This article was downloaded by: [Archives & Bibliothèques de l'ULB]On: 06 October 2014, At: 17:54Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK

The ExplicatorPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vexp20

Linda Pastan's EROSIONNils Clausson aa University of ReginaPublished online: 11 Nov 2011.

To cite this article: Nils Clausson (2011) Linda Pastan's EROSION, The Explicator, 69:2,100-107, DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2011.620921

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2011.620921

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all theinformation (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform.However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness,or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and viewsexpressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, andare not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of theContent should not be relied upon and should be independently verified withprimary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for anylosses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages,and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly orindirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of theContent.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan,

sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone isexpressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttp://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Arc

hive

s &

Bib

lioth

èque

s de

l'U

LB

] at

17:

54 0

6 O

ctob

er 2

014

The Explicator, Vol. 69, No. 2, 100–107, 2011Copyright C© Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0014-4940 print / 1939-926X onlineDOI: 10.1080/00144940.2011.620921

NILS CLAUSSON

University of Regina

Linda Pastan’s EROSION

Keywords: erosion, Linda Pastan, post-Darwin

Despite its modern form and its post-Romantic and post-Darwinian view of nature as indifferent, even hostile, to the wantsand needs of human beings, “Erosion” is, in significant ways, a tra-ditional poem. The problem faced by the speaker in “Erosion,” herrecognition that the seemingly firm land she is (not so firmly) stand-ing on will, at some point in geological time, be sea, may very wellbe a distinctly modern one, but Linda Pastan mediates this recogni-tion through the tropes, figures, and symbols she has inherited as apoet from the poetic tradition that includes the Bible, William Shake-speare, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and Matthew Arnold. Aclose reading of “Erosion” reveals that the tension between its mod-ern form and subject matter and the traditional poetic tropes andfigures that Pastan uses to structure the poem is the key to Pas-tan’s portrayal of a post-Darwinian world in which life, rather thanprogressing and evolving, returns to the primal waters whence itoriginally arose, a world in which humans are as insignificant as thesands eroded by the implacable sea. In this reading, Pastan becomes,in T. S. Eliot’s sense of the term, a more traditional poet than readersfamiliar only with such frequently anthologized poems as “Marks,”“Love Poem,” “To a Daughter Leaving Home,” and “Ethics” mightsuppose.

100

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Arc

hive

s &

Bib

lioth

èque

s de

l'U

LB

] at

17:

54 0

6 O

ctob

er 2

014

Linda Pastan’s EROSION 101

To fully appreciate Pastan’s multiple allusions to literary tradi-tion and the traditional metaphors, tropes, and symbols she uses todescribe the relentless erosion of the land by the sea, we first need tobe aware that the situation of the woman speaker in the poem evokesa long tradition of nineteenth-century poems featuring a speaker ona coast or seashore describing and responding to the sea, the most fa-mous examples being Wordsworth’s “It Is a Beauteous Evening,” By-ron’s apostrophe to the ocean in Childe Harold Pilgrimage, Canto theThird, CLXXIX (“Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean—roll!”),and Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” Moreover, “Erosion” appears in a col-lection of poems that is self-consciously traditional. It is one of thepoems in Pastan’s 1988 collection, The Imperfect Paradise, whichincludes two poems in traditional poetic genres, “Ars Poetica” and“Elegy,” a group of poems on Homer’s Odyssey, and closes with thetitle poem, “The Imperfect Paradise,” consisting of a sequence of sixShakespearean sonnets. The title (both of this poem and the collec-tion) alludes, of course, to Milton’s Paradise Lost, and on the cover ofthe paperback edition is Albrecht Durer’s engraving The Fall of Man(ca. 1509–10).1 Resolutely modern in its form, “Erosion” neverthe-less participates in a poetic tradition that includes the Bible, Shake-speare’s sonnets (especially Sonnet 50, beginning, “Like as the waves[ . . . ]”), Wordsworth’s and Byron’s poetry, and Arnold’s “DoverBeach,” a poem in which the sea figures as a symbol of the erosion offaith (it is worth noting that the white cliffs of Dover are themselvesbeing implacably eroded by the sea, as large chunks of the cliffsregularly fall into the English Channel).

