`On the Flat of My Temples As Proud As a Wreath'

Having found a reliable barber, my move to Houston is now official. One is permitted a few vanities of the misdemeanor sort, I tell myself, and I like a good haircut. The barbers to avoid are butchers and artistes, the indifferent and wayward, and they are legion. Meeting a barber for the first time is like asking a girl for a dance. You worry less about being rejected than being accepted and regretting it.

My boss suggested a new place in her neighborhood. She noticed the sign by the curb and an older woman going in and out. The shop, once a florist’s, is in a private residence, though Houston has no zoning laws and you can open a brothel beside a day-care center. The barber is the older woman’s son, just returned from an extended detour to San Francisco. Born in Akron, Ohio, “home of rubber and AA,” he’s lived most of his life in Texas. He asked a few questions (“Sideburns?”) and got busy.

No ferns or pictures of male models on the walls. No wine bar or pedicurist, though I missed the old magazines and the scent of witch hazel and talc (lingering childhood memories). With a good barber one builds a relationship at once intimate and formal. You come to trust his haircutting skills, his jokes and easy gift of gab.

“Haircut” is from Karl Shapiro’s first book, Person, Place, and Thing (1942):

“O wonderful nonsense of lotions of Lucky Tiger,

Of savory soaps and oils of bottle-bright green,

The gold of liqueurs, the unguents of Newark and Niger,

Powders and balms and waters washing me clean; 

“In mirrors of marble and silver I see us forever

Increasing, decreasing the puzzles of luminous spaces

As I turn, am revolved and am pumped in the air on a lever,

With the backs of my heads in chorus with all of my faces. 

“Scissors and comb are mowing my hair into neatness,

Now pruning my ears, now smoothing my neck like a plain;

In the harvest of hair and the chaff of powdery sweetness

My snow-covered slopes grow dark with the wooly rain. 

“And the little boy cries, for it hurts to sever the curl,

And we too are quietly bleating to park with our coat.

Does the barber want blood in a dish? I am weak as a girl,

I desire my pendants, the fatherly chin of a goat. 

“I desire the pants of a bear, the nap of a monkey

Which trousers of friction have blighted down to my skin.

I am bare as a tusk, as jacketed up as a flunkey,

With the chest of a moth-eaten camel growing within. 

“But in death we shall flourish, you summer-dark leaves of my head,

While the flesh of the jaw ebbs away from the shores of my teeth;

You shall cover my sockets and soften the boards of my bed

And lie on the flat of my temples as proud as a wreath.”

`The Mind in Pleasing Captivity'

“We read to find a place to dwell on, and even in, for a time; it’s of no country I know. There are many strangers in it, including myself.”

This is David Ferry, eighty-seven, speaking. The italicized words are the title of his selected poems, Of No Country I Know, published in 1999, and Dwelling Places: Poems and Translations (1993) is the title of his third book. Moving further back in time, Strangers, his second collection, appeared in 1983. In two sentences he distills a life in poetry.

Since moving a month ago to Houston, living away from family for the first time, I’ve been reading ferociously, or more ferociously than is customary – poetry, Dr. Johnson, Civil War, botany, Aquinas, little fiction. With no meals to prepare, no homework to grade, less laundry to wash, I can read as I wish, late into the night. Escapism? Of course not. As Ferry says: “for a time.” Books constitute an alternate world, yes, but one that supplements the given. Not separate realms, autonomous kingdoms, but mutually sustaining dwelling places. Their relation is synergistic, not parasitic, and I return bearing gifts. Reading is about meeting strangers.

Ferry has often described his devotion to Samuel Johnson, who writes in his “Life of Dryden”:

“Works of imagination excel by their allurement and delight; by their power of attracting and detaining the attention. That book is good in vain which the reader throws away. He only is the master who keeps the mind in pleasing captivity; whose pages are perused with eagerness, and in hope of new pleasure are perused again; and whose conclusion is perceived with an eye of sorrow, such as the traveller casts upon departing day.”

`Your Work Is Quick, Direct, Exact and Keen'

“Homage to Thomas Traherne” (Timely Issues, 2001) by the late Elizabeth Jennings:

“Your prose could hardly be more close to verse.

It soars, it sings, and God is your great theme,

Your paeans to Him never seem to cease,

He filled each waking moment and, in dream,

“God surely must have faced you gladly with

All his graces shining, sweet and clear.
You never needed to have fear of death
Yet your contrition was not hard to hear.

 “Your Centuries are noble, rich, serene,

Leaping with love and dancing with delight

And it is clear exactly what you mean.

“Traherne, you’ve lighted up my blackest night.

Your work is quick, direct, exact and keen

And everywhere I read I come on light.” 

Jennings refers to Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations, surely among the most beautiful books in the language:

“The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold: the gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me, their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things.”

`Life Changes Yet Remains the Same'

“For to make an eternity, we must build with eternities; whence, the vanity of the cry for any thing alike durable and new; and the folly of the reproach--Your granite hath come from the old-fashioned hills. For we are not gods and creators.”

The passage is from Chapter 75, “Time and Temples,” of Melville’s Mardi (1849). Don Stanford (1913-1998) uses it as the epigraph to New England Earth and Other Poems, a slender volume of twenty-six poems published in 1941 by The Colt Press of San Francisco, in an edition of three-hundred copies. The “Foreword” is by Stanford’s former teacher at Stanford University, Yvor Winters, who glosses the excerpt from Mardi without explicitly referring to it:

“It is not unnatural that a modern with some historical training should chance in his efforts to retrieve a classical sensibility to retrace in some sort the path by which that sensibility was lost; this in spite of the fact that he will probably carry with him, as Stanford appears to do, much of the knowledge accruing from that very experience of loss.”

Like his teacher, Stanford is concerned with the recovery of values, “a classical sensibility” rooted in tradition. Who can write a poem, or read one, without knowing what the best poets have written? The predictable reproach to such a stance, “old-fashioned,” is “folly,” plain and simple. Consider Stanford’s “Letter from the Widener Library,” titled “Letter to Yvor Winters: On Re-reading `The Journey,’ Widener Library, 1933,” when it was originally published in The Harvard Advocate:

“Now hushed and cool in brick that cannot yield
The eternal thought of centuries is sealed,
Broken and wary, record of living falls
The reddening ivy trembles to the walls.

“These trailing times from the idea fell.
Now every bed keeps sandals hot as hell,
Each senator grows plump for doing naught
And all’s puffed up and all’s revenging rot.

“Yet shrouded in your poems’ tired lines
I still see where truth and virtue shines
Clean as the deepest heaven’s untainted stars,
Till this sweet peace my blundering body mars.

“From coils of present art I may procure
What genius shrives, I cannot keep it pure.
My present self has sense and will to tame
The present age is loose and much to blame.

“When rage is laid away with my brisk years,
When lust calls vengeance, and when love appears,
In wisdom I may walk, where now I’ve strayed
The quiet past of which some men are made.

“And there, begotten in your silent mind,
I grow to sire my history, and to find
The future neither loss nor folly rears—
Each infant moment gains its parent years.

“When we read fuller lives and write them ours
We may increase what first were bounded hours
For who so reckons art he may profess
Where this life stays, where that life perishes?

“Though language loses the strict part of you
The feeling lives to set your meaning true
Ready to join a richer world than mine.
The Concept saves us when our forms decline.”

