I’ve been writing poetry or whatever it is since I was five or six years old, and I couldn’t stop, I never could stop. I don’t know why I did it.… It was like a stream that went along beside me, you know, my life went along here, and I got married and had three kids and did all the things you have to do, and all along the time this stream was going along. And I really didn’t know what it was saying. It just talked to me, and I wrote it down. So I can’t even take much credit for it.” — Ruth Stone
The late Ruth Stone’s poetry gives me goosebumps. It’s that good —observant, conversational, intimate, punctuated with humor, resonating life in all its undulations.
It’s Saturday afternoon. I lie here on my bed, going through Stone’s poems as the world pursues its daily tasks. Quietness is my paradise, allowing space to reflect on essentials that matter. Stone’s poetry does that well.
Ruth Stone (1915-2011) didn’t have it easy. A mother of three children, her husband committed suicide, plunging her into abject poverty. Her poetry prowess, however, earned her a piecemeal income through itinerant, short term teaching assignments at universities across America.
Between teaching gigs, she’d return to her home in Goshen, Vermont, crafting new poems and short stories, her talent earning her two Guggenheim awards.
Academy recognition came late. In 2002, she won the National Book Award for Poetry at age 87 (2002).
What puzzles me is that she remains widely unknown. Her poetry, abundant in robust metaphor, drawn from science and nature, stands on its own, defiant of imitation.
Stone saw life in all its teeming distillations, especially in regard to aging, about which she could be merciless.
Her death came in 2011 at age 96.
Her humble home in Goshen, soul of her prodigious output (13 books), has been designated a historical landmark and become a retreat for literary studies. Her informal grave is nearby.
Below, the Ruth Stone poem that fulfills Emily Dickinson observation on what makes for a good poem: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry…Is there any other way?” ( L342a, 1870):
“Always on the Train”
Writing poems about writing poems is like rolling bales of hay in Texas. Nothing but the horizon to stop you.
But consider the railroad’s edge of metal trash; bird perches, miles of telephone wires. What is so innocent as grazing cattle? If you think about it, it turns into words.
Trash is so cheerful; flying up like grasshoppers in front of the reaper. The dust devil whirls it aloft; bronze candy wrappers, squares of clear plastic–windows on a house of air.
Below the weedy edge in last year’s mat, red and silver beer cans. In bits blown equally everywhere, the gaiety of flying paper and the black high flung patterns of flocking birds.
What to write about, or finding your subject matter, doesn’t come easily.
Some writers respond to prompts to get them started.
Most writers probably get started out of a chance remark thrown their way in casual conversation or through stimuli in something they’ve read, or a keen interest, say in health research or climate change, that drives their protocol.
Political writers with an agenda find an especially easy route, simply reacting to adversary axioms they view as detrimental to public welfare. They’re never out of material, the spring never running dry in a media era of incessant scrutiny.
Popular author Tim Cotton just throws a sentence out there, not knowing where he’s headed: “What you don’t know about me, and won’t care, is that everything I write starts with a random sentence, typed onto a screen with no idea where I am going.”
Probing deeper, however, you’ll find this may be misleading. Cotton doesn’t simply post an initial sentence without an underlying coterie of everyday happenings—a visit with his aging father, the dream residue of an afternoon nap, the challenge of what to keep or toss, etc.
The key is to be mindful and present in the ordinary, and Cotton does this better than most of us. I suspect he jots down incipient observations he can expand upon later. Like many writers, he may keep a journal.
No matter how the writing venture begins, it has its mysterious aspects that all of us know very well. I remember a fellow graduate seminar student telling me that my writing exhibited a different person from the one of daily conversation.
That doesn’t surprise me. However I begin writing, I tunnel into a buried mineshaft of a separate self, perhaps akin to what Jung called the Shadow, surfacing in the writing act like a Yellowstone geyser bursting from subterranean depths.
Occasionally, I’ll bump into something I wrote several years ago and come away, Did I write that?
The poet Coleridge famously ascribed his Kubla Khan poem to an afternoon opium induced nap. On the other hand, Harvard scholar John Livingston Lowes pointed out Coleridge’s possible myriad reading sources in The Road to Xanadu.
