On a short walk this morning†, I noticed that ghostly day-moon above me and began to think of those wonderful Stevens’ poems, where he addresses the moon and its effects.  Then I thought, “What would I call her if I didn’t know the word moon, the concept moon, the idea moon, the history of moon?”  An answer came to me, and it made me happy.  It caused me to smile.  I won’t share here what that word was, but I will share what I scribbled into the palm of my hand on the way home.  I said, “An original relationship would mean no sadness because no expectation,” and I add now, “no expectation for a thing to be other than it is.”

It’s easy, especially if you’re a poet, to conceive of seeing the natural world as she is, but imagine seeing other relationships this way, from the one you have with your spouse and children to the one you have or don’t have with God.  What would it mean to let these flowers bud, develop, blossom and wither as they would?  Right now a zucchini vine grows spontaneously in our garden.  Nobody planted it there, but my wife and I have taken great pleasure in its magnificence for two weeks or so.  Today we noticed that deer have eaten back the large heart-shaped leaves.  Still many buds remain.

†This was written on July 10th, 2012.

On occasion my students have accused me of arrogance, and they are right to do so.  I can be arrogant.  And I’ve been called diffident, but then again, if we are two strollers moving in opposite directions, I can be also exceedingly chipper.  When my wife and I were living in a summer cottage on the small island of Shelter Island, we were affectionately referred to by the locals as the nice couple who lived behind the mini-golf.  Those years, in that cottage behind the mini-golf, on that island between the two forks of Long Island’s fish’s tail, were the happiest in my life, so if I were particularly friendly or nice (a word whose origins suggest idiocy, strangely), my circumstances and not my temperament can be credited.  As far as temperament goes, I’m with Emerson who believed it to be unalterable.  A sore loser in childhood will always and forever be a sore loser, though he might work on and all but conquer the symptoms of that inner loathing of defeat.  And one inclined toward magnanimity will always and forever be, putting aside a bad day or occasional misjudgments, magnanimous.  If character is fate, then it would be better to have been born to angels than ordinary human beings.

It has been my position–or rather my conviction–that luck plays a far more essential role in our lives than character does.  Be as cautious as you like and still calamity lurks just outside the door.  Be as careless as you like and still a fool is spared the consequences of his foolishness.  But lurk is the wrong verb here.  Luck is far too indifferent to lurk.  Whatever catastrophe touches our lives, whatever happiness or joy or pleasure we take from this world, these joys and catastrophes seek us out blindly, indifferently.  If our house is spared the lash of the hurricane or is uprooted by the winds, catastrophe doesn’t care and joy minds not.  Our marriages, our loves, even our habits are determined, the very nature of them shaped, more by luck than by any other force.  So what does this mean to the poet who once believed that through the work of being an artist he might, as Rilke discovers and commands, change his life?

Perhaps the best poetry offers in the way of change is that it might bring us to a better understanding of ourselves and our place in the universe, in the world, in our society, in our families and in our other relationships.  Our minds are changed, when we meditate on our circumstances, not our circumstances.  Therefore, it is dangerous to believe–and this is as true for poetry as it is for talk therapy and other programs, including spiritual ones, which rely on knowing oneself–that much can be made of these new understandings, when and if they come.  A poet is more likely to be wrong in a new way than he is to be made suddenly right.  And then whatever rightness he may experience is usually temporary and, finally, it may be said that his good fortune is indeed foruntate, that is, a matter of chance, or it has been caused by some other mis-recognized influence.

Why must it be that the good in our lives should be attached to some meaning or purpose?  Auden says in a poem I was reading earlier this morning† something along these lines: who doesn’t believe he was meant to be?  And Whitman claims that we are lucky to be born and, therefore, lucky to die, though to me his tone here feels more ironic than elsewhere in Song of Myself.  The problem with luck, to most people, is that the virtues we associate with character become meaningless, things like justice and love and so on.  Job’s comforters struggle with the fact that Job’s punishment doesn’t jive with what they know of Job’s character.  They must conclude, then, that Job is hiding something sinister from them or from himself.  King Lear cries on the stormy heath that he is a man more sinned against than sinning.  Who hasn’t felt like this on occasion?  Yet rarely is it that anyone concludes he doesn’t deserve the happiness he feels and even rarer still is one who says this and means it.  But deserves, as Clint Eastwood’s character in the Unforgiven points out, has nothing to do with it.