Within the library dwells “eternal thought” -- outside, lust, greed, “my blundering body,” politics as usual (Hitler came to power in 1933). In Winters’ poem “truth and virtue shines.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines “shrive” as both “to hear the confession of” and “to make one's confession,” to be priest and/or sinner. The word derives from the Latin scribere, “to write.” When Stanford writes “From coils of present art I may procure / What genius shrives, I cannot keep it pure,” he humbles himself before Winters’ accomplishment, before tradition. He scorns what Melville calls “the vanity of the cry for any thing alike durable and new.”

Stanford is a fine poet I would never have read without following a half-covered trail of allusions left by Winters and others. Winters says Stanford writes “with the complexity of Donne and the suavity of Dryden,” and yet I didn’t come to know his work until recently. Like any autodidact, my learning is spotty, but that doesn’t satisfactorily explain how so gifted a poet, scholar and editor remained unknown to me for so long. Stanford is not unique in this. Much of the Stanford School of poets around Winters, the Fugitives, the novelist John Williams (Stoner) – all half-remembered, or remembered only to be forgotten again, and all central to our national culture. Then think of Melville in his later years and for thirty years after his death: “For we are not gods and creators.”

Having just seen a lone goldfinch on a feeder in the backyard, I found Stanford’s “Summer Scene” stirring:

“With movement perfect and controlled
Through silence like the hush of sleep
The goldfinch cleaves the immobile deep,
Pale azure, in a loop of gold.

“Life changes yet remains the same.
The goldfinch flashes and is gone,
But through the emptiness is drawn,
The oriole’s thin dividing flame.”

`More Resigned to the Way They Have to Live'

Only this week did I learn that I work in an arboretum. In 1999, the Rice University campus, all 295 acres of it, was dedicated as the Lynn R. Lowery Arboretum, named for a Louisiana-born Houston horticulturalist. According to the inventory conducted after the devastation caused by Hurricane Ike in 2008, the arboretum contains 4,781 trees representing 168 species. Not surprisingly, live oaks (Quercus virginiana), with 2,262 trees, are most numerous. Go here to see a live oak-canopied path I walk every day, and remember the lines from Louise Bogan’s “Knowledge”:

“Trees make a long shadow
And a light sound.”

In his chapter on live oaks in Remarkable Plants of Texas (University of Texas Press, 2009), Matt Warnock Turner writes:

“Texas is blessed with oaks. In fact, we have more species of oak than of any other tree. Approximately three-fourths of U.S. oak species grow in our state, thanks to its size, geographic diversity, and proximity to Mexico, which itself boasts 60% of all New World species.”

Thirteen oak species grow on the Rice campus, and their common names suggest a homely poetry: white, overcup, bur, basket, chinkapin, water, willow, Monterrey, Shumard, post, cork, Texas, live. The Shumard, by the way, is named for Benjamin Franklin Shumard (1820-69), Texas state geologist and professor of obstetrics at the University of Missouri.

On my desk next to the paper wasp nest I found outside my office window last week is the sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua) sprig picked Tuesday on the way back from lunch. The tree, one of sixty-three sweetgums on campus, stands just east of my building, surrounded by live oaks. The three leaves are maple-like, and the spiky seed case dangles like one-third of a pawnbroker’s symbol. (Look at this guy.) In Trees of Texas (Texas A&M University Press, 2003), Carmine Stahl and Ria McElvaney write:

“Gray squirrels, flying squirrels, and at least twenty-five species of birds eat the seeds. The wood offers a wide variety of uses for musical instruments, veneers, cabinets, furniture, boxes, and more.”

Some people need the proximity of mountains or ocean to know contentment. All I need are trees. In Chapter VII of Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, Marie Tovesky says to Emil Bergson:

“I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.”

[ADDENDUM: Dave Lull passes along this passage from Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson by Hester Thrale (Hester Lynch Piozzi): “He loved the sight of fine forest trees however, and detested Brighthelmstone Downs [Brighton], `because it was a country so truly desolate (he said), that if one had a mind to hang one's self for desperation at being obliged to live there, it would be difficult to find a tree on which to fasten the rope.’”]

`Clean Abstract Poems in Plainest Style'

It’s a lesson rooted in long experience: When you come to suspect that all the good writers are dead and only mediocrities thrive, that contemporary literature is a vast Ponzi scheme run by con men and fools, rely on the taste of a reader you trust. Helen Pinkerton has sent me a chapbook, A Garland for John Finlay, edited by David Middleton and published by Blue Heron Press of Thibodaux, La., in 1991, the year Finlay died. It collects work by twenty poets, including some of our best – Pinkerton, Edgar Bowers, Janet Lewis. Helen writes on the title page:

“For Patrick,
Some mighty fine poems in here.
Helen”

She’s right: Poems by Dick Davis, Turner Cassity, Don Stanford, Dana Gioia, R.L. Barth and others whose names or work are new to me, including Middleton, Finlay’s friend and posthumous editor. His contribution is “For John Finlay,” which includes these lines:

“Truly a man of letters who could love
Blunt Johnson and the nuances of James
And ask how that which says `the mind is weak’
Can state its law and yet transcend the same,
You wrote clean abstract poems in plainest style
And sensuous descriptions charged with thought,
Probing toward the source and end of intellect
That marks our place in all the Maker wrought.”

I like “Blunt Johnson,” itself a blunt phrase that sounds like the name of a forgotten blues singer. Middleton collects the poem in Beyond the Chandeleurs (Louisiana State University, 1999), which also includes another sort of garland, a wreath of flowers, “Embertide in Advent”:

“They waited beneath the cold December snows,
Late flowers of the fall, the folded rose,
The angels’-trumpet crumpled in the mold,
Daisies of Michaelmas, the hidden lily curled
In dust of goldenrod and marigold,
Old matter’s liturgy, a pregnant world
Out of whose star-of-Bethlehem arose
A Roman hyacinth, sweet-olive of the snows.”

In the library I found two other collections by Middleton, both published by Louisiana State University Press – The Burning Fields (1991) and The Habitual Peacefulness of Gruchy: Poems After Pictures by Jean-François Millet (2005). That latter is a beautiful piece of book design, with a reproduction of Millet’s “Little Goose Girl” on the cover. To Helen I owe my discovery of yet another good poet. Here is “Epigram,” her contribution to A Garland for John Finlay:

“And Who is God? The Is of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob, self-begun I Am,
Actual source of act, to-be of being?
Or Eros, fluent in our veins, decreeing
Action and passion, will, truth or its sham?
`Love’’s ambiguities prevent our seeing.”

`He Couldn't Keep a Book He Loved'

The publisher of my first newspaper wasn’t much of a reader but when he discovered I was, he gave me a beat-up paperback copy of A.J. Liebling’s The Sweet Science. He told me, emphatically, it was a “good book.” A printer at another newspaper where I worked visited the Soviet Union with his wife, and as a souvenir brought me a volume of Tolstoy’s stories – in Russian, a language I don’t read.

When I worked as features writer and jazz critic for yet another newspaper, I would often see an editor who had retired from the same paper at local jazz clubs. He liked my work, said it reminded him of Joseph Mitchell’s, and gave me a battered copy of McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon.

The informal tradition continues. My boss is the executrix of a friend’s estate. He was a professional photographer who collected books, one of which my boss gave me last week – an edition of Robert Burns’ poems published by Collins in 1962. The cover is a bright red tartan. The book is thick with post-it notes scrawled with the previous owner’s annotations, most of them illegible. On my shelves, it’s my most conspicuous book.

I’ve always enjoyed giving away books, especially those I value, to likely appreciative readers. Most of mine were previously owned. I like thinking of myself as a book’s steward or caretaker, not its owner, or at least not for long, and try to imagine each volume’s “genealogy,” its chain of stewardship, past and future.

