On The Borders - Analysis

Refusing the urge to turn landscape into a message

The central claim of On the Borders is that some experiences are most truthful when they are left uninterpreted: the speaker wants a landscape that gives rest, not meaning. The opening places us in motion but also in emptiness: driving across tableland somewhere in the world, a deliberately vague location that makes the scene feel like pure exposure rather than destination. The country is almost bare of trees, and that near-barrenness matters because it denies the usual anchors for metaphor. The speaker’s tone is calm, even grateful, as the upland lets me rest from thinking. This is not ignorance; it is a chosen pause from interpretation.

Comfort in featurelessness, and a quiet edge of danger

The poem is drawn to a paradox: the tableland is described as near void of features, yet it always moves me. Murray lets the line hold both truths at once. The speaker is moved but not to thought, suggesting an emotional response that stays pre-verbal, like a body’s recognition of space. Still, the phrase Upland near void carries a faint chill: a high place with little shelter can feel cleansing, but it can also feel exposed. The poem keeps that exposure as part of the appeal. What the speaker wants is not to be fed significance, but to stand (or ride) in a kind of clean weather of the mind.

A poem that argues against the critical reflex

The poem’s first real turn comes when the speaker insists, I feel no need to interpret the upland as if it were art. This is where the voice becomes sharper and more polemical. The line Too much / of poetry is criticism now isn’t just a complaint about reviewers; it’s a complaint about a habit of mind that cannot let anything be itself. The tension is immediate and productive: the speaker is making an argument inside a poem that we, as readers, are naturally inclined to interpret. Murray sets up a border dispute between poem-as-experience and poem-as-explanation, and he sides with experience.

The hawk that cannot be owned

The hawk arrives as a test case for this ethic of non-possession. It is vivid and strange: clinging to / the eaves of the wind, beating / its third wing. The phrase third wing feels like imagination in the act of seeing: not a literal anatomical claim so much as an attempt to name the hawk’s extra force, the invisible lift it works with. Yet the speaker immediately draws a boundary: the hawk isn't mine to sell. That verb sell is crucial. It implies not only commodification but also the poet’s temptation to package the hawk as a meaning, a symbol, a product. The poem refuses to turn the hawk into the speaker’s property, even as it describes it in language that is clearly skilled and alluring.

Needing space around an image

When the speaker says, here is / more like the space that needs to exist around an image, the tableland becomes a model for how poems should behave. The landscape is not the image; it is the margin, the breathing room that keeps an image from being suffocated by interpretation. This is also where the title On the Borders starts to feel precise: the speaker is traveling through literal borderlands of featurelessness, while also advocating for aesthetic borders that protect things from being overused. There’s a gentle humility in this: the poem wants to provide enough attention to make the hawk real, but not so much interpretive pressure that the hawk becomes merely useful.

Soap roses: the last jab, and what it reveals

The closing comparison shifts the tone again, toward dry comedy with an acidic undertone: This cloud-roof country recalls people / who first encountered roses in soap. The image suggests a kind of impoverished or secondhand encounter with beauty: fragrance and idea without the living thorned plant. It also hints at cultural displacement, as if some people meet the world through substitutes and packaging. In the poem’s logic, that is what over-criticism does: it replaces the hawk’s hard, real flight with an interpretive perfume. The ending doesn’t simply mock; it warns that a life of mediated experience can make the genuine thing harder to recognize when it finally appears.

The poem’s hardest question (and its own contradiction)

If the hawk isn't mine to sell, what about the poem itself, which has already turned wind into eaves and flight into a third wing? Murray seems to admit that poetry inevitably shapes experience, but insists there is a moral difference between naming and owning. The border the poem patrols is thin: it wants language that gestures, then steps back, leaving the hawk and the empty upland with their independence intact.