An essay by the author exploring the capacity of the poem "The Old Quarry," and indeed of poetry generally, to usefully encode meaning among the vaired despairs of a single human life.
The old quarry's flooded echo came back To him almost exact, but left a blunted blank For song, a lack of deadened cold echo In so much dank; the quarry air was too Soft and queer to sough a song out right,-- Yet still the listening stone, it seemed, white, uptilted, Knew that song might be meant, to judge by crevice And shadowed device and looks that meant no peace Nor gave advice beyond the dusty tans Rained down on singing man. One saw then, The quarry was all quivered walls and rocks A mocking water swallowed at the bottom. It resembled nothing so much as a tomb. Man's voice rolled all against the abandoned lot, Echoing himself his repeated tune again Like nothing else in nature that to voice pretends; He was his own superior echo then While song pursued its end as if never begun, And time dilated some in jarring after-echo, Or made itself felt as one,--as dark burns on in coal While fire unfolds fire. Here, some soft after-noise (As in the mare the moaning foal) made some alloy, Forging voice and form alive in the willful quarry To totter and rejoice alone where dead water stayed, --A second singing voice came from bland clay, And was heard some way. It seemed, for once, The offence of voice had persuaded voice To once not stay remanded in veined marble But grace half-garbled, but half-audible, The silent singer's startled ear, and speak Some talk of the theme he'd followed half-awake Into the choked dark of the watery quarry. What he caught of what came back made him wary. "I won't be sorry. I won't, I won't--" He straightened up half-sighing, as if he'd meant Never to hear his own want in song he'd given All his graven morning to, and that, if spent above, Would have vanished less riven into eve Than the grave day that the quarry gave. Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
An illustration showing the complex rhyme pattern of this poem is downloadable in Adobe acrobat PDF format.
I'll let you in on a secret. This poem is "about" my returning from the weary wilds of melancholia to my familiar well of inspiration: poesy. It explores and expresses a whole range of doubts and moods I seemed to "need" to go through before I could allow myself to be a self-conscious, self-publishing poet again.
I'll let you in on a secret
Day-by-day, I performed various feats of existence on daylit common ground without giving myself recourse to the refreshment of my uncensored, molten emotional core. I was dry as a bone and dreary as a broom. My self-talk was all "howdoyoudoimfinethankyou" and no more than that. This is all I seemed able to manage in my homemade marriage of selves. The hometown population of my ego and id may have been vast--but the aftereffects of a Richter-scale despair had left them all as taciturn as a congregation of Minnesota Swedes. I wasn't talking to me. At least, not with the old and restless happiness; moments of song still seemed to slip out, however, and become instantly shipwrecked on the tattered raft of an idle afternoon.
The poem, in personal terms, is "about" how I noticed that some part of me was already pursuing the muse, was already singing again--under my breath as it were. I was noticing how people talked again, hearing dear endearments linking stranger syllables in naughty audial knots. This poem is an "autobiography" of feelings thoughts only--and what poem worth reading could resist, or would resist, those values? So much for autobiography. As Keats has said, a poet's work is a dark allegory of his heart and life, whose ultimate correspondences remain unknowable. This poem is a node in my own neural net of such worry beads. It takes the mystery of me and speaks it, but only "in a glass darkly." It is a piece of aesthetic piety, wherein the vocal avocation of this poet's "supreme confusion" is viciously, vaporously, and evocatively displayed.
A poet who has lost his voice, misplaced his pen, tumbled his troubled inks into a disappearing stream or dream without outlet, must, when he returns to singing, come back from quixotic exile to quotidian existence; he must confront again the sound of his own voice--which may seem a stranger's or siren's at first. And there must come to consciousness all of the once-settled issues every writer confronts when embarking on a career of marking up paper; questions such as "Why write anything down in the first place?" Olympian reassurances are required. Questions answered in the cradle by a mother's lullaby--or, at latest, by some nattering professor's quotation out of Horace in a Freshman survey course, come crawling back to gnaw.
