'To Seize the Greatness Not Yet Fairly Earned'

One of the pleasures of living in Houston for a native Northerner is witnessing the panic that ensues when temperatures drop and snow or freezing rain are forecast. People mob the stores, stockpiling bottled water and toilet paper. Businesses and even public libraries close prematurely. Lines at gas stations snake around the block, sparking memories of the Carter administration.

I’m careful about voicing nostalgia for snow. I know Texans who saw snow for the first time last year and remain traumatized by the memory, though about an inch fell and most of it had melted by the afternoon.

 

Meanwhile, our thoughts are elsewhere. We’re planning to build a garden in the backyard and have ordered native plants and even an olive tree. We want to attract butterflies and hummingbirds, who already visit the garden in front of the house. We’ll till new plots and put in tomatoes, beans, basil and flowers. Gardens mingle artifice and nature, with the best maintaining an uncertain balance. I don’t mind weeds among the herbs. The text for today’s sermon is “Time and the Garden” by Yvor Winters, which begins:

 

“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.”

 

Planning a garden encourages one to think beyond the moment. There’s a pleasant sense of anticipation.

 

“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.”

 

For Winters, a garden is at once real and metaphoric. Poets, too, even the greatest, mature with time and dedication:

 

“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.”

 

Winters died on this day, January 25, in 1968 at age sixty-seven.