In his latest collection of poems, David Wagoner refines and limits the talents which were obvious in his Collected Poems 1956-1976. There he impressed the reader with his diversity as he gamboled among topics ranging from becoming a door to door salesman to the return of Icarus. The simplicity of his wording, the clarity and depth of his meaning, the intensity of his descriptions, and the playfulness of his humor all made that an outstanding collection. At first glance, the reader of Who Shall Be the Sun? must feel a sense of disappointment at the ostensible narrowness of the subject matter. Even though twenty-seven of its poems are reprinted from the Collected Poems, this book is limited to poems based on the lore, legends, and myths of the Plateau and Northwest Coast Indians. However, in spite of, or perhaps because of, their limitation of topic, these poems achieve the broad impact and timelessness which is appropriate to the mythological.
Wagoner begins this achievement by basing many of the plots of the poems on Indian stories. The poems in the two sections of the book entitled “Myths and Legends” simply retell and combine in the author’s own words the many versions of the stories of the Kutenai, Nez Perce, Coeur d’Alene, Lillooet, Cathlamet, Coos, Chinook, Nootka, Kwakiutl, Haida, Tsimshian, and Tlingit tribes. The “Songs” in the other sections of the book are less directly influenced by the myths of the tribes, but, of course, they also reflect Wagoner’s interest in and awareness of Indian lore.
Wagoner then adds descriptions and imagery about nature to the stories; he also includes some details about the outdoor activities of the Indians. He combines all this with simple yet powerful wording and carefully constructs the whole poem so that it will demonstrate the Indians’ closeness to nature. The Indians’ trait of sharing their world as equals with plants, animals, and natural phenomena is their characteristic which Wagoner most admires (see his “Author’s Note”), and so in these poems he emphasizes the Indians’ animism and seeks to re-create for his reader the feeling of unity with the natural world.
The Indians believe that natural phenomena and all things, whether animate or inanimate, possess an innate soul. These poems reflect that belief and entice the reader into a world of determined owls and foolish coyotes, a world in which the equality of men and animals is dubious only because the animals often are smarter than their human companions. In “How Raven Came to the Feast,” a hungry bird who is denied food by villagers hollows out logs to resemble war canoes. When the villagers see the apparent canoes paddling towards them, they flee from what they believe to be a war party. Raven then eats their food. In other poems men become animals or take on animal traits. A hungry boy who eats fish tails, pieces of coral, and sea fog becomes Seagull; a hunter wears the robe and claws of Black Bear in order to be like the bear. Thus the plots and characters of many of these poems emphasize the interchanging of animal and human characteristics, and the reader finds that he can no longer feel superior to the animal characters of the poems just because he is human.
The Indians’ consciousness of the world around them inspired them to make up colorful and often ironic myths to explain events. Inanimate objects such as Rock, Sky, and Water react with human emotions and cunning in the stories which explore the origins of natural phenomena. In “How Moss Grew Strong” the ubiquitousness of moss and its presence at the base of trees is explained. Ice tries to help his sons become strong so that they can knock down the trees which are able to withstand him. Only Moss will not exercise with his brothers. In anger Ice scatters Moss throughout the woods, and from then on Moss lies at the feet of the great trees and strongly wrestles with them. The origin of falling stars is described in “Star-Woman Falling” when a woman who is unhappy in her marriage to a star seeks to escape from the sky. She climbs down the root of a spruce tree and falls.
Wagoner uses the Indians’ spiritual beliefs as more than just the basis for the plots and characters of his poems. He attempts to reproduce the feelings of man in the midst of a forest peopled with living presences—not only animals and objects with human characteristics, but also the spirits of the dead. “Song for the First People” beautifully expresses this awareness of others in the following lines:
The tree under which I bend may be you,
That stone by the fire, Nighthawk swooping
And crying out over the swamp reeds, the reeds themselves.
Have I held you too lightly all my mornings?
I have broken your silence, dipped you up
Carelessly in my hands and drunk you, burnt you,
. . . You have endured
All of it, suffering my foolishness
As the old wait quietly among clumsy children.
Sometimes the soul of the observer of nature is stolen by the many spirits of this world. In “Women-Asleep” Rattle steals the soul of an Indian’s wife when the Northwind blows. In “Wild Man” a man who goes to gather firewood fears that Land Otters will turn him into Wild Man, so he wears the skin of a dog in an attempt to gain the canine characteristics which will defend him. Later he snarls and grows claws, and finally he attacks his own family; he becomes Wild Man. The atmosphere in this poem and others is eerie and even frightening. Although some of these events might be explained by psychological aberrations of the character, the final line of the poem, “The skull on top of his skull began howling,” transports the reader to a primitive world, far away from sterile clinics and psychological labels, in which man must fight not only for physical survival, but for spiritual survival as well.
When a man does become attuned to the natural world, he can benefit in a special way. The Indians believed that by dreaming about someone or something a man could become that person or thing. In some of the Indian societies a man had to dream that he could perform a task before he would attempt it. Similarly, in “Who Shall Be the Sun?” it is snake (who has dreamed that he is the sun) and not Hawk or Raven, who becomes the sun. This dreaming is perhaps the ultimate example of unity with nature; by dreaming or projecting his consciousness, the Indian can become someone else or some other part of nature such as a rock or animal. Wagoner manages to convey this sense of displaced consciousness extremely well not only in his plots and choices of subject matter, but also in his ethereal style.
