What is an analysis of Brainstorm by Howard Nemerov?

Answer 1

Nemerov's poem "Brainstorm" indicates his propensity for the ancient view of the poet's role: this seemingly simple poem about a man who witnesses a rainstorm can also be read as an analogy for the poetic process. In the course of the poem, the rainstorm outside the man's window gradually becomes the "brainstorm" within the poet's head. In the opening lines, the man sits in an upstairs room, listening to the creaks and groans produced throughout his house by the rising wind.

As the wind grows stronger, the man begins to hear the crows, whose horny feet "scratched on the slate" of the roof of his house, incorporating a pun that suggests an allusion to writing, which could also be described as "scratching on slate." Ronald Palumbo, in a note on "Brainstorm," observes that the arrival of the crows, scavengers by nature and traditionally emblems of death, "suggests the process of dissolution and decay that is inevitably part of the cycle of nature." Their arrival on the roof of his house thus signifies a concurrent arrival of the poet's awareness of his own mortality. Palumbo asserts that the poem's final line, "Inside his head he heard the stormy crows," suggests that the poem's theme can therefore be interpreted as "the reflective power of the mind in the act of apprehending the possibility of its own dissolution."[5] However, a more comprehensive reading of the line would indicate that the poem also illustrates the way in which the individual's mind draws on the "mindfulness" in nature to form ideas about the world.

The poet's "brainstorm" indeed involves the sudden recognition of the ultimate inseparability of external and internal natures: "The secret might be out:/ Houses are only trees stretched on the rack./ And once the crows knew, all nature would know." As the poem progresses, the poet actually perceives himself as the house, witnessing the same incursion of nature that his house had undergone: "He might be dead,/ It seemed, and all the noises underneath/ Be but the cooling of the sinews, veins,/ Juices, and sodden sacks suddenly let go." He then imagines his own "ruins of wiring, his burst mains," indicating that the dissolution of poet and house are inseparable processes.

Finally, although he had become accustomed to viewing himself as the product of civilization rather than of nature, he now envisions himself as a full participant in the processes of nature:

The rainy wind had been set free to blow

Until the green uprising and mob rule

That ran the world had taken over him,

Split him like seed, and set him in the school

Where any crutch can learn to be a limb.

Thus, by the end of the poem, a quite different "mob rule," that of nature, and not of society, controls him.

Rain and wind are both traditional symbols of poetic inspiration. Here, the poet's brainstorm is not merely the product of the skill of the individual poet acting in isolation from the world, but rather, the inspiration overtakes and shapes him, rendering him a fit instrument for conveying the essence of nature. The poem suggests that poetry does not originate in the individual consciousness alone; rather, the artist simultaneously shapes and is shaped by the world through his poetic rendering of it. Both Nemerov and Barfield would contend that human consciousness is inseparably linked with the consciousness that is inherent in Nature.

Nemerov strives to depict the inseparability of these two kinds of consciousness; the individual poet's mind can never be separated from the mindfulness in things, nor, obviously, can their inherent mindfulness be recognized but for the poet whose mind mirrors them. The mutual inexclusiveness of these elements is illustrated in the final few lines of "The Blue Swallows": "The poem is not the point, finding again the world,/ that is the point, where loveliness adorns intelligible things,/ because the mind's eye lit the sun." While it is commonly accepted that the light from the sun made human life possible, Nemerov reverses the terms to suggest that our origins are mental to the same extent that they are physical.

Nemerov often refers to the poem as a model for the mind: ". . . a poem is not so much a thought as it is a mind: talk with it, and it will talk back, telling you many things that you might have thought for yourself but somehow didn't until it brought them together. Doubtless a poem is a much simplified model for the mind."[6] When Nemerov refers to the poem as a model for mind, he does not merely refer to the individual mind of the artist--but to "mind" in a larger, more comprehensive sense. For example, in "The Painter Dreaming in the Scholar's House," Nemerov emphasizes that the painter does not merely express that which is in his own mind; he also reflects the "mind" that surrounds him: "He is the painter of the human mind/ Finding and faithfully reflecting the mindfulness/ That is in things, and not the things themselves."

Recognition that nature is qualitative as well as quantitative accompanies an awareness of the mindfulness in nature. For example, if one thinks of colors simply as series of waves or vibrations, one overlooks the actual experience of color--the emotions and ideas that are associated with various colors. Nemerov's many depictions of the landscape, although they are drawn with a scientific exactitude, emphasize qualities in the natural world that are more often associated with activities that are conventionally regarded as purely "mental" or "abstract," such as writing or music or mathematics. He speaks of the landscape's rhythms, measures and pauses, as though nature were a piece of music or a poem waiting to be heard. As he describes the writing process in a poem simply entitled "Writing," he exclaims, "It is as though the world/ were a great writing."