Old issues and new, or renewed, assurances, need to be recovered from the lonely places of a poet's maudlin soul. This chamber of self-reflection and inflection is represented, and amplified (with a knowing nod to Yeats' "The Man and the Echo," and Frost's "The Most of It") by a disused quarry. "The Old Quarry" is a place of past riches dished up from a deeply delved subconscious, the ultimate well of both the individual self and the anima of Jungian diatribe and tribulation. Past riches and present echoes. What will come of this distorting mirror whose riches wind up back in the well of the receiving ear? Will a mealy-mouthed mumble become a trumpeting gospel?
The old quarry's flooded echo came back To him almost exact, but left a blunted blank For song, a lack of deadened cold echo In so much dank;
The loitering poet, a potential member of articulate humanity with a capacity for speech, revisits the old quarry, making undisclosed noises as he goes. Whether these noises are words, his footsteps, or the aimless aerations of witless birds, we do not know; we are not told. But some sound is occurring because the "flooded echo" comes back to him. And because the sound comes back to him, the source or origin might be himself. The protagonist is being radar-targeted by the audio center of this poem; speech, or something that must be described with speech in the poem (by the usual necessity of the poem being made up out of words) is giving us a hearing hint about the sort of themes we will be giving an ear to in this poem. The echo is "flooded," an unusual adjective that gives a latent description of the quarry, further underlining its abandoned status--since only abandoned quarries remain flooded. More suggestively, the echo is drowned, overwhelmed, covered in histories and nuances--in short, "flooded" by the consciousness and memories of the protagonist. All of these are layers in our mise-en-scene.
The man, as well as the echo, has "come back" to the old quarry. If he is a poet seeking inspiration or the connections of history and internal insight to create himself out of the bits and pieces of his psyche and world, then he is once again hunting that "old quarry" of all poets and hunters-after-conscious enlightenment--inspiration. With this punning meaning in mind, the "old quarry," of enlightenment or inspiration IS returning to him, and in a familiar and helpful old form; it is returning "almost exact." This fineness of difference, the quality of aging in one's relations with the muse from swain to well-heeled swell, may well be the heart and heat of what this poem's experience has to offer us.
We are the self we tell ourselves we are. Lacan, the French critic, makes much of this in his mirror-self breakdown of human development. We identify the self in the mirror with ourselves, and come to initimate terms with Rimbaud's "I is another." For Lacan, this happens at about the age of six months. That seems severely accelerated to me, and perhaps the result of growing up in a mirror shop. Perhaps this is merely the outcome of living in civilization's "accelerated grimace." Julian Jaynes, the British philosopher, thinks that this idea of the self as an object was the great cause of consciousness, and relates his own experience of discovering that he was a self-conscious being one day while staring at a furiously blossoming forsythia bush in his book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-Cameral Mind." Perhaps self-consciousness is simply an offshoot of having two eyes in the front of our heads, and triangulating on targets out of an age-old hunter's habit.
Existence precedes essence in this scenario
Existence precedes essence in this scenario, but what if, as the old pagans might have had it, existence is essence? How do we even hear ourselves--how do we hear our own story come "flooding back" to us? The process may proceed by alternately forgetting and remembering, giving division to experience. Sleep, Freud's unconscious, Jung's anima, and Socrates' "learning by remembering," are all examples of how this great fact can become a principle in idea-minded men.
So, our wayward wanderer, plopped here by the indifferent energy and god-power of narration, or fate, needs to relearn how to hear himself, how to come home to the mirror self-consciousness of "I is another." In such a reading, we see a problematical instance of this self-identification with the mirror image. The quarry is at best an indifferent mirror. An echo returns "almost exact," but never truly so. The man's own consciousness must, by force of self-inflicted fiction, make up the balance of the account. It is as if the mirror has become fogged, or the child blinded.
What will fulfill this fiction function for the poet? We learn that the "almost exact" echo has "left a blunted blank/ for song." Inspiration is called upon to fill the void, make the leap between the alienated echo and the intimate self. This will help him bring back to mind from the unclarified division sleep or forgetting has imposed on his experience away from the quarry, the source of self-perceiving selfhood, that existence IS essence. That he is what he experiences of himself. And with people and poets as creatures of speech, the fiction of self is a major component of this mirror, be it merry or morose.
