commentary on Louis Ginsberg's "Waterfalls of Stone"

Louis Ginsberg's son

Louis Ginsberg was Allen Ginsberg's father--a poet whom the son admired deeply, but whose poetry was (to take just this example) far more traditional both formally and thematically than any that his son would produce.

A brief profile of Allen Ginsberg begins this way:

Louis Ginsberg was a published poet, a high school teacher and a moderate Jewish Socialist. His wife, Naomi, was a radical Communist and irrepressible nudist who went tragically insane in early adulthood. Somewhere between the two in temperament was the Ginsberg's second son, Irwin Allen.

"Waterfalls of Stone," a modest but competent and even stimulating poem by Louis Ginsberg, is written in traditional ballad stanza--rhyming a b c b. In the first stanza we have lines ending in

	stone		a
	crest		b
	air		c
	rest		b

The likening done in the first line is this: buildings are like waterfalls, only they're stone. Actually Ginsberg doesn't say they are

Is it modern? Well, ask this question. Does the poem's form--its language, its stanzaic pattern, etc.--help us understand its attitude toward its subject matter?

like waterfalls; he implies the analogy without using the language of simile; they are waterfalls. But of course readers know that buildings aren't waterfalls.

One of the questions you ask when reading a poem to get a sense of its involvement in modernism is: Does the poem's form--its language, its stanzaic pattern, etc.--help us understand its attitude toward its subject matter? It is arguable here that Louis Ginsberg displayed--as a matter of the poem's content--a modern sensibility. His ideas about buildings are, possibly, modern. The stone building described in the first stanza is not nearly as stable, as fixed, as permanent-seeming, as pre-modern concepts of buildings would want. Perhaps. Perhaps. But what about the form? Does the form of the poem itself convey the instability, the fluidity, the waterfall-like quality of the building described in the poem?

It clearly does not. The poem--somewhat in this respect like Moody's poem about the moors of Gloucester--verges on modern content but its unvaryingly traditional ("closed") form tends to counteract that modern sensibility. The building, as it were, of this poem is not like a waterfall of language.