Daniel Hoffman’s “As I Was Going to St. Ives”

         A glance at Daniel G. Hoffman's poem "As I Was Going to St.  Ives" shows the reader that this is a verse mode, not a prose mode poem, a work consisting of nine quatrains, all of them typographically like the first:

 

As I was going to Saint Ives

In stormy, windy, sunny weather,

I met a man with seven wives

(The herons stand on the swift water).

 

         One might be tempted to jump to the conclusion that this is an accentual-syllabic poem, but one would be wrong, for scansion shows that there is no normative foot (recurring verse foot) in the first or fourth lines, although the second and third appear to be iambic tetrameter (four iambic feet: xX | xX | xX | xX ).  The fourth line starts out the same way; however, it breaks down in the second half of the line into what look like an anapest and a trochee (xxX | Xx).  Likewise, a syllable count yields lines of 8-9-8-9 syllables, but this regularity breaks down in the third stanza.  Inasmuch as there is an overt cadence running through the poem, one concludes that this is an accentual poem.  Specifically, Hoffman's "As I Was Going to Saint Ives" is written in podic prosody.

         Hoffman has invented a nonce stanza that contains double refrains — lines two and four are incrementally repeated throughout the poem; in fact, line two merely keeps the end-word "weather" as the object of a prepositional phrase containing different modifiers in each stanza.  Line four is a statement describing herons in various terms each time it recurs, and it is set off by parentheses.  Lines one and three are rising true-rhymes, but two and four are falling consonances  (weather-water).  The rhyme scheme, then, is aB¹aB², cB¹cB², and so forth, the refrains consonating (the capital letters indicate refrains; the superscript numbers indicate that, though the refrains rhyme, they are different lines).

         Other sonic devices used in the first stanza and throughout the poem are assonance (I-Ives), alliteration (windy-weather, stormy-sunny, and met-man); consonantal and vocalic echo (the n in "Saint," "windy," "sunny"; the short e in "weather," "met," "seven," and "heron").  There is repetition, especially of the words "stand" (refrains of stanzas 1, 2, 5, 6, 8) and "still" (refrains of stanzas 2, 3, 4, 9); the two words occur in a tandem relationship in stanza two ("stand still").

         By the time stanza one has been analyzed on the typographical and sonic levels, it is apparent that Hoffman has written an imitation Scots ballad in the stanza form called long hymnal stanza, which he has modified with refrains.  On the sensory level something else is immediately apparent as well: a major trope is allusion.  Both the title and the first line are an allusion to the famous nursery-rhyme riddle,

 

As I was going to Saint Ives

I met a man with seven wives;

Each wife had seven sacks,

Each sack had seven cats,

Each cat had seven kits.

Kits, cats, sacks and wives,

How many were going to Saint Ives?

 

the answer to which is one — only the man was going to Saint Ives; all the rest were presumably going in the opposite direction.  Another trope is the herons, an ancient symbol of morning and of regeneration, whose image is doubled reflectively in the water when it is still.  There is subdued metaphor (the man and his wife are herons), and many descriptions.  Stanza one is a prologue or an introduction.  Following stanzas discuss each of the seven wives:

 

One drinks her beer out of his can

In stormy, windy, and bright weather,

And who laughs more, she or her man?

(The herons stand still on the water.)

 

Clearly, this wife is a pal, a companion, but the next is the lover, the romantic partner:

 

One knows the room his candle lit,

In stormy, lightning, cloudburst weather,

That glows again at the thought of it

(Two herons still the swift water.)

 

The next wife is the nag, the harridan:

 

His jealous, wild-tongued, Wednesday's wife —

In dreepy, wintry, wind-lashed weather

What's better than that ranting strife?

(Two herons still the roaring water.)

 

From this stanza we know that wife number three is "Wednesday's wife"; therefore, we infer that stanza two is Monday's wife, stanza three, Tuesday's, and so on.  Thursday's wife, number four in stanza five, is the soulmate:

 

There's one whose mind's so like his mind

In streaming wind or balmy weather,

All joy, all wisdom seem one kind.

(The herons stand in the swift water.)

 

Friday's wife is the woman of mystery, the feminine enigma:

 

And one whose secret mazes he

In moon-swept, in torrential weather

Ransacks, and cannot find the key

(Two herons stand in the white water.)

 

Stanza eight is a transformational stanza,

 

And when to Saint Ives then I came

In fairest, rainiest, windiest weather,

They called his shadow by my name,

(The herons stand in the quick water.),

 

in which the traveler to Saint Ives becomes the man with seven wives.  Now the answer to the riddle is "one plus seven wives,"  so there are, assumedly, eight people who arrive in the town.  However, in the climactic last stanza, Sunday's wife, the seventh woman, is "the one":

 

And the one whose love moves all he's done,

In windy, warm, and wintry weather,

What can he leave but speaks thereon?

(Two herons still the swift water.)

 

         She is the one wife who is all the other wives; she is the only woman the man loves, and she is his companion, lover, nag,  soulmate, mystery woman, and lust-object all wrapped up in one person.  The last line tells the reader how many arrive in Saint Ives, at the end of the journey.

         On the ideational level, then, the subject of the poem is "wives," or perhaps merely "wife."  The schemas used are constructional (as in the parallel structures of the first lines of each stanza, in which "one,"-"one"-"none" parallels are drawn,  except in stanza four, which gives us the clue to the days-of-the-week sequence), and repetitional.  The whole poem is an inclusive structure relying heavily on prolepsis.

         The viewpoint of the poem is narrative; specifically,  author-oriented, third-person, single-angle (following only one character, as it turns out), with subjective access (we know she thinks what he thinks).  This is true until the penultimate stanza, when the narrator becomes the protagonist as well, and the viewpoint is seen to be character-oriented also.  Poetic syntax is objective, and the level of diction is poetic: it is colloquial with an archaic overlay, a modern rendition of the language of balladry.  The style must be seen, then, as high rather than mean, it is so literary, though it is not at all inaccessible.  The theme of the poem might be rendered as, "A man's wife is all women to him."

         Fusionally, the genre of the poem is that of the lyric narrative with a strong didactic element.  The levels Hoffman emphasizes are the sonic and the sensory — there is nothing original in the ideational level; treatment is everything here.  All levels support the theme.  It is a fine poem, but perhaps because it is intended to be a riddle, many readers find it to be obscure at first, especially those who led deprived childhoods and never heard the original nursery rhyme.

Orginally published in Poesis, vii:1, © 1986, pp. 54-58; all rights reserved 2009 by Lewis Turco.

NOTA BENE: This is an example of an essay written according to the “Analytical Outline” to be found in the Appendix on pages 457-8 of my The New Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Hanover: University Press of New England, 1986.