Sunday, August 11, 2024

'To Carry on With the Business of the Day'

Beware of “nature poetry.” It tends to be not about nature but the poet and his self-regarding epiphanies. Perhaps our finest nature poet is Yvor Winters. A basic understanding of biology is useful in discouraging pantheism and other forms of fashionable nature mysticism. 

We finally settled my brother in a Cleveland hospice and my nephew is keeping me updated. Next visit he’ll bring the Scrabble set, a game my brother loves, along with books of crossword puzzles. A little mental stimulation in a setting where the other patients are also dying couldn’t hurt. In The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets (ed. David Yezzi, 2009), I happened on what might be a nature poem by Deborah Warren, “A Simple Thing”:

 

“A branch that broke with the weight of the winter snow

went on with April, blooming anyway,

its death not having reached its hasty bud.

how simple—not to stop or think or know;

to answer a simple impulse with a drive

that assumes the sap as a habit in the blood;

to carry on with the business of the day

and eat the light and call itself alive.”

 

This has some of the tidiness of a covert syllogism. So much of life is momentum, persistence.

1 comment:

Harpo said...

For me, the poem by Mr. Frost conjoins ( how often may I use that word?:
When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloud. It was posted today on poem-a-day - occasionally, they choose real poets. It's called Acceptance - fitting word
And goes down burning into the gulf below,
No voice in nature is heard to cry aloud
At what has happened. Birds, at least, must know
It is the change to darkness in the sky.
Murmuring something quiet in its breast,
One bird begins to close a faded eye;
Or overtaken too far from its nest,
Hurrying low above the grove, some waif
Swoops just in time to his remembered tree.
At most he thinks or twitters softly, “Safe!
Now let the night be dark for all of me.
Let the night be too dark for me to see
Into the future. Let what will be be.”