In the Tunnel of Summers
Moving from day into day,
I don’t know how,
eating these plums now
this morning for breakfast
tasting of childhood’s
mouth-pucker tartness,
watching the broad light
seed in the fences,
honey of barley,
gold ocean, grasses,
as the tunnel of summers,
of nothing but summers,
opens again
in my travelling senses.
I am eight and eighteen and eighty
all the Augusts of my day.
Why should I be, I be
more than another?
Brown foot in sandal,
burnt palm on flaked clay,
flesh under waterfall
baubled in strong spray,
blood on the stubble
of fly-sweet hay.
Why not my mother’s, my
grandmother’s ankle
hurting as harvest hurts
thistle and animal?
A needle of burning;
why this way or that way?
They are already building the long straw cemetery
where my granddaughter’s daughter has been born and buried.
What first drew my eye to this poem, among the many attractions of Anne Stevenson’s posthumous Collected Poems was the tunnel-like shape. This is sharpened by the contrasting final couplet. The first of the paired lines is longer than any previous line, and the second spreads itself even wider, although it has the same number of syllables (13, if you pronounce “cemetery” informally, eliding the last “e”). Metrically, both lines are rough-hewn hexameters. The rest of the poem is in dimeter and trimeter. As a result, it looks like a tunnel that finally ends in an expanse of eye-blinking light.
The tunnel vision is made of summers, compressed by time, compressed in spite of time, so that “eating these plums now” connects quickly with “childhood’s / mouth-pucker tartness” – a phrase which might not refer only to the child’s sensation on tasting the plums but to childhood itself, with its unexpected jolts of the actual against the expected.
This first block of verse glides along through present participles. Childhood plum-tasting briefly recalled, it absorbs itself in time- and grammar-defying luxuriance, an immediacy of rich and golden harvests. The speaker knows herself to be travelling, “moving from day into day / I don’t know how” and her lines and syntax flow appropriately. Recurrence is often described as “day to day” and Stevenson’s tiny shift of preposition, “day into day”, promotes the movement forwards and the sense of evolution. Days are not all the same, but summer days tend to merge in the memory, seeded by “the broad light”, blurred through the sibilance of plural end-words: “fences”, “grasses”, “summers”, “senses”.
The separate couplet following the stanza break prefigures the last two lines. It’s a potent summary of a life. Numbers in a poem, even when printed as words, ease the weight of language. Stevenson, writing in middle-age, chooses the distant but “key” ages - of “eight and eighteen and eighty”- as shorthand for the one magical, haunted tunnel, containing “all the Augusts of my day”.
As those breakfast plums in the poem’s earlier lines recall William Carlos Williams’s immortal fridge-note, so the second block of verse, spurred by an ankle “hurting as harvest hurts / thistle and animal”, may well summon Robert Burns’s immortal mouse. There’s also a wider, more general tradition of western pastoral misting through the tunnel, and now, in line two of that second block, it seems we’re sped directly into antiquity. The “brown foot in sandal” and “burnt palm on flaked clay” suggest a Greek amphora and the ritualised figures depicted there. Stevenson’s omission of articles in these sentences abolishes the narrowness of individual experience, although we can still imagine the contemporary speaker’s accident – a fall, an ankle twisted and cut, the “needle of burning” that’s as painful as the sour plum in the child’s mouth. A sense of dissociation continues. Perhaps the foot is plunged under a cold waterfall to alleviate the pain. Perhaps “the blood on the stubble” is that of the harvest mouse or a sacrifice to Ceres. The timeless and the quotidian are plaited elegantly in these vivid lines.
Throughout the poem, existential questions arise. They’re concerned with the movement of time and life’s movement through time, and with consciousness itself. “Why should I be, I be / more than another?” the speaker asks, stress-patterning the lines so as to emphasise that second “I”. Mother and grandmother might equally have once seen themselves as “more than another”: no, in fact all sentient beings inevitably share that egocentric perception. It’s a dazzling, almost sickeningly dazzling, idea, like imagining the billion light-years distance of the stars.
The disconcerting “dazzle” of time and its replications is prolonged into the future as the vision opens out with “the long straw cemetery” and a “granddaughter’s daughter [who] has been born and buried”. Nothing else has cut through the honey-coloured harvest stalks with quite that trenchancy. It’s such a cold light at the end of the tunnel, that it might almost represent the tunnel’s continuation. Or so it seemed, perhaps, to readers of the collection in which it first appeared in 1985, The Fiction Makers.
Today, it’s one of many poems which gain (regrettably) an extra dimension from the climate emergency. To continue with the thought of further regeneration, an endless flow of childbirth and harvest, is difficult now: it’s more honest to imagine the tunnel blocked, human time ended. The poem remains a beautiful evocation of historical summers, with a hint of the future summers we’re in desperate danger of losing. It’s a fine memorial to Stevenson (1933-2020), a poet whose intense, delighted response to the natural world continues to enrich our “travelling senses”.
