The Year of the Cicadas

This year there will be a rare double appearance of two broods of cicadas, one seventeen-year brood and one thirteen-year brood. I remember very clearly the appearance of a seventeen-year brood back in 1953, when I was just a small child. (We called them locusts back then, though we knew they were properly called cicadas.) For a few weeks they were everywhere, they and the brittle exoskeletons they left behind as they changed into their adult forms. You could not take a step without crunching them. The adult forms covered the trunks and branches of trees. My father was much impressed by this phenomenon of nature, and he made a poem out of it. The poem was published a few years later in The American Scholar, but I thought this would be a good time to bring it back to life. I append a few comments about how the poem seems to me to work. Here’s the poem:

The Year of the Locusts
    By Duncan Clark

They said it was the year of the locusts,
And, sure enough, they came
Out of the earth, earth-colored,
Into the April sun.
Shedding their dirty skins,
Translated, they filled the air
With a shrill, pervasive singing —
So many it seemed for a time
That all of the scheme of creation
Had been working towards this climax
And the earth was locust-heaven.

And perhaps it was, but briefly,
For soon they were gone. And I,
Watching their coming and going,
Wondered if our translation
Is as brief and incidental
To the scheme of Paradise
As the locusts’ to locust-heaven.
And yet we, like the locusts,
Can do no more than work upward,
Through the earth, earth-colored,
To the unguessable sun.

This poem begins with the observation of a natural phenomenon and ends with application to human life and meaning. My Father wrote a number of poems in this mode; he used to quote Robert Frost’s remark that a poem should begin with observation and end with wisdom. I don’t think that’s the only way to write a poem—nor, I’m sure, did my Father, or Robert Frost for that matter—but even if it’s not entirely true, there is truth in it. Surely many bad poems are bad because they skip the observation and plunge right into the wisdom.

The two-part structure of the poem is consistent with the two-part theme: there are two stanzas, each eleven lines long; in the first stanza the poet observes the locusts, in the second stanza he applies this observation to human beings. The division into two parts is clear, but it is not exact: the end of the first stanza already moves beyond observation, and the first two lines of the second stanza are transitional, as the topic of the first stanza crosses over into the second. The change of topic occurs in the last two words of the second line (“And I”), which begin a sentence that continues in the next line. The divisions of the poem are not strict or mechanical.

The poem is written in flexible trimeters, with three stressed syllables and a varying number of unstressed syllables in each line; sometimes there is a hint of a fourth stress. Some lines fall into a more or less regular metrical scheme. The second line, for instance (“And, SURE eNOUGH, they CAME”), can be read as three iambs; the fourth line begins with a troche (“INto the A-pril SUN”). The first line, however, has a lot of extra syllables; I think the stresses are on “said” and “year” and the first syllable of “locusts”, but the line seems to resist an easy metrical pronunciation. In some lines, rhythmic inversions bring stressed syllables emphatically together, as in “Out of the earth, earth-colored”. This, in my judgment, should be read “OUT of the EARTH, EARTH-COLored”: a dactyl, a spondee, and a troche. The poem as a whole is metrical, but the varying rhythms make it sound conversational.

The vocabulary, for the most part, is free of poeticisms, except for the words “translated” and “translation” in the sixth line of the first stanza and the fourth line of the second stanza. The word “translation” comes from the Latin preposition “trans”, meaning “across”, and the past participle (fourth principal part) of the verb “fero, ferre, tuli, latum”, meaning “to carry”. (Compare the related word “transfer”.) The original English meaning of “translation” was something like “the process of moving something from one place to another”, and this meaning is still allowed by the dictionary, but the ordinary meaning today is something like “the process of moving a meaning from one language to another”. In this poem the word has its original meaning, but it also carries with it some of the more common meaning: the movement implies a change. This combination of ideas—change of location and change of nature—exactly fits the locusts, as their translation is also a transformation. The parallel structure of the poem suggests that human beings also undergo translation and transformation.

The meaning of the poem is created by repetition and parallelism. I have noted the repetition of “translated” and “translation”. Morever, the third line of the first stanza (“Out of the earth, earth-colored” is repeated in the tenth line of the second stanza (“Through the earth, earth-colored”). In the first stanza this line is primarily an observation: when the locusts come out of the earth, their “dirty-skins” really are more or less the color of earth. The similar line at the end of the second stanza is not primarily an observation; it suggests that human beings are of the earth, with our own dirty skins earth-colored. We come from the earth and we will return to the earth; there is a certain hint of gnostic distain for the body. The poem ends with another transformed repetition: lines three and four in the first stanza, “Out of the earth, earth-colored, / Into the April sun”, become the final and climactic lines of the second stanza, “Through the earth, earth-colored, / To the unguessable sun”—the descriptive “April sun” becomes “the unguessable sun”. The poet does not claim to provide answers, rather to ask questions and to suggest mysteries.

If our world is locust-heaven, the locusts’ time in locust-heaven is all too brief. If our time in this world is like the seventeen years the locusts spend underground, then perhaps our time in our heaven also will be no more than a moment, in the light of our heaven’s unguessable sun.

None of this analysis and interpretation, by the way, comes from the poet himself, from my Father. He used to talk about poetry often, but never about his own poems. I think he felt that a good poem should explain itself without extra help from the poet.