But at the same time that “Erosion” participates in a long po-etic tradition, it also explicitly breaks with some important ideasexpressed in that tradition, particularly Romantic ideas about natureand its relationship to human beings. For example, earlier Romanticimages of the sea, such as Byron’s, had evoked feelings of the sub-lime not only in the speaker but also in the reader. But the prospectof the waves eroding the shore is anything but sublime for Pas-tan’s speaker, who, as she watches the waves implacably eroding thebeach, hears something even more disquieting than Arnold’s “grating

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Arc

hive

s &

Bib

lioth

èque

s de

l'U

LB

] at

17:

54 0

6 O

ctob

er 2

014

102 The Explicator

roar” and “eternal note of sadness”: the erosion not of faith but ofhuman life itself. The poem, then, is an anti-Romantic meditation onthe relentless destructiveness of nature. Pastan’s speaker, unlike theWordsworth of “Tintern Abbey”—another poem with a speaker ina natural landscape contemplating the power of nature—no longercan have faith that “nature never did betray the heart that loved her.”More than two centuries after Wordsworth, nature for Pastan is ut-terly indifferent to human beings, represented by the speaker andher family as they struggle, ineffectively, to placate the sea’s inex-orable force as it erodes the land. Her modern view of nature seemsto be paralleled by the modern free verse form of the poem. Butthe poem’s very modern view of nature is, paradoxically, expressedprimarily through images, tropes, and metaphors derived from thepoetic tradition in which the poem participates. The erosion of theshore is evidence the Fall is still happening.

The first stanza of “Erosion” ends with a commonplace of tradi-tional poetry, a metaphor that personifies the waves as preindustrialreapers harvesting grain, a comparison prepared for by a pun on theword grain (of sand) in lines 2 and 3: “The waves move their longrow / of scythes over the beach” (lines 7–8). The double metaphor(waves = scythes; sand = grain) creates the first of several parallelsin the poem between the human world and the natural world: thewaves do to the land what harvesters used to do to the ripe grain.Thus Pastan subtly introduces the motif of death into the poem. Thescythe is the traditional accoutrement of the grim reaper, Death: justas the reapers harvest the ripe grain, so Death “harvests” humanbeings. The traditional image of the harvest also implies the cycleof the seasons and hence rebirth in the spring, but in Pastan’s poemthe cyclical image of death and rebirth is replaced by the linearmovement of the waves and by the irreversible process of entropy:everything is running down, like the sands in an hourglass. But itis not just the beach that the scythe/waves are cutting down. Thesame process of erosion/death that the speaker watches happening tothe seashore—“It happens as we watch” (6)—is also at work withinthe speaker. “We are made of water anyway (43),” says the speaker,

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Arc

hive

s &

Bib

lioth

èque

s de

l'U

LB

] at

17:

54 0

6 O

ctob

er 2

014

Linda Pastan’s EROSION 103

and are thus destined to return to the sea. “My main subject,” Pas-tan remarked in an interview in 2007, “[has been] the possibilityof death. Not just the possibility, but in my case the expectation”(O’Driscoll). In “Erosion,” which can be read as Pastan’s variationon the traditional memento mori theme, Pastan places the expectationof individual human death in the context of the inevitable erosionof all the land by the sea. The next stanza resurrects another con-ventional symbol often associated with the inevitability of death, thehour glass, a traditional symbol of time passing and the brevity ofhuman life:

. . . the clock’s handsmove continuouslyjust out of sight,but more like an hourglassthan a clock,for here sandis running out. (10–16)

This simile, like the previous motif of the grim reaper, establishesa parallel between the human world of hourglasses and clocks andthe natural world of sea, sand, and wind. The whole world is a hugehourglass, and time is slowly running out.

