Reaction to "A Walk to Sope Creek" by David Bottoms

A Walk to Sope Creek

by David Bottoms

Sometimes when I've made the mistake of anger, which sometimes
breeds the mistake of cruelty, I walk

down the rocky slope above the ruined mill on Sope Creek
where sweet gum and hickory weave sunlight

into gauzy screens. And sometimes when I've made the mistake
of cruelty, which always breeds grief,

I remember how, years ago, my uncle led me, a boy,
into a thicket of pines and taught me to pray

beside a white stone, the way a man had taught him, a boy,
to pray behind a clapboard church.

Sometimes when I'm as mean as a stone, I weave
between trees above that crumbling mill

and stumble through those threaded screens of light,
the way anger must fall

through many stages of remorse.
Any rock, he allowed, can be an altar.

When I first read this poem, the first line, “sometimes when I’ve made the mistake of anger” drew me in because I personally try to prevent myself from getting angry, and when I do, I always regret it. In the last two stanzas of the poem, Bottoms says, “anger must fall through many stages of remorse”, and I think he describes this process really well.
He starts off by explaining how anger turns to cruelty, which then turns to grief. I really liked his use of the word breeds to explain this progression because it gave me the impression that his emotions had a life of their own and were mostly beyond his control, continuously giving birth to new ones. I agree that anger especially can be hard to suppress once something triggers it, and I think everyone has had a similar experience at some time. It was also interesting to me that as his emotions were progressing, he was also progressing through time and space. As his anger goes through the many stages of remorse, he walks through the “rocky slope” and is motivated to think back to when he was a little boy walking with his uncle who taught him how to handle anger, just as someone had taught him. His use of enjambment helped to portray this relationship because the poem flows from stanza to stanza, never actually coming to a full stop until the end of the fifth stanza. Through his diction, he also created a relationship between himself and his surroundings. In the second stanza, he describes how the “sweet gum and hickory weave sunlight”, and he uses the word weave again to describe his own movement in the sixth stanza when he says, “I weave between trees above the crumbling mill. In the fourth and fifth stanzas, he describes how his uncle “taught [him] to pray beside a white stone”, and he describes himself in the next stanza as being “mean as a stone”. These relationships between emotion and physical movement and his body and nature helped me to better understand what he was experiencing and to create a more vivid image of Sope Creek in my mind.
Like the first line, the last line really resonated with me. The advice passed on by his uncle taught the author that “any rock can be an altar”. Although he tries to avoid getting angry, he knows exactly what to do on the days when he fails. He recognizes that there’s not one designated cure, that each person must deal with emotions in their own way. For him, this means taking the journey to Sope Creek that he has described and finding a rock where he can pray and recover.