The Inheritors Poem

From the opening line of the poem, the speaker assumes that the quest for alternatives to loss, either through aesthetic ordering or through the creation of myths, “will fail always in the end.”Nevertheless, the poem enacts the speaker’s endorsement of the imaginative process; it sanctions the way in which the imagination responds to “grief,” “loss,” and betrayal.”The ability to generate myths and to appropriate them as models is central to humankind’s way of seeing themselves in relation to natural and historical phenomena. The mature, reflective speaker in this poem represents those who know “there is only the dignity of the present/Sliding away into the bookish past” (511) They have created “the old stories”, the appropriate garden,” “the

Jennings continues to express her concern with the imagination, its relation to reality and its role in mediating reality, through retrospective analysis on her own use of natural objects to objectify personal thoughts and emotions. She creates speakers in these poems who both question and exemplify the inclination to use images from nature to describe changing moods and memorable moments of “sadness and grief.” Thus, the question of how her imagination responds to nature, how it creates moments of aesthetic awareness, become the subject for poems such as “Elegy in Spring” “Even in Spring I see an elegy,” she writes, “A long recall, a cherishing the past.” In “Seasonal Reverie,” “the speaker’s “heart exults/With these becomings and these benedictions.” And in “Sundowning,” the compulsion to record “How the sun revels in this earth beneath/ / Its power and dignity” (510) becomes the subject of the

(510)

Balanced against these attempts to show the spiritual power of nature are poems which question the particular way in which she uses natural imagery to give formal expression to personal experience. In “Let Summer Thrive” for instance, the speaker considers why she should ask “this successful summer” to fit her mood, be winter till/ The blue has gone and there is charcoal sky?’ And in the poem “In April,” she laments that while “ the earth shows such propitious signs/ The bursting blossom, and the birds who sing,” she has “no words, no sign and no fit call”(514)

In this autobiographical volume, Jennings takes as her subject significant stages in the growth of her own mind. Poems which portray the early period of childhood intimacy with nature are followed by poems which question her use of nature to depict the ideal. The next groups of poems present a stage of loss by focusing on lost love and the debilitating effects of time. “Years Ago” is a poetic vignette of a “memorable summer of hot days.”During this long summer: “Nothing was elegiac or nostalgic.” “We threw time in the river….. and so/ Day entered evening with a sweeping gesture”(525) This early experience of shared, reciprocal love is associated with an archetype of timeless, harmonious being: This is the love that I knew/ Before possession, passion and