Angle of Geese

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Angle of Geese

N. Scott Momaday 1974

Momaday first published “Angle of Geese” in the New Mexico Quarterly in 1968. The poem is an example of what critic Yvor Winters calls “post-Symbolism,” a style of writing which employs sharp sensory detail to deliver meaning. Momaday, a student of Winters’ at Stanford, employs this style in his early work, but later moves on to other types of poetry.

The occasion of the poem is the death of a friend’s child. Momaday discusses the difficulty of conveying condolences, and the inadequacy of language to convey his feelings at the funeral. The speaker’s musings on death bring to mind another event: his killing of a goose while hunting as a boy. As the goose dies in his arms, it gazes at the rest of its flock which has rearranged its formation and flown on.

Momaday had written about the incident twice before, once in an essay that appeared in the Santa Fe New Mexican, and once in House Made of Dawn, where the hunter is the protagonist Abel. The death of the goose has a profound effect on Momaday, making him aware of his own mortality. In the poem the goose has a symbolic dimension: it becomes an archetypal figure whose death releases it from the bondage of time.

Author Biography

Momaday was born in 1934 in Lawton, Oklahoma, to Alfred Morris Momaday, a Kiowa Indian, and Mayme Natachee Scott, who was part Cherokee. As

an infant Momaday was named Tsoai-talee, or “Rock Tree Boy,” after a 200-foot volcanic butte in Wyoming (known commonly as Devil’s Tower) that is sacred to the Kiowas. As a youngster Momaday lived on several Navaho reservations and at the Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico, where his parents were teachers. He attended Augusta Military Academy in Virginia his last year of high school to take college prepartory classes that were unavailable at his local school. Momaday then studied at the University of New Mexico; it was there that he began writing poetry. After graduating with a degree in political science, Momaday spent a year teaching on the Jicarilla Apache reservation in Dulce, New Mexico. He returned to academic pursuits after being awarded a creative writing fellowship at Stanford University. He earned his master’s degree in 1960 and his doctorate in 1963. Momaday’s first published book, The Complete Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (1965), was originally his doctoral dissertation. In 1968 Momaday published House Made of Dawn, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel for which he is most famous. Although he has published nonfiction and novels, Momaday considers himself a poet foremost and has published several books of verse. His talent also extends to drawing and painting, and these works have been exhibited in various galleries.

Poem Text

How shall we adorn
Recognition with our speech?—
Now the dead firstborn
Will lag in the wake of words.

Custom intervenes;
We are civil, something more:
More than language means,
The mute presence mulls and marks.

Almost of a mind,
We take measure of the loss;
I am slow to find
The mere margin of repose.

And one November
It was longer in the watch,
As if forever,
Of the huge ancestral goose.

So much symmetry!—
Like the pale angle of time
And eternity.
The great shape labored and fell.

Quit of hope and hurt,
It held a motionless gaze
Wide of time, alert,
On the dark distant flurry.

Poem Summary

Lines 1-4

In this stanza Momaday discusses his feelings in attending the funeral of a friend’s child. In particular he refers to the difficulty of speaking directly to his friend about the tragedy. He is aware of the deficiency of language in transmitting his feelings. He uses the verb “adorn” to indicate that language functions in this situation merely as decoration. Americans are given to oblique statements in expressing condolences, preferring to say “I am sorry to hear about Jimmy,” rather than “I’m sorry your son died.” In lines 3 and 4 Momaday uses a metaphor and then puns on it. He states that the presence of the dead child is like something pulled behind a boat in its wake, a wake also being a ceremony that follows a death.

Lines 5-8

In this stanza Momaday continues his reflections on the inadequacy of language to express grief, but here he adds a new dimension, implicitly contrasting his Indian culture (Momaday is Kiowa) with mainstream American practices. In line two Momaday uses the word “civil,” meaning not only “polite,” but having also a connotation of “civilized” as opposed to the “savage” practices of Indians. Plains Indians traditionally expressed grief more passionately than white Americans, keening the tremolo, and practicing mutilation, cutting off hair or fingers.

Lines 9-12

Here Momaday, along with the other mourners, tries to come to grips with the death, assess its impact (“take measure” of it), but finds that he has difficulty finding the “margin” of repose, the beginnings of it.

Lines 13-16

Here Momaday shifts without transition to another event: As a teenage boy he was hunting geese with a group of men by a river. As the geese rose from the water the men fired all at once, and one goose fell. Momaday picked it up and observed it watching its fellows fly off towards the horizon. The bird died in his arms. This stanza describes watching the geese from a blind. Momaday uses the term “huge ancestral goose” to indicate its archetypal nature: it is no longer one goose only, but a symbol of untamed nature.

Lines 17-20

In this stanza the geese have risen, the men have shot, and one bird has fallen into the river. Momaday remarks on the symmetry of the formation of geese as they fly off. He uses catachresis—a strained use of words or metaphor—to describe the formation: “the pale angle of time/And eternity.” Catechresis is traditionally used to call particular attention to something. Here is emphasizes the fact that there is something special about these geese, a transcendental dimension.

