To the Desert

¶ … God of Sand and Fire Benjamin Alire Saenz's breathtaking poem "To the Desert," updates the ancient sonnet form which Donne once used to praise the Christian God, and turns it into a revolutionary invocation of a pantheistic deity embodied by the desert itself. Through a flawless onomatopoeia which evokes the brushing and rustling and hissing sounds of the desert, he weaves sharply observant images to bring the very scent and color of the desert to the reader's mind.

From this evocative nature poetry he increasingly moves towards personifying and deifying the desert itself, addressing it directly from the beginning, and eventually begging it to consume him. His reverential tone, which so warmly pays tribute to Dante's devotional hymn "Batter my heart Three-personed God), combines with his clear diction and imagery to allow him to make statements in verse (such as this about the desert being a god) that might seem improbable or even foolish in a less perfect setting.

Saenz's poem is particularly effective because of his masterful use of poetic technique to invoke sentiment and scenery. Through-out the poem he uses very simple sentence structure and wording to highlight the starkness of the landscape, though his sentiment is far from simplistic. He also utilizes long evocative lists such as "sand, wind, sun, and burning sky" to establish a sense of rhythm that reminds one strongly of the footfalls of horses on sand or even the rippling of dunes.

In establishing the rhythm of the desert wanderer, Saenz also takes care to express the sounds of the desert. One may notice the consistent repetition throughout the poem of the R, B, and S. sounds, and a marked preference for using vowels followed by a nasal N. Or M. This is evidenced clearly in lines such as."..sand, wind, sun, and burning sky, The hottest blue.

You blow a breeze and brand your breath into my mouth, you reach-then bend...wrap your name right around my ribs" (Saenz) These letters are significant because of their sound qualities. They have a very desert-like sound to them, with the roughness of the B. And R. like sand and the hissing, sibilant sound of the S. like snakes. This onomatopoeia serves to strengthen the imagery and impact of the poem.

His use of simile is also particularly evocative, as when he speaks of the way the wind will "brand your breath into my mouth." (Saenz) The image of branding calls up even more sense of burning and sizzling and fire, even while it speaks of the ownership which the desert claims over the poet's body.

These techniques serve to make a very powerful image of the divine nature of which Saenz speaks, and by themselves would be sufficient to make this one of the better paeans to nature, though technique alone would not suffice to make the reader truly sense and understand how God is in the desert landscape. Yet poetic merit is not all that Saenz has working for this piece. Additionally it carries with it an inherited weight of powerful symbolism.

The poem is obviously conceived as a companion piece to Doneness classic sonnet "Batter my heart Three-Personed God." The concept of Doneness original was, in a nutshell, a plea to the Christian deity to force the poet into his service in the same way a man may force a hesitant woman into his bed, because without such psychic rape the poet will never be able to serve God fully and this is something he desires.

Saenz has a similar point, though with far less of a sense of rape and far more of a sense of mutual re-creation and absorption. Doneness God will "imprison" the poet, whereas Saenz' desert will keep him warm, and swallow him up. However, there is certainly a degree to which the same sense of overwhelming power and force is intended.

More importantly, the sense of majesty and power which invests Doneness original with the weight of Christian dogma is something which Saenz wishes to borrow for his desert, so that the educated reader may see this natural world through the lens of that sort of devotion and self-yielding. He ties the two poems together thematically, but also joins them by quoting Doneness third to fourth lines "bend / Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new" as his sixth to seventh lines.

Additionally, in the tenth to eleventh line of Doneness poem the verses read "[I] am betroth'd unto your enemy; / Divorce me,'untie or break that knot again..." Saenz references this, though to some degree he seems to be addressing the fiery desert as the very usurper from which Doneness God might try to steal the poet, for he writes "Never break your knot," and in the original the poet was first tied to the usurper.

Regardless of that minor detail, these two quotes serve to tie this piece firmly to Donnes's tradition and thus endow it with a sense of history and resonance it otherwise might have missed. In being bound thematically and through quotes to Doneness work, Saenz' poem was also bound to it stylistically. Doneness original was a sonnet, with fourteen rhyming lines with strict (and sometimes slightly forced) meter.