'Well-known Types of Miracle'

It’s grim out there and getting grimmer. Two poems encountered on the same day delivered a touch of buoyancy. The first was originally written in Russian by Vladimir Nabokov on May 6, 1923: 

“No, life is no quivering quandary!

Here under the moon things are bright and dewy.

We are the caterpillars of angels; and sweet

It is to eat from the edge into the tender leaf.

 

“Dress yourself up in the thorns, crawl, bend, grow strong—

and the greedier was your green track,

the more velvety and splendid

the tails of your liberated wings.”

 

Nabokov was living in what turned out to be permanent exile. The Bolsheviks had seized Russia in a coup d’état. Lenin was busy murdering kulaks, among other innocents. The previous year, Nabokov’s father had been murdered, and he writes a touchingly hopeful poem. He suggests we may metamorphose into angels. The other poem is by John Wain from his 1961 collection Weep Before God (1961):

 

“This above all is precious and remarkable.

How we put ourselves in one another’s care,

How in spite of everything we trust each other.

 

“Fishermen at whatever point they are dipping and lifting

On the dark green swell they partly think of as home

Hear the gale warnings that fly to them like gulls.

 

“The scientists study the weather for love of studying it,

And not specially for love of the fishermen,

And the wireless engineers do the transmission for love of wireless,

 

“But how it adds up is that when the terrible white malice

Of the waves high as cliffs is let loose to seek a victim,

The fishermen are somewhere else and so not drowned.

 

“And why should this chain of miracles be easier to believe

Than that my darling should come to me as naturally

As she trusts a restaurant not to poison her?

 

“They are simply examples of well-known types of miracle,

The two of them,

That can happen at any time of the day or night.” 

 

Yes, people on occasion are capable of exercising the good, despite the barbarism flourishing around them. A decade or so ago I read Wain’s Sprightly Running: Part of an Autobiography, published in 1962. Later he would publish a good biography of his mentor, Dr. Johnson. In the memoir he describes his wartime years at Oxford:

 

“When I should have been running forward to embrace life, I was digging a fortification against it. With every reason for optimism, I became a stoical pessimist. Samuel Johnson was my favourite author, my moral hero; Boswell and The Rambler were constantly open on my table. Johnson reflected my mood exactly, because he put into dignified and resounding prose the sense of stoical resistance against hopeless odds.”

 

He continues:

 

“I would murmur to myself. As if they were lyrics poems, sombre fragments of his lay sermons. 'Life is everywhere a state in which there is much to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.’ [Rasselas, Chap. 11] 'So large a part of human life passes in a state contrary to our natural desires, that one of the principal topics in moral instruction is the art of bearing calamities.’ [The Rambler #32] But it was not his gloom alone that made Johnson a hero to me. It was his tragic gaiety.”

 

[The Nabokov poem is translated by Brian Boyd and Dmitri Nabokov, and collected in Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings (eds. Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle, Beacon Press, 2000).]