As for poetry, change means superficial change, that is, a change of style.  A poet develops from inarticulate groans and grunts into more patterned forms of speech until finally he reaches, if he’s lucky, eloquence.  Eloquence means, for some, more beautiful poetry.  But it might also mean, as Stevens says, plainly to propound, that is, eloquence could be an achievement of a clarity akin to prophetic vision.  The happiness, then, of the poet has little or nothing to do with typical human happiness.  This doesn’t mean, as some have concluded (John Berryman believed, for instance, that ordeal was necessary for poetic insight) that a poet must suffer to be a poet.  This would mean, as it is supposed to be in tragedy, that pain leads to redemption.  But the great lesson of King Lear is otherwise.  Lear’s pain and loss are un-redemptive and, therefore, senseless.  If this is true, it may also be true that our joys are just as senseless as our sufferings.  Beautiful weather may cause us to sing but while the meeting may or may nor be auspicious, it has little to do with our essential worthiness or unworthiness.  Cancer patients whose dispositions are sunnier and who laugh more are no more likely to survive treatment than their gloomier co-sufferers.  The only difference lay, according to a study I read, in the quality of the time spent in treatment but not the outcomes.

This may be where poetry becomes important again, even essential.  Because false expectations and unreasonable hopes cause more dissatisfaction than whatever our current circumstances are actually, poetry’s promise of clarity and insight keeps us from such errors of judgment.  I said above that catastrophe and joy seek us out blindly, indifferently, but an important detail has been left out of that equation.  We may also make our circumstances worse if we should attempt to avoid our fates or meet them too soon.  All our struggling and striving may do more to hurt and harm us than if we remain still and quiet.  But we must remember that stillness and quiet can’t call the good to us anymore than it can promise us inoculation from misfortune.  What poetry does is make us still enough not to welcome to our bosom more pain than might otherwise be our lot but it also dissuades us from tossing aside the good and the pleasurable too soon, when we possess them.  Those changes will come and do to us what they will.  Ours is to endure, which is a kind of love, until even that last virtue becomes obsolete and, happily, we go.

†I wrote this post several weeks ago.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

It’s hard to say what moves me about this poem and about this stanza particularly, except that when I read it it reminds me of Frost’s work and specifically it reminds me of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”  Thomas and Frost knew one another before the war, but I don’t think that their relationship accounts for the uncanny resemblance I sense in these two poems.  Rather, it seems to me that these poems touch on an essential something, which good poetry must to be called good and which must be present to inspire would-be poets to become good poets.

It may be impossible to look with fresh eyes at the last two lines of Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods,” because most of us were introduced to the poem at a time when we are least open to poetry’s real influences and those who were open to those influences then–the sensitive, the strange, the broken-hearted–find the explanation they receive, regarding the poem’s significance, falls far short of how the poem makes them feel.  Borges, in a lecture on metaphor, says all that can be said about Frost’s couplet, when he says, “we are made to feel that the miles are not only in space but in time, and that ‘sleep’ means ‘die’ or ‘rest.’”  And yet, however accurate Borges’ explanation here is, still more happens when we read those last two lines than merely substituting sleep for die and miles for some larger measurement of time, and it is this more which connects Thomas’ poem to Frost’s.

Another poem comes to mind now–this one by William Blake–which possesses a similar quality.  The first stanza is one that I repeat to myself frequently, when suffering through a horrific traffic jam or walking the mall with my wife during the holidays.  It’s called “London,” and it goes:

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

The strength of this poem lies not in its trick (this is what Borges calls Frost’s repetition at the end of his poem), but in how straightforward the poetical statement is.  For all of Blake’s prophesying, his greatest strength as a poet may be the simple observation.  The obviously true is sometimes hardest to see.  On the road to Emmaus, for instance, Christ’s disciples don’t recognize him at first.  It isn’t until he breaks bread with them and says a prayer that they see their savior seated at the table with them.  Monks, when they greet visitors to the abbey, wash the feet of their guests and treat each as if he were Christ himself.  The message these gestures underscore is not that you never know where and when the lord will appear.  Rather, the opposite is true.  You always know: he is your neighbor; he is the stranger come to ask for a bed for the night; his are the eyes you refuse to meet, when walking wherever you go.

Wallace Stevens says something remarkable about poetry in his essay “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” which when I read it recently recalled to me why I began to call myself a poet in the first place.  Stevens says that poetry

isn’t an artifice that the mind has added to human nature.  The mind has added nothing to human nature.  It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without.  It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.  It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.

It used to be the last statement moved me most–the idea that poetry helps us live our lives.  But now it is the suggestion that poetry is part of human nature.  I am of the opinion that the best part of us isn’t natural.  Consciousness, such as we experience it, is an unintended byproduct of language.  Therefore, whatever evolutionary advantage language possesses must be shared with all animals who communicate, from the lowly ant to the magnificent chimpanzee, but poetry and the awareness which poetry engenders surpasses these advantages and reveals something more.  Maybe what scripture means when it says we are made in God’s image comes closest to answering the question implied by this distinction.  Or maybe poetry reveals to us not our divinity but our limitations, a far more useful understanding and far more likely to help us live our lives.

