JOSEPH BRODSKY
461
to consider working up the last stanza, and this is just one of the spin-offs),
which serves to recapitulate the ship's ostentatiousness. Fish are seen here as if
through a porthole, hence the magnifying glass effect dilating the fish eyes and
making them moonlike. Of much greater consequence, however, is this stanza's
third line, which concludes the exposition and serves as the springboard for the
poem's main business.
"And query: 'What does this vaingloriousness down here?' " is not only a
rhetorical turn setting up the rest of the poem to provide the answer to the
question posed by the line. It is first of all the recapturing of the oratorical
posture, somewhat diluted by the lengthy exposition. To achieve that, the poet
heightens his diction here, by combining the legalese of "query" with the clearly
ecclesiastical "vaingloriousness." The latter's five-syllable-long hulk marvelously
evokes the cumbersomeness of the ship at the sea's bottom. Apart from this,
though, both the legalese and the ecclesiastical clearly point to a stylistic shift
and a change of the whole discourse's plane of regard.
Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything
Prepared a sinister mate
For her - so gaily great -
A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.
Now, "Well" here both disarms and signals a regrouping. It's a colloquial
conceit, designed both to put the audience a bit off guard - should
"vaingloriousness" have put it on alert - and to pump some extra air into the
speaker's lungs as he embarks on a lengthy, extremely loaded period. Resembling
somewhat the speech mannerisms of our fortieth President, "Well" here indicates
that the movie part of the poem is over and now the discourse begins in earnest.
It appears that the subject, after all, is not submarine fauna but Mr. Hardy's - as
well as poetry's very own, ever since the days of Lucretius - concept of causality.
"Well: while was fashioning/This creature of cleaving wing" informs the
public - syntactically, above all - that we are beginning from afar. More impor–
tant the subordinate clause preceding the Immanent Will statement exploits to
the hilt the ship's gender designation in our language. We've got three words
here with increasingly feminine connotations, whose proximity to each other
adds up to an impression of deliberate emphasis. "Fashioning" could have been
a fairly neutral reference to shipbuilding were it not qualified by "this creature,"
with its overtones of particular fondness, and were "this creature" itself not side–
lit by "cleaving." There is more of "cleavage" in "cleaving" than of "cleaver,"
which, while denoting the movement of the ship's prow through the water, also
echoes a type of sail with its whiteness, resembling a blade. In any case, the con-
