Olson begins the poem with a question about the (him) self. How can the self stay abstract, strong, strung, and cold, when confronted with this hell and thicket?First, one must ask what the self is confronted by in this hell.
Obviously the self has been knocked down in line twelve, and something has obstructed the self from where it must go. However, there is the possibility of escape. At the moment the self, the speaker deams, may be able to raise himself up out of this hell, this thicket. The problem is the self is "imageless" and "reluctant". He cannot escape or even transform the hell he is in if he does not know who he is. Which is the very question he will eventually ask. He becomes abstract to even himself. The self is its own thicket of questions, of fear at the inability to know itself. It grows as he grows, changes as he changes. The self is the prison and the prisoner, its own afflicter.
He has, "isolated, observed, picked over, measured, raised / as though a word, an acuracy were a pincer!" He knows the self more completely and acurately than ever. The thicket, the self, however, has grown now knows what he knows which only keeps him from raising out of the thicket.
Obviously the self has been knocked down in line twelve, and something has obstructed the self from where it must go. However, there is the possibility of escape. At the moment the self, the speaker deams, may be able to raise himself up out of this hell, this thicket. The problem is the self is "imageless" and "reluctant". He cannot escape or even transform the hell he is in if he does not know who he is. Which is the very question he will eventually ask. He becomes abstract to even himself. The self is its own thicket of questions, of fear at the inability to know itself. It grows as he grows, changes as he changes. The self is the prison and the prisoner, its own afflicter.
He has, "isolated, observed, picked over, measured, raised / as though a word, an acuracy were a pincer!" He knows the self more completely and acurately than ever. The thicket, the self, however, has grown now knows what he knows which only keeps him from raising out of the thicket.
II
The poem halts after the truth has been uttered. "But hell now / is not exterior, is not to be gotten out of, is the coat of your own self." He cannot move. The battlefield is in him. As each old self dies it changes into a new self, and a higher thicket. He is "shaped" and "carved" unable to know himself completely in order to be free of the self, because he is constantly changing. He is constantly, "moving off / into the soil, on his own bones." He must move "without wavering". This is demanded by nature of the self, to move, to change, to waver unwaveringly.
Olson begins with an ignorance is bliss tone of voice, yet follows himself into the realization of an inescapable hell. His awareness of the self has trapped him in indeterminancy. The poem reflects this indeterminancy because the poem is, "precise as hell is, precise / as any words."
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