Blindsiding God

Close Encounters

By David Havird

“William O. Douglas—the name, and not just the poster’s rusty red lettering, appears to have faded. He is ‘Justice Warren Douglas’ in one scholar’s reference to the poem; elsewhere, in a brief discussion by the same, he’s the ‘chief justice,’ which he wasn’t—typical careless errors, those. Incredibly, even Dickey got him wrong, conflating William O. Douglas with Lewis Williams Douglas—or rather mistaking the ambassador to the Court of St. James’s (1947-1950) for the Supreme Court associate justice. It was Ambassador Douglas who somehow, while fly fishing in 1949, lost an eye: ‘half your sight,’ as Dickey puts it in ‘The Eagle’s Mile,’ ‘left hanging in a river/In England, long before you died.’”—David Havird

SHREVEPORT Louisiana—(Hubris)—January/February 2026—“I’m especially pleased,” James Dickey writes, “by your response to ‘The Eagle’s Mile,’ which is one of the last serious poems I have written, and is different from most of the others.” That letter to me is dated December 21, 1983. Three years later, “The Eagle’s Mile” became the title poem, of course, of Dickey’s last book of new poetry—a splendid poem about the transmigration of a soul. Though William Douglas, whom the poem addresses, has been dead for a year or two, his soul is “still in time-flow,” as in a creek, say, or current of air or on a trail through woods, the Appalachian Trail. 

I was in 1983 a doctoral candidate at the University of Virginia. At this time The Virginia Quarterly Review was at One West Range—Poe’s room, which you can view through plexiglass, is several doors south—at the north end, near the Rotunda, of Mr. Jefferson’s Academical Village. Graduate students—faculty as well—were able to walk in and take from a circular table a book for anonymous review. I cannot now remember whether my review of Night Hurdling: Poems, Essays, Conversations, Commencements, and Afterwords saw print. (A folded draft, in longhand on loose-leaf notebook paper, is tucked inside the cover.) Anyway, there in that grab bag of mostly prose, I read “The Eagle’s Mile.”

“If you come by here,” Dickey continues, meaning 4620 Lelia’s Court when Ashley (whom he sends “love” to) and I are in Columbia visiting my folks at Christmas, “I have a large poster featuring the poem, and if you’ll remind me I will be happy to give you one.”

Unrolling the poster, Dickey marveled at the eagle, in black ink, a silhouette, wings down in flight—a position rarely seen in photographs. The poster credits Shelly Grossman. It measures, the poster does, some 19 inches across and 34 inches from top to bottom. The calligrapher, Lothar Hoffmann, has rendered the title in large italics and the poet’s name in larger block letters at the bottom—both scripts in what used to be a rusty red, or so my memory after 42 years depicts it; now it’s pale ochre. The poem’s lettering is black. 

The dedication “for William Douglas,” which is how it also reads in Night Hurdling, appears just below the title. Is this the Supreme Court justice, I remember asking Dickey. Only subsequently in The Eagle’s Mile and two years later in his collected poems does it read “for Justice William Douglas.” William O. Douglas (like Robert E. Lee) was a name to reckon with when I was growing up, though frankly, my indelible mental picture of him includes not only the old man, his deeply lined round face and headful of not-so-neatly combed straight hair, but also his young, new wife. He was 67 and she 23 when they married in 1966. The marriage was sufficiently sensational for news of it to reach even me. I wasn’t yet 13. At the verge of puberty, I found her, blonde with boyish haircut, surprisingly sexy. 

Controversy of other sorts—his environmental activism (I pictured Douglas also in a western hat amid the Great Outdoors) and the effort by House Republicans to impeach him in 1970, by which time I was a junior in high school—attached itself to Douglas. (I’ve learned, by the way, that the word “ecology” appears for the first time in a Supreme Court ruling in Douglas’s 1967 majority opinion in Udall v. Federal Power Commission, which found to be central to decisions regarding economic development the effect of said development on the ecology, in this case the likely harm of a hydroelectric dam to salmon runs.) 

But I hadn’t been aware that Douglas was blind in one eye—a physical deficiency that figures crucially in Dickey’s poem. Yes, it was William O. Douglas, Dickey said. Though it was as “James L. Dickey” (the “L” standing for “Lafayette”) that he published his early poems and as he still appears at the Poetry Foundation Website, Dickey had come to disdain such use of the middle initial.

William O. Douglas—the name, and not just the poster’s rusty red lettering, appears to have faded. He is “Justice Warren Douglas” in one scholar’s reference to the poem; elsewhere, in a brief discussion by the same, he’s the “chief justice,” which he wasn’t—typical careless errors, those. Incredibly, even Dickey got him wrong, conflating William O. Douglas with Lewis Williams Douglas—or rather mistaking the ambassador to the Court of St. James’s (1947-1950) for the Supreme Court associate justice. It was Ambassador Douglas who somehow, while fly fishing in 1949, lost an eye: “half your sight,” as Dickey puts it in “The Eagle’s Mile,” “left hanging in a river/In England, long before you died.” 