In short, the depth psychologists Freud and Jung were right: We file our experiences, even the most trivial, at the unconscious level, lying dormant, only to spill suddenly into awareness, triggered by associative stimuli.
And so Tim Cotton is also right. However you start, your writing will reveal unknown vistas, revelatory of a much wiser Self than that quotidian persona we publicly assume.
Cotton inspired this post. I simply typed the first sentence, not knowing what I’d say. I had no notes, did not google, etc. That concealed self, automatic writing psychic enthusiasts might call it, filled out the blank.
Our minds are a file cabinet of our human experience, waiting retrieval. Writing may prove laborious, but think of what you miss when you don’t bother to write—the confluence of your life’s journey and its meaning; above all, your linkage with wider humanity, fostering understanding and empathy.
A journey of serpentine twists, leading to unanticipated trajectories, you never really know where you’ll end up.
Can you hold time in your hand? Place it on your dresser? Put it in your wallet?
Can something impalpable exist?
And yet we measure by it—past, present, future.
While physicists debate its existence, intuitively we believe in it.
Like we do God.
We age by it. We are not what we once were.
Gardeners know its passage, from seed to birth, ripening to harvest.
Or as the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam renders it, “One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies; The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.”
Perhaps we’d do better to conceive time as flow, or infinity’s rhythm, with neither beginning nor ending, our lives but a wink amid a stellar darkness of unending boundary, a universe among universes, yielding mystery and wonder to finite eyes.
Always Was, Is, and Shall Be.
If we truly believe in time, it behooves us to use it wisely, alter our history, relish awareness, and live in the present.
Or as Mark Twain, one of America’s genuine truth-sayers, put it, “There isn’t time, so brief is life, for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving, and but an instant, so to speak, for that.”
Jack Kerouac turned 102 a week ago. The fierceness of his writing overwhelms, lyrical, sensory, harnessing human moods, a fiery warmth beneath a canopy of gazing stars on cold stellar nights:
“Fury flashing on rocks that rise like gloomy sea shroud towers out of the cove, the bingbang cove with its seas booming inside caves and slapping out, the cities of seaweed floating up and down you can even see their dark leer in the phosphorescent seabeach nightlight.”
—Big Sur
“…the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’”
—Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing. It’s a dream already ended. There’s nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the vast awakenerhoo 0d, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born.”
—The Portable Jack Kerouac
The world you see is just a movie in your mind. Rocks dont see it. Bless and sit down. Forgive and forget. Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now. That’s the story. That’s the message. Nobody understands it, nobody listens, they’re all running around like chickens with heads cut off. I will try to teach it but it will be in vain, s’why I’ll end up in a shack praying and being cool and singing by my woodstove making pancakes.
Palestinian poet, novelist, and educator Hiba Aba Nada, age 32, wrote this poem ten days before her death in her home on October 20, 2023 from an Israeli bombing attack in south Gaza that killed many others. In the poem, God proffers an afterlife of refuge for the besieged and dying. In the closing verse, He assures the martyrs’ ultimate triumph:
1. I grant you refuge in invocation and prayer. I bless the neighborhood and the minaret to guard them from the rocket
from the moment it is a general’s command until it becomes a raid.
I grant you and the little ones refuge, the little ones who change the rocket’s course before it lands with their smiles.
2. I grant you and the little ones refuge, the little ones now asleep like chicks in a nest.
They don’t walk in their sleep toward dreams. They know death lurks outside the house.
Their mothers’ tears are now doves following them, trailing behind every coffin.
3. I grant the father refuge, the little ones’ father who holds the house upright when it tilts after the bombs. He implores the moment of death: “Have mercy. Spare me a little while. For their sake, I’ve learned to love my life. Grant them a death as beautiful as they are.”
4. I grant you refuge from hurt and death, refuge in the glory of our siege, here in the belly of the whale.
Our streets exalt God with every bomb. They pray for the mosques and the houses. And every time the bombing begins in the North, our supplications rise in the South.
5. I grant you refuge from hurt and suffering.
With words of sacred scripture I shield the oranges from the sting of phosphorous and the shades of cloud from the smog.