The imperfection of the mirror has left a "blank for song," which the wanderer must provide. His experience lacks only his articulated sense of himself, perhaps painfully so. With the word "lack" the poem begins its great circle of cyclings, its deranged arrangement of rhymes and almost-echoes that mirror the theme of this man's Odyssian wanderings of consciousness. "Lack" rhymes an odd line-and-a-half back up with "back," and is a near-rhyme with "blank," which finds its rhyme a line-and-a-half on in "dank." Nature, or experience, or existence, have provided the blank, even in "so much dank," but the self-perceiver must engage this blankness and sing. Perhaps he already is singing or whistling when he comes into the quarry, drawn by no more than unconscious habit to his habitat. This singing or whistling may well be the source of the echo that "came back" to the listener (for a sound coming back implies a listener) in the poem's first line. It is ambiguous at this point, but the excuses one makes about why one's singing is not sufficient to outface the blanks, why we can't proceed to a self-conscious "existence is essence," are clearly stated:
the quarry air was too Soft and queer to sough a song out right,--
A very wonderful use of the word "sough" which has, among its definitions, "to make a rush, rustling, or murmuring sound." Even a murmured or slurred song would be tough to manage in the dank of the quarry; the uncertainty or tentativeness of the soughing is emphasized with the semi-pun "out right" for outright--even the murmuring song cannot be sung in a direct or forthright manner, not even into the echo chamber of the old quarry.
Even so, the stone is "listening," it is being infected by this will to fiction and self-consciousness that song can bring on. Is the man simply displacing his self-image onto the stone walls of the quarry so that he can see or accept the evidence of reflection before integrating the reflection as a part of himself? In the "knowing" of the narrator (and perhaps the singing man), the stone itself seems to "know that song might be meant" by the ambiguous soughing. The only cues and clues to this conscious participation by the rock is discerned by judging "crevice/ and shadowed device"--the darkened or obscured looks of a listening quarry, whose purposes or consciousness is most definitely "other" to the man's mind in the poem. Judgment is a distancing process that calls on the judge, in this case the singing man of the poem, to draw a line around a thing, gauge it as a whole, and make a decision about it, passing judgment.
The stone walls are obviously judged as other since they "meant no peace/ nor gave advice" other than to cover the living, singing man with "dusty tans," or, more simply, dust, in response to the vibrations set up by his soughing away in a place previously and usually so quiet. What is quieter than being underground? This is the first chill touch of the death theme in the poem. And in response to this spectre's bone finger, it becomes clear--in a second judgment, now that the faculty has been stirred into awareness--that
The quarry was all quivered walls and rocks A mocking water swallowed at the bottom.
The active existence and assertion of "otherness" by the quivering quarry rocks finds an active echo of itself and its function as a reflection in the water that echoes the echoing walls. The rocks are "mocked" by the water; water knows that all solidity is on its way to dissolution; water takes the path of least resistance; water, swallowed all of our lives, swallows all in the end. To flow on to the logical extreme of the water's activity, is this not itself an echo of the Last Judgment? This Last Judgment of the water is then internalized by the narrator or the singer into human terms. A line of the poem then arrives that drops itself almost without echo. It is a source-note, and not one in which "unconscious" nature may participate. Once human consciousness identifies with its image as "other," then it can see that that "other," having begun, must come eventually to an end. The problem of self-creation is the eventual destruction of that self. This is, of course, the cause of all civilized artifacts, and the poets' roaming hope that ars longs, vita brevis. This line drops like lead into a feather pillow.
It resembled nothing so much as a tomb.
As, indeed, this line little resembles the lines around it; it is not a note or theme that can be picked up by nature, which assuredly kills and dies as it breeds and births, but does not "know" that it does so. There is a pun in resembling nothing, no doubt, and only man, perhaps, can look on existence and see non-existence. To me, this non-existence is what most philosophers or priests would think of as essence. It is a deceitful cheat, a coin-destroying bogey, and a cheap lessening of the miracle of IS.
