Category Archives: Poetry

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Lovely, dark and deep

Actually, the woods my daughters and I walked through yesterday were anything but dark. The sun was so bright I could hardly even see this robin in the trees above, much less determine what kind of bird it was.

When we reached this point in the trail, my youngest exclaimed, “I want to go into that tree tunnel!”

We paused beside a stream…

and thought…

…and the girls waded…

…and we listened. We “came into the presence of still water,” as Wendell Berry says:

I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

The rest of “The Peace of Wild Things” is here.

When we started out, I despaired of seeing any critters because of the noise my two small companions made (and the often louder noise I made with my piercing “SHHH!!”). But the quietness of the woods seemed to seep inwards and we all came under the spell. We heard a woodpecker drumming and calling, songbirds letting loose as they got used to our being there, chipmunks scurrying in the undergrowth. I’m not sure how long we were there, but it was long enough to satisfy. Truly.

Then we went home.

Poetry Friday is at Jama Rattigan’s Alphabet Soup today. Enjoy the poetry feast over there!

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Poetry Friday: Land of Counterpane

My youngest is sick today. This means missing our last homeschool co-op of the year, a birthday party this afternoon, and possibly Presentation Day tomorrow. She has a knack for falling ill on special occasions, but the familiarity of this scenario doesn’t make it any easier.

In her honor, I’m posting the classic children’s sick day poem by Robert Louis Stevenson. I love “The Land of Counterpane” because it acknowledges that even being taken out of the game for a day has a certain luxury. Rest, imagine, play in a desultory fashion — though around here it’s plastic horses, not “leaden soldiers.” Being sick also means more television than is usually allowed, to “keep one happy all the day.” And later, we’ll have a “book party,” another of the consolations of sickness. We’ll be sure to revisit A Child’s Garden of Verses:

When I was sick and lay a-bed,
I had two pillows at my head,
And all my toys beside me lay
To keep me happy all the day.

And sometimes for an hour or so
I watched my leaden soldiers go,
With different uniforms and drills,
Among the bed-clothes, through the hills;

And sometimes sent my ships in fleets
All up and down among the sheets;
Or brought my trees and houses out,
And planted cities all about.

I was the giant great and still
That sits upon the pillow-hill,
And sees before him, dale and plain,
The pleasant land of counterpane.

Jessie Willcox Smith illustration courtesy of Wikipedia

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Poetry Friday: Finishing Well

One never knows, but I’ve been thinking lately that I’m probably about halfway through my life. Maybe a little over.

What do I have to show for it?

I look back over my story so far and see an odd jumble of ingredients that don’t seem to have resolved themselves yet into a definite direction. If I were reading it in a book, some episodes would make me sad or worried, but nevertheless I like my story. I wouldn’t want to trade it for someone else’s; I’ve grown attached to it. But… where is it leading? What impact will it have?

Many good stories don’t really gain momentum till after they pass the halfway point. Then all the threads are gathered together and the total picture comes clear. I’m hoping mine will be in that class.

In this mood, Wendell Berry’s “From the Crest” comes to mind. It’s a long poem, but these lines from the third section lend a voice to my mid-life ruminations:

From the crest of the wave
the grave is in sight,
the soul’s last deep track
in the known…

I am trying to teach
my mind to accept the finish
that all good work must have:
of hands touching me,
days and weathers passing
over me, the smooth of love,
the wearing of the earth.
At the final stroke
I will be a finished man.

Or, in my case — a finished woman.

Poetry Friday is at Read Write Believe today.

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Healing and Hiding

This morning, I read a story that’s always intrigued me: the woman with the hemorrhage who came through the pressing crowds and touched Jesus’ robes. I’m using a harmony of the gospels these days, but the account in Mark 5 serves for a reference.

What I noticed today was the way that Jesus asked who had touched him. Surely he knew — ? This man who had known when he was dissed behind his back for being a Nazarene? This man who immediately after this episode indicates that he knows even before he sees Jairus’ daughter that she is “not dead but is asleep“? If we tried we could make a long list of incidents that show Jesus’ clairvoyance.

The commentary I have assumes that Jesus asked who touched him because he didn’t know. But I have a hard time believing that’s the case. There are times in the gospels when Jesus makes it clear that he is offering a demonstration for the benefit of those around him, not because he himself requires it. (Healing the paralytic, for instance, “so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” Or raising Lazarus: “Father, I thank You that You have heard Me. And I knew that You always hear me; but because of the people standing around I said it…”)

I wonder if Jesus’ request of the crowd in this case — “Who touched my robe?” — was for the benefit of the woman herself. It’s because I’m (still) reading Hiding from Love that this occurs to me. Just yesterday I pondered these words, in the context of a discussion about denial:

Reality perception is primarily relational. That’s why Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but through Me” (John 14:6). He was showing us that truth is more than an amassing of facts; it is enclosed in a connection to Him.

We learn reality primarily from our attachments. Learning it from books and propositional statements is a secondary process that occurs after our fundamental relational abilities are established inside…

We learn reality from relationship, especially in the impressionable and formative years of childhood. Here we learn to affirm those parts of us that keep us in relationship, and to deny those parts that isolate us.

Could it be that Jesus was offering the woman, whose actions had been understandably furtive, an opportunity to come out of hiding and be healed within as well as without? She was considered perpetually unclean, and was healed in secret, but Jesus invited her to acknowledge it publicly. Coming forward took the healing beyond a medical intervention, into a connection with God. It also clarified that her superstitious belief in power emitted through Jesus’ clothing wasn’t what healed her; it was her faith that released his healing.

