OCEAN OF GRASS
The ground was holy, but the wind was harsh
and unbroken prairie stretched for hundreds of miles
so that all she could see was an ocean of grass.
Some days she got so lonely she went outside
and nestled among the sheep, for company.
The ground was holy, but the wind was harsh
and prairie fires swept across the plains,
lighting up the country like a vast tinderbox
until all she could see was an ocean of flames.
She went three years without viewing a tree.
When her husband finally took her on a timber run
she called the ground holy and the wind harsh
and got down on her knees and wept inconsolably,
and lived in a sod hut for thirty more years
until the world dissolved in an ocean of grass.
Think of her sometimes when you pace the earth,
our mother, where she was laid to rest.
The ground was holy, but the wind was harsh
for those who drowned in an ocean of grass.
---Edward Hirsch
Lately, I’ve been fond of asking the question ‘What is sacred?’. Each of us is bound to answer this question differently, and on some levels we should. Certainly there will be things that all of us hold dear, but our differences in terms of what we value and place above all else are interesting to explore. The fisherman who holds sacred the still waters of morning when the sun has just woken and begun its rise might not understand why the accountant holds sacred a clean ledger with zero balances, and vice versa. Yes, we hold different things sacred, but we can learn from our differences and better understand others by asking that question about what they hold sacred. Edward Hirsch built a whole poem around that question and a story rolls forth in his modified villanelle Oceans of Grass.
“The ground was holy, but the wind was harsh.” This beginning will serve as one of the key repeating lines in Hirsch’s villanelle rhyme scheme, but it also occupies an important place in the story he tells. The woman in the poem is symbolic of people in general and she identifies her strange, contradictory answer to what she holds sacred. The ground, the earth itself, is holy to her, but an element of that earth, the wind and weather, is destructive. This sets up an inevitable and constant tension that will play out on “unbroken prairie stretched for hundreds of miles,” a disorienting vast landscape that looks like an “ocean of grass.”
I’m fascinated by how Hirsch clips bits and pieces of many storytelling techniques in this poem. He uses a villanelle, a classic poetic form built upon repetition, but modifies it because, I would assume, he places the story above the form. There is not a perfect end rhyming pattern or a middle line rhyming pattern in this poem, but Hirsch’s changes are not glaring because they naturally fit the fable he is telling us. Hirsch also slips in allusions, such as the lonely woman “nestled among the sheep,” that had me vaguely thinking of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, and even The Bible. Beyond biblical and literary allusions, Hirsch organically maintains a reverential tone in the poem toward the earth, the type of respectful mindset that is characterized by early Native Americans. When the woman in the poem “went three years without viewing a tree” I understood how much this affected here, possibly more than other people. When she “got down on her knees and wept inconsolably, / and lived in a sod hut for thirty more years / until the world dissolved in an ocean of grass,” I could feel her loss and I could see the larger picture of what her story means to us today. The woman in this poem and her land of origin might be nameless, but Hirsch cleverly equips the poem with little touches that allows it to connect to many previous, meaningful mediums.
Villanelle’s are known for delivering that final stanza oomph, the masterstroke that stops readers in their tracks and hopefully makes them want to go back and explore the poem again. Hirsch continues this tradition by completely shifting the poem’s focus in its final stanza. Up to this point he’s focused on the woman and her reaction to her “ocean of grass” becoming an “ocean of flames,” but now Hirsch shifts to us, the readers, breaking down that proverbial wall. He instructs us to “Think of her sometimes when you pace the earth, / our mother, where she was laid to rest.” Drawing a line between us and her, Hirsch charts our ancestry for us and forges a connection between her loss and what could potentially become our own loss in the future. Returning to our initial question about what we hold sacred, I’m filled with a bittersweet taste in my mouth by the end of the poem. She “drowned in an ocean of grass,” but this grass was something she held sacred.
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