Month: March 2004

Rhododendrons Springing Up Everywhere

I might be falling behind on my poetry reading and updating, but I haven’t fallen behind in my walking. We’ve had some awesome weather lately, and, despite yesterday’s sudden drop in temperature and accompanying squalls, it certainly seems like spring around here.

All the proof you need of that can be found in Point Defiance’s Rhododendron garden. It’s still too early for most flowers, but the native varieties are already in full bloom:

Rhododendrons are the state flower, so I’ve grown up around them and probably take their beauty for granted.

I guess that’s why I like this picture so much:

Until I took this picture from above, I hadn’t even realized that rhododendrons grew from a single stem like this, probably because I’d only seen them from the side before. Hopefully this’ll remind me not to take such beauty for granted, but, instead, to try to look at it through new eyes.

A Brighter Day Awaits

When I left home yesterday morning, I was met by wet streets, raindrops splattering against the windshield, and skies turning from a dismal gray to a gloomy black.

Nor was the long drive from Tacoma to my doctor’s appointment in Portland made any shorter by gusting winds and rain-splattered windshields.

In fact, it wasn’t until I neared Portland that the weather brightened up, at least enough to make lunch at Who Song and Larry’s on the Columbia River with Bill enjoyable.

Unfortunately, time was short and I felt compelled to constantly check my watch to make sure I had time to make it to the doctor’s appointment across town. Good thing I left early, too, or the ten miles of stop-and-go traffic would have made me late for my appointment.

Hearing the doctor relate my medical history to his young intern and having an examining tool shoved up my nose and down my throat didn’t make my day any better.

However, having the doctor pronounce me healthy and saying I didn’t need to come back for a check-up for a full year did somehow make the whole day seem much brighter.

If I didn’t know better, I might even have imagined that nature was reveling in my good news, for the skies were clear on the way back and even Tacoma was bathed in sunlight. Even the small flowers in the front garden seemed even beautiful than when I had passed them in the morning.

“No Worst, there is none.”

I was a little surprised yesterday to discover how fond Stanley Kunitz was of Gerard Manley Hopkins while running down a reading of “God’s Gandeur,” but when I consider today’s poems, I probably shouldn’t have been because I hear reflections of these poems when I read some of Kunitz’s best poems.

As it turns out, Hopkins poems on grief and despair rival those of John Donne’s great “Batter my heart, three person’d God; for, you.” They even rival his beautiful celebrations of God’s Grace noted yesterday.

Thank God I haven’t felt the kind of despair expressed in:

65

NO worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing”
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked “No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief’.

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

for quite awhile, but that doesn’t mean I have forgotten that despair, or even that I will ever be able to forget that despair. Considering how much I like this poem, perhaps I don’t even want to forget these moments for they are part of the tapestry that makes up life itself. I would no more want to forget how I felt when I got my “Dear, Loren” letter or when my first wife told me she wanted a divorce, than I would want to forget the joy of falling in love the first time or the joy of having my first child, and even a second.

For me, no line of poetry has ever captured this sense of despair better than “Pitched past pitch of grief,/More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.” The “wag” in me might go so far as to suggest that trying to pronounce these lines clearly in front of a room of rowdy students may actually have reinforced the feeling that they truly capture a sense of despair.

Certainly the mind has “cliffs of fall/Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed” that could only be doubted by those who are too young to have experienced life’s inevitable tragedies, perhaps foreshadowed by those nightmares toddlers endure.

Sometimes fighting against this despair can seem as frightening as the despair itself:

64

NOT, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist”slack they may be”these last strands of man
In me “r, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me

Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruis”d bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?

Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, ch”er.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, f”ot tr”d
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

I’d have to admit at times to “feasting” on my despair, or, at the very least, indulging in extended periods of living the “blues.” Bobby Bland’s “Further Up the Road,” or John Lennon’s “Instant Karma” come to mind as good ways to indulge those feelings of despair that accompany divorce and other moments of despair. But, then, Van Morrison and John Lee Hooker’s rendition of “Never Get Out of these Blues Alive” still gets played a lot around here, 24 times in less than 6 months according to iTunes.

Still, I’d like to think that the best reason for suffering the blues is so that “my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.” For Hopkins, despair was a way to find God; for me, despair is a way of finding my true self, though I’m not entirely convinced those two statements are entirely incompatible. If we could see beyond the immediate inner turmoil, we might find that it is, indeed, our better self, some might even say our true self, that struggles to overcome those forces that tempt us to sacrifice our true values for immediate gain, immediate gratification.

Hopkins’ Poems (1876-1889)

The forty-eight poems in Hopkins’ Poems (1876-1889) contain, in my opinion, some of the greatest poems ever written in the English language. Hopkin’s “God’s Grandeur” and “Pied Beauty” rival Marvel’s “To His Coy Mistress”and “The Definition of Love.”

Perhaps they are enhanced by the suspicion that, like Emily Dickinson’s poems, their style can never be emulated by another poet. They are unique.

Though I find it a little strange that my view of the world can suddenly coincide with a Catholic priest’s view of the world, “God’s Grandeur” so nearly parallels my view of the natural world that it might well stand as a synopsis of what little optimism I hold for the future of our world:

GOD’S GRANDEUR

THE world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

To fully appreciate this poem, of course, you must read it out loud or listen to someone who loves it read it out loud. How can anyone living in the 20th century not feel that God’s creation has been “seared with trade” and “wears man’s smudge.” And still, despite man’s neglect and abuse, “nature is never spent.” Watching a beautiful sunrise or sunset, one could almost believe “the Holy Ghost over the bent/ World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”

Anyone who doubts that the beauty of the world transcends man’s ability to smudge it, only need read:

PIED BEAUTY

GLORY be to God for dappled things,
For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow,
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls, finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced, fold, fallow and plough,
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange,
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim.
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change;
Praise him.

Though tempted to save this poem until I finished studying Flash because it seems the near-perfect poem to set to pictures, I relented, realizing it’s a great enough poem to be mentioned again and again, and yet again, lest we forget what beauty is father-forthed again and again if only we have the wisdom to discern it. Beauty is there, even in the “trades, their gear and tackle and trim” if we are but able to see it.