Some visitors never give their name, and the one in Anne Scott Musil's "Nerves" stays anonymous from start to finish. We learn only that the nerves "know" it, and that it brings "lassitude," a "call," a "sudden song." Judging by the imagery, it could be inspiration, a spiritual jolt or an actual storm, and the poem keeps all three possibilities open. That refusal to explain is the poem's central idea. Some experiences are registered by the body before the mind can sort them, and language arrives late and out of breath.
The poem's first half is a quick tour of the faculties, each one failing in its own way. The nerves simply know. The soul "sees the inner / movement," a phrase that hangs oddly because "will" follows on the next line, and "movement will" can be read as a noun and a verb, or as a noun and the faculty of willing. Then comes the collapse: "thought tries description fails." Musil leaves out any punctuation or conjunction between "tries" and "fails," so the two words sit side by side like a stumble. The order matters, too. Understanding gets weaker as we move from the body to the intellect, which reverses the usual idea that the thinking mind is the most reliable guide.
That lack of punctuation runs through the whole poem. Almost everything is lowercase, and there is a single full stop, after "sudden song." The five unrhymed tercets give no regular beat to settle into. The lines are short and the syntax keeps slipping. In the opening, "nerves know the visitor / can feel the lassitude the call" can be read two ways: the nerves know the visitor, and can feel the lassitude, or the nerves know that the visitor can feel it. The poem doesn't resolve this. It reads like thought caught in the act, before it has been tidied into proper sentences.
The third stanza is the most surprising. "The mind wincing at / a platitude which could startle / the tenth time" admits that the mind recoils from clichés, but it also suggests that a worn-out phrase might still jolt us if the experience behind it is real enough. The poem then gives its own version of that: after it has said that description fails, it goes on to describe anyway, but through images instead of explanations.
The images are domestic and then violent. The "well-kept yards fenced sprayed" are a world of control, with fences marking the edges and chemicals killing off whatever is unwanted. Their inhabitants are "easy certainties unchallenged," and the stacked past participles, with no commas, make the neatness feel airless. These certainties don't resist. They "wait for the visitor," which suggests that part of them wants to be disturbed. The last stanza answers that wish with a pile-up of verbs: "to trample break stifling / air." The word "stifling" can modify the air or work as a verb, so the visitor either breaks the oppressive air or breaks the stifling itself. Then "trees crash / and fly lyrical." The sounds change here. "Crash" is short and hard, while "fly lyrical" is made of open vowels and liquid l's. Destruction turns into music in a single line, and "lyrical" echoes the "sudden song" of the opening, so the poem ends where it started, with the same event seen at full strength.
The poem is significant because it enacts what it claims instead of just arguing it. A poem about the failure of description could have been abstract and vague, but this one holds back its subject and trusts the pressure of its images. It also quietly takes a side. The neat, sprayed yard is not presented as evil, but it is presented as incomplete, a place where nothing can happen until something breaks in. For a reader, the lesson may be that the most important experiences, whether artistic, emotional or spiritual, tend to arrive uninvited and to damage our tidy ideas first. Whatever the visitor is, the poem suggests it is worth the wreckage, because trees that crash can also fly.