Trial By Beauty

“Blandeur” - Kay Ryan

“If it please God,

let less happen.

Even out Earth's

rondure, flatten

Eiger, blanden

the Grand Canyon.

Make valleys

slightly higher,

widen fissures

to arable land,

remand your

terrible glaciers

and silence

their calving,

halving or doubling

all geographical feature

toward the mean.

Unlean against our hearts.

Withdraw your grandeur

from these parts.”

The immensity and profundity of the world that surrounds us cannot be expressed. Yet, somehow Kay Ryan comes close to understanding it all through the simple way in which she describes the sculpted landscape. Despite what poetryfoundation.org might assert, I don't think this is so much a call for “sensory deprivation,” or the declared desire for “less.” Ryan rather seems to describe the sort of pain and suffering that comes with such natural wonder and beauty. Evidenced by the line “Unlean against our hearts” (18), Ryan intimates some deeper relationship between the individual and the presence of God. Ryan implies a sort of heartache, or weight on the soul that correlates with the evidence of esoteric workings in the universe. Ryan writes as if the absence of God in daily life, accentuates the pain of seeing such “grandeur” in nature. If only the world was as “bland” and unextraordinary as sitting at a cubicle from nine to five, then the lack of meaning at a personal level would seem less poignant. Ryan also addresses human placement in the world. With the world constantly transforming, “calving, halving or doubling” (14-15), humans seem trivial when put in the context of geologic time. In this sense, Ryan's work takes on a very existential tone, as she pleads for less in the world to assuage her own feelings of purposelessness. No matter the literary analysis, this poem certainly possesses a tone of angst that appears so often in modern and post-modern works of literature.