On J.L. Moultrie’s “Bastille”
In “Bastille,” published in Issue Three of Post Pop Lit, modern imagist poet J.L. Moultrie blurs time, memory, and consciousness through invocation of natural elements (stones, leaves, tides, rivers, seedling, strata, wood, soot) and syntax and spatial form that utilizes visual pauses and echoes to represent “sieving,” or shifting through internal debris. At its core, this poem is existential and recursive, representing cycles of physical, psychological, and spiritual evolution and reincarnation.
The title “Bastille” brings to mind the Bastille fortress and prison in Paris, which was stormed on July 14th, 1789 during the French Revolution. By invoking the Bastille as the title of this poem, Moultrie gestures towards imprisonment and violent release. His use of spatial and syntactic fragmentation to enact this theme of “sieving” mimics the constraint and release of consciousness and self-awareness Moultrie examines in “Bastille.” Indeed, his patterned syntax, oscillating between left-indented lines and center-indented lines, enacts a crucial line from the poem: “Sieved into shape, born of tides.” Time is a mirror, born of tides, sieving the narrator and the object of the narrator’s interest or affection into “shape.” When I first read this poem, I instantly thought of Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity (1905), specifically the relativity of simultaneity, which postulates that events that appear simultaneous to an observer may appear non-simultaneous to another observer.
Moultrie writes “I recall time being a mirror” that “sieve(s) [humans] into shape, born of tides”; thus, time reflects back one’s own ever-evolving self, always changing in the context of the grand natural Earth and its elements (“Who are we but stones // thrown amid leaves?”... “The single experience / of being, a seedling breaking waves and form.”) His natural, elemental imagery of stones, leaves, tides, rivers, seeding, strata, wood, and soot highlights the constant decay and reincarnation of physical matter. Thus, to Moultrie, the self is ever-evolving, ebbing and flowing, decaying and coming back to life.
This poem is particularly effective due to its restraint, clarity and precision of language (“A short flight; all I felt was blue.”), and its effective invocation of physical, psychological, and spiritual evolution and reincarnation through invocation of natural elements and theories of relativity. In “Bastille,” Moultrie demonstrates that one’s ever-evolving consciousness is a source of imprisonment and impassioned release, a pattern that repeats endlessly throughout one’s life experiences.