I grant you refuge in knowing that the dust will clear, and they who fell in love and died together will one day laugh.
I’ve never formally studied Walt Whitman’s poetry, despite a graduate degree in English. That’s because I made Victorian Literature my major interest, with modern American and British Literature secondary. Still, I’ve read his landmark Leaves of Grass many times, America’s psalmody in its pioneering free verse; in its robustness, an encomium of America were it doing more than lip service to the American dream.
It says much about Whitman, out-of-joint with his generation much like contemporary Emily Dickinson, uncomfortable with the cultural shibboleths of middle class Amherst. Perhaps influenced by his father’s radical views on politics and religion, Whitman emerges an essential element of America’s constant of progressive rebellion, resistant to mercenary interests that gave us slavery, wealth inequality, desecration of nature, racial injustice, and imperialism.
If you’re looking for a summation of Leaves of Grass, nothing excels his “Credo” in the poem’s Preface. Conscious of America’s failure to live up to its promise, “Credo” exemplifies its gulf and champions its realization:
“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, andyour very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”
I’ve long revered Robinson Jeffers’ poetry, ahead of its time in addressing humanity’s pillaging of nature and its consequence.
Formerly one of our most esteemed poets, even making the cover of TimeMagazine (1932), Jeffers fell out of favor with the entrance of America into WW Il. Another outplay of human interests gone amuck, he wanted no part in it. It violated his concept of “inhumanism,” the subordinating of anthropocentric interests to nature’s primacy. By 1965, much of his work was out of print.
That is no shame. Other American poets, like Dickinson and Whitman, out of joint with their times, have suffered banishment to benign forgetfulness.
As he later explained in his 1948 preface to the Double-Axe and Other Poems, “Inhumanism is the devaluation of human-centered illusions, the turning outward from man to what is boundlessly greater. The attitude is neither misanthropic nor pessimistic, nor irreligious.”
I’m not unaware that his poetry has aroused controversy with its misanthropic tenor, long narrative poems replete with violence and latent pessimism about humanity’s future.
With the 2022 UN supported IPCC study just out, conducted by more than 500 scientists from 40 countries, and running 8,000 pages, documenting climate change acceleration and biodiversity loss, Jeffers deserves the reappraisal of his poetry now underway.
Jeffers’ antipathy towards humanity is expressed in his poem, “Original Sin”:
As for me, I would rather be a worm in a wild apple than a son of man. But we are what we are; and we might remember Not to hate any person, for all are vicious; And not to be astonished at any evil, all are deserved; And not fear death: it is the only way to be cleansed
Much of his verse is rooted in Darwinian cataclysm. No Wordsworth, Jeffers wasn’t myopic about nature. He accepted its relentless tooth and claw interchange. Man, however, is the ultimate predator, which explains his hostility: “I’d sooner, except for the penalties, kill a man than a hawk” (“Hurt Hawks”).
Jeffers will not lament mankind’s ultimate passing:
I’m never sorry to think that here’s a planet Will go on like this glen, perfectly whole and content, after mankind is Scummed from the kettle.
Nature deserves reverence. In his poem, “Nova,” he writes,
…we know that the enormous invulnerable beauty of things Is the face of God, to live gladly in its presence, and die without grief or fear knowing it survives us”
In “The Answer,” he pens that
Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man
Man has violated that wholeness. In “Animals,” one of my favorites, Jeffers movingly nuances man’s estrangement from his fellow creatures:
At dawn a knot of sea-lions lies off the shore In the slow swell between the rock and the cliff, Sharp flippers lifted, or great-eyed heads, as they roll in the sea, Bigger than draft-horses, and barking like dogs Their all-night song. It makes me wonder a little That life near kin to human, intelligent, hot blooded, idle and singing, can float at ease In the ice-cold midwinter water.
Jeffers’ poetry isn’t always easy to understand. Immensely learned, he can be deeply philosophic, much of his verse influenced by his wide reading in Lucretius, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Spengler, Vico, myth and anthropology.