As a writer for The New Yorker, John McNulty (1895-1956) specialized in what Harold Ross called “low life,” in particular the denizens of Third Avenue in Manhattan. My copy of The World of John McNulty, a Dolphin Books paperback from 1961, includes an “appreciation” by McNulty’s friend James Thurber, who writes:

“A few years before he died he gave me his precious copy of Mencken’s The American Language, saying, `This is the book I love the most.’ Mencken once spoke to me, in the Algonquin lobby, in praise of McNulty and his handling of the people and the parlance of Third Avenue, and I remember how McNulty’s face lighted up when I told him about it. He had a lot of favorite books, including the Oxford English Dictionary, which he read as if it were a novel, filled with wonders and suspense. There must be many of us who have books that McNulty once owned. `He couldn’t keep a book he loved,’ Faith McNulty [the writer’s widow, also a New Yorker writer] told me the other day. `He wasn’t happy until he had given it to some friend.’”

`Yes: Weeds'

Flourishing in the drought in empty lots and along the sides of roads are black-eyed susans, one of the first flowers I learned to identify as a kid. Their colors are autumnal, like marigolds, but any color is welcome when green bleaches to brown in the sun.

The Latin name, Rudbeckia hirta, is a history/botany/etymology lesson. The genus honors Olof Rudbeck the Younger (1660-1740), Swedish botanist and ornithologist, and his father, Olaus Rudbeck (1630-1702), the polymathic linguist, astronomer and professor of medicine. The genus was given its name by Olof’s student, Carol Linnaeus, deviser of binomial nomenclature.

The species name is from the Latin hirsutus, “rough, shaggy, bristly,” the root of our “hirsute.” The stems and leaves of the black-eyed susan are covered with coarse hairs called “trichomes” (from the Greek trikhoma, “growth of hair”). The flower’s “eyes” are not black but brown, even purplish when rubbed on the skin, as we did as kids making war paint. Dave Lull alerted me to an excerpt from Richard Mabey's Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants published recently in the Wall Street Journal:

“Houston has its own high puritan criteria. In that space-age city, bylaws have made illegal `the existence of weeds, brush, rubbish and all other objectionable, unsightly and unsanitary matter of whatever nature covering or partly covering the surface of any lots or parcels of real estate.’ In this litany of dereliction weeds are defined as `any uncultivated vegetable growth taller than nine inches’—which makes about two-thirds of the indigenous flora of the entire country illegal in a Houston yard.”

Offhand, I can’t think of a single plant, weed or otherwise, I want to see criminalized, except Brussels sprouts. I like Louise Bogan’s endorsement of weeds in “The Sudden Marigolds” (A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan, 2005):

“What was the matter with me, that daisies and buttercups made hardly any impression at all…As a matter of fact, it was weeds that I felt closest to and happiest about; and there were more flowering weeds, in those days, than flowers in gardens…Yes: weeds: jill-over-the-ground and tansy and the exquisite chicory (in the terrains vagues) and a few wild flowers: lady’s slipper and the arbutus my mother showed me how to find, under the snow, as far back as Norwich. Solomon’s seal and Indian pipe. Ferns. Apple blossoms.”

`Slightly Draped with Weeds'

In the last of his many books, The March of Literature, published less than a year before his death in 1939, Ford Madox Ford writes of Samuel Johnson:

“This was a man who loved truth and the expression of truth with a passion that when he spoke resembled epilepsy and when he meditated was an agony. It does not need Boswell to tell us that; the fact shines in every word he wrote, coming up through his Latinisms as swans emerge, slightly draped with weeds, from beneath the surface of a duck pond. His very intolerances are merely rougher truths; they render him the more human – and the more humane.”

In his Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, I began to notice how often Johnson judges the accomplishments of poets, their worth as men and writers, by their allegiance to truth. He writes of Dryden: “Subtility and harmony united are still feeble, when opposed to truth.” Of Pope: “The heart naturally loves truth.” Of Cowley: “The basis of all excellence is truth: he that professes love ought to feel its power.” Of Swift: “Wit can stand its ground against Truth only a little while.” Of Milton: “Truth allows no choice.” And of Congreve:

“Falsehoods of convenience or vanity, falsehoods from which no evil immediately visible ensues, except the general degradation of human testimony, are very lightly uttered, and once uttered are sullenly supported.”

Ford was a renowned fabulator, not always a reliable chronicler of his own life and times. He describes The March of Literature in his introduction as “the book of an old man mad about writing—in the sense that Hokusai called himself an old man mad about painting.” He wishes to induce readers “to taste the pleasure that comes from always more and more reading.” In short, he is an enthusiast for the best books and describes Johnson’s Lives as “a mountain of good reading; his vast common sense outweighs with its pronouncements any harm his more prejudicial moods and wrong-headednesses may in their day have caused.”

A reader has sent me a link to a remarkably flippant essay by a contemporary American poet who denies poetry’s capacity for expressing truth. Language, she says, is a sort of trap for the feeble-minded. She pities those of us naïve enough to search for truth and celebrate its occasional expression. She’s an academic, of course, a professor of English who willingly, gutlessly surrenders her humanity. Johnson knew her type three centuries ago: He writes in The Rambler #150:

“Truth is scarcely to be heard but by those from whom it can serve no interest to conceal it.”

`We Can Understand His Freaks and Foibles'

“Some people are flower lovers.
I’m a weed lover.”

The opening lines of “Weeds” (Sea to the West, 1981) might serve as Norman Nicholson’s poetic manifesto. Like weeds, his poems possess a homely beauty unnoticed or scorned by many. He was a weed of sorts, never cultivated but sturdy and deeply rooted. Born in 1914 in the iron-mining town of Millom, on the edge of the Lake District in Cumbria, he lived in the same Victorian house all his life but for several years spent in a tuberculosis sanatorium as a teenager. He died in 1987.

This post by Stephen Pentz at First Known When Lost introduced me to Nicholson. His poems, like his muttonchops, are somewhat old-fashioned and eccentric, but admirably so. One senses he wrote not for fame, not to take his place in literary history, but because he had little choice in the matter. He did the work he had to do. In this, and in other ways, he resembles another weed-poet, William Cowper (1731-1800), also happily provincial, who lived most of his life in Olney. Nicholson was aware of the affinity. In 1951 he published William Cowper, a study of his great precursor, and in 1975 edited A Choice of Cowper's Verse. Included in his 1948 collection, Rock Face, is “Cowper”:

“He walked among the alders. Birds flew down,
And water voles watched by the river shore.
A mist hummed on his eyelids, blurred and brown—
The self-sequestered with himself at war.

“The bright psalms were his banners: Sion, Ind,
Siloam, rang like horns down Joshua’s plain.
At noon the thunder rambled from his mind—
He felt the sun beneath the Olney rain.”

Nicholson tactfully hints at Cowper’s bouts of madness without romanticizing them. The alders might refer to this stanza from Cowper’s “The Shrubbery,” which makes his mental anguish explicit:

“This glassy stream, that spreading pine,
Those alders quiv'ring to the breeze,
Might sooth a soul less hurt than mine,
And please, if any thing could please.”

The “bright psalms” could be Cowper’s poems or "The Olney Hymns" he wrote with John Newton. In one of them, “Joy and Peace in Believing,” Cowper writes:

“When comforts are declining,
He grants the soul again
A season of clear shining,
To cheer it after rain.”

