The Lodger
Fiona Sampson
You could figure it as a trapdoor,
blur of hinge and
down
into the unconscious of this stranger
moving around your garden like a trap—
making all the greens unstable
as the warble of nausea come bang up to greet you.
Bang to rights
is how he'd like to have your house. Cuckoo,
wool-wearing garden-dweller,
new-age Salvationist, holy among your cow-parsley
and roses.
Meanwhile, the unaccustomed heat.
Meanwhile, a sky tunnelling upward—
sense of proportion—golden section
of elder hedge; then the disgraceful paddock gone wild.
A more elusive poem than Charles Reznikoff’s, see immediately below.
My analysis:
The poem starts informally, idiomatically, “You could figure it.” So it begins with explaining how the reader could figure; it also begins with the how the speaker thinks about it but generalizes her figuring into how anyone, “you,” could figure it just as she does. The figuring also suggests making poetry of it, figure it, make images of it, so to say, whatever “it” is.
“it” can be figured and figured out as a trap door. We could fall through it. Quickly or dizzily too, the hinge is a “blur” as we go whizzing or dizzily past it. And we could figure that we fall into the unconscious of it. This “stranger” is “it.”
So, a couple of enigmas among others:
How is it, the stranger, a trapdoor;
How do we fall into the stranger’s unconscious?
My idea is that it, the stranger, is like a trapdoor for us. Its presence is a shock that entraps/traps/entices us. But into what? Its unconscious? How can that be? Is it that we don’t see what is there: rather, we see what we see is there? In that, a stranger, something external to us, merges in us as we see not what is there as such but rather what we make of it, how we see it, perceiving as informed by all of what we are, what is beneath the surface of us, our unconscious.
On this basis, falling into “the unconscious of this stranger” is to fall into our own.
And on this basis, coming upon something strange to us, a stranger, traps us into immediately going inside ourselves to come to sense what it is. It’s a trapdoor to that trapping simply in virtue of what the unbidden “stranger” is to us.
So, it may be that it, the stranger, takes up space in our heads, is lodged there, is a lodger there just as the stranger seems to have lodged itself/himself on our property, taking up space there, indeed unsettling everything. And for yet another us, the stranger is now lodged in our heads as readers, unsettling us as we try to make sense of its presence in the poem.
The conceit of the trap as involving our instantaneous inner then outer journeys continues by those journeys’ result, our apprehension of it trapping the speaker’s garden, which we can figure is our own. As the stranger moves, it seems to us, in our figuring, the garden writhes in his entrapment of it, “making all the greens unstable” with its havoc-causing. So we get “the warble of nausea come bang up to greet you.” “Warble” nicely with onomatopoeia catches the inner sensation of a wave of nausea suddenly afflicting us, inflicting itself inside us, “come bang up to greet you.”
The vernacularity of some of the language, “come bang up,” juxtaposed with some of the more formal language, “the unconscious,” and with some of the poetic language, “blur of hinge,” “the greens unstable,” “warble of nausea” capture conventional everyday us mixed with intellectual, learned us, and mixed with the figuring us, all remaking reality.
The nausea that comes “bang to greet you” is of a piece with figuring gone wild. For we might imagine that the stranger, now a he, “bang to rights,” would like to have our house.
“bang to rights” is suggestive. We imagine he assumes it’s his complete right to take what we principally own, our house, just as he seems to us to have lodged himself in our garden.
But also “bang to rights” might suggest our uneasiness, perhaps guilt, over we what we as haves have and what the stranger as a have not has not.
After all, we come to see him, as “cuckoo” in a ragged wool coat of some kind, worn, it turns out, in “unaccustomed heat,” a crazy person igniting our sense of his denied rights, his right to have some of what we have and he doesn’t.
Then our figuring—thinking, imagining, in wild speculation—runs on further, turning sharply from the bedraggled assertion of rights to a,
“new-age Salvationist, holy among your cow-parsley
and roses.”
With this, figuring has reached its apex.
Now, a certain detached, calm, rational sobriety asserts itself in the poem’s last four lines. Vernacularity ends. The language is now formal
“Meanwhile” which is to say, now or at the time, and is also to say, background becomes foreground, becomes actuality, there is “unaccustomed heat.” The actuality of the heat intrudes on and moves to the side all the figuring. It makes itself momentarily predominant.
Metaphor returns with the second “Meanwhile” as we have the metaphor of a sky “tunnelling upward.” We can think of the thickness, the enervating heaviness, of “unaccustomed heat.” We can then imagine the sky trying in effect to dig up through the heat to reach its own lightness, likened to digging underground or through massive rock to create a new opening.
The poem’s end with the juxtaposition of order—“sense of proportion” in tandem with managed prettiness, “golden section of elder hedge”—and a kind of subsuming finale—chaos, but, then again, chaos as observed and understood —“then the disgraceful paddock gone wild.” Paradoxically here, the speaker intellectually notes the prevailing chaos.
So, might we theorize another aspect of lodging given the shift to the more formal language in the last four lines right after “your cow-parsley and roses”?
That aspect may be this: with the conversational vernacular—“You could figure it…”—gone, do the last four lines, with their echo of Wallace Stevens, signify a return to more conventional, formal poetry?
If so, then has what’s gone before with its colloquial conversational quality lodged within the formal frame provided by the last four lines? Might it be that what precedes them is a poem within a poem?
The poem ends with “then” leading into the chaos of “the disgraced paddock gone wild.” Does this last portion of the last line recapitulate the unsettling shock of the stranger in the garden as evident in the wildness of the figuring welling up from the unconscious?
Therefore, in sum, The Lodger immerses itself in how we might understand the unfolding of responses triggered by the shock of a strange, seemingly crazy man, seemingly come from out of nowhere, taking up lodging, so to say, in one’s garden and in one’s consciousness and imagination.
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