The poem endorses the look for for symbolic association both for the relationship between humankind and nature and the relationship between natural and supernatural. Physical love is expressed in terms of mystical and spiritual experience, and finally the lovers can only gesture towards the “bigger star”:
A curtain fell, the night’s, so slow to come We did not notice it until the air, The outer star packed air flowed through the room. And when you pointed at one bigger star Both of us were dumb. (432)
Jennings speaks in a tone that is intimate, personal, and authentic in this poem and in another poem “Love needs an Elegy,” she uses the precise form of the terza rima to deny the possibility …show more content…
The lovers make keep their promises, but they “stay awake,” mutually wary of surrender to reciprocal human love. They lack the transcendent power of the lovers in “Never Such Peace.” Since they cannot reach beyond the borders of their own subjectivity and achieve ideal union, “love needs an elegy.” Love and the possibility of transcending the borders which separate lovers is also the subject of “A Weather Spell.” The mesmerizing spell of the poem represents an attempt to control, through rituals, emotions and situations which are resistant to conscious human control, an attempt which implicitly links the depicted acts of the speaker with the view of the poet as magus. The incantatory diction and syntax of this poem creates the effect of a charm which has traditionally used to ward off evil and to call upon spirits to win success in love. The speaker continues to assume the stance of magus as she invokes the power of the elements “to move their dangerous charges.” She conjures up a magical world that is not conditioned by all that is random or accidental: “Chance is tossed away.”
Still, paradoxically she endows the lovers with “choice / And a purpose and a voice” (433) This dismissal of chance seems to undermine the gift of choice and to make it pointless, but, in the world created by the magic charm, the magus takes control over the elements and over human love: “I will take the dark aside,/Make the furious seas divide,/ But most I’ll breach the wall of you/Come the heat and come the snow”
A curtain fell, the night’s, so slow to come We did not notice it until the air, The outer star packed air flowed through the room. And when you pointed at one bigger star Both of us were dumb. (432)
Jennings speaks in a tone that is intimate, personal, and authentic in this poem and in another poem “Love needs an Elegy,” she uses the precise form of the terza rima to deny the possibility …show more content…
The lovers make keep their promises, but they “stay awake,” mutually wary of surrender to reciprocal human love. They lack the transcendent power of the lovers in “Never Such Peace.” Since they cannot reach beyond the borders of their own subjectivity and achieve ideal union, “love needs an elegy.” Love and the possibility of transcending the borders which separate lovers is also the subject of “A Weather Spell.” The mesmerizing spell of the poem represents an attempt to control, through rituals, emotions and situations which are resistant to conscious human control, an attempt which implicitly links the depicted acts of the speaker with the view of the poet as magus. The incantatory diction and syntax of this poem creates the effect of a charm which has traditionally used to ward off evil and to call upon spirits to win success in love. The speaker continues to assume the stance of magus as she invokes the power of the elements “to move their dangerous charges.” She conjures up a magical world that is not conditioned by all that is random or accidental: “Chance is tossed away.”
Still, paradoxically she endows the lovers with “choice / And a purpose and a voice” (433) This dismissal of chance seems to undermine the gift of choice and to make it pointless, but, in the world created by the magic charm, the magus takes control over the elements and over human love: “I will take the dark aside,/Make the furious seas divide,/ But most I’ll breach the wall of you/Come the heat and come the snow”