ENTRANCE TO A WORLD: HELEN PINKERTON'S "BRIGHT FICTIONS", THE

Another of the "Bright Fictions" that features landscape is "On Winslow Homer's Moonlight on Water (1895) in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art." Like the poem on Blakelock, this one focuses on a moonlit landscape, only in this case the human element is more securely present in the poem itself - and in the painting.

Two seated lovers form one shadow, dark

But warmly intimate against the bright

Instants of surf that strike the blackrock shore.

Secure, they take the sea's luminous beauty

Into their joy, as if long-ebbing love,

Its power held back by fear (as you once painted

Two on a moonlit beach, separate, silent),

Had flowed, finally, into oneness here.

Their single, quiet form resists the many.

By contrast with the Blakelock poem, in which the human consciousness is taken into nature, the lovers here "take the sea's luminous beauty / Into their joy." This movement parallels, at an emotional level, the literal movement of the surf striking "the blackrock shore." Helen Pinkerton has remarked, apropos of these lines, that "the instants of surf more or less represent time and its constant passage in individual moments" and that the lovers "together represent a unity in love that resists the shattering effects of the passage of time."10 These remarks are interesting and accurate as far they go, but they are necessarily partial or incomplete, minimizing the "in-between" condition of human consciousness. The lovers may well resist the shattering effects of time, but they seem extraordinarily conscious of its passage, their "warm intimacy" not merely resistant to, but also illuminated by the "bright / Instants of surf." The sea's light is in a sense delivered to them, at least in part, by the relentless surf. The light is an emblem of the eternal riding on the waves of time, and both the tension and the balance of this action are captured by the line division and the enjambment of "bright / Instants." The two lovers here, like the Lover in the poem on van Huysum, could well say that in time's passage "we have our long day."

Both the passage of time and the sense of transcendent value are reinforced by the reference to a second, earlier painting by Winslow Homer, in which two lovers are depicted as isolated, separate, but nonetheless situated on a comparably "moonlit beach." We are left guessing whether these are different lovers or the same two on a different occasion, but the overall effect suggests that although love can alter in different times and under different circumstances, something in the larger scene remains unchanged. And the motion of the surfis paralleled, too, by the larger movements of the tide, whether it is ebbing away from or flowing into the joy of the lovers. Such a landscape may offer a version of the "pathetic fallacy," a projecting of human longing onto nature, but it may also hint at that potent sense that human feeling, belonging indisputably to the individuals involved, is also a part of something much larger.

One way to elaborate on this hint is to note the poem's dialogic structure. The address to the painter here is oblique, contained within a parenthesis. The parenthetical address implies that his earlier painting, though not directly acknowledged in this painting, is to be understood as a voice or presence necessary to the full understanding of this one. And similarly, like the painting, the poem also implies a less than fully acknowledged dialogue, a kind of dialogic engagement with Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," in which the tide, when it's in, symbolizes a fullness of faith. For Arnold, the fidelity of lovers ("Ah, love, let us / Be true to one another!") offers a measure of consolation for the "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of the tide and for his loss of faith. In Helen Pinkerton's poem, the atonement of the lovers, their oneness, is figured as a return of the tide. In terms of the title of the larger collection of which "Bright Fictions" is a part, their union and their joy is something that is "Taken in Faith." It includes a kind of faith in their fidelity to each other, in their harmony with nature, and in the goodness of the whole - even though in the human world such faith or such happiness is inherently vulnerable, precariously balanced "in-between."