Question about Duncan

Consider “The Structure of Rime I,” by Robert Duncan, which has a “she,” named in this poem as “a woman who resembles the sentence” that the author is in the process of blindly reformatting. His conversation with this woman seems of an introspective bent; she speaks in response to his assertion that he is her “master, who [comes] to // serve.” Her words are italicized, not quoted, so we know the text stems from Duncan himself; her speech is repetitive, the sequence of rhetorical “Do I [not’s]” lead into the answer to her question “Why” do you not “take the actual world for granted.” There is a clear progression from speaker to speaker; first Duncan, then the woman, and so on, and she has the final say, focusing her tirade on his desecration of literary “Law.” “Rime II” is of a similar phrasing, but the woman vanishes; instead, we have the image of a “Lion” as a “Messenger,” but in this case Duncan shifts his focus to consider not the sentence but the source of the sentence. The final line, “the meaning of the music of the spheres” stems from the clearly dated notion that the heavens in their motion generated “music.”


The words and phrasing sound purposefully archaic. The man was writing in the 1960s, after the Modernists we’ve been reading, and yet he speaks with structure, with purpose, in words that promote the kind of “high-sounding” interpretation that Moore detested. I found it amazing that a post-Modernist writer could bring himself to give the reader even the semblance of a conclusion, a final defining thought. Yet, in “Often I am permitted to return to a meadow” that is exactly what he does. Duncan states “that is a place of first permission, // everlasting omen of what is,” bringing together the focus of “permission” and “eternal” places with the new, fully interpretable “omen of what is.” He even gives the reader structural landmarks, capitalizing the first word of each sentence – having sentences in the first place – it’s like he cares if the reader is following along. The poem itself, its setting and its thematic imagery, are meant to be decipherable; his modern perspective only comes into play through the references to “she,” the “Queen Under The Hill,” the only reference in the poem that is even partially indecipherable.


I don’t fully understand the literary regression; is Duncan trying to make a point or merely appease the average reader with 95%-decipherability? Is Duncan taking the opposite route of Williams, lulling us into a sense of complacence instead of provoking us into reading further? That sounds too paranoid; but ultimately, the older tone of his writing is what makes it stand out in the midst of the modern literature we have been reading, and knowing the reason behind his tone will greatly help me understand his poems.