Gifted, Jeffers read classical Greek and Latin at age 5, and as a teen, was fluent in French, German and Italian. Along with his brother, he had been educated in private schools in Geneva, Lausanne, Zurich, and Leipzig,
Recognized for his intellectual brilliance, he was admitted to Occidental College with junior standing, though only sixteen, graduating two years later. He went on to medical and forestry schools,dropping out to pursue his love for literature.
He settled with his beloved wife, Una, in Big Sur’s rugged landscape where the Santa Lucia mountains in Monterey County rise suddenly, adjacent to the Pacific ocean and not far from Carmel, a lush landscape of small farms and virgin redwood forest. I think of it as one of the most beautiful landscapes on earth. Jeffers described it as “the noblest thing I have ever seen.”
Big Sur
Relishing its beauty and isolation, he built his own house, now open to visitors, out of stone wrestled up with his own hands from the beach below, and called it TorHouse. It includes HawkTower, where he wrote his poems each morning by a window offering mountain vistas. From it, absent of mist, visitors can glimpse many of the 2,000 cypress and eucalyptus trees he planted and hand-watered. The grounds include a well-maintained cottage garden.
TorHouse merits visiting. The docent quality may vary, but here Jeffers is rekindled, few places so associated with a writer as TorHouse. George Gershwin, Martha Graham, and Langston Hughes would be among those paying homage. It’s in the dining room, laid out like an English pub, that he slipped into eternity.
Jeffers settled in Big Sur in 1914. Nearby Carmel had only 350 inhabitants.
In his forward to SelectedPoetry, he relished the afforded isolation, “purged of its ephemeral accretions. Men were riding after cattle, or plowing the headland, hovered by white sea-gulls, as they have done for thousands of years, and will do for thousands of years to come.”
Jeffers inspired novelist Henry Miller to settle nearby, where he would remain until Jeffers’ death in 1962. Others, like Ken Kesey and Hunter Thompson, would follow. Jack Kerouac’s DharmaBums has its partial setting in Big Sur.
Jeffers wasn’t a rabid romantic. He knew intrusion would prove inevitable, expressing his resentment in his acclaimed pastoral lyric, “Carmel Point.”
The extraordinary patience of things! This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses— How beautiful when we first beheld it, Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs; No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing, Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads— Now the spoiler has come: does it care? Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide That swells and in time will ebb, and all Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty Lives in the very grain of the granite, Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.—As for us: We must uncenter our minds from ourselves; We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident As the rock and ocean that we were made from.
Poet Robert Hass deems Jeffers “the first American poet to grasp the devastating extent of the changes human technologies and populations were wreaking on the rest of the earth’s biological life” (“Introduction,” Rock and HawkA Selection of Shorter Poems by Robinson Jeffers).
Renowned physicist Freeman Dyson exclaims in TheNewYorkReviewofBooks that “Robinson Jeffers was no scientist, but he expressed better than any other poet the scientist’s vision. Ironic, detached, contemptuous like Einstein of national pride and cultural taboos, he stood in awe of nature alone. He stood alone in uncompromising opposition to the follies of the Second World War. His poems during those years of patriotic frenzy were unpublishable….I discovered Jeffers thirty years later, when the sadness and the passion of the war had become a distant memory. Fortunately, his works are now in print and you can read them for yourselves” (May 25, 1995).
Can I ever forget his magisterial “De Rerum Virtute,” alluding to Lucretius “De rerum natura”?
All things are full of God Winter and summer, day and night, war and peace are God …
One light is left us, the beauty of things The immense beauty of the world, not the human world
Jeffers’ reputation may have suffered time’s undulations—a change in taste, or political rebuttal, or rebellion against his insistent passion and human dislike, but for environmentalists, he remains its patron saint, and I know that I, for one, adore him.
Tell all the truth but tell it slant — Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth’s superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind.
This poem, widely read, typically exhibits Dickinson’s syntactical subtleties, meriting close, repeated readings.
At its primary level, it counsels the circuitous in communicating with others in difficult circumstances: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” “Slant” connotes the angular, or indirect, anticipating the sun and lightning analogies in the lines that follow.
