The Spirit Is Too Blunt an Instrument
The spirit is too blunt an instrument
to have made this baby.
Nothing so unskilful as human passions
could have managed the intricate
exacting particulars: the tiny
blind bones with their manipulating tendons,
the knee and the knucklebones, the resilient
fine meshings of ganglia and vertebrae,
the chain of the difficult spine.
Observe the distinct eyelashes and sharp crescent
fingernails, the shell-like complexity
of the ear, with its firm involutions
concentric in miniature to minute
ossicles. Imagine the
infinitesimal capillaries, the flawless connections
of the lungs, the invisible neural filaments
through which the completed body
already answers to the brain.
Then name any passion or sentiment
possessed of the simplest accuracy.
No, no desire or affection could have done
with practice what habit
has done perfectly, indifferently,
through the body's ignorant precision.
It is left to the vagaries of the mind to invent
love and despair and anxiety
Notes
How much of another person can we ever truly understand? In Anne Stevenson’s The Spirit Is Too Blunt an Instrument, the delicate physical formation of a child becomes a meditation on the limits of human intention. The body takes shape through countless intricate processes, while the spirit, with all its longing and imagination, seems almost too clumsy to account for such precision. We like to imagine ourselves as authors of our own existence, yet so much of who we are precedes our awareness. The body arrives before the story we tell about it, carrying possibilities and limitations we never chose. For November’s The Mask, Stevenson offers a quieter way of approaching identity. Before we learn the roles expected of us, before we acquire names and recognize ourselves in the eyes of others, we are already beings of extraordinary complexity. Perhaps every identity we construct is an imperfect attempt to give meaning to a life that began long before we could understand it. #AnneStevenson #BritishPoetry #ContemporaryPoetry #Existentialism #Identity
Anne Stevenson, "The Spirit is Too Blunt an Instrument" from Poems 1955-2005. Copyright © 2005 by Anne Stevenson.