Robert Morgan on A. R. Ammons's "Fasting":

The poem "Fasting" enacts a number of figures and discoveries we have seen before in Ammons's best poems. It is both parody and parable. The parody is partly in the rhetorical asides, the stops and starts in the voice, the side hops in the first third of the poem. In such words as "perforce" and "therefore" and "hark" the poet mocks the traditional romantic habit of reading nature and nature's transitions as moral, as model for the mind. Ammons loves to tease the poetic and celebrate the anti-poetic impulse, especially as he begins a poem. The resistance to the poetic connection is often the trigger to the imagination.

"Fasting" shows a fascination with loss, with the world stripped bare, threatened, bleak. The scene is the woods near Halloween as wind rips the forest bare and shakes dry leaves. The voice is conversational and formal by turns. The speaker starts and stops again, shifts and raises the ante. The title suggests the ascetic, sacramental starving, abstention to make prayer or vision more valid, the hunger that gives our minds and imaginations edge.

Allhallows Eve is the time when the spirits of the dead return. At the moment of loss and bleakness the air is haunted, and the hint of haunting thrills and frightens. The speaker has thought so much about image and symbol that the very trees seem like sketches of themselves, artistic imitations.

But the rattle of the leaves and the movement of the trees suggest spiritual presences, suggest other worlds so intensely, we are both inspired and frightened. At the threshold of winter, at the threshold of darkness, the world is quickened by the imagined presences of those who have gone before us into the outer cold, the darkness beyond, as though they have returned for reasons we cannot understand.

Poet and novelist Robert Morgan is Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell University.

(Back to Poetry Daily Prose Feature - This Is Just a Place: The Life and Work of A. R. Ammons)