"Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow" is the first poem in The Opening of the Field; the reader thus connects the meadow in the poem with the field in the book's title. Field is a broad term referring to various landscapes, to the notion of a perceptual gestalt, and to Olson's idea of composition by field. Does the shift to a meadow signal a more specific landscape? A meadow suggests a single harmonious climate, a space protected by its surroundings.

Duncan sees in Pound's early writing on Imagism and on the troubadours the possibility of an almost Whitmanian aesthetic, but one that is too firmly entrenched in the past. Pound's thought "does not go forward with contemporary scientific imagination

to a poetic vision of the Life Process and the Universe but goes back to Ficino and the Renaissance ideas" (PC, 190). In Duncan's "opening" poem, "Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow," he creates an ideogram that can include both of his predecessors and that has indications of both past and future.

In "My Mother Would Be A Falconress," from Bending the Bow, the mother appears as a distinct and close figure, no less mythical for her clarity. The images of her as Falconress and him as the obedient little falcon who is later to break away from her enable Duncan to dramatize the whole series of conflicts involving possessiveness and love on the one hand and freedom and the need for identity on the other.

The second poem, "I Know a Man," is without doubt Creeley's best-known. A phrase of it has served as the title of Jeremy Lamer's novel Drive, He Said and of the movie made from it. More recently the poem has served as the epigraph of the final chapter of Stephen King's fantasy about American automobile culture, Christine. In this chapter, the book's narrator, Dennis Guilder, attempts to destroy the possessed 1958 Plymouth Fury Christine by battering her to death with a large pink tanker truck. In spite of a badly injured leg, Dennis tells us, "I was going to drive" (486).

Even when a man resists the definitions of himself posed by others, he must still integrate into a seamless whole the disparate experience in which be finds himself engaged. "The Flower" beautifully illustrate the fragmented self who, in his very desire to experience himself as a self-conscious unity, generates only aestheticized fragments that mock the desire that spawned them:

[. . . .]

Creeley’s version of the contemporary responds to the traditional with an ironising edge. Whether it be irony about the mnemonic adhesiveness or rhyme or irony about recognized forms, the traditional is admitted because it has to be responded to like other facts of existence. Irony in relation to tradition is apparently in, for instance, ‘The Flower’. Here the language of the nursery rhyme (‘she love me / she loves me not / she loves me / she loves me not’) is reconstituted into ‘Pain is a flower like that one, / like this one, / like that one, / like this one.’

In For Love’s title poem, dedicated to his second wife, Creeley tries to make a definitive statement about love. He attempts to gather his thoughts together as this hesitant sounding passage, full of the unsaid, suggests:

It the moon did not . . . no, if you did not I wouldn't either, but what would I not

do, what prevention, what thing so quickly stopped. That is love yesterday or tomorrow, not

now. . . .

Even here in the company of love, doubts linger and will continue to linger. Nothing is certain for tomorrow, yesterday is gone, only the present moment is real; and, perhaps, just perhaps, that is enough. Almost as though he were consciously rejecting the goddess herself, he corrects his statement, "If the moon did not . . . / no, if you did not," the moon being another form of the goddess. The poet has committed himself to the woman, the physical and not the mythical woman.

Despite the fact, however, that Creeley, . . . speaks everywhere in his statements on poetics of the poem as a self-determining activity, of the poem that realizes itself in the poet's literal act of writing, it should also be clear that this is an ideal characterization of the text and of the creative process, and as such not often or at least not immediately accurate to what Creeley achieves in his actual poetic practice . . . .

… As an object of worship the sun is various and slippery, and in his rush toward a coherent system of belief and symbolic representation, Harry confused unity with totality, so that he attempted to absorb within his belief every aspect and atom of the sun that man in his wisdom or silliness had ever found cause to venerate. The sun – all-seeing eye, blinding light, source of life, killer of Icarus and Phaethon, masculine principle, creative principle, godhead and the eye of the godhead – is at once more comprehensive and a paradigm of ambiguity.