The Dream of the Unified Field by Jorie Graham
“The Dream of the Unified Field” by Jorie Graham is a free verse poem that explores complex themes of connection, perception, and the human desire for unification amidst chaos. Structured into seven sections and twelve stanzas, the poem juxtaposes personal experiences with broader historical narratives, particularly through the lens of ballet and exploration. The speaker embarks on a journey through a snowstorm to deliver a black leotard to her daughter, which serves as a metaphor for connection and continuity between generations. As she navigates this landscape, she reflects on her own childhood experiences with a ballet master and the historical encounters of figures like Christopher Columbus.
The poem employs vivid imagery and cinematic techniques, such as close-ups and panoramic shifts, to create a dynamic interplay between the immediate and the distant. The snowflakes, birds, and the actions of the speaker weave together to illustrate the transient nature of experiences and the elusive quest for meaning. The stark contrasts of colors and actions, such as the black leotard and the black crow, highlight themes of identity and belonging. Through this intricate layering, Graham contemplates the futility of seeking a singular unified experience, ultimately suggesting that human connections are complex and often fragmented. The poem invites readers to reflect on the interplay of personal and collective histories, leaving a rich tapestry of thought and emotion to ponder.
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The Dream of the Unified Field by Jorie Graham
First published: 1993, in Materialism; 1995 in The Dream of the Unified Field
Type of poem: Lyric
The Poem
“The Dream of the Unified Field” is a relatively long poem in free verse subdivided into seven sections that are further divided into twelve stanzas. It challenges conventional notions of organizational patterns of poetry while confronting the fallacy behind humankind’s desire to unify experience. This fallacy is implied in its title, a reference to Albert Einstein’s unsuccessful attempts to prove the theory of the unified field. The speaker (apparently Graham herself) attempts to yoke walking through a snowstorm to take a black leotard to her young daughter together with her own childhood experiences with ballet master Madame Sakaroff and finally with the initial contact of Christopher Columbus with the New World. As she weaves through the poem, she connects the immediate and personal with the distant and impersonal in ways that work naturally as well as in ways that she must force to work, thus reinforcing the impact of the title.
In the first section of the poem, as the speaker treks through the snow to carry the leotard to her daughter, she becomes caught in the “motion” of the snow—the patterns it creates in falling, the “arabesques” that it, like her daughter, performs. The transience of the snowflakes, “Gone as they hit the earth,” also strikes her as she moves through their motion, finding in their symbols a clue to her own meaning, her own existence.
Upon completion of her task, she is taken by the sight and sound of a “huge flock of starlings” coursing through the snow and finally alighting in ever-shifting patterns on a bare-limbed oak tree. “Foliage of the tree of the world’s waiting” she calls them, and they return her to the vision of her daughter through the window as she performs her pirouettes: “I watch the head explode, then recollect, explode, recollect.”
Drawn by the screech of a single crow in the midst of the flock of starlings, the speaker feels the emptiness in her pocket which once held the balled-up leotard, and, “terrified” at that emptiness, returns to watch the unknowing child through the window. The crow draws her attention more closely, and she minutely separates the colors that make up his “blackness” as he suddenly lifts and ascends in one “blunt clean stroke” only to land to disappear again.
Crowlike, the vision of Madame Sakaroff in her studio in Stalingrad intrudes upon her consciousness. Uniting “The dream of Europe” with the New World, black crow with black dress, bird with “bird-headed knob,” the vision of Madame Sakaroff brings in more explicitly the need to connect with or reject old patterns of belief. “No one must believe in God again,” the speaker hears as, entranced, she watches Madame Sakaroff encounter herself (“her eyes eyed themselves”) in the “silver film” of the mirror. That vision, however, ultimately proves unsuccessful; the speaker finds in it “no signal” and “no information” as she turns helplessly to the window of her present, seeking “what” she “should know to save” her child.
Unable to “know,” she centers herself within the snowstorm, taking possession of it as well as the blizzard of her own experiences, and, through them, the “Age behind the clouds, The Great Heights.” Her own desire to possess, to seek, to know becomes connected with an explorer, the “Admiral” Christopher Columbus as he, also in the midst of a snowstorm (a fiction manufactured to force the unity that may not really exist), takes harbor in Puerto de San Nicolas and places the cross signalling possession “on a conspicuous height.” As the speaker had clothed her daughter in the black leotard, he clothes the young “very black Indian” woman captured by his men and returns her (apparently against her will) to her people. The final vision of the poem is the glint of gold on her nose “which was a sign there was/ gold/ on that land.”
Forms and Devices
Appropriately for a poem first appearing in a collection entitled Materialism, “The Dream of the Unified Field” contains startlingly vivid images that seek to re-create actual experience. Not technically metaphors, the images nonetheless interconnect and react on each other, reinforcing the impact as they amass. The blackness of the leotard, the blackness of the birds, the blackness of Madame Sakaroff, even the blackness of the Indian girl all contribute to the “dream” of unity that informs the poem. Similarly, the patterning and repatterning of the dance (“I watch the head explode then recollect, explode, recollect”), the birds on the tree (“scatter, blow away, scatter, recollect”), the swirling snow (“the arabesques and runnels, gathering and loosening”), and experience (“they stick, accrue,/ grip up, connect”) unite the patterning and repatterning of history, thought, and meaning both in the individual and the species. This movement reflects the building of imagery in the poem from the personal experience in the opening to the quintessential experience of burgeoning civilization at the end. Connecting these experiences is the long road, the footfall, the “white sleeping geography” often obscured by blinding snow and often directionless. It is briefly lit only by the flash of the silver mirror, the glint of the gold on the girl’s nose.
The ever-changing imagery of the poem provides the perfect vehicle for the cinematic techniques that critic Helen Vendler, in The Given and the Made (1995), see as pervasive in Graham’s poetry: “close and far focus, panning, jump-cutting, emphasis on point of view and looking.” In this poem Graham employs each of these techniques, from the close-up of the crow to the panorama as it streaks into the air and lands again, from the jumps from bird to child, from child to woman, and from woman to admiral. These techniques are reinforced by the cinematic frames provided by the window that forms a frame through which she watches her daughter dance and the mirror that doubles the image of Madame Sakaroff.
The interlaced imagery in the poem also gives rise to organic patterns of lineation. Vendler notes that the use of long lines and long sentences is a distinguishing characteristic of Graham’s work. In an interview with Thomas Gardner in Denver Quarterly 26 (Spring, 1992), Graham attributes these long lines to her need to write in lines that contain more than the typical five stresses, because they cannot be spoken or even understood “in one breath unit for the most part (and since our desire is to grasp them in one breath unit) [it] causes us to read the line very quickly.”
Reading quickly leads, she feels, to a “rush in the line” that creates “a very different relationship with the silence: one that makes it aggressive—or at least oceanic—something that won’t stay at bay. You have fear in the rush that can perhaps cause you to hear the fearful in what is rushed against.” This “rush” is evident throughout “The Dream of the Unified Field” in the dashes that link images and concepts (“the century—minutes, houses going by—The Great/ Heights—”) as it is in the long lines that attempt to capture and hold the essence and music of experience. An example is Madame Sakaroff’s encounter with herself (“I . . ./ saw the light rippling almost shuddering where her body finally/ touched/ the image, the silver film between them like something that would have/ shed itself in nature now”). In The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham (1995), Vendler finds a metaphor of “Earthly desire itself” in Graham’s lineation, “desire always prolonging itself further and further over a gap it nonetheless does not wish to close. In this search by desire, mind will always outrun body.”