Natural History

            Of all the poems in Dan Chiasson’s book, Natural History, I particularly enjoyed the one titled, “Which Species on Earth is Saddest?” for a number of reasons. First off, the title itself is interesting and harbors the same gloomy feel that all of the other poems in the book retain. After a number of readings, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what Dan Chiasson is talking about. There are poems where you can sort of follow what is happening, and there are other poems where you cannot. “Which Species?” is one of the latter.

However, after a while, Dan Chiasson’s purpose, though not exactly clear, reveals itself little by little. My wild guess is that the topic in question is the transmigration of souls from one body to the next. The first stanza begins, “When we wake up in our bodies, first we weep. We weep because the air is thick as honey.” Chiasson is referring to how babies leave the womb of the mother crying. I’m not sure what he means by “the air is thick as honey.” That line reminds me of something I’d heard a while ago about babies crying because of they can innately sense the evil in the world they have just entered. For the next three stanzas, Chiasson enters a discourse of bodies, referring to the air as a body and the human body as the “bottommost and newest body nested inside other, older ones.” These stanzas add on to the possible theme of transmigration because it seems that Chiasson is referring to the universe as a system of shell-like bodies that consists of different levels with the smallest level being the human body, which holds the soul.

Then, Chiasson introduces an emotional context, grief, into the poem when he writes of “a swollen boy, now years ago, in farthest Africa, who filled a grove of cherry trees with tears.” The diction, which includes “swollen boy,” “farthest Africa,” and “trees” reminds me of the story of Adam and the conception of the world. However, in Chiasson’s case, the first human being is not content, but filled “with tears.” Perhaps it is because he knows that the thing he represents so well, life, isn’t such a great thing.

Finally, by the beginning of the last third of the poem, Chiasson starts to get personal when he talks about “you” and “your sister.” He apparently brings a personal story into the greater historical context of life that he began in first two-thirds of the poem. At one point, Chiasson even writes, “Don’t be born at all” and he ends the poem with “Only to cry comes naturally.” There is an underlying distrust of living throughout the entire work. Chiasson condemns the first man for being the catalyst for innumerable generations of man to come. I think what draws me most to the poem is the hopelessness and the skepticism. It’s nihilistic in such a unique way. Chiasson isn’t simply saying that he doesn’t want to live; instead, he says that he hates the entire human existence, starting from that first man in “farthest Africa.”