Quatrains In Growing Points

I feel I could be turned to ice If this goes on, if this goes on. I feel I could be buried twice And still the death not yet be done. I feel I could be turned to fire If there could be no end to this. I know within me such desire No kiss could satisfy , no kiss.

I feel I could be turned to stone A solid block not carved at all, Because I feel so much alone. I could be grave-stone or a wall.

But better to be turned to earth Where other things at least can grow. I could be then a part of birth, Passive , not knowing how to know. (314)
The four rhymed quatrains are controlled successively by images of ice, fire, stone, and earth exact images which symbolize particular moods and feelings relating to the overwhelming desire for oblivion. This single poem sums up and epitomizes many of the inchoate feelings that were diffused among the various poems of Relationships. “I Feel” is representative of the best poems in Growing Points, poems which show that Jennings has achieved her new voice and a new authority.
The poems in Growing Points encompass personal themes, as well as a broad range of
subject including nature, religion, mythology and history. The volume opens with several sonnets which use images from nature to symbolize attitudes of strength and resilience, attitudes which contrast with the passivity and vulnerability so pervasive in Relationships.
The first poem, “Beech,” celebrates the qualities of strength and tenacity by commending the fragile leaves and branches which survive into winter:
They will not go. These leaves insist on staying.
Coinage like theirs looked frail six weeks ago. What hintings at , excitement of delaying, Almost as if some richer fruits could grow. If leaves hung on against each swipe of storm If branches bent but still did not give way. (307)
The speaker, who has been appealing to the visual senses, enters the poem at this point, appeals to the tactile sense, and draws attention to the way in which the leaf is beginning to function figuratively as a metaphor for endurance: “The leaves are warm./ I picked one from the pavement and it lay// With borrowed shining on my Winter hand.” She shows how the fragile leaves and branches work on the imagination through the senses, and she describes the effect in specific physical terms: “Persistence of this nature sends the pulse/ Beating more rapidly.”(307)
Jennings draws attention to the devices used to create poetic effects and to the poetic effects themselves by using a word “coinage” which sounds like foliage and suggests the medium of exchange both for the tree and for the poet.
The poet coins words and create new meanings, constantly renewing the “coinage” which “looked frail six weeks ago.” In the final rhetorical question, Jennings suggests that ideas will continue to be precipitated and embodied even by “utterly bare” branches which will “seem like something else.” Thoughts and insights beneath the surface of consciousness, “now half forgotten,” “will be aroused by the “bare branches” and will take on a different form: “mo part of a
tree.”
Jennings emphasizes the way in which poetic diction, organic metaphors. Sensuous images, and rhetorical questions enable the poet to link the transforming power of nature to the transforming power of art. Her concern with poetic devices and with questions relating to poetic composition are related to the renewed sense of intellectual and emotional vitality which animates the poems she writes at this time.
In “Growing,” the poetic speaker seems to be addressing another poet, advising her to mediate between the inclination to wait passively for the moment of inspiration and the tendency to “Tamper with touching.” She employs organic imagery to advocate an attitude of creative receptivity which is flexible enough to accommodate shifting perceptions and frustrated teleological designs during the “long rummaging with words, with things.” As she explains in Let’s Have Some Poetry, “the poet is neither wholly inspired, nor on the other hand, wholly conscious of exactly what he is doing when he writes a poem” (Jennings, Let’s Have Some Poetry 110). When a poem is written, however, it “leaves you and it sings.” Estranged from her autonomous creation, the poet “must attend to other things” until something else initiates “the coming together of thought and feeling, or word and image which constitute the creation of poem” (110)
The organic metaphors which structure “Beech” and “Growing” also structure “Grapes,” another sonnet which celebrates the resilience of the imagination and its ability to transform experience. The ripe grapes are “the sign/ Of harvest and Of Sacrament,” “an invincible “knot of juice held in” until they are ready to be transformed into wine, and the blood of Christ. The speaker shares the other speakers’ concerns with premature tampering and warns against touching the grapes.
The next group of poems is especially religious in theme and subject matter are related to the other poems in Growing Points through their emphasis on the strength and resilience of the human spirit. In the four main stanzas of “Mediation of the Nativity,” Jennings gives poetic form to a conventional religious subject in a highly idiosyncratic way: “All gods and goddesses, all looked up to / And argued with and threatened.” “All that fear” has disappeared “in fables coming true, “in the serene image of “A woman and a child”: “Placating prophets talked but here are truths/ All men have only praised/ Before in dreams.” (317)