Lines 21-24

In the final stanza Momaday makes use of what his mentor Yvor Winters called a “post-symbolist image,” that is, an image in which “the sensory detail contained in a poem or passage is of such a nature that the detail is charged with meaning without our being told of the meaning explicitly.” Here the meaning seems to be that death is not something to be dreaded, but rather a means of escaping the trammels of time. The dying goose is already “wide of time,” another catachresis implying that while still alive the goose has already entered another temporal dimension.

Media Adaptations

A video of House Made of Dawn was released in 1996 by New Line Cinema and Firebird Productions
An audio cassette titled The Indian Oral Tradition: Peter Nabokov Interviews N. Scott Momaday was released in 1969 by Pacific Tape Library.
Momaday is featured on a videotape titled More Than Bows and Arrows: The Legacy of the American Indians, released by Camera One, 1994.
N. Scott Momaday: A Film by Matteo Bellinelli is available on cassette. It was released in 1995 by Films for the Sciences and Humanities.
The transcript of an interview conducted with Momaday on June 28, 1996, in Sun Valley, Idaho, is available online at http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/momOint-1.

Themes

Language and Meaning

The first stanza of “Angle of Geese” presents a contradiction that has posed a problem for as long as human beings have used language to capture the natural world of our experiences. In the first half of the stanza, speech is an “adornment” of recognition, indicating that humans recognize or perceive an object or situation and then, after perception has already taken place, we attach words to it (like holiday decorations). In the last half of the stanza, though, the situation is reversed: language leads the way, and nature’s most powerful reality, death, is experienced in “the wake” of language, not directly affecting the person. The problem here is that understanding requires thinking about a thing, but thinking about it is different from experiencing it. This poem gives importance to “the mute presence,” identifying it as being “More than language means.” The relationship between language and reality is a central concern of poetry, and

Topics for Further Study

Explain how the feeling of a poem is different when the poet rhymes uneven lines (first and third of each stanza) as opposed to the even lines.
Choose one creature that cooperates instinctively with its peers. For example: geese flying in angles, ants marching in columns, elephants roaming in herds, etc. Report on why scientists think they behave the way they do.
Write a poem about the first dead thing that you can remember seeing. Try to concentrate your poem around the most unexpected aspect of its look.

for a poet to admit that language should be thought of as the less important of the two is, in a way, admitting the unimportance of poets.

The second half of “Angle of Geese” gives us an example of how language can be used properly: to project a situation without intellectualizing it and to show us what is happening without telling us what to think about it. We want to read more into this situation than the poem will allow us to do. There seems to be something symbolic about the “huge, ancestral goose,” and yet there is nothing about a goose that allows us to force it into any known symbolic relationship. The last stanza especially confounds understanding; the dead goose lacks the context of ideas that it had previously belonged to (for instance, the symmetry of an angle of flying geese and also time, which it is wide, or outside, of). The description in the last stanza is designed to be interesting and accurate but not especially meaningful.

Death

“Angle of Geese” uses death as a way to measure the ideas we hold about huge philosophical concepts such as language, time, and geometry. We generally associate life with limitation and death with eternity. This poem, however, challenges that notion with the example of the goose. In the fifth stanza, the formation of geese flying in the air forms the “pale angle of time / And eternity,” while in the following stanza, the goose that has died has been pushed outside (“wide”) of time’s boundaries. If the usual assumption is that those who have died have somehow been launched out of our dimension into an eternal existence, Momaday reverses that assumption: here, life is actually the sphere of eternity, because eternity, like language and symmetry, is a figment of the human mind. The poem uses noticeably formal language, such as “We take measure of the loss,” in order to show how inappropriate language is in dealing with death’s reality.

While we use thoughts of eternity to comfort ourselves about death, we also use anger; practically every death is an outrage and an injustice. By referring to “the dead firstborn” in the beginning of this poem, Momaday cleanses the situation of any lingering, misguided sense of unfairness. The first to be born is the first to die in the world of this poem. If the poem referred to the dead in any other way, it would be pointing out variations in this natural order instead of its consistency.

By disarming us of the comfort of feeling that eternity awaits or of feeling cheated, this poem rips open the question of how we should respond to death. It opens with a question that is never answered. It is clear that the death mentioned has created a feeling in the poet (otherwise, there would be no poem), but Momaday cannot come up with an intellectual or verbal way to capture that feeling.

Order vs. Disorder

From the very title of this poem, we can tell that “Angle of Geese” is emphasizing the order found in the natural world. An angle is a concept in geometry; it is one of the higher functions of the intellect, but it is used here by animals that have no intellect. This suggests that there is order in the natural world—that geometry exists in a place where man could not possibly have put it. With this idea planted firmly, the poem goes on to pose a similar but more difficult question: is there emotional order beyond the reach of language? Momaday circles around the question without directly giving an answer because there really is no way to answer it directly. To talk about an emotion, such as what one feels when faced with death, means to already have it organized into language. Therefore, there would seem to be no way to examine a feeling without altering it (much like the scientific principle that says subatomic particles cannot be observed because the light needed to observe them would change their motion). But poetry does have a way of reaching straight to emotion. If the poet can present a situation to readers directly, so that all readers have the same response without being told what that response should be, then the poet can bypass the language of emotion. Poet T.S. Eliot referred to this as the “objective correlative.” The description of the goose at the end of this poem seems disordered and unorganized, but if this object, the dead goose, can correlate the feelings of readers everywhere together, then it is more valuable to the poet and to the point of the poem than anything Momaday could say “about” it.

