The speaker of  Eamon Grennan’s “The Cave Painters” imagines how the early—original?— painters and those who assisted them created their images.  He speculates about how they  “left the world of weather and panic / behind them” and, using “rushlight,”  crouched their way into a “rock chamber.”  He considers how their painting was able to capture such “intangible” qualities in the animals they depicted as “speed,” “fear,” and “gentleness.”  He further wonders if they worked in silence—as did the monks at work on illuminated manuscripts—or if they were as noisy—gossipy—as a flock of birds.

As artists the “intent and human” cave painters resembled medieval monks doing their glorifying “lace” work, just as they resembled the speaker using the tools of poetry to “come to terms” with possibly sharing a motive with earlier people.  In part, the speaker makes (or finds) his argument above this motive with intermittently spaced repetitions of the word one: the cave painters push “as one pulse” into the caverns; (in what for me are the lines I have most trouble following because I am not sure what the speaker means by “unbroken line” or what he sees “everything” to include) “they attach / the mineral, vegetable, animal / realms to themselves, inscribing / the one unbroken line / everything depends on.”  Playing out this notion of the line, the speaker continues, “On this one line they leave / a beak-headed human figure of sticks / and one small, chalky, human hand.”  After discussing the silence or noise of the cave painter’s practice, the speaker returns to the one pulse that informed their work—a pulse the poem claims we later humans recognize and share: “one desire / we’d recognize”: to “leave something / upright and bright behind them in the dark.”

The speaker’s argument is underscored by the words the poem.  After describing a group lighting their way into the cave, “The Cave Painters” focuses on the materials and then on the stony cave walls they used as their surfaces:

The pigments mixed in big shells

are crushed ore, petals and pollens, berries

and the binding juices oozed

out of chosen barks. The beasts

 

begin to take shape from hands and feather-tufts

(soaked in ochre, manganese, madder, mallow white)

stroking the live rock, letting slopes and contours

mould those forms from chance, coaxing

rigid dips and folds and bulges

to lend themselves to necks, bellies, swelling haunches,

a forehead or a twist of horn, tails and manes

curling to a crazy gallop.

 

This passage is typical of how lushly sonorous the poem is.  Just as the “dips and folds and bulges” of the cave surface play their parts in shaping what the painters depicted, the sounds of the words—particularly as picked up in assonance and alliteration—help the words swell.  One of the pleasures of the poem is how its meditation is informed by—molded by—the sonority available in the poet’s material.  He produces the aural equivalent of “shapes of radiance.”   (My own favorite glint of radiance is the line that builds on the repetition of short I’s—“labyrinth of lit affinities.”)  The poem seems to have been composed out loud; the repeated sounds within the words seem to help the speaker (and his readers) move ahead; at the same time those sounds unite us—ground us—in a shared, and, because we can savor the echoings, enjoyable creation.  The poem feels molded by the “dips, folds and bulges” of sound.  Like the cave painters working with the materials and surfaces they have available, the speaker uses what the words give him to shape a “bright and upright” poem to leave behind.

–Jack