Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Rebecca Wolff’s "Tunnel Visionary" is a haunting meditation on history, violence, and perception, where the speaker navigates a landscape saturated with past horror, natural excess, and the instability of memory. The poem unfolds in a dreamlike progression, merging past and present, nature and decay, knowledge and uncertainty. Through its interplay of fragmented observation and philosophical musing, the poem constructs a vision of history as both inescapable and collapsible, an ever-present structure that threatens to dissolve at any moment.

The poem opens in a nightmarish scene: “Dead men dangling / and lying everywhere.” The starkness of this statement situates the speaker in a world where death is both abundant and strangely unmoving. The immediate juxtaposition—“The rhododendrons / are fecund as gangrene”—links natural fertility with decay. Rhododendrons, typically associated with lush beauty, are rendered grotesque, their vitality tainted by the metaphor of infection. The phrase “rhododendrons not in flower / but in redundancy” reinforces the sense of excess, as if the landscape itself is burdened with too much life, too much death. The repetition of these plants creates a claustrophobic atmosphere, where beauty and ruin are indistinguishable.

“The path was frightening all along, / I had to stop writing, in the light rain / the ink was running.” This moment grounds the speaker’s presence in the scene—there is an act of recording, but the rain disrupts it, rendering language unstable. This breakdown in inscription parallels the thematic concern with history’s collapse. The “promissory sky” that is “reneging, remaining absolutely gray” suggests an expectation unfulfilled, a reality that refuses to deliver meaning or illumination. The sky’s failure mirrors the erasure of the written word, reinforcing the poem’s preoccupation with the instability of truth and record.

The next lines shift to an eerie perception of the natural world: “In crowds of trees I see, between / the trees, an awesome / thicket, so dark green and above / all still. Too full and carved.” The sense of depth and enclosure intensifies—the speaker is not simply in a forest but surrounded by something sculpted, unnatural in its perfection. The tableau is described as “virgin,” a word that suggests untouched purity but is immediately subverted: “it has not held a step / since one was murdered last.” This chilling aside implies that the landscape is defined by past violence, that its pristine appearance conceals a history of death.

“I know a body / was perfectly discovered, / I know it decomposed / fast in that crèche of mulch.” The certainty in these lines—“I know”—establishes an omniscience that the speaker later calls into question. The phrase “perfectly discovered” is unsettling, as if discovery itself were an art, an inevitability. The body’s decomposition is rapid, as if time itself is accelerated in this space, consuming and erasing evidence even as the speaker reconstructs it.

“I see its whole form now, but leave off / horror as I leave off / omniscience sometimes.” Here, the speaker acknowledges the power to perceive, to recall, to reconstruct, but also the ability to disengage. The ability to “leave off” horror suggests a certain detachment, an awareness that observation does not necessitate emotional engagement. This detachment mirrors the instability of historical narrative—what is recorded, what is erased, what is selectively remembered.

“Walking, my theorem runs: / if history is a tunnel, / timed ribs supporting a structure, / then it is collapsible / like a traveling-cup.” This passage shifts the poem into a philosophical meditation on history’s form. The image of history as a tunnel suggests a fixed, linear structure, something containing and directing movement. But the assertion that it is “collapsible” challenges this rigidity, proposing history as something that can fold in on itself, that can be dismantled or reconfigured. The “traveling-cup” comparison suggests a portability, a convenience to historical narrative that makes it adaptable but also precarious.

“Chuckling, walking. / That I could believe it to be so!” The momentary levity of chuckling is striking—after so much darkness, the speaker’s ability to laugh feels almost absurd. Yet this laughter may be an acknowledgment of the impossibility of truly mastering history, of containing it in a neat structure.

The next lines present a vision of simultaneity: “Unpinioned forms of simultaneity / lodged at all times (face down / in the moss or floating / in shallow foam at pond’s edge).” The phrase “unpinioned forms” suggests something freed from restriction, unbound from linear time. The bodies—face down in moss, floating in water—occupy a space where past and present coexist, reinforcing the idea that history is not a progression but a recurring presence.

“But it is the farfetched day now, / it all happened, and it’s happening / in my sight.” This sudden assertion collapses past and present entirely—what was, is. The “farfetched day” suggests an unreal quality to the present moment, as if time itself has stretched into a paradox.

“Leaf upon leaf, in captivity, / I see bodies in the way every insult / loosed has a voice / like thought.” The layering of leaves mirrors the accumulation of history, each covering the one before. The comparison between bodies and “every insult loosed” suggests that violence, whether physical or verbal, lingers in the landscape, shaping perception. The past is not just recorded—it speaks, it resists silence.

The final lines introduce a more explicitly political undercurrent: “A veil as thin / as smoke from cooking tells / the king what crime is possible / to say.” Here, speech is tied to power, to what is permitted, to what can be acknowledged. The king’s knowledge of crime is mediated by the “veil” of language, thin yet obscuring. This connects to the broader theme of selective history—what is seen, what is spoken, what is allowed to remain in the record.

The closing image returns to the oppressive vegetation: “And the spooky rhododendrons / grow analogous up and over, weaving / darkness from daylight in kudzu-like / fever to enslave.” The rhododendrons, earlier described as fecund and redundant, now take on an active role in obscuration. They “weave darkness from daylight,” actively shaping perception, enclosing the speaker in an environment where history itself becomes a tangle, a fevered overgrowth that traps and confounds.

"Tunnel Visionary" is a poem of haunting simultaneity, where history is both a structured tunnel and a collapsible illusion, where the past is both distant and unfolding in real time. The speaker moves through a landscape thick with past violence, nature entwined with human atrocity, and the act of observation itself becomes a performance of historical reckoning. Through layered imagery and recursive thought, Wolff crafts a vision in which memory, perception, and power are constantly shifting, and where the ghosts of history are not buried but growing, entwining themselves into the present.

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