Many years ago, I took a graduate seminar on John Milton centered on ParadiseLost (1667), one of the crowning achievements of the English Renaissance. But it was another work—Areopagitica (1644), his impassioned defense of freedom of speech—that has resonated with me ever since.
Written in opposition to Parliament’s Licensing Order, Milton argued that truth is strengthened, not endangered, by being tested against error, a bold stance in an age when dissent could invite imprisonment or execution.
Milton’s intellectual hero was Galileo. In Paradise Lost, he evokes the great astronomer when describing Satan’s massive shield:
“…the moon, whose orb Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views…”
The “Tuscan artist” is Galileo, whose telescope transformed humanity’s understanding of the heavens.
In Areopagitica, Milton recalls visiting Galileo at his villa in Arcetri, where the aging scientist lived under house arrest after being condemned by the Roman Inquisition for advocating the Copernican model of the solar system.
Forced under threat of torture to recant what he knew to be true, Galileo spent his final years blind and confined. I like to imagine that Milton’s visit offered some measure of consolation to a man whose only offense had been to follow the evidence where it led.
Today, speaking one’s conscience seldom risks imprisonment in liberal democracies, but it can still carry severe consequences: reputational ruin, professional ostracism, organized harassment, and targeted campaigns intended to silence rather than engage.
Public discourse, accelerated by social media, spreads these consequences with astonishing speed, rewarding denunciation far more readily than disagreement.
Our universities bear part of this responsibility. Among the intellectual influences that have shaped portions of academic life is Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, mentor of the New Left. In his 1965 essay Repressive Tolerance, Marcuse proposed a striking inversion of classical free expression:
“Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.”
He made the practical implications explicit, advocating for the “withdrawal of tolerance before the deed, at the stage of communication in word, print, and picture.”
In Marcuse’s view, there are issues where “certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed.”
Whether one agrees with Marcuse or not, his framework represents a profound departure from Milton’s conviction that truth emerges through open contest rather than enforced orthodoxy.
I have no dog in today’s culture wars. Censorship has become an equal-opportunity temptation for both the Left and the Right. Battles over gender, sexuality, race, religion, history, and politics have produced book bans, withdrawn publications, disinvited speakers, removed art, renamed institutions, and ousted educators. The particulars vary; the impulse to silence does not.
Milton himself understood the cost of dissent. Like Galileo, he eventually lost his sight. Following his death in 1674, he was denied burial in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner due to his support for the Parliamentary cause during the English Civil War. Buried instead at St. Giles Cripplegate, his grave was desecrated more than a century later by souvenir hunters who carried away portions of his bones as grisly relics.
Some may dismiss Milton’s model as anachronistic, but I remain convinced that falsehood is exposed by argument, not by prohibition. The remedy for bad ideas remains better ideas, fearlessly expressed.
History offers sobering reminders of what happens when enforced orthodoxy replaces open debate. Authoritarian regimes throughout history have always understood that controlling speech is the prerequisite to controlling thought.
America has never perfectly reconciled its ideals with its practice, which is precisely why freedom of speech remains indispensable.
We improve our republic not by silencing one another, but by arguing honestly, listening seriously, and trusting that truth has nothing to fear from debate.
As Milton wrote in Areopagitica nearly four centuries ago:
“And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”
I hadn’t known that Andy Burnham, Britain’s new prime minister, is a fan of Philip Larkin—England’s premier poet since Auden. It aligns with Burnham having read English at Cambridge, making him rare among a long line of prime ministers.
I find that refreshing—not because English majors possess superior virtue, but because the finest literature is fundamentally moral in its urgings, even in unsettling works like A Clockwork Orange or Joyce’s Ulysses. As for poetry, moral resonance often defines its very existence.
Of course, Larkin has come under fierce attack, his published letters revealing objectionable racist and sexist views. It’s the familiar, troubling dilemma of separating an artist from the work.
I’ve just finished reading Sue Prideaux’s revelatory Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, with its unsettling account of his relationships with young native girls. Picasso physically abused several of his partners. Richard Wagner was a vehement anti-Semite, yet his music endures in our concert halls. Even foundational thinkers—Hume, Kant, and Hegel—harbored implicit racism, while Aristotle viewed women as flawed versions of men.
