'Sea-shell and Leaf Alike'

As the human world seems to grow more chaotic, as though entropy were finally triumphant, I look for evidence of pattern and design in nature and among writers I admire.

In his short story “The Bicycle Rider,” Guy Davenport arranges a still life evoking order, including two shells: “A glass jar of acorns. A nautilus shell. Shale slab with a fossil gingko leaf. A Greek coin from Metaponton in Sicily. A snail shell.” In the same story, Davenport writes: “Luck has nothing to do with happiness, which comes from rhythms, order, clarity.” In his poem “For Basil Bunting,” Davenport celebrates the spiral, which you will find everywhere if you take the time to look: 

“to be Greek as a curl

on a flat cheek

 

“the coil of white

the Ismene lily

 

“spirals, hound’s tail

when his nose is down

 

“snail shell, paper nautilus

wavetop scroll

 

“ear, weather, world

this shape of turning”

 

In his essay “Marianne Moore,” Davenport says the poet loved things “cunningly made.” See her poem “The Paper Nautilus.” Here is the opening sentence of his short story “The Dawn in Erewhon”:

 

“The Dutch philosopher Adriaan Floris van Hovendaal was arranging the objects on his table, a pinecone to remind him of Fibonacci, a snail’s shell to remind him of Ruskin, a drachma to remind him of Crete.”

 

Leonardo Bonacci of Pisa, better known as Fibonacci (c. 1170-c. 1250), lent his name to the sequence known as the Fibonacci numbers. Starting with 0 and 1, each number in the sequence is the sum of the previous two numbers. Thus: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, and so on. The ratio between each term and its predecessor approaches 1.618 . . ., the golden ratio, which appears commonly in nature and art.

 

The Fibonacci numbers suggest, at least to this non-mathematician, the presence of design principles in the universe, perhaps one of nature’s structural default modes. The notion, I know, appealed to Davenport, from whom I first learned of Fibonacci decades ago in “The Dawn of Erewhon”:

 

“The Fibonacci number following thirty-four is fifty-five. A set of thirty-four helix curves radiating from a common center clockwise crossing a set of fifty-five helix curves rotating counterclockwise from the same center gives the finely meshed honeybrown redgold spiral net panier of the Grote Zonnebloem, Helianthus annuus.

 

“Adriaan had one on his desk, others in a wicker basket at his feet. If one spiral is a rotation of thirteen helices, then the counterspiral is twenty-one. Fibonacci, both. And he [Fibonacci] had brought the ancient Indic naught, the Arabian number unoccupied by quantity, to be our zero.

 

“Fibonacci harmonies ran through the pinecone which he kept on his table, through the snail shell.”

 

Helianthus annuus is the sunflower, in which each floret is positioned toward the next at an angle of about 137.5 degrees, the golden angle. This produces the pattern of interconnecting spirals described by Davenport. Botanists speculate that the arrangement results in the most efficient packing of seeds.

Clearly, this pattern fascinated Davenport – and Marianne Moore, though she doesn’t name it. In her poem “The Pangolin,” she notices the creature’s skin with “scale / lapping scale with spruce-cone regularity.” In fact, the scales on cones are arranged in alternating spirals, like the sunflower, with the number of spirals always representing two adjoining numbers in the Fibonacci sequence – say, three and five, or eight and thirteen. Because Fibonacci numbers approximate irrational numbers, the scales do not line up precisely, and weaken the arrangement. There’s structural integrity in regular irregularity. Science overlaps with aesthetics. As Paul Valéry puts it in Sea Shells (1936, trans. Ralph Mannheim):

 

“Run off by the billions, each different from the rest (though the difference is sometimes imperceptible), they offer an infinite number of solutions to the most delicate problems of art, and of absolutely perfect answers to the questions they suggest to us.”

 

Another poet, Howard Nemerov, in “Figures of Thought” (Sentences, 1980), celebrates the patterns hiding in plain sight:

 

“To lay the logarithmic spiral on

Sea-shell and leaf alike, and see it fit,

To watch the same idea work itself out

In the fighter pilot’s steepening, tightening turn

Onto his target, setting up the kill,

And in the flight of certain wall-eyed bugs

Who cannot see to fly straight into death

But have to cast their sidelong glance at it

And come but cranking to the candle’s flame —

 

How secret that is, and how privileged

One feels to find the same necessity

Ciphered in forms diverse and otherwise

Without kinship — that is the beautiful

In Nature as in art, not obvious,

Not inaccessible, but just between.

 

It may diminish some our dry delight

To wonder if everything we are and do

Lies subject to some little law like that;

Hidden in nature, but not deeply so.”