For props thus far, we have an inanimate (or at minim indifferent) Nature, and the wary self-consciousness of death beating within the human figure of the scene. What might be the response to inanimate indifference and the palpable un-pleasure of death? Perhaps to ask this here is to jump the question of the poem somewhat. Let us be content with what the scenery and the first act have wrought: we have our stage, our circumstances, and the issues raised that the poem shall, indeed must, revolve about. Let's see what happens when the curtain goes up again.
Man's voice rolled all against the abandoned lot.
The human predicament eloquently, severly stated
The human predicament eloquently, severly stated. Without an outside agent or source of meaning, and with the inevitability of death, what can man do? The lot, our lot in life, and the lot of the Earth herself, has been abandoned to make what meaning may be created from these bare, despairing facts. Every effort to signify is tried. The voice rolls "all against" the surfaces that Reality presents. The vital difference between the human, the uniquely conscious, and the rest of this bare reality is underlined in the two following lines:
Echoing himself his repeated tune again Like nothing else in nature that to voice pretends
The "echoing himself" line is just about as self-referential as a line of poetry in a poem not explicitly talking about itself can possibly be. It is the self-conscious artifact of a self-conscious being. The "like nothing else" that immediately follows brings out in an ironic fashion the difference that this self-referential thing and the being that breathed it forth have in comparison to the world by which they are surrounded. The circumstances of the old quarry are an "abandoned lot," and not such a richly repetitious artifice as the singer sings. The quarry can only "pretend" to have a voice by echoing the song released within it; but, it is only an echo. Man too, via the myriad repetitions and mirrors of art, can echo himself, and even create self-referential "perpetual motion" mobiles of sound and sense in his writhing writing. Such writing seems to echo itself in a self-conscious artifice as the "repeated tune" seems to do. Animate man and stony, storyless Nature both have "echoes" that are separable from their "inner" natures--actual artifacts that can then compete against each other in the larger field of experiential reality. What is real in experience---and what is only "pretend"? Where is the ultimate, or even useful (albeit temporary), locus of that Reality? Does it reside in the apprehending man, confused on the edge of his own song? Is it in the outward quarry that pushes the man's song back into his ears? Or is it in some combination of their competitive, potentially equivalent echoes? An assertion is made on behalf of man being the locus, at least in the narrative before us.
He was his own superior echo then While song pursued its end as if never begun And time dilated some in jarring after-echo, Or made itself felt as one,--
Man, by repeating himself self-consciously, becomes his own "superior" echo; he is self-reflective; he throws his mind back upon itself by its own devices. He holds the mimetic mirror up--not just to outer nature but to his own inner nature as well, and then spies out the reality that this very structure helps to impose. We have a series of significant relationships set up before the first spying out of reality can even begin. Time and space, dimension and duration, are vital categories that must exist before any reality can come into being to fill them with existence. And yet, man must be something more than all of this, or something other; he is "superior" to the processes he sets in motion--even if those processes result in all of Reality.
The song that the singer creates totters off "as if never begun," ignorant of itself, its origins, and of its maker. The maker creates the song, and even, given the nature of our knowledge, creates the entire Reality that the song occurs within, but he does not forge its destiny. It is only the historicity of the song, the knowing that it had begun, that allows one to discern its difference from the sounds of the quarry.
It is because of our awareness of the echo's source
It is because of our awareness of the echo's source that we do not assign awareness to the quarry but to the singer. But, once emitted, the song may not be recalled, and it may go on in its existence to be re-used and altered by other realities in the "abandoned lot." Perhaps it is a bit more of a haunted lot than an abandoned one.