But back to Burnham. What does he see in Larkin? Will his affinity for the poet make him a more responsive leader, attuned to his nation’s pressing domestic needs?
This much is clear: Larkin possessed an extraordinary gift for bringing poetry into quotidian life, capturing present urgencies, human longing, despair, and the precise mood of the British landscape. I can still hear the train wheels rhythmically clicking along the rails, carrying newly married couples, in “The Whitsun Weddings.”
Larkin rendered poetry conversational and, in doing so, deeply palpable.
What better guiding text for a new prime minister than these lines from “The Mower”?
…we should be careful Of each other, we should be kind While there is still time.
Or from “Going, Going”:
Their kids are screaming for more More houses, more parking allowed More caravan sites, more pay.
Reading Larkin might just keep Andy Burnham anchored to the everyday lives of working people in an era of corporate autocracy, widening economic disparity, and self-interested oligarchy.
Larkin reminds us that ordinary lives matter, not a bad script for a new prime minister to follow.
Mary Oliver was perhaps the most beloved American poet since Robert Frost, whose nature-centered poems continue to reverberate.
Oliver’s gifts were different from Frost’s. She rarely pursued the subtle symbolism beneath his seemingly familiar surfaces or the double meanings hidden within his plain diction. Yet we continue to read her for a similar invitation: to find rest, not among our busy fellows, absorbed in the pursuit of the volatile, but in nature’s quietude—the bubbling stream, the scurrying chipmunk, the scent of pine, the intricate tapestry of a snowflake.
As always when I read her, a quiet solace takes hold. I grow tranquil, reminded that contentment is found not in possessions but in nature’s moods, even its thunder—in the sense that I, too, belong to something larger than myself, a continuity that neither time nor circumstance can annul.
My childhood returns: memories of a pine-scented grove, a whispering wind, a fox moving silently through the brush.
A few moments ago, I read an Oliver poem I had somehow missed, despite having read much of her work. It’s “What Can I Say,” one of her final poems, included in “Swan: Poems and Prose Poems.”
Once again, she beckons us to immerse ourselves in nature’s quiet wonders, to gather its gifts, and to discover grace by accepting its rhythms.
Her poems never insist; they invite. They ask us to linger long enough for the ordinary to become luminous.
Nature still speaks, if we’ll but listen. As Oliver reminds us, “the leaf is singing still.”:
“What Can I Say”
What can I say that I have not said before? So I’ll say it again. The leaf has a song in it. Stone is the face of patience. Inside the river there is an unfinishable story and you are somewhere in it and it will never end until all ends. Take your busy heart to the art museum and the chamber of commerce but take it also to the forest. The song you heard singing in the leaf when you were a child is singing still. I am of years lived, so far, seventy-four, and the leaf is singing still.
When Christopher Nolan decided to film TheOdyssey, he had no shortage of distinguished English translations from which to choose. From among them, he chose Emily Wilson’s, remarkable for its freshness, clarity, and contemporary English while remaining faithful to Homer’s poetry.
Wilson, a classics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has also translated TheIliad. Unlike some modern “translators,” whose work consists largely of revising earlier English versions, Wilson translates directly from the ancient Greek text. She is equally at home in Latin, a reminder of the extraordinary linguistic preparation classical scholarship once demanded.
That accomplishment is no small feat. Were Homeric Greek taught as a modern foreign language, its highly inflected grammar would make it among the most demanding languages to master, up there with Chinese, Arabic, and Russian.
Wilson also reads classical Greek fluently, the evolved language of Plato, Sophocles, Thucydides, and Aristotle with its unique vocabulary and grammar.
My own acquaintance with the classical languages began in high school, where I studied Latin for two years. The curriculum offered four years, but I opted instead for French and German. Today, my old high school no longer teaches those languages, having replaced them with Spanish.
A few years later, I enrolled in an intensive eight-week Harvard summer course in Koine Greek, the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean during the Roman Empire and language of the New Testament. Easier than Homeric or classical Greek, it nevertheless presents formidable challenges.
Our Australian instructor insisted that we learn Greek actively rather than merely decipher it. Instead of translating Greek into English, we were expected to orally translate English into Greek. With only ten students in the room, we couldn’t evade being called upon repeatedly to think, speak, and stumble in the language in real-time. That meant knowing where the accents fell for each word, often very arbitrary, unlike Spanish and Italian.
