A Good Read: Interpretations of Infinities

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Crepuscule

An elephant in its bathtub
and the three children sleeping
off the strange, strange tale
the tale of the sun sinking

—Philippe Soupault (1897–1990)

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Starry Night

In the late Nineteenth century
one is out painting landscapes
with spiralling sky
and helicopter lights approaching.

—Les Murray (1938– )

What brevity!  Can four lines of verse capture the essence of abstract things?  Soupault’s “Crepuscule” (my own translation, from the French) embodies twilight, and Murray’s “Starry Night,” inspired by Van Gogh, describes the painter at work in an anachronistic night.  Both poets convey sensations of expansiveness and the ethereal in very small containers. The effect is extreme intimacy—the infinite in the minute.  Look again at the first line of “Crepuscule,” and imagine overflowing flesh, high density, and yet infinite capacity.  Just as the weighty elephant fills the bathtub, so the crepuscule gorges the sky—i.e., the reader’s mind.

Both Soupault and Murray blend the real with the unreal; to them, expanse is strange. By comparing an elephant in a bathtub to the moment the sun sinks, and by placing helicopter lights in the nineteenth century, they displace the reader. The quatrain form of the poems also serves this purpose. Brevity effectively throws open the reader’s imagination: he now stands at the edge of, or far away from (yet somehow, still, within!), a vast, unknowable expanse.

—Kevin Hong