As You Come Over the Hill

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
—T.S. Eliot

Warning: This is not a happy post. Well, it's happy for me because it's about a new poem I discovered. But the poem itself is not quite… Well, here. Read it for yourself.

As You Come Over the Hill

You’ll see cows grazing in a field
And perhaps a chicken or a turtle
Crossing the road in their sweet time,
And a small lake where a boy once
Threw a girl in who couldn’t swim,

And many large maple and oak trees
Offering ample shade to lie in,
Their branches to hang yourself from,
Should you so desire,
Some lazy afternoon or evening

When something tells the birds to hush,
And the one streetlight in the village
To keep a few moths company
And the large old house put up for sale
With some of its windows broken. 

—Charles Simic

Did you feel that? That shift from tranquil country road to lonely, old, abandoned farmhouse? Wow. I heard this poem read aloud on the radio during an interview with the author the other day, and I want to try to recreate that experience of hearing it for the first time. It went something like this:

It starts off well enough. A nice country scene. We're coming over a hill. Ok. Cows. A chicken. A turtle. A lake. Very nice. A girl who can't swim thrown in a lake? Well that was an odd detail. I wonder what happened to her, being thrown in like that? And why did he throw her? Maybe she quickly learned to dog paddle, or maybe she was rescued (and ended up marrying that boy who so obviously had a crush on her). Or maybe she …. But wait, we're moving on. Maple trees and oaks. Lovely shade. Such a nice, relaxing, peaceful scene to come upon as I come over the hill. Wait—branches to hang yourself from? Whoa, Charles. That seems abrupt. Oh, but were back to peaceful. Good. Hushed birds. Ahh. One streetlight. Well that seems a little lonely. Moths? (Really, moths?) Empty old house? Broken windows? Wait. How in the world did we get here? This is not at all the scene we started with. 

And yet it is. It is still a scene of all the things you'll see "As You Come Over the Hill." Simic finds two very different emotions elicited by the same scene.The shift from the peaceful cows, chicken, turtle, lake, etc. to the empty, lonely, broken house at the end is shocking. And subtle. Even more shocking because it is subtle. Yet, on a second look, it shouldn't be. The shift really starts half way through—at the middle line of the middle stanza. And even the last line of the first stanza hints that possibly all is not well. Still, at the end I am completely amazed and surprised that I didn't end up at all where I thought he was going to take me. And that, in a nutshell, is why I loved this poem as soon as I heard it.

Footnote:  I already like Charles Simic. During a poetry workshop class at USU in 2005, I wrote a review of his book The World Doesn't End, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1990. His poems in that volume are surreal, darkly  humorous and deceptively simple. "As You Come Over the Hill" reminds me of one line from a poem in that book: "Dear Friedrich, the world’s still false, cruel and beautiful."