No would-be poet begins his career searching for the precipice beyond which human powers can’t reach, but necessarily this is what he finds.  That he would call that experience something else, that he would be tempted to say that where consciousness ends there meaning begins, is forgivable.  Stevens’ assessment of poetry is heroic, but ultimately untrue.  One becomes a poet precisely where one’s consciousness ceases to be merely human.  Self-preservation, therefore, has nothing to do with what poetry offers.  If poetry first creates a self, it finally annihilates that self.  The uncanny is the beginning of terror and the end of meaning.

Before Francis of Assisi was St. Francis, he was a playboy.  The story goes that he indulged in all the pleasures of the flesh and was well liked by his peers and the young women of Assisi.  He sang secular songs of love and romance, which his mother taught him.  And for his father’s sake, he attempted to win glory in battle and so was fearless in the pursuit of that acclaim.  Then something happened to him.  During his conversion, Francis asked himself of what was he most afraid.  The answer was lepers.  Francis in a moment of spiritual insight forced himself to touch the thing he feared most, the rotting flesh of a leper, and kiss the fetid wounds.  Like this he began to be a Christian, that is, like Christ, who knew where we are flesh we might be light and love is the antidote to fear.

Emerson claims that charity is living fairly.  In “Self-Reliance,” he regrets the money given to charities, which he might have withheld, since the dollar isn’t offered in the name of love but for expiation.  Our goodness, he says elsewhere, ought to have some edge or else it isn’t goodness.  Montaigne agrees, when he says that repentance must hurt to be repentance.  When Thoreau writes “Civil Disobedience,” he makes clear that it is a matter of conscience to put our money where our mouths are, but also that we must be willing to suffer the consequences of our convictions.

Poetry, at its best, brings us to similar conclusions.  I am skeptical of a poetry which doesn’t draw us closer to reality, and by that I mean, a poetry which doesn’t reveal some truth.  Whether the poet or the reader of poetry walks toward that truth is another matter.  The difference between the saint and the poet, or the saint in every man, woman and child, and the poet in every man, woman and child, is the difference of motion, action,  faith.  Faith, in this sense, doesn’t mean belief without proof.  Faith means doing.  Faith is a motion toward the good, the difficult, the true.  The saint, like Francis, ultimately climbs the mountain and receives the wounds.  The poet asks the question, Of what are you most afraid?  Ammons asks, What is the lowly?  Whitman asks, What is the grass?  The questions here are several, but each leads to a similar answer.

The other day, I saw a beggar, cardboard sign and all, standing on the exit ramp.  I avoided his eyes.  SKG and I were in the car heading to eat some lunch.  The next day, as I crossed the parking lot of the grocery store, I saw a poor family panhandling there.  Their sign read: Please, I have two children, money or food.  It seemed there was only one thing to do.  So I included a few essentials in my basket for the family.  In some ways, this was absolutely unremarkable.  I didn’t feel responsible for them, but felt merely as if I was answering a question posed by someone who asked.  However, at the checkout, a young woman complained about the family to the girl at the register who called the manager who said he was on it.  And this is the important part of the story.  Suddenly, I felt ashamed for having bought the food.  That shame was followed by anger because I wondered why no one shoos away the Girl Scouts troop accosting shoppers entering the grocery store, and why the Salvation Army bell-ringers are welcome to ring their bells.

Ely, in McCarthy’s novel The Road, when asked by the father about God, says, “There is no god and we are his prophets.”  Monks knew that every guest ought to be treated like Christ, and so visitors to an abbey would have their feet washed by the abbot.  And the two disciples on the road to Emmaus find themselves breaking bread once again with their lord, now resurrected, because of their hospitality.  Hope, St. Paul believes, is the necessary link between faith and charity, and where we lack one we lack all.

It is one thing to celebrate the universe and everything in it as one thing, and then, as Whitman says, there is no death.  But it is quite another to put that understanding into action and therefore live–truly live.  Our goodness has to cost us because it is in the aftermath that we see what is: the oneness of things.  I’m sorry for the young woman who complained about the poor family.  That feeling of love, which is always a question to be answered, felt so foreign to her and so threatening, she mistook it for the false responsibility to the suburban fear of the lowly.  And that shame I felt was not shame exactly.  It was the reopening of a wound which I thought had healed over and which I thought had become calloused.  This is how the flesh gives way to the spirit.  Slowly.  In a moment it comes, and then it goes.  But the residue of its coming offers another opportunity like an obligation, like a gift.