Style

The occasion of the poem is the death of a friend’s child. Momaday discusses the difficulty of conveying condolences, and the inadequacy of language to convey his feelings at the funeral. The speaker’s musings on death bring to mind another event: his killing of a goose while hunting as a boy. As the goose dies in his arms, it gazes at his the rest of its flock which has rearranged its formation and flown on.

“Angle of Geese” is written in syllabic verse: the first and third lines have five syllables; the second and fourth have seven. Syllabic verse must vary the number and position of accented syllables, or else it becomes accentual syllabic verse, in which there is a regular pattern of accented and unaccented syllables. Momaday does this consistently in the second and fourth lines of the stanzas, but the first and third line of every stanza except the fourth (lines 13 and 15) are trochaic, but catalectic. That is, they omit the last unstressed syllable.

Interestingly, the trochaic lines rhyme, while lines 13 and 15 are half rhyme at best. The even numbered lines do not rhyme. Syllabic verse is comparatively rare in English. The earliest English verse was often accentual—a set number of accents with a variable number of syllables. From the late middle ages until the nineteenth century most English poetry was accentual syllabic. For the past century more and more poets have moved to free verse. A few of the major poets who have used syllabic verse include John Skelton, Robert Bridges, W. H. Auden, and Marianne Moore. Momaday’s use of syllabic verse allows him to establish very subtle rhythmic structures.

Historical Context

On page 150 of his memoir The Names, Momaday tells of returning to the reservation at Jemez, New Mexico, where he grew up, and visiting with a neighbor. She told him that her son, who the author had played with when he was a child, had been killed a few days earlier in Vietnam. In the following paragraph he gives an account of being in a valley and watching a flock of geese take flight, “falling strangely into place.” His father shot one of the geese, and Momaday went and retrieved the body. There is no way to tell if this event happened before the visit home, but the order of events in the memoir mirrors the events in “Angle of Geese,” right down to the similarity of descriptions of the dead bird: “There was no resistance in it, neither fear, only a kind of calm and recognition that I had never seen before.” This anecdote is reworded in the poem’s last stanza, right down to the parallel between “calm and resignation” and “quit of hope and hurt.”

The fact that Momaday’s childhood friend had been fighting in the U.S. armed forces is notable because it raises the question of whether this service was a matter of choice; it also ties into a century-long struggle for independence on the part of Native Americans. Until 1871, the United States government signed treaties with the American Indian nations, including the Kiowa which Momaday belonged to. These treaties put an end to fighting between the American government and the Indians by limiting Indians to particular areas of land—reservations—and granting Indians the right to rule themselves on their reservations. The reservations were established as separate countries within the United States. Almost immediately, though, Congress began passing laws that applied to life within the Indian nations and that even altered the boundaries of the nations. In an 1870 tax case, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress had the right to pass actions that the Indian nations would be obliged to follow. This power exerted by Congress

Compare & Contrast

1974: After a Congressional Judiciary Committee recommended his impeachment for obstructing justice in the Watergate scandal, Richard Nixon became the only U.S. president to resign from office.
1980: Ex-president Ronald Reagan, testifying under oath regarding the illegal sale of weapons to Iran during his administration to finance illegal weapons shipments to Nicaragua, responded “I don’t know” or “I don’t remember” more than 130 times.
1992: A special prosecutor was assigned to investigate President Bill Clinton’s involvement in a real estate deal known as Whitewater; the Clinton administration was subject to numerous scandals, from finance irregularities to sexual harrassment charges against the President
1974: Henry Aaron hit his 715th career home run, breaking the major league baseball record held by Babe Ruth since 1935. By the time Aaron retired, he had 755 home runs.
Today: No baseball player has yet broken Aaron’s record.

was called “plenary power,” and from the 1870s to the 1970s it was the tool used to pry Indians apart from their heritage and make them accountable to U.S. law.

