Dark Harbor by Mark Strand

First published: 1993

Type of poem: Poetic sequence

The Poem

Dark Harbor is a book-length poem in unrhymed verse, divided into forty-five sections that are identified sequentially by roman numerals. There is also an introduction in verse entitled “Proem.” Each section, including “Proem,” is written in tercets, but six of the sections end with stanzas of only one or two lines.

The title resonates with echoes of some of Strand’s earlier books: Sleeping with One Eye Open, his first book of poems; Reasons for Moving, probably fueled by his life as the son of a salesman who moved his family too often for them to form long-term relationships with other people; and Darker, perhaps the first of Strand’s books to convince the critics that his apparent preoccupation with the darker aspects of life was actually a vehicle for explorations of the human ability to find the light hidden in the darkness. Beyond these first three books, all of Strand’s books of poetry (and even his children’s books) push and pull readers through the dark harbors of the human journey.

Although Dark Harbor is not a narrative poem in the classic sense of a work that has a definable beginning, middle, and end, it has a combined sense of form and unity that gives it the sort of through-line of thought that one normally expects from a narrative. The narrator of the poem is a poet on a journey, an odyssey that takes him through a return to his places (both physical and spiritual) of origin and eventually brings him to a place of closure.

Each of the forty-five numbered sections is written from the first-person perspective of the narrator, but “Proem” is written from the perspective of an omniscient narrator. This narrator serves as a sort of Greek chorus who introduces the narrator of all that is to follow, the poet/narrator: “ ‘This is my Main Street,’ he said as he started off/ That morning, leaving the town to the others.” These opening lines set the stage for the poet/narrator to take the reader on a journey. Halfway through “Proem” comes the first hard evidence that the narrator who is being introduced is indeed a poet, almost certainly Strand himself or an image of himself that he wants to project for the reader: “he would move his arms/ And begin to mark, almost as a painter would,/ The passages of greater and lesser worth, the silken/ Tropes and calls to this or that, coarsely conceived.”

In section I the narrator describes the place of departure for the journey to come. He is in a dark place lighted by streetlamps, but he is wearing a white suit that outshines the moon. “In the night without end,” others await his arrival at “the station” before they begin their journey somewhere beyond those still on Earth. In section II he describes the village or hamlet as a place where the reader has never been, a place where there are no trains or places for planes to land. (One might wonder from what sort of station they departed.) It is somewhere in the West that has considerable wind and snow. It is a place where people are not up on fashion and sleep well at night, an indication that those who dwell here have cleaner consciences than people elsewhere.

In section III the place begins to sound more like a small town. Midway through this section the narrator provides a bit of information that appears to contradict what he had said earlier about the reader having never been to this place: “And you pass by unsure if this coming back is a failure/ Or a sign of success, a sign that the time has come/ To embrace your origins as you would yourself.” It is possible to interpret this “you” as the travelers that were waiting for him at the beginning of the journey or as someone to whom the reader has not been introduced. Throughout this poem it is often difficult to discern the identity of the narrator’s “you.” The final tercet of this section might even suggest that the narrator is referring to himself in the second person: “life looked to be simpler back in the town/ You started from look, there in the kitchen are Mom and Dad,/ He’s reading the paper, she’s killing a fly.” It is possible that there is no single “you” consistent throughout the poem. Each usage could be relative to its particular section, leaving the reader to discern identity from the context.

Overall, the narrator paints a picture of returning home to the small town that he left long ago to live in a large city. Most of the sections are vignettes of the narrator’s rediscovery or new evaluation of this small town, his place of origin. However, some of the sections are so abstract that they add little, if anything, to the geography of the poem. They appear more as commentaries on life in general. A few others make such sudden turns into sarcasm that they come across as comic, but the comedy, in perfect keeping with the title and the general mood of the poem, is always dark.

The final section, XLV, rounds out the collection by echoing elements of the first two sections: the cottages, unidentified people grouped together, angels singing, images of life after death. It gives both a feeling of completion and a sense of the cyclical nature of everything. This is the dark harbor of souls.