The competitive and radical equality of sense impressions is here made plain (as plain as it may be)--and the concomitant illusory effects and artifacts of such equality are explored. We are told that, as the song was taken up by the quarry and returned to the man that something rather extraordinary happened. "Time dilated" as the repetitive song returned to the singer. One of the "objective" measures of quantitative meaning and reality is brought into question with this line. There is even an refinement (or, more properly, an over-refinement) of this questioning echoing business in describing this temporal dilation as the result, not of the echo directly, but of some sort of "jarring after-echo." This is an echo that follows the echo proper somehow, and may indeed be a separate entity--either in the man's mind, or it may be the original contribution of the old quarry itself. To further call the witness of sense and senses into question, this elusive perception of "jarring" or also ascribed potentially to Time itself, the dilation of Time making itself felt as "jarring" after the echo has come and gone and come again. This is just the sort of trouble a perceptive poem about perceptions would try to cause the reader--and here The Old Quarry seems to be succeeding admirably. We are in a confusion surrounded by uncertainties--and yet, by the very nature, process, and purpose of a poem, meaning is adamantly demanded of both the reader and the writer.
The ambiguity of this state is the elaborated (perhaps over-elaborated) in a figure that suggests the history of the "divine spark" in man. Even while the echo goes on to interact with other echoes and reality in general, the source of the spark retains an original quality. Only, in this figuration, the spark and the dark are reversed; the light that ignites is actually a source-darkness, a creative mud or coal full of potential sparks and combustion while retaining its quality as the original creative foundation.
as dark burns on in coal While fire unfolds fire.
The creation is nimble, fantastic, mutable and flammable--it is all the result that we see and all the heat that we feel; it is the summary Maya and illusion of life and its seemingly "independent" actors. This is essentially the quality of the experience outlined thus far--although our props of surety, sanity, experience, and time have all been brought into question, and indeed seem about to fail us. We have only the "divine murk" of our historical knowledge that we are self-conscious while the world has not yet shown itself to be so. This slippery self-assurance of the "superior echo" of humanity is beginning to look pretty shaky at this point in our story. All of the past has only brought us to this tremulous moment, this provisional, timeless "here," and this here of the poem is an ambiguous, mottled mix of equally impressive, imposing, attention-demanding echoes. Echoes of past feeling in the speaker willfully obscured by the poet--echoes in the quarry that bewitch the singer who brought them hence--echoes in the song that reflect a tradition or historical record of self-conscious beings that no longer seem to participate in the grand game of awareness--the formal echoes of the poem itself as story and song--the echoey tones of its rhyme scheme, etc. All of this has only brought us, woefully unprepared, to "here." And now something unexpected happens--a surprise--after all of our daylit, reasonable assurances concerning our doubtful realities have already been hustled off of the stage of the poem in careful preparation for this fourth-act pathos, and the once unshakable divine spark has been weirdly, willfully replaced by a divine murk.
Here, some soft after-noise (As in the mare the moaning foal) made some alloy, Forging voice and form alive in the willful quarry To totter and rejoice alone where dead water stayed; --A second singing voice came from bland clay And was heard some way.
Are we witnesses at the birth of a second self-consciousness? This would be a major change in the creation as heretofore revealed--a new compact or contract with the ineffable, a new covenant without an apparent God. Or is this instead the complete breakdown of this one individual's ability to discern a more commonly conceived "objective" reality? As usual, we must decide for ourselves from the evidence and propaganda presented by our senses.
First we notice that the poet is, in parenthesis, using a living analogy for what he is experiencing "(as in the mare the moaning foal)"--setting us up to hear this "soft after-noise" in living terms of the natural creative cycle of conception and birth. Living things have an acknowledged separate consciousness from our own--whether or not we think of them as self-conscious. The subject at hand is still, strictly speaking, the echo of the protagonist's song coming back to him from the echoey quarry.
Self-consciousness, emblemed in the poem by the singing man who moves from unconscious recitation into a consciousness more fully aware of itself and the consciousness of the nature around it, evokes consciousness from the dusty rock--or, at least, self-consciousness evokes an appearance of consciousness indistinguishable from actuality--at least to the self-conscious observer. If the singer cannot tell the singer from the song, then who can? There are no other judges to help us, This is the human predicament par excellence.
