Dialectical Anthropology 11:157-168 (1986)
9 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht - Printed in the Netherlands
CRITICISM
THE POETRY OF EDWARD SAPIR
by Toni Flores
There is a Sapir revival on, a thing which
can only be applauded, since Sapir's work,
various and subtle as it is, still has much that
is new to offer us. What is, to me, especially
valuable about the recent analyses of Sapir is
that they recognize and explore the fact that
his anthropological work is directly linked
with his literary and musical work, that they
are actually part of a larger theoretical whole.
That Sapir wrote poetry is no longer noted as
an oddity. His poetry is no longer considered
an outrigger to his anthropology. It is begin-
ning to be studied as an integral part of the
mind and the praxis of the man.
It is this trend that I would like to further
here, by focusing exclusively on the poetry
itself and on what it reveals, or creates. [1]
Here we see Sapir, not writing ethnography or
theory, but creating masks of himself. If we
accept his own insistences that culture is, at
bottom, a group of individuals in the habit of
living with each other, that these individuals
have desires and emotions and thought-pat-
terns and conflicts all their own, and that
they feel impelled to work out these compli-
cations in making their culture, then we may
and in all consistency must apply the same
approach to Sapir himself. I. suggest, then,
that in his poetry we see Sapir working
through a series of important intellectual,
moral, and aesthetic preoccupations.
At the very grave risk of over-simplifying, I
think that these preoccupations may be seen
at least in part as a tension between the
impulse to immanence and the impulse to
transcendence.
If on the one hand we may define imma-
nence as that which is inherent, internal,
grounded, and constrained by reality, and on
the other hand we may define transcendence
157
as that which is surpassing, beyond, over-
leaping of material reality, then I think we
would find in Sapir's work a poet uneasily
dancing between these two impulses, turning
from one to the other, in revulsion or exasper-
ation or longing or passion or even pleasure,
but never in ease.
When he leans towards immanence, he is
concerned with human social relations, with
the problem of dependency, with the social
network as support and as trap, with love and
death and the violence humans may do each
other. He leans into groundedness. But he
never fully accepts it. There is very seldom a
straightforward connectedness with the peo-
ple about whom he writes; rather, he holds
them off with irony or fear or objectification.
Even in love, one gets the sense that he is
grappling with passion rather than with the
reality of the beloved person.
When he leans the other way, into tran-
scendence, he is concerned with escape, with
individual independence or solitude, with
non-human nature, with the longing for God
or the longing for death, and with the immer-
sion of the self in what I call " t h e populated
Universe," a non-personal, mystical, but
meaningful universe. He seems to long for
significance beyond that inherent in human
lives, yet at the same time he is always
compelled to look back from the empyrean to
the human earth, as though he more than half
suspects that the significance he seeks can
only be created in some human mind.
The mood, both annoyed and relieved, with
which he turns from transcendence to imma-
nence may perhaps best be read in the follow
two brief lyrics:
158
Levels
I toe-danced on a tower-point
Under the horn of the moon.
I lost my balance when a breeze
Rushed in with a trivial tune.
Oh the lightning vision,
As I tumbled through space!
And the gasp of my heart,
Storm on my face!
It's duller in the valley,
Dancing's rather slow -
Still it's a way of living
And people come and go.
July 4, 1919
(Poetry, November, 1931) [2]
The Squirrel
The children see the squirrel jump,
The squirrel's tail waves into a hump.
The children hang on the flicker of his eye,
The squirrel's a trifle nearer the sky.
They say that God has time to see
The squirrel's flight from tree to tree.
Oh I am weary of looking within,
There's a million of squirrels beyond my chin.
(The Stratford Monthly, June 1924)
Watching people may be second best, but it's
alright too, and necessary in its way.
Love, Death, and People-Watching
This sense that people-watching is a neces-
sary second best colors most of his "people"
poems. On the whole, they are cynical, de-
flating, disappointed. People are miscast in
their life roles (the various characters in
"Mislabeled Menagerie") or hypocritical
("Monks in Ottawa") or inexplicably dam-
aged by life (the farm woman in " G a m m e r
Collins" and the stenographer in "This Age"),
or humbugs, especially humbugs. The mili-
tary, politicians, the clergy, and academics
and intellectuals in particular all come in for
a thorough roasting.
The Professor
I doubt if you know how wise I am.
Last year I published a heavy tome
Of well-nigh eight-hundred pages.
