"Things Seem Strong" by Jane Hirshfield
Knock knock.
Things Seem Strong Things seem strong. Houses, trees, trucks—a chair, even. A table. You don't expect one to break. No, it takes a hammer to break one, a war, a saw, an earthquake. Troy after Troy after Troy seemed strong to those living around and in them. Nine Troys were strong, each trembling under the other. When the ground floods and the fire ants leave their strong city, they link legs and form a raft, and float, and live, and begin again elsewhere. Strong, your life's wish to continue linking arms with life's eye blink, life's tear well, life's hammering of copper sheets and planing of Port Orford cedar, life's joke of the knock-knock. Knock, knock. Who's there? I am. I am who? That first and last question. Who once dressed in footed pajamas, who once was smothered in kisses. Who seemed so strong I could not imagine your mouth would ever come to stop asking. —Jane Hirshfield from the September 5, 2016, print edition of The New Yorker.
This one came back to me as a single phrase: “Troy after Troy after Troy.” If you’ve been around here for any length of time, you know I love repetition, whether it be the anticipated patterns of a received form, or a rhetorical device unique to an individual poem’s argument or emotional arc—anaphora or epistrophe or something looser and organic—or simply a sequence of matching sounds, regular or not, that chime between the lines.
It was this repetition that sent a shiver down my spine the first time I read “Things Seem Strong,” so it was no wonder that that’s what called me back to it this week. What was terrifically surprising was discovering that what was in my memory a pivotal moment actually occurs early on—it’s an exposition, the aria’s opening gesture, and not the thunderclap I carried in my memory, which had become a kind of stand-in or synecdoche for the poem as a whole. Some words and phrases cling to a consciousness like burdock to a cuff. I’m tempted to say it’s just some fascination of the pattern-loving mind, that the scraps that stick are, if not arbitrary, perhaps without much significance, though if you asked a magpie, I imagine you’d find that every shiny treasure in her nest was somehow meaningful to her.
What’s to love about “Things Seem Strong”? Hirshfield is a Zen Buddhist, a translator of Classical Japanese poetry, and these practices carry into her own poems in ways that I find captivating. She is a poet of presence, observation, direct experience, connectedness. What I love in this poem is the way that the poet’s philosophical concerns are born out by its making: how the form enacts habits of mind—until, of course, it doesn’t—and, likewise, the music of its construction regulates tone, until it is subsumed by it.
Initially, the music is a call to attention, to presence: “Things seem strong.” Combined with the single syllables, each taking equal stress—I have just learned the the term for a metrical foot consisting of three stressed syllables in a row is molossus—this descending scale is not unlike the striking of bells with successively deeper tones, like chimes employed to bring one’s awareness to the present. But beyond hearing this music, observe what happens to your tongue when you say the words aloud yourself, how the vowel sounds progress from front to rear. The short i of thing tips up to brush the back of the teeth, then seem’s long e flattens the dorsum like a plate before the short o of strong, which verges on a short u, buckles it and drops towards the base, into the throat.
Here, in assuming the poet’s speech, we are drawn deeper into our own bodies. This is what I’ve always loved most about the lyric: how it transfers individual, physical experience, like some kind of . . . what? The best I can come up with is displeasingly disembodied: something akin to a program you install in yourself in order to run a simulation of another person’s being. Walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, sure, but you’ll get a more direct line if you repeat their words as you do so. You’ll inhabit the very shape of their breath, and with it both thought and emotion, consciousness and feeling, the body the link in between.
“Things Seem Strong” is not a metered poem in any traditional sense, but the opening molossus does establish a dominant measure, a loosey-goosey version of trimeter, or lines containing three stressed syllables. Of eight stanzas, seven begin with1 three-beat lines
Things seem strong.
You don’t expect one to break.
When the grounds flood
Strong, your life’s wish
Knock, knock. Who’s there?
That first and last question.
Who once dressed in footed pajamas,
Though the lines—and, subsequently, the speaker’s breath—expand to seven beats (“to continue linking arms with life’s eye blink, life’s tear well”) and contract to just one (“I am”), each new stanza returns us to the opening call to attention and the steady comfort of the triad, a pattern the mind adores.2
The outlier in this pattern is, of course, my personal clarion, stanza three’s “Troy after Troy after Troy”—though note again the triple repetition. Outside the possibility that I was a Trojan in a previous life, I expect the stickiness of the line has to do with an amplification of the music as well as the meaning. Where “Things seem strong” has a descending intonation, sinking deeper into the body and nearer the lungs and the heart, the source of all life, “Troy after Troy after Troy” strikes a single note repeatedly: a hammer against a forge.
Capped with a now-familiar spondee3—“seemed strong”—the line commands, in contrast to the measured pacing and inward movement that precedes it, outward attention, and I hear a note of fury in it, if not simply anguish, the rhythmic exhalation of a keening. It’s also the first time the poem shifts its speech act from contemplation of a hypothetical or general concept—the nature of our ideas about strength, the consideration of how damage might be inflicted—into the realm of historical specificity. Troy did seem strong, and it seemed that way in each of its nine incarnations, the existence of which, of course, illuminate the limits of their appearance.
Hirshfield quickly returns us to our breath, continuing the stanza with another descending scale in “Nine Troys were strong”—a long i, the diphthong of oy, the short o-u of strong—and the gentle lapping of a dactylic4 rhythm to close the stanza: each trembling under the other. It’s technically the same pattern as our Trojan hammer, but listen once again to the descending scale established by the vowel sounds—long e, short u, short o—and how they drawn the attention inward, back to the breath, the calm of genuine presence.
Despite now settling back into stability, the departure that opens the stanza has introduced a tension that telegraphs what’s to come, when the speaker moves on from the consideration of resilience and determination in the face of what she is increasingly pushing us—and surely herself—to accept. In the fire ants’ cooperation and adaptability, we understand how, though nine Troys fell, nine Troys also rose. Similarly resourceful and determined is the life’s wish to continue, in all of its sadness and pleasure in beauty and silliness.
If you didn’t see a knock-knock joke coming when we set out on this journey, you’re not the only one. And yet how quickly we shift yet again, this time out of the familiar absurdity5 and into the existential “I am who?” which the speaker describes in the single single-line stanza as “The first and last question.” The question that begins one’s life is here asserted to be the same question that ends it—and by this point in the poem we are highly attuned to what’s missing from this construction: the middle, what comes between birth and death. The part, I infer, that seems strong.
I am—you are—who? Once a child in footed pajamas. Once smothered in kisses. Once so strong it could not be imagined we could ever be otherwise.
Poetry belongs to its public, so A Momentary Stay will always be free. If you’d like to support this project, you can send a one-time tip or a recurring donation on Ko-fi.
Alternatively! There’s nothing I like more than hearing that a poem you read here did something for you, or that you forwarded it to a friend or read it out loud to someone you love: I can’t trade that for coffee, but it also keeps me going.
Or, in the case of stanza seven’s monostich, entirely comprised of.
Past, present, future; beginning, middle, end; Larry, Moe, Curly.
Two stressed syllables.
Stressed-unstressed-unstressed.
I can’t resist pointing out that the knock-knock joke, too, is a tripartite structure, the initiator of the joke speaking three times.
I love this poem, which was new to me. I love its no-bullshit quality, the way it keeps its feet so firmly on the ground. The “seem” of its title is great. Molossus—what a word! New to me, too. Love-child of molasses and colossus. And it all but forces you to say it how it means, those slow big gobs of syllables. Fantastic.