I Remember Galileo by Gerald Stern

First published: 1981, in The Red Coal

Type of poem: Meditation

The Poem

Gerald Stern’s poem “I Remember Galileo” is composed of two twelve-line free-verse stanzas in which Stern contrasts Galileo’s image of the mind as a “piece of paper blown around by the wind” with his own preferred image of the mind as a squirrel narrowly escaping death on the highway. The poem exhibits Stern’s characteristic expansiveness (he is often compared to the nineteenth century American poet Walt Whitman) and humor, but in the end his point is serious as he applauds the squirrel’s insistent race to save his life (Stern appoints a masculine gender to the animal) instead of the paper’s random blowing.

Stern begins the poem by describing the piece of paper as Galileo saw it, “blown around by the wind,” an image he once found appealing, evidently in part because of its randomness. The implications of the metaphor for the mind are suggestive. Galileo says that the mind, like the paper, is subject to random forces outside itself, forces that take it into unpredictable places. That unpredictability is evident in the places Stern once imagined the paper—against a tree, in a car, in various cities. (Although the speaker of a poem should not necessarily be confused with the poet, in Stern’s work his voice is often so personal, as here, that the idea of a persona widely removed from the poet himself seems unnecessarily artificial.) Stern says he was satisfied with the comparison for years, but he has come to prefer another metaphor instead.

His new preference is for a squirrel like one he saw “crossing/ Route 80 between the wheels of a giant truck.” The squirrel escaped death under the truck’s wheels, though Stern describes the way the animal’s life must surely have been shortened “by all that terror.” In the second stanza Stern amplifies the significance of the squirrel as an image for the mind, noting especially his speed, “his lowness to the ground,/ his great purpose and the alertness of his dancing” as the qualities that distinguished the squirrel from the paper. The paper, Stern says, “will do in theory,” but the living animal is what is needed “for this life.” At the poem’s end, Stern leaves his usual conversational voice briefly to apostrophize “O philosophical mind, O mind of paper” and then explains to that mind his need for the squirrel and his “wild dash.”

Throughout the poem Stern moves easily from serious commentary to a sort of humorous exaggeration (as in the description of the squirrel’s fear at his narrow escape) and finally, as in the last three lines, to a higher level of lyricism as he praises the squirrel’s intensity. That intensity is what makes the squirrel an appealing image for what Stern admires in the mind; it chooses where it will go instead of being blown randomly into cars and trees.

Forms and Devices

Stern is a free-verse poet; he does not use conventional forms, and his use of traditional figures of speech is sparse. In this poem he creates a stanza break, not so much to contrast the idea of the paper with the squirrel but instead to use the second stanza to define and amplify exactly what about the squirrel resembles the mind.

The conversational tone with which Stern begins is typical of his work; he sounds as if he is continuing a conversation he has already begun with the reader. Throughout most of the poem his diction is colloquial, the ordinary language of conversation among educated people, thus supporting the conversational tone. Even the first figure of speech, the simile of mind and paper, is introduced quite matter-of-factly. Stern recalls what Galileo said about mind being like “a piece of paper blown around by the wind,” asserts that he “loved the sight of it,” and imagines the places the paper might blow—a tree, “the backseat of a car.” At last, with an air of exaggeration, he claims that for years the paper would “leap” through his cities.

The next simile is Stern’s own, the comparison of the mind to a squirrel. Stern locates the squirrel precisely; it is on Route 80 and caught “between the wheels of a giant truck.” Stern compares the squirrel’s indecisive darting to “a thin leaf,/ or a frightened string,” but in fact the scene is one that almost everyone has seen—a squirrel wavering in his own misjudgment about the speed of oncoming traffic, darting now in one direction, now another.

Although Stern is present as observer and recorder through most of this poem, at this point he views the situation from the squirrel’s point of view, imagining how terror has shortened his life, has even caused “his yellow teeth” to be “ground down to dust” (perhaps another exaggeration).

The second stanza explains why the animal seems a more satisfactory mind-model than the paper. Paper, Stern says, is for theory, “when there is time/ to sit back in a metal chair and study shadows.” Yet life is not carried out in the metal office chairs of theory; the squirrel’s speed and intensity at this crucial moment of his life are what move Stern, “his great purpose and the alertness of his dancing.” Stern goes on to describe how the threat of death electrifies the squirrel and makes his life somehow more vivid. At that point Stern indents a line and, in the last three rather Whitmanesque lines, addresses the“philosophical mind” of paper, telling it that he needs not it but the squirrel, which seems now to represent raw energy as he makes the dash which saves his life and lets him run “up his green ungoverned hillside,” a free being who has gambled for his own fate.