 

[Davenport’s poem appears in Thasos and Ohio (North Point Press, 1986). His story “The Bicycle Rider” is collected The Jules Verne Steam Balloon (North Point Press, 1987). The Moore essay is in The Geography of the Imagination (North Point Press, 1981). “The Dawn in Erewhon” is collected in Davenport’s first story collection, Tatlin! (Charles Scribner’s Son, 1974).]

'Alive and Vivid'

“I believe that it behooves the living, for our own sake, to keep the memory of the dead alive and vivid . . .” 

That’s William Maxwell in 1980 when he received the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, given every five years for the most distinguished novel published during that period. For once, they got it right. Maxwell was honored for So Long, See You Tomorrow, his finest novel, published when he was seventy-eight. Here is the remainder of his sentence, so typical of Maxwell’s graciousness:

 

“. . . and so I would remind you now of Louise Bogan, or her ravishing formal poetry and her literary criticism, so free from intellectual display and so on target. Because of her encouragement at a critical period of my life I stopped being a full-time editor and went back to writing novels and I therefore have her to thank for the fact that I am standing where I am this minute.”

 

Bogan had died a decade earlier, on February 4, 1970, at age seventy-two. Maxwell’s obituary for her appeared in the February 7 issue of The New Yorker. He wrote of his friend:

 

“To say that she was one of the finest lyric poets of our time is hardly to do her justice; her best poems have an emotional depth and force and a perfection of form that owe very little to the age she lived in and are not likely to go out of style, being a matter of nobody’s style but her own. She was a handsome, direct, impressive, vulnerable woman. In whatever she wrote, the line of truth was exactly superimposed on the line of feeling.”

 

We’ve all heard funeral eulogies delivered by strangers to the deceased, collages of cliché, just as we’ve heard award-show acceptance speeches that amount to Olympic-class displays of ass-kissing. The most important thing in the Howells speech is a homely four-word phrase: “for our own sake.” We are diminished as men and women if we forget our dead.

 

Back in the seventies, at the first newspaper where I worked as a reporter, the first thing I wrote was an obituary for a farmer whose last name was Campbell. That’s all I remember but I’ve taken it as a sign. I was given my theme: “to keep the memory of the dead alive and vivid . . .” That goes for our personal dead and the writers whose memory we keep alive by reading their books.

'He Was Dull in a New Way'

“A dull country magistrate gave Johnson a long tedious account of his exercising his criminal jurisdiction, the result of which was his having sentenced four convicts to transportation. Johnson, in an agony of impatience to get rid of such a companion, exclaimed, ‘I heartily wish, Sir, that I were a fifth.’” 

Recently I endured the company of a descendant of Dr. Johnson’s tiresome judge, a person for whom storytelling was an excuse for holding his listeners hostage and torturing them. He reminded me of my father who, whenever we visited someone, on arrival promptly recited details of the route we had taken, including street names, landmarks and weather conditions. This abuse, endured throughout childhood, left me with a burning intolerance for bores, especially conversational bores. I wanted desperately to be a grownup so I wouldn’t have to be polite to such dullards.

 

Elsewhere in Boswell, Johnson says of Thomas Sheridan: “Why, Sir, Sherry is dull, naturally dull; but it must have taken him a great deal of pains to become what we now see him. Such an excess of stupidity, Sir, is not in Nature."

 

And another anecdote recounted by Boswell: “He attacked [the poet Thomas] Gray, calling him ‘a dull fellow.’ Boswell: ‘I understand he was reserved, and might appear dull in company; but surely he was not dull in poetry.’ Johnson: ‘Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him GREAT. He was a mechanical poet.’”

 

Johnson never uses the words we would apply to such people – bore, boring, boredom. Bore appears in his Dictionary as “the hole made by boring,” as in carpentry. His words are dull and dullness. The OED tells us the modern sense of the noun bore showed up in the nineteenth century and cites Benjamin Disraeli: “The true bore is that man who thinks the world is only interested in one subject, because he, himself, can only comprehend one.”

'The Document of Our Time'

Among my teachers when I was young was a man I never met. In fact, he had died several years before I enrolled in his school. Oscar Williams, born in Ukraine, died in New York City in 1964. He was a poet but I knew him strictly as an anthologist. Sorry to say, his poems are forgettable. Around 1966 I bought Immortal Poems of the English Language and, a little later, The Pocket Book of Modern Verse and A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry: English and American. That was how I learned the tradition of poetry in English. Anthologies get dismissed but thanks to Williams I read Wyatt and Jonson, Robinson and Auden. I started from zero, knowing nothing, and discovered the writers I loved. I remember falling for Karl Shapiro's war poems. Thanks to Williams, I learned the continuity of poetry in English. 

A Williams anthology I didn’t read was The War Poets: An Anthology of the War Poetry of the 20th Century (John Day Co., 1945). In his introduction, dated December 31, 1944, Williams writes: “The poet’s poem has always outlived the names of battles, generals and statesmen; our was poetry as a whole is perhaps the document of our time that will outlive all the rest.” That’s optimistic but World War II was months away from ending.