The subject? It matters not;
But this I know, that only two men in the
world
Understood (or partly understood) its learned
fill.
One was a spectacled privat-docent in Bonn,
The other was myself.
And yet some Philistines begrudge my salary!
( Dreams and Gibes, 1917) [3]
A few show ironic sympathy:
Optimist
Kicked in the belly
By the gentlemen of Fate,
" A h yes," he says,
"I am a kettle-drum;
I mark the rhythm
Of the universal symphony."
(July 25, 1920)
and a few still exhibit genuine sympathy, as
does "Somewhat Neglected" with its lovely
last line:
Somewhat Neglected
How can I be the sponsor of his soul, -
A careless domicile and poorly planned,
Without improvements? He cannot pay
his dole
To Honor buttoned up on dress parade,
Nor Pride stalking upon the parapet,
Nor such another fellow of the set.
Having no change, here is he driven to trade

With nails and burrs, jack-knife, and bits of
string
Let in his childhood pocket years ago,
And while their Worships think him
so and so
And hardly worth the inventorying
I saw the sages visit from the South,
I saw how Helen kissed him on the mouth.
(Palms, Jan. 1929)
Many touch at some point on the problem
of authenticity. " H o w many masks, how many
m a s k s / a r e pressed tight on your skin?" he
asks. " T h e last, I thought was a proper
face/Yet it's fallen off with a grin." (" Masks,"
August 20, 1918). For the theoretician of the
"Culture, Genuine and Spurious" article, [4]
such a preoccupation seems natural, but it is
a little sad that Sapir, the people-watching
poet, seems to have found so little genuine-
ness about which to write.
Indeed, what he has found is a world
sharply divided and damaged by injustice. In
a number of poems he makes bitter comment
on social inequities, as he does for instance in
"Susquehanna Hills," in which the servant
boy is seen not to have a right to imagination
or spirituality, as he has no right to leisure:
Susquehanna Hills
"Paddy, O Paddy, have you the horses fed?"
A lone star brightens on the failing day;
Suspended warm high over wisps of hay
That strew the path up to the cattle shed,
The evening star holds Paddy in a dream,
Dropping a veil upon the farmer boy.
Paddy, O Paddy, why do you annoy
The master? For things are not what they
seem.
Life is real, life is earnest, P a d d y ,
For a thin and rather ugly orphan laddie.
Let poets paint a star over a barn
In these old hills. But as for you, I warn
You wake up! After all, when all is said,
Paddy, O Paddy, have you the horses fed?
(Voices, March 1925)
159
Possibly his most biting commentary, how-
ever, is reserved for the subject of war. In
poem after poem he writes despairingly of the
horrors of modern war, of "a world in flames"
(" Del Inferno"), of the "ravenous .... red-hot
eyes" of war ("War"), of professors and di-
plomats and reporters as they feed on war, of
the ironies faced by returned soldiers. Per-
haps his best poem on the subject, however, is
an understated, bleak, bitter little epitaph,
with its deliberately awkward rhythm and
failed expectations of rhyme:
Epitaph of a Soldier
I died for king and native land,
I died for justice and the right,
But most of all I died because a shell
Just caught me in the nick of time
And finished me.
(Dreams and Gibes, 1917)
Interestingly, Sapir's observations about
women also carry much of the same note.
Mostly, when he writes about women, it is as
love objects. That is, only old women or those
who are hurt or pitiable are really people. The
beloved women are, in his poems, essentially
a collection of body parts - eyes, hands, feet,
hair especially. Those who are not are
"savage" ("The Moon's Not Always Beauti-
ful") or "wanton," "unthinking," ("To A Re-
cruiting Girl") or goading ("The Old Maid
and the Private") creatures who lure men to
their destructions. As in " W o m e n Play
Mandolines Before Midnight," women are the
"wild-eyed, the soft-eyed" Delilahs or sirens
who desecrate, demean, and seduce men, who
must turn from the gilded cage of their civili-
zation to the manly ways of nature, with its
lordly, powerful, rumbling rivers etc. It's odd,
finding in Sapir this urge to go fishing with
the boys.
Women Play Mandolines Before Night
The lights are going out where
the mandolines play,
Where the wild-eyed, soft-eyed women play.
160
I will have none of all this twilight tinkle,
I am going away.
They look upon the moon, it is their heart,
They think the stars are fluttering,
They think your captive heart is "listening,
Mine listening.