Forms and Devices

The first easily recognized device the poet uses in Dark Harbor is the introductory poem, “Proem.” This is not a proem in the sense that some critics now use the term, a portmanteau created by combining the words “prose” and “poem.” It is a proem in the classical sense—an introductory passage to a longer work that provides clues to the nature and origin of the work that is to follow.

Ironically, Dark Harbor reads very much like a prose poem. The rhythms are dictated more by syntax than by lineation. Strand uses a combination of three physical devices to give the poem a structured, poemlike appearance. First, he breaks the poem into lines; there are usually between ten and fifteen syllables to each line, but this is by no means a strict rule. Sometimes the lines end on weak or unstressed words, but the breaks usually wrap logically into the next line. Second, he begins each line with an uppercase letter. This accomplishes two things: It emphasizes the line breaks, and it adds a touch of formality, a punctuating element that helps define each line as a component that exists both within and outside of syntax. Third, he breaks each section into tercets. This gives a consistent appearance to all forty-five sections of the poem as well as “Proem,” and it serves as a framing device, using white space to sometimes enhance, sometimes override the ostensible logic of the syntax. It also adds another element of formality that complements the high level of diction and wide variety of sentence structures employed throughout the poem.

Form is essential in all of Strand’s poetry. In his essay “Notes on the Craft of Poetry,” published in Claims for Poetry (Donald Hall, ed., 1982) Strand writes:

[A]ll poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes.…[F]orm has to do with the structure or outward appearance of something but it also has to do with its essence.…[S]tructure and essence seem to come together, as do the disposition of words and their meanings.

For Strand, poetry is a marriage of form and function, and, for better or worse, without both elements there is no marriage, therefore, no poetry.

The most common and interesting images in Dark Harbor are those one sees upon looking up: stars, clouds, the sky, moon, sun, falling snow, even angels. These images do not, as might be expected, serve as counterpoints to the dark images of the earth and earthbound things, implying a good-versus-evil dialogue. Rather, they are symbolic of those elusive qualities that define the human spirit as distinctly different from anything else in nature. The dark is not a place of evil; it is simply a point of departure, a place from which people start their quests and inquiries. The light is what one seeks, and Strand is critical of anyone who belittles that. “O you can make fun of the splendors of moonlight,/ But what would the human heart be if it wanted/ Only the dark, wanted nothing on earth/ But the sea’s ink or the rock’s black shade?”

There are no intentional end rhymes in this poem, but alliterations are not uncommon. Section XXVII makes good use of anaphora, the first six of the seven tercets beginning with the same word, and of alliterations and assonance. Together these tropes add a rich musical quality and an air of nobility to this particular section.

The overall tone of the poem is elegiac, but there are a few sections that provide comic relief, sometimes bordering on zaniness (as in section XIX, the shortest section) and sometimes slipping into a sarcastic mode that adds a different kind of bite to a work that already has a formidable set of teeth. Surrealism is the order of the day. From the very first scene, in which the unnamed group of travelers bands together to begin the journey from darkness, to the final scene, in which there are rumors of dead poets wandering, wishing “to be alive again,” everything seems to happen somewhere between dream and reality. Strand’s choices of forms and poetic devices give each section of this poem an individual character that allows each to stand on its own. Overall, the same choices give Dark Harbor the power of one uniform work that drives all of its component parts in a single direction.

Sources for Further Study

Boston Globe. March 21, 1993, p.14.

Chicago Tribune. August 1, 1993, XIV, p.4.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. May 9, 1993, p.11.

The New Republic. CCVIII, March 8, 1993, p.34.

The New York Times Book Review. XCVIII, April 18, 1993, p.15.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch. May 30, 1993, p. CS.

The Virginia Quarterly Review. LXIX, Autumn, 1993, p. 5S136.

The Yale Review. LXXXI, July, 1993, p.134.