Williams divides his book into three sections: Great War poems, “Poems by the Men in the Armed Forces of England and America” and “War Poems by the Civilian Poets.” The poets in the second section are identified by their military rank. Sgt. William Abrahams (1909-98), a poet I had never heard of, is author of “Poem in Time of War,” which includes an unexpected Paul Valéry allusion. And there’s Lt. William Jay Smith’s “3 for 25,” which reminds me of the snapshots my father brought home from North Africa and France.

I’m still reading the book but I can recommend it for historical and literary reasons. Most of the good poems in the anthology I already knew. Some of the poets included by Williams had already been killed by the time of publication. Take Sub-lieutenant, Fleet Air Arm Gervase Stewart (1920-41). The blogger Richard Warren remembers him here.

Williams includes my favorite poem by Edwin Muir, “Reading in Time of War”:

“Boswell by my bed,

Tolstoy on my table;

Thought the world has bled

For four and a half years,

And wives' and mothers' tears

Collected would be able

To water a little field

Untouched by anger and blood,

A penitential yield

Somewhere in the world;

Though in each latitude

Armies like forest fall,

The iniquitous and the good

Head over heels hurled,

And confusion over all:

Boswell's turbulent friend

And his deafening verbal strife,

Ivan Ilych's death

Tell me more about life,

The meaning and the end

Of our familiar breath,

Both being personal,

Than all the carnage can,

Retrieve the shape of man,

Lost and anonymous,

Tell me wherever I look

That not one soul can die

Of this or any clan

Who is not one of us

And has a personal tie

Perhaps to someone now

Searching an ancient book,

Folk-tale or country song

In many and many a tongue,

To find the original face,

The individual soul,

The eye, the lip, the brow

For ever gone from their place,

And gather an image whole.”

'Green As an Arbour Grew Leafy June'

I had seen the phrase before and guessed correctly at its meaning from context but still found the expression puzzling: “widow’s weeds.” It entered English in the fifteenth century and is defined, according to the OED, as “the mourning clothes or weeds of a widow.”  Weeds in isolation meant “clothing customarily worn by a widow during a period of mourning for her spouse, and traditionally comprising a black or dark-coloured dress and a veil.” Pairing the words produced memorable alliteration. The phrase stands as evidence of a faded world, what Emerson called “fossil poetry.” I happened on the phrase again in a poem by Walter de la Mare, “A Widow’s Weeds” (Peacock Pie: A Book of Rhymes, 1913): 

“A poor old Widow in her weeds

Sowed her garden with wild-flower seeds;

Not too shallow, and not too deep,

And down came April -- drip -- drip -- drip.

Up shone May, like gold, and soon

Green as an arbour grew leafy June.

And now all summer she sits and sews

Where willow herb, comfrey, bugloss blows,

Teasle and pansy, meadowsweet,

Campion, toadflax, and rough hawksbit;

Brown bee orchis, and Peals of Bells;

Clover, burnet, and thyme she smells;

Like Oberon’s meadows her garden is

Drowsy from dawn to dusk with bees.

Weeps she never, but sometimes sighs,

And peeps at her garden with bright brown eyes;

And all she has is all she needs --

A poor Old Widow in her weeds.”

 

De la Mare plays off the dual meaning of weeds (and raises the question of what distinguishes a “weed” from a “flower”) and recalls Oberon’s floral catalogue as delivered to Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act II, Scene 1):  

 

“I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,

Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,

Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,

With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:

There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,

Lull'd in these flowers with dances and delight;

And there the snake throws her enamell'd skin,

Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in:

And with the juice of this I’ll streak her eyes,

And make her full of hateful fantasies.”

 

True poets, Seamus Heaney said somewhere, know the names of flowers.

'The Excitement of Entomological Exploration'

A pivot or lasting change of focus occurred to me as a teenager. For years, since probably late toddlerhood, I had thought of myself as a budding naturalist. Behind our house in suburban Cleveland were a creek, grassy fields and second-growth woods, including a dense stand of poplars, locust trees and sassafras. Blackberries grew everywhere. In and along the creek were crayfish, salamanders, frogs and water striders. Our backyard was, in effect, a bountiful museum of biodiversity, surrounded by heavy development. Insects thrived – yellow jackets and hornets, spittlebugs and mosquitoes, and, best of all, the order Lepidoptera, butterflies and moths. 

Cecropia moths favored the trunks of ash trees. We found luna moths and mourning cloaks. The first field was rich in milkweed, which attracted monarchs. Various species of swallowtails, painted ladies and fritillaries seemed drawn to blackberry and strawberry blossoms. I became a collector and a devoted reader of field guides.

