Close Reading - Horizon: Zero Dawn: Metal Flower Mk I B

Enjuk responds to Aloy's question about how he'd like being cornered by an American Black Bear. After Aloy and Sylens, he demonstrates the most knowledge of our times of any character in the game, yet his theories regarding animal life in our time are significantly off.

It's Tuesday, and that means it's time to take a look at yet another of our poems from the Metal Flowers in Horizon: Zero Dawn.

Code fragment downloaded: /// [function: true] {{Evening wind:}} {{water laps}} {{the heron's legs.}} [function: true] ///

This is another Buson haiku, like last week's Metal Flower. As far as Aloy's concerned, though, these have no authors, or no knowable authors. There's no way for her to be able to determine that these poems have the same author (nor does she have any way of recognizing them as translations - I cannot even be sure whether or not they have the same translator).

What Aloy can see here is that once again, the poem paints a brief, striking image. There is the barest hint of an action, but the feeling here is one of a general impression of a moment that resonates through specificity, but which specificity is lost upon her. Aloy has never seen a heron. Indeed, unless they are in Horizon: Forbidden West, there's a good chance she never will as they may be completely extinct. The best she can make of this is that some beast, whether mechanical or animal, is standing in the water as the wind causes the water to lap its legs.

Depending on when you find this one, there may be some alternate readings Aloy could glean from this. If she hasn't yet found out the origin of the machines, she may believe that the Old Ones (our civilization) lived alongside machines as her people do in her present, and that this could be a machine prior to the derangement of the machines (which made machines more likely to target and attack humans rather than flee when under attack for parts). Aloy is more likely to understand the heron as some kind of animal if she knows the origin of the machines.

In the end, the specificity of the heron is lost upon Aloy, and if the heron holds any specific meaning in poetry in Buson's time, that is also lost. That loss, however, only makes the poem feel more like an impression, a flickering moment of time, rather than a real, strong image. And that feels like a good way to think of nature and nature poetry as Aloy is encountering it: transitory impressions of nature, which is constantly in motion and changing.