As I discovered when reviewing The Complete Poems of James Dickey for the then online James Dickey Newsletter (edited by Joyce Pair and Gordon Van Ness) in 2013, this Douglas, Ambassador Douglas, had served unknowingly as a model for “The Man in the Hathaway Shirt,” an iconic ad created by David Ogilvy, which began its 30-plus-year run in 1951. (The character in the ad was played by one George Wrangell, a White Russian nobleman.) According to Kenneth Roman in The King of Madison Avenue: David Ogilvy and the Making of Modern Advertising, “The idea [for the eye patch] was prompted by a photograph of Ambassador Lewis Douglas, who had injured his eye while fly fishing in England.” In magazines that came to our house when I was growing up, the Man in the Hathaway Shirt was seemingly omnipresent. No doubt his gaze caught Dickey’s eye—which is to say the professional eye of an ad man in the 50s. (Dickey began in 1956 his four-or-five-year stint in advertising.)

Interestingly, of William O. Douglas Douglas Brinkley observes (in a 2022 article in Vanity Fair) that “Spending long stretches in the North Cascades and fly-fishing in Oregon brought equilibrium to Douglas’s pressured life.” So it appears did walking the Appalachian Trail, the whole length of which he reputedly hiked (as Lewis Douglas did not) over a span of years—as Dickey likely knew, depicting him as he does there walking, his “patched tunnel-gaze exactly right/For the buried track,” as if he saw through the patch. Meanwhile, his “other sight” was where he lost the eye: “Far off.” “Other sight” becomes a metaphor for memory, on which the imagination, as Aristotle understands it, draws to produce new images—here the merging of “England-curved water,” while not with the “always hidden trail,” with its analogue, a “North Georgia creek”: “both fresh waters marbling together” in Douglas’s mind.

This depiction of a white-shirted Douglas (the fictional composite) in life returns us to a moment earlier in the poem, which finds his transmigrating soul poised for reincarnation with his sight not only restored but magnified. As those waters converge, so do that blind “half” of Douglas’s sight and “new” sight that belongs as if to lightning “true-up together” at Springer Mountain, the foot of the Appalachian Trail (the setting also, by the way, of the poem, in which a naked hunter “dances” with a deer, that caught the eye of the literary agent who consequently contacted Dickey about a possible novel with bow-hunters in Appalachia). 

That brief description of Douglas in life—the parallel between the “marbling together” of those waters, as imagined by the half-blind man, and the after-death “truing-up” of his injured eye, its sight restored, with new sight “Struck from death’s instant” in the seeing one as well—depicts him in the act of “soul-making,” by which, as Keats describes it in his famous 1819 letter, innate “Intelligence,” a “spark of divinity,” acquires, thanks to individual “circumstances” (which Keats likens to “Clouds continually gathering and bursting”), a personal “Identity”—in other words, a “Soul.” (Keats was for Dickey “one of the great human presences in the whole of history,” and the earlier poet’s thoughts on this matter of “soul-making,” his argument “in favor of a valid emotional life . . . of a large and vivid—and also a deep—participation in a wider circle of kinds of experience,” figure crucially in Dickey’s 1968 commencement address at the University of South Carolina, which I heard as a ninth-grader there with my father.) Of course, Dickey’s Douglas is making a more literal, immortal soul than Keats may have had in mind—and one whose afterlife, while spurning any “humble standard of disinterestedness,” a Christian virtue whose value Keats acknowledges, promises to be voracious.

Ambassador Douglas died in 1974, Justice Douglas in 1980, five years after a stroke sat him in a wheelchair. Curiously, as Henry Hart observes (in James Dickey: The World as a Lie, his prodigious 2000 biography), Douglas still had two weeks yet to live, two exactly, when Dickey mailed his “elegy celebrating the judge’s life and ideals” to the Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, “which had commissioned it for five hundred dollars.” Curiously, I say, since the process of reincarnation, which the poem explores, occurs during the “second year/Of death.” Perhaps the poem began gestating within two years of Ambassador Douglas’s death. When the commission came Hart fails to note. (In a 2015 article about Dickey’s debt to foreign poets, Van Ness merely attributes the commission to the jurist’s wife.) 

Right below the dedication is an epigraph, the first line of a rhyming couplet in Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence” (the poem that famously begins, “To see a World in a Grain of Sand”). The couplet reads: “The Emmet’s Inch & Eagle’s Mile/Make Lame Philosophy to smile”—which represents as relatively equal the two units of measure, meaningless tools for ant and eagle, indispensable ones for the analytical eye, the eye of Natural Philosophy, which is supercilious despite a partiality of vision that contrasts with the eagle’s clairvoyance—maybe the ant’s as well. Dickey’s eagle is memorably “Clairvoyant with hunger” (a phrase, by the way, that serves as the title of an essay by the late Laurence Lieberman about “The Eagle’s Mile” and indeed his 2016 collection of probing essays). There are no ants in Dickey’s poem. 

