Twelve Stones, Twelve Stanzas

Leslie Norris wrote “The Twelve Stones of Pentre Ifan” celebrating the megalithic monument in  Wales. The monument itself is a four-stone structure in the middle of eight smaller stones. A notable feature of Norris’ poem is that the poem itself is twelve stanzas long—twelve stones long. The word “stanza” is itself notable in this context. A stanza is: "a group of rhymed verse lines," 1580s, from It. stanza "verse of a poem," originally "standing, stopping place," from V.L. *stantia "a stanza of verse," so called from the stop at the end of it, from L. stans (gen. stantis), prp. of stare "to stand”.

            Norris’ nearly translates the stone monument literally by memorializing it in stanzas. Like the ancients who originally stood the stones endwise and arranged them harmoniously, so also did Norris create a monument by standing objects on end. The characters  the ancients wrote their language in were tangible objects, dense, with specific gravity, and cumbersome. By some engineering device they raised the capstone (about 16 tons,) atop three erect stones and raised a monument.

            The tools Norris utilized were significantly different than this. Norris’ tools were much, much smaller. Rather than recording the language of his moment in heavy stone, Norris employed small angular tools, which represent little mouth noises fashioned by linguistically-advanced primates. Are words less cumbersome than stones?  Perhaps they are. Perhaps they are not. The question which remains to be answered is whether linguistic stones will stay standing as long as those of granite.

            Wendell Berry commented, indirectly, on the plight of Norris. In the beginning lines of his poem “The Farmer, Speaking of Monuments”, Berry writes, “Always, on their generations breaking wave, men think to be immortal in the world.” And a few lines later, “He will not be immortal in words.” The work of our hands will outlive us, of course, but Berry seems to think our immortality is better chiseled in stone than in the simple mouth noises we articulate in the moment. “His words all turn to leaves,” he writes, “answering the sun with mute quick reflections.” And to end the poem Berry writes, “In autumn, all his monuments fall.” I interpreted this as a reference to death, and how death is the great author and finisher of our lives. When autumn comes, all of our monuments will fall.

                Melendez seems to approach this with a different sensibility. She writes, “I oppose temples, object to the mountainous externalization of might.” This is a truly beautiful expression. Rather than meditating on the erection of temples and the existence of stone, she rejects these forms of masculine self-identification. She approaches it with a newness that violates the male sentiment expressed in the building of temples. “Might in me,” she writes, “is not erected, but absorbed.”
            Perhaps the purpose of our life is better represented by the philosophy of Melendez than by Berry or Norris. I saw a bumper sticker the other day that I thought was apt: “Leaving your mark is overrated.” Perhaps this is the basic truth of our existence: that we will live a while, then we’ll die a while, and all things external have always been external, and will remain external forever. Perhaps we are only here to observe. Our monuments are bound to fail. Even the language of stone is indecipherable after a gap in history. We are doomed to pathetic contributions, and our names will die no matter how high our skyscrapers. It’s best to accept that and adopt a non-interventionist attitude.