Knit Two, Purl a Poem 9 comments

By Peggy Rosenthal

This post isn’t just for knitters. It’s for anyone who reads poetry—or prose. I’d love your help in sleuthing for knitting metaphors: in poetry especially, but wherever they happen to turn up.

In my previous post, I mused on knitting as a way of meditating with poetry. Today I want to turn the tables and muse about another way that poetry and knitting interweave: when knitting becomes a metaphor within a poem.

The poem that first comes to mind is Denise Levertov’s “Flickering Mind” (originally in A Door in the Hive, New Directions, 1989). My colleague David Impastato and I used to start off our retreats on the spirituality of poetry by leading a guided meditation through this poem, so I’ve heard hundreds of people’s responses to the poem and especially to the knitting image near the poem’s center.

“Flickering Mind” is a prayer: an address to God expressing the poet’s frustration at not being able to focus her mind on God’s presence. In fact, the content of the poem is a series of metaphors for the poet’s “flickering mind.” Around the middle of the poem, there is this intriguing metaphor:

I stop to think about you, and my mind
at once
like a minnow darts away,
darts,
into the shadows, into gleams that fret
unceasing over
the river’s purling and passing.

“What’s purling?” a retreat participant would always ask. I wasn’t much help, since I hadn’t yet learned to knit. But fortunately we almost always had a knitter in the group. And she would explain: “in knitting, a purl stitch forms a little bump, so that it looks exactly like a rushing stream at the point where the water has to swirl around and over a rock.”

An apt image for the mind’s restlessness when we try to pray.

Knitting offers a very different sort of image and resonance in Jeanne Murray Walker’s “Sister Storm” (in Image #53). The poem’s title echoes St. Francis’s beloved “Canticle of Brother Sun,” where Francis praises God through “Sister Moon,” “Brother Fire,” “Sister Water” and so on. Walker’s “Sister storm,” however, is violent and destructive—definitely not, in the poet’s view, an element through which to praise God. The poet talks bravely back to the lightening storm that is raging:

I defy you. Leave us alone
and tell your ugly cousin, war,
to leave our kids alone.
I write for all of us.
With life I write this.
I write with death.

And then comes the surprisingly powerful, constructive image with which the poet defies the storm:

My house is knit to other houses,
living rooms hooked to front yards,
neighborhood to neighborhood,
hooked to that bright creative engine,
to whose rule, before the sun, moon
and stars, we hold out our hands.

Knitting is formed by a series of loops “hooked” to subsequent loops. Walker takes this core image and expands it dramatically. First it’s the image for her treasured connectedness to the people around her; then further out the image connects “neighborhood to neighborhood”; then in the poem’s closing lines above, the poet projects the image out to cosmic size. Her life and those of her neighbors and the neighborhood’s neighbors—that is, of all people in their connectedness—are knit to the creative force of “sun, moon/ and stars.”

I hear an echo here of the final line of Dante’s Divine Comedy: to that “love that moves the sun and the other stars.” This cosmic, divine love, in Walker’s vision, knits us all together in a creative work that overpowers the forces of destructiveness and death.

And all from the single strand of yarn hooked together over and over and over again by two pointed sticks. Knitting is a humble craft—profoundly simple yet capable of astounding effects. No wonder poets find it an image with rich and varying potential.

Since knitting and poetry are my two passions (well, along with my husband, of course, and my granddaughters and their parents), I’d love to hear of other connections of the two. I’d be grateful if readers would tell me any titles of poems you know (or prose works, too) where knitting plays a part.