It was a demanding approach, but by the end of the course I could work through New Testament passages with little more than the aid of a dictionary. Most of that Greek has long since vanished, although I can still read the alphabet, which proved unexpectedly useful years later when I studied Russian, whose Cyrillic alphabet derives in part from Greek.
Impressed with my teacher, I asked him how long he had studied the classical languages. His answer has remained with me ever since: “Thirteen years of Latin; eleven years of Greek.” I was in good hands.
I’ve often regretted not keeping up with Greek, a language renowned for precision in contrast to English, whose richness often lies in words layered with multiple shades of meaning, wonderful for poetry, but often less exact. Reading Greek reveals layers of irony, structural symmetry, and philosophical nuance that disappear in translation.
Growing up in Massachusetts, one could spend a Saturday “junking” through secondhand bookstores and antique shops, coming away with Latin and Greek grammars for a dime apiece, evidence of the former preeminence of classical languages in the curriculum of schools such as Boston Latin School.
Long before my own time, that same New England landscape was shaped by minds saturated in the classics. Ralph Waldo Emerson read Plato in the original Greek, finding in those ancient dialogues the architecture for his own transcendental philosophy. His friend Henry David Thoreau famously carried his Greek text of TheIliad with him to Walden Pond, writing in Walden that true literature must be read in the language in which it was written—the ancient letters “carved out of the breath of life itself.”
Much of that world has faded. Outside a handful of elite institutions like Deerfield Academy, Groton, Phillips Exeter, or in schools like England’s Eton, the sustained study of Latin and Greek has become increasingly rare. Wilson herself began studying both languages at Oxford High School, an independent all-girls school in Oxford before reading Classics (“Greats”) at Balliol College, Oxford, and earning her doctorate at Yale.
I sometimes imagine what it would have been like had I continued with Greek throughout my life: to read Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, and Homer in their own words, perhapsallowing my synapses to mount a quiet resistance to incipient forgetfulness.
I think, too, of modern writers like J.K. Rowling and Toni Morrison, whose formal classical training echoes structurally throughout their work. And yet, the figure who haunts me most is one who had to build her own door to the ancient world: Virginia Woolf.
Denied the university education her brothers received, simply because she was a woman, she taught herself Greek and continued reading it throughout her life. For Woolf, Greek was not an academic ornament, but a living intellectual companion shaping her prose, her essays, and her understanding of literature.
Each year I return to her magnificent essay, “On Not Knowing Greek” (1925), invariably lingering on her summarizing sentence:
“It is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, the confusion, the Christianity and its consolations, of our own age.”
I recently came upon this Emily Dickinson poem—one I hadn’t read before, yet find incredibly rich in resonance, crafted with immense subtlety. Understood most fully within its New England cultural context, it brilliantly nuances contemporary reflection as well in its strident humanism.
She remains my favorite poet:
That it will never come again Is what makes life so sweet. Believing what we dont believe Does not exhilirate.
That if it be, it be at best An ablative estate – This instigates an appetite Precisely opposite.
Briefly, the poem opens with the speaker’s affirmation that life is to be cherished precisely because of its transience. She refuses to feign belief in something she cannot embrace: the recompense of an afterlife.
The second stanza explains why, drawing on “ablative”—the Latin grammatical case denoting removal or “taking away.” To Dickinson, a conventional heaven is an “ablative estate” because it strips away our physical, sensory selves. (Intriguingly, “ablation” also carries a modern surgical definition of tissue removal, reinforcing this sense of loss).
Ultimately, the proffer of this sterile, diminished eternity only instigates an appetite “precisely opposite”: a heightened hunger for the sensory, mortal now.
If you ask me to name my favorite American poet, and there are many extraordinary ones to choose from, I will unabashedly reply: Emily Dickinson.
Her recurring themes of deity, nature, and mortality have always held me captive. I grew up in an intensely Christian household, only to rebel later in life as the problem of evil weighed heavily on my mind. Dickinson was herself a rebel. In a time of vestigial Puritanism, she chose to stay home from church and frequently questioned God’s way of doing things.