Cowper and Nicholson were serious Christians. Both reveled in nature and the English landscape. Neither was a theorist. Despite his depression, sometimes suicidal, Cowper’s poetry, Nicholson writes, is “largely the poetry of pleasure.” Again, the same might be said of Nicholson’s work. The final paragraph of his William Cowper reads like autobiography:

“His was a strange life and a strange personality; witty, and yet warped; warm-hearted, impulsive, and yet timid and reserved; sociable, and yet solitary; sympathetic, tolerant, understanding, and yet bigoted; gay and yet pathetic; endearing and lovable and yet never receiving all the love he needed…Not even Chekov, carefully selecting significant trivia, could tell us more about his characters than Cowper tells about himself in a chance remark on a hat or cat, a chair or a hare. Strange as he was, most poets are strangers compared with him. His very oddness is so companionable that we can understand his freaks and foibles better than we can understand the normal actions of saner men.”

`What Any Man Can Write, Surely I May Read'

E.V. Lucas (1868-1938) was a remarkably industrious English writer and publisher, little remembered, who wrote and edited more than one-hundred books on subjects as various as cricket, Cowper, Constable and Charles Lamb. He published the first substantial biography of Lamb (1905), edited the seven-volume Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (1903-1905) and the three-volume Letters of Charles Lamb, to Which Are Added Those of His Sister Mary Lamb (1935), and on the centenary of Lamb’s death in 1934 published the charming At the Shrine of St. Charles (1934). On Thursday, library serendipity led me to a previously unknown Lamb/Lucas collaboration, The Charles Lamb Day Book (1925).

The format is simple: for each day of the year Lucas selects one or two passages from Lamb’s essays, reviews, poems or letters, and gives them a page and a title. Collecting the contents must have been almost effortless, and not only because Lucas was a scholar of his subject. Who in English, after Shakespeare, Milton, Johnson and the King James Bible, is so prolifically quotable as Lamb? Take today’s entry, July 22 (the only dog-eared page in the volume). The first passage is from a letter Lamb wrote to William Wordsworth on March 20, 1822:

“I had thought in a green old age (oh, green thought!) to have retired to Ponder's End,--emblematic name, how beautiful!,--in the Ware Road, there to have made up my accounts with Heaven and the Company, toddling about between it and Cheshunt, anon stretching, on some fine Izaak Walton morning, to Hoddesdon or Amwell, careless as a beggar; but walking, walking ever, till I fairly walked myself off my legs,--dying walking!”

One wonders what the notably humorless Wordsworth made of Lamb’s linguistic shenanigans. You can hear Lamb riffing on a theme, gratuitously embellishing when it pleases him (like Art Tatum), carried along by friendship, ebullience and bottomless verbal imagination. The same inspired silliness is evident in Lucas’ other selection for July 22, from another letter to Wordsworth, written Aug. 9, 1815:

“Did you ever read Charron on Wisdom? or Patrick’s Pilgrim? if neither, you have two great pleasures to come. I mean some day to attack Caryl on Job, six Folios. What any man can write, surely I may read.”

I can’t explain why I find this so funny, especially with Wordsworth as the recipient, except that I’ve known the sort of overweening pedant who would ask if you know Charron on Wisdom, and feign pity and chagrin when you admitted your ignorance. (Go here to learn that Charron, a follower of Montaigne, was “one of the twenty-five children of a bookseller.”) The rest of Lamb’s letter, not excerpted by Lucas, gets even sillier:

“If I do get rid of auditing Warehousekeepers Accts. and get no worse-harrassing task in the place of it, what a Lord of Liberty I shall be. I shall dance and skip and make mouths at the invisible event, and pick the thorns out of my pillow and throw ’em at rich men’s night caps, and talk blank verse, hoity toity, and sing `A Clerk I was in London Gay,’ ban, ban, Ca-Caliban, like the emancipated monster, and go where I like, up this street or down that alley. Adieu, and pray that it may be my luck. God be to you all.”

A reader has asked why I’m so fond of Lamb, why I share my affections for him with Dr. Johnson, when clearly he’s not so serious or important a writer. I’m under no obligation to be consistent in my bookish tastes, and feel no need to apologize for loving Tolstoy and P.G. Wodehouse, Yvor Winters and Kay Ryan. There’s no explaining affinity. In his preface to The Charles Lamb Day Book, Lucas writes (approvingly):

“Lamb belonged externally very little to his own time. He cared nothing for politics or public events, although he was not sorry when the death of a royal personage gave him a holiday. He preferred, as he put it, to `write for antiquity.’”

`A Great Wonder and a Great Order'

An eighth-grader attending a summer robotics camp down the hall from my office told me he’s “passionate about building stuff,” and I believed him. Some kids parrot what they think you want to hear. They learned early that a mingling of confabulation and flattery – bullshitting – can be useful when dealing with credulous elders. This kid was too nervous, too obviously still in love with Legos to be lying, I think. In her essay on “Writing” in Personal Pleasures (1936), Rose Macaulay asks:

“Wherein lies its charm? Mainly, I believe, in arranging words in patterns, as if they were bricks, or flowers, or lumps of paint.”

We might be rechristened Homo faber (or Homo ludens). Some of us are happiest and truest to our nature when “building stuff,” whether blog posts, flower gardens, pico de gallo, watercolors, jokes or robots. Romancing disorder and nothingness is a contemporary fancy, a sterile, unnatural aberration. Humans make things. In “Lying” (Collected Poems, 1943–2004), Richard Wilbur begins with an inconsequential lie, another human creation, told at a party. The poem is complex but fluid, a web of doglegs and digressions, modeling the mind’s machinations. The speaker says:

“In the strict sense, of course,

We invent nothing, merely bearing witness

To what each morning brings again to light.”

In opposition is nothingness, so seductive to some. The speaker counters “…that more rare conception, nothing. / What is it, after all, but something missed?” Wilbur silently evokes Milton and his “arch-negator, sprung / From Hell to probe with intellectual sight” – Satan. The italicized “black mist low creeping” is from Book IX of Paradise Lost, in which Satan enters the serpent, tempts Eve into eating the apple and Adam does the same:

“So saying, through each Thicket Danck or Drie,
Like a black mist low creeping, he held on
His midnight search, where soonest he might finde
The Serpent…”

“Lying” here modulates into a meditation on metaphor – itself a metaphor for lying, for poetry, for creation: “Odd that a thing is most itself when likened.” In “Some Notes on `Lying’” (The Catbird Song: Prose Pieces 1963-1995), Wilbur writes of the poem:

“The poem assumes that the essential poetic act is the discovery of resemblance, the making of metaphor, and that, the world being one thing, all metaphor tends toward the truth.”

Lying is truth, which sounds Orwellian but is not, at least as a metaphor. In an interview, Wilbur says:

“The main thing that `Lying’ has to say is that we can't create another reality, because all things are inevitably part of the `cognate splendor’ of the original creation and its development. The busy-ness of the poem (Ralph Ellison once told me `Man, you are riffing in this one.’) consists of one metaphorical proof after another that all things are of one nature.”

“Lying,” he goes on to say, is “a bombardment of proofs that the world is one.” Asked by the interviewer if he is an optimist by nature, Wilbur replies:

“If an optimist is somebody who thinks everything will come out all right, I'm not. But, if it's optimistic to think that the world is fundamentally a great wonder and a great order, yes, I subscribe to those things.”

`However Painful or Ambiguous It May Appear to Be'

“I lost my pocket Homer, I lost my pistol, I lost one of my horses and, finally, I came very near losing my life by a wound which kept me five months on my back.”

The author of this colorful declaration is Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve (1831-1924), classicist, philologist, translator and Confederate veteran of the American Civil War. Through his role as soldier I learned of Gildersleeve in Helen (Pinkerton) Trimpi’s Crimson Confederates: Harvard Men Who Fought for the South (University of Tennessee Press, 2009).

