Air for Mercury (Style)

Style

Sections

The most noticeable aspect of Hillman's "Air for Mercury" is its structure. Hillman divides the poem up into four separate sections, which are labeled with simple numbers, one through four. This construction is deliberate on the poet's part and works to reinforce the underlying subject of the poem, the passage of time. The number four is a potent number in poetry, especially in poems that discuss time passing, because it evokes images of the four seasons passing in nature — a powerful theme that many authors employ in their literature. Indeed, as the poem progresses, Hillman gives little clues that each section may be intended to stand for a season. Sometimes these clues are blatant, such as in the second stanza of the second section, when she notes that "A season stopped by without your / noticing." In other sections, the link to seasons is more subtle, such as in the third section, when Hillman talks about the crow greeting "dusk," a natural state that precedes darkness in a typical day.

In literature, the season of winter is also often symbolized by darkness since when snow blankets the land, the days get shorter and darker. Winter is also commonly associated with death since most vegetation dies during the winter and is reborn in the spring. This concept correlates to Hillman's references to spiritual death, and her use of "something white" in the fourth section could very well be a reference to snow. So, if this is the case, then the dusk reference in the third section would relate to the season of fall, which precedes winter. Working backwards then, the second section would correlate to summer and the first section would correlate to spring. Given the context of the poem, which depicts a religious faith that starts out strong but slowly weakens and dies as organized religion becomes cumbersome and society embraces secularization, it makes sense that Hillman structures the poem to follow a natural, seasonal cycle.