The first major instance of Congress exercising plenary powers occurred in 1885: in response to a Supreme Court ruling that an Indian killing another Indian on reservation land was outside of the jurisdiction of U.S. laws, Congress passed the Seven Major Crimes Act that extended federal jurisdiction and allowed it to supersede tribal laws. In 1887 plenary power was used to change the shape of the reservations that had been agreed to in treaties. The General Allotment Act gave Indian families 160 acres of land in exchange for becoming U.S. citizens, with all “surplus” reservation land being put up for sale. The promise of U.S. citizenship was used continuously throughout the century as a justification for trimming away the sovereignty of Indian nations. After World War I, Congress passed an act allowing citizenship for the approximately 9,000 Indians who had served in the armed forces voluntarily, but few Indians accepted the offer. In 1924 President Coolidge signed into law the Indian Citizenship Act, which stated in part that “all non-citizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States be, and they are hereby, declared to be citizens of the Unites States.” As a result of this, the United States’selective Service Act, which was passed in 1940 and used to draft soldiers into World War II, was applied to citizens of the Indian nations. The tribes fought in court to be excluded, arguing that Congress had no right to pass a bill affecting citizens of the Indian nations because they were separate from the United States government, but they lost. Immediately following World War II, the government began working harder at eliminating all claims of Native American independence. A 1953 law, HCR 108, called for termination of all special services to the Bureau of Indian Affairs and to specific tribes “at the earliest possible time.” Thus, even though Momaday gives no details in his memoir, it is very likely that his boyhood friend could have been drafted into the armed forces and forced to leave the reservation to serve in Vietnam.

In the early 1970s when this poem was written, Indian nations were actually experiencing a renewed independence due to support from President Richard Nixon. Nixon is remembered for making great advances in international diplomacy, but he is even more widely remembered for having resigned from office in shame after a Congressional judiciary committee voted for his impeachment. To this day, though, he is remembered fondly by some Native Americans for his support of Indian autonomy. The previous president, Lyndon Johnson, had given verbal support to Indian self-determination

and had suggested programs and appointed councils to examine related problems. Nixon, however, was the president who took action on the issue. One significant gesture was returning the sacred Blue Lake to the Indians of Taos Pueblo in 1970. Also in 1970, in a special message to Congress, he asked Congress to pass a new resolution overturning HCR 108. “The time has come to break decisively with the past,” Nixon said, “and to create conditions for a new era in which the Indian future is determined by Indian acts and Indian decisions.” Congress was slow to follow his recommendations, but in 1974, the year this poem was published, significant powers of self-government were returned to the Indian nations.

Critical Overview

Although Momaday became famous for his novels, especially House Made of Dawn, he began his writing career as a poet. He went to Stanford to study with Yvor Winters, the poet and critic who became his mentor. According to biographer Matthias Schubnell, originally Momaday intended House Made of Dawn to be a long narrative poem.

“Angle of Geese” is probably Momaday’s greatest poem. Roger Dickinson-Brown argues emphatically that it is: “Momaday’s greatest poem is certainly ‘Angle of Geese’ ... a masterpiece of syllabic rhythm.” Kenneth Lincoln compares the poem to Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and Kenneth Fields claims Momaday’s sensibility resembles that of Emily Dickinson.

Criticism

Alan Velie

Alan Velie is a freelance writer and professor at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK. In the following essay, Velie deems Momaday’s lyric poem a “masterpiece” and analyzes how the poet is able to successfully express complex emotions concerning death through a form of expression defined by an economy of words.

As the twentieth century draws to a close, many students of American culture would argue that American Indian literature has replaced Jewish and African-American literatures, both of which have had their vogue, as our most dynamic ethnic literature. Much of the credit for this development

What Do I Read Next?

The anthology Growing Up Native American collects works from noted Indian authors of the past two centuries who write about their childhoods. Included are Leslie Marmon Silko, Black Elk, and Louise Erdrich.
Besides being a poet, N. Scott Momaday is famous for writing in all fields. His first book, the novel House Made of Dawn, won the Pulitzer Prize for 1969.
One of the most famous and influential books in Native-American literature is Black Elk Speaks, first published in 1932 and revised in the late 1960s. Black Elk was a witness at the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876 and the massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1890. He was an Ogalala Sioux, not a Kiowa like Momaday. Since Black Elk did not read or write English, his story was written for this book by John G. Neuhardt.
Richard Ford is a writer who, like Momaday, is concerned about the West’s tradition of independence and how it is affected by culture. His short story “Communist,” in particular, has themes and incidents similar to those in “Angle of Geese.” The story is included in Ford’s 1987 collection, Rock Falls.

must be given to N. Scott Momaday, a Kiowa from Oklahoma, who began what is now known as the American Indian Renaissance with the publication of his novel House Made of Dawn.

Before House Made of Dawn won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize, literate Americans would have been hard pressed to name an Indian writer. Since then a number of superb writers have received national attention—James Welch (Blackfeet), Louise Erdrich and Gerald Vizenor (Chippewa), Leslie Silko (Laguna), and Sherman Alexie (Spokane), to name just a few. American Indians are unique in one respect among the writers of the world in that virtually all of their successful novelists are poets as well. Momaday, the dean of Indian writers, began as a poet. In fact, he originally intended House Made of Dawn to be a series of poems.

“Angle of Geese,” one of Momaday’s earliest poems, is still his masterpiece; in fact, it is one of the best lyric poems of our time. Initially difficult to understand, as the reader comes to comprehend the poem he or she learns about the creative process—how the poet renders experience into art.

