A Study Guide for Robert Creeley's "Fading Light"

Fading Light

Robert Creeley

1988

Introduction

Robert Creeley's poem Fading Light, originally published in a 1988 collection of poems titled Windows, was republished in 2001 in Just in Time, which contains the entire contents of three of Creeley's earlier collections. These poems illustrate the themes and styles with which the poet engaged himself as he approached the age of seventy. Thus it represents a mature effort of a poet who has been writing since his late twenties. The poem is short, only twelve lines long, and its line length is somewhat more extended than in most of his poems. Many of Creeley's poems are short, sometimes so short that they achieve comprehensibility only as part of a longer cluster of poems. The typical Creeley poem tends to be a sinewy stream of words on a mostly white page. Indeed, for a poet who often places a single word, sometimes a word as simple as the to stand alone as a line, his lines in this poem mark a minor stylistic shift. Fading Light is a poem that begins with a very simple image—an image of dusk seen through an open window—a commonplace, almost impersonal image that is transformed from perception into reflection on time and memory, all in an austere, remote style, one in which the diction is kept spare and deliberately simple. Belying the simplicity of the diction, however, the poet uses a number of techniques to cause the work to be somewhat difficult to interpret in a first reading or hearing. The poem is punctuated as one sentence, but it is composed of fragments that are so deliberately, ambiguously constructed that the reader has to interpret where and how the different parts interact to create a meaningful whole. It is the difficulty in understanding what exactly is being said