I am going away from all this longing
and feeling,
Heart-feeling on fingers mad.
Do you know of something merciful
and madder,
Cold and glad?
Do you think that a river rumbling low
and forever,
Taking a lord's way round the hills,
Is medicine for ears too full of tinkling
Syllables?
For I'll have no more of woman's desecration,
making the moon a womanish thing
And making the ice-cold, far away, bitter stars
A fluttering.
(The Measure, No. 6, Aug. 1921)
On the other hand, there's something not
so odd about it, something that seems conso-
nant with the entire immanence-trans-
cendence problem, which seems at times to
swing around the metaphor of the Mother.
I'm saying metaphor deliberately, because I
do not wish to psychoanalyze Sapir and have
no idea about his actual relationship with his
actual mother. No, the point seems to me to
be precisely that the Mother is the very image
of immanence. In the mother, one is grounded
in the material body as with no one else. In
the mother, a person is enmeshed in the social
net as is possible nowhere else. The mother
holds us to the body and to people.
Lovers' Night
Night has a beautiful way with lovers. She
No more than whispers of abandonment;
Slowly she lets the hair fall, with the scent
Of the winds sweetens her body perfectly,
And round the neck wears starlight for a
charm.
She is a playful wanton, indolent,
Who in girl-hearted mothering is bent
Over the lovers lying arm in arm.
Lovers are beautiful children of the night.
They hear faint whispers in their mother's
hair;
Disturbed, they cannot sleep, they cannot
wake,
They are entranced in fragrance and dim
light;
They cannot seize their joy, which they
mistake
For a strange, subtle, somnolent despair.
(The Measure, July, 1925)
In this compelling little poem, with the
delicate rhyme we see the mother in a number
of her many moods or modes. She and night
wear disguises of each other. The night mother
is encouraging, protecting the lovers; she is
leaning over them "in girl-hearted mother-
ing," as a young mother leans, fascinated and
adoring over her infant. At the same time,
this dark mother is a seductress, a wanton,
bejeweled and perfumed, and she is menac-
ing, disturbing, an inducer of despair. She is,
then, the Erotic, whatever force it is that
attracts us to human couplings and connec-
tions, with all their attendant dangers and
joys.
This identification of the self, the human,
as a child, continues even in poems in which
the poet is seeking to break or transcend such
connections. In " T h e Firmament Advises
Man," the vast, impersonal universe advises
"blow out, child, through me." And in
"Nocturnal Comfort," even as they seek Some
One, or God, the Meaning - Maker, they call
Him as though He were the night Mother.
This tendency to inject intense personal
feeling into observation or interaction with
other human beings or even into the observa-
tion of non- human phenomena, so character-
istic of the "Mother" poems, is apparent
throughout the poetry. A good many of the
poems, for instance, are seemingly "about"

nature. Sapir is much concerned with the
sensual apprehension of the physical and
especially of the natural world and displays
an intense attention to such sensually ap-
prehended matters as color, form, smell, and
touch. Often, however, this doesn't come off
well as poetry. The nature poems have a
distinct tendency toward purple. He tends to
do what I call "coming all over adjectival." A
snowstorm "sobs in the night" or "moans in
the gloom," sunbeams "dance," winds
"frolic," lovers walk by the "thundering sea,"
a tree is "branched and glorious" etc. He has
trouble really connecting with the natural or
material world in its immediacy but resorts
instead to "poetic" language and imagery. I
do not think this is to supply a lack of real
feeling as much as it is to defend against
feeling, to put up an insulating barrier be-
tween the self and the all too present world.
The same thing may possibly be true of the
love poems, of which there are great numbers.
Probably a majority of them are truly bad,
with such lines as:
It means that when your little feet come
tripping
A symphony floods in my ears.
It means that when I run my fingers
through your hair
I cannot see for happiness
(" Love," Dreams and Gibes, 1917)
or
Our love is trembling, dear,
Deep - throbbing
It is ecstasy of happiness,
And weeping, weeping
Shyly, blissfully,
Overcome with the choking fullness of its joy,
Trembling, my beloved,
Trembling, my radiant blessed love.
(" Our Love," Dreams and Gibes, 1917)
This is adolescent poetry (is it, in fact,
poetry?), but it got made that way, not, I
think, because Sapir couldn't make better,
161
because he obviously could, but because he
was not grappling in any real way with the
beloved person but instead screening himself
with a protection of stock erotic phrases and
images. When he drops this screen and deals
directly with his subject or speaks directly to
the beloved, the results are much better, as
for instance:
This Age
They say this age is subtle, swift, and dark,
And headstrong with an infinite disgust,
Saying to Love, "We know you for the lust
You are. Cease strumming in the moony
park!"