In The Irrational Season, Madeleine L’Engle wrote a poem about this woman. It too focuses on the personal dimensions of the story, imagining the relationship that was forged in that moment of healing:

When I pushed through the crowd,
jostled, bumped, elbowed by the curious
who wanted to see what everyone else
was so excited about,
all I could think of was my pain
and that perhaps if I could touch him,
this man who worked miracles,
cured diseases,
even those as foul as mine,
I might find relief.
I was tired from hurting,
exhausted, revolted by my body,
unfit for any man, and yet not let loose
from desire and need. I wanted to rest,
to sleep without pain or filthiness or torment.
I don’t really know why
I thought he could help me
when all the doctors
with all their knowledge
had left me still drained
and bereft of all that makes
a woman’s life worth living.
Well: I’d seen him with some children
and his laughter was quick and merry
and reminded me of when I was young and well,
though he looked tired; and he was as old as I am.
Then there was that leper,
but lepers have been cured before –

No, it wasn’t the leper,
or the man cured of palsy,
or any of the other stories of miracles,
or at any rate that was the least of it;
I had been promised miracles too often.
I saw him ahead of me in the crowd
and there was something in his glance
and in the way his hand rested briefly
on the matted head of a small boy
who was getting in everybody’s way,
and I knew that if only I could get to him,
not to bother him, you understand,
not to interrupt, or to ask him for anything,
not even his attention,
just to get to him and touch him…

I didn’t think he’d mind, and he needn’t even know.
I pushed through the crowd
and it seemed that they were deliberately
trying to keep me from him.
I stumbled and fell and someone stepped
on my hand and I cried out
and nobody heard. I crawled to my feet
and pushed on and at last I was close,
so close I could reach out
and touch with my fingers
the hem of his garment.

Have you ever been near
when lightning struck?
I was, once, when I was very small
and a summer storm came without warning
and lightning split the tree
under which I had been playing
and I was flung right across the courtyard.
That’s how it was.
Only this time I was not the child
but the tree
and the lightning filled me.
He asked, “Who touched me?”
and people dragged me away, roughly,
and the men around him were angry at me.

“Who touched me?” he asked.
I said, “I did, Lord.”
So that he might have the lightning back
which I had taken from him when I touched
his garment’s hem.
He looked at me and I knew then
that only he and I knew about the lightning.
He was tired and emptied
but he was not angry.
He looked at me
and the lightning returned to him again,
though not from me, and he smiled at me
and I knew that I was healed.
Then the crowd came between us
and he moved on, taking the lightning with him,
perhaps to strike again.

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The Mouse of Amherst

Some time ago, another blogger mentioned The Mouse of Amherst in a Poetry Friday post. I ordered it immediately, but not until yesterday did the right time come for Elizabeth Spires’ 61-page imaginative introduction to Emily Dickinson, accented by Claire Nivola’s delicate drawings. The ultimate proof came at the end, when my 8-year-old exclaimed, “Let’s read some of her poems!”

The Mouse of Amherst is named Emmaline. She lives is the wainscoting in Emily Dickinson’s bedroom, and although she owns a quill pen, an inkwell, and a notebook, she values them chiefly as decorations. It’s when she observes the poet in action, reads one of her poems, and begins exchanging poetry with Emily herself that she realizes not only the meaningfulness and purpose of words, but her own unplumbed poetic gifts.

Emmaline’s point of view creates a fitting air of mystery around this writer neighbors referred to as “the Myth.” The mouse is bewildered at times as she observes Emily, but always speaks out of a deep sense of kinship with her. As mouse and poet exchange their thoughts in writing, poetry is depicted as a vessel that catches the overflow and the cross-currents of experience. The poems chosen — actual poems by Emily Dickinson, as well as those written by Emmaline — do not condescend. Enough reaction to the poetry is given to begin the process of interpretation, but it is not analyzed or flatly explained. In the end, the ambiguity is intact, but not intimidating to a young reader.

I wished I had read Rumer Godden’s introduction to A Letter to the World: Poems for Young Readers before reading Mouse instead of after. It provides a brief biographical review that would have made certain scenes in Mouse more intelligible. It would have been better, for instance, if I had brushed up beforehand on Colonel Higginson’s visit to the house in Amherst as a potential publisher of Dickinson’s poetry. But even without the benefit of outside knowledge, The Mouse of Amherst creates a memorable portrait of this reclusive philosopher who would lower gingerbread from her window in a basket to the children playing below, who composed nearly 2,000 poems bound together with twine into tiny booklets, and who described her own literary sensibility by saying,

If I read a book, and it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?

An excellent question, that. How do you “know it”?

Colonel Higginson told Emily Dickinson her poems were “alive but spasmodic,” and “uncontrolled.” Rumer Godden more rightly describes

this style like glancing light, the paradox of an odd flippancy about serious matters like death and God, with an immense awareness of their insoluble mystery. There [is] an unpretentious camaraderie.

Spotlighting this “unpretentious camaraderie” is what The Mouse of Amherst does best. Elizabeth Spires manages to introduce the large issues of the power, mystery, and relevance of poetry without losing sight of its human face. That’s quite an achievement.

There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –
This Travel may the poorest take
Without offense of Toll –
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human soul.

–Emily Dickinson