Charles Tomlinson is an English poet whose best work expresses his perceptions of the world with clarity and sensitivity. Less concerned with people and emotions than with the outside world, Tomlinson’s poetry has much in common with that of the American poets Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. The poem ‘Swimming the Chenango Lake’ was published in the year 1969 in the collection ‘The Way of a World’. It’s a well-known and frequently anthologized poem.
Winter will bar the swimmer soon.
He reads the water’s autumnal hestitations
A wealth of ways: it is jarred,
It is astir already despite its steadiness,
Where the first leaves at the first
Tremor of the morning air have dropped
Anticipating him, launching their imprints
Outwards in eccentric, overlapping circles.
The poet begins the poem by saying that the imminent winter season shall stop the swimmer soon. The swimmer swims in the lake in autumn season. The poet focuses on the ongoing changes in the lake as the winter approaches. He can read or feel the autumnal hesitation of water in an abundant way. The water is jarred. It has an unpleasant effect. The winter is yet to arrive. But the water already started to prepare for winter. Despite its steadiness the water is aroused by the fall or dropping of leaves early in the morning. Wherever the leaves imprint their fall, overlapping circles are formed.
There is a geometry of water, for this
Squares off the clouds’ redundances
And sets them floating in a nether atmosphere
All angles and elongations: every tree
Appears a cypress as it stretches there
And every bush that shows the season,
A shaft of fire. It is a geometry and not
A fantasia of distorting forms, but each
Liquid variation answerable to the theme
It makes away from, plays before: It is a consistency, the grain of the
pulsating flow.
Shapes of Geometry appears in water by
the fallen leaves; overlapping circles, squares, angles and elongations- each
circle or squares become longer. Through reflection, the clouds in the sky form
various shapes in water. Every tree appears in water as cypress because they
stretch in the moving water. Every seasonal bush nearby the lake is reflected
in water as a shaft or arrow of fire. It’s pure and precise geometry, and not a
fantasia of distorting forms- not distorting figures in a cartoon. But each
variation formed in the water is answerable to the theme which is consistent.
But he has looked long enough, and now
Body must recall the eye to its dependence
As he scissors the waterscape apart
And sways it to tatters. Its coldness
Holding him to itself, he grants the grasp,
For to swim is also to take hold
On water’s meaning, to move in its embrace
And to be, between grasp and grasping, free.
The swimmer has looked long enough to the water, but now he must remind his eyes about its dependence or the body must order the eye to its dependence. He swims across the lake like scissors cutting a piece of cloth apart and the cloth sways like badly torn pieces. The coldness of water is holding him in its grasp, “for to swim is also to take hold on water’s meaning”. The swimmer makes a place for himself in the sustaining element of water, at the same time he surrenders himself to its embrace. Yet he tries to move in water’s embrace and wanted to be free ‘between the grasp and grasping’. Swimming is at once ‘to take hold on water’s meaning’ and ‘to move in its embrace’.
He reaches in-and-through to
that space
The body is heir to, making a where
In water, a possession to be relinquished
Willingly at each stroke. The image he has torn
Flows-to behind him, healing itself,
Lifting and lengthening, splayed like the feathers
Down an immense wing whose darkening spread
Shadows his solitariness: alone, he is unnamed
By this baptism, where only Chenango bears a name
In a lost language he begins to construe —
A speech of densities and derisions, of half-
Replies to the questions his body must frame
Frog wise across the all but penetrable element.
He swims across the lake and reaches the space which belongs to him. He owns the space. This possession is relinquished by each further stroke. Though he tears the waterscape by his swimming forward, the torn image of water merge back behind him ‘healing itself’ by spreading wide apart. The poet compares this with the spreading of a giant wing which cast shadows on his loneliness. The swim causes a transformation on the swimmer too and he seems to be baptized into a new self, by shedding off all his former identities. As he spends time in the lake, he begins to understand the lost language of the lake. It is a language of densities and derisions, of the half replies to the questions his body would pose as he swims like a frog across the water.
Human, he fronts it and, human, he draws back
From the interior cold, the mercilessness
That yet shows a kind of mercy sustaining him.
The last sun of the year is drying his skin
Above a surface a mere mosaic of tiny shatterings,
Where a wind is unscaping all images in the flowing
obsidian,
The going-elsewhere of ripples incessantly shaping.
Human faces or draws back from the mercilessness
of interior cold of the lake. But he feels a kind of mercy the lake shows which
sustains him in the water. As the wind incessantly shaping ripples and various
images on the water (the flowing obsidian), above the lake he dries his skin in
the last sun of the year.
The swimming is a metaphor which has wider connotations like man’s struggle against the elements of nature to achieve victory. The swimmer becomes part of the element that supports him, part of an ever-changing geometry through which he slices, and which then corrects itself as he moves past. One should move beyond oneself leaving no trace. Swimming frees one from the world. The contact between the swimmer and the lake water is intimate, sustaining, and yet threatening to the swimmer. The water gives support only because the swimmer keeps moving, keeps reaching out in it, knowing all the time that this fluid environment will not sustain him forever. As he invades the lake, the water sways to tatters, but heals itself behind him. He realizes the baffling nature of the water, which gives only 'half -replies' to his questions.
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