Longer Poem Analysis

Tony Miller
English 210—Intro to Literature
Prof. Ann Hostetler
February 14, 2011
Davis’s “12 Songs For A Long Winter”: A Treasure Enjoyed(?) Alone
“12 Songs for a Long Winter” is a poem from the third section of Todd Davis’s 2007 volume, Some Heaven. The poem, as its title indicates, is itself divided into 12 parts, one of several from the book that include Roman-numeraled sections. Four of these sections have ten lines, but that is where any regularity in the structure of this poem ends—the other eight sections vary in length from six to 18 lines, and there is no standard meter or line length. The title, “12 Songs for a Long Winter,” could be applicable to any location in the northern half of the United States. Davis was raised in Elkhart County—and as any member of English 210 will know, there comes a point when one wonders if a Michiana winter will ever end, so an Elkhart native would be particularly suited to writing about it.
Attempting to return to analyzing the poem from cracking wise about it, one of the first major themes the reader will notice is the consistent appearance of snow and the gray, grim appearance that occurs in nearly every stanza. The second major theme is the use of animals, and it is ambiguous in certain places whether a given pronoun refers to a human, a bear, or even a deer. The ambiguity appears to be intentional: by way of example from stanza IV, while the mention of a den appears to suggest the dwelling of a non-human narrator, I also know that in late fall and winter, dead leaves are some of the less annoying objects that blow or are tracked into the entrance of a personal domicile.
The location of this poem is never stated, but the several mountain references would indicate that Davis, who frequently draws explicitly in Some Heaven on first-person pronouns and his own experiences, set “Winter” closer to his present location in Pennsylvania’s Allegheny Mountains than either of his childhood homes in Indiana or Massachusetts. This interpretation agrees with stanza III’s description of a nor’easter sweeping inland over the mountains, but does nothing to satisfy the people of this area who may wish to claim Davis as their own.
Description runs rampant throughout the poem, from the “doe [that] steps gingerly across the white crusts” of lines three and four to the ground littered with muddy-yellow and black excrement (Davis eschews “excrement” in favor of a word less appropriate for this paper) in stanza II to the snow scattered in soiled banks in the stanza which closes the poem. In between, the language of a silent observer with his notebook in the woods evokes the quote on the book’s front cover – “Todd Davis has absorbed this world fully into his heart and mind.”
Let us for a moment leave aside the commentary of others. This mimics the laying aside from Davis of others’ work – while poetry allusions and homages are certainly not the forte of this writer, I cannot find any reference to the work of another poet – scarcely is mentioned even the activity of another human besides the narrator’s family – which suggests a belief that nature is an individual relationship, just a person and the wild. In a sense this is logical, as it is the throngs of people working on assembly lines in Detroit that popularized the automobile which now spews megatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but in a sense it is inexcusable, for why would something so valuable be restricted only to one person?
In a sense, the previous sentence is applicable to much of the poetry of Davis, of which this is just one example. He writes of a naturalist world where everything falls into place – a sort of utopia in which everyone living could simply get back to the basics of life. But in order for that to happen, the population would need to remain small to prevent overdeveloping the land.
That dilemma is the principal point that sticks from “12 Songs for a Long Winter.”