Like her, I am intimately aware of death’s proximity and its universal scythe. As for her ardent love for nature—count me in.
Above all, I admire her poetry for its enigmatic essence, her finest poems lending themselves to myriad readings and leaving behind a lingering residue.
Like the Bible studies of my youth, her work invites group commentary. Like her elusive life, we probe the lines and never exhaust them.
Perhaps her most universally beloved poem is “Hope is the thing with feathers.” Unlike the vast majority of her 1,776 poems, this one resides in an apparent simplicity, which likely explains its enduring popularity:
Hope is the thing with feathers – That perches in the soul – And sings the tune without the words – And never stops – at all –
And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard – And sore must be the storm – That could abash the little Bird That kept so many warm –
I’ve heard it in the chillest land – And on the strangest Sea – Yet – never – in Extremity, It asked a crumb – of me.
Yet, the poem has its detractors. Some critics contend that its smooth surface, aside from the initial personification of hope as a bird, lacks the integrity of a truly well-crafted poem.
They argue that it contains no irony, no paradox, and no resonant dictional elements. In its hymnal quatrains, they hear a sing-song quality that invites parody. They claim it lacks metrical subtlety.
They ask: if the bird sings a song without words, shouldn’t a poem proffering hope actually articulate its basis?
The second stanza, however, belies the poem’s seeming simplicity, introducing an undermining threat to its optimism: “And sore must be the storm / That could abash the little bird.” In short, the stanza introduces the possibility of a duress so severe that even hope cannot transcend it. “Abash” connotes embarrassment, or even shame for having entertained hope in the first place, while “little bird” underscores an acute vulnerability.
I actually admire this stanza precisely for its ambiguity. Are there life interventions that—no matter what we oppose against them, like sandbags piled against a rising river, cannot avail?
Dickinson does not answer, nor should she. The stanza deserves praise for its integrity. Writing in a cultural context that demanded a definitive conversion experience, Dickinson may suggest that hope—or better yet, faith, does not always prevail.
The eminent late critic Helen Vendler, about whom I recently posted (Vendler ), contends that the poem’s seeming simplicity conceals an underlying riddle. The text never once specifies the word “bird”; we are left to discover it ourselves.
While hope carries a massive theological history, the poet bypasses complication with a quotidian analogy drawn from nature. St. Paul famously wrote of the three virtues that abide—or rather, transcend: faith, hope, and love. Dickinson’s analogy is demonstrative of this. Replete in New Testament overtones, this hope “endures all things,” despite life’s vicissitudes of “storm” and “gale.”
It continues, asking for nothing—not a single “crumb.” It does not need to be fed; it requires no logical rationale.
Returning to that challenging second stanza, perhaps the speaker is not acquiescing to the idea that hope will fail under trial. Instead, she may be conjecturing about what unthinkable life tribunal would be required to extinguish it.
The ambiguity remains beautifully unresolved. Is Dickinson admiring the unshakeable faith of her fellow townsfolk—a faith to which she herself could not subscribe? I have a cousin whose faith has remained utterly unaltered, no matter the circumstance, from the earliest days I have known her.
If we exclude Dickinson herself from the poem’s persona, as the most valuable exegesis does, a deeper problematic emerges: is this a poem of distant admiration or personal testimony? The closing words, “of me,” pull us back and forth between a deeply personal confession and the observations of a detached admirer.
Vendler is entirely right about the riddle here that conceals a depth wrought of subtle artistry. Even Dickinson’s dashes perform a vital cinematic role—acting like a panning camera that takes in each angle separately, before finally folding the scene into a consummate plenitude.
Today is “Poem in Your Pocket Day,” a chance to carry a poem with you and share it. Poetry speaks to the feeling dimension at the heart of who we are, most often through metaphor.
I’ve chosen Sara Teasdale’s “Stars,” first published in 1917. Teasdale is also known for “There Will Come Soft Rains,” whose title Ray Bradbury later borrowed for one of his most memorable stories. She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
“Stars” is a short poem whose apparent simplicity conceals careful craft:
“Stars”
Alone in the night On a dark hill With pines around me Spicy and still,
And a heaven full of stars Over my head, White and topaz And misty red;
Myriads with beating Hearts of fire That aeons Cannot vex or tire;
Up the dome of heaven Like a great hill, I watch them marching Stately and still,
And I know that I Am honored to be Witness of so much majesty.