The most obvious traditional trope in the poem is, of course, themetaphor comparing the family’s house overlooking the beach toNoah’s ark and, by implication, the sea encroaching on the shore tothe flood in Genesis:

The childrenpress their faces to the glassas if the windows were portholesand the house fillswith animals: two dogs,a bird, cats—we are becomingan ark already. (33–39)

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Arc

hive

s &

Bib

lioth

èque

s de

l'U

LB

] at

17:

54 0

6 O

ctob

er 2

014

104 The Explicator

The biblical flood was part of God’s plan for renewal and rebirth; theworld of the poem, however, is a thoroughly secular one, controlledby natural forces: “We have tried prayer” (26), the speaker says, butthere is apparently no god to hear them. The Sea of Faith havinglong since receded, there is no supranatural realm in this poem,only a post-Darwinian world of slow, continuous, and implacablegeological change. Nor is there a need for a supernatural powerto wipe out a sinful humanity; natural forces are doing it all bythemselves, naturally.

The irreversible movement of the waves toward the shore andthe speaker toward death is reflected in the poem’s syntax. Whereasits traditional symbols, tropes, and myths denote a cyclical world inwhich humans once lived in harmony with nature and in which rebirthcyclically followed death, the syntactic patterns of the poem evokea world in which nature is oblivious of human life. The standardsentence pattern in “Erosion” is the most common one in English:subject + verb + object (or complement). Most sentences in the firstfour stanzas begin with “we” as the subject, immediately followedby the main verb, for example: “We are slowly / undermined”; “Wewake to water”; “We have tried a seawall” (1–2, 17, 25). This unvary-ing sentence pattern mimics the irreversible movement of the waves“continuously” eroding the sand. There is, however, one notable ex-ception to this dominant pattern: “Implacably lovely / is this view”(18–19). When a poet sets up a pattern early in a poem, any laterdeviation from it will usually be significant. The startling effect ofthese two lines depends largely on the unexpected syntactic inversionin a poem that otherwise conforms to the syntax of linear, expositoryprose. The reader expects “This view is implacably lovely” but findsan almost archaic word order. The inverted word order breaks up thecliche “lovely view” and associates loveliness with implacableness,forcing the reader to look at this conventional picturesque “view” ofthe sea from a fresh new perspective. Pastan turns something conven-tionally pretty, a sea view, into something terrifying by transforminga trite real-estate cliche, “lovely sea view,” into a biblical image ofa sea monster, threatening to “swallow” the whole house: “it [the

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Arc

hive

s &

Bib

lioth

èque

s de

l'U

LB

] at

17:

54 0

6 O

ctob

er 2

014

Linda Pastan’s EROSION 105

view] will swallow / us whole,” like Leviathan, or perhaps the whalethat swallowed Jonah, anticipating the later biblical reference to theFlood. The reader’s perspective is reversed just as the syntax is. Thechoice of the word implacably, by the way, is deft. It comes from theLatin im = “not” + placare = “to calm, to appease” (from which isderived the English verb “to placate”). The family desperately triesto placate the ocean, but to no avail: “We have tried a seawall. /We have tried prayer. / We have planted grasses [ . . . ]” (25–27).Syntactic repetition (We + verb + direct object) suggests a growinghelplessness as each desperate plan fails and is desperately replacedby another. Their repeated failure is as predictable as the repetitionof the waves.

Verbal repetitions and inversions reinforce the repeated syntacticpattern. Particularly subtle are the repetitions in the final three linesof the stanza: “For the wind / does its work, the water / does itssure work.” The last words of the last three lines—wind, water,work—are joined by alliteration, emphasizing the contrast betweenthe “sure work” of the wind and the water and the family’s ineffective(unsure) work described in the first three lines of the stanza. Theenjambment of “the wind / does” and “the water / does,” so thatsubject and verb appear, respectively, at the end and then at thebeginning of successive lines of verse, emphasizes the collaborationof the wind and the water against the futile efforts of humans toplacate the (implacable) forces of nature. Work, a word that wouldnormally be applied to human actions, suggests a deliberate attemptto uproot humans from their temporary foothold on the shore, amalicious purpose hinted at by the connotations of “undermined” inthe opening two lines of the poem: “We are slowly / undermined.”(The choice of the passive voice implies that from the outset humansare not in control but helplessly acted upon by the implacable forcesof nature.) Ironically, despite the family’s doomed efforts to build aseawall and plant grasses, their characteristic behavior in the poemis to “watch,” not “work”: “It happens as we watch.”

Geological erosion of the land and the undermining of humanbeings (leading to eventual extinction) come together in the final

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Arc

hive

s &

Bib

lioth

èque

s de

l'U

LB

] at

17:

54 0

6 O

ctob

er 2

014

106 The Explicator

stanza, which links the death of the individual to the larger geologicalprocess of erosion and destruction:

The gulls will followour wake.We are made of water anyway,I can feel it in the yieldingof your flesh, though sometimesI think that you are sand,moving slowly, slowlyfrom under me. (41–48)

Just as the waves are eroding the sand on the beach, frail human fleshis “yielding” to the inevitable dissolution of death. The speaker’sawareness of the continuous and implacable geological erosion ofthe land by the sea leads to her meditation on the impermanenceand fragility of the human body and to her awareness that since“We are made of water anyway” and have always been a part of thenatural world, we are destined to return, “moving slowly, slowly,”to the sea whence we arose. The ending of the poem resonates withsubtle echoes of the opening. The first two lines, “We are slowly /undermined,” are subtly echoed in the last two: “I think that you aresand, / moving slowly, slowly / from under me.” The verbal echoesof slowly and under emphasize the slow but implacable erosionand reinforce the idea that slow geological time is repeated in theinevitable movement of human life toward death. Just as in the firststanza’s “The waves move their long row / of scythes over the beach,”in the last the speaker’s husband is “moving slowly, slowly / fromunder [her],” like the grains of sand moving under the waves. Whatis happening to the beach is also happening to the body.

The most complex word play in the poem is the repetition ofwake and the half-pun on wake and watch. The third stanza begins,“We wake to water.” The last one opens, “The gulls will follow / ourwake.” All three principal meanings of wake are relevant here: toawaken after sleep, the track of turbulence left behind a boat moving

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Arc

hive

s &

Bib

lioth

èque

s de

l'U

LB

] at

17:

54 0

6 O

ctob

er 2

014

Linda Pastan’s EROSION 107

through water, and the watch over the body of a deceased personafter death (frequently accompanied by festivity). Every dawn thespeaker wakes to more water and less shoreline, and every day bringsher closer to her death and to a return to the water whence she arose.And when the sea has finally eroded all the land and the speakerand her family are living on a latter-day Noah’s ark, the gulls willfollow the wake of their floating house. Daily the speaker and herfamily “watch” the waves eroding the sand; their “watch” is a kindof “wake” over the dying (eroding) land. Though technically not anelegy, “Erosion” is another death-by-water poem, an elegiac lament,a wake for a drowning world—and for the speaker, whose life, likethe sand in an hourglass and on the eroding beach, is running out.There is no festivity at this wake.

Note1For a discussion of the importance of Eve and the Garden of Eden in Pastan’s poetry, see Tracy

Mishkin; see also Pastan’s Aspects of Eve.

Works Cited

Mishkin, Tracy. “Aspects of Eve: The Garden of Eden in the Poetry of Linda Pastan.”Jewish Womens’ Writing of the 1990s and Beyond. Eds. Ulrike Behlau and BernhardReitz. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2004. 95–103. Print.

O’Driscoll, Bill. “Linda Pastan Explores the Spectre of Death Stalking Home andHearth.” Pittsburgh City Paper. Web. 1 March 2007. <http://www.pittsburghcitypaper.ws/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A23527>.

Pastan, Linda. Aspects of Eve: Poems. New York: Liveright, 1975. Print.———. “Erosion.” The Imperfect Paradise. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988. Reprinted in

The Norton Introduction to Poetry. 6th ed. Ed. J. Paul Hunter. New York: W. W. Norton,1996. 150–51. Print.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Arc

hive

s &

Bib

lioth

èque

s de

l'U

LB

] at

17:

54 0

6 O

ctob

er 2

014