There are two parts to the poem. In the first, the poet describes his reactions to the funeral of a friend’s child. Momaday refers to this obliquely in the opening stanza: “How shall we adorn / Recognition with our speech? / Now the dead firstborn, / Will lag in the wake of words.” Momaday considered adding the epigraph “For a friend on the death of his child,” but ultimately rejected the idea. Nowhere does Momaday tell us who the friend was or what the man’s reaction was to the death of his child. The focus is solely on the feelings of the narrator.

The stanza succinctly raises one of Momaday’s favorite themes: the power and limitations of language. Here language is inadequate to its task of expressing condolences to the friend. In the second stanza, with the lines “Custom intervenes / We are civil, something more,” Momaday implies that the problem lies with civility—of being cililized. It is quite possible that he is thinking of the contrast between the decorum of this funeral and the “savage” traditions of his tribe. Kiowa mourning practices called for keening, shaving the head, and even amputation of fingers in some cases.

But Momaday does not explore the question of different cultural responses to loss; instead, in the second part of the poem, he focuses on his own experience to come to grips with his attitudes toward death. In stanzas four through six the poet recounts a hunting experience from his youth:

And one November
It was longer in the watch,
as if forever,
Of the huge ancestral goose.
So much symmetry!
Like the pale angle of time
And eternity.
The great shape labored and fell.
Quit of hope and hurt,
It held a motionless gaze,
Wide of time, alert,
On the dark distant flurry.

Momaday had used the incident before, in a column he wrote for the Santa Fe New Mexican, but here he draws some new conclusions from the event and universalizes it. I quote the column in its entirety:

One of the Wild Beautiful Creatures

That day the sun never did come out. It was a strange, indefinite illumination, almost obscure, set very deep in the sky,—a heavy, humid cold without wind. Flurries of snow moved down from the mountains, one after another, and clouds of swirling mist spilled slowly down the slopes splashing in slow, slow motion on the plain.
For days I had seen migrating birds. They moved down the long corridor of the valley, keeping to the river. The day before I had seen a flock of twenty or thirty geese descend into the willows a mile or more downstream. They were still these, as far as I knew.
I was thirteen or fourteen years old, I suppose. I had a different view of hunting in those days, an exalted view, which was natural enough given my situation. I had grown up in mountain and desert country, always in touch with the wilderness, and took it all for granted. The men of my acquaintance were hunters. Indeed they were deeply committed to a hunting tradition. And I admired them in precisely those terms.
We drew near the river and began to creep, the way a cat creeps upon a sparrow. I remember that I placed my feet very carefully, one after the other, in the snow without sound. I felt an excitement welling up within me. Before us was a rise which now we were using as a blind. Beyond and below it was the river, which we could not yet see, except where it reached away at either end of our view, curving away into the pale, winter landscape. We advanced up the shallow slope, crouching, leaned into the snow aned raised ourselves up on our toes in order to see. The geese were there, motionless on the water, riding like decoys. But though they were still they were not calm. I could sense their wariness, the tension that was holding them in that stiff tentative attitude of alert.
And suddenly they exploded from the water. They became a terrible, clamorous swarm, struggling to gain their element. Their great bodies, trailing water, seemed to heave under the wild, beating wings. They disintegrated into a blur of commotion, panic. There was a deafening roar; my heart was beating like the wings of the geese.
And just as suddenly out of this apparent chaos there emerged a perfect fluent symmetry. The geese assembled on the cold air, even as the river was still crumpled with their going, and formed a bright angle on the distance. Nothing could have been more beautiful, more wonderfully realized upon the vision of a single moment. Such beauty is inspirational in itself; for it exists for its own sake.
One of the wild, beautiful creatures remained in the river, mortally wounded, its side perforated with buckshot. I waded out into the hard, icy undercurrent and took it up in my arms. The living weight of it was very great, and with its life’s blood it warmed my frozen hands. I carried it for a long time. There was no longer any fear in its eyes, only something like sadness and yearning, until at last the eyes curdled in death. The great shape seemed perceptibly lighter, diminished in my hold, as if the ghost given up had gone at last to take its place in that pale angle in the long distance.

It would be naive to assume that the column represents the actual experience and the poem its transmutation into art. Nonfiction writing can involve as much art as fiction, and Momaday is consciously striving for aesthetic effects in his prose. The geese “disintegrated into a blur of commotion,” and “assembled on the air.” The river “was still crumpled with their going.” But poetry involves much greater compression than prose, and Momaday manages to compress the roughly fivehundred-word column into a mere fifty-two words of verse. He leaves out setting the scene as well as the stalking and shooting of the birds. The poet watches, the birds pass, the goose falls and dies. But the goose is no longer simply one bird; it has become “the huge ancestral goose,” an archetype of wild nature. The formation of geese resembles the angle of time and eternity, a metaphor strained to the point of catachresis. Momaday wrenches language to allow him to suggest a metaphysical dimension: outside of time lies another, eternal realm.

In the first part of the poem, language proves inadequate to express reactions to death. In the second part Momaday contorts language, straining its normal uses to make it adequate to the task. It is a risky strategy—he may lose readers—but it works; those that follow him gain an insight into man’s relationship with nature and the supernatural.