The opening stanza—“Alone in the night / On a dark hill”—does not suggest loneliness so much as attentiveness. The speaker is set apart in order to perceive more fully. The “spicy and still” pines engage not only sight but scent, grounding the experience in the physical world.
In the second stanza, the sky’s “white and topaz / And misty red” stars introduce a quiet richness of color. Rather than dramatizing emotion, the imagery gently intensifies perception, drawing us into a heightened awareness.
The third stanza personifies the stars as having “beating / Hearts of fire.” This is a form of pathetic fallacy, but it feels less like projection than kinship. The stars are not indifferent; they seem alive with a steady, enduring energy, untouched by time’s vexations.
By the fourth stanza, the speaker’s response becomes more clearly shaped: the stars “marching / Stately and still” evoke a ceremonial procession, ordered and serene.
The final tercet—departing from the earlier quatrains—serves as a quiet coda:“I am honored to be witness of so much majesty.”
The shift in form underscores the inward turn toward gratitude.
A small poem, yet it opens onto something vast: a moment in which solitude becomes not isolation but privilege—the chance to witness a universe both immense and strangely intimate.
Reading The Times Literary Supplement this morning, I learned of the death of Helen Vendler, one of our most astute literary critics, who died on April 23, 2024, at her home in Laguna Beach, California, at age 90.
I cannot quite account for how I missed this as she mattered enormously to me, beginning with my first encounter with her splendid elucidations of Emily Dickinson’s teasing, cryptic lines.
Harvard’s first female University Professor, the university’s highest academic distinction, Vendler produced a body of work remarkable in its breadth: essays and book-length studies of Shakespeare, Milton, Herbert, Blake, Keats, Hopkins, Yeats, Stevens, Plath, Lowell, and Heaney, among others.
She declined to write on living poets, believing that time was needed to properly weigh their achievement.
With her passing, the great cohort of Anglo-American literary critics has thinned further: Kermode (d. 2010), Bloom (d. 2019), Perloff (d. 2024). Only Sir Christopher Ricks, now 92, remains among the preeminent critics of the last century.
Vendler’s particular gift was guiding readers line by line through the most demanding verse, illuminating rather than overwhelming.
She was a lifelong devotee of I. A. Richards, whose landmark PracticalCriticism advocated close attention to a poem’s formal patterns, setting aside authorial intent, reader response, and historical context. Poetry yields its meaning, Richards argued, through how it is shaped; above all, through its diction.
This was also the foundation of the New Criticism as developed by John Crowe Ransom and Cleanth Brooks (see Brooks’ The Well Wrought Urn and Understanding Poetry).
It is the way I was schooled to read poetry, which may explain why I found Vendler’s skepticism toward deconstructionism and other theoretical fashions so congenial.
Her dictum to aspiring poets, “Write so your mother could understand,” captured her conviction precisely: convolution out, clarity in.
She was not without controversy. Her pointed dismissal of Rita Dove’s Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry in the New York Review of Books:’”Are These the Poems to Remember?,” drew sharp criticism for what many saw as racial bias in her canonical judgments.
That she apologized to Dove as she lay dying, speaks volumes to her integrity. Her criticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet she loved as a “fastidious aesthete” and “intemperate dogmatist,” illustrates her refusal of hagiography. She evaluated poets on aesthetic terms, not identity, and expected the same rigor of herself.
Her path to that eminence was hard-won. As a Harvard graduate student in the 1950s, she was told by the English Department Chair: “You know we don’t want you here…. We don’t want any women here.”
Pregnancy barred her from teaching. At 34, divorced, she supported a son on child support and the income from four courses, one of them in the evenings. When first offered a professorship she declined it. (She would not accept a position at Harvard until the mid-1980s.).
The irony is that she had not begun as an English major at all, winning a Fulbright in mathematics. But poetry had claimed her early. As a teenager, she had committed several Shakespearean sonnets to memory.
Fluent in reading Latin, Spanish, Italian, and French from her youth, she became, by common consent, the preeminent literary critic of the second half of the twentieth century.
Her honors included the Jefferson Lecture — the federal government’s highest humanities recognition; the presidency of the Modern Language Association; and 28 honorary doctorates.
