On Panic: Whose Woods These Are I Think I Know

Panic begins with the goat god, Pan. I found him in the dictionary. That’s where I find all my boyfriends. In Endymion, Keats gives Pan the “O thou” treatment: “O thou,/ ... /Hear us, great Pan!” I’d like someone to give me the “O thou” treatment. Today is Valentine’s Day. Time to hand me an “O thou”—the kiss of apostrophe, the grope of the vocative.

In eighth-grade English, I memorized poems: compulsory exercise. The teacher, whose last name was a sandwich shop and soda fountain now shut down, fed us Robert Frost. Codes in Frost alarmed. His lines stick to me, like the poison paper I place under my apartment stove to catch mice.

“Whose woods these are I think I know./His house is in the village, though.” The first line, a complete sentence, ends with a period. The second line, also a complete sentence, ends with a semicolon, a device to promise closure while suspending it. Stop here, but don’t entirely halt. A frightful experience, around the bend, awaits.

By the first line, I’m already panicked. What happened to the comma? It got lopped off. Whose woods these are, comma, I think I know. We pause, midline, obedient to the unmarked caesura. We behold, sweaty-palmed, stomach roiling, lightheaded, an inverted sentence: I think I know whose woods these are has entered the funhouse mirror and become whose woods these are I think I know.

We dwell in an ignorance foisted on us by the system of property rights. I don’t own the poem. I don’t own the woods. I think I know who does own these woods: the witch. I’m Hansel or Gretel, lost in New England. I’d rather be back home with my punitive and impecunious parents. Instead, I’m wandering, somnambulating, on the border of someone else’s death-dealing demesne.

Whoever owns these woods stole the property from its original custodians. Land theft creates a caste of the dispossessed. Take back the forest from its plunderers, we chant, in my coven.

If he owns the woods, why is his house in the village? Spoiled patriarch! Sleep on the moss at the foot of a tree. Construct a tent. Squat. In this waking dream called interpreting poetry, I stand outside the owner’s village house. I’m banging on the windows: Let me in. Shirley Jackson wrote We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and Robert Frost wrote We Have Always Lived in the Village but We Also Own the Forest and We Lock You Out of Both Properties Because You Are a “Sub Bottom” Reader.

Nightmarish errancy erupts with the nonphonetic rhyme of know and though. The gh in though trips up a system-seeking child-reader, who tries to puzzle out the unsounded consonants, the gh that dares not speak its name. In first grade, when I learned to read, words were crenellated castles, each letter a moat.

Because the owner’s house is in the village, he won’t see what I’m doing in his woods. Stopping beside them, I’m doing dirty stuff in a state of dyspeptic, anesthetized solitude. I’m dying, lactating, salivating, ruminating, rhyming, scanning, sublimating, skunk-houring.

Poetry leads to panic because you must ferret out the secret story behind the words. What if the buried meaning remains undetectable? What if the metaphor skein blocks your fingery entrance?

Iambic tetrameter—four poetic feet, four iambs, da DUH, da DUH, da DUH, da DUH—whose WOODS/these ARE/i THINK/i KNOW—is not a panic-inducing formula. The symmetry of stresses—two, two—announces stability, like hitting twice with a hammer the carnival contest that brings you, as prize, a teddy bear more Marilyn Monroe-ish than kid-consciousness authorizes.

The though makes us panic the most. The though structure—the ever-presence of a leak, an exception, a caveat—kills comfort. God loves you, though you’re a sinner. That apple tasted good, though it was poisonous. You’re safe in the village, though you don’t own property. You’re safe in an alabaster chamber of reading, though the poem will deport you before you discover the dead body in its basement.

Suspension of certainty—I think I know, but I don’t really know if I know—produces epistemological ecstasy, if you’re built to enjoy not knowing. Keats, who gave the “O thou” treatment to Pan, coined “negative capability,” the apophatic ability to dwell in uncertainty. Can you enjoy not knowing where you will sleep, not knowing who owns these woods, not knowing if you will be shot for trespassing?

Poetry’s favorite trick—letting a reader dwell in uncertainty—can be uncomfortable, but the displeasure, because it obeys the rules of the Gothic, traps a reader in the cozy grip of a panic as form-fitting as a chair I once coveted in a Vienna café, when I said to myself, “I was born to dwell in a Mitteleuropa that hated me.” Emily Dickinson compared the mind to a haunted chamber. She enjoyed the nearness of the Gothic—fables of being entrapped in a brain or by a husband, an owner, a history, a system of property.

If I can savor the feeling of panic, then I win the Negative Capability Award. If I dislike panic, then I’m exiled from poetry, whose founding ploy is the propagation of fear.

I speak to you in the voice of Bertha Rochester on a proleptic Radio Free Europe broadcast during WWII or the American Renaissance or any period of fright and duplicity. I bend over for Frost, or he bends over for me. No one bends; the line is inflexible. The woods are filling up with innuendo. Pretend the innuendo is a village house. Tucked into a third-floor closet is a locked trunk. Open it later tonight, after you finish reading this feuilleton, and take out a nightgown. Put on the garment, despite its grave odor, the corrosiveness of a clause devouring itself with a soiling involution, like a curl of sausage in the butcher’s window, in a film depicting village children wandering away from their homes. Who is the butcher? Must every essay contain a butcher? Mademoiselle, I think we know who chopped down the trees. A poem has locked up its secrets, and only an interpreter motivated by panic can ungovern the clasps, dislocate the property arrangements, and uncover the texture of the me who is saying these words while waving a flag that signifies defeat in the meaning wars. We’ve given up our foothold in the Augenblick, the lightning blink of the eye. Whose woulds, whose conjectures, whose woods, whose I would have saved them, whose I would not have been capable of saving them, I think I know (eye blink I sew): I concoct the eye-blink Augenblick from a couplet that accords me, every time I remember it, the sensation of fairy fetters, an enclosure in not-knowing, as similar to panic as cream soda is to celery soda, twin flavors of passé satiation.