Roger Mitchell - When the Stones Revolted

Nothing I know wants nothing, even stones.
I’ve seen them lying in the riverbed,
exhausted, toward the end of summer,
and the river has thinned down to a film
of pure transparency, when the stones
revolted and rose against the river banks,
which moved against them with such rootedness
and loamy weight, they fell back shouting
to the stars from which they’d come, don’t leave us.
Which the stars heard, but only faintly,
and when they shone next, poured down on them
a trickle of something the stones almost
remembered. Though it was a long way off,
and the air was hazy, so they said nothing.

Today’s piece appears first in Roger Mitchell’s 2007 collection Half/Mask. If you haven’t had the chance to read Mitchell before, this is a great place to start. It also appeared in his 2008 new and selected titled Lemon Peeled the Moment Before. I first came across Mitchell back in the heyday of poetry blogspots sometime in 2008. He had one (which still exists, though he hasn’t posted anything since then) where he offered up what felt like mini lectures on poetry and form. I was starving for real academic engagement with the subject of poetry, so his blog was a godsend.

Mitchell opens up the poem with a line that demands a slow reread, which is fine because the individual sounds force us to slow down and carefully consider them. “Nothing I know wants nothing, even stones.” The semantic break happens just after “wants” and gives our ears the chance to hear the symmetry of the line: the repetition of nothing and the echoing long o’s in know and stones. This line could have been said in a more direct and simple way, but it would have lost some of its soul. The speaker thrusts himself to the center of the piece, making clear that this is less about a concrete truth of the world and more about his perception. The desire of the stones becomes less about the stones and more a projection of the person talking to us. There is also a metrical repetition at play in these first couple of lines. They each open with a trochee (NOTHing and I’VE seen) that gives way to a series of smooth iambs. This results in something that feels melodic despite being constructed of pretty heavy sounds.

This all gets disrupted by the third line. It’s still five feet, but now the flow has been interrupted by an extra unstressed syllable stretching out the middle of the line and drifting off in the end. This shift helps to sell the exhaustion of the stones. Add to that the concept of the summer’s end, an end to the extra activity that comes with warm weather and the line itself feels tired. I’m tired after reading it out loud.

Mitchell creates a rhythm in the fourth line with the inclusion of the auxiliary verb has. He could have said “the river thinned down to a film” but this would have created a speed that takes away from the tone he’s built. Instead, he pivots off of these monosyllables that lead to a rhetorical tapering “and the river has thinned down to a film” and an enjambment that builds towards the “pure transparency.” Then there’s the caesura after that transparency, where the speaker snatches us away from the image to focus on the action of the scene instead. The comma marks a divide between the ghostly water and the emboldened stones.

The attempts at uprising are short lived and another caesura plays the role of an emotional shift in the 8th line when the stones fail. This is the emotional core of the poem and the pacing helps us to understand that this is not an energy filled rebellion but more like the myoclonic jerks of a thoroughly defeated entity. The narrative collapse to the perspective of the stones in their plea to the stars is packaged in a grammatical collapse within the line. This speech, important enough to warrant a frame shift, wasn’t powerful enough to earn quotation marks. Without punctuation to bracket it, their cry blends into narration, as if even their protest has surrendered to the grammar of the world.

Sidebar here: if you’re ever very interested in reading more about psycholinguistics and how small syntactic changes actually alter the cognitive demand, you should check out the work of Dr. Fernanda Ferreira at UC Davis. The Ferreira Lab has pumped out an absurd amount of papers that will send you into all sorts of thought spirals on language and all the things you take for granted when speaking/listening/reading/whatever.

Back to the poem. There’s a temporal delay built into the response of the stars. The speaker tells us “when they shone next” to emphasize that the stars responded on their time, not at the need of the stones. There’s a deeper implication here. Cosmic help doesn’t come when you beg (or demand), it comes in its own rhythm. There’s more cosmic fuckery in the contradictory language of “poured down” and “a trickle of something.” The pouring loses its volume to instead become a word describing grace. Emphasis shifts onto the down as if we are being reminded that the lowly stones are lucky to be receiving whatever the stars decide to give them. On the topic of that gift “a trickle of something the stones almost/ remembered” sounds awfully hesitant and vague. Whatever the stars offer, it pales against the great need of the stones.

Mitchell ends the poem with inarticulateness, a deeply human condition. The stones aren’t silent because they don’t have the words to speak, they are silent because of the emotional weight of feeling the vague memory of something that once meant everything, but now has slipped too far into the past to speak of comfortably.