They say this age is like a frantic shark
That snaps his rapid psychologic jaws
Upon those hoary sentimental laws
That still come floating down from
Noah's Ark.
So be it! Mary, let us turn our back
For an absent-minded minute to the age,
Forgetting the contemporary sage,
Oblivious to irony and rage,
And let me say, "Your eyes" - and never
crack
A smile - "are stars. What if the age is
black?"
(Voices, Dec. 1923 - Jan. 1924).
Interestingly, the best love poems are to a
dead beloved or are a response to the death of
a beloved. In "How You Were More Beautiful
Than Dusk," he writes such lovely, direct
lines as:
Oh now it is terrible that your straight knees
Can neither flex nor turn,
Nor in any way can you find ease
But this rigidity must learn.
(Voices, April 1926)
and in "Worms, Wind and Stone":
Beauty that was and broke in two
I cannot piece together.
162
Again and again I have asked the worms
For what weighed but a feather
(The Measure, July 1925)
Here is reality itself, faced without protec-
tion, with honest emotion, and with clear,
forceful language (and only two adjectives!).
It is almost as though he can handle this
uncomfortable reality, now that it is gone or
is merging with the world beyond this present
one.
Sapir seems fascinated with death, seems to
fear and long for it at once, yet this fascina-
tion, unlike that with nature and with love,
does not seem to require "purple" writing.
He does use mythological images (as in
"Charon" and "Acheron") or the model of
the folk ballad (as in "Three Hags Come
Visiting"), but in all of these cases he has
integrated the foreign material with the per-
sonal feelings and with the physical facts,
producing a commentary at once direct and
moving and aesthetically powerful. In
"Charon," for instance, he writes:
I am Charon the wily,
Open-eyed.
Your eyes are wide,
Sweet, they cannot see,
They cannot see.
( Poetry, Jan. 1926)
The contrast between the all-seeing, all-know-
ing Charon and the blind eyes, open in death
and wide in innocence, of the dead person is
both intellectually and emotionally powerful,
and the repetition of "they cannot see/they
cannot see" conveys real grief better than any
long adjectival description possibly could.
Likewise, in "Three Hags Come Visiting," the
lines
The hags down there
Come slowly up the dark stair
And push the lady's door;
The comb has dropped from her lovely hair,
They find it on the floor.
(Poetry, Jan. 1926)
like the folk ballad from which their form
comes, leave off narrative and lyrical descrip-
tion to focus on the emotional core of the
moment. It is a classic stanza, as much folk
material is, balanced, restrained, and utterly
clear.
The same could be said about much of his
work in a related theme, that of the fleetness
of time. Here again, with a topic which has
led many a poet to wax maudlin and
melodramatic, Sapir works by pruning and
compacting his lines, so that they carry on
their seeming simplicity a heavy freight of
meaning and emotion. For instance, he has in
" T h e Measurer" (1923) the clock speak "...
sketching all the while a simple s o n g / " T h e r e
is an end. Life is not very long,'" or in "Time's
Wing" (1925) he admits to time that "Graves
pile behind you."
I have wondered why this is, that Sapir's
worst writing is called forth by the subjects of
nature and love while his best, most honest,
most artful work is called forth by the sub-
jects of death and the passing of time. It is
tempting, but I think incorrect, to simply
ascribe this to a morbid personality trait, a
kind of aesthetic neuroticism. Rather, it seems
to me to be related to this problem of imma-
nence and transcendence. He is drawn,
powerfully, to the material and the social, the
world of immanence, but he does not feel
comfortable with these connections. When he
turns to the disconnections of death and de-
cay and old age and the passing of time, he is
getting closer to a realm which suits him, in
which he feels at home, the world not of
existence but of essence, not of the body but
of the spirit, not of fact but of meaning, not
of immanence but of transcendence.
The World of Meaning: Longing, Tradition,
and the Spirit
In a sense, Sapir seems to be reversing
Archibald MacLeish's dictum. A poem, or a
life or a culture, should not be but mean. He
wants always to go beyond what he pretty
obviously considers brute existence to find
the meaning of a phenomenon. If you will,

teleology rather than ontology. The problem
comes, for him, when he cannot find a mean-
ing. His longing is for purpose and for closed,
complete systems, but he is harried by his
own very great intelligence, which refuses to
accept false completions and spurious mean-
ings. His general mood is, perhaps, best con-
veyed by "A Roadside Incident:"
An old old witch
Keeps a general store
For poor and rich
To knock at the door.