Just as we cannot view the sun directly, so it is with harsh realities that need filtering, given the “infirmity,” or sensitivity, of humans unable to absorb truth undiluted: “Success in Circuit lies/Too bright for our infirm Delight.” Although the sun isn’t specifically mentioned, “bright” confirms its presence..
Likewise, to disclose the truth directly is analogous to the lightning’s surprise flash, frightening children, whose anxiety is only eased with softened explanation: “The Truth’s superb surprise/As Lightning to the Children eased/With explanation kind.”
The poem’s final lines reiterate the poem’s opening counsel, while warning of the consequence of not doing so: “The Truth must dazzle gradually/ Or every man be blind.” That is, we may otherwise do greater harm.
Ethicists may argue with the seeming absolutism in the all of “Tell all the truth.” Surely we can think of circumstances that demand otherwise. A lot depends on the motives we bring to troublesome situations, whether centered in ourselves or on others. Dickinson unequivocally chooses the latter, with kindness the arbitrator.
Dickinson was hardly naive. As poet Camille Dungy observes, “We can’t truly know comfort unless we know its opposite. Writers who think carefully about how to render the world in a truthful and realistic way have to handle, bare-handed and, thus, ever so carefully, the double-edged sword of comfort versus discomfort” (poetryfoundation.org).
We would be wise to adopt a cultural approach as well. We’re not sure of when Dickinson wrote this poem, but most scholarship suggests between 1858 and 1865. In short, it may have been written in the context of America’s Civil War. The conflict was cataclysmic, with an ultimate casualty toll of 600,000. The majority of leading scholars think she internalized the struggle to reflect her psychological wrestlings.
This isn’t to say she wasn’t mindful of the war’s gruesome realities. We have, for example, her “It Feels Ashamed to be Alive” poem, which opens: “It feels a shame to be Alive—When Men so brave—are dead.” We also have her letters and journal. It’s conceivable Dickinson had in mind families and friends receiving grim news of their loved one’s demise. Amherst was a small, close-knit community.
But the poem can also be read in quite another way as Dickinson’s aesthetic of concealment, or how poetry should be written. Good poetry should show, not tell; hint, but not reveal, a credo consistently realized in her poetry. Sound poetry engages readers in discovery, fashioning a poem’s constituents into pattern, yielding coherence, or like pieces of a puzzle, fitting into place.
Through such methodology, poetry acquires universality, the reader becoming the text. This doesn’t mean readers can impose any meaning. On the contrary, astute readers map a poem’s clues and observe its boundaries. Like a good mystery, the clues are planted, awaiting their discovery.
With this in mind, it’s conceivable we can pursue the poem at a metaphysical level as well. What is this “truth” to be shared cautiously? Has it to do with the mystery of Deity’s doings; His ways beyond our “infirm Delight,” or capability to comprehend, necessitating Divine truth be a fragmentary unfolding?
In both Judaism and Christianity, the Shekinah, or divine immanence, is traditionally associated with light. Light dominates this brief poem: “too bright”; “lightning”; “dazzle.” Did Dickinson have in mind Exodus 33:20?: “And he said, Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live” (KJV).
A devotee of the metaphysical poets, Dickinson may have read Henry Vaughan’s “There is in God (some say) a deep, but dazzling darkness” (“The Night”). Did she have this in mind in her summation, “The Truth must dazzle gradually/Or every man be blind”?
We know that Dickinson wrestled with traditional Christianity and a Deity allowing suffering and death. She did not attend church. In an earlier poem, “There’s a certain Slant of light,” she writes of a light “That oppresses, like the Heft/Of Cathedral Tunes/Heavenly Hurt, it gives us.”
Less than a dozen poems of 1779 total were published in Dickinson’s lifetime. This poem was published in 1890, four years after her death. It remains one of her most popular poems.
Dragonflies were as common as sunlight hovering in their own days backward forward and sideways as though they were memory now there are grown-ups hurrying who never saw one and do not know what they are not seeing the veins in a dragonfly’s wings were made of light the veins in the leaves knew them and the flowing rivers the dragonflies came out of the color of water knowing their own way when we appeared in their eyes we were strangers they took their light with them when they went there will be no one to remember us
When I lived in Kentucky and kept up a flower garden, I’d hear every now and then a whizzing sound above my head, look up, and see a dragonfly moving swiftly to snag its mid-air prey between its long legs. I never thought much about them as such. They were simply there.
