A Reading Of Charles Reznikoff’s Poem, The city breaks in houses to the sea, uneasy with waves

The city breaks in houses to the sea, uneasy with waves, 

Charles Reznikoff

The city breaks in houses to the sea, uneasy with waves,
And the lonely sun clashes like brass cymbals.

In the streets truck-horses, muscles sliding under the steaming hides,
Pound the sparks flying about their hooves;
And fires, those gorgeous beasts, squirm in the furnaces,
Under the looms weaving us.

At evening by cellars cold with air of rivers at night,
We, whose lives are only a few words,
Watch the young moon leaning over the baby at her breast
And the stars small to our littleness.

The slender trees stand alone in the fields
Between the roofs of the far town
And the wood far away like a low hill.

In the vast open
The birds are faintly overheard.

My view of it:

The first stanza sets a scene from a distant perspective. It sees the city as a whole and it sets its edge, its breaking, suggesting the city itself breaking as in the break of day as does the day itself—daybreak, and also the houses like waves crashing or breaking on the shore. 

So “uneasy with waves” may suggest this imagined action of the houses and more directly the waves crashing on the shore. In that, “uneasy” suggests a foreboding, ominously creeping note, importing the speaker’s ominous sense of how he takes in the scene. 

Adding to the foreboding sense is the image of the sun clashing like brass cymbals, suggesting an analogue in onomatopoeic sound—clashes—to the what at times seems like a visible shock to us, the sudden glare of the sun as it breaks into the day.

The scene then in the second stanza moves into some of the business of the city. We’re put in view of the street and horse drawn carts or wagons, horse-trucks—with a striking and revealing image of the horses working—“muscles sliding under the steaming hides.” The horses are in labour, their hooves making sparks as they pound the pavement.   We might imagine a very hot day coming from the clashing lonely sun in the connected imagery of fire and heat in “steaming,” “sparks,” “fires” and “furnaces.” 

The perspective dances. We see the horses from the outside but moving to particular observation—hooves and sparks. Then the observation moves to the overarching and somewhat admiring, “fires” to “gorgeous beasts” that “squirm in the “furnaces”—the stifling heat of the day making the scene an environment of furnaces, as the sun bounces off the the pavement in more intense heat and as the pavement itself is brought to a boil—to, most overarching, “Under the looms weaving us,.”

This fuses looming, as in what ominously awaits us—looming ahead, and some design, forces weaving us, which sounds lyrical and contrasts with the harshness, though altogether something determinate.

The clash of the brass cymbal lonely sun is part of what joins the first two stanzas, generating the heat and fire that runs through the second stanza.

Then, next stanza, day becomes night and heat turns to cold as again after the overarching, particularity emerges, “an evening by cellars cold,” as we are grounded back onto the street and its houses and their cellars. 

We can imagine at night winds coming off an adjacent river (and the sea?) as the focus now turns for the first time to us, and we’re “downsized,” “We, whose lives are only a few words,” as though the commas bracketing this clause in punctuation signify how bracketed and small we are from an overarching point of view, what we’re only, it may seem: but there’s more.

Again the perspective shifts abruptly: we, comprised by our words, see a young moon, a sliver of moon, and imagine it maternally leaning over the baby it holds at her breast. And in an amazing line we watch “the stars small to our littleness,” fusing with some complexity our smallness yet with consciousness and imagination we create metaphors and imagery with what we see;  and we can reduce the size of the stars in our perception of them as small from our vantage point in watching them, “small to our littleness.”

The contrast of sun and moon and what is wrought from them by us is among what makes the first and this stanza cohere. 

And then next stanza, like in Hemingway, the scenes rolls out from immediate particular to the general. The city’s breaking houses structure our vision narrowing it to see only lonely slender trees in fields past the city, cut off in their wholeness from us by the roofs of the far town and then furthest away, far away, a “wood” seen “like a low hill.” 

Out there in the far away vast open, unlike the circumscribed and circumscribing-us congested city we faintly overhear birds, as though we’re listening in to something we shouldn’t or shouldn’t be able to, but nevertheless can still get an ear’s glimpse of.

Running through the poem is the idea of making poetry, with uneasy or unconventional breaks, with the poet as the muse weaving with his loom the words he’s made up of, of an encompassing vision of it all that delights:

in the poetic shifts; 

in the ideas made flesh in language; 

in the sheer poetry of what encompasses: 

overview; and 

particularity. 

And the encompassing vision delights in what take the measure of moon and stars and transform them, and in what can hear, overhear, a distant song, when it might be thought we can’t.

So, in a nutshell, what binds this poem? 

My view, the paradox of us as comprised by only a few words but by them we take in through art varieties of shifting perspectives and the moods they evoke; and by them we transform in size and meaning what surrounds us.