Nothing is to be rejected in fear or horror. One must have patience and infinite care and let the light sound, whether of spiders’ delicate feet on a leaf or the chuckle of water in some irrelevant drain-pipe, unfold too. One must put aside antipathies and jealousies and not interrupt. To read this poem one must have myriad eyes, like one of those lamps that turn on slabs of racing water at midnight in the Atlantic, when perhaps only a spray of seaweed pricks the surface, or suddenly the waves gape and up shoulders a monster. The page is often corrupt and mud-stained, and torn and stuck together with faded leaves, with scraps of verbena or geranium. quotes poetry poem Faith Hill Carl Phillips The Atlantic deathĬertainly, one cannot read this poem without effort. He is a professor of English at Washington University in St. Served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2006 to 2012. Phillips has written “It’s a human need, to make of shapelessness a form.” He hasn’t reached answers in this poem, but he’s given shape to some of the most essential questions. Ultimately, he asks how we should live while we wait for it. How are we to / regard his effects … do we say they are / relics and so treat them like relics? / Does his soiled linen count? By the end, Phillips has weaved his way to a broader wrangling with mortality and human frailty, and a sense of wonder for what death will bring.
#SUMMARY OF AS FROM A QUIVER OF ARROWS BY CARL PHILLIPS SERIES#
In “As From a Quiver of Arrows,” Phillips wrestles with death in a series of questions that progresses from the specific to the existential: What do we do with the body, he begins asking. So Phillips chooses subjects-love, power, freedom, grief-that are particularly hard to grasp.
“Poetry is a form of control,” he once said.
Carl Phillips, the former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, has often described poetry as a way to wrestle with ambiguity-to attempt to contain it.
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