Allen Ginsberg’s An Eastern Ballad:
I speak of love that comes to mind:
The moon is faithful, although blind;
She moves in thought she cannot speak.
Perfect care has made her bleak.
I never dreamed the sea so deep,
The earth so dark; so long my sleep,
I have become another child.
I wake to see the world go wild.
———-
I’m seeing this poem as the movement from a kind of innocence to experience, from being cosseted to becoming unbridled. It could also suggest being on the cusp of the movement from one kind of poetry, stock and conventional, to perhaps something unbounded and unformed in poetry.
In the first verse—maybe—he thinks of love, and what comes to mind is the moon, a traditional image and symbol for love and lovers. So maybe in his conventional conception of love, it’s faithful but blind—blind to what though: maybe other possibilities in love beyond faithfulness, and maybe beyond heterosexual faithfulness.
The moon moves in his thought—he “speaks of love that comes to mind”—but he can’t say anything about it but what is conventional, traditional and accept ed/able. The comfort of conformity to the acceptable, which is “perfect” in a stultified way, has made the moon, which is an image and symbol of love and lovers, bleak, which is to say, bare and cold.
(I don’t read this poem biographically necessarily, but Ginsberg was gay and him coming to terms with being gay may inform a dimension of what this poem may be thought to go to.)
But now, second verse, he sees the sea’s depths—and consider here the moon affecting the sea, and consider ocean depths beneath the surface; and he sees the earth’s darkness, maybe the experience side of the coin of existence, the other side innocence. He sees the dark side, wildness, radicalism, against convention’s strictures.
He has been asleep in his innocence, in his conventionality. (Btw, the depths of the sea is sometimes a metaphor for the unconscious.) Now he’s woken to become someone different, a child of the universe, another one, a different one. Now the world is wild for him.
As for the title, I’m not sure. The sun rises in the East. Does it rises as he wakens from his dream of darkness and depths from a sleep so long to the new-for-him wild world? And the ballad is a song and verse form inherited from England by America. Is the Eastern Ballad a merger of the two?
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taught me more than my class. i loved it!
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