The goose dies tranquilly realizing that it is wide of—that is, freed from—time. The poet learns from the goose that death is not, to borrow some phrases from Macbeth, the “be-all and the end-all,” but a transition from one “bank and shoal of time” to another. In considering the death of the goose, the poet learns to put the death of the child in its perspective sub specie aetemitatis (under the aspect of eternity). The child too is now “wide of time.”

Other Indian writers have written about hunting experiences. In fact, it is a common theme. Gerald Vizenor tells of killing a squirrel in a particularly grisly fashion and then swearing off hunting. But Momaday’s account is somewhat different. He too regrets killing his prey, but his poem is not about cruelty to animals. It is rather about how the death of an animal brought about an epiphany. This is not the literary epiphany reminiscent of James Joyce, in which a character suddenly realizes some truth about him or herself. This is an epiphany in the original sense, a manifestation of the holy. In contemplating the death of the goose, Momaday recognizes the nature of eternity.

Source: Alan Velie, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1997.

Roger Dickinson-Brown

In the following article, Dickinson-Brown praises the poetry of N. Scott Momaday, particularly the poem, “Angle of Geese,” which he asserts is the writer’s best.

It is surprising that Momaday has published so few poems. “Angle of Geese” contains only eighteen—the considered work of a great poet around the age of forty. But the poems are there, astonishing in their depth and range. “Simile,” “Four Notions of Love and Marriage” “The Fear of Botalee” “The Story of a Well-Made Shield” and “The Horse that Died of Shame” are variously free verse (the first two, which are slight and sentimental) or prose poems. They partake of the same discrete intensity that characterizes the storytelling in The Way to Rainy Mountain, and which makes them some of the few real prose poems in English.

The poems written in grammatical parallels are much better: “The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee” and “Plainview: 2” In the latter, Momaday has used a form and created emotions without precedent in English:

I saw an old Indian
At Saddle Mountain.
He drank and dreamed of drinking
And a blue-black horse.
Remember my horse running.
Remember my horse.
Remember my horse running.
Remember my horse.
Remember my horse wheeling.
Remember my horse.
Remember my horse wheeling.
Remember my horse.
Remember my horse blowing.
Remember my horse.
Remember my horse blowing.
Remember my horse.
Remember my horse standing.
Remember my horse.
Remember my horse standing.
Remember my horse.
Remember my horse hurting.
Remember my horse.
Remember my horse hurting.
Remember my horse.
Remember my horse falling.
Remember my horse.
Remember my horse falling.
Remember my horse.
Remember my horse dying.
Remember my horse.
Remember my horse dying.
Remember my horse.
A horse is one thing.
An Indian another;
An old horse is old;
An old Indian is sad.
I saw an old Indian
At Saddle Mountain.
He drank and dreamed of drinking
And a blue-black horse.
Remember my horse running.
Remember my horse.
Remember my horse wheeling.
Remember my horse.
Remember my horse blowing.
Remember my horse.
Remember my horse standing.
Remember my horse.
Remember my horse falling.
Remember my horse.
Remember my horse dying.
Remember my horse.
Remember my blue-black horse.
Remember my blue-black horse.
Remember my horse.
Remember my horse.
Remember.
Remember.

A chant or a parallel poem is necessarily bulky and especially oral. I have often recited this poem to individuals and groups, in part to test its effect upon an English-language audience. My own voice is consciously based upon the oral readings of Pound, Winters, and Native American chant, with a dash of childhood Latin Mass. I read the lines without musical intonation but with emphatic regularity and little rhetorical variation. The results are extreme: about half the listeners are bored, the other half moved, sometimes to tears. The poem is obviously derived from Momaday’s experience of Indian chant, in which, as in most other cultures, small distinction is made between music and poetry. In this respect “Plainview: 2” is a part of the abandoned traditions of Homer, The Song of Roland, oral formulas, the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish chant, and even certain Renaissance poems. The various forms of repetition in these works are still common in the Islamic and black African and certain other worlds, but they survive in the West (where individual originality has destroyed community), only through such traditional popular genres as commercial song (which, unlike “modern intellectual” poetry and “classical” music, preserves the fusion), nursery rhymes, and among the non-white minorities. These are our surviving traditions of form, which is by nature repetitive.

In addition to the obvious repetitions in “Plainview: 2” the repetition of stanza 1 at stanza 10, and the two-line rehearsal of the four-line stanzas turn the poem. The whole poem is, in fact, simply a subtle variation, development, and restatement of the first stanza, with the extended, reiterated illustration of both the beauty of the horse’s actions and its death. The ninth stanza occupies the poem like a kernel of gloss, but even its third and fourth lines are simply restatements of its first and second.

The form of this poem distinguishes with rare clarity what we call denotative and connotative. In a literate age of recorded language, where memory and repetition—sides of a coin—have each faded from our experience, we are inclined to regard such hammering as a waste of time—but it can, instead, be an intensification and a kind of experience we have lost. That is precisely the division of modern response to the poem.