The song come back to tell him of himself, of his troubles and concerns, his guilts and repressed reminiscences. The song sings quiveringly of his own worries and consciousness; since he, indeed, is the source of the song, this should not be too surprising, but the song presents it weight of interpretation in a new, un-thought-of perspective. The quarry is transitioning from null echo-chamber to sprightly father-confessor. This is, in some ways, not too distant from Novalis' notion that the desire to speak poetry gets in the way of actually producing any poetry at all. Poetry is a separate thing, a self-concern of language purely, and not subject to human whim and will. To hear what he is really saying, what the song is really communicating, the singer may need to be uninvolved in the speaking; he may need to hear the quarry sing, either in actuality as a separate consciousness or as a fiction imposed by the senses and our interpretive limitations.
Man, as the creator in this scenario (if not exactly the creator of this scenario) speaks back abruptly when confronted by a too-eerie semblance of meaningfulness in the quarry. Abruptly, but no less ambiguous for that. "I won't be sorry. I won't, I won't--" This sentiment, broken off as if in sudden awareness of its possible interpretation as a confession, could refer to what the song, sung by unconscious habit erratically, is about, but the speaker was not really aware of the subject matter--merely singing as he was out of habit, and which he only becomes aware of when he listens to it as if it were coming from the "second singing voice" of the quarry. An imprecation spooked from the inanimate--or maybe a creator's refusal to regret the gamble and unpredictability of his creation. The singer refuses to regret the results of having sung, or of having wakened the quarry from its "veined marble" into a "grace half-garbled." Similarly, the ransom of a Jesus sent from heaven to redeem the sons of Adam might be God's way of saying that he has no regrets about the creation of free will, no matter the tragedy and sadness that have ensued from the experiment.
Of course, the song and the echo have also, inevitably, served to increase the self-awareness of the singer. The singer has entered the grave-box of the quarry and re-emerged, not exactly renewed, but more greatly aware of his own powers and contradictions. If he had simply proceeded in his normal day he would have remained less self-aware, "less riven."
He straightened up half-sighing, as if he'd meant Never to hear his own want in song he'd given All his graven morning to, and that, if spent above, Would have vanished less riven into eve Than the grave day that the quarry gave.
The sighing or soughing of the singer returns in the near-nocturnal denouement of evening--a sort of muddled vespers for the irreligious. He "straightened up half-sighing," as if from prayers or devotion, and we learn that he was surprised to hear news of himself in his interaction with the world via the quarry. His leaving off from the implied communion of prayer and natural connection either shows that he did not think a mutual connection could occur or did exist between himself and the world--that he lived in a post-modernist solipsistic cave--or that, although he recognized the "second singing voice" of the quarry, he did not think that the quarry could recognize and respond to him. In any case, he is caught-out delightfully unawares of his situation; he begins to leave off his singing or soughing; he cuts it into a half-portion to gather his wits, or is forced back into his mind and his wits by an amazement at what has happened in the quarry. The "otherness" of the quarry forces him to hear himself. The singer is rehabilitated into self-consciousness. He is once again a modern "riven" man, and not the unconscious agent of an unconscious universe. Whatever had made him forget his creative role in the mix of things, his very source and importance as a self-acting agent, has relented at last; the sleeper has awakened.
If the mind did not despise itself for being intrigued with trifles, one could go on with such methodless investigations until another, more final judgment trumped the titivating critic.
The old quarry, the hunted beast of the phantom-frighted brain, the grave reality of the wandering day, gives this gift of self-consciousness back to the human intruder. Perhaps this is a turpitude of Wordsworthian magnitude, perhaps the timid self-ignition of a Coleridge, or even a something in-between where attribution and acknowledgment are indecencies to the sacred instant. The quarry, gravely unleavened save by doubt, gifts the man (whether or not the quarry has actually given evidence of its self-awareness); but the gift, as it ever was and ever shall be, is perilous.
Let the ear delight and the eye conspire.
Let the native vigor of the ear cagily become a raconteur of rhyme and rhythm. All we know of the world is what we can cleverly crib from its mysteries. So let us inveigle our irritable sensitivities into suavities of the sublime. Let us let this poem give our ear a home and our eye a heaven-ypointing spire.