Her book is an act of historical reclamation, a redressing of accounts. Nearly a century and a half after the events at Appomattox Courthouse, Harvard has never formally recognized its alumni who fought for the Southern cause. Pinkerton documents 357 “confirmed names” and lists another 120 she judges “possible.” In contrast, Memorial Hall on the Harvard campus was dedicated in 1874. On its twenty-eight marble tablets are inscribed the names of 136 alumni who died in the war on the Union side. As recently as 1996, a proposal to erect a plaque listing all of Harvard’s Civil War dead (including sixty-four Confederates) was withdrawn after strong opposition. Pinkerton calls her effort an act of “reconciliation,” a word she has used in connection with Herman Melville and the spirit of his Civil War poems in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War.

Crimson Confederates is notable for concision of language and breadth of research. The entries are arranged alphabetically, encyclopedia-fashion, in double columns. Pinkerton condenses lives, most of them obscure even to historians, into chronology, names and dates, and quoted material. Gildersleeve, for instance, was born in Charleston, S.C., son of a Presbyterian minister. “Taught by his father, he read in Greek the Gospel of St. John at age 5. He wrote later that he `virtually thought in Greek’ thereafter.” He graduated from Princeton in 1849, taught Greek and Latin in Richmond, and earned his Ph.D. at the University of Göttingen, Germany. In 1856 he published “The Necessity of the Classics”:

“Around the magic cadences of our existence, the twin eternities of the Hebrew faith and the Hellenic imagination have buried themselves inextricably, and the one can be as little dispensed with in art as the other in morals.”

Gildersleeve was a professor of Greek at the University of Virginia (1856-1876) when the Civil War started. Like his father and three brothers, he volunteered for service in August 1861, serving in the Army of Northern Virginia. He gives a vivid account of a classicist in military life in “A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War” (The Creed of the Old South, 1915):

“When I was a student abroad, American novices used to be asked in jest, `Is this your first ruin?’ `Is this your first nightingale?’ I am not certain that I can place my first ruin or my first nightingale, but I can recall my first dead man on the battlefield.”

In September 1864, during the Shenandoah Valley Campaigns in Virginia, Gildersleeve was struck in the thigh bone by a bullet fired from a Spencer rifle. He recuperated for five months and walked with a limp for the rest of his life. Pinkerton writes:

“Gildersleeve saw a historical parallel of the Greek city states’ war to that of the American states, writing in Hellas and Hesperia (1909): `The period in which some of us lived most intensely, in which we lived on the highest level on which mortals can live, has its parallels with Thucydides, History of the War between the States.’ He also likened the loyalty of the Theban poet Pindar to his city state during the Persian wars to his own loyalty to [Virginia].”

In 1876, Gildersleeve became the first faculty member at the newly founded Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He set up the first program of classical studies at the graduate level in the United States, founded and edited the American Journal of Philology, and co-founded the American Philological Association. He received honorary degrees from Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge and six other universities, and died of pneumonia in 1924.

Gildersleeve’s story will offend some readers, as will the other lives chronicled by Pinkerton. Some will question her scholarly dedication to documenting a discredited “cause,” but this amounts to self-righteous myopia. Who is pure enough to feel superior to a man like Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve?

In her introduction, Pinkerton quotes the late Rev. Peter J. Gomes, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church at Harvard University. He was a renowned African-American preacher who argued in favor of memorializing Harvard’s Confederate dead, in a “spirit of reconciliation not with a wicked cause, but with young lives who once shared the ideals of the University but who died at one another’s hands in the most morally devastating of human conflicts, a civil war.” A university church, he said, “should strive to tell a larger truth…however painful or ambiguous it may appear to be.”

Some readers want nothing to do with ambiguity (another word for merely human), even in the history of their nation.

`Of Horrors That Happen So'

The book’s cover is an attractive shade of coppery brown, reminiscent of an old saddle, unblemished but for some fading on the spine. The leaf size is 7-7/16 by 4-7/8 inches, and its 272 pages have turned faintly brown but not brittle. Melville’s Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War was published Aug. 17, 1866, by Harper and Brothers, the New York house that had published Moby-Dick fifteen years earlier. The collection was never reprinted during Melville’s life. On Monday I read among the poems in the first edition of Battle-Pieces in the the Fondren Library’s Woodson Research Center at Rice University.

On the inside cover is an Ex Libris bookplate for George Frisbie Whicher (1889-1954), associate professor of English at Amherst College and author of This Was a Poet: A Critical Biography of Emily Dickinson (1938). On the facing page, “$8.50” is written in pencil, and this is stamped twice in purple ink: “From H.C. Clarke, Stationer, Book and Music Dealer, Vicksburg, Miss.” In 1866, Harper and Brothers had priced the book at $1.75.

See Published Poems, Volume 11 of The Writings of Herman Melville (Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 2009), for authoritative texts of Battle-Pieces, John Marr and Other Sailors (1888) and Timoleon Etc. (May 1891, in an edition of twenty-five copies. Melville died Sept. 28). The book’s nine-hundred forty pages are stuffed with annotations and textual history, including a two-hundred-page “Historical Note” by Hershel Parker, author of a two-volume biography of Melville. Parker writes:

“Basing `Lee in the Capitol’ on newspaper articles, Melville mythologized the man [Robert E. Lee] who had endured a public renunciation of military glory—something parallel to the grandeur of his own renunciation, for years now, of literary glory: informing the poem is Melville’s profound though covert identification with Lee.”

One of the editors of Published Poems, G. Thomas Tanselle, reports Battle-Pieces had a print run of 1,260 copies, compared with 3,000 to 4,500 for most of Melville’s earlier books with Harper and Brothers. In twenty years, only 471 copies were sold, “leaving the publisher with over 500 copies on hand (or more than half of the edition, after the review copies are taken out). The total income from sales amounted to about $537…not much more than half of the production costs.” Tanselle’s next sentence is grim:

“Of the 500 copies unsold in 1887, those still unbound were surely destroyed, and the 360 or so that were bound either went to a publisher’s trade sale for remaindering or were also destroyed.”

In its review of Battle-Pieces dated Sept. 26, 1866, the National Quarterly Review wrote:

“There is much more truth than poetry in this volume; the author is a sensible man with respectable literary talents, but not a poet.”

The sentiment is a common one. I’ve written before about Battle-Pieces and its centerpiece, “Lee in the Capitol,” and Helen Pinkerton, a poet and critical champion of Melville’s poetry. She is author of Melville's Confidence Men and American Politics in the 1850s (Archon Books, 1987) and Crimson Confederates: Harvard Men Who Fought for the South (University of Tennessee Press, 2009). Helen has encouraged me to reread and reevaluate Melville’s poetry, which is so often dismissed as a dilettantish afterthought or footnote to his prose accomplishment. Consider conventional critical wisdom when reading “The Apparition (A Retrospect)” and its chilling final stanza:

“So, then, Solidity’s a crust—
The core of fire below;
all may go well for many a year,
But who can think without a fear
Of horrors that happen so?”

Helen wrote me over the weekend:

“The Melville book took 10 years of my life, which I much enjoyed, traveling East to find the illustrations, and reading countless biographies of American politicians. Melville's mind I found almost endlessly fascinating, and reading about the period made it even more so. Today, we think we have political problems. We should try dealing with an issue of the magnitude of slavery. Melville grew intellectually enormously in pondering the problem. He also grew into a philosophical pessimist about human nature and a political conservative, which the current PC Melvillians refuse to recognize.”

