Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

"Chord" by William Stanley Merwin is a haunting meditation on the simultaneous occurrence of creation and destruction, art and suffering. Through the juxtaposition of the English Romantic poet John Keats and anonymous laborers cutting down sandalwood forests, Merwin elegantly juxtaposes two realms that seem worlds apart but coexist in the same fabric of time and circumstance. The poem navigates this duality to probe into the nature of human existence, where beauty and agony, culture and nature, the poetic and the pragmatic all exist in a complex web.

Keats, known for his odes and his intricate poetic investigations into beauty and mortality, is engrossed in his art. While he listens to a nightingale, a common subject that symbolizes transcendental beauty in his poetry, laborers are heard axing away the sandalwood forests. The vivid image serves not only as an environmental comment but as a profound metaphor for the cost at which beauty or art is often created or appreciated. The "sandalwood forests" might symbolize nature, but also innocence, a simpler life, which is sacrificed for more complex forms of human expression.

This opposition continues throughout the poem, painting a vivid tableau of the human condition. Keats' pen "travelled the iron," perhaps referring to the ink or his poetry's lasting impact, while the laborers find the iron they coveted "hateful to them," probably because their labor yields them no personal benefit. It's a sharp critique of how beauty is often built on a foundation of unacknowledged or exploited labor.

While Keats "thought of the Grecian woods," perhaps an allusion to his famous "Ode on a Grecian Urn," the laborers "bled under red flowers," their experience more visceral, more brutal, and yet, uncannily connected to the very beauty that Keats attempts to eternalize in his verse. It could be argued that their blood is the price of Keats' Grecian woods, and this realization makes the chord struck by the poem hauntingly dissonant.

And then there's the end of the poem, capturing the fallouts of both lives. Keats, whose life was cut short by tuberculosis, "groaned on the voyage to Italy." His mortality is laid bare as he "lay with the odes behind him." The laborers, too, meet a grim fate: the wood "was sold for cannons," a stark emblem of destruction. Their toil did not bring prosperity or even sustenance but contributed to a cycle of violence and decay. The image of cannons contrasts sharply with the lyrical beauty of Keats' odes, yet both are outcomes of human endeavors.

"Chord" closes with an observation that an "age arrived when everything was explained in another language," perhaps referring to a time when the true cost of things-beauty, art, life, nature-can no longer be understood in the language of simplicity and direct experience. The poem leaves us with a troubling question: if the essence of life is a complex chord of interconnected actions, sufferings, and joys, can we ever untangle it to understand the individual notes that compose it?

In summary, William Stanley Merwin's "Chord" is a compelling exploration of the intricate relationship between beauty and suffering, art and labor, one man's song and another's silence. It lays bare the complexities of our shared human experience, reminding us that the sublime and the tragic are often but two sides of the same coin

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