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Helen Vendler observes that "the constitutive trope of the ode "To Autumn" is enumeration, the trope of plenitude" and, indeed, the poem is "o'er-brimm'd" (l.11) with a catalog of fruits, nuts, flowers, grains, and animals. This abundance appears formally, as well, in the dense textures of Keats's poetic line, in the subtleties of sound and rhythm, and, as H.T. Kirby-Smith adds, "in a wealth of vocalic resonances, echoes, and reflections" (225) that finally turn the poem over to music and the ambivalent songs of autumn in the final stanza.... Stipe, too, loads his poetic line with an abundance of carefully considered sound elements, and creates a speaker whose cornucopia of spices and scents -- referencing, as he does, bergamot, vetiver, ginger, lemon, indigo, coriander stem, rose of hay -- articulates his own pursuit of sensuous immediacy and expression of "the richness of this transient existence" (Kirby-Smith 249).... What neither writer or speaker possesses in abundance, though, is time, and thus each lyric proceeds with the painful awareness that what now is "loaded," "swelled," and "o'er-brimm'd" must finally fall, turn to "last oozings," or reach the ocean. Amidst all the temporal and spatial movement, the poetics of each lyric also ironically strive to produce stoppages and stasis, seeking to arrest the flow of time with challenging syntax, rhythmic variation, and metaphor.
Stipe, of course, manages the progression of time most obviously with his masterful rhythmic variations and metrical anomalies. In addition, the obliqueness of some of his phrasings (e.g., “bergamot and vetiver / run through my head and fall away” (l. 17-18)), the tactical breaks with syntactic convention (e.g., “river poet search naïveté”), and the Hopkins-like coined phrases (e.g., “bayberry moon” (l. 8)) all serve to slow down the reader’s experience of time, and thus work brilliantly with the thematic content of “Find the River” even as they work against those rhythmic elements that sweep one along in its current. As a lyric, then, “Find the River” stops, rearranges, and even at one level transcends the problems of time in the way that poems can; as a musical composition and auditory experience, however, the song accedes to a sense of linear inevitability, proceeding from the soft opening strums of the acoustic guitar to its preordained conclusion after three minutes and fifty-two seconds. Because music happens to us in “real time,” argues Matthews, “to change the time of a piece of music is to alter, as it were, its cellular makeup, and for the worse” (38); to violate the flow seems to do a kind of violence to it. Although it’s repeatable and we can find the river over and over again, we always necessarily swim in different waters —- it is always, at some level, an experience of one-timeness. While its meditative content and formal qualities do, as we’ve seen, extend the reader in time, the semantic coda of “Find the River” does not exhibit the expressive qualities of what Barbara Smith calls “weak closure” (250): the last line, in which the speaker, seemingly again addressing the young auditor, promises that “all of this is coming your way” (l. 39), feels so declarative, so wise, and so full of final significance as to secure strong closure.
If, though, we consider, as we should, the musical elements that surround and complement Stipe’s words, then, when the rushing stateliness of the final verse seems at last to capitulate to the unforgiving linear nature of time, we realize Stipe receives help from his band-mates. We’re delivered definitively and emotionally to that final end-stop, but yet the song, in its very last moments and just after Stipe’s voice has exited, yields to the soft repetitive strums of the acoustic guitar, which fade gently as if loath to leave, and as if the notes -— and we the listeners —- are being stretched like gossamer in an unending present: like “permanence wrung out of wane,” as Rilke writes in his poem “Gong.” We think, perhaps, of Plumly’s assessment of Keats, that “at his best, in the odes, time is not only suspended but extended to an edge, to where the running-over almost spills” (344). This is poetry’s “timeless, time-bound business,” writes Linda Gregerson, “to trace both portal and mortality, to write against death, yes, but also into it” (263).... Just as Keats’s poem provides that exhilarating spatial sensation of veering upwards into the expanse of sky, “Find the River” widens out to the ocean and the horizon as the river dramatically approaches the estuary. In each case, we ultimately experience a poetic work “whose visionary size transcends its local space” (Plumly 172).
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As convinced as Keats was in his last year that he’d leave little of value behind in his poetic work, no one any longer, of course, needs to argue for his legacy or for that of his odes. Using “To Autumn” as an ongoing reference point in a discussion of Stipe’s “Find the River” in no way implies an equivalency of stature or accomplishment -— the latter will never, after all, appear in a single poetry anthology. All the same, “To Autumn” uniquely helps to reveal the thematic and emotional amplitude of “Find the River,” as well as to draw out the intricacies of Stipe’s nuanced poetics. Considered together, however improbably, we value these two lyrics because they convince us that the imaginative can be situated “in a harmonious relation to the natural” (Vendler 126) and in so doing they provide recompense and instructions for our experience of time. By being so resolutely embedded in the fleeting, both “To Autumn” and “Find the River” teach us how to assimilate the implications of the reaped furrow and the river’s arrival at the ocean, and thus to extend ourselves temporally -— with grace and with the expectation that sweetness will follow. We are, in turn, perhaps newly appreciative of the “stubble-plain,” accepting of the power of the undertow, and welcoming of the expanse (and possibly the void) of the boundless sky and sea. With sense that “seems to be brought along by chimes of sound” (Hallberg 164), these two lyrics allow us to reach beyond the linguistic, to sense “a cohesion and ongoingness to which we adhere even when we cannot know its ground” (Stewart 331). And if and when there is, indeed, “nothing left to throw,” and no more songs of Spring in the sonorous air, these lyrics tell us we can make peace with the accompanying doubts and uncertainties, trusting that our figurative last line will be some manner of enjambment and not an end-stop.
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