Monday, March 30, 2020

Today, the classic Monday-morning scenario that everyone hates: Tom forgets to set his alarm, we oversleep by an hour, the next 45 minutes are a flurry and a panic with lunch slapped together and breakfast wolfed and T rushing out the door . . .

But now it is quiet.

I fell asleep last night to the sounds of thunder and lightning and the rattle of sleet, a strange but strangely soothing combination. Now there's a steady drizzle, and in the gray first light I can see my cat digging a hole in my garden, a rain-coated neighbor stepping out for a double-dog walk, the sodden grass greening.

In a few minutes, I'll gather myself together: start a load of laundry, wash breakfast dishes, make the bed, take a shower, open a manuscript file, and begin the picky prissy rigamarole of copyediting. Paul's classes start this morning, so our daily schedules will change--I hope for the better. I've had such a hard time concentrating on my work, both paying and personal. That's in no way his fault. But maybe the knowledge that both of us have exterior obligations will help me use his class time constructively for myself.

The news is bad. The news is worse. But the wet air is full of bird song--cardinals, mockingbirds, robins, a white-throated sparrow--and yesterday, before the rain, I discovered that my peas are up.



Spring

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.


What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

5 comments:

nancy said...

Your peas are up?! As of yesterday, I still had bits of snow on my garden : )
The storm last night was amazing: the longest rolls of rumbly thunder that I have ever heard. This morning, I awoke to an email from a student describing the storm and its metaphorical equivalent. The world is fresh and clean this morning. Hopefully our emotional and mental states are, as well : )

Carlene Gadapee said...

Thank you for the poem, and for keeping us in your domestic loop. Social distancing is not the same thing as physical distancing, and you, my dear friend, keep us all close with your posts.

In somewhat a more mundane but particularly interesting vein; did you hear about the studies that they've talked about on the news recently, that baking is the best way to cope with stress? That may explain why I have a freezer full of banana bread.

I recall some time back you were pondering about the connections/juxtapositions of recipes and poetry and the whole quiet loveliness of huswifery. It seems that you have already seen what the science is now telling us!

Keep safe.

Christopher Woodman said...

In reply to your question about the poem I posted yesterday, it's a fragment from my past associated with feelings and images I can never forget. And compliments to you, dear Dawn, your own magical poem, “Epithalamion for Grendel,” got it going in me yet again!

The poem has been accompanying me as secretly yet passionately as Bill Monroe’s "Lonesome Road,” and is just as musical for me as it is verbal because of its genius sounds, alliteration and rhythm. It also has such huge ‘yearning’ — I go through periods of time reciting it to myself over and over again, reaching for the sky.

(I’m just rereading for the 3rd time Richard H. Sewall’s huge biography of Emily Dickinson — the part where he talks about ‘hyperbole’ in the whole family on both sides of the road. So that makes me feel maybe my own hyperbole can be forgiven...)

The poem is “The Pearl” from the 14th Century manuscript that also contains “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” and may even have been written by the same author though the metrical forms and the language are quite different — both poems, among the greatest in English, survive only in that one m.s.

I had the great good fortune to study them both at Yale with Marie Borroff in 1963 -- she was the first woman to be a Professor of English there, lucky me. The course was on Old and Middle English literature in the original, and I can still recite chunks of “The Pearl” and “Beowulf” by heart — I didn’t even have to look up the spelling to leave you the note. So they’re indelible. In fact, I did check out the spelling before I posted the lines just to be sure, and I could do that because I still have all my Old English texts from New Haven here on my shelves in Chiang Mai. I hadn’t taken either of them out in at least two decades, so they were covered in dust and fragments of jing-jot egg-shells, (jing-jots are the tiny lizards that live all through my books and walk on my ceiling over my head.)

I confess too that the theme of “The Pearl” is also close to some of the recent difficulties between us, which is perhaps why it was resonating when you posted “Epithalamion for Grendel” — which also connects with some of those themes, and I thank you for that. And I should say that my interest in the theme not only goes back to 14th Century England but to 14th Century Italy as well, and of course we've been there too, and not to speak of Rilke. And just to say in passing that I think one of the greatest and deepest explorations of the theme is in Alain Fournier’s novel, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913 — the author died the same year in the trenches). His first and only novel, the title is sometimes translated (often, and very well!) as The Lost Domain and sometimes as The Wanderer. (Some say it is the greatest single-influence on the 20th century English novel, and it gets to Eliot, Graves, Auden etc. etc. too — so there’s a dare for you. (It could be great reading for right now if you van get hold of it.) Indeed, I could imagine you writing a novel in the blessed shadow of it, or better even in a long poem like "Mr Kowalski" -- using the same themes and imagery, you could easily set it in Harmony...

Wow!

I also wanted to say that I regretted having posted the excerpt from “The Pearl” as soon as I did as I realized that most people weren’t going to know it. It’s so basic for me, so at the root of my language, my literature, my poetry and and my person that I forgot how dated I am! Please forgive me if I sounded pretentious — I’m not.

And I won’t ever leave such a long comment again, so don’t worry about that. Indeed, no reply is necessary, and I mean that. (All the best correspondences are by notes in bottles and smoke signals in any case, and they're best received with ears to the ground.)

C.

Dawn Potter said...

I'm happy you posted "The Pearl" which I've read but not recently so could not pinpoint it. My Middle English education is scattier than I would like. Re Le Grand Mealnes: also a huge influence on John Fowles. I've never seen a copy of it, but have been longing to read it for years and years.

Christopher Woodman said...

Yes, John Fowles above all -- I didn't dare to mention that. And all the way from Bloomsbury to Woody Allen.

What a strange word we live in, neither here nor there yet still so intensely grafted to pasts we feel we have an ethical obligation to forget.

Alain Fournier was only 23 (in 2014, not '13) when he died so falling in love spiritually and creatively as he did can hardly be called poaching. My very strong feeling is we've got to work hard on all that, or perhaps better, accept it as an archetypal nut to crack at the very least if not esoteric (hate the word, but it has its points, at least if you can obey the injunction not to talk about it).

C.