Saint Francis and the Sow (Style)

Style

This poem is an example of the free verse style that characterizes much American poetry from the mid-fifties to the present. In free verse, there is no dependence on formal patterns of meter or rhyme for the poem’s structure. Instead, the poem’s content and emotional textures often determine line length and line breaks, the interior patterns of sounds, and the texture of images. Like many poets of his generation, Galway Kinnell wrote at first in “strict” forms. But long before he composed “Saint Francis and the Sow,” his work had taken on the “old” free verse style that has its roots in the poetics of Walt Whitman, the “grandfather” of American free verse. In discussing his own style with Wayne Dodd and Stanley Plumly, Kinnell observes that Whitman “seeks in the music of his verse what he calls the ‘perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movements of animals, ’ and his lines have that — they are exactly right yet there’s no way to systemize them.”

A Whitmanesque “rectitude and insouciance” is palpable in “Saint Francis and the Sow.” There is a certain “insouciance” or nonchalance to the lack of stanza breaks, uneven line lengths, and discursive voice. But there is also a definite “rectitude” or discipline that guides the 24 lines into one coherent, logically-structured sentence. The poem’s deductive reasoning, from general to specific, takes place almost invisibly through a strategic placement of images and punctuation. The more abstract first half of the poem is actually two independent clauses. The first four lines introduce the concept of self-blessing. A semicolon then introduces a qualification of that idea and an elaboration on the central image of the bud, all of which prepare the reader for the illustration of that concept in the poem’s second half.

Like an icon, Saint Francis stands at the very center of the poem on a line by himself, just as the bud and sow similarly, and significantly, occupy the very first and last lines of the poem. The act of blessing then ripples along the second half of the poem through prepositional phrases minimally punctuated by commas, as though not to disturb the flow of healing energy. At the end of the penultimate, or next-to-last line, a colon announces at last what the sow “began remembering”: her own “long, perfect loveliness.”

The description of the mother pig is quite sensuous, not only because Kinnell uses words that employ sight, sound, smell, and touch, but because the very patterns of sounds within and among words become physical things-in-themselves when read aloud. The explosive “sp” sounds of line 19 thrust their way into the portrait much like the spine itself. The “ur” sound which begins in “earth,” the pig’s elemental home, occurs over and over, in “earthen,” “fodder,” “curl,” “spurting,” and “shuddering.” The dark vowels in “fodder and slops” are at one with the character of compost, and the ordinarily unlovely “uh” sound becomes “perfectly lovely” when repeated in the context of the sow’s motherly abundance, her milk “shuddering” into the mouths of “sucking” piglets. As Kinnell’s poem reveals, “free verse” is not liberation from form and discipline. It requires an ear trained to the rhythm and resonance of language, and an imagination awake to the power of both reason and emotion.