`This More Delicate Belle of the Swamp'

Spring arrived in Houston shortly after 8 o’clock Monday morning, when the sky was blue and almost free of clouds, and the air warm enough to turn my thoughts to germinating seeds. I had an appointment with a post-doc in bioengineering but I was early, so I took off my jacket and took my time.

On the far side of campus, literally in the shadow of the Texas Medical Center, I passed through a low, marshy pocket I had never visited before, where shade has kept it moist even through the drought. Thousands of cars pass daily, as do students, patients and joggers. Nearby are the soccer stadium, tennis courts and baseball diamond, but here is one of those in-between places left over when we’ve paved everything else. Misleadingly, it’s judged “vacant.”

Two rabbits retreated into the tall grass as I approached. A pigeon working the bare patch along the sidewalk stayed put. A Northern mockingbird perched in a newly planted sapling, and below, near the wettest spot, grew a patch of lanceleaf tickseed (Coreopsis lanceolata). The yellow, daisy-like flowers reminded me of the “fringed orchis” (probably Platanthera psycodes) Thoreau jealously savored in his journal on June 9, 1854:

“It is remarkable that this, one of the fairest of all our flowers, should be one of the rarest,--for the most part not seen at all. I think that no other but myself in Concord annually find it. That so queenly a flower should annually bloom so rarely and in such withdrawn and secret places as to be rarely seen by man! The village belle never sees this more delicate belle of the swamp.”

Coreopsis is not so rare as Thoreau’s orchid, except when we choose not to see it. I mentioned my discovery of the flower blooming in January to the bioengineer, a recent transplant from Cambridge, Mass., where Thoreau graduated from Harvard in 1839, and she was polite. Spring, after all, is almost two months away. Thoreau carries on about his fringed orchis:

“How little relation between our life and its. Most of us never see it or hear of it. The seasons go by to us as if it were not. A beauty reared in the shade of a convent, who has never strayed beyond the convent bell. Only the skunk or owl or other inhabitant of the swamp beholds it. In the damp twilight of the swamp, where it is wet to the feet. How little anxious to display its attractions! It does not pine because man does not admire it. How independent on our race! It lifts its delicate spike amid the hellebore and ferns in the deep shade of the swamp. I am inclined to think of it as a relic of the past as much as the arrowhead, or the tomahawk I found on the 7th.”

`Always, the Past is Heard'

One notices the changes first – the new white window casings, the branch missing from the post oak, the spinning pinwheel stuck in the ground by the sidewalk. Only then does the scene’s familiarity sooth, a little, the shock of change. Without knowing I remembered them, I recognized the bend in the roof, the brown shingles and black fence. The past returns with a pang we have no right to regret. It’s like longevity: We want to live forever but don’t want to grow old. We want to revisit the past but avoid the ache of its pastness.

Our former neighbors invited me to lunch. They live across the street from the house we bought in 2004 after leaving New York and moving to Houston. Our sons were almost four and not yet two. Now they’re eleven and nearly nine. It’s the first house they remember, the template against which they will measure every subsequent house. All their memories are happy, as best I can judge. Our cat adopted us here. Michael learned to ride a bicycle on this street. This blog started here almost six years ago. I planted lemon and key lime saplings in the backyard. On Easter morning seven years ago another post oak leaned against the side of the house, and a crew worked until after dark taking it down.

The couple who bought the house from us almost four years ago still lives there, and they’ve had a child of their own, triggering in me a shameful flash of resentment, as though they were vandals or thieves. Then I remember the old lady from whom we bought the house. Her husband had recently died and she was moving to be closer to her son and his family. She and her late husband had bought the house new in 1955, and she lived there for almost half a century. Her flowers, chosen so at least one species in the yard was blooming every day of the year, are still blooming.

Clive Wilmer conducted a series of interviews with fellow poets for BBC Radio 3 from 1989 to 1992, and the transcripts were published as Poets Talking (Carcanet, 1994). In his talk with C.H. Sisson, Wilmer notes one of Sisson’s poems ends with the line “Only the past is true.” He asks, “Could we begin by looking at your poetry in the light of that discovery?” and Sisson answers:

“Well, the future is imaginary, the present is happening and that only leaves the past to be true; and it leaves the past as, in a sense, all of a piece. Once a thing is done, it belongs to the past.”

In one of Sisson’s great late poems, “In the Silence,” he writes:

“In every spoken word,
Always, the past is heard.”

`Dedicate the Attention So to One Small Thing'

Frank Wilson reminds us that Saturday was the 787^th birthday of St. Thomas Aquinas and commemorates the date with a sentence he attributes to the philosopher:

“All the efforts of the human mind cannot exhaust the essence of a single fly.”

The passage about the “unius muscae,” drawn from Expositio in Symbolum Apostolorum, humbles our pretensions to understanding by summoning the humblest of creatures. The fly is small, ubiquitous and scorned. Only entomologists lavish attention on it. A man could devote a lifetime not to Drosophila as a biological abstraction but to a fly as an individual, and still know ignorance. We learn enough to swat one when it lights on the dinner plate but not enough to envy the compound eyes or marvel at the elegance of its architecture, as the poet-priest Thomas Traherne (1636-1674) did in The Kingdom of God:

 “The Creation of Insects affords us a Clear Mirror of Almighty Power, and Infinite Wisdom with a Prospect likewise of Transcendent Goodness. Had but one of those Curious and High Stomached flies, been Created, whose Burnisht, and Resplendent Bodies are like Orient Gold, or Polisht Steel; whose Wings Are So Strong, and Whose Head so Crowned with an Imperial Tuff, which we often see Enthroned upon a Leaf, having a pavement of living Emrauld beneath its feet, their contemplating all the World…the Infinit Workmanship about his Body the Marvellous Consistence of his Lims, the most neat and Exquisit Distinction of his Joynts, the Subtile and Imperceptible Ducture of his Nerves, and Endowments of his Tongue, and Ears, and Eyes, and Nostrils; the stupendious union of his Soul and Body, the Exact and Curious Symmetry of all his Parts, the feeling of his feet and the swiftness of his Wings, the Vivacity of his quick and active Power...”

Traherne could have rhapsodized the anatomy of any creature, but the smallest suited his purposes. The earliest practical microscopes appeared during his life. For the first time, men could observe in detail the multiplicity of worlds previously invisible, “the most neat and Exquisit Distinction of his Joynts.” The first microscopic description of living tissue appeared in 1644 -- in Giambattista Odierna's L'occhio della mosca (The Fly's Eye).

In her 1930 poem “Lines to a Kitten” (Poems 1924-1940, 1950), Janet Lewis memorably describes her cat as a “Morsel of suavity.” It sits on her knee and intently watches a fly from six feet away:

“Only the great

And you, can dedicate

The attention so to one small thing.”

`Poetry is Form'

It looks less like a pamphlet of poems by one of the last century’s great poets than a modest tract from a Bible society. The pale green cover is made of card stock and is turning lichen-brown around the edges. The publisher is The Tryon Pamphlets of Tryon, N.C. On the back cover are small announcements for other pamphlets in the series -- Happy Farmers by John Crowe Ransom and Psyche in the South by R.P. Blackmur. Each costs 25 cents, as does the book in hand: Before Disaster by Yvor Winters. An online dealer is selling it for $275.

The 26-page booklet published in 1934 contains a four-page prose foreword and twenty-one poems, including some of Winters’ best and best-known -- “To a Young Writer,” “On Teaching the Young,” “Elegy on a Young Airedale Bitch Lost Two Years Since in the Salt-Marsh” and “Before Disaster” (subtitled “Written early in the winter of 1932-33,” when Hitler was coming to power). The copy I have, bound in cardboard covers, is from the Fondren Library. A label at the front says the book was a “Gift of George G. Williams September 1954.” It hasn’t circulated in sixteen years.

Before Disaster consolidates Winters’ evolution from early free-verse Imagism to his mature work, traditional in meter and rhyme. He’s a rare poet who matured in the best sense, abandoning youthful avant-garde pretensions to evolve a sensibility that crafted poetry for adults, poetry that lasts. In his foreword Winters writes:

“I cannot grasp the contemporary notion that the traditional virtues of style are incompatible with a poetry of modern matter; it appears to rest on the fallacy of expressive form, the notion that the form of the poem should express the matter. This fallacy results in the writing of chaotic poetry about the traffic [as opposed to “Before Disaster”]; of loose poetry about our sprawling nation [Whitman, Crane]; of semi-conscious poetry about semi-conscious states…Poetry is form; its constituents are thought and feeling as they are embodied in language; and though form cannot be wholly reduced to principles, there are certain principles which it cannot violate.”

Almost eighty years after Winters wrote them, the words are more bracing and probably more futile than ever, an implicit call to seriousness, good sense, respect for tradition and dedication to craft. Rolfe Humphries begins his review of Before Disaster in the February 1935 issue of Poetry with this admission:

“This attractively-priced paper pamphlet will beguile you into more study than you bargain for.”

`As If It Had Made Up Its Mind to Stay'

Two mornings in a row I observed the silhouette of a puffed-up, ample-breasted bird perched in a shrub outside my office window. The branch bobbed in the wind fifteen feet over the sidewalk. Featureless in the early-morning murk, the robin-sized bird remained as impassive as a duck decoy. The second day I walked outside and confirmed he was a robin, Turdus migratorius (not what you think: turdus is Latin for “thrush”). He reminded me of a small pen-and-ink sketch I bought many years ago in an Indiana antiques shop: “Round Robin.”

Where I grew up in Ohio, the robin was a seasonal alarm clock, an early herald of spring we started looking for in February. Not so in Texas. B.C. Robison writes in Birds of Houston (Rice University Press, 1990):

“…in southeast Texas it is a harbinger of the deep winter. The bird starts moving into the Houston area in December, and it remains fairly numerous through March. Robins begin to migrate back north in April, and by late summer they are seldom seen in the city.”

By repute, the robin is the gentlest of birds, an honorary dove, at least to humans, though I’ve watched them pull meters of earthworm from the lawn. Between 1824 and 1826, John Clare composed a series of “Natural History Letters” (The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare, edited by Margaret Grainger, 1983) to his friend James Augustus Hessey. Among them is a lengthy description of a robin he befriended as a boy growing up in Helpston:

“…in winter it will venture into the house for food & become as tame as a chicken—we had one that usd [sic] to come in at a broken pane in the window three winters together I always knew it to be our old visitor by a white scar on one of the wings [del. which might have been an old wound made by some cat] it grew so tame that it would perch on ones [sic] finger & take the crumbs out of the hand…it would never stay in the house at night tho it would attempt to perch on the chair spindles & clean its bill & ruffles its feather & put its head under its wing as if it had made up its mind to stay”

`The Annual Wreckage'

The storms that blew through Houston on Wednesday started a day earlier as afternoon fog, skies like dirty milk and rising temperatures through the evening. That ominous sense of nature behaving in counterintuitive ways. A muggy chill. At dawn, muted yellow light and the stink of ozone and sewage. Wind pushing dry leaves along the pavement, making scratching sounds. Among them tumbled in the street near my car not tumbleweed but an uprooted, shrub-sized pokeweed. The lovely and toxic purple berries were gone but the racemes and leaves held on. I put it in the trunk to look at later.

Pokeweed is a poet’s dream, too pat an emblem for something – sustenance and poison, beauty and danger. An opportunist, flourishing where soil is disturbed, adaptable as a cockroach. Whitman finds it in a gone-to-seed pasture without hinting at its toxicity: “And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap'd stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed.” There’s much to admire in weeds, their tenacity and refusal to hew to human wishes. Amy Clampitt likes and respects them in “Vacant Lot with Pokeweed” (The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt, 1997):

“Tufts, follicles, grubstake
biennial rosettes, a low-
life beach-blond scruff of
couch grass: notwithstanding
the interglinting dregs

“of wholesale upheaval and
dismemberment, weeds do not
hesitate, the wheeling
rise of the ailanthus halts
at nothing--and look! here's

“a pokeweed, sprung up from seed
dropped by some vagrant, that's
seized a foothold: a magenta-
girdered bower, gazebo twirls
of blossom rounding into

“raw-buttoned, garnet-rodded
fruit one more wayfarer
perhaps may salvage from
the season's frittering,
the annual wreckage.”

The poem is a patchwork of harmonious fragments, like weeds in vacant lots. “Weeds do not / hesitate.” The “wayfarer” ("some vagrant") is a mockingbird or cardinal, at once harvesting and sowing.

`Eager to Share What He Deemed Best'

Yvor Winters died on this day in 1968, a year of turmoil and grief, at the age of sixty-seven. His great poem “On a View of Pasadena from the Hills” concludes:

“The driver, melting down the distance here,
May cast in flight the faint hoof of a deer
Or pass the faint head set perplexedly.
And man-made stone outgrows the living tree,
And at its rising, air is shaken, men
Are shattered, and the tremor swells again,
Extending to the naked salty shore,
Rank with the sea, which crumbles evermore.”

Charles Tomlinson, the English poet born in 1927, visited Winters at his home in Palo Alto in December 1959, and recounts the meeting in “Beginnings” (Some Americans: A Personal Record, 1981):

“…the striking thing about Winters’s conversation that day was its lack of precisely that quality of ratiocinative abstraction that he professed to admire in poetry. His talk consisted of a celebration of the concrete: Californian wines, Californian trees and the shapes of their leaves, local topography and the changes the vicinity had undergone, the habits of airedales [sic], the migration of birds, the kinds of birds that visited Palo Alto, the distinguishing peculiarities of the older Californian culture.”

In other words, the world he knew and cherished. Tomlinson admits to feeling apprehensive about meeting this “reputedly unaccommodating man,” but concludes:

“The day was an entire success. The dignity and dimension of the man unmistakably communicated themselves, as did a capacity for friendship, rather than friendliness. Winters showed no desire to please, but, as in his urging to try a particularly fine wine, he was eager to share what he deemed best.”

`Godfather to an Insect'

“They will have enough to do without having to memorize Latin declensions.”

The author is James S. Miller, and he’s defending the world’s poor overworked biologists. There’s something embarrassing about the dean and vice president for science of the New York Botanical Garden carrying on so in public. Bilingual whining is still whining. Imagine Darwin or some other sturdy Victorian conducting himself in so undignified a fashion. As of Jan. 1, the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature has discarded its requirement that botanists provide a Latin description of a new species. No word on whether fauna will follow flora. Compare Miller’s display with a 1943 poem, “On Discovering a Butterfly,” by Vladimir Nabokov, lepidopterist:

“I found it and I named it, being versed
in taxonomic Latin; thus became
godfather to an insect and its first
describer—and I want no other fame.

“Wide open on its pin (though fast asleep),
and safe from creeping relatives and rust,
in the secluded stronghold where we keep
type specimens it will transcend its dust.

“Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,
poems that take a thousand years to die
but ape the immortality of this
red label on a little butterfly.”

Nabokov gave Latin genus and/or species names to twenty butterflies and moths. Other lepidopterists have bestowed thirty-nine names that allude to Nabokov or one of his books. Some of the latter are obvious: Itylos pnin, Nabokovia ada, Paralycaeides shade; others, more recondite: Leptotes delalande, Leptotes krug, Madeleinea nodo. Nabokov’s best-known godchild is Lycaeides melissa samuelis, the Karner blue butterfly, the endangered species he immortalized in 1943 and re-immortalized in 1957 in Pnin:

“A score of small butterflies, all of one kind, were settled on a damp patch of sand, their wings erect and closed, showing their pale undersides with dark dots and tiny orange-rimmed peacock spots along the hindwing margins; one of Pnin’s shed rubbers disturbed some of them and, revealing the celestial hue of their upper surface, they fluttered around like blue snowflakes before settling again.”

Almost uniquely, Nabokov took sublime zest in both butterflies and words. Though otherwise luxuriantly multilingual, his Latin was purely functional, a biologist’s “taxonomic Latin.” Its precision reflects the genius of binomial nomenclature, the system devised by Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778) that permits the particular to take its rightful place in the general. In An Autobiography (1913), Theodore Roosevelt writes:

“My first knowledge of Latin was obtained by learning the scientific names of the birds and mammals which I collected.”

That was my experience as well. Among the first I learned, even before formally studying Latin: Acer saccharum (sugar maple) and Passer domesticus (house sparrow). In The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (2010), Douglas Brinkley tells us Roosevelt as a boy studied Linnaeus’ Species Plantarum and Systemae Naturae. He writes:

“By the time Theodore Roosevelt was growing up, scientists and explorers seeking glory ranged far and wide in the remote wilderness, racing to discover organisms that could be named after themselves.”

Brinkley cites a passage by Nancy Pick in The Rarest of the Rare: Stories Behind the Treasures at the Harvard Museum of Natural History (2004):

“The Linnaean system eliminated the confusion of having, for example, a butterfly called the mourning cloak in the United States, the yellow edge in Canada, and the Camberwell beauty in Britain. People all over the world, whatever their language, can understand Nymphalis antiopa.”

Or could, until recently. The point is, no one would wish to eliminate the profusion of common names for plants and animals. They constitute a form of folk poetry, one of the glories of English. But neither should we eliminate the more rigorous poetry of Latin plant descriptions. The world always outstrips our capacity to adequately describe it.

[Go here for Curious Taxonomy and here for a blogger at Scientific American defending the elimination of Latin “diagnoses” of new plant species.]