Octavio Paz and Robert Frost: El polvo y la nieve que se deshacen entre las manos

Comparative Literature, Summer 1995 by Zubizarreta, John

One of Paz's significant thematic predilections as a poet tends to parallel Frost's concerns with the role of metaphor in the imagination's efforts to define and order through the power of analogy the outer confusion of shifting reality. On the subject of how metaphor--thus language itself--as analogy bridges the gulf between the conceiving imagination of poet and the physical world perceived by senses, Paz writes, "Analogy is a rhythmic vision of the universe; before becoming an idea, it is a verbal experience. If the poet hears the universe as a language, he also utters the universe" (Mire 94). In "Entre Lo Que Veo y Digo..." ("Between What I See and What I Say..."), Paz puts it this way:

[La poesia] No es un decir: es un hacer. Es un hacer que es un decir. La poesia se dice y se oye: es real. Yapenas digo es real, se disipa. Asi es mas real?

([Poetry] is not speech: it is an act. It is an act of speech. Poetry speaks and listens: it is real. And as soon as I say it is real, it vanishes. Is it then more real?)

(Collected Poems 484-85)

The intermediary force of the word is efficacious enough, though illusory and impermanent, to blur boundaries of sound and sense, outer and inner realities, bringing Paz's meaning of word as act close to Frost's notion of poetry as performance, an idea Frost reveals in an interview with Poirier: "I look at a poem as a performance. I look on the poet as a man of prowess, just like an athlete. He's a performer. And the things you can do in a poem are very various. You speak of figures, tones of voice varying all the time...Every poem is...some sort of achievement in performance ...The whole thing is performance and prowess and feats of association. Why don't critics talk about those things: what

feat it was to turn that that way and what a feat it was to remember that--to be reminded of that by this?" (Lathem 233-34). The associative power of metaphor is a momentary spectacle of the imagination's resolve to name the physical world, to say it is real in poetry, which is also real and speaks and listens. Word becomes world; world becomes word: "The universe is...ruled by rhythm; everything is coded; everything rhymes," Paz says in the essay "The Siren and the Seashell" (29). "Poet's Epitaph" also conveys the sense of words as act, performance, illusion:

Quiso cantar, cantar para olvidar su vida verdadera de mentiras y recordar su mentirosa vida de verdades.

(He tried to sing, singing not to remember his true life of lies and to remember his lying life of truths.)

(Early Poems 14-15)

And in the poem "Entre Lo Que Veo" ("Between What I See"), he adds,

Idea palpable. palabra impalpable: la poesia va y viene entre lo que es y lo que no es. Teje reflejos ylos desteje. La poesia siembra ojos en la pagina, siembra palabras en los ojos. Los ojos hablan, las palabras miran, las miradas piensan. Oir los pensamientos, ver lo que decimos, tocar el cuerpo de la idea. Los ojos se cierran, las palabras se abren.

(Tangible idea, intangible word: poetry comes and goes between what is and what is not. It weaves and unweaves reflections. Poetry scatters eyes on a page, scatters words on our eyes. Eyes speak, words look, looks think. To hear thoughts, see what we say, touch the body of an idea. Eyes close, the words open.)