Who's born of a womb
And born to die
Comes into her room
And comes to buy.
"Granny, a pound
of mulberry cake,
For I am bound
For Oblivion Lake
"And ere I drink
I'll lunch on sweet,
The going, I think
Is long but fleet."
"Sonny, my honey,
The times is bad;
O honey, my honey,
No cake's to be had.
"Give me your soul
And I'll sell you a bun
With a nice round hole,
And the bargain is done."
He gaped and blinked
And scratched his head,
The old dame winked,
His heart was lead.
"I made a mistake
When I crawled from the womb,
I thought you had cake
In the storage room."
"There's a wee little bit
For folks as is born
163
With a half-baked wit
Or a bit of a horn.
"For a chap like you
A bun will do.
Give me your soul,
Just give me your soul."
"I made a mistake
To come this way -
A bun 'stead o' cake
And ruinous pay."
And while they were talking
Of buns and pay,
Time came walking
Along that way,
And just for fun
He gave him a lift
And took him on a run
And brought him swift
To Oblivion Lake
And dropped him in,
He careless like
Just dropped him in.
The old witch laughed.
"And I'll be sworn!
And wasn't he daft
For being born?"
(April 29, 1923)
The colloquial voice, the ironic tone, the bi-
tter portrayal of the granny- witch (that
Mother who fails us again!), the rage at the
carelessness with which time "just dropped
him in" to oblivion, the sense of unfair de-
privation during this brief life, and the over-all
sense of hurt bafflement that things are not
what they are supposed to be are all char-
acteristic of the poems in which Sapir deals
with the search for or the attempt to create
meaning. He does this, with pretty much the
same result, in a number of contexts, both
"immanent" and "transcendent."
He looks, for instance, for meaning in hu-
man cultural productions. As a good anthro-
164
pologist, he looks first to culture, or tradition,
but his looking is not dispassionate, objective,
but rather shot through with a sense of
simultaneous urgency and disappointment.
For example, in the very moving poem " T h e
King of Thule," (a poem which sounds, in
tone and subject matter very much like early
Yeats), he recounts the legend about a god-
king who sees and knows all ("with an eye
fixed on space in a / C o m p r e h e n d i n g stare"),
who lives in harmony and beauty, who regu-
lates and governs the universe, who listens
and responds to human prayers. And after
describing this King of Thule, he warns us
that we cannot accept legends, no matter how
much we may ache to. Worse still, we cannot
accept them, not because they may be mis-
taken, but because:
Yet we cannot be sure of legends
Coming from our wise
Grandfathers and grandmothers,
Many of them are lies.
Our aching hearts can tell us that
Many of them are lies.
( The Nation, July 1922)
They lie to us. Those very parents, ancients,
tradition-bearers, meaning- makers on whom
we rely not only misinform but also deceive
us, led, no doubt, by their own insecurity and
longing.
Even when we seek to be undeceived and
to rely on facts and the patterns inherent in
phenomena such as atoms or societies, we do
but lose the beauty and comfort of magic to
the comfortless aridities of science. In "Sci-
ence Clears the Air" the old wizard says
Where Holy lamb was sheared to serve my ill
I see but mutton feeding on the hill
(Feb. 27, 1925)
and in "King Solomon," he comments " O h
h u m haw...":
We put on glasses and study the soul
And look for spooks beneath the brain.
This strangeness too will fall in a hole;
King Solomon said, "It's all in vain."
Tradition, then, may be a support, but it is
also a trap, a net which, even as it supports
us, binds us in a web of mistakes or outright
lies.
The same, he implies, may be said of reli-
gions and philosophic systems. Here, at the
least, we might find humans applying their
brains to find or create satisfying, honest,
harmonious systems of meaning. In a mood
at once satiric and despairing Sapir burlesques
the Great Search:
Poetic-Philosophic Apostrophe
Tiddledy-winky-wunky
Said the poet to the star,
Hailing, as 'twere, an ancestral monkey.
A-swing on trans-aetherial bar.
The lone star, the lone star,
Had neither mind nor stomach for
The poet's lyric delirious twaddle
But firmly held in the zodiac saddle.