 

Perhaps it was the arrival of puberty. I never lost complete interest in the natural world but my attention shifted to literature. I stopped collecting. Around 1967, I discovered the work of Vladimir Nabokov, a love that has never faded and served to supplant my devotion to applied biology. He sustained lifelong  interest in lepidoptery and literature, with brilliant accomplishments in both. In the June 5, 1948, issue of The New Yorker, Nabokov published “Butterflies,” a memoir of his infatuation with Lepidoptera while growing up in prerevolutionary Russia. He later revised the piece which became Chapter Six of Conclusive Evidence (1951), then of Speak, Memory (1966), the finest of all autobiographies. He writes of those childhood quests:

 

“Few things indeed have I known in the way of emotion or appetite, ambition or achievement, that could surpass in richness and strength the excitement of entomological exploration. From the very first, it had a great many intertwinkling facets. One of them was the acute desire to be alone, since any companion, no matter how quiet, interfered with the concentrated enjoyment of my mania. Its gratification admitted of no compromise or exception. Tutors and governesses knew that the morning was mine and cautiously kept away.”

 

The New Yorker excerpt concludes with one of Nabokov’s best-known set-pieces, an early digression on his great subject, Time:

 “I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness—in a landscape selected at random—is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which I cannot explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love, a sense of oneness with sun and stone, a thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern, perhaps to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to the tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”

 

Nigel Andrew in his delightful book The Butterfly: Flights of Enchantment (Saraband 2025), refers to Nabokov as “the most literary of all butterfly lovers,” saying he was “conscious of the inadequacy of his own representations of butterflies in his fiction, when compared to his scientific work.” Yet no one who reads Pale Fire (1962) will forget the repeated appearance of Vanessa atalanta, the red admiral (or “red admirable,” as the novel’s poet John Shade prefers).

'Keep Abreast of the Essentials First'

In a letter to his friend the Rev. William Unwin, written in March 1784, nine months before Dr. Johnson’s death, William Cowper says he is “very much the biographer's humble admirer,” and continues:

“His uncommon share of good sense, and his forcible expression, secure to him that tribute from all his readers. He has a penetrating insight into character, and a happy talent of correcting the popular opinion, upon all occasions where it is erroneous; and this he does with the boldness of a man who will think for himself, but, at the same time, with a justness of sentiment that convinces us he does not differ from others through affectation, but because he has a sounder judgement.”

Cowper had been reading Johnson’s Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779-81). His assessment of Johnson’s critical judgment is accurate. Incidentally, it might also be applied to Yvor Winters. We no longer associate criticism with common sense and an implicit refutation of “theory.” In his biography of Johnson, John Wain tells us Johnson’s “method” relied on “his memory, his judgement, his learning.” The same might be said of the way he assembled his Dictionary more than twenty years earlier. In writing of fifty-two English poets, Johnson combines biographical storytelling with critical assessment, which in his case means tart, unexpected judgments. He’s not shy about praise or condemnation. Take this from his “Life of Pope”:

“Pope was from his birth of a constitution tender and delicate; but is said to have shewn remarkable gentleness and sweetness of disposition. The weakness of his body continued through his life, but the mildness of his mind perhaps ended with his childhood.”

Wain describes the Lives as “Johnson’s gentlest, most companionable work.” This is true yet Johnson is often at his most entertaining when cantankerous. In his “Life of Milton” he famously said of “Lycidas” that “the diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing.” Johnson knew what he was doing and how some readers would react. Boswell reports that on March 26, 1779:

“He said he expected to be attacked on account of his Lives of the Poets. ‘However (said he,) I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an authour is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse; an assault may be unsuccessful; you may have more men killed than you kill; but if you starve the town, you are sure of victory.’”

Reading the Lives is always entertaining. Were I forced to bring only a single work of criticism, or a single work by Johnson, to that mythical desert island, it would be this one, Johnson’s final masterpiece. Who do you think Johnson is writing about in this passage:

“Next to argument, his delight was in wild and daring sallies of sentiment, in the irregular and excentrick violence of wit. He delighted to tread upon the brink of meaning, where light and darkness begin to mingle; to approach the precipice of absurdity, and hover over the abyss of unideal vacancy. This inclination sometimes produced nonsense.” 

Read the complete biography and you’ll never think the same way about John Dryden. In his postscript to an essay about Kingsley Amis collected in The Revolt of the Pendulum: Essays 2005-2008 (Picador, 2009), the late Clive James writes:

“One doesn’t say that Aubrey’s Brief Lives set the desirable measure, but it always helps to remember how much got said by Johnson in his Lives of the Poets, any one of which is the first thing to read on the poet in question. Not, of course, the only thing: but surely our aim, like Johnson’s, should be to keep abreast of the essentials first.”