Seeing the poem whole and artistically rendered, its lines centered one with another, as it moves down the poster, down the wall—moves, hung framed, down the blue wall of our library, Ashley’s and mine, as down the wall in three prior residences, first in Charlottesville)—lines shifting slightly rightward where there’s the ink-black eagle riding “the eagle’s mile,” I recall the apt description of this magnificent poem in Herbert Mitgang’s New York Times review of The Eagle’s Mile, which draws appreciative attention to its setting amid the Georgia mountains’ woods and flowing water, the setting also of Deliverance: “Mr. Dickey’s verse meanders down the page in rivulets that eventually join together in a rushing mainstream of language.”

The poem opens with the image of a trout “streaming with all its quick/In the strong curve” and, after circling back to this trout “in the gill-cleansing turn/Of the creek,” ends with a flash of lightning, which Dickey audaciously personifies as Adam, whom Douglas appears to have become, over Brasstown Bald, the highest point in Georgia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Meanwhile, the poet has explored three possible targets for the transmigrating Douglas by directing him to “catch without warning” into the trout, by musing in a lovely way on his becoming a spike buck (such as the speaker of an earlier poem, “The Escape” in Buckdancer’s Choice, reports seeing in an “unfenced/Country graveyard,” which prompts him to buy himself a plot there), while also positioning him with an eagle “in merciless look-down,” as is also “Adam/In lightning,” surveilling the ground for prey. (This eagle/man configuration, as Lieberman neatly puts it, symbolizes the “soaring human spirit.”) No less hungry than the eagle, the soul of Douglas, in its second year of transmigration, is starving for “meat.”

Dickey’s vision for Douglas, focusing as it does on those four creatures, comprises the four classical elements: water (the trout in “water blowing/Fresh and for a long time//Downhill”), earth (the deer, “head humming with the first male split/Of the brain-bone, as it tunes to the forked twigs/Of the long trail”), air (the eagle “rid[ing]” its “mile”), and fire (that Adam when “splintering out,” “blue as the very foot/Of fire”)—a vision that conveys the wholeness that Douglas, or rather the soul of Douglas, achieves when Adam, in the last line of the poem, “Splinter[s] uncontrollably whole” and thereby becomes the spirit of the trail, “from Springer Mountain to Maine.” Having been “invited” by the poet to “reside,” as Lieberman observes, in each of three creatures’ “animal hides, in succession,” the soul now forks, its lightning becoming—so it appears to me—incarnate in all three at once, a new birth that also aligns (“true[s]-up”) “The once-more instantly/Wild world,” the world restored to its prelapsarian state in a flash that blindsides God.

I puzzled over “Adam in lightning,” and in that letter Dickey explains: “The phrase—and the image—of ‘Adam in lightning’ just alludes to the fact that a bolt of lightning, with all its off-branchings, looks something like an anatomical chart, a map of veins, a kind of instantaneous sketch of a human (because upright) vascular system, and it seems to me a much more dramatic and unexpected way of ‘creating’ Adam than the relatively commonplace traditional one, the matter of the molded clay into which God breathed life.” This Adam, a poet’s more imaginative creation than God’s, blindsides God (whose impoverished imagination, despite his long memory, identifies him as Blake’s Urizen, a deification of the horizons that blinker him, the limits of reason). While God’s Man in Genesis names the animals, Dickey’s becomes incarnate in not only that trout, that deer, and that eagle but also, by extension, the creatures of the air, the water, and land—a lightning-sown spark within. Poets, Dickey insists (in the transcript of his very last class at the University of South Carolina, January 14, 1997, five days before he died)—“they are not trying to tell the truth, are they?” (Despite the specificity of the poem’s dedication, can Dickey’s composite Douglas have been an intentional invention?) “They are trying to show God a few things he maybe didn’t think of.” Put this way, the poet’s aim is a manifestation of hubris, which is as often as not the tragic hero’s hamartia.  

In that letter promising the poster, Dickey reflects, “Since I am almost 61 now, the vague shape of life-after-death—at least for the work—begins to loom.” He had already signed the poster, one of 250 such copies—this one being number four, which he now personalized “To David Havird.” Forty-two years on, his name as signed and also made (his fame) has faded badly. Mine has damned near faded out—“writ,” looks like (as Keats feared of his name), “in water.” When I was a student of Dickey’s—as I am still, if truth be told—I hungered without, of course, an eagle’s clairvoyance for nothing so much as to make my name as a poet.