`The Work of Seasons and of Hands Unseen'

If a garden implies order, the backyard is less garden than semi–domesticated nature. A post oak pruned for horizontal sprawl and shade grows from a hole in the wooden deck. Twenty feet to the northeast stands a loblolly pine, suggesting an oversized bottle brush. Along the vine-covered fence grow Southern wax-myrtle, parsley hawthorn, oleanders, papyrus, two palmettos with trunks like artichokes carved from wood, and two sego palms – few flowers and nothing edible by humans.

As I write, a grackle splashes in the bird bath, in the shade of the post oak. Twice a day the owner sows “critter food” on the grass, attracting squirrels, rats (now deceased) and dozens of birds. One morning last week, like a tableau vivant of Edward Hicks’ “Peaceable Kingdom,” eight species foraged at the same time on the ground and in the bird feeders -- mourning dove (most numerous), white-winged dove (“who-cooks-for-you”), blue jay, downy woodpecker, Carolina chickadee, robin (“cheerily, cheer-up, cheerio”), pine warbler and a female cardinal.

It’s my sort of garden – almost orderly, almost wild. In “The Garden” (New Collected Poems, 2009) Charles Tomlinson dismisses those who dismiss gardens as “merely the expression of a class / Masterful enough to enamel away / All signs of the labour that produced them.” Rubbish. All classes and most individuals love a garden. (Go here.) The one Tomlinson visits is in Gloucestershire, and it gives him another opportunity to slap the critics (of gardens, of poems):

“One must smile

At the irritability of critics, who

Impotent to produce, secrete over what they see

Their dislike or semi-assent, then blame

The thing they have tamed for being tame.” 

Tomlinson moves on to more important matters: 

“But today, see only how

Laden in leaves, the branchwork canopy—

Bough on bough, rearing a dense

Mobile architecture—shudders beneath its finery

In cool July.” 

The July coolness here in Houston is a Northern dream, but the “dense / Mobile architecture” is a transcription of what I see out the rear window and every weekday on campus, where the live oaks weave a canopy almost orderly, almost wild, “The work of seasons and of hands unseen / Tempering time.”

`With Sincere Regard'

Almost daily I request books from the Library Service Center at the Fondren Library, an off-campus facility designed, according to its website, “to shelve infrequently used library materials.” Normally the books I want arrive the following day and I claim them at the circulation desk. Most are older volumes, often with a punch card in the pocket at the back and a circulation sheet for stamping the return date. Some identify the school as The Rice Institute, a name formally changed to Rice University in 1960.

On Friday I picked up six books from the LSC written or edited by Yvor Winters: Twelve Poets of the Pacific (New Directions, 1937), Edwin Arlington Robinson (New Directions Books, 1946), Poets of the Pacific, Second Series (Stanford University Press, 1949), The Function of Criticism (Alan Swallow, 1957), The Poetry of J.V. Cunningham (Alan Swallow, 1961), Quest for Reality (The Swallow Press, 1969). The most recent date of circulation stamped in any of the volumes is 1992.  The Function of Criticism hasn’t left the library since 1973. The Cunningham volume is sixteen pages and a cardboard cover – “The Swallow Pamphlets Number 11” – and last circulated in 1985.

The books have the fragrance and gravitas of history. I didn’t look at them closely until I returned to my office, and was most curious about Twelve Poets of the Pacific, the earliest published gathering of the “Stanford School,” poets associated with Winters, many his students or former students. In it are six poems by Winters, thirteen by his wife Janet Lewis, twelve by Cunningham, the rest by Clayton Stafford, Howard Baker, Henry Ramsey, Achilles Holt, Barbara Gibbs, Don Stanford, James Atkinson, Richard Finnegan and Ann Stanford. On the title page is the New Directions colophon designed two years earlier by Heinz Henges.

Winters’ “Foreword” is characteristically pugnacious. In a book put out by the publisher of Ezra Pound, Winters writes:

“The aims of the group might fairly be summarized thus: in the matter of conception, clarity, as opposed to contemporary obscurantistic tendencies, or, to put it otherwise, the expression of the feeling in terms of the motive; in the matter of style, purity and freedom from mannerism, as distinct from the contemporary tendency to substitute mannerism for true originality.”

Winters even goes on to criticize some of the poets and poems he includes in the anthology. Holt is “beset with too great difficulty in generalization,” as Don Stanford is with “too great facility.” Baker “as a stylist is often clumsy to the point of maddening one.” Cunningham is “sometimes clever to shallowness,” though in the first sentence of his 1961 pamphlet, Winters calls Cunningham “the most consistently distinguished poet writing in English today.”

I was enjoying the pleasure of holding the book and marveling at the wonder of libraries when I opened the front cover and noticed an inscription written in a small, spidery but legible hand:

“To Professor and Mrs. Hardin Craig

from Yvor Winters, with sincere
regard. Stanford, 1937” 

Hardin Craig (1875-1968), I’ve learned, was a professor of English at Stanford University from 1928 (the year after Winters arrived as a graduate student) until he retired in 1942. He was a scholar of Renaissance literature, Shakespeare in particular, and his literary interests must have overlapped Winters’. He died the same year as Winters, in Houston, which may account for the signed copy of Twelve Poets of the Pacific being in the Fondren Library. Winters writes in the “Foreword”: 

“It would be easy to point to imperfect achievement of these aims in the book; but too perfect an achievement of them might fairly be suspect, for life is difficult to understand and the irrelevancies of personality are insistent and are but imperfectly amenable to discipline. Let us say that we have sought in the main, and to the best of our abilities, to correct our weaknesses instead of to cultivate them.”

'I Am in Love with This Green Earth'

Walking from the library back to my office, in the flickering shade of the live oaks, I thought about something a reader had written to me concerning Charles Lamb:

“It turns out that Lamb had in many ways a vexing life (again, few of us have a mad sister who knifes our mother to death). Lamb had to go to work at age fourteen. He labored up to ten hours a day for six days a week for thirty-six years. He worked in a counting house. He didn’t like the job. He explains all about his job in his essay `The Superannuated Man.’ I love the way this essay ends. Lamb was also an alcoholic.”

Yes, he was, but not in the familiar literary mold of John Berryman or Malcolm Lowry. As writer and man, Lamb was a charming, witty, frequently beneficent drunk, almost saintly in his devotion to Mad Mary Lamb. History has pegged him a humorist, and his essays and letters, even through the scrim of Elia, and largely because of the inspired unruliness of his language (“whim-whams” he called his archaisms and digressions), can make a twenty-first-century sophisticate laugh out loud. But almost always, even at his silliest and most pun-ridden, his words are suffused with the grimness of the indelibly funny. In this, he reminds us of a writer he much admired, Laurence Sterne. In “Confessions of a Drunkard,” included by my reader in his email, Lamb writes:

“Life itself, my waking life, has much of the confusion, the trouble, and obscure perplexity, of an ill dream. In the day time I stumble upon dark mountains.”

The metaphor mutes the melancholy. Had he written, “My life is terrible,” who would care? Who would wish to read it? The same is true of another essay, “New Year’s Eve.” It starts as a folksy look at the holiday, already associated two centuries ago with revelry, and modulates into a meditation on mortality:

“I am naturally, beforehand, shy of novelties; new books, new faces, new years,--from some mental twist which makes it difficult in me to face the prospective. I have almost ceased to hope; and am sanguine only in the prospects of other (former) years.”

Sensing that he skirts middle-aged self-pity, Lamb responds with a gesture of gratitude, celebrating the coming of the New Year:

“I am in love with this green earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets. I would set up my tabernacle here.”

This back and forth, give and take, is typical of Lamb. His wavering lends the essays certainty. We must accept the whole man, contemptible and admirable, Jeremiah and joker, as we accept the world. He writes in the following paragraph:

“Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself -- do these things go out with life?”