A philosophic carnival troupe
Shot Roman candles in the air,
They somersaulted and looped the loop,
Hoping to glimpse God's glorious hair.
This reverend Gentleman, however,
Never did materialize,
Wherefore in adjectival fever
They cried out their terrestrial eyes.
Tiddledy-winky-winky-wunky,
Oh Faith, Uncertainty, Despair!
Star is star, man star-like donkey,
And God is neither here nor-there.
(The Forge, Summer 1927)
It's funny, he says, watching the circus mag-
ician trying to pull God out of a hat and
pulling out only donkeys instead. Or it would
be funny, if we didn't care so much.
Having sought and not found the comfort
of the Mother, having rejected the false secur-

ity and comfort of religion, humans have to
rely on Philosophy, but it is obviously a poor
substitute.
Nocturnal Comfort
As children, waking troubled in the night,
Will tremble to the ticking clock and cry
Out "Mother!" while the eerie moments fly,
And, waiting, "Mother, mother!" but the
flight
Of time is dark and straight, unanswering,
And they for terror weep, then softer weep
For comfort into dreaming slumber weep
Feeling the smiling angels mothering,
Their elders play the child to Some One,
wake
Capriciously and only half they make
Believe but half they fear, prelude with moan,
Praise tunefully, sundry requests intone,
Sink back confused to Life's activity
Under the wings of a Philosophy.
(March 1, 1924)
In a softer, more gently mocking mood, he
writes of the philosopher's lament that we
have not too few but too many systems, each
cancelling the others out and thus allowing no
recourse but skepticism, no comfort but the
cold comfort of irony.
Epitaph of a Philosopher
I had a perfect system when I lived,
Flawless, waterproof to fallacy;
The world but seemed a string of episodes,
Each born to prove my system.
Nature and Man and God were each
assigned a comfortable niche
And Art and Law both fitted like a glove.
But ever since they dug a hole for me,
To meditate the further reach of time,
I've thought out many systems more -
One a day's about my average -
And lo! each system fits more perfectly
than any other.
Of late Fve tried to find a system
Unsusceptible of flawless demonstration;
165
Alas! I have not found one yet.
O gentle tombstone-visitor, have you?
(Dreams and Gibes, 1917)
Irony, of course, is ultimately insufficient
to still the longing for meaning. So, not find-
ing satisfaction in relations between persons
or in social and cultural systems, the poet
turns away from the human network, seeks to
send himself flying from above all that mire.
As the ordinary social world, in spite of the
application of intelligent analysis and the
knocking of longing, refuses to yield satisfac-
tion, he turns to the individual as the only
possible source of epiphany. He seeks to re-
cover the "tower-point under the horn of the
moon" where the " I " of "Levels" danced
before his fall. To get this I (himself and us)
back up to the heights of intense, non-ordinary
feeling, we must cultivate the spirit, and to do
this we must first kick free of human, earthly
entanglements. He rages "Your wings are
clipped;/Your hands are tied-/the winged
god in you is slave" ("The Chasm," 1919).
What we need is a vision quest, some way of
getting out of the earthly prison and into the
empyrean, or at least into touch with the
forces that inhabit the empyrean. Desiring to
make that contact, he has the character in
"She Sits Vacant-Eyed" exclaim:
Two thousand pathways ran to treasure -
The raven spoke, I saw the vision.
Suns burn, moons burn -
God, God! I am sitting in prison
Surely, surely there is something for me -
There is something to fill my spirit whole.
Sun, burn! sun, burn
Pity me, make a blaze of my soul!
(Poetry, May 1921)
Finally, however, even this proves unsatis-
factory. In one poem after another, he seeks
the vision but, like society, the individual
person cannot provide it from inner re-
sources. The individual spirit does not flare
up on its own, incandescent with understand-
ing and blazing with meaning.
166
What he resorts to at last is what mystics
for centuries have resorted to, the impulse to
immerse oneself, to lose the self, in a vibrat-
ing universe. In " G o d , " he writes, '"I am
looking for God," said Man" and '"I am
breathing God," said Oak", but
"I am God Himself," said Stone,
"I breathed when neither tone
Nor ripple nor ancient sigh
Stirred under the rigid sky,
And the silence of far space
Was the thought on God's face."
