West-Running Brook

Poets want to understand the world; scientists want to measure it. The humanities and the sciences have long been at odds on how to define the cosmos, as artists call it, or the universe, as scientists call it. As a philosophical poem, “West-Running Brook” explores the reality of a universe that continually frustrates any scientist’s efforts to define it and at the same time renders ironic any artist’s efforts to understand it. Everything about the poem—the stream, the couple, the sun, the world the husband comments upon—everything reveals a stubborn contrariness.

The stream runs west although it is surrounded by “normal” streams that flow logically eastward to the nearby ocean. The woman is romantic, deeply spiritual, imaginative, given to fanciful interpretations of the world around her, not content to allow it to be defined only by the senses; her husband is practical, logical, immersed in the immediate world and what observation of it can reveal, unwilling to trust interpretations of that verifiable world. The world that the husband creates during his lengthy lecture to his wife reveals that, for him, the entire cosmos is held in tension between what the heart yearns to be true and what the intellect understands is true.

The heart (or the soul, the husband never actually names it) yearns for release from the soft prison the world, the necessity of heading irrevocably deathward. The intellect, however, understands one inevitably will die. In the end, the husband refuses to reconcile the contrary nature of heart and head. Like the stream and the husband and wife’s relationship that endures despite or because of radically different personality types, the cosmos is sustained through the dynamic of opposites. Like the stream that runs westward but curls in on itself and flows eastward, a person moves through time doomed to die: “Our life runs down in sending up the clock” (Line 69).