`The Voluptuary Taxonomists of Literature'

“…there are other readers too, beautiful amateurs and skillful collectors of books, persons whose reading is wider than it is profound and more guided by love of adventure than by accepted critical opinion. These readers are almost completely immune to the fevers of contemporary fashions in reading, though they enjoy good new work equally with the older when they are certain they have found it.”

This is written by Fred Chappell, last of the great American men of letters – novelist, superb poet, critic and North Carolina raconteur – in “The Function of the Poet,” collected in Plowing Naked: Selected Writings on Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 1993). With a little revision, mostly pronouns, I’d like to have Chappell’s epitaph chiseled on my headstone.

He taxonomizes the sort of reader I am, for better (“beautiful amateurs”) or worse (“wider than it is profound”) – the sort who used to be called common readers, who have evolved into uncommon common readers, an always rare and now endangered species. That’s it: a reader “guided by love of adventure,” which calls for resourcefulness, a taste for the unknown and willingness to take risks. Perhaps the best way to clarify how I understand Chappell’s notion of the adventuresome reader is to catalog the books I’m reading, whether dutifully, line by line, cover to cover, or skimming for the useful bits. Besides Chappell’s essay/review collection, they include:

Crimson Confederates: Harvard Men Who Fought for the South, by Helen (Pinkerton) Trimpi (University of Tennessee Press, 2009).

The Tennessee, by Donald Davidson (two volumes, Rinehart & Company, 1946).

New Collected Poems, by Charles Tomlinson (Carcanet Press, 2009).

Dragonflies through Binoculars: A Field Guide to Dragonflies of North America, by Sidney W. Dunkle (Oxford University Press, 2000).

Deeply Dug In, by R.L. Barth (University of New Mexico Press, 2003).

Ode to the Sea and Other Poems, by Howard Baker (Alan Swallow, 1966).

And some others. From the last volume cited, here’s a sonnet titled “Dr. Johnson,” who advised Boswell “to have as many books about me as I could”:

“With what imperious `Sir!’ he devastated
Coherences relieved of miracles,
I do not know; nor how he demonstrated
That cornered doubters wore the stripe of trulls.
But that after all the hue and cry is done,
Though his the victory who defends the name
Of the Immortal Soul, what has he won?
Death not more lightly shakes the mortal frame.

“Like him we stand, watching a smoky sky.
The eye loosens, blurring with darkness, haunted
By memory of faces; syllables die
Along the draft, and the heaving blood is daunted
In a blue chill on flesh. No other terms,
We are all Boswells harkening the worms.”

If my bookish hunger were less unruly, if my immunity to “the fevers of contemporary fashions in reading” were compromised, if I read faddishly or out of guilt or self-aggrandizement, I might never have discovered Baker’s tribute to a formidable reader whom Terry Teachout recently called “my hero.” (Mine too.) Chappell goes on about his “beautiful amateurs”:

“These are the voluptuary taxonomists of literature. They read for pleasure, and the pleasure of reading has become so keen for them that they are eager but patient to discriminate, to enjoy as much as possible of every sort of literature, not merely the so-called respectable sort. They are able to immerse themselves in reading so earnestly, so longingly, that their experience of books is the best part of their experience of life, and finally these two experiences are joined as one, life and literature commenting upon one another at equal length and with equal authority.”

`Pilots Who Are Their Own Craft'

Dozens of dragonflies are flitting about the engineering quadrangle when I arrive in the morning. The sun is still low but already blinding. Light glints off wings and abdomens, turning them into harmless (to humans) tracer bullets ricocheting over the grass. I wanted to identify the species and understand the frenzy so I contacted the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and got an answer from assistant professor Volker Rudolf:

“I'd guess they are Pantala flavescens, the Wandering Glider. They form migrating swarms this time of the year. They are indeed feeding, and this is when they are migrating and laying eggs in puddles & ponds. As an interesting side note, this species occurs worldwide and in some parts of the world they engage in the longest migration of any insect. The monarch [butterfly] travels a maximum distance of about 3,000 miles. Pantala travels 11,000 miles across the Indian Ocean from India to South West Africa, twice a year.”

Strength and beauty linked is always impressive, in insect or poem. Pantala is the Ur-dragonfly, a perfect killer, so well-adapted it has colonized the world. The authors of the magisterial Dragonflies of North America (Scientific Publishers, rev. ed. 2000) bluntly call Pantala flavescens “The one cosmopolitan dragonfly.” In Dragonflies through Binoculars: A Field Guide to Dragonflies of North America (Oxford University Press, 2000), Sidney W. Dunkle writes:

“The world’s most evolved dragonfly, it drifts with the wind as it feeds on aerial plankton until an air mass of different temperature produces the rain pools in which it breeds. Over the ocean they fly day and night for thousands of miles…It is the only dragonfly found around the world, breeding on every continent except Europe. On many oceanic islands, such as Easter Island, it is the only dragonfly.”

In “September Swamp” (The Door in the Wall, 1992), Charles Tomlinson refers with memorable precision to the “swift, aerial transaction” of dragonflies, and says “All movement is below, save for the blue / Crackle of the dragonflies through static air.” I remember sitting at the end of a dock on a lake in northern Ohio, fishing and listening to the buzz of dragonflies – “crackle” is a better word, reinforced by “static” – as they investigated the rod, the line and me. It was an intimate sound, less like the public drone of cicadas than the private purr of a cat. In Cracks in the Universe (2006), Tomlinson includes “Dragonflies”:

“Dragonflies
flock to this garden
like swallows in autumn
(it is high summer):
such glamour
in predation, scissor-jawed
and single-minded,
they radar their way
past obstacles,
flying in formation,
pilots who are their own craft,
speed their sole stratagem:
cold that means death to them
makes them begin
to disappear just as the dark
comes cooling in.”

Tomlinson confirms my first impression of the dragonflies in the quad -- they resemble swallows, dipping and diving as they harvest airborne meals. “Radar” works for bats, not dragonflies, but I like “pilots who are their own craft, / speed their sole stratagem.” I can’t imagine catching a dragonfly in flight with my hands, or grasping a good poem after the first read.

[For another post on dragonflies and a good poem about them, go here.]

`The Sheer Accumulation of Delicious Stuff'

The most moving recent poem I know, the title poem from For Louis Pasteur (1989) by Edgar Bowers, is concise and measured in its formulation of anger, praise and love. It closes with these lines:

“I like to think of Pasteur in Elysium
Beneath the sunny pine of ripe Provence
Tenderly raising black sheep, butterflies,
Silkworms, and a new culture, for delight,
Teaching his daughter to use a microscope
And musing through a wonder—sacred passion,
Practice and metaphysic all the same.
And, each year, honor three births: Valéry,
Humbling his pride by trying to write well,
Mozart, who lives still, keeping my attention
Repeatedly outside the reach of pride,
And him whose mark I witness as a trust.
Others he saves but could not save himself—
Socrates, Galen, Hippocrates—the spirit
Fastened by love upon the human cross.”

The poem starts in disgust, with the epigraph -- “‘Who is Apollo?’ College student” – but doesn’t settle for yet another censure of appalling ignorance. “A new culture” is witty. “Musing through a wonder” – the scientist’s essential capacity for curiosity and contemplation. “Practice and metaphysic all the same” – action as sacrament, “sacred passion.” Bowers honors his heroes – note the repetition of “pride” – each a teacher by example. Pasteur teaches his daughter to use a microscope “for delight.” Educate, from educere – “bring out, lead forth.” An educator leads the teachable out of ignorance.