(Contemporary Verse, March 1920)
The universe is vast, impersonal, but full of
orenda, powerful, full of some meaning im-
possible to apprehend with the intellect but
capable of being joined, if only one is willing
to cede personhood and merge into universal
energy. Sapir is most explicit about this in
" T h e Firmament Advises Man":
I am a sieve for you.
I strain out your desire
Whose heart is through and through
Tortured with fire.
And blow out, child, through me,
Leaving the coals aglow;
I shall remain unseared,
Colder than silent snow.
Yes, child, your eyes are stars of doubt
And flame is in your hair,
Tumultuous you stumble out
In this vast, freezing air:
A pattern I shall make of you,
A starry clusterlet on high,
With one word let me snuff out madness,
Embellishing the sky.
Sweet burning, weeping child,
I have done this once before;
Leave me your anguish and your flame
For an increment to star-lore.
My little child, blow out through me,
And you shall gain frivolity,
Peace and holiness and death,
And gladness of an even breath.
And you shall join the angels' band
That frolics in eternity,
Knowing their God's asleep and grand.
My little child, blow out through me.
( The Stratford Monthly, Nov. 1924)
Here, the "little child" seeks, not the Mother,
not human connectedness, not even personal
independence and vision, but a dissolution.
The personal flame will become part of the
burning matter which is a star. Personhood
gets exchanged for atomic existence some
dance between pure matter and pure energy.
The only meaning, the mystic in Sapir seems
to find, that is acceptable is the largest, ulti-
mate meaning of space. Tellingly, that mean-
ing is only knowable outside of human life, in
that which transcends it.
He doesn't give up entirely on immanence,
however. If we go back to the people-watch-
ing poems, we can see that he is demanding
(and thus still hoping for) an end to humbug
and oppression and denial in human life. He
is calling for in his poetry what he called for
in "Culture, Genuine and Spurious," a way
of life which allows people to develop power
and meaning for themselves, in their individ-
ual lives. And while it is true that his poetry
makes much of the connection between love
and death, it is also true that he holds fast to
the personhood of the once-alive beloved, even
in death. When, then, he calls for the subver-
sion of the human self in the impersonal
universe, it is not a total loss, an annihilation,
but a change into another kind of existence.
In dealing with the problem he posed in
"Squirrel" and "Levels," then, characteristi-
cally, he does not resolve the issue by giving
an over- simplified answer. What he does do,
in his wisest poems, is to mediate immanence
and transcendence, to balance and mesh them.
In "Ariel" (March 1925), for instance, he
praises the liminal being, the one who knows
"sun-way and cloud's and sudden earthen
aim." And in the wonderful sonnet "Zuni,"
he seeks balance between humanity and na-

ture, ritual and landscape, material and spirit-
ual, stasis and movement, reality and imagin-
ation, immersion and distance, connection and
transcendence.
Zuni
I send you this. Through the monotony
Of mumbling melody, the established fall
And rise of the slow dreaming ritual,
Through the dry glitter of the desert sea
And sharpness of the mesa, keep the flowing
Of your spirit, in many branching ways!
Be running mirrors to the colored maze,
Not pool enchanted nor a water slowing.
Hear on the wings, see in a flash, retreat!
Beauty is brightest when the eye is fleet.
The priests are singing softly on the sand,
And the four colored points and zenith stand;
The desert crawls and leaps, the eagle flies
Put wax into your ears and close your eyes.
(Poetry, Jan. 1926)
Do not be tempted, he seems to say, into a
vain attraction to perfect beauty. That way
lies only wreckage. Only in the process of
searching for or making meaning and in the
form of the search is there any hope. It is the
process and the form, not the thing, which
counts.
Ultimately, it is this principle, that mean-
ing lies in process and form, that is the key to
Sapir's poetry and, I think, the key to his
reason for making poetry.
He was, obviously, very concerned with the
formal matter of poetry. And well he should
have been. He needed the discipline of formal
requirements to help curb his more "poetic"
excesses. When he comes all over adjectival,
as he does for instance in such lines as these
from " T h e Music Of The Spheres"
The winds that gently brush the stars
and set them twinkling,
Set them twinkling like a host of tiny
silvery bells.
Presences invisible and vast do breathe
into the falling strains.
(The Minaret, June 1917)
167
one wishes for the restraint of Horatian ode
or sestina or sonnet. It's not a guarantee, of
course. Some of his worst pieces are in perfect
sonnet form, as in "A Sonnet of Rain," obvi-
ously a practice piece, which carries lines like
The heavens destroy themselves with
rousing rain,
And in a smudge have gone the tumult cloud.