The rest of Momaday’s poetry is traditionally iambic or experimentally syllabic. Winters has called the iambic pentameter “Before an Old Painting of the Crucifixion” a great poem, and perhaps it is, in spite of a certain stiltedness and melodrama, reminiscent of the worst aspects of House Made of Dawn. Yet the iambic poems are certainly among the best of their kind in Momaday’s generation, and it is only the exigency of space that limits me to a few lines from “Rainy Mountain Cemetery”:

Most is your name the name of this dark stone.
Deranged in death, the mind to be inheres
Forever in the nominal unknown....

Momaday’s theme here is an inheritance from Winters, though it is as old as our civilization: the tension, the gorgeous hostility between the human and the wild—a tension always finally relaxed in death. Winters did a great deal to restore and articulate that consciousness, after and in the light of Romanticism. And it was Winters too who taught Momaday one of his greatest virtues, the power and humanity of abstraction—heresy in the cant of our time: deranged is a pure and perfect abstraction.

And there is more Winters:

... silence is the long approach of noon
Upon the shadow that your name defines—
And death this cold, black density of stone.

We have already seen this in House Made of Dawn Winters called it post-symbolist method. The physical images carry the full force, often through double sense, of abstraction: the shadow defines; and death is the impenetrability, the incomprehensibility, of black density. Yet the images are not metaphors, for they are not subservient to the abstractions they communicate, nor are they synecdochical. They persist in the very mortal obstinacy which they mean. This style is everywhere in Momaday, but it is something which Winters could not have duplicated, for it is also profoundly Kiowa....

Momaday’s syllabic poetry is his best and experimentally most exciting work. Even deprived of the rest of the poem, the middle stanza of “The Bear” seems to me among the perfect stanzas in English, rhythmically exquisite in its poise between iamb and an excess of syllabic looseness, utterly comprehensive in its presentation of the motionless wild bear and its relationship to time:

Seen, he does not come,
move, but seems forever there, dimensionless,
dumb,
in the windless noon’s hot glare.

“Comparatives” is a tour-de-force of alternating unrhymed three-and four-syllable lines, again with Momaday’s abstract and physical fusion. Momaday succeeds in presenting such unrhymed, short lines rhythmically, in spite of a necessarily high incidence of enjambment; the faint lines convey a melancholy appropriate to the antiquity and death which are the consequence of his juxtaposition of the dead and the fossil fish:

... cold, bright body
of the fish
upon the planks,
the coil and
crescent of flesh
extending
just into death.
Even so,
in the distant,
inland sea,
a shadow runs,
radiant,
rude in the rock:
fossil fish,
fissure of bone
forever.
It is perhaps
the same thing,
an agony
twice perceived.

Momaday’s greatest poem is certainly “Angle of Geese,” a masterpiece of syllabic rhythm, of modulated rhyme, of post-symbolic images, and of the meaning of language in human experience. Although perhaps none of its stanzas is equal to the best stanza of “The Bear,” each functions in a similar way, shifting from perfect to imperfect to no rhyme with the same supple responsiveness Dryden

“Momaday‘s greatest poem is certainly ‘Angle of Geese,’ a masterpiece of syllabic rhythm, of modulated rhyme, of post- symbolic images, and of the meaning of language in human experience.”

mastered, but with more range. Nevertheless the largest importance of this poem, even beyond its extraordinary form, is its theme, which is probably the greatest of our century: the extended understanding of the significance of language and its relation to identity—an understanding increased not only by the important work done by the linguists of our century but also by the increased mixture of languages which has continued to accelerate, over the last hundred years or so: French or English among Asians and Africans, often as first or only languages among nonetheless profoundly non-European people; Spanish established on an Indian continent; and, of course, English in America. These are non-native native speakers of English, as it were, further distinguishing literature in English from English literature. Their potential has much to do with their relative freedom from the disaster and degeneracy which Romantic ideas have created among their European-American counterparts: many of these new English writers still have deep connections with their communities, instead of the individualistic elitism which characterizes contemporary European-American art, music, and poetry. They are more like Shakespeare, Rembrandt, and Homer. And they often have fewer neuroses about the evils of form. Momaday, as a Kiowa, a university scholar, and a poet of major talent, is in an excellent position to take advantage of these multicultural possibilities. The result is “Angle of Geese”:

How shall we adorn
Recognition with our speech?—
Now the dead firstborn
Will lag in the wake of words.
Custom intervenes;
We are civil, something more:
More than language means,
The mute presence mulls and marks.
Almost of a mind,
We take measure of the loss;
I am slow to find
The mere margin of repose.
And one November
It was longer in the watch,
As if forever,
Of the huge ancestral goose.
So much symmetry!
Like the pale angle of time
And eternity.
The great shape labored and fell.
Quit of hope and hurt,
It held a motionless gaze,
Wide of time, alert,
On the dark distant flurry.

The poem is difficult and a little obscure, mostly because the subject is—but also because Momaday has indulged a little in the obscurantism that makes modern poetry what it is—and an explication of the poem is therefore necessary.