I reread Bowers’ poem after reading Dick Davis’ “A Qasideh for Edgar Bowers on His Seventieth Birthday” (Touchwood, 1996). Besides being a poet, Davis is professor of Persian at Ohio State University, and has translated much poetry and prose from that language. In a note, he defines qasideh as “a praise poem, conventionally in four unequal sections.” Never in the strict sense his teacher, Bowers was Davis’ mentor and friend, whose life and work served as exemplum. In the third section, “Madh” (“praise”), Davis writes of Bowers:

“A dear companion with an eye and ear
For all that’s complex, marvellous, austere
Or simply filed with an unruly charm—
Whatever will delight and do no harm.
I could not list the things you’ve taught me here,
The music, painting, poems, prose—the sheer
Accumulation of delicious stuff
That’s in my head because you cared enough
To pass it on—nor could I list the ways
Your casual kindness constantly outweighs
The claims of friendship. Knowing you has been
(And may it be for years yet unseen),
To steal a phrase, a liberal education,
A cause for gratitude and celebration.”

Note the qualities Davis associates with teaching, with “all the things you’ve taught me here” – delight, care, kindness, generosity. Teachers formal and informal, acknowledged and implied, have graced my life with similar gifts. Davis closes “Madh” with praise for Bowers’ most recent poems (circa 1994, the year he turned seventy). His final line is the final line of “For Louis Pasteur”:

“…your latest verses
Whose unobtrusive, faultless skill rehearses
Our species’ exaltation, need and loss
`Fastened by love upon the human cross.’”

`Touchwood'

Dick Davis prefaces his 1996 collection Touchwood with a definition of the title word: “decayed wood…used as tinder.” A close synonym might be “punk,” another sort of kindling. The Oxford English Dictionary elaborates: “Wood or anything of woody nature, in such a state as to catch fire readily, and which can be used as tinder.” The word has an impressive pedigree, with the OED citing uses by John Lyly (1578), Sir Thomas Browne (1646) and Thomas Hardy (1887), but my favorite is from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621):

“As a match or touchwood takes fire, so doth an idle person loue [love].”

Burton uses the word in a rather steamy chapter (“adultery, incest, sodomy, buggery”) devoted to “Causes of Love-Melancholy” and attributes the simile to Aristotle in his Politics. The dictionary goes on to cite a figurative use of the word:

“Said of a thing or person that easily ‘takes fire’, or which, like tinder, ‘kindles’ something else…esp. an irascible or passionate person, one easily incensed. Now rare.”

Davis draws on both senses in “Touchwood”:

“Quirks of lost childhood give
The fears by which we live,
And look – identity
Is like this twisted tree
The lightning struck at there,
Till for a dry, warm lair
The woodlice entered it:
In secret, bit by bit,
They make a mealy bin
Of touchwood sealed within.”

A long-forgotten slight or other thoughtless act, intentional or otherwise, might wound us so deeply it remains “sealed within” and deforms our personalities. “The fears by which we live” become the fuel firing our pettiness and rage. All true, but my first reaction to the poem was more benign, in part because of the photograph reproduced on the cover of the Anvil Press Poetry edition I’m reading. It shows a cross-section of a tree trunk, exposing the annual growth rings. The credit identifies the photographer as Maurice Nimmo and titles the picture “Tree Rings of Larix decidua, European larch.” It reveals no touchwood but the asymmetry of the rings is lovely. They billow to the left in the photo, like solar flares bulging from the surface of the sun. Whatever caused the asymmetry – uneven distribution of moisture? – distorted even the external shape of the larch’s trunk. It’s pear-like, not round.

Whatever the stimulus, the result is aesthetically pleasing. Might not a “twisted tree” – or human personality – produce something quite beautiful and unprecedented, like a poem?

`What, in the Beginning, We Are Not'

Among my readers is a retired English professor in his eighties who lives in Wisconsin. His health is a challenge and lately he’s lived with skin cancer, neuropathy in his feet and a knee replacement. He can no longer drive a car but this is the man who reads, on alternate nights, a Shakespeare sonnet and something from Keats’ letters. I should note that on top of the armoire across from my bed stand, left to right, three volumes of Shakespeare, Ronald Knox’s Enthusiasm, Boswell’s Johnson, and two volumes of Keats’ letters. Dave Lull writes of our friend:

“He's still as interested in ideas and literature as he's ever been, though he said again that he's reading few new books (mostly those of a few favorite crime fiction writers) and is doing a lot of re-reading.”

But for the crime fiction, Dave could be describing me. The blinkered may indulge in pity for the retired professor, for the narrowing of his life, but that would be foolish and condescending. Books don’t heal, but they do sustain. Can the same be said of television or video games? James V. Schall, S.J., writes in The Life of the Mind: On the Joys and Travails of Thinking (2006):

“We need to surround ourselves with books because we are and ought to be curious about reality, about what is. The universe is not of our own making. Yet it is all right for us to be what we are, because the universe is potentially ours through our knowledge. In knowing, we become the other, become what we are not, as Aquinas taught. But in doing so, in coming to know, we do not change what it is that we know. We change ourselves. Our very intellectual being is intended to become what, in the beginning, we are not.”

Schall is eighty-three years old.

`Why Had Texas So Embraced Borges?'

In the July issue of Guernica, Eric Benson documents the long convergence of Texas and Jorge Luis Borges:

“There was at least one place, I would discover, where that `instant’ of Borges persisted, a land where Borges lived on as both Borges and `I,’ legend and life. That place is Texas. Starting in 1961, Borges made five visits to the state—first, to teach for a semester in Austin as a visiting professor; then to lecture on Cervantes and Whitman as a literary celebrity. When Borges died on June 14, 1986, the University of Texas’s main campus lowered its flags to half-mast, a rare tribute for a writer and a perplexing honor for one without deep Texas roots. Why had Texas so embraced Borges? And why had Borges continued to return there throughout the final twenty-five years of his life?”

`She May Let Them Hop Off By Themselves'

In 1822, John Clare sent Charles Lamb a copy of The Village Minstrel, and other Poems, the collection he had published the previous year. Lamb singled out “Recollections after a Ramble” for praise, and wrote to Clare in a letter dated Aug. 31:

“I thank you heartily for your present. I am an inveterate old Londoner, but while I am among your choice collections I seem to be native to them and free of the country. The quality of your observation has astonished me.”

Unlike his friends Coleridge and Wordsworth, who celebrated the beauties of rural England (sometimes absurdly, with little biological or historical understanding), Lamb lived all his life in London and its suburbs. Away from the city, he was restless and ill-at-ease. “I must have a prospect of seeing Fleet Street,” he wrote to his friend Thomas Manning in 1802.

Clare was Lamb’s sympathetic opposite. Born in Northamptonshire, he spent most of his life in the country (“I live here among the ignorant like a lost man”). One can’t imagine either man swapping places with the other.

I thought of Lamb’s letter while talking with a dinner guest, a woman in her sixties who was born in Houston and lived here all of her life. She’s a realtor, shrewd and charming in a distinctly Southern manner. She has traveled little outside of Texas and late in the conversation confessed to a dream harbored since childhood: “I want to spend a week in Paris. I want to see all the places I’ve only seen in pictures.”

Lamb left England only once, in 1822, when he visited Paris. He concludes his letter to Clare with these sentences:

“Since I saw you I have been in France, and have eaten frogs. The nicest little rabbity things you ever tasted. Do look about for them. Make Mrs. Clare pick off the hind-quarters, boil them plain, with parsley and butter. The fore-quarters are not so good. She may let them hop off by themselves.”