The Ant Mansion by Robert Bly
"The Ant Mansion" is a prose poem by Robert Bly, featured in his 1975 collection *The Morning Glory*. The poem narrates an introspective journey where Bly, after waking from a dream, explores the forest and discovers a decaying wooden chunk inhabited by ants. This object captivates him and serves as a metaphor for human existence, reflecting on themes of labor and the unseen fruits of life. Bly's use of the prose poem format allows for a narrative style that emphasizes content over form, promoting a contemplative and intimate exploration of nature and mortality.
The poem begins with a dream involving a rattlesnake bite, leading to his encounter with the wood, which he imagines as an "apartment house" for the ants. As he examines the wood's cavities and colors, he muses on inviting the souls of deceased loved ones to inhabit this "ant mansion." The work ultimately symbolizes the legacy of human effort, highlighting how much of what individuals create remains unnoticed or unappreciated. Bly's reflections also touch on familial connections and the longing for recognition of past labors, offering a poignant commentary on life and memory.
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The Ant Mansion by Robert Bly
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1975 (collected in The Morning Glory, 1975)
Type of work: Poem
The Work
“The Ant Mansion,” one of the longer prose poems included in Bly’s volume The Morning Glory (1975), contains a short narrative in which the poet, after waking in his sleeping bag, takes a walk through the forest. He comes upon a “wood chunk” that has started to decay, providing a home to a colony of ants. He takes the object home and, after studying it, begins to speculate on its significance as a metaphor for human existence.
This poem, as well as the entire collection The Morning Glory, was the culmination of a series of poems Bly began in the early 1970’s. After his psychological journeys in Sleepers Joining Hands, Bly began to experiment with the form he called the “prose poem,” a form the French poet Charles-Pierre Baudelaire claimed would be the major poetic form of the twentieth century. The prose poem offered Bly several new options, introducing new elements into his poetry. First, it introduced the element of plot—the poems became more narrative in nature. Second, the emphasis was not on the form at all but on the content—not on the language, but on the thought. Third, it allowed Bly the best medium in which to write what had been called, for lack of a better phrase, the “thing poem,” or the object poem.
In his essay “The Prose Poem as an Evolving Form” (1986), Bly points out that the main difference between usual poetic forms and the prose form is that the basic unit of the usual poem is the line. In the case of the prose poem, the basic unit is the sentence. According to Bly, the sentence allows the poem to proceed at a calmer, more relaxed pace; the prose poem establishes a more intimate, more natural, state for contemplation. According to Bly, the form’s closest antecedent—although it resembles the fable, the short story, and the essay—is the haiku. Like the haiku, the prose poem (or object poem) “is evidence that the poet has overcome, at least for the moment, the category-making mentality that sees everything in polarities: human and animal, inner and outer, spiritual and material, large and small.” The prose poem allows a kind of participation in nature that more structured poetry does not allow.
Bly begins “The Ant Mansion” by describing a dream in which the rubbing of his sleeping bag causes him to dream of being bitten by a rattlesnake. This wakes him, and he heads to the pasture, veering into some nearby woods. There he discovers the chunk of wood; he takes it back to his house, placing it on his desk. He begins to study the object, noting its many cavities, the color of each various shade of brown or black. He speaks of the wood as an apartment house for ants, speaking of the cavities as floors and the bark strips as roofs.
In the second half of the poem, Bly remarks that the “balconies” created by the half-decayed wood would make excellent “places for souls to sit” and begins to consider inviting all those souls he has known that are now dead to come and live in the ant mansion. He includes villagers he has known, his brother, his grandmother, and eventually such large masses as those who died in the Civil War. By the end of the poem, it becomes clear that the ant mansion has become a symbol for the objects of human labor, the fruit of human life on earth, which no one (or very few) is ever likely to see or use. Bly ends the poem thinking of his father’s labor and wishing that it, too, could be found by a pasture and somehow validated.
Bibliography
Altieri, Charles F. “Varieties of Immanentist Experience: Robert Bly, Charles Olson, and Frank O’Hara.” In Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry During the 1960’s. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1979.
Davis, William Virgil. Understanding Robert Bly. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988.
Friberg, Ingegard. Moving Inward: A Study of Robert Bly’s Poetry. Goteborg, Sweden: Acta University Gothoburgensis, 1977.
Harris, Victoria. The Incorporative Consciousness of Robert Bly. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992.
Lensing, George S., and Ronald Moran, eds. Four Poets and the Emotive Imagination: Robert Bly, James Wright, Louis Simpson, and William Stafford. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976.
Malkoff, Karl. Escape from the Self: A Study in Contemporary American Poetry and Poetics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977.
Nelson, Howard. Robert Bly: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
Peseroff, Joyce, ed. Robert Bly: When Sleepers Awake. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1985.
Robert Bly Web site. www.Robertbly.com.
Smith, Thomas R. Walking Swiftly: Writings and Images on the Occasion of Robert Bly’s 65th Birthday. New York: Perennial, 1991.
Sugg, Richard P. Robert Bly. Boston: Twayne, 1986.