THE STARTLING DEER: TWO POEMS

Startlingly, in their capacity to startle and be startled, deer stare out to us from the heart of lyric poetry. “As the hart panteth after the water brooks,” begins Psalm 42, “so panteth my soul after thee, O God.” So the human heart pants after the divine like a thirsty deer craving fresh water.

So too does the speaker of this revelatory sonnet by Jane Satterfield, from the current issue of THINK, stare at a hart reclining by the side of the road. Starting from the Anglo-Saxon origin of the English language— from its “heart,” as it gently puns, in the form of the word heroet , or meadhall, meaning “home of the hart”—the poem stuns as it turns, in its ninth line, on a question: “Was the Buddha reincarnated as a deer?”

In the vast colloquy of poetry, poems question and answer poems, and “A Resurrection” finds a response to its question in a great precursor lyric, “Psalm” by George Oppen. Here wild deer are on the alert, where they “Startle, and stare out,” prompted by the human gaze—as if about to answer the question suggested by Satterfield’s deer, before it bounds off.