In short, this is where you get off, reader;
I'll continue alone, on foot, in the failing light,
“Nil Nil” is one of—if not the—most famous poem written by the author. It is a two-part meditation upon the meaning of life. Or, more specifically, the meaningless of life. Or, even more specifically: how what seems to be of such tremendous import in our existence always, ultimately, becomes thrashed by the ravages of time into something that is forgotten. The title is a reference to a soccer game in which all the competitive spirit of play winds up in a nothing-to-nothing tie. Not just symbolically speaking, what could be a better metaphor for the absence of great meaning in life? The soccer game is juxtaposed against a secondary part of the narrative involving a pilot crashing to death on April Fool’s Day in one of the most ironically unlucky crash scenarios ever. Both aspects of the narrative serve to illuminate the poet’s persistent presence in his verse of personae who inhabit the storyline but ultimately are revealed in one way or another to be merely masked version of himself. In this particular example, the mask is removed six lines from the poem’s end as the speaker simultaneously reveals himself briefly before sliding the mask back over his face and taking off.
So then we offered what advice we could
on his tropes and turns, his metrical comportment,
on the wedding of the word to the event,
and suggested that he might read this or that.
We said Now: write us more poems like The Rat.
The speaker here is one poet referring to another poet. The opening lines inform the reader that this other poet once wrote some verse about a rat that was absolutely the best verse ever written about a rat. Naturally, this inspired great expectation on the part of those who realized the brilliance of the poem about the rat. Not to mention much excitement which only served to be kindled by the frustrating lack of a follow-up. The poem is about a poet and poetry, but it is, of course, really an indictment of critics and criticism. The message is not that poetry should be free from critical engagement, but rather than critics should be more mindful of what effect their criticism can have upon the creative spirit. The message is also directed toward the creative writer himself as a warning against overthinking and overcalculation in an art form in which success depends so much upon feeling rather than intellect.
One morning, Don Miguel got out of bed
with one idea rooted in his head:
to graft his orange to his lemon tree.
It took him the whole day to work them free,
One aspect of Paterson’s poetry which is immediately notable as charting off the course of modern day expectations is that he still clings tightly to rhyme and rhythm and meter. These are traditional elements of verse which over the course of the 20th century went distinctly out of style and which even today often signal to some that the poem using them is not to be taken as quite so seriously. In the mindset of many, poetry since the latter half of the 20th century which contains rhyme and a distinct rhythm is immediately associated with writers tracing the line from Ogden Nash to Dr. Suess. Rhyme is not to be trusted in serious poetry. That, at least, is the overall impression that has come to be the standard.
Of course, where poets are found there shall also be rebels and Paterson is definitely one of those at the forefront of the rebellion against this misapprehension of rhyme schemes. It doesn’t even matter that both Nash and Seuss are today studied as serious writers of poetry; the wall still yet exists. And, to be honest, there is something sing-songy about the opening lines of this poem that may attune one to dismissing it as merely light verse. This would be a mistake, however, as from this opening the poem becomes increasingly more complex and the rhythm much less sing-songy despite the rhyming remaining intact throughout.
