Bleak Solace in a Poem by William Olsen - Mark Halliday

Each of us, as seen by the great anthologist in the sky, is like a short poem.

I told my daughter, in the summer of 2023, that I was failing to choose a book of poems to write an essay about. She asked “What poetry has interested you most recently?” I said I’d spent the morning puzzling over a short poem by my friend William Olsen, a poem I’d been drawn to for more than fifteen years without fully understanding it. “Write about that,” Devon said. I smiled – “A whole essay on one short strange poem?” “Sure,” she said, “you love close reading!”

I do. The effort of close reading expresses our belief that we may be able to find and appreciate the depth of emotion and of insight in another person, and that another person may be able to do that for us.

We don’t want to lose hope. Hope is endangered for us all now – we had to think of this every day in the hot summer of 2023 – by global warming. To say this sounds banal – because it is a truth too vast and too unremitting. It can make you miss the drama of the fear of nuclear war; nuclear war would have to come from the monstrous stupidity and evil of national government leaders – they could be disempowered, removed from office …. But every one of us contributes to global warming every day.

But we need to hope. Without hope, meaning disintegrates. Without hope the days and years rush past us like an empty train.

William Olsen’s poem “By a Railroad Crossing” imagines radical loss of hope. The poem does not find an answer to or a recovery from this loss. Except that we can hope that the stoicism in the poem’s imagining is being offered to us and may give us courage.

“By a Railroad Crossing” does not refer to global warming. The loss of hope the poem imagines is a response to the even more fundamental reality of our living in time and space and contingency.

The poem appeared in Olsen’s book Avenue of Vanishing (Northwestern University Press) in 2007.

There are moments when each of us realizes that we are on the way to vanishing. Everything we care about will disappear from the universe. Normally we pull ourselves out of these moments and return to our lives of effort and hope. Olsen’s poem stays in its moment. From its title “By a Railroad Crossing” and phrases near the end of the poem we infer that the moment has come to the poet’s mind on a winter night, waiting in his car for a train to pass. His realization – his bleak epiphany – comes in twelve lines, six two-line stanzas.

One day our signatures will ascend from our wills with all the rubbish of our little dusks.

Those first two lines make a declaration through a surrealism that is calmly decisive. Can we paraphrase it? In the infinity of change in time our careful formalized expressions of intention will eventually become forgotten paper junk divested of the ink of our individual identities which will have drifted up into the clouds – along with whatever else we foolishly cherished on our little desks in the brief after-sunset minutes of our absurdly small days.

And what will be our response to those losses?

We’ll give up on redemption, for the time will have passed for waiting around like abuse for angels to board us.

We will know that it has become too late to hope for any fundamental rescue; the hope in religion will be exposed as delusion like the delusion of a person perennially expecting serious change in an abusive partner. We will realize that our lives are not destined to be like an express train guided by angels.

In the moment of this realizing, we will feel we have arrived at a silence beyond words; and at a radical isolation that has let go of even the idea of being with other persons. There will be no more thought of conversation; the ancient list of numbers called “the phone book” will have become detritus like our wills and other rubbish.

That instant after language and solitude a page of the phone book will blow away, with a few more.

One page, another page, several pages – no matter how many, because none of the pages will have meaning anymore.

And a last human voice will argue the unconditional terms of perpetual sadness.

The dictionary says that as a transitive verb “to argue” is “to put forth reasons for or against.” Either way, in this case the terms in question are recognized by the poem as unconditional – that is, the terms cannot be refused or even alleviated. Still, on the final occasion described by the poem, a human voice will articulate reasons for – or against – these unconditional terms. Whose voice will do this? I think of it as the voice of the protagonist who has stopped at the railroad crossing on a winter night; or perhaps it is the voice of any person experiencing the radical relinquishment of hope, any member of the “we” in line three. The assertion that “a last human voice” will recover language enough to reflect on – and to consider the meaning of – our inevitable ongoing sadness is as close as Olsen’s poem can come to affirmation of our dignity in confronting the void. The poem says we will have given up on redemption, but we may feel that a chilly kind of redemptive value persists in the human insistence on arguing here at the final crossing – and we can hope that Olsen feels this too.

The poem’s last four lines locate us there on the winter night, waiting for a train to pass. The strange phrase “our very first lives” seems to imply that more lives are to be lived by us – lives changed by the absolute realization that has come to us by a railroad crossing.

The white face of the earth, streetlight off snow. One street, one train, one stoplight to go green.

This shall be the last night of our very first lives, and what this means shall pass like empty berths.

The phrase “very first” calls to mind experiences that are new to a child – “her very first merry-go-round,” “his very first movie at a theater” – so the realization we will undergo at the railroad crossing will be a crossing to a life without the innocence of trusting in legacy (“our wills”) and redemption and relief from sadness. And yet the meaning of this loss of innocence will not be available to us; or, if we do see the meaning, it will rush past us like a dark train without passengers.

A person listening to the poem rather than reading it would wonder if the last word could be “births” rather than “berths”. What is an empty birth? The phrase suggests the beginning of a life without meaning, without value. Olsen does not point toward the berths/births pun but he knows it will come to mind.

“By a Railroad Crossing” embodies the paradox of epiphany without revelation; “what this means shall pass like empty berths.” The poem is faithful to the radical bafflement of being human on earth. It can seem strange to say that you love a poem so bleak, so uncomforting. And yet many great poems stay faithful to radical bafflement; perhaps most do. “Fled is that music: – Do I wake or sleep?” ; “Much Gesture, from the Pulpit — / Strong Hallelujahs roll — / Narcotics cannot still the Tooth / That nibbles at the soul –” ; “I must lie down where all the ladders start, / In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.” ; “And forced the underbrush – and that was all.” We take comfort in our kinship with a great poet who digs down to radical bafflement.

Here is William Olsen’s “By a Railroad Crossing” as a whole: