One hundred fifty-nine years ago today, Thoreau writes in his journal:
“Methinks I would share every creature’s suffering for the sake of its experience and joy.”
This is nonsense, a Romantic pose he sometimes shared with a much less biologically informed writer, Walt Whitman. Thoreau is not thinking here, but dabbling in contrarian whimsy. No sane person voluntarily chooses a life of disease, hunger and predators. In the final decade of his life, Thoreau shed many delusions, struck fewer poses and saw the natural world with growing acuity. The same can’t be said for his political thinking. The journal entry continues:
“The song sparrow and the transient fox-colored sparrow,—have they brought me no message this year? Do they go to lead heroic lives in Rupert’s Land? They are so small, I think their destinies must be large. Have I heard what this tiny passenger has to say, while it flits thus from tree to tree? Is not the coming of the fox-colored sparrow something more earnest and significant than I have dreamed of? Can I forgive myself if I let it go to Rupert’s Land before I have appreciated it?”
Please, Henry, forgive yourself. We have. More Romantic rapture. Sparrows carry no message but the one we chose to hear – their beauty, the wonder of their otherness, their inter-relatedness with the rest of creation. One sentence, though dubious, redeems the passage: “They are so small, I think their destinies must be large.” A sparrow will never be a sparrowhawk.
“God did not make this world in jest; no, nor in indifference. These migrating sparrows all bear messages that concern my life. I do not pluck the fruits in their season. I love the birds and beasts because they are mythologically in earnest. I see that the sparrow cheeps and flits and sings adequately to the great design of the universe; that man does not communicate with it, understand its language, because he is not one with nature. I reproach myself because I have regarded with indifference the passage of the birds; I have thought them no better than I.”
Thoreau’s constitutional fondness for paradox is sometimes too glib, like the easy one-liners of a nightclub comedian. I don’t know what “mythologically in earnest” means. Being “one with nature” has nothing to do with it. We fail to communicate with a sparrow, “understand its language,” because we are not sparrows. Their otherness is no judgment on us. We haven't somehow failed. We share a world but not a mind. There is no sparrow Weltanschauung for me to comprehend. In “House Sparrows” (The Venetian Vespers, 1979), Anthony Hecht reminds us:
“They are given to nervous flight, the troubled sleep
Of those who remember terrible events,
The wide-eyed, anxious haste of the exiled.”
To remind us that nature is more than unrelieved grimness, however, Hecht concludes his poem like this:
“Yet here they are, these chipper stratoliners,
Unsullen, unresentful, full of the grace
Of cheerfulness, who seem to greet all comers
With the wild confidence of Forty-Niners,
And, to the lively honor of their race,
Rude canticles of `Summers, Summers, Summers.’”
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
`At the Call of the Imagination'
In a hurry and almost late, as usual, I grabbed one book off the school library shelf on the way to read-aloud time with the kindergarteners – This Delicious Day: 65 Poems (1983), edited by Paul B. Janeczko. I scanned the table of contents and selected, almost at random but with brevity in mind, “Celery” by Ogden Nash:
“Celery, raw,
Develops the jaw,
But celery, stewed,
Is more quietly chewed.”
Accompanied by crunching and moist chewing sounds, my reading was politely received. On the facing page, conveniently, was “Arbuckle Jones” by Peter Wesley-Smith:
“Arbuckle Jones
When flustered
Eats custard
With mustard.
“I’m disgustard.”
This too was a bone fide hit, as food poems and anything with monkeys or underwear usually are among five-year-olds. So I moved on to “Alligator Pie” by Dennis Lee, a Canadian, as the final stanza suggests:
“Alligator soup, alligator soup,
If I don't get some I think I'm gonna droop.
Give away my hockey stick, give away my hoop,
But don't give away my alligator soup.”
This library assignment started with two boys – one autistic but cheerily charming, though he hardly speaks; the other what was called in less linguistically dishonest times, “backwards” – slow, self-absorbed, immature, with a rudimentary attention span, but not a bad kid. By now, about a dozen boys and girls, always in flux around the two founding members, gather with me on the floor to listen and look at the pictures. In some I detect the germ of imagination, a sense of humor, even incipient bookishness. In his 1990 essay “Toward a Fateful Serenity” (A Jacques Barzun Reader, 2002), Barzun writes:
“Accepting life whole and keeping one’s love of art from idolatry means remembering that nonliving things must be loved soberly. The living have first claim, and fellow feeling for them should stir not only at the sight of sorrow and pain, but at the call of the imagination.”
In some of the kids I faintly hear “the call of the imagination,” which I also hear, unexpectedly, in This Delicious Day, which proved a time-released blessing. I read more poems to the kids, including an X.J. Kennedy number that fell flat, but I kept the book and read it over lunch. That’s when I found “Stone” from a cycle of four short poems, “Things,” by Donald Justice (Departures, 1973):
“Hard, but you can polish it.
Precious, it has eyes. Can wound.
Would dance upon water. Sinks.
Stays put. Crushed, becomes a road.”
Without the title, it’s a riddle, almost a compressed parable, reminding me of Zbigniew Herbert’s "Pebble." I like “Precious, it has eyes,” which reminds me of an Alec Wilder song title – “It’s Silk, Feel It.” I was also surprised by another poem unlikely to appeal to five-year-olds – “The Beach at Evening” by David Ferry (On the Way to the Island, 1960):
“The beach at this evening full
Tide is a fisherman’s back,
Whose bright muscles of rock
Glisten and strain as they pull
The cast net of the sea
In with a full catch
Of pebble, shell, and other
Things that belong to the sea.”
The conceit, in my experience, is novel – beach as fisherman, sea as net. Justice’s and Ferry’s are pleasing minor works by good poets, inhabiting that uncertain space between children and adults, light verse and – what? Serious verse? Too solemn, even pretentious. The poems have in common, rather, a certain sort of reader, one unafraid to laugh or at least silently relish wit.
“Celery, raw,
Develops the jaw,
But celery, stewed,
Is more quietly chewed.”
Accompanied by crunching and moist chewing sounds, my reading was politely received. On the facing page, conveniently, was “Arbuckle Jones” by Peter Wesley-Smith:
“Arbuckle Jones
When flustered
Eats custard
With mustard.
“I’m disgustard.”
This too was a bone fide hit, as food poems and anything with monkeys or underwear usually are among five-year-olds. So I moved on to “Alligator Pie” by Dennis Lee, a Canadian, as the final stanza suggests:
“Alligator soup, alligator soup,
If I don't get some I think I'm gonna droop.
Give away my hockey stick, give away my hoop,
But don't give away my alligator soup.”
This library assignment started with two boys – one autistic but cheerily charming, though he hardly speaks; the other what was called in less linguistically dishonest times, “backwards” – slow, self-absorbed, immature, with a rudimentary attention span, but not a bad kid. By now, about a dozen boys and girls, always in flux around the two founding members, gather with me on the floor to listen and look at the pictures. In some I detect the germ of imagination, a sense of humor, even incipient bookishness. In his 1990 essay “Toward a Fateful Serenity” (A Jacques Barzun Reader, 2002), Barzun writes:
“Accepting life whole and keeping one’s love of art from idolatry means remembering that nonliving things must be loved soberly. The living have first claim, and fellow feeling for them should stir not only at the sight of sorrow and pain, but at the call of the imagination.”
In some of the kids I faintly hear “the call of the imagination,” which I also hear, unexpectedly, in This Delicious Day, which proved a time-released blessing. I read more poems to the kids, including an X.J. Kennedy number that fell flat, but I kept the book and read it over lunch. That’s when I found “Stone” from a cycle of four short poems, “Things,” by Donald Justice (Departures, 1973):
“Hard, but you can polish it.
Precious, it has eyes. Can wound.
Would dance upon water. Sinks.
Stays put. Crushed, becomes a road.”
Without the title, it’s a riddle, almost a compressed parable, reminding me of Zbigniew Herbert’s "Pebble." I like “Precious, it has eyes,” which reminds me of an Alec Wilder song title – “It’s Silk, Feel It.” I was also surprised by another poem unlikely to appeal to five-year-olds – “The Beach at Evening” by David Ferry (On the Way to the Island, 1960):
“The beach at this evening full
Tide is a fisherman’s back,
Whose bright muscles of rock
Glisten and strain as they pull
The cast net of the sea
In with a full catch
Of pebble, shell, and other
Things that belong to the sea.”
The conceit, in my experience, is novel – beach as fisherman, sea as net. Justice’s and Ferry’s are pleasing minor works by good poets, inhabiting that uncertain space between children and adults, light verse and – what? Serious verse? Too solemn, even pretentious. The poems have in common, rather, a certain sort of reader, one unafraid to laugh or at least silently relish wit.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
'The Thisness of the Book in Hand'
In my school, the sight of a child reading a book in solitude, outside the presence of a hectoring teacher, is so unusual as to seem suspicious. I wonder: What’s she up to? When possible, I identify the title and try to assess the kid’s pleasure quotient. On Monday, I noticed a Russian-born girl with a long, braided ponytail seated in the office with a fat volume open on her lap. She was bent over the book in a manner suggesting a tall wading bird waiting for a fish, and she appeared to be in an open-eyed trance, unmoving but for her eyes. I asked what she was reading and she was startled but held up the book: the same edition of Robinson Crusoe with illustrations by N.C. Wyeth that I read as a kid.
I was excited but didn’t wish to sound patronizing. The enduring appeal of Defoe’s masterpiece, first published in 1719, is rooted in a common fantasy: If I were marooned on a desert island, how would I survive and what sort of world would I create? The girl, like Crusoe, said she had just met Friday. In Crusoe’s homely words, as recounted by Elizabeth Bishop, “Friday was nice.” As vivid for me as Defoe’s clean, matter-of-fact prose are Wyeth’s illustrations from 1920. Go here to see them.
Even in an inexpensive reprint, the book is a pleasure to hold and gaze at, half a century after my first encounter. Wyeth’s illustrations, like John Tenniel’s and Arthur Rackham’s, have melded with their books, merging in this reader’s memory – how rare an accomplishment in publishing, another art almost extinct. Here, from Mind and Blood: The Collected Poems of John Finlay (John Daniel & Company, 1992), is a tribute to another writer’s collaborator in the art of making a book, “Of Harry Duncan, Bookmaker”:
“He crafts a print and page that gird
The poem’s grace and make it manned.
He creates matter for the word,
The thisness of the book in hand,
A poem’s flesh, its life conferred.”
I was excited but didn’t wish to sound patronizing. The enduring appeal of Defoe’s masterpiece, first published in 1719, is rooted in a common fantasy: If I were marooned on a desert island, how would I survive and what sort of world would I create? The girl, like Crusoe, said she had just met Friday. In Crusoe’s homely words, as recounted by Elizabeth Bishop, “Friday was nice.” As vivid for me as Defoe’s clean, matter-of-fact prose are Wyeth’s illustrations from 1920. Go here to see them.
Even in an inexpensive reprint, the book is a pleasure to hold and gaze at, half a century after my first encounter. Wyeth’s illustrations, like John Tenniel’s and Arthur Rackham’s, have melded with their books, merging in this reader’s memory – how rare an accomplishment in publishing, another art almost extinct. Here, from Mind and Blood: The Collected Poems of John Finlay (John Daniel & Company, 1992), is a tribute to another writer’s collaborator in the art of making a book, “Of Harry Duncan, Bookmaker”:
“He crafts a print and page that gird
The poem’s grace and make it manned.
He creates matter for the word,
The thisness of the book in hand,
A poem’s flesh, its life conferred.”
Monday, March 28, 2011
`These Remarks Are Heretical'
Serious readers cultivate a personal canon, the books well-known and obscure meant to sustain them across a lifetime. It’s not a canon in the dogmatic sense but a library one stocks and culls without answering to prevailing tastes or other forms of censorship. Dissenters are not to be chastised for fashioning their own wayward canons – this is inevitable and ought to be encouraged. Readers who prize what is best in the literary tradition tend to be traditionalists with an anti-authoritarian streak – at least this reader is. We reject the notion that the new and fashionable are necessarily worthy of attention, and that the old and seldom-read should be forgotten.
Yvor Winters is the rare sort of critic who gives the impression of being first of all an enthusiastic reader, not a burned-out academic drudge. Known popularly for the harshness of his assessments, Winters was in fact an enthusiast. He loved Greville and Bridges even if the world thought otherwise. In “Yvor Winters—,” Marianne Moore calls him “a badger-Diogenes” and praises his “hostility to falsity” and “tenacity unintimidated by circumstance.” In “English Literature in the Sixteenth Century” (The Function of Criticism: Problems and Exercises, 1957), Winters writes:
“I am not trying to be insulting (the technical term, I think, is `arrogant’); I am trying rather to state an important truth which is overlooked for the greater part in the academic world. There is likely to be over long periods what one might call an underground, or unpublicized, tradition of the best writing which one can discover only if one has the perception to trace the tradition from poem to poem. I am fully aware that these remarks are heretical.”
I resist using “underground” because of its countercultural connotations (which have long since gone “over-ground”), but the word is apt. Moore, an old friend, writes in her poem to Winters:
“He does not hesitate to call others foolish,
and we do not shrink from imputations
of folly—of annoying a man to whom
compliments may be uncongenial;
--wise to be foolish when a sense of indebtedness
is too strong to suppress.”
Yvor Winters is the rare sort of critic who gives the impression of being first of all an enthusiastic reader, not a burned-out academic drudge. Known popularly for the harshness of his assessments, Winters was in fact an enthusiast. He loved Greville and Bridges even if the world thought otherwise. In “Yvor Winters—,” Marianne Moore calls him “a badger-Diogenes” and praises his “hostility to falsity” and “tenacity unintimidated by circumstance.” In “English Literature in the Sixteenth Century” (The Function of Criticism: Problems and Exercises, 1957), Winters writes:
“I am not trying to be insulting (the technical term, I think, is `arrogant’); I am trying rather to state an important truth which is overlooked for the greater part in the academic world. There is likely to be over long periods what one might call an underground, or unpublicized, tradition of the best writing which one can discover only if one has the perception to trace the tradition from poem to poem. I am fully aware that these remarks are heretical.”
I resist using “underground” because of its countercultural connotations (which have long since gone “over-ground”), but the word is apt. Moore, an old friend, writes in her poem to Winters:
“He does not hesitate to call others foolish,
and we do not shrink from imputations
of folly—of annoying a man to whom
compliments may be uncongenial;
--wise to be foolish when a sense of indebtedness
is too strong to suppress.”
Sunday, March 27, 2011
`The Flower, and Wood, and Spring'
“I think that I am here, on this earth,
To present a report on it, but to whom I don’t know.
As if I were sent so that whatever takes place
Has meaning because it changes into memory.”
The lines are from “Consciousness,” collected in Unattainable Earth (1986), translated by its author, Czeslaw Miłosz, and Robert Hass, and read like the Polish poet’s apologia, his moral and literary pledge. He was blessed or cursed to survive much of the worst the twentieth century specialized in producing, but Miłosz was too scrupulous a witness to report only the horrors, for that would have left the report incomplete. His work evolved into a celebration of creation, sometimes in the tones of Walt Whitman (whom he translated into Polish and called “the poet of the great reality”).
I find congenial Miłosz’s notion of writer-as-reporter, though not in a political or otherwise didactic sense. Look around. Pay attention. Study. Read. Write. That’s Miłosz’s message to this writer and one-time newspaper reporter. We celebrate Miłosz’s centenary on June 30, and Cynthia Haven has reported here and here on early festivities in New York City. Another celebrant is Edna O’Doherty in her essay-review “All Things Considered” in the Dublin Review of Books:
“In his early adulthood Miłosz saw the world plunge into evil, but unlike many of his friends and contemporaries he survived that evil and even outlived the repressive political system he had once believed to be an inescapable destiny for his nation. Disagreeing with Adorno, he believed that poetry was possible after Auschwitz and that just as there is the extermination camp, so also there is the flower, the wood, and spring. The flower cannot expunge the camp, and the camp cannot expunge the flower. Life is a burden, but one that sometimes seems worth bearing; and if it can be hard and painful, at least it does not last forever.”
For sheer idiocy, Adorno’s chestnut ranks with Shelley’s “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” In a late poem, “Unde Malum,” addressed to another Polish poet, Tadeusz Rozewicz, Miłosz writes:
“evil disappears from the world
and consciousness with it
"Of course, dear Tadeusz,
evil (and good) comes from man.”
To present a report on it, but to whom I don’t know.
As if I were sent so that whatever takes place
Has meaning because it changes into memory.”
The lines are from “Consciousness,” collected in Unattainable Earth (1986), translated by its author, Czeslaw Miłosz, and Robert Hass, and read like the Polish poet’s apologia, his moral and literary pledge. He was blessed or cursed to survive much of the worst the twentieth century specialized in producing, but Miłosz was too scrupulous a witness to report only the horrors, for that would have left the report incomplete. His work evolved into a celebration of creation, sometimes in the tones of Walt Whitman (whom he translated into Polish and called “the poet of the great reality”).
I find congenial Miłosz’s notion of writer-as-reporter, though not in a political or otherwise didactic sense. Look around. Pay attention. Study. Read. Write. That’s Miłosz’s message to this writer and one-time newspaper reporter. We celebrate Miłosz’s centenary on June 30, and Cynthia Haven has reported here and here on early festivities in New York City. Another celebrant is Edna O’Doherty in her essay-review “All Things Considered” in the Dublin Review of Books:
“In his early adulthood Miłosz saw the world plunge into evil, but unlike many of his friends and contemporaries he survived that evil and even outlived the repressive political system he had once believed to be an inescapable destiny for his nation. Disagreeing with Adorno, he believed that poetry was possible after Auschwitz and that just as there is the extermination camp, so also there is the flower, the wood, and spring. The flower cannot expunge the camp, and the camp cannot expunge the flower. Life is a burden, but one that sometimes seems worth bearing; and if it can be hard and painful, at least it does not last forever.”
For sheer idiocy, Adorno’s chestnut ranks with Shelley’s “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” In a late poem, “Unde Malum,” addressed to another Polish poet, Tadeusz Rozewicz, Miłosz writes:
“evil disappears from the world
and consciousness with it
"Of course, dear Tadeusz,
evil (and good) comes from man.”
Saturday, March 26, 2011
`Daffodils Again'
Shakespeare used it ninety-five times but we can go a lifetime without hearing the word: thither. It sounds like a lisping scissor, orphaned cousin of hither and whither, also lost to the modern tongue. A dithering adverb, more gesture than word, it means “there,” “to that place,” a pointed index finger. In Henry IV, Part I, Hotspur tells his wife: “Whither I go, thither shall you go too.” One of literature’s reclamation specialists, Samuel Beckett, wrote “Thither” in English in 1976:
“thither
a far cry
for one
so little
fair daffodils
march then
“then there
then there
“then thence
daffodils
again
march then
again
a far cry
again
for one
so little”
“Thither” is a thicket of multiple meanings, suggesting tenderness for the small and distressed. The twice repeated “march” is at once movement and month, flowers on the march in March -- “a far cry” from dancing with the daffodils. “A far cry,” idiomatically, is something different or distant, as thither is a far cry from hither (and yon).
“thither
a far cry
for one
so little
fair daffodils
march then
“then there
then there
“then thence
daffodils
again
march then
again
a far cry
again
for one
so little”
“Thither” is a thicket of multiple meanings, suggesting tenderness for the small and distressed. The twice repeated “march” is at once movement and month, flowers on the march in March -- “a far cry” from dancing with the daffodils. “A far cry,” idiomatically, is something different or distant, as thither is a far cry from hither (and yon).
Friday, March 25, 2011
`That I May Catch Life and Light'
A sunny day, almost warm, a day for shedding coats and stifling impulses to sing and dance. Pacific Northwest natives complained the sunlight hurt their eyes. The neighbor’s yard was yellow with daffodils and forsythia. The school’s sand-covered athletic field had dried enough for a boy to lie on his back, flap arms and legs, and make a “sand angel.” Five girls, arms linked, high-kicked in a chorus line. In his journal for March 25, 1859, Thoreau writes:
“I thought the other day, How we enjoy a warm and pleasant day at this season! We dance like gnats in the sun.”
We ought to be flattered. In the next paragraph, he describes “a score of my townsmen” shooting and trapping “musquash [muskrats] and mink,” inspiring Thoreau to write:
“Am I not a trapper too, early and late scanning the rising flood, ranging by distant wood-sides, setting my traps in solitude, and baiting them as well as I know how, that I may catch life and light, that my intellectual part may taste some venison and be invigorated, that my nakedness may be clad in some wild, furry warmth?”
Thoreau is fond of finding or devising analogs for the writerly enterprise. Writers are trappers, capturing creation’s elusive spawn and returning with the raw material of sustenance and finery. In my sack for today is yesterday’s limit of life and light.
“I thought the other day, How we enjoy a warm and pleasant day at this season! We dance like gnats in the sun.”
We ought to be flattered. In the next paragraph, he describes “a score of my townsmen” shooting and trapping “musquash [muskrats] and mink,” inspiring Thoreau to write:
“Am I not a trapper too, early and late scanning the rising flood, ranging by distant wood-sides, setting my traps in solitude, and baiting them as well as I know how, that I may catch life and light, that my intellectual part may taste some venison and be invigorated, that my nakedness may be clad in some wild, furry warmth?”
Thoreau is fond of finding or devising analogs for the writerly enterprise. Writers are trappers, capturing creation’s elusive spawn and returning with the raw material of sustenance and finery. In my sack for today is yesterday’s limit of life and light.
Thursday, March 24, 2011
`A Lump of Iron Turning Into a Space Shuttle'
Only recently have I discovered the music of The Handsome Family, a husband-and-wife, Albuquerque-based duo whose sound is usually described as “alternative country,” which means nothing. The words are credited to Rennie Sparks, the music to Brett Sparks. The CD I’m listening to, Last Days of Wonder, came out in 2006, and its title is drawn from the second track, “Tesla’s Hotel Room.” The lyrics are devoted, with considerable biographical faithfulness, to the final days of Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), Serbian-born inventor, electrical engineer, rival to Edison and namesake of the Tesla coil. By the end of his life, Tesla’s longtime eccentricity had devolved into mundane madness, and he died alone in a room in the Hotel New Yorker. The CD’s title appears in three of the song’s eleven verses. Here’s the first:
“In the last days of wonder
When spirits still flew
where we sat holding hands
In half-darkened rooms”
The phrase – “the last days of wonder” – is haunting, even apart from the context of Sparks’ lyric. It suggests impending emotional and intellectual numbness, a sort of death-in-life, whether caused by trauma, drugs or hipness. We all know people too cool to be surprised, awed or dumbfounded – or at least they pretend to be. I don’t think Sparks is suggesting Tesla’s life as a scientist and engineer destroyed his capacity for wonder -- that soft-headed Romantic notion. I’ve never understood the alleged incompatibility of science and art, or science and a religious sense. Rather, at their best, all are rooted in a capacity for wonder expressed by Miroslav Holub (1923-1998), the Czech poet and immunologist. I started reading his prose collection Shedding Life: Disease, Politics and Other Human Conditions (Milkweed Editions, 1997) after reading this statement by Holub in the March 14, 2003, issue of ScienceWeek:
“Between the fifth and tenth days the lump of stem cells differentiates into the overall building plan of the mouse embryo and its organs. It is a bit like a lump of iron turning into the space shuttle. In fact it is the profoundest wonder we can still imagine and accept, and at the same time so usual that we have to force ourselves to wonder about the wondrousness of this wonder.”
“In the last days of wonder
When spirits still flew
where we sat holding hands
In half-darkened rooms”
The phrase – “the last days of wonder” – is haunting, even apart from the context of Sparks’ lyric. It suggests impending emotional and intellectual numbness, a sort of death-in-life, whether caused by trauma, drugs or hipness. We all know people too cool to be surprised, awed or dumbfounded – or at least they pretend to be. I don’t think Sparks is suggesting Tesla’s life as a scientist and engineer destroyed his capacity for wonder -- that soft-headed Romantic notion. I’ve never understood the alleged incompatibility of science and art, or science and a religious sense. Rather, at their best, all are rooted in a capacity for wonder expressed by Miroslav Holub (1923-1998), the Czech poet and immunologist. I started reading his prose collection Shedding Life: Disease, Politics and Other Human Conditions (Milkweed Editions, 1997) after reading this statement by Holub in the March 14, 2003, issue of ScienceWeek:
“Between the fifth and tenth days the lump of stem cells differentiates into the overall building plan of the mouse embryo and its organs. It is a bit like a lump of iron turning into the space shuttle. In fact it is the profoundest wonder we can still imagine and accept, and at the same time so usual that we have to force ourselves to wonder about the wondrousness of this wonder.”
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
`A Peculiarly Pleasant Bitter Tang'
Readers surely have noticed Thoreau’s fondness for apples and the private mythology he fashions around them. The two books he published during his lifetime feature splendid conclusions, both including apples. Here is the final paragraph of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849):
“We had made about fifty miles this day with sail and oar, and now, far in the evening, our boat was grating against the bulrushes of its native port, and its keel recognized the Concord mud, where some semblance of its outline was still preserved in the flattened flags which had scarce yet erected themselves since our departure; and we leaped gladly on shore, drawing it up, and fastening it to the wild apple-tree, whose stem still bore the mark which its chain had worn in the chafing of the spring freshets.”
One long graceful sentence concluding with the curiously complex image of an apple tree scarred by a chain soon to be fastened again. A “freshet” is the flood caused by heavy rains or, as in this case, the spring thaw. Thoreau emphasizes the tree is wild, not cultivated. Even in his return to Concord there’s a suggestion of wilderness. The familiar, too, is feral. The season is spring, Thoreau’s consistent image of return, renewal, rebirth – a theme made even more explicit in the second-to-last paragraph of Walden (1854):
“Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer's kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts — from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb — heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board — may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society's most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!”
Another densely layered image – the apple wood in the kitchen table is a “well-seasoned tomb.” When reading Thoreau’s prose, remain ever alert for puns and other suggestions of multiple meaning, even within in a single word – “urn,” for instance, and “aburnum.” Dry Yankee comedy is seldom far away. This final chapter to a cyclically organized book is titled “Conclusion” (the preceding chapter is “Spring”), with its well-known final sentence: “The sun is but a morning star.”
In his essay “Wild Apples,” Thoreau says “…the apple-tree may be considered a symbol of peace no less than the olive.” True, but sustained reading of Thoreau’s works, including the journal, suggests he likewise associated the tree and its fruit with abundance, sustenance, independence, tradition and a uniquely American species of individualism. He says in “Wild Apples”:
“Surely the apple is the noblest of fruits. Let the most beautiful or the swiftest have it. That should be the `going’ price of apples.”
In Objects on a Table: Harmonious Disarray in Art and Literature (1998), another mythologizer of apples and author of Apples and Pears, Guy Davenport, writes:
“Thoreau’s feeling that the apple had become a naturalized American while the pear remained European bears inspection. Apple—prize, temptation, reward—is a symbol containing opposite meanings: love and hate, harmony and discord. Pear is wholly charismatic; moreover, when it displays double meanings like the apple, the meanings are both benign.”
In the wild apple – sweet and tart, gnarled and smooth, common and sublime -- Thoreau glimpsed an image of himself. In his journal for Oct. 29, 1855, he writes:
"There is a wild apple on the hill which has to me a peculiarly pleasant bitter tang, not perceived till it is three quarters tasted. It remains on the tongue. As you cut it, it smells exactly like a squash-bug. I like its very acerbity. It is a sort of triumph to eat and like it, an ovation."
“We had made about fifty miles this day with sail and oar, and now, far in the evening, our boat was grating against the bulrushes of its native port, and its keel recognized the Concord mud, where some semblance of its outline was still preserved in the flattened flags which had scarce yet erected themselves since our departure; and we leaped gladly on shore, drawing it up, and fastening it to the wild apple-tree, whose stem still bore the mark which its chain had worn in the chafing of the spring freshets.”
One long graceful sentence concluding with the curiously complex image of an apple tree scarred by a chain soon to be fastened again. A “freshet” is the flood caused by heavy rains or, as in this case, the spring thaw. Thoreau emphasizes the tree is wild, not cultivated. Even in his return to Concord there’s a suggestion of wilderness. The familiar, too, is feral. The season is spring, Thoreau’s consistent image of return, renewal, rebirth – a theme made even more explicit in the second-to-last paragraph of Walden (1854):
“Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer's kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts — from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb — heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board — may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society's most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!”
Another densely layered image – the apple wood in the kitchen table is a “well-seasoned tomb.” When reading Thoreau’s prose, remain ever alert for puns and other suggestions of multiple meaning, even within in a single word – “urn,” for instance, and “aburnum.” Dry Yankee comedy is seldom far away. This final chapter to a cyclically organized book is titled “Conclusion” (the preceding chapter is “Spring”), with its well-known final sentence: “The sun is but a morning star.”
In his essay “Wild Apples,” Thoreau says “…the apple-tree may be considered a symbol of peace no less than the olive.” True, but sustained reading of Thoreau’s works, including the journal, suggests he likewise associated the tree and its fruit with abundance, sustenance, independence, tradition and a uniquely American species of individualism. He says in “Wild Apples”:
“Surely the apple is the noblest of fruits. Let the most beautiful or the swiftest have it. That should be the `going’ price of apples.”
In Objects on a Table: Harmonious Disarray in Art and Literature (1998), another mythologizer of apples and author of Apples and Pears, Guy Davenport, writes:
“Thoreau’s feeling that the apple had become a naturalized American while the pear remained European bears inspection. Apple—prize, temptation, reward—is a symbol containing opposite meanings: love and hate, harmony and discord. Pear is wholly charismatic; moreover, when it displays double meanings like the apple, the meanings are both benign.”
In the wild apple – sweet and tart, gnarled and smooth, common and sublime -- Thoreau glimpsed an image of himself. In his journal for Oct. 29, 1855, he writes:
"There is a wild apple on the hill which has to me a peculiarly pleasant bitter tang, not perceived till it is three quarters tasted. It remains on the tongue. As you cut it, it smells exactly like a squash-bug. I like its very acerbity. It is a sort of triumph to eat and like it, an ovation."
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
`Enchantment Was What He Was After'
I’ve been working with a new student, an under-sized, over-stimulated kindergartener. I tube-feed him and tutor him in math, reading and writing. The classroom teacher has supplied us with a homemade writing workbook – photocopied pages, red cover, two staples. The handwritten title is “My Sight Word Poetry Book,” beneath which someone has drawn a pocket resembling a pair of jockey shorts, and beneath that, also handwritten, a poem of sorts:
“Put a rhyme in your pocket.
At school you start
To love learning words
With all of your heart.”
It’s not Milton but I appreciate the effort and sentiment, and so does my student. The idea is to supply the word missing in four or eight rhyming lines. He’s to print the same word four or eight times and, by repetition, learn to form letters while using the word correctly in a sentence. Here’s a sample, reminiscent of an exercise in a nineteenth-century primer:
“Bread comes from wheat.
Apples come from trees.
Milk comes from cows.
Honey comes from bees.”
Despite prevailing educational wisdom, I’m a great believer in rote learning. Try mastering irregular French verbs by osmosis. After he wrote “from” four times, my student and I read the lines aloud. We syncopated them, exaggerating the stressed syllables, and I snapped my fingers on the beat like a pedagogical hipster. He enjoyed the spectacle so we did it again, and again, and did the same with two more rhymes. I already know this kid, despite his troubles, is bright, a quick learner, but I’ll never turn down a student who asks me to repeat an exercise. My next project is to type up rhymes by Walter de la Mare, leaving some of the words blank. In “The King of Never-to-Be” (Fine Incisions: Essays on Poetry and Place, 2010), Eric Ormsby writes:
“De la Mare used the music of words as a way of extending them. He wanted words to be suffused with a sort of penumbra; he wanted them to cast a spell. Enchantment was what he was after.”
“Put a rhyme in your pocket.
At school you start
To love learning words
With all of your heart.”
It’s not Milton but I appreciate the effort and sentiment, and so does my student. The idea is to supply the word missing in four or eight rhyming lines. He’s to print the same word four or eight times and, by repetition, learn to form letters while using the word correctly in a sentence. Here’s a sample, reminiscent of an exercise in a nineteenth-century primer:
“Bread comes from wheat.
Apples come from trees.
Milk comes from cows.
Honey comes from bees.”
Despite prevailing educational wisdom, I’m a great believer in rote learning. Try mastering irregular French verbs by osmosis. After he wrote “from” four times, my student and I read the lines aloud. We syncopated them, exaggerating the stressed syllables, and I snapped my fingers on the beat like a pedagogical hipster. He enjoyed the spectacle so we did it again, and again, and did the same with two more rhymes. I already know this kid, despite his troubles, is bright, a quick learner, but I’ll never turn down a student who asks me to repeat an exercise. My next project is to type up rhymes by Walter de la Mare, leaving some of the words blank. In “The King of Never-to-Be” (Fine Incisions: Essays on Poetry and Place, 2010), Eric Ormsby writes:
“De la Mare used the music of words as a way of extending them. He wanted words to be suffused with a sort of penumbra; he wanted them to cast a spell. Enchantment was what he was after.”
Monday, March 21, 2011
`So Wide Is the Choice of Parts'
In 1840, the vernal equinox fell on March 21 and Thoreau, age twenty-two, was in the early stages of organizing his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, an almost-forgotten American masterpiece. In his journal he notes:
“By another spring I may be a mail carrier in Peru—or a South American planter—or a Siberian exile—or a Greenland whaler, or a settler on the Columbia River—or a Canton merchant—or a soldier in Florida—or a mackerel fisher of Cape Sable—or a Robinson Crusoe in the Pacific—or a silent navigator of any sea—So wide is the choice of parts, what a pity if the part of Hamlet be left out.”
It’s the springtime reverie of a young man – a young American -- with faith in unlimited possibility. His identity and path are uncertain but he fuels himself with hope. The only note out of key is sounded by Shakespeare’s indecisive prince. The excerpt and the day’s entire entry are notably free of observations from the natural world. Eighteen years later, on the same date, Thoreau visits a swamp and reports on the skunk cabbage and the song of a chickadee. He notes:
“The first spring rain is very agreeable. I love to hear the pattering of the drops on my umbrella, and I love also the wet scent of the umbrella. It helps take the remaining frost out and settles the ways, but there is yet frost and ice in meadows and swamps.”
Who knew Thoreau carried an umbrella? And who else would carry one while paying a call on a swamp? The declarations of “love” – of a sound and a smell – are fervent and chaste. Thoreau died in May 1862, made his final journal entry the previous November, and wrote nothing on March 21, 1861. Three days earlier, less than a month before the firing on Fort Sumter, he writes:
“You can’t read any genuine history – as that of Herodotus or the Venerable Bede – without perceiving that our interest depends not on the subject but on the man, -- on the manner in which he treats the subject and the importance he gives it. A feeble writer and without genius must have what he thinks a great theme, which we are already interested in through the accounts of other, but a genius – a Shakespeare, for instance – would make the history of his parish more interesting than another’s history of the world.”
“By another spring I may be a mail carrier in Peru—or a South American planter—or a Siberian exile—or a Greenland whaler, or a settler on the Columbia River—or a Canton merchant—or a soldier in Florida—or a mackerel fisher of Cape Sable—or a Robinson Crusoe in the Pacific—or a silent navigator of any sea—So wide is the choice of parts, what a pity if the part of Hamlet be left out.”
It’s the springtime reverie of a young man – a young American -- with faith in unlimited possibility. His identity and path are uncertain but he fuels himself with hope. The only note out of key is sounded by Shakespeare’s indecisive prince. The excerpt and the day’s entire entry are notably free of observations from the natural world. Eighteen years later, on the same date, Thoreau visits a swamp and reports on the skunk cabbage and the song of a chickadee. He notes:
“The first spring rain is very agreeable. I love to hear the pattering of the drops on my umbrella, and I love also the wet scent of the umbrella. It helps take the remaining frost out and settles the ways, but there is yet frost and ice in meadows and swamps.”
Who knew Thoreau carried an umbrella? And who else would carry one while paying a call on a swamp? The declarations of “love” – of a sound and a smell – are fervent and chaste. Thoreau died in May 1862, made his final journal entry the previous November, and wrote nothing on March 21, 1861. Three days earlier, less than a month before the firing on Fort Sumter, he writes:
“You can’t read any genuine history – as that of Herodotus or the Venerable Bede – without perceiving that our interest depends not on the subject but on the man, -- on the manner in which he treats the subject and the importance he gives it. A feeble writer and without genius must have what he thinks a great theme, which we are already interested in through the accounts of other, but a genius – a Shakespeare, for instance – would make the history of his parish more interesting than another’s history of the world.”
Sunday, March 20, 2011
`It Is Only at His Best That He Is Readable'
A casual observation by Helen Pinkerton sent me back to the shelves and prompted another bookish digression. I had written to her in an email:
“The failing is mine but I have never been able to appreciate or enjoy Hawthorne. I read him dutifully, mostly because of Melville, but I seem immune to his charms and I feel no urge to rectify the situation.”
Pinkerton replied:
“I was always interested in Hawthorne, though mainly because of his relationship to Melville. About four years ago I tried re-reading the Marble Faun, after luxuriating in James's descriptions of the Italian, especially Roman, settings in his work, and found I just couldn't take his wooden, repetitive, almost sneering descriptions of Italy and the Italians themselves. His breadth of vision is extremely limited compared with James and Wharton, Nevertheless, he did have a shrewd, conservative, thoughtful intellect.”
The pairing of James and Hawthorne returned me to the former’s much-quoted, seldom read monograph, Hawthorne (1879), in which James offers this teasingly ambivalent characterization of his subject:
“We seem to see him strolling through churches and galleries as the last pure American—attesting by his shy responses to dark canvasses and cold marble his loyalty to a simpler and less encumbered civilization.”
Rereading Hawthorne after a decade failed to kindle a renaissance of interest in its subject but I was impressed by James’ understanding, at age thirty-six, of Americanness, in particular his assessment of “the unconventional Thoreau, [Hawthorne’s] fellow-woodsman at Concord.” With Lincoln and Melville (in Moby-Dick), Thoreau and James constitute the nineteenth-century quartet of great American prose writers. In Chapter IV, “Brook Farm and Concord,” James writes of:
“…that odd genius, his fellow-villager, Henry Thoreau. I said a little way back that the New England Transcendental movement had suffered in the estimation of the world at large from not having (putting Emerson aside) produced any superior talents. But any reference to it would be ungenerous which should omit to pay a tribute in passing to the author of Walden. Whatever question there may be of his talent, there can be none, I think, of his genius. It was a slim and crooked one; but it was eminently personal. He was imperfect, unfinished, inartistic; he was worse than provincial--he was parochial; it is only at his best that he is readable.”
Let’s interrupt to note that Thoreau, a Harvard man, earned most of his living as a surveyor and manufacturer of pencils in the family business. He was never a hermit but remained content to live on the margins of literary culture. He had no literary “career,” as such; rather, a vocation. Most of his writing – his two-million-word journal – was published more than forty years after his death. As a result, few contemporaries read his masterpiece, except for the material Thoreau pulled from it and recast as essays and lectures. Who can think of a comparably gifted American writer whose writing life – except for its dedication and genius – was less like James’? He continues:
“But at his best [Thoreau] has an extreme natural charm, and he must always be mentioned after those Americans--Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Motley--who have written originally. He was Emerson's independent moral man made flesh--living for the ages, and not for Saturday and Sunday; for the Universe, and not for Concord. In fact, however, Thoreau lived for Concord very effectually, and by his remarkable genius for the observation of the phenomena of woods and streams, of plants and trees, and beasts and fishes, and for flinging a kind of spiritual interest over these things, he did more than he perhaps intended toward consolidating the fame of his accidental human sojourn. He was as shy and ungregarious as Hawthorne; but he and the latter appear to have been sociably disposed towards each other, and there are some charming touches in the preface to the Mosses in regard to the hours they spent in boating together on the large, quiet Concord river. Thoreau was a great voyager, in a canoe which he had constructed himself, and which he eventually made over to Hawthorne, and as expert in the use of the paddle as the Red men who had once haunted the same silent stream.”
James here is shrewd and a little snide. “Flinging a kind of spiritual interest over these things” – that is, the natural world – is faintly condescending. At his best – that is, in the later years of his journal – Thoreau “flings” nothing. The verb implies something frivolous and imposed from outside, like gingerbread ornamentation on a house. “His accidental human sojourn,” too, is patronizing, as though in other circumstances Thoreau might have been a woodchuck. James is observing a close but divergent species. In his final reference to Thoreau in Hawthorne, James writes:
“Henry Thoreau, a delightful writer, went to live in the woods; but Henry Thoreau was essentially a sylvan personage, and would not have been, however the fashion of his time might have turned, a man about town.”
The author of Walden, of course, assured us, “I have travelled a great deal in Concord...”
“The failing is mine but I have never been able to appreciate or enjoy Hawthorne. I read him dutifully, mostly because of Melville, but I seem immune to his charms and I feel no urge to rectify the situation.”
Pinkerton replied:
“I was always interested in Hawthorne, though mainly because of his relationship to Melville. About four years ago I tried re-reading the Marble Faun, after luxuriating in James's descriptions of the Italian, especially Roman, settings in his work, and found I just couldn't take his wooden, repetitive, almost sneering descriptions of Italy and the Italians themselves. His breadth of vision is extremely limited compared with James and Wharton, Nevertheless, he did have a shrewd, conservative, thoughtful intellect.”
The pairing of James and Hawthorne returned me to the former’s much-quoted, seldom read monograph, Hawthorne (1879), in which James offers this teasingly ambivalent characterization of his subject:
“We seem to see him strolling through churches and galleries as the last pure American—attesting by his shy responses to dark canvasses and cold marble his loyalty to a simpler and less encumbered civilization.”
Rereading Hawthorne after a decade failed to kindle a renaissance of interest in its subject but I was impressed by James’ understanding, at age thirty-six, of Americanness, in particular his assessment of “the unconventional Thoreau, [Hawthorne’s] fellow-woodsman at Concord.” With Lincoln and Melville (in Moby-Dick), Thoreau and James constitute the nineteenth-century quartet of great American prose writers. In Chapter IV, “Brook Farm and Concord,” James writes of:
“…that odd genius, his fellow-villager, Henry Thoreau. I said a little way back that the New England Transcendental movement had suffered in the estimation of the world at large from not having (putting Emerson aside) produced any superior talents. But any reference to it would be ungenerous which should omit to pay a tribute in passing to the author of Walden. Whatever question there may be of his talent, there can be none, I think, of his genius. It was a slim and crooked one; but it was eminently personal. He was imperfect, unfinished, inartistic; he was worse than provincial--he was parochial; it is only at his best that he is readable.”
Let’s interrupt to note that Thoreau, a Harvard man, earned most of his living as a surveyor and manufacturer of pencils in the family business. He was never a hermit but remained content to live on the margins of literary culture. He had no literary “career,” as such; rather, a vocation. Most of his writing – his two-million-word journal – was published more than forty years after his death. As a result, few contemporaries read his masterpiece, except for the material Thoreau pulled from it and recast as essays and lectures. Who can think of a comparably gifted American writer whose writing life – except for its dedication and genius – was less like James’? He continues:
“But at his best [Thoreau] has an extreme natural charm, and he must always be mentioned after those Americans--Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Motley--who have written originally. He was Emerson's independent moral man made flesh--living for the ages, and not for Saturday and Sunday; for the Universe, and not for Concord. In fact, however, Thoreau lived for Concord very effectually, and by his remarkable genius for the observation of the phenomena of woods and streams, of plants and trees, and beasts and fishes, and for flinging a kind of spiritual interest over these things, he did more than he perhaps intended toward consolidating the fame of his accidental human sojourn. He was as shy and ungregarious as Hawthorne; but he and the latter appear to have been sociably disposed towards each other, and there are some charming touches in the preface to the Mosses in regard to the hours they spent in boating together on the large, quiet Concord river. Thoreau was a great voyager, in a canoe which he had constructed himself, and which he eventually made over to Hawthorne, and as expert in the use of the paddle as the Red men who had once haunted the same silent stream.”
James here is shrewd and a little snide. “Flinging a kind of spiritual interest over these things” – that is, the natural world – is faintly condescending. At his best – that is, in the later years of his journal – Thoreau “flings” nothing. The verb implies something frivolous and imposed from outside, like gingerbread ornamentation on a house. “His accidental human sojourn,” too, is patronizing, as though in other circumstances Thoreau might have been a woodchuck. James is observing a close but divergent species. In his final reference to Thoreau in Hawthorne, James writes:
“Henry Thoreau, a delightful writer, went to live in the woods; but Henry Thoreau was essentially a sylvan personage, and would not have been, however the fashion of his time might have turned, a man about town.”
The author of Walden, of course, assured us, “I have travelled a great deal in Concord...”
Saturday, March 19, 2011
`Unable to Fear What is Too Strange'
As the grays rain in the gray rains of the Pacific Northwest, borne on rain-rich winds out of the west, daffodils bloom, dogwoods swell and juncos nest in our shrubs. A woman at school says Fukushima is revenge for Hiroshima, and she seems to approve of this dime-store brand of karma. Fear and ignorance breed new-found interest in signs and portents, and suburban matrons channel Thomas Gray:
“Iron sleet of arrowy shower
Hurtles in the darkened air.”
I fear doom-reveling alarmists more than microsieverts of radiation. Richard Wilbur, whose ninetieth birthday we observed earlier this month, wrote “Advice to a Prophet” early in the Atomic Age:
“When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God's name to have self-pity,
“Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.”
“Iron sleet of arrowy shower
Hurtles in the darkened air.”
I fear doom-reveling alarmists more than microsieverts of radiation. Richard Wilbur, whose ninetieth birthday we observed earlier this month, wrote “Advice to a Prophet” early in the Atomic Age:
“When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God's name to have self-pity,
“Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.”
Friday, March 18, 2011
`I Never Wished to Have a Child'
Without heat or excitement, out of a grim sense of obligation, four second-graders pulled the coat off a classmate, chased him across the playground and knocked him to the pavement. Their target is slow and sweet-natured, almost an innocent, a natural-born victim, and enjoyed the chase until it hurt. I hauled them to the office of the principal who was already dealing with a kindergartener who had slapped a classmate and left finger-shaped red marks across his cheek. The slapper said, “I don’t like him talking to me.” All the perpetrators were required to write “think papers,” explaining their actions and promising never to do it again.
On Wednesday evening, April 10, 1776, Johnson (age sixty-seven) and Boswell (thirty-five) dined at the home of Mrs. Thrale where the conversation as usual was various, sharp and stimulating. Boswell reports:
“I said, I disliked the custom which some people had of bringing their children into company, because it in a manner forced us to pay foolish compliments to please their parents.”
Boswell’s objection stands, as little has changed in two hundred thirty-five years. The obligation to flatter dolts, to praise Junior for speaking in complete sentences and staying out of prison, is more stridently enforced than ever. Boswell continues:
“JOHNSON: `You are right, Sir. We may be excused for not caring much about other people’s children, for there are many who care very little about their own children. It may be observed, that men, who from being engaged in business, or from their course of life in whatever way, seldom see their children, do not care much about them. I myself should not have had much fondness for a child of my own.’”
Johnson, of course, is baiting the company, always good sport. Boswell, in the final pages of the Life, writes: “Johnson’s love of little children, which he discovered upon all occasions, calling them `pretty dears,’ and giving them sweetmeats, was an undoubted proof of the real humanity and gentleness of his disposition.” Now, back to the heart of Johnson’s matter, as reported by Boswell:
“MRS. THRALE: `Nay, Sir, how can you talk so?” JOHNSON: “At least, I never wished to have a child.’”
We can wonder about Johnson’s candor on the question of progeny but not his unaffected love and respect for children – though he and most of his contemporaries are unlikely to have used such language. Johnson would have made a splendid father, and has served as a benign father-figure to millions of readers. I’ve met the parents of some of the kids involved in Thursday’s casual violence, and know with certainty “there are many who care very little about their own children.”
On Wednesday evening, April 10, 1776, Johnson (age sixty-seven) and Boswell (thirty-five) dined at the home of Mrs. Thrale where the conversation as usual was various, sharp and stimulating. Boswell reports:
“I said, I disliked the custom which some people had of bringing their children into company, because it in a manner forced us to pay foolish compliments to please their parents.”
Boswell’s objection stands, as little has changed in two hundred thirty-five years. The obligation to flatter dolts, to praise Junior for speaking in complete sentences and staying out of prison, is more stridently enforced than ever. Boswell continues:
“JOHNSON: `You are right, Sir. We may be excused for not caring much about other people’s children, for there are many who care very little about their own children. It may be observed, that men, who from being engaged in business, or from their course of life in whatever way, seldom see their children, do not care much about them. I myself should not have had much fondness for a child of my own.’”
Johnson, of course, is baiting the company, always good sport. Boswell, in the final pages of the Life, writes: “Johnson’s love of little children, which he discovered upon all occasions, calling them `pretty dears,’ and giving them sweetmeats, was an undoubted proof of the real humanity and gentleness of his disposition.” Now, back to the heart of Johnson’s matter, as reported by Boswell:
“MRS. THRALE: `Nay, Sir, how can you talk so?” JOHNSON: “At least, I never wished to have a child.’”
We can wonder about Johnson’s candor on the question of progeny but not his unaffected love and respect for children – though he and most of his contemporaries are unlikely to have used such language. Johnson would have made a splendid father, and has served as a benign father-figure to millions of readers. I’ve met the parents of some of the kids involved in Thursday’s casual violence, and know with certainty “there are many who care very little about their own children.”
Thursday, March 17, 2011
`Is It Changed, or Am I Changed?'
For extra-literary reasons, a kindergarten teacher brought to school a book she bought in Boston while in college. Inside, she had found sixty-three four-leaf clovers pressed between pages 276 and 277, and wanted to show them to her students for St. Patrick’s Day. The clovers are flat and dry, and have turned a uniform gray-green, almost olive drab, but remain intact. The pages are stained rusty-brown, as though botanically foxed. On the front end paper, written in green marker, is the teacher’s maiden name, address and telephone number in Boston. Below, in a fine, spidery hand, the likely original owner writes:
“E. Mary Shellinger, Lowell, Mass., 1873-74.”
Published by Scribner & Co. of New York, the book collects the articles appearing in Scribner’s Monthly (“An Illustrated Magazine for the People”) between November 1873 and April 1874. There’s no precise counterpart to such a magazine today. You'll find no celebrities, scandal, sports or popular culture as we understand it, and little politics. The tone is elevated, genteel, high-minded, aimed at middle-class readers seeking distraction that edifies. I recognize the names of a few contributors – George W. Cable, John Hay (one of Lincoln’s secretaries, later ambassador to the United Kingdom), Bret Harte and Jules Verne. The Frenchman is represented by the first chapter of The Mysterious Island. Hay contributes a poem, “Boudoir Prophecies,” that fails to live up to the promise of its title:
“One day in the Tuileries,
When a south-west Spanish breeze
Brought scandalous news of the Queen,
The fair, proud Empress said,
`My good friend loses her head,’” and so on.
“Savage Man” by N.A.H. is what you would expect of an article on race published less than a decade after the Civil War. The "Type of the White Race" illustration looks like Lord Byron, the “Type of the Yellow Race” like a Sax Rohmer caricature. Someone has underlined several passages, including this:
“The white races may, without conceit, regard themselves as being the highest type of humanity as we see it today. Their pre-eminence is attested no less by their straight and regular features, and their superior musculature strength and endurance, than by their higher intelligence and refinement.”
An unsigned review of Longfellow’s Aftermath (1873) sets the tone for the magazine’s literary stance:
“His works are his confession. Almost every man of original genius bears upon him marks that strongly distinguish him. This is true of every one of the great writers of the time. Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Emerson, Whittier, Bryant, Lowell, are all men of sharply defined individuality.”
The reviewer quotes in full “Changed,” a poem from “Birds of Passage,” the final section of Aftermath. He calls it “tender and lovely,” and it is:
“From the outskirts of the town,
Where of old the mile-stone stood,
Now a stranger, looking down
I behold the shadowy crown
Of the dark and haunted wood.
“Is it changed, or am I changed?
Ah! the oaks are fresh and green,
But the friends with whom I ranged
Through their thickets are estranged
By the years that intervene.
“Bright as ever flows the sea,
Bright as ever shines the sun,
But alas! they seem to me
Not the sun that used to be,
Not the tides that used to run.”
Most inexplicable is something I almost missed. Elegantly printed in a modern hand on the endpaper at the back of the volume are lines lineated like a poem. No title or author is given, and there’s no meter or rhyme. It starts like this:
“The Bells of Boston ring—
proclaiming freedom & independence
the 4th of July has arrived
the hot dogs have been eaten
the concert has been played
and listened to…”
and so for another twenty-nine lines, including these, my favorites:
“Slumbering peacefully in the
Subways, ignoring the headlines
of war & murder in the
papers
and even mistreating their friends
and families
until this time next year
when they’ll be reminded of
their greatness.”
When I asked the teacher if she knew who had written this, she replied, “Not me! I just bought it for the four-leaf clovers.”
“E. Mary Shellinger, Lowell, Mass., 1873-74.”
Published by Scribner & Co. of New York, the book collects the articles appearing in Scribner’s Monthly (“An Illustrated Magazine for the People”) between November 1873 and April 1874. There’s no precise counterpart to such a magazine today. You'll find no celebrities, scandal, sports or popular culture as we understand it, and little politics. The tone is elevated, genteel, high-minded, aimed at middle-class readers seeking distraction that edifies. I recognize the names of a few contributors – George W. Cable, John Hay (one of Lincoln’s secretaries, later ambassador to the United Kingdom), Bret Harte and Jules Verne. The Frenchman is represented by the first chapter of The Mysterious Island. Hay contributes a poem, “Boudoir Prophecies,” that fails to live up to the promise of its title:
“One day in the Tuileries,
When a south-west Spanish breeze
Brought scandalous news of the Queen,
The fair, proud Empress said,
`My good friend loses her head,’” and so on.
“Savage Man” by N.A.H. is what you would expect of an article on race published less than a decade after the Civil War. The "Type of the White Race" illustration looks like Lord Byron, the “Type of the Yellow Race” like a Sax Rohmer caricature. Someone has underlined several passages, including this:
“The white races may, without conceit, regard themselves as being the highest type of humanity as we see it today. Their pre-eminence is attested no less by their straight and regular features, and their superior musculature strength and endurance, than by their higher intelligence and refinement.”
An unsigned review of Longfellow’s Aftermath (1873) sets the tone for the magazine’s literary stance:
“His works are his confession. Almost every man of original genius bears upon him marks that strongly distinguish him. This is true of every one of the great writers of the time. Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Emerson, Whittier, Bryant, Lowell, are all men of sharply defined individuality.”
The reviewer quotes in full “Changed,” a poem from “Birds of Passage,” the final section of Aftermath. He calls it “tender and lovely,” and it is:
“From the outskirts of the town,
Where of old the mile-stone stood,
Now a stranger, looking down
I behold the shadowy crown
Of the dark and haunted wood.
“Is it changed, or am I changed?
Ah! the oaks are fresh and green,
But the friends with whom I ranged
Through their thickets are estranged
By the years that intervene.
“Bright as ever flows the sea,
Bright as ever shines the sun,
But alas! they seem to me
Not the sun that used to be,
Not the tides that used to run.”
Most inexplicable is something I almost missed. Elegantly printed in a modern hand on the endpaper at the back of the volume are lines lineated like a poem. No title or author is given, and there’s no meter or rhyme. It starts like this:
“The Bells of Boston ring—
proclaiming freedom & independence
the 4th of July has arrived
the hot dogs have been eaten
the concert has been played
and listened to…”
and so for another twenty-nine lines, including these, my favorites:
“Slumbering peacefully in the
Subways, ignoring the headlines
of war & murder in the
papers
and even mistreating their friends
and families
until this time next year
when they’ll be reminded of
their greatness.”
When I asked the teacher if she knew who had written this, she replied, “Not me! I just bought it for the four-leaf clovers.”
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
`Now Held Forever in the Lean, Hard Line'
Typical of Thoreau, who reveled in paradoxes and honed contrariness into a mode of perception: In winter, read of the tropics; in summer, the Arctic. He was his own antipodes, and writes in "Natural History of Massachusetts":
“Books of natural history make the most cheerful winter reading. I read in Audubon with a thrill of delight, when the snow covers the ground, of the magnolia, and the Florida keys, and their warm sea-breezes; of the fence-rail, and the cotton-tree, and the migrations of the rice-bird; of the breaking up of winter in Labrador, and the melting of the snow on the forks of the Missouri; and owe an accession of health to these reminiscences of luxuriant nature.”
The linkage of book to season and place is complicated, and if we could perceive our reading history whole, all at once, it might constitute our truest biography, more telling than a mere catalog of names and dates. Thoreau’s mention of Audubon came back as I was reading “Audubon at Oakley” (Mind and Blood: The Collected Poems of John Finlay). Oakley was the plantation near St. Francisville, La., where John James Audubon lived and worked in 1821. Finlay (1941-1991) was a native Alabaman who received his Ph.D. at Louisiana State University and lived in the state for a decade. Here is the poem:
“My Gallic cunning poured sweet wine into
The calyxes of trumpet-vines and caught
Small drunken birds a bullet blows apart.
Others I shot, pinned them to a board
To draw the fresh-killed life. Elusively
The is that quickens in the living eye
Escaped the sweat of art, drying ink.
I tore blind pages till I reached the one
That pleased my avid mind. The wilderness
There teems with birds I never saw before;
White and wood ibises, the sparrow hawk,
The red-cock woodpecker, and painted finch.
I hunted them for days and nights until
I throve in timelessness. One day stood out.
I heard below all things the river sough;
The fall was blazing in the silent trees.
I saw my book, taut wings of mockingbirds
In combat with the snake knotted beneath
The nest, its open mouth close to the eggs,
Now held forever in the lean, hard line.
And underneath, defining them, combined:
The clean abstraction of their Latin names,
The vulgate richness of this Saxon salt.”
This reads like a self-portrait of the artist. Finlay wrote his doctoral dissertation on the intellectual theism of Yvor Winters and his poem “Odysseus” is written “In honor of Yvor Winters.” Another poem, “The Exiles,” is dedicated to Janet Lewis, the poet, novelist and wife of Winters. “Audubon at Oakley” in particular seems suffused with Winters’ evocatively laconic style: “Now held forever in the lean, hard line.” Like Winters, Finlay honors the physical world despite the difficulty of remaining true to the real: “Elusively / The is that quickens in the living eye / Escaped the sweat of art, drying ink.” The editor of Mind and Blood, David Middleton, reports Finlay was planning a long poem on Audubon., and quotes the poet saying in an unpublished paper:
“Audubon is the prototype of the artist, who has to shift back and forth between two sometimes conflicting worlds: the experience of the wilderness, immediate, sensual, non-intellectual, and the mental state of detachment from that experience, in which the mind works through the wilderness into art.”
That distills a lesson learned late in life by Thoreau, one that many of his readers blithely ignore or fail to recognize.
“Books of natural history make the most cheerful winter reading. I read in Audubon with a thrill of delight, when the snow covers the ground, of the magnolia, and the Florida keys, and their warm sea-breezes; of the fence-rail, and the cotton-tree, and the migrations of the rice-bird; of the breaking up of winter in Labrador, and the melting of the snow on the forks of the Missouri; and owe an accession of health to these reminiscences of luxuriant nature.”
The linkage of book to season and place is complicated, and if we could perceive our reading history whole, all at once, it might constitute our truest biography, more telling than a mere catalog of names and dates. Thoreau’s mention of Audubon came back as I was reading “Audubon at Oakley” (Mind and Blood: The Collected Poems of John Finlay). Oakley was the plantation near St. Francisville, La., where John James Audubon lived and worked in 1821. Finlay (1941-1991) was a native Alabaman who received his Ph.D. at Louisiana State University and lived in the state for a decade. Here is the poem:
“My Gallic cunning poured sweet wine into
The calyxes of trumpet-vines and caught
Small drunken birds a bullet blows apart.
Others I shot, pinned them to a board
To draw the fresh-killed life. Elusively
The is that quickens in the living eye
Escaped the sweat of art, drying ink.
I tore blind pages till I reached the one
That pleased my avid mind. The wilderness
There teems with birds I never saw before;
White and wood ibises, the sparrow hawk,
The red-cock woodpecker, and painted finch.
I hunted them for days and nights until
I throve in timelessness. One day stood out.
I heard below all things the river sough;
The fall was blazing in the silent trees.
I saw my book, taut wings of mockingbirds
In combat with the snake knotted beneath
The nest, its open mouth close to the eggs,
Now held forever in the lean, hard line.
And underneath, defining them, combined:
The clean abstraction of their Latin names,
The vulgate richness of this Saxon salt.”
This reads like a self-portrait of the artist. Finlay wrote his doctoral dissertation on the intellectual theism of Yvor Winters and his poem “Odysseus” is written “In honor of Yvor Winters.” Another poem, “The Exiles,” is dedicated to Janet Lewis, the poet, novelist and wife of Winters. “Audubon at Oakley” in particular seems suffused with Winters’ evocatively laconic style: “Now held forever in the lean, hard line.” Like Winters, Finlay honors the physical world despite the difficulty of remaining true to the real: “Elusively / The is that quickens in the living eye / Escaped the sweat of art, drying ink.” The editor of Mind and Blood, David Middleton, reports Finlay was planning a long poem on Audubon., and quotes the poet saying in an unpublished paper:
“Audubon is the prototype of the artist, who has to shift back and forth between two sometimes conflicting worlds: the experience of the wilderness, immediate, sensual, non-intellectual, and the mental state of detachment from that experience, in which the mind works through the wilderness into art.”
That distills a lesson learned late in life by Thoreau, one that many of his readers blithely ignore or fail to recognize.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
`Raise Yourself Up from Gloom'
The life and work of one writer, born more than three-hundred years ago, reliably inspires in readers a sense of human solidarity and moves us to concur with his second-greatest biographer:
“The deeper secret of his hypnotic attraction, especially during our own generation, lies in the immense reassurance he gives to human nature, which needs—and quickly begins to value—every friend it can get.”
That’s W. Jackson Bate in the first paragraph of the first chapter of Samuel Johnson (1977). One never reads such things about Shakespeare or Milton, and the distinction I’m making is not qualitative but a matter of kind. Johnson reads like a friend, a confidante, in a way the others never could. Online, in just the last week:
Mike Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti recounts his rereading of Boswell’s Life of Johnson by sharing favorite passages.
Nige at Nigeness remembers Hodge, Johnson’s “sable” cat re-immortalized in Nabokov’s Pale Fire.
Michael Billington in the Guardian reports on a dramatization of Johnson, based on Boswell, staged in the great man’s house on Gough Square, off Fleet Street, in London.
On Sunday, a copy of Mind and Blood: The Collected Poems of John Finlay (1992) arrived from the University of San Diego via interlibrary loan. The editor, David Middleton, notes that among Finlay’s “heroes of the mind” were Odysseus, Oedipus, Solon, “the exiled Ovid,” “a Benedictine monk,” Johnson, Audubon, Henry James and Sherlock Holmes – an apt gathering worthy of admiration.
Included from Finlay’s 1988 collection The Salt of Exposure are translations of two Latin poems by Johnson. The first, “After Samuel Johnson’s Latin Poem to Thomas Lawrence, M.D.,” is addressed to Johnson’s personal physician, a Latin scholar and president of the Royal College of Physicians. Bate calls Lawrence (1711-1783) “a high-minded and sweet-natured man” in whom Johnson felt comfortable confiding. Here is the poem:
“By your life, then, will you confess
Yourself with crude mobs who attack
The wise, who call their power a fake—
Loud braggart fleeing in distress,
Whose only wounds disgrace his back?
“You live through evils none ensures
His life against, from which we find
The holy and the brave do not escape.
You have the skill of potent cures,
But miss those purges of your mind.
“Throughout the tediousness of night,
Blind opened depths for anything,
Throughout the unworked hours of day,
Cares blot out your paternal sight
And to your core distraction bring.
“More than enough of grief at length
Is paid. Raise yourself up from gloom.
You hold the means and know the way.
The healing art, dead sages’ strength
Demand from you their life and room.
“Sacrifice some human things to God.
Let faith be grace to the tough truss
Of steel men have—do not inveigh.
You bleed on strangest ground unshod.
Come home to your strong mind and us.”
The poem is an exhortation to courage and perseverance, perhaps addressed by Johnson, famously plagued by melancholy, to himself: “Raise yourself up from gloom.” The second poem translated by Finlay, “After Samuel Johnson’s Summe Pater,” proposes a solution to despair and Johnson’s lifelong fear of madness – his bulwark of religious faith:
“Father most strong, whatever You intend
As to my body’s fate—but Jesus, plead—
Do not destroy my mind. Can I offend
In begging life in me for Your own seed?”
“The deeper secret of his hypnotic attraction, especially during our own generation, lies in the immense reassurance he gives to human nature, which needs—and quickly begins to value—every friend it can get.”
That’s W. Jackson Bate in the first paragraph of the first chapter of Samuel Johnson (1977). One never reads such things about Shakespeare or Milton, and the distinction I’m making is not qualitative but a matter of kind. Johnson reads like a friend, a confidante, in a way the others never could. Online, in just the last week:
Mike Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti recounts his rereading of Boswell’s Life of Johnson by sharing favorite passages.
Nige at Nigeness remembers Hodge, Johnson’s “sable” cat re-immortalized in Nabokov’s Pale Fire.
Michael Billington in the Guardian reports on a dramatization of Johnson, based on Boswell, staged in the great man’s house on Gough Square, off Fleet Street, in London.
On Sunday, a copy of Mind and Blood: The Collected Poems of John Finlay (1992) arrived from the University of San Diego via interlibrary loan. The editor, David Middleton, notes that among Finlay’s “heroes of the mind” were Odysseus, Oedipus, Solon, “the exiled Ovid,” “a Benedictine monk,” Johnson, Audubon, Henry James and Sherlock Holmes – an apt gathering worthy of admiration.
Included from Finlay’s 1988 collection The Salt of Exposure are translations of two Latin poems by Johnson. The first, “After Samuel Johnson’s Latin Poem to Thomas Lawrence, M.D.,” is addressed to Johnson’s personal physician, a Latin scholar and president of the Royal College of Physicians. Bate calls Lawrence (1711-1783) “a high-minded and sweet-natured man” in whom Johnson felt comfortable confiding. Here is the poem:
“By your life, then, will you confess
Yourself with crude mobs who attack
The wise, who call their power a fake—
Loud braggart fleeing in distress,
Whose only wounds disgrace his back?
“You live through evils none ensures
His life against, from which we find
The holy and the brave do not escape.
You have the skill of potent cures,
But miss those purges of your mind.
“Throughout the tediousness of night,
Blind opened depths for anything,
Throughout the unworked hours of day,
Cares blot out your paternal sight
And to your core distraction bring.
“More than enough of grief at length
Is paid. Raise yourself up from gloom.
You hold the means and know the way.
The healing art, dead sages’ strength
Demand from you their life and room.
“Sacrifice some human things to God.
Let faith be grace to the tough truss
Of steel men have—do not inveigh.
You bleed on strangest ground unshod.
Come home to your strong mind and us.”
The poem is an exhortation to courage and perseverance, perhaps addressed by Johnson, famously plagued by melancholy, to himself: “Raise yourself up from gloom.” The second poem translated by Finlay, “After Samuel Johnson’s Summe Pater,” proposes a solution to despair and Johnson’s lifelong fear of madness – his bulwark of religious faith:
“Father most strong, whatever You intend
As to my body’s fate—but Jesus, plead—
Do not destroy my mind. Can I offend
In begging life in me for Your own seed?”
Monday, March 14, 2011
`Where I Come Closest to Peace'
I opened a jar of thyme to test its freshness – I needn’t have worried – and was back in a small country cemetery in the Schoharie Valley of New York. It was early summer fifteen years ago and I was working on a story about a hamlet I can no longer remember. I wrote dozens of such stories, all of them now turning brown in a file cabinet, and the names blur but the graves in this cemetery were densely covered in grasses and thyme – readymade pun! The scent was potent and I gathered some for friends in the newsroom.
A low limestone wall sinking into the earth surrounded the plot, and the grass was flecked with violets, phlox, chicory, dandelions, Dutchman’s breeches and daisies, and I thought of Don Adriano de Armado’s song in Love’s Labours Lost:
“When daisies pied and violets blue
And lady-smocks all silver-white
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight…”
Some of the gravestones dated from the eighteenth century and bore Dutch and English surnames – brothers to Gray’s “rude Forefathers” -- though many inscriptions are partially erased by acid rain and time. Each, looked at carefully, “Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.” The day was warm, the air pleasantly scented, and I was content to write my notes and enjoy untroubled solitude. Alice Thomas Ellis writes in A Welsh Childhood:
“The place on earth where I come closest to peace is the graveyard amongst all the quiet dead. I seem to have thought, all my life, of little but death – partly because of impatience, a yearning to have it over and done with: that extraordinary last thing that we are called upon to do, the act of dying. If we have to do it – I think to myself – I would rather do it sooner than later. But mostly it comes from the old awareness that I am not whole, that there is something missing: something more important than all the world. Death is the price we must pay for completion.”
A low limestone wall sinking into the earth surrounded the plot, and the grass was flecked with violets, phlox, chicory, dandelions, Dutchman’s breeches and daisies, and I thought of Don Adriano de Armado’s song in Love’s Labours Lost:
“When daisies pied and violets blue
And lady-smocks all silver-white
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight…”
Some of the gravestones dated from the eighteenth century and bore Dutch and English surnames – brothers to Gray’s “rude Forefathers” -- though many inscriptions are partially erased by acid rain and time. Each, looked at carefully, “Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.” The day was warm, the air pleasantly scented, and I was content to write my notes and enjoy untroubled solitude. Alice Thomas Ellis writes in A Welsh Childhood:
“The place on earth where I come closest to peace is the graveyard amongst all the quiet dead. I seem to have thought, all my life, of little but death – partly because of impatience, a yearning to have it over and done with: that extraordinary last thing that we are called upon to do, the act of dying. If we have to do it – I think to myself – I would rather do it sooner than later. But mostly it comes from the old awareness that I am not whole, that there is something missing: something more important than all the world. Death is the price we must pay for completion.”
Sunday, March 13, 2011
`The Intensity of American Life'
This short film possesses the fascination of family scrapbooks, old Sears, Roebuck catalogs and Ulysses. The fascination is such that when I first watched it, I suspected fraud, a postmodern goof. It seems too beautiful and sad to be true. In the spring of 1906, a filmmaker mounted a camera on the front of a trolley in San Francisco and recorded life swarming along Market Street. Today, cameras move and editors shuffle frames. In this century-old film, it’s the world that moves and the camera that remains constant, if not stationary.
That the film was made days before the earthquake is less interesting than seeing our ancestors (many, presumably, soon to be dead) move about – drive, lumber, stroll, scamper, promenade, cavort – in a recognizably modern manner. Two years earlier, their Irish cousin, Leopold Bloom, a freelance advertising canvasser, moved like them around Dublin:
“Before Nelson's pillar trams slowed, shunted, changed trolley, started for Blackrock, Kingstown and Dalkey, Clonskea, Rathgar and Terenure, Palmerston Park and upper Rathmines, Sandymount Green, Rathmines, Ringsend and Sandymount Tower, Harold's Cross.”
More than twenty years earlier, Henry James in Portrait of a Lady was associating trolleys with a distinctly American bustle:
“Henrietta Stackpole was struck with the fact that ancient Rome had been paved a good deal like New York, and even found an analogy between the deep chariot-ruts traceable in the antique street and the overjangled [doesn’t that look like a Joyce coinage?] iron grooves which express the intensity of American life.”
Closer to home in every sense, James returned to the United States after a twenty-year absence in 1904-05. In the second chapter of The American Scene, “New York Revisited,” he writes of his birthplace, so disturbingly transformed:
“Your condition was not reduced to the endless vista of a clogged tube, of a thoroughfare occupied as to the narrow central ridge with trolley-cars stuffed to suffocation, and as to the mere margin, on either side, with snow-banks resulting from the cleared rails and offering themselves as a field for all remaining action.”
Can we expect a man born in 1843 to share our fondness and fascination for trolleys (he loved driving with Edith Wharton) and the pace of the world they occupied? In his poem about James’ return to America, Donald Justice refers to the novelist’s sense of “a sort of freshness being lost,” a sense we know well.
[Go here for a 60 Minutes episode about the film.]
That the film was made days before the earthquake is less interesting than seeing our ancestors (many, presumably, soon to be dead) move about – drive, lumber, stroll, scamper, promenade, cavort – in a recognizably modern manner. Two years earlier, their Irish cousin, Leopold Bloom, a freelance advertising canvasser, moved like them around Dublin:
“Before Nelson's pillar trams slowed, shunted, changed trolley, started for Blackrock, Kingstown and Dalkey, Clonskea, Rathgar and Terenure, Palmerston Park and upper Rathmines, Sandymount Green, Rathmines, Ringsend and Sandymount Tower, Harold's Cross.”
More than twenty years earlier, Henry James in Portrait of a Lady was associating trolleys with a distinctly American bustle:
“Henrietta Stackpole was struck with the fact that ancient Rome had been paved a good deal like New York, and even found an analogy between the deep chariot-ruts traceable in the antique street and the overjangled [doesn’t that look like a Joyce coinage?] iron grooves which express the intensity of American life.”
Closer to home in every sense, James returned to the United States after a twenty-year absence in 1904-05. In the second chapter of The American Scene, “New York Revisited,” he writes of his birthplace, so disturbingly transformed:
“Your condition was not reduced to the endless vista of a clogged tube, of a thoroughfare occupied as to the narrow central ridge with trolley-cars stuffed to suffocation, and as to the mere margin, on either side, with snow-banks resulting from the cleared rails and offering themselves as a field for all remaining action.”
Can we expect a man born in 1843 to share our fondness and fascination for trolleys (he loved driving with Edith Wharton) and the pace of the world they occupied? In his poem about James’ return to America, Donald Justice refers to the novelist’s sense of “a sort of freshness being lost,” a sense we know well.
[Go here for a 60 Minutes episode about the film.]
Saturday, March 12, 2011
`Certainty May or May Not Come Later'
The school’s art teacher hangs posters in the hall outside her room and on the walls in the adjoining staff bathroom, some of it trendy rubbish – Duchamp, Warhol – intended as a sop to hipness, but one reproduction delivers reliable pleasure each time I pass: Richard Diebenkorn’s “Cityscape I” (1963). Despite the title, the scene feels suburban, perhaps because I grew up in a postwar suburb, on the margin between empty lots and development, the middle and working classes, concrete and trees. For a putatively urban painting, Diebenkorn’s is deeply, attractively green (the color, I mean, not the fad).
Critics demean suburbia for conformity and dullness, but that’s not how I remember it. Our neighborhood balanced the familiar and foreign, and seemed to us like a place made for exploration. “Cityscape I” reminds me of our suburb’s raw edge of fields and woods, an ideal setting for childhood. The people, too, were raw, men who worked for Ford or Republic Steel, women who worked at home. I grew up not knowing anyone who had “gone to college” – that was the phrase – and life was better than anyone suspected. In Diebenkorn’s painting I see unbounded geometry, form without limit or fear, and that was our sense of growing up in the suburbs.
After his death in 1993, Diebenkorn’s wife found a list of ideas – call them aphoristic advice – among her husband’s papers, and John Elderfield published it in his essay included in The Art of Richard Diebenkorn (1997). The first of the artist’s ten points seems pertinent:
“Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may be a valuable delusion.”
Critics demean suburbia for conformity and dullness, but that’s not how I remember it. Our neighborhood balanced the familiar and foreign, and seemed to us like a place made for exploration. “Cityscape I” reminds me of our suburb’s raw edge of fields and woods, an ideal setting for childhood. The people, too, were raw, men who worked for Ford or Republic Steel, women who worked at home. I grew up not knowing anyone who had “gone to college” – that was the phrase – and life was better than anyone suspected. In Diebenkorn’s painting I see unbounded geometry, form without limit or fear, and that was our sense of growing up in the suburbs.
After his death in 1993, Diebenkorn’s wife found a list of ideas – call them aphoristic advice – among her husband’s papers, and John Elderfield published it in his essay included in The Art of Richard Diebenkorn (1997). The first of the artist’s ten points seems pertinent:
“Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may be a valuable delusion.”
Friday, March 11, 2011
`A Meeting of Morticians in Our Trees'
My eight-year-old and I witnessed the gathering of the dawn kaffeeklatsch, accompanied by a variation on “Reveille,” as we stood under the white pine at the bus stop. To the east: solo and chorus, caw and response. Across the blank clouds, commas moved horizontally. A crow in the yellow birch across the street pumped his head and complained. Another in the pine, above our heads, commiserated. I knew they were sharing menus but they sounded like old men kvetching in the park.
“Here’s a meeting
of morticians in our trees.
They agree in klaxon voices:
Things looking good.
The snowfields signify
A landscape of clean skulls,
Seas of Tranquility
Throughout the neighborhood.”
Back at the house, a crow perched on the lid of our overstuffed trash bin at the curb, tearing at the exposed trash bag. He flew away, complaining, as I approached, and returned when I went inside. Through the front window I watched him pull and discard a coffee filter, a ball of aluminum foil and a pencil that had broken in the washer after the eight-year-old mentioned above left it in his pants pocket. By the time I left for school, the bird was still at work but hadn’t yet reached the cat litter.
“Here’s a mined,
A graven wisdom,
A bituminous air.
The first cosmetic pinks
Of dawn amuse them greatly.”
For a week, I’ve watched crows gather on the roof and among the trees around the playground, waiting for the end of recess. Kids drop snacks and lunchroom leftovers, and crows clean it up. It reminds me of the playground scene in The Birds.
“They foresee the expansion of graveyards,
they talk real estate.
Cras, they say,
repeating a rumor
among the whitened branches.”
By the time I got home, my boys had already pulled the trash bins back into the yard, behind the house, but they hadn’t bothered to sweep up the cat litter.
“And the wind, a voiceless thorn,
goes over the details,
making a soft promise
to take our breath away.”
The quoted lines are Anthony Hecht’s “Crows in Winter” (The Transparent Man, 1990).
“Here’s a meeting
of morticians in our trees.
They agree in klaxon voices:
Things looking good.
The snowfields signify
A landscape of clean skulls,
Seas of Tranquility
Throughout the neighborhood.”
Back at the house, a crow perched on the lid of our overstuffed trash bin at the curb, tearing at the exposed trash bag. He flew away, complaining, as I approached, and returned when I went inside. Through the front window I watched him pull and discard a coffee filter, a ball of aluminum foil and a pencil that had broken in the washer after the eight-year-old mentioned above left it in his pants pocket. By the time I left for school, the bird was still at work but hadn’t yet reached the cat litter.
“Here’s a mined,
A graven wisdom,
A bituminous air.
The first cosmetic pinks
Of dawn amuse them greatly.”
For a week, I’ve watched crows gather on the roof and among the trees around the playground, waiting for the end of recess. Kids drop snacks and lunchroom leftovers, and crows clean it up. It reminds me of the playground scene in The Birds.
“They foresee the expansion of graveyards,
they talk real estate.
Cras, they say,
repeating a rumor
among the whitened branches.”
By the time I got home, my boys had already pulled the trash bins back into the yard, behind the house, but they hadn’t bothered to sweep up the cat litter.
“And the wind, a voiceless thorn,
goes over the details,
making a soft promise
to take our breath away.”
The quoted lines are Anthony Hecht’s “Crows in Winter” (The Transparent Man, 1990).
Thursday, March 10, 2011
`A Special Kind of Humility'
“He is casual, unguarded, unsystematic. He plays with words…”
This is the late John Gross in The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1969), describing G.K. Chesterton as critic, and Gross intends it as generous praise, as I would. His eight pages on Chesterton the writer, without reference to Chesterton the corpulent caricature, are a bracing restorative for so misunderstood a figure. They apply with comparable justice to Eric Ormsby, whose Fine Incisions: Essays on Poetry and Place (Porcupine’s Quill, 2010) I was reading the same day. To Gross’ list of qualities I would add learned but not cripplingly academic, fluent in many languages including Arabic, funny, politically unobtrusive, and possessing a poet’s understanding of making poems.
I’m not by training or temperament a critic. I lack the requisite analytical powers and proselytizing streak. I know what I like but not always why. My reading proceeds intuitively. I read for pleasure – and instruction. I’m not inclined to finish a dull book unless someone is paying me to do so. When I consider the writers I admire, I see little in common among them except literary excellence. A good critic encourages us to share his enthusiasms. Charles Olson’s poetry is unreadable, as Ormsby says, and Geoffrey Hill’s is “full of rich and solemn music,” as Ormsby also says, and I’m content to let it go at that. If you disagree, the loss is yours. I won’t sacrifice pleasure in order to join anyone’s club – one of the reasons Ormsby is among the handful of critics who have taught me how to write about books.
“He plays with words”: Ormsby is a poet in love with language, which ought to be a prerequisite for anyone presuming to write. He quotes two lines from “Lycidas” (“…their lean and flashy songs / grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw.”) and declares them “undiluted pleasure for the ear.” Ormsby always comes back to sound. Reading him has charged me with enthusiasm for my next reviewing assignment, a book of poems translated from the Polish, though I’m also grateful for the caution he issues at the end of his title essay:
“Our judgments may – and probably will – prove as perishable as the books they judge. This requires a special kind of humility: despite our best efforts, if the work is truly good, something will always elude our analysis. There’s a mystery here I don’t pretend to understand. Perhaps Emily Dickinson expressed it best:
“Surgeons must be very careful
When they take the knife!
Underneath their fine incisions
Stirs the Culprit – Life!”
This is the late John Gross in The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1969), describing G.K. Chesterton as critic, and Gross intends it as generous praise, as I would. His eight pages on Chesterton the writer, without reference to Chesterton the corpulent caricature, are a bracing restorative for so misunderstood a figure. They apply with comparable justice to Eric Ormsby, whose Fine Incisions: Essays on Poetry and Place (Porcupine’s Quill, 2010) I was reading the same day. To Gross’ list of qualities I would add learned but not cripplingly academic, fluent in many languages including Arabic, funny, politically unobtrusive, and possessing a poet’s understanding of making poems.
I’m not by training or temperament a critic. I lack the requisite analytical powers and proselytizing streak. I know what I like but not always why. My reading proceeds intuitively. I read for pleasure – and instruction. I’m not inclined to finish a dull book unless someone is paying me to do so. When I consider the writers I admire, I see little in common among them except literary excellence. A good critic encourages us to share his enthusiasms. Charles Olson’s poetry is unreadable, as Ormsby says, and Geoffrey Hill’s is “full of rich and solemn music,” as Ormsby also says, and I’m content to let it go at that. If you disagree, the loss is yours. I won’t sacrifice pleasure in order to join anyone’s club – one of the reasons Ormsby is among the handful of critics who have taught me how to write about books.
“He plays with words”: Ormsby is a poet in love with language, which ought to be a prerequisite for anyone presuming to write. He quotes two lines from “Lycidas” (“…their lean and flashy songs / grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw.”) and declares them “undiluted pleasure for the ear.” Ormsby always comes back to sound. Reading him has charged me with enthusiasm for my next reviewing assignment, a book of poems translated from the Polish, though I’m also grateful for the caution he issues at the end of his title essay:
“Our judgments may – and probably will – prove as perishable as the books they judge. This requires a special kind of humility: despite our best efforts, if the work is truly good, something will always elude our analysis. There’s a mystery here I don’t pretend to understand. Perhaps Emily Dickinson expressed it best:
“Surgeons must be very careful
When they take the knife!
Underneath their fine incisions
Stirs the Culprit – Life!”
Wednesday, March 09, 2011
`You Ever Heard of D-Day?'
The fifth-graders are working on a month-long writing assignment that in their collective opinion is “humungous” and “mean.” Translation: ten pages, spelling counts, and no plagiarism. They choose a subject, research it and write what amounts to a glorified term paper. In our district, composition is taught as a variation on Ikea-furniture assembly, with “topic sentences” screwing snugly into blocks of “detail,” coherence and interest optional.
One of the boys I work with wants to write about “Native Americans.” He shrugged off my suggestion that he narrow the topic: “It’s all on the internet.” Another kid chose gray wolves. When I told him I’ve written about efforts to reintroduce wolves into their former habitats, he said, “That sounds kind of boring.” A third said he wants to write a biography of a football player, and that’s when I surrendered without protest. Their teacher has already approved the topics.
Another kid, not one I customarily work with, approached me with a question: “You ever heard of D-Day?” When I assured him I had, he asked if I could help. Out of his backpack he pulled a volume I mistook for a school yearbook – a history of the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment. His great-grandfather belonged to the Red Devils and was among the men who jumped into the darkness over Normandy early on the morning of June 6, 1944. In the book, the boy showed me a photo of a young sergeant seated behind a desk – his great-grandfather.
In my experience, this was a rare moment. Most students do everything, even washing their hands after sneezing, under duress. This kid, a rather mulish proto-jock, was beaming. It was the family connection, of course, history made personal, and the first thing he wanted to write for his paper was the dedication – to his great-grandfather, who is still alive. I had to help him with the spelling of almost every word, and I resisted telling him he might want to read Six Armies in Normandy by John Keegan and A.J. Liebling’s World War II Writings. Beaming has its limits.
But I indulged a remembrance of Liebling’s eyewitness account of the assault on Omaha Beach, reported from his perch in an LCIL (Landing Craft, Infantry, Large). Three crew members were killed by an artillery shell. Of the ten landing craft in the group carrying Liebling, four were sunk before their cargo of one-hundred forty men each could be unloaded. Liebling remained shipboard and didn’t make it to shore until June 9. He describes the experience in “For Bunny Rigg -- Cross-Channel Trip” (Mollie and Other War Pieces, 1964). Writing of a sergeant named Angelatti from Cleveland, assigned to a tank crew, Liebling says:
“The tanks had been headed for that beach and should have helped knock out the pillboxes. It hadn’t been the tankmen’s fault that the waves had swamped them, but the sergeant said disconsolately, `If we hadn’t fucked up, maybe those other guys wouldn’t have been killed.’ He had a soldier’s heart.”
I might get around to telling the justifiably proud fifth-grader of the footnote Liebling added to The Honest Rainmaker (1953):
“The way to write is well, and how is your own business. Nothing else on the subject makes sense.”
One of the boys I work with wants to write about “Native Americans.” He shrugged off my suggestion that he narrow the topic: “It’s all on the internet.” Another kid chose gray wolves. When I told him I’ve written about efforts to reintroduce wolves into their former habitats, he said, “That sounds kind of boring.” A third said he wants to write a biography of a football player, and that’s when I surrendered without protest. Their teacher has already approved the topics.
Another kid, not one I customarily work with, approached me with a question: “You ever heard of D-Day?” When I assured him I had, he asked if I could help. Out of his backpack he pulled a volume I mistook for a school yearbook – a history of the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment. His great-grandfather belonged to the Red Devils and was among the men who jumped into the darkness over Normandy early on the morning of June 6, 1944. In the book, the boy showed me a photo of a young sergeant seated behind a desk – his great-grandfather.
In my experience, this was a rare moment. Most students do everything, even washing their hands after sneezing, under duress. This kid, a rather mulish proto-jock, was beaming. It was the family connection, of course, history made personal, and the first thing he wanted to write for his paper was the dedication – to his great-grandfather, who is still alive. I had to help him with the spelling of almost every word, and I resisted telling him he might want to read Six Armies in Normandy by John Keegan and A.J. Liebling’s World War II Writings. Beaming has its limits.
But I indulged a remembrance of Liebling’s eyewitness account of the assault on Omaha Beach, reported from his perch in an LCIL (Landing Craft, Infantry, Large). Three crew members were killed by an artillery shell. Of the ten landing craft in the group carrying Liebling, four were sunk before their cargo of one-hundred forty men each could be unloaded. Liebling remained shipboard and didn’t make it to shore until June 9. He describes the experience in “For Bunny Rigg -- Cross-Channel Trip” (Mollie and Other War Pieces, 1964). Writing of a sergeant named Angelatti from Cleveland, assigned to a tank crew, Liebling says:
“The tanks had been headed for that beach and should have helped knock out the pillboxes. It hadn’t been the tankmen’s fault that the waves had swamped them, but the sergeant said disconsolately, `If we hadn’t fucked up, maybe those other guys wouldn’t have been killed.’ He had a soldier’s heart.”
I might get around to telling the justifiably proud fifth-grader of the footnote Liebling added to The Honest Rainmaker (1953):
“The way to write is well, and how is your own business. Nothing else on the subject makes sense.”
Tuesday, March 08, 2011
`Keen to the Most Distant Perfumes'
My first Lepidoptera of the season was a hardy little pale-gray moth on the pale-gray concrete wall beside the school playground. The day was cold but windless, and the sun had shone long enough by early afternoon to warm the wall. His wings were opened as though awaiting the collector’s pins. Instead, I gently ran the tip of my index finger down his thorax and abdomen, and he seemed to ripple in place like a cat, and then flew away in that busy, inelegant way moths have. On my finger he left a smudge of gray dust like the ash of a cigarette.
At home, as though he had anticipated my lepidopteral discovery, I found a link from Dave Lull to Butterflies and Moths of North America, a database operated, in part, by the U.S. Geological Survey, of species information, photographs and other things of interest to aurelians. Also just arrived was my copy, at last, of Fine Incisions: Essays on Poetry and Place by Eric Ormsby, which prompted me to remember his “Moths at Nightfall” (Time's Covenant, 2007). Ormsby was born and raised in Georgia, and in the final lines of the poem he remembers moths landing on his grandmother’s screen door:
“Their madras wings, graced
With a dusty haze of pollen,
Pulsed slowly upon the screen
All night. And their stark
Delicacy of fringed and pluming
Antennae, keen to the most
Distant perfumes, enthralled
And repelled: they curved like white
Ferns banished from the daylight,
Or sometimes, as we watched them,
Their feathery antennae furled outward
And seemed to tremble with attention,
Vivid against the darkened yard beyond.”
At home, as though he had anticipated my lepidopteral discovery, I found a link from Dave Lull to Butterflies and Moths of North America, a database operated, in part, by the U.S. Geological Survey, of species information, photographs and other things of interest to aurelians. Also just arrived was my copy, at last, of Fine Incisions: Essays on Poetry and Place by Eric Ormsby, which prompted me to remember his “Moths at Nightfall” (Time's Covenant, 2007). Ormsby was born and raised in Georgia, and in the final lines of the poem he remembers moths landing on his grandmother’s screen door:
“Their madras wings, graced
With a dusty haze of pollen,
Pulsed slowly upon the screen
All night. And their stark
Delicacy of fringed and pluming
Antennae, keen to the most
Distant perfumes, enthralled
And repelled: they curved like white
Ferns banished from the daylight,
Or sometimes, as we watched them,
Their feathery antennae furled outward
And seemed to tremble with attention,
Vivid against the darkened yard beyond.”
Monday, March 07, 2011
`Deep in the Watery Clarities'
“Wild blossoms on the river banks
Sway yellow in the rising wind:
See—their images loom too,
Deep in the watery clarities.”
Frederick Morgan’s lines serve as epigraph to Paula Deitz’s Of Gardens: Selected Essays (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). They’re drawn from “Recollections of Japan,” a poem in Morgan’s final collection, The One Abiding, published in 2003. He died the following year, age eighty-one. Morgan was a founding editor of The Hudson Review in 1948, which is now edited by Deitz, his widow. Her book carries this dedication: “For Fred, in loving memory.” She might have chosen the first stanza of “Recollections of Japan” as an appropriate epigraph to her new book, though “watery clarities” would be difficult to resist:
“The garden in the hills
shadowy still at dawn
shows no trace of footprints.
And yet, spring has arrived:
the snow is melting patchily.”
I learned of Deitz’s book from Elizabeth Barlow Rogers’ review in the March issue of The New Criterion. Her name was unfamiliar but the review accomplished a rare feat, at least for this reader: I wanted immediately to read the book, and felt an ache because I wouldn’t be able to visit the library for several days. Deitz starts a brief essay, “Autumn in New England,” like this:
“Whenever I sit down for a cozy reread of a favorite book, invariably a few dry but still brightly colored pressed leaves spill from its pages into my lap. Each one recalls a happy autumnal trek through New England to view the fiery reds and brilliant yellows of the spectacular fall foliage.”
Deitz cites a scene from Henry James' Roderick Hudson set in the part of western Massachusetts she visits on a day James describes as “when summer seems to balance in the scale with autumn.” I thought of another James volume, The American Scene, and its lovely first chapter, “New England: An Autumn Impression”:
“…the way the colour begins in those days to be dabbed, the way, here and there, for a start, a solitary maple on a woodside flames in single scarlet, recalls nothing so much as the daughter of a noble house dressed for a fancy-ball, with the whole family gathered round to admire her before she goes.”
Deitz’s prose is clean, precise and purple-free, and laced with allusions to botany, history, landscaping and architecture, yes, but also literature, painting and the other riches populating a civilized mind. She proves once again that a gifted writer can animate any subject by writing up, not down, to her readers. Deitz relates Roderick Hudson to a painting by Thomas Cole of a bend in the Connecticut River, “The Oxbow,” and concludes her essay like this:
“I flew back to Boston in the copilot’s seat of a small plane that felt like a chariot riding over the islands—a red-streaked sunset on one side and the harvest moon piercing the clouds on the other. I thought of Henry James and his fictional description of the river valley visit: `This is an American day, an American landscape, an American atmosphere.’”
Where was this essay first published? In the Dec. 1993-Jan. 1994 issue of Gardens Illustrated.
Sway yellow in the rising wind:
See—their images loom too,
Deep in the watery clarities.”
Frederick Morgan’s lines serve as epigraph to Paula Deitz’s Of Gardens: Selected Essays (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). They’re drawn from “Recollections of Japan,” a poem in Morgan’s final collection, The One Abiding, published in 2003. He died the following year, age eighty-one. Morgan was a founding editor of The Hudson Review in 1948, which is now edited by Deitz, his widow. Her book carries this dedication: “For Fred, in loving memory.” She might have chosen the first stanza of “Recollections of Japan” as an appropriate epigraph to her new book, though “watery clarities” would be difficult to resist:
“The garden in the hills
shadowy still at dawn
shows no trace of footprints.
And yet, spring has arrived:
the snow is melting patchily.”
I learned of Deitz’s book from Elizabeth Barlow Rogers’ review in the March issue of The New Criterion. Her name was unfamiliar but the review accomplished a rare feat, at least for this reader: I wanted immediately to read the book, and felt an ache because I wouldn’t be able to visit the library for several days. Deitz starts a brief essay, “Autumn in New England,” like this:
“Whenever I sit down for a cozy reread of a favorite book, invariably a few dry but still brightly colored pressed leaves spill from its pages into my lap. Each one recalls a happy autumnal trek through New England to view the fiery reds and brilliant yellows of the spectacular fall foliage.”
Deitz cites a scene from Henry James' Roderick Hudson set in the part of western Massachusetts she visits on a day James describes as “when summer seems to balance in the scale with autumn.” I thought of another James volume, The American Scene, and its lovely first chapter, “New England: An Autumn Impression”:
“…the way the colour begins in those days to be dabbed, the way, here and there, for a start, a solitary maple on a woodside flames in single scarlet, recalls nothing so much as the daughter of a noble house dressed for a fancy-ball, with the whole family gathered round to admire her before she goes.”
Deitz’s prose is clean, precise and purple-free, and laced with allusions to botany, history, landscaping and architecture, yes, but also literature, painting and the other riches populating a civilized mind. She proves once again that a gifted writer can animate any subject by writing up, not down, to her readers. Deitz relates Roderick Hudson to a painting by Thomas Cole of a bend in the Connecticut River, “The Oxbow,” and concludes her essay like this:
“I flew back to Boston in the copilot’s seat of a small plane that felt like a chariot riding over the islands—a red-streaked sunset on one side and the harvest moon piercing the clouds on the other. I thought of Henry James and his fictional description of the river valley visit: `This is an American day, an American landscape, an American atmosphere.’”
Where was this essay first published? In the Dec. 1993-Jan. 1994 issue of Gardens Illustrated.
Sunday, March 06, 2011
`That Long Formality: Peace'
Remembering a poet, even with the best of intentions, is an empty gesture unless we read his poems. Cynthia Haven introduced me last year to a good one, Moore Moran, and it was Cynthia who told me tonight of his death. Here’s an early poem by Moran, “That Breakfast” (The Room Within, 2010) first published in The Atlantic in 1956, the year after the death of Wallace Stevens, to whom Moran dedicates the poem:
“His pigeons have reached darkness
By now, and absolute shade,
The one fast color, hardened
The rich change of his blue gaze.
“Indelible leaves falling
Across the Sundays, firing
An ice-rimmed sky or blazing
In his page, will hold his sound.
“Earth only will find him cold.
“How fair must have been that late
And inexorable stand
When, closely groomed, breakfasting
Expensively on warm wine,
Eggs Benedict, he reworked
Some dark juxtaposition,
“His gaze led by innocence,
His hands in the moment, all
Malice suspended softly,
And heard in the seventh hour,
Dilating like the sea's prose,
That long formality: peace.”
“His pigeons have reached darkness
By now, and absolute shade,
The one fast color, hardened
The rich change of his blue gaze.
“Indelible leaves falling
Across the Sundays, firing
An ice-rimmed sky or blazing
In his page, will hold his sound.
“Earth only will find him cold.
“How fair must have been that late
And inexorable stand
When, closely groomed, breakfasting
Expensively on warm wine,
Eggs Benedict, he reworked
Some dark juxtaposition,
“His gaze led by innocence,
His hands in the moment, all
Malice suspended softly,
And heard in the seventh hour,
Dilating like the sea's prose,
That long formality: peace.”
`Taste It in a Moment, Time and All!'
The snow is off the snow drops and robins outnumber juncos and sparrows. Two weeks away, spring is a prolonged tease. Fern fronds of green rise from last year’s brown leftovers. Buds redden the big-leaf maple. Grasses and mosses are their greenest in six months, and the front lawn is spongy to walk across, like a bog. Crocuses and daffodils spike the flower beds. The sky’s blue-to-gray ratio shifts hourly. We pull off socks before going to bed. In his entry for March in Kalendarium Hortense: or the Gard’ners Almanac; directing what he is to do Monethly throughout the Year; And what Fruits and Flowers are in Prime (1664), John Evelyn writes:
“Stake and bind up your weakest Plants and Flowers against the Winds, before they come too fiercely and in a moment prostrate a whole years labour.”
In defiance of the proverb, the winds of March have been docile. We won’t tend a plot in the community garden this year. Instead, I’ll till new plots in the backyard and put in tomatoes, beans, basil and flowers. Gardens mingle artifice and nature, the best maintaining an uncertain balance. I don’t mind weeds among my herbs. Thinking about what to plant and where, I remember the Yvor Winters line: “The future gathers in vine, bush, and tree.” Here is “Time and the Garden”:
“The spring has darkened with activity.
The future gathers in vine, bush, and tree:
Persimmon, walnut, loquat, fig, and grape,
Degrees and kinds of color, taste, and shape.
These will advance in their due series, space
The season like a tranquil dwelling-place.
And yet excitement swells me, vein by vein:
I long to crowd the little garden, gain
Its sweetness in my hand and crush it small
And taste it in a moment, time and all!
These trees, whose slow growth measures off my years,
I would expand to greatness. No one hears,
And I am still retarded in duress!
And this is like that other restlessness
To seize the greatness not yet fairly earned,
One which the tougher poets have discerned—
Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Greville, Raleigh, Donne,
Poets who wrote great poems, one by one,
And spaced by many years, each line an act
Through which few labor, which no men retract.
This passion is the scholar’s heritage,
The imposition of a busy age,
The passion to condense from book to book
Unbroken wisdom in a single look,
Though we know well that when this fix the head,
The mind’s immortal, but the man is dead.”
Like fishermen and poets, gardeners must understand time, accept its unseen constraints, wince at its indifference, grieve the losses it carries, harvest the wealth it brings.
“Stake and bind up your weakest Plants and Flowers against the Winds, before they come too fiercely and in a moment prostrate a whole years labour.”
In defiance of the proverb, the winds of March have been docile. We won’t tend a plot in the community garden this year. Instead, I’ll till new plots in the backyard and put in tomatoes, beans, basil and flowers. Gardens mingle artifice and nature, the best maintaining an uncertain balance. I don’t mind weeds among my herbs. Thinking about what to plant and where, I remember the Yvor Winters line: “The future gathers in vine, bush, and tree.” Here is “Time and the Garden”:
“The spring has darkened with activity.
The future gathers in vine, bush, and tree:
Persimmon, walnut, loquat, fig, and grape,
Degrees and kinds of color, taste, and shape.
These will advance in their due series, space
The season like a tranquil dwelling-place.
And yet excitement swells me, vein by vein:
I long to crowd the little garden, gain
Its sweetness in my hand and crush it small
And taste it in a moment, time and all!
These trees, whose slow growth measures off my years,
I would expand to greatness. No one hears,
And I am still retarded in duress!
And this is like that other restlessness
To seize the greatness not yet fairly earned,
One which the tougher poets have discerned—
Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Greville, Raleigh, Donne,
Poets who wrote great poems, one by one,
And spaced by many years, each line an act
Through which few labor, which no men retract.
This passion is the scholar’s heritage,
The imposition of a busy age,
The passion to condense from book to book
Unbroken wisdom in a single look,
Though we know well that when this fix the head,
The mind’s immortal, but the man is dead.”
Like fishermen and poets, gardeners must understand time, accept its unseen constraints, wince at its indifference, grieve the losses it carries, harvest the wealth it brings.
Saturday, March 05, 2011
`Whatever Was at Hand'
“If your [sic] so smart how come your [sic] teaching little kids and not writing books [sic]”
So writes an anonymous reader. Despite the paucity of punctuation I take this as a question. What follows is an incomplete answer. I work in a public school with children because I enjoy the company of most kids, and even on the most discouraging day I contribute something, if only a joke or civil greeting, to at least one kid’s life. For some of them, I may be the only source of such things. Also, for a writer, kids are good material.
I’ve earned at least a portion of my living from writing for thirty-two years, mostly for newspapers. That too was a good source of material – for writing, for life – and served to patch my moth-eaten education. I’ve written about science and engineering for two universities, furthering my career as an autodidact and curing me of the notion I might enjoy college teaching. As to a book: I like what I’m doing, publically and otherwise.
Zbigniew Herbert writes in “The Price of Art” (Still Life with a Bridle):
“The Dutch painters of the `golden age’ undertook all kinds of employment that a contemporary so-called artist would reject as degrading. They were artisans, and their humility toward life was great and beautiful.”
“…Others, the best known painters among them, led a `double’ professional life. They were cooks, innkeepers, owners of taverns or brick kilns, petty clerks, traders of works of art, real estate, stockings, tulips, and whatever was at hand.”
So writes an anonymous reader. Despite the paucity of punctuation I take this as a question. What follows is an incomplete answer. I work in a public school with children because I enjoy the company of most kids, and even on the most discouraging day I contribute something, if only a joke or civil greeting, to at least one kid’s life. For some of them, I may be the only source of such things. Also, for a writer, kids are good material.
I’ve earned at least a portion of my living from writing for thirty-two years, mostly for newspapers. That too was a good source of material – for writing, for life – and served to patch my moth-eaten education. I’ve written about science and engineering for two universities, furthering my career as an autodidact and curing me of the notion I might enjoy college teaching. As to a book: I like what I’m doing, publically and otherwise.
Zbigniew Herbert writes in “The Price of Art” (Still Life with a Bridle):
“The Dutch painters of the `golden age’ undertook all kinds of employment that a contemporary so-called artist would reject as degrading. They were artisans, and their humility toward life was great and beautiful.”
“…Others, the best known painters among them, led a `double’ professional life. They were cooks, innkeepers, owners of taverns or brick kilns, petty clerks, traders of works of art, real estate, stockings, tulips, and whatever was at hand.”
Friday, March 04, 2011
`In the Rapture of Attention'
The third of five portraits Sir Joshua Reynolds painted of his friend Samuel Johnson came to mind as I was tutoring my fourteen-year-old student after school on Thursday. The only light in his family’s dining room comes from the chandelier hanging above the table. Dust dims the low-wattage bulbs and I’m forever adjusting my bifocals, angling books and papers to maximize illumination and holding them against my nose.
I folded back the cover of my student’s algebra workbook, trying to decipher his hard-lead scrawl, when I remembered the picture Reynolds painted of Johnson in 1775 – an uncanny likeness to yours truly, I thought, but for the wig. (Has any great man ever looked less great than Johnson?) In his life of Johnson, John Wain says Reynolds “understood Johnson’s mind and heart perfectly,” and describes the portrait of Johnson that renders
“…the mature critic of literature and society. Like the first portrait it shows him working; not sitting at a desk producing a daily stint of words but holding up to his fierce, near-sighted gaze a book that in the rapture of attention he is grasping and forcing out of shape, the covers back to back (it will never be the same again). Once again one notices the hands: large, strong, actively participating in the thrust towards knowledge and ideas, as if wisdom were a juice that could be literally squeezed out of dry paper and ink.”
Certainly I’ve known “rapture of attention” while reading, though I wasn’t holding the algebra text with that degree of ardor. Once I snapped in half an old Oxford University Press edition of Ben Jonson’s plays while reading it, though its spine had already been cracked by previous readers. To identify with Johnson is a risky enterprise, at once presumptuous and inevitable. In his humanity he was superhuman. We read him to learn to bear our common, failing, myopic lot.
I folded back the cover of my student’s algebra workbook, trying to decipher his hard-lead scrawl, when I remembered the picture Reynolds painted of Johnson in 1775 – an uncanny likeness to yours truly, I thought, but for the wig. (Has any great man ever looked less great than Johnson?) In his life of Johnson, John Wain says Reynolds “understood Johnson’s mind and heart perfectly,” and describes the portrait of Johnson that renders
“…the mature critic of literature and society. Like the first portrait it shows him working; not sitting at a desk producing a daily stint of words but holding up to his fierce, near-sighted gaze a book that in the rapture of attention he is grasping and forcing out of shape, the covers back to back (it will never be the same again). Once again one notices the hands: large, strong, actively participating in the thrust towards knowledge and ideas, as if wisdom were a juice that could be literally squeezed out of dry paper and ink.”
Certainly I’ve known “rapture of attention” while reading, though I wasn’t holding the algebra text with that degree of ardor. Once I snapped in half an old Oxford University Press edition of Ben Jonson’s plays while reading it, though its spine had already been cracked by previous readers. To identify with Johnson is a risky enterprise, at once presumptuous and inevitable. In his humanity he was superhuman. We read him to learn to bear our common, failing, myopic lot.
Thursday, March 03, 2011
`Take an Insect View of Its Plain'
Allen J. Coombes, author of The Book of Leaves (University of Chicago Press, 2010), plays it safe with an epigraph from Thoreau’s journal dated Oct. 22, 1839:
“Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.”
Granted, this is the callow Thoreau, written precisely two years after his first, Emerson-inspired journal entry. He was twenty-two and, though already a gifted amateur naturalist, sadly smitten with Romantic sentimentality: “She invites us…” Nature, in fact, invites nothing but more nature, but the young Thoreau was a conventional man of his time, a would-be Emerson destined, fortunately, to outgrow his landlord. When I say Coombes plays it safe with the Thoreau snippet, I mean that out of context the sentiment could show up in a “green” greeting card, though I like “insect view.”
Visually, The Book of Leaves is the most beautiful new volume I’ve seen in years. Color photographs of leaves from six-hundred trees around the world, reproduced actual size, accompany brief descriptions of each species, distribution maps, tables of vital stats, and sidebars devoted to similar species and detailed accounts of each tree’s leaves. The introduction, with sections on “Leaf Shape and Arrangement” and “Identifying Tree Leaves” (“Monocot or Dicot?”), is a useful orientation to the subject, not a token text for a coffee-table book. An author’s note informs us Coombes was president of the International Oak Society from 2006 to 2009, so here is a portion of his entry devoted to the leaves of Quercus coccinea, the scarlet oak:
“The leaves of the Scarlet Oak are elliptic to obovate in outline, and up to 6-1/4 in (16 cm) long and 4-1/4 in (12 cm) across. They are deeply pinnately lobed, with up to 7 or 9 lobes, sometimes almost to the midrib. Each lobe is widest toward the tip and is further divided, ending in several bristle-tipped teeth. The leaves are glossy dark green above, paler and glossy beneath, turning bright red in fall.”
Poetry is rooted in deep observation. This is poetry. If “obovate” and “deeply pinnately lobed” leave you unenlightened, here is Thoreau, nineteen years after the passage cited above, looking as closely as Coombes at the leaf of the scarlet oak, and turning it into another sort of poetry. He transforms precise description into a fantastic, extended metaphor. This is from the journal entry for Nov. 11, 1858:
“The scarlet oak leaf! What a graceful and pleasing outline! a combination of graceful curves and angles. These deep bays in the leaf are agreeable to us as the thought of deep and smooth and secure havens to the mariner. But both your love of repose and your spirit of adventure are addressed, for both bays and headlands are represented, — sharp-pointed rocky capes and rounded bays with smooth strands. To the sailor's eye it is a much indented shore, and in his casual glance he thinks that if he doubles its sharp capes he will find a haven in its deep rounded bays. If I were a drawing master, I would set my pupils to copying these leaves, that they might learn to draw firmly and gracefully. It is a shore to the aerial ocean, on which the windy surf beats. How different from the white oak leaf with its rounded headlands, on which no lighthouse need be placed!”
“Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.”
Granted, this is the callow Thoreau, written precisely two years after his first, Emerson-inspired journal entry. He was twenty-two and, though already a gifted amateur naturalist, sadly smitten with Romantic sentimentality: “She invites us…” Nature, in fact, invites nothing but more nature, but the young Thoreau was a conventional man of his time, a would-be Emerson destined, fortunately, to outgrow his landlord. When I say Coombes plays it safe with the Thoreau snippet, I mean that out of context the sentiment could show up in a “green” greeting card, though I like “insect view.”
Visually, The Book of Leaves is the most beautiful new volume I’ve seen in years. Color photographs of leaves from six-hundred trees around the world, reproduced actual size, accompany brief descriptions of each species, distribution maps, tables of vital stats, and sidebars devoted to similar species and detailed accounts of each tree’s leaves. The introduction, with sections on “Leaf Shape and Arrangement” and “Identifying Tree Leaves” (“Monocot or Dicot?”), is a useful orientation to the subject, not a token text for a coffee-table book. An author’s note informs us Coombes was president of the International Oak Society from 2006 to 2009, so here is a portion of his entry devoted to the leaves of Quercus coccinea, the scarlet oak:
“The leaves of the Scarlet Oak are elliptic to obovate in outline, and up to 6-1/4 in (16 cm) long and 4-1/4 in (12 cm) across. They are deeply pinnately lobed, with up to 7 or 9 lobes, sometimes almost to the midrib. Each lobe is widest toward the tip and is further divided, ending in several bristle-tipped teeth. The leaves are glossy dark green above, paler and glossy beneath, turning bright red in fall.”
Poetry is rooted in deep observation. This is poetry. If “obovate” and “deeply pinnately lobed” leave you unenlightened, here is Thoreau, nineteen years after the passage cited above, looking as closely as Coombes at the leaf of the scarlet oak, and turning it into another sort of poetry. He transforms precise description into a fantastic, extended metaphor. This is from the journal entry for Nov. 11, 1858:
“The scarlet oak leaf! What a graceful and pleasing outline! a combination of graceful curves and angles. These deep bays in the leaf are agreeable to us as the thought of deep and smooth and secure havens to the mariner. But both your love of repose and your spirit of adventure are addressed, for both bays and headlands are represented, — sharp-pointed rocky capes and rounded bays with smooth strands. To the sailor's eye it is a much indented shore, and in his casual glance he thinks that if he doubles its sharp capes he will find a haven in its deep rounded bays. If I were a drawing master, I would set my pupils to copying these leaves, that they might learn to draw firmly and gracefully. It is a shore to the aerial ocean, on which the windy surf beats. How different from the white oak leaf with its rounded headlands, on which no lighthouse need be placed!”
Wednesday, March 02, 2011
"A" and Anew
My review of “A” and Anew: Complete Shorter Poems by Louis Zukofsky appears in Issue 23 of The Quarterly Conversation.
`For Children and Others'
When read to, young children are as likely to hear sounds as adults are to hear ideas, concepts, meaning. The difference can be as dramatic as between a deaf listener and one who loves Mozart. I’m not jettisoning the denotative worth of language, and the ideal adult reader/listener holds sound and sense in fructive balance, but kids unashamedly revel in lexical abandon.
In honor of Richard Wilbur’s ninetieth birthday on Tuesday, though without announcing it to anyone (librarian, teachers, kids), I read some of the poems Wilbur has written for children to a group of kindergarteners. Call it an exercise in applied criticism. In his introductory note to Collected Poems: 1943-2004, in which he includes his five volumes of children’s verse, Wilbur says: “They are, as I have sometimes said in subtitles, `for children and others.’”
Placing these poems in suitable genres can be perplexing. They might qualify as “light verse,” much-maligned by sophisticates. They are not “nonsense verse,” in the cloying sense, and don’t resemble most of the thin gruel marketed as poetry for children. Wilbur’s art, even in its most casual or recreational manifestations, makes sense, however silly. I read six poems to the kids, reading for maximum rhythmic impact and jokiness. This one from More Opposites (1991), a volume dedicated to Wilbur’s granddaughter:
“The opposite of kite, I'd say,
Is yo-yo. On a breezy day
You take your kite and let it rise
Upon its string into the skies,
And then you pull it down with ease
(Unless it crashes in the trees).
A yo-yo, though, drops down, and then
You quickly bring it up again
By deftly pulling on its string
(If you can work the blasted thing)."
My only preface was to ask if everyone knew what a kite was, and a yo-yo. I also showed them Wilbur’s Thurber-esque drawing of a monstrous little girl holding a kite string in one hand and a yo-yo string in the other. Most had stories about botched kite-flying adventures with family. The final line was popular because, like me, not one kid can get a yo-yo to operate properly. Next up was this from A Few Differences:
“You don’t confuse a cake of soap
With other sorts of cake, I hope.
Were you to eat a helping of
Camay, or Ivory, or Dove,
I think you’d have digestive troubles
Caused by a stomach full of bubbles.
“How horrible! But the reverse
Confusion might be worse.
Be careful, if you please: I’d rather
Not see you bathe in mocha lather,
Or watch as you shampoo your head
With angel food or gingerbread.”
By far, this was the most popular of Wilbur’s offerings with the five-year-olds, confirming what I already knew about children: food and “grossness” rank high in the kid pantheon. Put them together and you have a hit on your hands. One little girl with a perfect Prince Valiant coif rubbed her fingers on her scalp as though lathering up, and said:
“I dream of gingerbread!”
In honor of Richard Wilbur’s ninetieth birthday on Tuesday, though without announcing it to anyone (librarian, teachers, kids), I read some of the poems Wilbur has written for children to a group of kindergarteners. Call it an exercise in applied criticism. In his introductory note to Collected Poems: 1943-2004, in which he includes his five volumes of children’s verse, Wilbur says: “They are, as I have sometimes said in subtitles, `for children and others.’”
Placing these poems in suitable genres can be perplexing. They might qualify as “light verse,” much-maligned by sophisticates. They are not “nonsense verse,” in the cloying sense, and don’t resemble most of the thin gruel marketed as poetry for children. Wilbur’s art, even in its most casual or recreational manifestations, makes sense, however silly. I read six poems to the kids, reading for maximum rhythmic impact and jokiness. This one from More Opposites (1991), a volume dedicated to Wilbur’s granddaughter:
“The opposite of kite, I'd say,
Is yo-yo. On a breezy day
You take your kite and let it rise
Upon its string into the skies,
And then you pull it down with ease
(Unless it crashes in the trees).
A yo-yo, though, drops down, and then
You quickly bring it up again
By deftly pulling on its string
(If you can work the blasted thing)."
My only preface was to ask if everyone knew what a kite was, and a yo-yo. I also showed them Wilbur’s Thurber-esque drawing of a monstrous little girl holding a kite string in one hand and a yo-yo string in the other. Most had stories about botched kite-flying adventures with family. The final line was popular because, like me, not one kid can get a yo-yo to operate properly. Next up was this from A Few Differences:
“You don’t confuse a cake of soap
With other sorts of cake, I hope.
Were you to eat a helping of
Camay, or Ivory, or Dove,
I think you’d have digestive troubles
Caused by a stomach full of bubbles.
“How horrible! But the reverse
Confusion might be worse.
Be careful, if you please: I’d rather
Not see you bathe in mocha lather,
Or watch as you shampoo your head
With angel food or gingerbread.”
By far, this was the most popular of Wilbur’s offerings with the five-year-olds, confirming what I already knew about children: food and “grossness” rank high in the kid pantheon. Put them together and you have a hit on your hands. One little girl with a perfect Prince Valiant coif rubbed her fingers on her scalp as though lathering up, and said:
“I dream of gingerbread!”
Tuesday, March 01, 2011
`Not Subject to Our Stiff Geometries'
Today we celebrate the ninetieth birthday of the American poet Richard Wilbur, who reminds us that the world is a splendid place after all. I spent years acknowledging his gifts but denying myself the pleasure of enjoying them while permitting louder, coarser voices, including some among his prominent contemporaries, to drown him out. Wilbur’s voice is above all civilized – that is, witty, learned but not pedantic, musical, sensitive, attuned (though not abjectly) to tradition, even encouraging and entertaining. In a recent interview, Wilbur notes he has written and published only one free-verse poem in seventy years. He adds:
“I was just pointing out to a friend of mine that, in the dictionary, `formalism’ and `formaldehyde’ are very close; and I'm afraid a lot of people think of form that way. I have no interest at all, really, in meter, per se, or in rhyme patterns, or in received forms. It's all in what you do with them, or indeed against them. The great poets have always been violators of meter.”
This is bracing, and hardly a secret to readers of Milton and Pope. The notion of meter as a straightjacket to inspiration, a wet blanket thrown across sincerity, is self-servingly delusional. Meter and rhyme sing, in the proper hands. “It’s all in what you do with them,” as it is with every other good thing in life. Here is one of the new poems from Collected Poems 1943-2004, “In Trackless Woods”:
“In trackless woods, it puzzled me to find
Four great rock maples seemingly aligned,
As if they had been set out in a row
Before some house a century ago,
To edge the property and lend some shade.
I looked to see if ancient wheels had made
Old ruts to which the trees ran parallel,
But there were none, so far as I could tell --
There'd been no roadway. Nor could I find the square
Depression of a cellar anywhere,
And so I tramped on further, to survey
Amazing patterns in a hornbeam spray
Or spirals in a pine-cone, under trees
Not subject to our stiff geometries.”
Fourteen iambic lines, all but the ninth – the one on which the poem begins to turn -- with precisely ten syllables. “Amazing” is threadbare but the line ends with the lovely “hornbeam spray.” Despite the rhyming couplets, the poem defies the “stiff geometries” it might have calcified into. The poem touches, even formally, on a favorite Wilbur theme – the persistence of order in a disorderly world. The title of his third collection was Things of This World (1956), and he echoes it in the recent interview:
“Poetry is concerned with things, and with making them vivid, and what metaphor does is to render some part of the world more vivid by comparing it– sometimes violently– to something else….it makes the thing under consideration far more solid and it gives you a more intense and surprised perception of the interlaced objective world, of things as they are.”
[Richard B. Woodward has a fine appreciation of Wilbur in the Wall Street Journal.]
“I was just pointing out to a friend of mine that, in the dictionary, `formalism’ and `formaldehyde’ are very close; and I'm afraid a lot of people think of form that way. I have no interest at all, really, in meter, per se, or in rhyme patterns, or in received forms. It's all in what you do with them, or indeed against them. The great poets have always been violators of meter.”
This is bracing, and hardly a secret to readers of Milton and Pope. The notion of meter as a straightjacket to inspiration, a wet blanket thrown across sincerity, is self-servingly delusional. Meter and rhyme sing, in the proper hands. “It’s all in what you do with them,” as it is with every other good thing in life. Here is one of the new poems from Collected Poems 1943-2004, “In Trackless Woods”:
“In trackless woods, it puzzled me to find
Four great rock maples seemingly aligned,
As if they had been set out in a row
Before some house a century ago,
To edge the property and lend some shade.
I looked to see if ancient wheels had made
Old ruts to which the trees ran parallel,
But there were none, so far as I could tell --
There'd been no roadway. Nor could I find the square
Depression of a cellar anywhere,
And so I tramped on further, to survey
Amazing patterns in a hornbeam spray
Or spirals in a pine-cone, under trees
Not subject to our stiff geometries.”
Fourteen iambic lines, all but the ninth – the one on which the poem begins to turn -- with precisely ten syllables. “Amazing” is threadbare but the line ends with the lovely “hornbeam spray.” Despite the rhyming couplets, the poem defies the “stiff geometries” it might have calcified into. The poem touches, even formally, on a favorite Wilbur theme – the persistence of order in a disorderly world. The title of his third collection was Things of This World (1956), and he echoes it in the recent interview:
“Poetry is concerned with things, and with making them vivid, and what metaphor does is to render some part of the world more vivid by comparing it– sometimes violently– to something else….it makes the thing under consideration far more solid and it gives you a more intense and surprised perception of the interlaced objective world, of things as they are.”
[Richard B. Woodward has a fine appreciation of Wilbur in the Wall Street Journal.]
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