A strategy of slipping rhymes is apparent in "The Old Quarry." Strong end-rhymes are followed by an echoing rhyme in the middle of the third line after the rhyme first appears. The end-rhyme of this same "third" mid-line rhyme line starts a new sequence of end-rhyme, end-rhyme, mid-line rhyme. The poet does not exhibit a slavish adherence to this rhyme scheme, however, but uses the new expectations that this lagging, "echoing" method sets up to tease out greater meaning from the material presented. New tensions can be explored in new territory. The poem is rich in re-readings. The more adjusted the ear becomes to the set-up, the more there is to discover in terms of violations or stretching of the new convention.
The first instance allows the far wall of the quarry to become more individually embodied; the landscape is beginning to exhibit its potential autonomy--its ability to give a genuine response to the musing speaker. (Please refer to Figure 1, "Rhyme Diagram.") The three rhymes "right/white/might" are shoved from a pure end-rhyme, end-rhyme, mid-rhyme arrangement. Instead the anthropomorphically "listening stone's" white uptilted-ness tilts the second end-rhyme out of sequence; it comes precipitously before the end of the line. The rhyme tilts in a way that exhibits the stone's tilt. But the re-arrangement is very slight--only one word in from its expected place at the end of the line; this is just a hint of what is possible, the first lilt of a tilt. Soon we will be rushing headlong down a very decisive incline.
Following immediately upon this tilting trip-up there is a deepening angle of "crevice/device/advice." The double mid-line rhyme after crevice demonstrates the deepness of the angle, the harrowing lowness which our hero is entering. The quarry is further assigned purpose down here--giving looks and using "shadowed devices" to enclose the wayward wanderer. The quarry even gets a tan in the next line; the inanimate is acquiring a human stature detail by detail. The narrowness of this defile, for humans at least, is also amplified by the lack of three rhymes in "tans/man." There is only an ominous "then" following hard upon the hemmed-in "man." (Unless you count the "one" right after man, which further emphasizes his isolation in this new, all-too-lively territory.) Very early on the soundscape is moving toward a crisis. The aftermath of this crisis, its impact and tonality, will constitute the rest of the poem.
The quarry is unsteady as jelly; it is all quivering walls and swallowing waters. These three rhymes ("all/wall/swallowing") come hard together, as if in a single gulp the man might disappear. The only hope is that mayhaps the water is some blackened base of being, a chaos out of which all comes or came, and to which all shall return: man and quarry both. Our wanderer's only hope may be oblivion. This is, of course, always the other option to self-consciousness for humans. The poet's slowly self-asserting voice must overcome this very real crisis before even the first self-acknowledged note can escape his bitter lips. He is uncertain and unsteady, and all around him the "rocks/mock," along with the drowning waters.
Now we come to the crisis proper. No more the headlong dive; this is the nadir, this is the very "bottom." In a very deadened rhyme we are told that it resembles "nothing," or at best, nothing so much as a "tomb." It seems that the crisis is a catastrophe, and that the budding or burning self-consciousness must extinguish. And yet, this thud of a rhyme, this songless and hopeless "bottom/tomb" combo holds the first assertion of the poet over his encasing environment. "It resembled nothing so much as a tomb," is a human judgment upon his environment. The quarry is being, however hopelessly, put in its place in the mind of the singer; the quarry is becoming part of the poem even as it threatened to "swallow all."
The edge of despair has kept its vibrancy, and yet the sneaky individual still finds value enough to thrive. Even a starving vagrant can make a gem of a joke, it seems.
After the tomb, the quarry then becomes a godless "abandoned lot," and the end rhymes are hidden behind the hard edge of "lot" which is used as a red herring on the way to a regular re-assertion of the end-rhyme, end-rhyme, mid-line rhyme pattern. "Abandon/again/in," constitutes a semi-hidden trio in the barrenness of this middle-space of the poem. The deadness of "bottom/tomb" has broken the sonic expectations of the listener, mimicking the wanderer's despair and sense of being at a loss. The hard "t" of "against/lot" also makes it hard to recognize the "abandoned/again" semi-rhyme. Only later, with a touch of analysis, can we see the pre-figuring foreshadow of the quadruple rhyme of "then/abandoned/ again/in." The fact of this winsome prefigurement underscores the fact that the singer is "echoing himself." It is always, says the design of the poem, a human landscape--whether we are lost or found within it.