The first stanza presents the subject and observes that the Darwinian animal which we were, who is our ancestor, cannot be rediscovered in our language, which is what moved us away and distinguished us from the animal.

The second stanza explains the divorce: we have become civilized, but not wholly. “The mute presence” may, by syntax, seem to be the presence of language, but it is not. It is the presence of wilderness which is mute. We live in connotation, which is wild response. “Mulls” and “civil” are odd diction.

The third stanza contemplates this ambivalence, this incompleteness, and moves from the general to the particular. We are almost whole, or wholly civilized and conscious, and to precisely this extent we have lost our own wilderness. The speaker, introduced at this point, is slow to realize, outside language, what is wild in him. The language is typical of Momaday in its outright and exact abstraction: “mere” in the old sense of pure or unadulterated—here, by language and civilization; “margin” because this is where humans, with their names and mortality, overlap with wilderness, which has neither; “repose” because what is wild is forever and at every moment perfect and complete, without urgency, going nowhere, perpetuating itself beautifully for no sake at all. It is useful to remember wilderness here primarily in terms of immortal molecules and galaxies, without number or name—except those collective names imposed upon them by men who have to that extent simply perceived and thought about that which is unaltered by thought, which does not know the thinker, and which is, finally, a kind of god—not a god, as Stevens said, “but as a god might be.” It is a kind of altered Romantic god, but one supported rather more by the pure sciences than by Deism and Benevolism: a nature pure and perfect, composed of sub-atomic particles and framed in an unimaginable universe with no edge. Language contradicts itself with this god, who is its enemy. It is the wilderness of our century, deprived of Romantic benevolence but retaining its old terrifying innocence and immense and nameless beauty, which ignores us and must destroy us, one by one. It is a god of mere repose. The goose, which the hunter waits for one November, is almost perfectly a part of the god (Momaday only implies the word), although a goose shares with men certain forms of individual consciousness of itself and others. Some animals have some language, and to this extent the goose knows the same clear and lonely condition we do, and is an imperfect symbol of the wilderness. The long watch, in any case, implies the eternity which is the whole of which the goose is an indiscriminate part: as if forever. The goose is huge because it is inseparable from the wild deity: what Emerson called the “not I,” which neither names nor knows itself, which cannot die—whatever is, like the grasshopper of the ancient Greeks, immortal because the individuals have no name. That is our ancestor who does not know us, whom we hardly know.

So, in the fifth stanza, the symmetry of the angle or V of the flock of geese implies the perfection for which geometry and symmetry have always served as imaginary means. A goose is shot, and falls out of the angle, into the speaker’s world.

The last stanza gives the goose a little of that hope and hurt which grants this sophisticated animal a part of what will kill the speaker: a conscious identity. But the goose is essentially wild, and it holds, like an immortal cockatrice, an inhuman gaze—motionless, outside the time in which we live and die, wildly, purely alert—fixed on the receding flurry of the flock out of which it fell, growing as dark and distant physically as it is in truth to the dying speaker who watches it too and for whom, alone, something has changed. The word “flurry” fuses with the flock all the huge vagueness which is our blind source.

“Angle of Geese” seems to me the best example both of Momaday’s greatness and his importance to contemporary literature: it profoundly realizes its subject, both denotatively and connotatively, with greater art in an important new prosodic form than anyone except Bridges and Daryush. It also presents, better than any other work I know—especially in the light of what has only recently been so developed and understood—perhaps the most important subject of our age: the tragic conflict between what we have felt in wilderness and what our language means.

Source: Roger Dickinson-Brown, “The Art and Importance of N. Scott Momaday,” in The Southern Review, Vol. XIV, No. 1, January, 1978, pp. 30-45.

Sources

Dickinson-Brown, Roger. “The Art and Importance of N. Scott Momaday, Southern Review, n.s. 14 (1978), pp. 31-45.

Fields, Kenneth. “More Than Language Means,” Southern Review, n.s. 6 (1979), 196-204.

Lincoln, Kenneth. Native American Renaissance, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

Schubnell, Matthias. N. Scott Momaday. Norman: The University of Oklahoma Press, 1985.

For Further Study

Lyons, Oren, et. al., Exiled in the Land of the Free: Democracy, Indian Nations and the U.S. Constitution, Santa Fe: Clear Light Publishers, 1992.

This is a highly intelligent history of U.S. relations with the Indian nations. It is full of dates and factual information, but at the same time it is easy to follow.

Momaday, N. Scott, The Names, New York: Harper & Row, 1976.

This is not a memoir in the sense that we are used to, since Momaday goes back to several generations before he was born for part of the story. We learn about the culture as well as the man.

Tyler, S. Lyman, A History of Indian Policy, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of the Interior, 1973.

As a government publication, this book naturally takes a less angry tone toward government policies than books published by Native Americans or concerned spectators. Still, it was put together at a time when awareness of Indian oppression was at its height, and it does not take the trouble to hide its compassion.

Poetry for Students