Her final book, InhabitingthePoem: LastEssays, published by the Library of America, was written as she knowingly was dying and is a fitting capstone. Yeats presides over it, as he always did for her: “the finest poet of the twentieth century.”
As poet Tom Cook observes in the TLS, “It is hard to imagine a critic of her sheer range and depth, with the time and willingness to share it, emerging again.
It was at Exeter College, Oxford, in 1979, while doing a course in modern poetry, that I first heard of Philip Larkin, featured among the poets we studied..
Many critics consider him Britain’s best poet since WWII. Later, I would make him a staple of my own university courses in modern poetry. One Larkin poem that impressed me tremendously was “Church Going,” with its somber reflection on Christianity’s demise and, by extension, religion in contemporary life. Larkin, a librarian at the University of Hull, was slated to visit our tutorial, only to cancel for whatever reason at the last minute. He died a few years later.
While “Church Going” remains my favorite Larkin poem, it had its thematic precedent, however, in modernist American poet Wallace Steven’s “Sunday Morning,” published in 1915 and revised in 1923. Like Larkin, Stevens takes up the embers of a once vibrant faith.
It’s not an easy read, Stevens perhaps with Eliot the most erudite of modernists poets. I’ve been thinking a lot of Stevens and this particular poem as Easter approaches. The resurrection, whether mythic or historical, is the poem’s underlying centripetal force that energizes this magnificent poem.
I.
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice. She dreams a little, and she feels the dark Encroachment of that old catastrophe, As a calm darkens among water-lights. The pungent oranges and bright, green wings Seem things in some procession of the dead, Winding across wide water, without sound. The day is like wide water, without sound, Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet Over the seas, to silent Palestine, Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.
Commentary:
The poem commences on a Sunday morning, moving intermittently from the palpable, sensory present—an anonymous woman in nightgown, lounging on a couch, enjoying her coffee and oranges, a green parrot resting on her rug.
An interlocutor voice intrudes with philosophic reflection, setting up dialectic tension: nature’s plenitude versus a “silent Palestine/Dominion of the blood and sepulchre,” vague and distant.
II.
Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams? Shall she not find in comforts of the sun, In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else In any balm or beauty of the earth, Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven? Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow; Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms; gusty Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; All pleasures and all pains, remembering The bough of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul.
Commentary:
The idea of paradise distant and abstract, vividly contrasts with the pungency of the physical world, sufficient in both “grievings” and “elations.”
III.
Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth. No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind. He moved among us, as a muttering king, Magnificent, would move among his hinds, Until our blood, commingling, virginal, With heaven, brought such requital to desire The very hinds discerned it, in a star. Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be The blood of paradise? And shall the earth Seem all of paradise that we shall know? The sky will be much friendlier then than now, A part of labor and a part of pain, And next in glory to enduring love, Not this dividing and indifferent blue.
Commentary:
The ancient myth of Jove, the Roman sky-father, and his non-human birth yields a deity absent of human experience, a monarch remote from sensory, earthly life, suggestive of Jesus born of a virgin (“virginal,” “star”). Blood, “commingling…With heaven” implies the Incarnation. “Muttering”suggests incomprehensibility, a divine speech not relevant to human need, an indicting of the traditional transcendent god, absent from daily life. The several symbols — Jove, blood, the Virgin, the star, the hinds (female deer)—suggest their man-made origins. Humans project on the universe their need for the palpable (i.e., “blood) to meet what fulfills their longing for a deity who co-mingles among them (“requital to desire”). Requital means reciprocation, a satisfying of longing. Several pivotal questions are raised toward the stanza’s end:
“Shall our blood fail?” — Will human desire for the divine simply die out?
“Or shall it come to be the blood of paradise?” — Or will we succeed in sacralizing earthly life itself?
“Shall it give back all that it has absorbed?” — Will heaven (the sky, the idea of transcendence) return what it has taken from us — our energy, our desire, our consolation?
“Or shall men gather and make hymns to what / Is left of paradise?” Or shall they celebrate / The sky, the sun, the earth?”
In sum, the human-wrought Incarnation is needless, for Earth functions sufficiently as our sole paradise (i.e., heaven): “A part of labor and a part of pain.” Nature, woven into our experiential world, yields a friendlier, knowable cosmos, the stuff of human experience.
