3 hours ago
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The Man in the Wind
The man in the wind
who keeps us awake tonight
is not the black monk of the wind
cowering in corners and crevices,
or the white face under the streetlight
stricken with the guilt of his noise,
or the great slapping hand of the wind
beating and beating the rainy alleyways
while the torturer proceeds with the interrogation
and the prisoner’s risen voice
bleeds over cymbals and timpani.
Listen.
His dream of the wind
is the anger that tunes his mind
and wears his skin.
His cry is not what the wind says
but the fear he lives in.
Nor is the wind less human for being wilder,
or being, as now, a roar, a continuous roar
as of waves where there is no shore,
none, and no inland or headland to hinder
the pour of dark water over still more water.
And now it is drowning our polite island,
the little free ports with their spylights alerted,
ships, towerblocks, cranes, steeples, pylons
the carious skyline gone with his last horizon
to a clean pure end,
to the only end in this night of the uncreated
where the wind’s wind, loosened by his sleep
to the force of itself,
moves without meaning or being —
a wave that began before beginning,
that will not end after the end.
From her 1982 collection, Minute by Glass Minute, The Man in the Wind sets out to find a figure who is not entirely beyond myth, but without the power of myth to exert means of understanding and control. Perhaps the poet was challenging herself initially to find the visible equivalent of the pareidolic Man in the Moon, often associated by English tradition with Sabbath-breakers and drunks. But there’s no nursery-friendly reassurance or comedy in the images Stevenson evokes in stanza one in order to reject them. The poem goes on to work out a denser portrayal of the man in the wind, where the figure retains political resonance, and its character as a threat to the civilised achievements and values of “our polite island”. It becomes a force of implacable nature, “without meaning or being”.
In the first stanza, the “black monk” may refer to the bringer of delusory insight in Chekhov’s short story The Black Monk. A “mirage” or “phantom”, always swathed in black, this visitor convinces the story’s human protagonist, Kovrin, of its actual existence in nature, and persuades Kovrin of his own super-human genius. (The whole story, translated into English by REC Long, can be read here.)
The monk is found by Stevenson to be a redundant personification of the wind. Inadequate, too, are the more politically weighted images of power and abuse, which evolve from the cowering “white face under the streetlight” and culminate in images and sounds of torture, when “the prisoner’s risen voice / bleeds over cymbals and timpani”. The speaker rejects both the extremes of superhuman power and human debasement, although after-images from the stanza haunt the rest of the poem.
Rhythmically, the second stanza suggests a moment when the wind drops and the noise is replaced by something else, perhaps the ability of a mind to hear its own thoughts. The (necessary) interpretation of the man in the wind is the man himself, in all his “anger” and “fear” as the wind rises once more, and emits “… a roar, a continuous roar” that will become human.
A particular skill of the poem is the composition of its soundscape: sparing rhymes, attention to assonance, the breath-like patternings of long and short lines that unselfconsciously reinforce the natural vision, the connection of wind and breath. The poem’s engineering insists on a certain interplay of beginnings and endings; it echoes the rhythm of the human mind, both in its lineation and its drive to understanding. Stevenson also keeps the larger breath-flow of the wind intact: she lets us hear the syntax-defying roar, a crescendo of sound unlike, though not entirely unrelated to, the “melancholy, long withdrawing roar” of the Sea of Faith in Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach.
This wind-sound, compounded by the comparison to “waves where there is no shore”, shrinks the human time-span, the whole hypothetical time-horizon and the myth of beginnings and endings. It brilliantly “uncreates” the world, and makes us hear the terrifyingly unmanned and existential gale. Although the poem might be read, partly, as an American poet’s examination of the political weather in her adopted Britain of the early 1980s, its reach towards a concept of nature is immeasurably vaster.
