In the Face of the Poem

First of all we should notice the first stanza of the first version. There is an

enormous flaw on it from an imagist perspective. Where is “there”? Is it here where I

am sitting now as opposed to the present location of the poet? Is it beside this very poet?

Does it even make reference to the place where the poet is? “There” is everywhere and

nowhere.

In the second version, the first stanza is somewhat more accurate. In the same

way she sits with tears on her check, the word “tears” itself falls from the first verse of

the poem to the second, as if the word was the tear itself. It’s somewhat hard to be as

exact with a metapoetic image as that. Also, we already know that she is crying. We can

somewhat see a girl sitting there crying. The second stanza reveals even more.

Not only the second stanza of the second version unveils to us that the “on” is

somewhat a way to keep the flux of the tears (they both and with on, which also

suggests it goes on), it also reveals that in the same way that the tears roll way down the

cheeks, the cheeks itself are below the tears. Again, metapoetic and way imagetic. It is

as if he is creating a face at the same time he is wring the poem, or, to put it even more

radically, that the poem is the face itself.

The third stanza keeps the imagery. It would appear - as I’ve already suggested -

that he is describing the scene from up to down, so it’s only logical that, if we have any

hands holding the head, the hands should make an appearance now. In a way we could

say that the poem is also following or adopting the perspective of the tears, rolling way

down uninterrupted. This is only possible, however, because of his usage of the free

verse and of the concentrations of words. Not only the words are exact, they are way

concentrated and they move towards the goal of making an image of the “object” as we

can see is his precision to describe in the same way a video would, i.e. as if it was taking

a shot from up to down.

Fourth and fifth stanzas manage to continue this even more, especially the

precision part. It’s the child’s nose, not any nose but this one child’s nose that presses

against the glass. He is not in any lap, he is in the crying girl’s lap. We have no

information whatsoever about their relation, but this one, and this is more than enough

for us to picture the scene. We do not need to know if they are mother and son, strangers

or anything. He gives us the exact measure of the words for the exact scene he sees. A

young woman is at the window. She is crying. She has a child on her lap. The child is

pressing his nose against the glass of the window. Different from what I just did,

though, we are gradually introduced to the painting of the scene in the same way we

would if we saw a painting in the making.