I regret that now and am unlearning my indifference. Dragonflies, like many other insects, are disappearing, a reality Merwin hints at in this melancholic poem, treating mutability and, with it, loss; a nature tapestry vanishing before our very eyes.
The journal Biological Conservation informs us that 40% of insect species, and that’s in the millions, are in serious decline. “If we don’t stop it, entire ecosystems will collapse due to starvation,” says University of Sydney researcher Francisco Sánchez-Bayo. Our fate will be to perish with them.
Lamentably, dragonflies, these bejeweled aerial acrobats, are among those insects suffering decline. Fundamental inhabitants of freshwater ecosystems, their loss would have immeasurable consequence. Along with climate change, habitat encroachment and degradation have contributed to their falling numbers.
Folklore has it that dragonflies are emissaries of good fortune. And so it seemed for some 300 million years. Members of the phylum Arthropoda, they comprise some 5,000 species in varied sizes and hues.
Merwin’s poem, abjuring punctuation to simulate conversational flow, employs a temporal schema of past, present, and future to depict the incipient fate of dragonflies and, by implication, of other fated creatures, once of prodigious number, now facing not only decline, but future extinction. Contrast looms large in the poem’s time’s sequences.
The poem opens with the persona’s conjecturing past aeons before Man, when dragonflies “were as common as sunlight,”the double use of “were” in the opening lines contrasting their present decline. The simile associating their once prodigious numbers to the sun’s plentitude dazzles in its originality.
Employing kinetic imagery, the persona visualizes a former halcyon indulgence of lingering dragonflies amid time’s seeming suspension: “hovering in their own days/backward forward and sideways.”
Or like the varied probings of memory: “as though they were memory.” And, I might add, like the poem in its past, present and future interweave.
The jarring “now” in its emphatic positioning at the beginning of the fourth line transitions readers fully into the present with its glaring contrast.
Despite the miraculous artistry wrought by evolutionary mechanisms over vast stretches of time, there exist “grown-ups” who, suffering a disconnect with nature and “hurrying” to other pursuits, have never seen a dragonfly
That “they do not know what they/ are not seeing,” harbors the poem’s concluding warning. Not only does the present suffer a nature deficit, but future generations may never know dragonflies existed.
Exiled in the present, humans lack cognizance of that primordial garden, if not Edenic paradise, of teeming dragonflies, diaphanous creatures born of water, instinctual, spontaneous, integral eco entities not knowing Man:
the veins in a dragonfly’s wings were made of light the veins in the leaves knew them and the flowing rivers the dragonflies came out of the color of water knowing their own way
The alienation motif follows with Man’s trespass. In time’s vast unfolding, the dragonflies had not known us: “when we appeared in their eyes/we were strangers.”
Unable to live in a human world, it’s as though they took flight, with consequential, if not incalculable loss for mankind. This is our future and the penultimate line stuns: “they took their light with them when they went.”
Creatures of a once thriving abundance, the dragonflies are extinct! We have come full circle, the sun’s plentitude of the opening line gone dark.
On a scientific note, dragonflies are often depicted as translucent creatures associated with the sun. Merwin, a mindful observer of nature and diligent keeper of a garden, was aware of this: “the veins in a dragonfly’s wings/were made of light.”
Biologically, we know they possess a variety of opsin genes that encode light sensors (science.com
The poem’s last line serves as warning: “there will be no one to remember us,” signifying our own ultimate demise, both as individuals and as species, as our survival cannot be severed from nature’s fate.
It also returns us to the “After” of the title, perhaps initially problematic. Now we know its why. In the immediate of a world devoid of dragonflies, we will have suffered a grievous loss beyond boundary. Merwin’s gift lies in making us feel that loss.
If nature’s eclipse emerges as seemingly ineluctable in this eco-poem, its melancholy consequence lies with Man as its implied source.
