general statements: "All the new thinking is about loss. / In this it resembles all the old thinking." The meaning of loss in "the new thinking" is language's failure to express. The poet, in his search for aptly expressive language, is likened to a "clown- / faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk / of that black birch." The use of dead and sculpted create a connotatively discordant image because of the sense of loss in death's tragedy and the sense of gain in sculpture's beauty. This mixture of tragedy and beauty is the essential tonal conflict of the poem and parallels the tragedy of language's shortcomings and the poetic possibilities of "moments when the body is as numinous / as words."

A specific example in lines 8-11, ironically, illustrates the problem of the general idea presented in lines 3-4. Hass reduces the belief in the "luminous clarity of a general idea" to a "notion" and uses the irony of this example to reveal the narrowly translatable qualities of this philosophy. As there is "in this world no one thing / to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds," Hass hearkens to the Platonic idea of a separation between unique worldly elements and the words that represent a uniform ideal. The phrase "in this world" opposes the idea of a world specifically correlative to the life of one person-a comprehensible world, an "insert pronoun world." This employment of Platonic thought supports lines 1-2 while propelling two greater movements within the poem: (1) proof that general philosophical ideas can be clear but are practically useless and (2) the necessity of personal experience to develop employable philosophical thought.

Much of the diction in the first 11 lines forces the reader to define conceptual terms in relation to what they know, both of words and of the world. This process occurring beneath the movement of these lines exemplifies the philosophical convictions developed and reiterated throughout the poem: the definition of identity. The denotation of "elegy" in line 11 lends itself to the linguistically destructive criticism that because "there is no one thing" represented by it, its meaning is destroyed. The use of "elegy" is particularly apt for this task, as the word ironically signifies its own death in parallel to the death of deconstruction by means of its own definition. Thusly, the reader is forced to acquire a personally acceptable definition of many conceptual words before accepting the author's thought.

The first pronoun of the poem, "We," opens line 12 and shifts focus to the "insert pronoun world" of understanding:

We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman,you and I.

The enjambment of line 12 on the word "voice" emphasizes the importance of this element in understanding and defining identity as well as its significant impact on the effects of language. The following enjambment on "tone" functions similarly. The first comma of line 13 creates a grammatically unexpected pause that relates a feeling of the unexpected to the speaker; this "thin wire of grief" becomes an object of particular curiosity. Enjambment of line 13 also highlights the consideration of the speaker and the importance of diction in describing this friend's tone as "almost querulous." This tone of complaint echoes that of loss in "All the new thinking." It is through this complaint about loss that words, and thusly experiences and the ability to recount them, lose all meaning.

Lines 15-16 contain a list of nouns that shift between conceptually and physically denotative words to expose the expressive power that comes not from the definition or signification of words, but from their roots and relationships to the physical world. Justice is a strongly conceptual term with dissection of its physical implications calling back, again, to Platonic dialogues. From this historically connotative setting Hass makes his most pointed linguistic argument. Pine has no distinguishable relation to justice in modern English; however, from Old English and Vulgar Latin roots the word denotes the act of causing suffering or inflicting punishment. This relationship is Hass's argument for the emotional intensity gained from the interconnectedness of language and its link to the tangible. In the movement from pine to hair the speaker enters into personally connotative connections, which through more personal association links to woman and you and I.

The speaker's struggle to capture the full history of these personal connotations emerges in lines 16-24:

There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed.

Diction is an important factor in locating this struggle. Line 17 mixes the complex concept of "love" with the physical act of "holding." The enjambment of "holding" is elaborated upon with the addition of "shoulders" and "hands." The speaker then feels a "violent wonder at her presence." In this shuffle between the conceptual and the physical the speaker relives the subtle associations made in line 16 with more vivid detail. The struggle becomes more pronounced with the introduction of simile to contract a strongly conceptual "violent wonder" to a physical "thirst for salt." This thirst turns the speaker to the past, where the world gained its definition. Hass speaks of the earliest stages of self-identification in an essay entitled One Body: Some Notes on Form:

I thought [our children] responded when I bent over their cribs because they were beginning to recognize me. Now I think that it was because they were coming to recognize themselves. They were experiencing in the fluidity of things a certain orderliness: footsteps, a face, the smell of hair and tobacco, cooing syllables. One would gradually have the sense that looking-out-of-the-eyes was a point around which phenomena organized themselves; thinking this is going to happen and having it happen might be, then, the authentic source of the experience of being, of identity, that word which implies that a lot of different things are the same thing. (Twentieth Century Pleasures, Hass)

Colloquial speech enters lines 24-25 in a literal contradiction and explores further limits of language. "Desire" is described as "full of endless distances." The implication of fullness would require enclosure, which would interfere with endless distance. But making liberal use of these figures of speech intends to show that meaning can be perfectly clear even when usage transcends the bounds of literal definition. This argument for colloquial expression in language pervades everyday life, and Hass seeks to justify its legitimate use in literature as well. This use of colloquial speech is another indication of Hass's belief in personal experience and acquisition of identity as the ultimate means of understanding.

The statement beginning in line 24 curiously bemoans the sentiment that "It," the immediate evocation of images from the speaker's childhood in lines 20-24, "hardly had to do with her." But the speaker finds consolation that he/she "must have been the same to her," that she, too, has her own life-developing childhood. This kind of singularity is troublesome to the speaker because the realization of identity comes at a time when he/she is seeking companionship, not the separation of something that "hardly [has] to do with her." "But [the speaker] remembers so much," and attempts to gather the greater scope of those memories into a cohesive past. The use of "But" to open the sentence is a discontented reply to the inability to create a separate identity for the couple's relationship, one that is free of reflections of individual pasts. Lines 26-28 provide the attempt to isolate the historical center of the couple's relationship. The speaker remembers "they way her hands dismantled bread," which can be directly attributed to frequent dining together, "the thing her father said that hurt her," which is indicative of emotional intimacy, and "what / she dreamed," which is a product of their living and, specifically, sleeping together. Through these specific memories the speaker defines the relationship, not in broadly descriptive terms.

The memory of "Such tenderness, those afternoons and the evenings, / saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry" is the speaker's quest for identity, his/her search for the "one thing / to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds." It is made apparent by the final line that Meditation is meant to be read aloud, for the repetition of blackberry depends on voice, it depends on tone to create its meaning. Hass's conclusion details the practice of identity, the solidification of the "insert pronoun world."