The Past for Our Pleasure?

I have to admit, I really did not understand the James Dickey poems we had to read. I enjoy poetry; especially works by Robert Frost, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, but I just could not get my head around what Dickey was saying.

A couple of the first poems seemed to have a strong spiritual undercurrent, as in “Sleeping Out at Easter” and “Walking on Water.” But then I found myself slightly lost between the topics of animals, death, and forbidden love. I was fairly confused by all of the poems, and found myself with questions about nearly all of them. But the poem that really caught my attention was “Hunting Civil War Relics at Nimblewill Creek.”

This poem tells the story of two brothers who go searching for a battlefield in hopes of finding buried treasure. It is seen through the eyes of the brother who seems to be the side-kick; he is not privileged enough to use the mine detector or listen in on the earphones. Instead, he must lug the shovel and pick around, waiting for his brother’s signal. And while the treasure hungry brother seems to be enjoying this journey in terms of what he has to gain, the narrator seems to be experiencing things on a much deeper level.

There are two passages that I felt betrayed the narrator’s innermost feelings. The first one says:

Softly he wanders, parting
The grass with a dreaming hand.
No dead cry takes root
In his clapped ears
Or can be seen in his smile.
But underfoot I feel
The dead regroup,
The burst metals all in place,
The battle lines be drawn
Anew to include us
In Nimblewill,
And I carry the shovel and pick

Clearly, the narrator is much more in tune with the world around him and the history behind him. He is not taking this adventure lightly. He is feeling it deeply, allowing things to come alive in his mind about what happened on this field in the past.

The second passage, I think, shows the narrators true feelings even more clearly. He says

I choke the handle
Of the pick, and fall to my knees
To dig wherever he points,
To bring up mess tin or bullet,
To go underground
Still singing, myself,
Without a sound,
Like a man who renounces war,
Or one who shall lift up the past,
Not breathing “Father,”
At Nimblewill,
But saying, “Fathers! Fathers!”

I think this passage really makes the poem. It is emotionally charged and beautifully written. It made me experience what I believe the narrator must have been feeling … the realization of the awful deaths that took place, the great loss that people experienced. And now here he was with his brother, not honoring the past, but rather, simply stealing from it to gain some pleasure. How completely tragic.