That came in anger, flaunting heavy shrouds
Above the wide and unexpectant plain.
(Canadian Bookman, June, 1921)
The practice, however, generally tells, because
he is very capable at handling the materials of
language. His rhyme is usually subtle, unob-
trusive, and very pleasing. He employs sound
patterning with great dexterity. Meter and
line placement are unforced and supple.
More interestingly, he seems to have studied
other poets carefully and tried out their vari-
ous styles. " T h e King of Thule," I am con-
vinced, is in imitation of Yeats; "Levels" may
be too. "Miriam Sings Three Hymns" is what?
A mixture of e.e. cummings and Gertrude
Stein?
Miriam Sings Three Hymns III
I am growing wiser and wiser
In sweet and complete freedom
Of laughing deviser.
I am putting by gods and demigods
And sewing up dolls
With this incredible two-ply thread
All out of my head.
I am laughing softer and softer,
Under a mask is grander weather
Than floating high-principled over the
heather.
Oh Mrs. Heney, I am very "umble,
Your gospel is clear as a bumble-bee;
I, getting grander and grander, agree
With every goose and every gander.
Smooth my hair and kiss my lips
And let us sweep the kitchen floor;
Sealing friendships with sips of tea
Is not such an awful terrible bore;
For I am laughing softer and softer
168
In sweeter completer freedom
Than ever I knew.
This too is true.
Amen.
(The Canadian Forum Jan. 1925)
God Blows a Message" is nothing if it is not
influenced by Emily Dickinson.
God Blows a Message
Through her gaunt cheeks and sunken eyes
God blows a message
Delivered at the first sunrise
Of a forgotten age.
Her fingers point not truthfuller
To evanescence
Than the soft planetary whirr,
Eternity's pretence.
The soul that disarranges hair
Puts out the firefly -
And strewed the stars upon the air
And gave them word to die.
(Poetry, November 1931).
Even the folk ballad has its obvious influence.
In Poetry he published superb translations of
a number of French-Canadian folk songs,
translations which are true to the tone and
style of folklore, and at the same time make
fine poems in English, understated, and full
of restrained power. Their influence is evident
in "Three Hags" among others.
If this habit of absorbing literary in-
fluences and then trying out the various styles
makes some problem of authenticity for Sapir
himself, it is a small problem, because the
essential voice singing in all these different
styles is still Sapir's, and the subjects of the
songs are still Sapir's subjects.
Indeed, I do not think that it was because
Sapir was a linguist and therefore interested
in language and form that he expended so
much energy on form. I do not think that it
was even that he was a poet and therefore
concerned with the skills of his craft. More
specifically, I think that for him, poetry, with
this necessary alliance between subject and
style, presents a further mediation for the
dualism which so preoccupies him. A poem
refers in two directions at once; it refers to
the world of its content, and it refers to the
world of its form. Its meaning lies in the
interaction between these two. It implies if
you will a human meaning and a non-human
meaning. It implies a communication between
poet and audience and at the same time it
implies an entity existent into itself. In other
words, a poem at once inheres in itself and
transcends itself. It is, for Sapir, the perfect
and one might almost say inevitable means
for both expressing and resolving some central
preoccupations of his thought.
NOTES
1. I am especially indebted to Richard Handler's fine essay
"The Dainty and the Hungry Man: Literature and Anthro-
pology in the Work of Edward Sapir" in George Stocking,
ed., Observers Observed: Essays m Ethnographic Fieldwork.
History of Anthropology, Vol. L (Madison: Umversity of
Wisconsin Press, 1983). My conceptualization of Sapir's
concern with immanence and trascendence is related to
Handler's conceptualization of Sapir's Hungry Man and
Dainty Man impulses, but it is different too, and I think the
difference is due to the fact that Handler is really working
from the prose material (in spite of the use of the poem as
metaphor) while I am working almost totally from the
poetic material.
2. All quotations will be accompanied by a citation of the
periodical or book in which the poem was published or, if it
was not published, by the date on the manuscript. The
manuscript of unpublished poems was obtained through the
courtesy of Philip Sapir and with the help of Stanley Di-
amond.
3. Edward Sapir, Dreams and Gibes (Boston: The Poet Lore
Company, The Gorham Press).
4. Edward Sapir, "Culture, Genuine and Spurious," American
Journal of Sociology Vol. 29, 401-429,