2021 NPM Number 30 Jane Hirshfield - Three Foxes by the Edge of the Field at Twilight
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Here is the direct link to the audio for this podcast: https://anchor.fm/steve-spanoudis/episodes/2021-NPM-30-Jane-Hirshfield-e106jed
This will be our last article for National Poetry Month. I hope you have enjoyed the series. I would like to extend my warmest thanks to Kashiana Singh and Nelson Howard Miller, who each contributed three thoughtful, varied articles, and also thank Kashiana for her three podcasts. Nelson helped out despite contracting Covid and being hospitalized, followed by surgery. Kashiana, despite being in the process of a cross-country move.
Today’s poem is a deceptively simple piece by American poet Jane Hirshfield, a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and author of nine books of poetry and two more of essays. Her writing is clear and conversational, even when, like today, the subject is a difficult one for us to put into words. The title of the poem seems simple and descriptive,
(https://poets.org/poem/three-foxes-edge-field-twilight) Three Foxes by the Edge of the Field at Twilight, but as we have hopefully learned, something observed in the world around us can often reflect something else.
neither hunting nor playing.
One stood; sat; lay down; stood again.
except to turn her head a little as we walked.
In this case, the narrator feels that the foxes’ behavior mirrors something about her own self. Perhaps her own fear, indecision, and wariness. Published when Hirshfield was forty-three, it suggests a changing viewpoint, or a turning inward - a personal transition:
There is more and more I tell no one,
This slips into the heart
without hurry, as if it had never been.
Just as her metaphor, the foxes, disappear into the woods without a trace. The important part of what the poem is telling us is not that there has been a change, but that she, the narrator (the poet) has recognized that change. She ends with,
And yet, among the trees, something has changed.
Something looks back from the trees,
and knows me for who I am.
So I guess you could call this a poem of self-knowledge, of recognition that identity changes, and that we change, sometimes without knowing why.
We’ll end the series there for this year, on a thoughtful note, close to where we started, wondering how pandemic and isolation have altered our viewpoint, of the world, and of ourselves.
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Once again this is Steve Spanoudis at theotherpages.org. You can find more there, at The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr. The full text of this poem is available at Poets.org
(https://poets.org/poem/three-foxes-edge-field-twilight)