IV.
She says, “I am content when wakened birds, Before they fly, test the reality Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings; But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields Return no more, where, then, is paradise?” There is not any haunt of prophecy, Nor any old chimera of the grave, Neither the golden underground, nor isle Melodious, where spirits gat them home, Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured As April’s green endures; or will endure Like her remembrance of awakened birds, Or her desire for June and evening, tipped By the consummation of the swallow’s wings.
Commentary:
Here, Stevens address the poem’s pervasive anxiety, the longing for immortality. The woman worries that the beauty of the earth—the “green of April” or the “plum on the golden plate”—is too ephemeral to satisfy the human soul’s longing for something eternal. In rebuttal, the voice argues the insufficiency of vague, mythic afterlife narratives, the “chimera of the grave,/Neither the golden underground, nor isle/Melodious, where spirits gat them home,” to cyclic nature’s sustaining cornucopia of delight.
V.
She says, “But in contentment I still feel The need of some imperishable bliss.” Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams And our desires. Although she strews the leaves Of sure obliteration on our paths, The path sick sorrow took, the many paths Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love Whispered a little out of tenderness, She makes the willow shiver in the sun For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet. She causes boys to pile new plums and pears On disregarded plate. The maidens taste And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.
Commentary:
The woman longs for assurance of a heaven with its bliss in the conflict between rejecting religion and persistent emotional need. Mortality, the voice argues, heightens our awareness of present beauty resplendent in human event.
VI.
Is there no change of death in paradise? Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs Hang always heavy in that perfect sky, Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth, With rivers like our own that seek for seas They never find, the same receding shores That never touch with inarticulate pang? Why set the pear upon those river-banks Or spice the shores with odors of the plum? Alas, that they should wear our colors there, The silken weavings of our afternoons, And pick the strings of our insipid lutes! Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, Within whose burning bosom we devise Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
Commentary:
The interlocutor’s musing as to the nature of heaven. Is it a place of unchanging sameness, absent of ending ,where “fruit never falls” and the “boughs hang always in that perfect sky”? Is it a place, like earth, of continuing longing, “With rivers like our own that seek for seas They never find…?” Mortality intensifies an awareness of life’s intrinsic value.
VII.
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn Their boisterous devotion to the sun, Not as a god, but as a god might be, Naked among them, like a savage source. Their chant shall be a chant of paradise, Out of their blood, returning to the sky; And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice, The windy lake wherein their lord delights, The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills, That choir among themselves long afterward. They shall know well the heavenly fellowship Of men that perish and of summer morn. And whence they came and whither they shall go The dew upon their feet shall manifest.
Commentary:
The poem’s climax opens with an extended auditory image of a naturalistic celebration of life—“a chant of paradise”!—cognitive of mortality, enhancing acceptance of its ending: “They shall know well “the heavenly fellowship Of men that perish and of summer morn.”
VIII.
She hears, upon that water without sound, A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine Is not the porch of spirits lingering. It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.” We live in an old chaos of the sun, Or old dependency of day and night, Or island solitude, unsponsored, free, Of that wide water, inescapable. Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness; And, in the isolation of the sky, At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
Commentary:
The concluding stanza commences with the speaker’s rejection of the Resurrection:
“The tomb in Palestine Is not the porch of spirits lingering. It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”
Independent of a transcendent deity, we are granted autonomy (“freedom”), our lives governed by ancient, impersonal physical laws (the “dependency of day and night”) rather than a moral or spiritual prerequisite.
The stanza concludes with the image of an evening flock of pigeons making “Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to darkness, on extended wings.”
“Ambiguous undulations” suggests impermanence, the inevitable intrusion of change as life transitions from beauty to death. We, like these birds, glide gracefully (“extended wings”), “sinking” inevitably toward the “darkness” of extinction.
REFLECTIONS:
Previous to my retirement, I had taught this poem for some twenty years as part of my course in Modern Poetry, unceasingly admiring its resonant Keats and Wordsworth innuendos.
Paradoxically modern in its delivery, cerebral and image focused, the poem is rooted in English Romanticism, celebrating the imagination’s witness to our fated passage into a parenthesis of light suspended between spheres of darkness.
