Poem of the Day: ‘Silence’
In this early poem by the American poet, novelist, and critic Babette Deutsch, the speaker dwells on what goes unspoken between lovers: not the words they say, turning something ineffable into language, but their silences.
This early poem by the American poet, novelist, and critic Babette Deutsch (1895–1982) purports to turn the notion of the love poem on its head. Deutsch’s speaker dwells on what goes unspoken between lovers: not the words they say, turning something ineffable into language, but their silences. These, the poem says, are large and full of mystery and, more significantly, freedom. This may be the freedom of perfect refreshment and rest together, the freedom of not needing to speak — but as the final image suggests, there’s also, always, on the horizon of those silences, the possibility of freedom from each other.
But how does the poem represent all this unspoken possibility, except in language? How does it speak of silence, except to break silence? Even the form leans toward something which it deliberately is not. In twelve pentameter lines whose rhyme scheme approaches but avoids predictable pattern, “Silence” shadows the sonnet form, which from its inception existed to articulate the mysteries of romantic love. This poem resists the sonnet’s impulse toward the completion of a thought, choosing to speak of not speaking and, at the same time, to acknowledge the impossibility of its task.
Silence
by Babette Deutsch
Silence with you is like the faint delicious
Smile of a child asleep, in dreams unguessed:
Only the hinted wonder of its dreaming,
The soft, slow-breathing miracle of rest.
Silence with you is like a kind departure
From iron clangor and the engulfing crowd
Into a wide and greenly barren meadow,
Under the bloom of some blue-bosomed cloud;
Or like one held upon the sands at evening,
When the drawn tide rolls out, and the mixed light
Of sea and sky enshrouds the far, wind-bellowed
Sails that move darkly on the edge of night.
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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.