Now the word "echo" itself is brought into question
Now the word "echo" itself is brought into question. There is never any rhyme for the word "echo" offered anywhere in the poem. "Echo" is without an echo itself. Just to emphasize this point, the poet has stuck "echo" in the end-rhyme position as "after-echo." This can be seen as either confirming the non-originality of the quarry, its inhumanness, or as proof that the quarry does not merely echo the singer in its midst, but is capable of its own tones and embellishments to the audial moment of the poem. Of course, the possibility is held out that quarries and humans both merely "pretend" to have their own voices.
The endlessness of song and "original response," at least to the human experience of its environment, is so permanent a feature of the mind that the song seems to "pursue its end as if never begun." It is just about impossible for a human consciousness to interact with the world without some art or song being felt and noticed by the human perceiver. To pursue an end as if never begun is to never end. So the center of this song/consciousnesss experience is a central mystery of the life experience, which the wandering poet is coming to embrace again after his self-limiting misery. The assuredness of things as merely things is thrown out of whack by this strong experience, even "time dilates." There is no way to measure a mystery that you cannot escape or solve. You must simply deal with it as it is and as you are: you must embrace life, as ignorant of its ultimate purpose as the song is of its singer. The endlessness this on-goingness is emphasized in the poem with the multiple rhymes in a single line: "one/burns/on/in." The spark of life, while it illuminates and heats our existence, cannot itself be ultimately illuminated; it is a "dark" that burns.
Now the singer begins to be born back to his life experience. The tying rhymes are "coal/unfolds/foal." The inter-mix of the mess is colloquial and haphazard, as much accident as intention: "noise/alloy/ quarry." The singer no longer visits the quarry, he becomes the quarry. There is an identification of self with this new experience; what was outside and other becomes internalized and self. His voice is "forged" in this experience. This is a successful gambit that supports being alive, and the rhymes underscore this as well: "voice/rejoice/voice." The identity moves from accident and happenstance to a self-conscious and articulated embracing of experience.
Of course there are trials and crises involved in living, and the moment that the singer has embraced this challenge, even if only provisionally (as he may think), he is assaulted. He does not simply rejoice in his new unity, he "totters and rejoices." The wanderer's mixed response to the quarry's new wakefulness that he is internalizing is captured in the "marble/garbled/audible/startled" near-rhymes. The self, once aware of itself enough to consciously embrace life, is instantly invited to divide against itself; the attitude to the now-embraced experience is mixed. Consciousness is the source of the dilemma, and the provisional answer can only come from yet more consciousness; the wanderer must "speak/talk/awake," despite the "choked dark" of the surrounding world. The rest of the poems traces attitudes and responses to these problems of being alive and knowing it, and not choosing to not-exist, not choosing to dissolve into despair or the dissolution and nothingness of the death-in-life experience from which the speaker has just so recently wandered.
"Quarry/wary/sorry," encloses this moment succinctly. The "quarry" is the where and substance of the challenge; the "wary" holds the increasingly self-conscious response; and the "sorry" makes a bittersweet assertion of embracing this dilemma, however incompletely. "Won't/meant/want," are all intention-words, conscious articulations of a self-recognizing actor on the uncertain stage of the "watery quarry." The uncertainty of the resolution is touched with the iffy-assonance of "half-sighing as if." But the decision has been made; it has been "given." The mark of this decision separates the past and the present ("given/graven/riven"). The self-awareness of this fact of consciousness is reviewed in the last lines of the poem. The wanderer notes how different a person he would have been if he had never entered the quarry of the unconscious and come to terms with the experience. If he had remained in the clear day "above," things would not have changed internally for the walker. A life-from-death has been achieved in this new "eve;" it is something that the "grave/gave."