The simplicity of the wording of these poems is appropriate to the subject of man’s unity with nature. Except for the translations of Indian names for things and people, the words are usually short and understandable. Concrete details about nature abound, and some specific details about Indian life are present, especially those relating to eating or food-gathering. In “The Boy Who Became Seagull” the woman does not simply fill her basket with food but carries “her spruce-root basket/With mussels and crabs, chitons and limpets.” Specific plants and foods are often catalogued in these poems. Also, many of the images in the poems reflect and emphasize the Indians’ animism; for example, barnacles are “teeth of Salt Woman,” and the changing colors of the sun are the skins of Snake. The images are often beautiful, and sometimes they eerily beckon the reader to a world of spirits and superstition. One example of Wagoner’s effective use of this unearthly imagery is in “Song for the Fishing of the Dead.” The dead come out to fish at night in canoes that have holes in the bottom of them to serve as eyes under the water. Yellow willow leaves are caught as their trout, and dead branches are speared for their salmon.
The humor which enlivened many of Wagoner’s poems in the Collected Poems is missing in this collection, but there is a quiet irony in some of the poems. Sometimes it comes from the legend on which the poem is based; other times it is the result of Wagoner’s careful wording. In “Loon” a boy who has been spurned by a chief’s daughter wears the skin of a loon and brings her presents; the girl believes that Heron, Sea Lion, and Black Bear have brought her the gifts and boasts that they want to marry her. Finally the boy becomes a loon and swims away, uttering the cry of the loon, a cry which sounds like laughter. The laughter is directed at the conceited girl who still does not know the identity of her suitor or realize that he is leaving. In “Salmon Boy” the poem describes the ecstasy of a previously hungry boy who becomes a salmon, swimming and eating his fill, jumping with joy: “He could breathe everything! He could see everything!/He could eat everything! And then his father speared him.” This juxtaposition of joy with sorrow conveys a sense of irony which is more obvious in the dry humor of “How Coyote Learned the Five Songs of Water.” Coyote hears water dripping and tells it to be quiet. He hears water as it follows him, as it flows up his chest, and as it fills his throat. Finally he “learns” the fifth song of water, a song “for the drowning of Coyote.”
Wagoner’s style is carefully adjusted to his subject of Indian legends. Although no obvious refrains appear, his use of repetition with variation makes some of the poems sound like chants or songs. Sometimes the repetition is within the line: “He is shattering, shattering/The ice of his heart” as it is in “Song Against the Sky.” Sometimes a word or sound is repeated; “hole” and “bone” occur throughout “Song for the Coming of Smallpox.” Occasionally there is repetition of the structure of the sentence. “I will carry you, Spring-No-One-Has-Tasted./I will plant you in this dry season/Where you will grow green and cold./I, the dream-catcher Only-One,/I will do it, Rainbush, Rainskin” occurs in “Song for the Stealing of a Spring.” As the last two lines of that poem demonstrate, Wagoner effectively uses pauses in many of his lines. This pausing for emphasis is especially appropriate in poems based on myths since storytellers traditionally pause to emphasize a point.
The poems which the reader can understand without recourse to a handbook on Indian lore are often very powerful and moving. The emotions which they portray—greed, ambition, and love—are universal. Greed and ambition are especially emphasized, and anthropological studies of the Northwest Coast Indians suggest why. The Indians lived in a society in which hereditary rank and wealth were very important. At a potlatch a chief demonstrated his own importance by giving gifts to his guests and ranked his guests by giving the biggest gifts to the most important guests and the smallest gifts to the least important. The potlatch is mentioned directly in “Song from the Roof of a Flooded Lodge,” but greed or vaulting ambition leads to a downfall in many of these poems. For example, in “Sun Dog” a rich man who has many trinkets and furs wants to become the sun. He takes the Sun Blanket from an old woman and wears it. However, in his vain desire to have everyone see him, he gets too close and burns all the people. At the end of the poem there is no one left to watch him, and Sun Dog himself burns.
Although greed is criticized, the longing to be part of nature or to become a better person is sympathetically portrayed. The legends themselves favor the underdog who achieves greatness like snake does in “Who Shall Be the Sun?” However, it is Wagoner who effectively portrays the longing for greatness, for success or for love. “Only-One” describes a boy who “wanted to be more than a boy.” Seeing with only his missing eye, he sees a “half-sun” and a “half-sky” and a girl half in shadow to whom he sings his first dream song. When the people of the village cannot see the girl, the reader sympathizes with the magic of the boy’s vision and with his desire not to be alone.
Wagoner’s poems become a kind of religious statement. The lesson they convey is one of humbleness, but also one of creation. For it is by recognizing that he is no better than the animals, rocks, and other elements of nature which surround him that man discovers his own role as part of nature. It is by “dreaming” or losing his soul to the world around him that man becomes something more than what he was before. Wagoner, who has also given up part of himself—his range of topic and his bantering humor—has become something different in this volume. He has become the voice of myth, the re-creator of the timeless. In Who Shall Be the Sun? David Wagoner has invoked a respect for the presences which surround us.