TWO ASTONISHMENTS: READING "HOPKINS FOREST" IN A FEBRUARY THAW

Mirja Paljakka /by permission A person steps outside, looks at the night sky, comes in transformed. That's what happens in Yves Bonnefoy's "Hopkins Forest." It's not all that happens, even though in many poems it would be plenty. The speaker dreams, remembers, compares, contemplates language, time, and mortality, and walks in the forest where those thoughts rise and rest. Going outside at night in the country is a chance to feel the presence of mystery. It's almost inevitable. Filling a bucket of water and looking up at the sky, Bonnefoy's speaker finds it looks different than it had a moment before. The "deepest blackness" (I'm using Emily Grosholz's translation throughout) is marked only by the Milky Way, appearing as a "brazier from which a coil of smoke" rises, as remote as it is brilliant. I picture the small hibachi we used to cook on long after dark, or any bonfire, transferred to a vast realm.