Letting Yourself into the River

Sometimes I'll read a poem by William Stafford and be taken by its simplicity. Further readings of the poem will peel back layer after layer of meaning, and I'll find more and more points of connection. That's what a good poem does with me . . . it allows me many places through which to enter into it, to find myself in it. Stafford's poetry gives me plenty of doorways and windows through which to enter.

As I read various poets, I find that many, many contemporary poets were influenced by William Stafford. Many feel indebted to him.

I don't know whether Robert Bly would say that about Stafford, but he might. Bly has something of Stafford's spirit about him. His poetry is often tied to images from the natural world, like Stafford's. Bly has devoted many years to helping men give attention to matters of soul and spirit. Though he has done so outside the Church, he is familiar with the human soul, and his poetry reflects his sensitivity to matters of life-meaning and soul.

I read both Stafford and Bly quite a bit. Awhile back my eye was drawn to Bly's poem, "When William Stafford Died." I've read it and pondered it quite often recently. I've given quite a bit of time to exploring the poem's points of entry, the places where I find resonance with it.

Here's the poem.


When William Stafford Died
Robert Bly


Well, water goes down the Montana gullies.
“I’ll just go around this rock and think
About it later.” That’s what you said.
When death came, you said, “I’ll go there.”

There’s no sign you’ll come back. Sometimes
My father sat up in the coffin and was alive again.
But I think you were born before my father,
And the feet they made in your time were lighter.

One dusk you were gone. Sometimes a fallen tree
Holds onto a rock, if the current is strong.
I won’t say my father did that, but I won’t
Say he didn’t either. I was watching you both.

If all a man does is to watch from the shore,
Then he doesn’t have to worry about the current.
But if affection has put us into the stream,
Then we have to agree to where the water goes.


[Robert Bly, Meditations on the Insatiable Soul (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 16 – 17.]


I can't say anything about what Bly intended through his poem. But I can say something about what I discover in it for myself.

The striking image for me is the water flowing downhill . . . gullies, streams, rivers . . . all with their current flowing downstream, flowing to wherever the gullies take you. Once in the current, you have little say about where you go. You have to accept the limitations of the banks. You have to accept what the terrain looks like and feels like as you flow down to sea-level. And you have to accept what is at the end of the journey.

The option is to stand on the bank, to never let yourself into the river. If you leave yourself on the bank, you can watch the current, you can notice the nuances of the stream and study its science, but you cannot really engage it. And you will never end up where the current goes. Bly says, "If all a man does is to watch from the shore, // Then he doesn't have to worry about the current."

It seems to me that this is a crucial image for life . . . that if something (Bly says, "affection") puts us into the stream, "then we have to agree to where the water goes." There are things in life that I don't get to choose. There are things in life I wouldn't choose if given a choice. But once in the current, I open myself to whatever comes, to wherever it takes me. And then my life becomes about how I navigate those waters, how I stay in the flow, how meaning comes from even the rocks and ravines of the journey.

Bly says, "If affection has put us into the stream . . ." I've wondered the last couple of weeks what that word would be for me. Is it affection? Or something else? freedom? passion? hunger? love? What puts me into the stream?

Then, last week . . . four days at the Benedictine Monastery in Pecos, New Mexico . . . the Pecos River valley and mountains on every side . . . walking on a trail that heads north from the monastery, along the Pecos River . . . this is what I saw.

Immediately my mind went to the poem. I had been with it enough to remember the lines, so when I saw this tree just off the trail, my mind immediately went to, "Sometimes a fallen tree // Holds onto a rock, if the current is strong."

This fallen tree, stubbornly holding onto the bank, refusing to drop into the current, resisting the life of the river became a kind of symbol for me. If this fallen tree would not let itself go, what about me?

The end of the river may be death -- the poem, after all, is called, "When William Stafford Died" -- but the tree that never drops into the current is dead already.

So the convergence of poetry with real-life images from the created world -- river and tree -- stays with me. The poem is not finished doing its work with me. And though my time in Pecos is over and I'm back in my daily life-work, the image of the fallen tree lives on within me.

For the Sake of Your Soul

Robert Bly is one of my favorite contemporary poets. He writes from the deep place of soul and soul-consciousness. Several of his poems are among my favorites. Over the last couple of months I have regularly read his poem (which I may post later), "When William Stafford Died." It is about the power of affection and passion, and the willingness to live the life one has been given. It challenges me to live the only life that is authentically mine to live.

Then this evening I heard this Bly poem read, and in the few hours since have read it myself another 10 - 12 times. Try it on for yourself.


One Source of Bad Information
by Robert Bly

There’s a boy in you about three
Years old who hasn’t learned a thing for thirty
Thousand years. Sometimes it’s a girl.

This child had to make up its mind
How to save you from death. He said things like:
“Stay home. Avoid elevators. Eat only elk.”

You live with this child but you don’t know it.
You are in the office, yes, but live with this boy
At night. He’s uninformed, but he does want

To save your life. And he has. Because of this boy
You survived a lot. He’s got six big ideas.
Five don’t work. Right now he’s repeating them to you.


[Robert Bly, Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems.]

Overheard: Merton and Bly on Moving toward Our Purpose

Life consists in learning to live on one's own, spontaneous, freewheeling: to do this one must recognize what is one's own -- be familiar and at home with oneself. This means basically learning who one is, and learning what one has to offer the contemporary world, and then learning how to make that offering valid. . . .

The world is made up of the people who are fully alive in it and can enter into a living and fruitful relationship with each other in it. The world is therefore more real in proportion as the people in it are able to be more fully and more humanly alive: that is to say, better able to make a lucid and conscious use of their freedom. Basically, this freedom must consist first of all in the capacity to choose their own lives, to find themselves on the deepest possible level.

[Thomas Merton, Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation, ed. by Jonathan Montaldo (Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2008), 37.]


Every man and every woman on this planet is on the road from the Law to the Legends. Surely every person reading this book is. The Legends stand for the moist, the swampish, the wild, the untamed. The Legends are watery, when compared to the dryness of the Law. It takes twenty years to understand the Laws, and then a whole lifetime to get from there to the Legends.

The Law stands for the commandments we need in order to stay alive, the rule that says which side of the road we drive on, the law of gravity. We need to learn the axiom that we cannot take water into our lungs and keep breathing; the dictate that keeps us from murdering each other over a slight rebuke; the canon against self-slaughter; the postulates that encourage prudence, politeness, and appropriateness; the precepts that help us control our madness. . . .

We are each on the way from the Law to the Legends, from dogma to the Midrash, from the overly obedient man to wildness. . . . The closer a person comes to the Legends, then the closer he or she comes to depth, moistness, spontaneity, and shagginess.

[Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book about Men (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1990), 140-41.]