Like much of Romantic poetry, again that of Wordsworth in its blank verse of unrhymed pentameter, melancholic disposition, rich symbolism, and lofty diction, its voluptuous fantasy, reminiscent of Keats, it supremely celebrates nature.
While there is an insistent tension through much of the poem between nature’s plenitude and the woman’s expressed need for something more, it’s crucial to Stevens’ purpose of philosophical debate.
The final stanza proffers epiphany, the woman’s possible acceptance of a cosmos devoid of divine certitude—“the old chaos of the sun,” a realm of “ambiguous undulations,” where no promise of resurrection intrudes upon the flux of being. We cannot be sure the woman is even present here. Critic Frank Kermode points out Stevens preference for open endings. He sees the poem’s final stanza as process, not conclusion.
Distinguished critic Helen Vender reads the poem as a movement toward a “natural supernaturalism”—a vision in which transcendence is reabsorbed into nature. The final stanza’s birds and “ambiguous undulations” affirm process, not permanence.
Stevens’ masterpiece, a secular hymn, grants solace not in transcendence but in the acceptance—and even the aesthetic affirmation—of metaphysical ambiguity: the freedom to choose, to become arbiters of all that we define as beautiful, grounded wholly within a mortal world.
On winter mornings, before the day has decided what it will become, the fields hold a stillness that feels provisional—frost clinging to the grass, fence lines darkened with damp, the land waiting without impatience. It is a good hour for reading slowly, for choosing words that do not hurry ahead of their meanings.
I have begun the year reading Wendell Berry. Now in his ninety-second year, he continues—more slowly, more deliberately—to farm and to write, unchanged in his fidelity to limits: the authority of place over abstraction, the moral claims of the local over the corporate, tradition understood not as nostalgia but as knowledge earned through use and endurance.
I read him most mornings. His work steadies the day. It does not offer solutions so much as orientation—toward what is given, what is sufficient, and what must be borne. Berry has always made room for joy, but never without sorrow, nor for hope without the acknowledgment of failure, including one’s own.
Some of his most influential prose appeared early, when his voice was still finding its public footing. The Long-Legged House and The Unsettling of America argued, quietly and insistently, that culture and agriculture are inseparable, and that when land is treated as commodity rather than community, both soil and people are diminished.
I return often to his poetry, especially A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems. Written on Sundays and largely free of polemic, these poems are acts of attention. They move patiently through the stages of a human life—birth, labor, love, diminishment—offering a sacramental vision of ordinary days lived close to the ground. Among them is Berry’s most widely known poem, “The Peace of Wild Things,” whose calm acceptance of life’s ephemerality offers not escape from anxiety, but release from the burden of false mastery:
“I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.”
The peace the poem offers is not consolation so much as proportion. Its discipline lies in relinquishing the anxious reach into the future and reentering creaturely time—where life is finite, local, and sufficient.
That same discipline governs Berry’s essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” first published in 1987 and often misread as a rejection of technology itself. It is instead a meditation on the moral weight of tools. Berry does not deny their usefulness; he questions their claims. Certain technologies, he suggests, quietly privilege speed over deliberation and convenience over care, reshaping habits of attention until efficiency becomes an unquestioned good.
The good life, in Berry’s accounting, is not optimized. It is inhabited. To live well requires learning the difference between what is necessary and what merely promises ease.
Barbara Kingsolver, another Kentuckian, names this work plainly when she writes:
“I consider it no small part of my daily work to sort out the differences between want and need. I’m helped along the way by my friend Wendell, without his ever knowing it. He advises me to ask, in the first place, whether I wish to purchase a solution to a problem I don’t have.”
Berry’s essay is not finally about computers at all. It is about scale and consequence. It asks not simply what a tool can do, but what it may undo—what forms of patience, responsibility, and mutual care it quietly displaces. It asks how our choices shape our relationships to family, to community, and to the land that sustains both.
Berry still writes with pencil on a yellow legal pad. He still farms, though within the limits age imposes. He still publishes—new poems, even a recent novel. The persistence itself feels instructive.
In a culture bent on expansion and acceleration, Berry’s life suggests another measure of success: fidelity to place, restraint in use, and the long patience required to learn what is enough.
Brimmings: up from the well 