Merwin wrote this poem in 2016 when in his late eighties, going blind, and just three years before his death. If you look at the poem’s dictional element closely, you’ll notice its many verbal seeing and light allusions, beginning with the sun simile of the poem’s opening. The poem’s imagery is consistently visual.
Dragonflies are often described in biology depictions as translucent, their heads virtually a gigantic eye.
I’ve always admired Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as a supreme literary achievement. In teaching it over the years, its structural complexity, thematic depth, and passionate intensity never failed to astound me. Putting it another way, Wuthering Heights has haunted me, much like Catherine’s ghost at Heathcliff’s window.
Years ago, I had the good fortune to visit the parsonage where she lived out her brief life in Hayworth, Yorkshire. (Her father was a clergyman with Methodist leanings.) A cramped, but lovingly preserved house, eerily next door to the church cemetery, you could easily surmise the Brontë children were temporarily out and be back shortly and we could settle down to robust conversation over a pot of tea.
While we remember Brontë for her novel, she also wrote poetry, 200 poems in fact. Sadly, her sister Charlotte, renowned for Jane Eyre, subsequently revised many of them, adding whole lines, rewording others, attempting to widen their public appeal. Scholars, trying to recover Emily’s probable texts, have found her cramped script difficult to decipher.
Of her poems, “No Coward Soul Is Mine” is well-known and my favorite. Brontë wrote it in the context of her fateful illness from tuberculosis. I’m so fond of this poem that I’ve been tempted to memorize it. I could almost think I was reading Emily Dickinson with its dismissal of religious orthodoxy and affinity for nature. That same fierce voice element of Wuthering Heights, perhaps a Wesleyan revivalism influence, you’ll find here, carried out by its heavy trochees as in the poem’s initial two lines or lines one and three of stanza five with their opening trochee feet.
You can be a non-believer and still appreciate the poem, for good poetry offers reading variance, or to borrow from medicine, “referral” nuance through well-crafted interweave of image, structure and diction. Our mortality spells change, not ending; a return to Nature’s genesis, or to what was, and is, and will always be.
No Coward Soul of Mine
No coward soul is mine
No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere
I see Heaven’s glories shine
And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear
O God within my breast
Almighty ever-present Deity
Life, that in me hast rest,
As I Undying Life, have power in Thee
Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men’s hearts, unutterably vain,
Worthless as withered weeds
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main
To waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by thy infinity,
So surely anchored on
The steadfast rock of immortality.
With wide-embracing love
Thy spirit animates eternal years
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears
Though earth and moon were gone
And suns and universes ceased to be
And Thou wert left alone
Every Existence would exist in thee
There is not room for Death
Nor atom that his might could render void
Since thou art Being and Breath
And what thou art may never be destroyed.
The poem’s imagery, drawn from nature, supports the poem’s theme of Deity’s abiding presence. Composed of seven quatrains, reminiscent of Methodist hymnody, in alternating tetrameter/pentameter meter, rime occurs consistently throughout, lines one with three, and two with four, including the fourth stanza with its near rime, suggesting a purposive, or teleological, cosmos.
Brontë effectively softens “the world’s wind-troubled sphere” in line two of the initial stanza with alliteration, suggesting tranquility in context of storm.
Each sentence is declarative, resonating conviction. Unlike Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” there is absence of tension, no struggle with doubt in the persona’s resolute faith, “So surely anchored on/The steadfast rock of immortality” ( Stz. 4).
Emily’s God isn’t Dickinson’s transcendent, mysterious, removed deity or Blake’s “No bods’ daddy.” Refulgent in his creation, He lives in our hearts, canceling any fear we might otherwise have, given the “world’s storm-troubled sphere” (Stz. 2). A poem of faith, it finds its affirmation not through anthropomorphic rendering, but in a pantheistic vision of Deity’s universal immanence.
Stanzas 3 and 4 logically follow in their rejection of creedal orthodoxies that are but worthless speculations, promoting anxiety, not peace. The repeated use of “vain” proves double entendre, human speculations fruitless and conceited, or of no more significance than the “idlest foam” of an infinite ocean:
Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men’s hearts, unutterably vain,
Worthless as withered weeds
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main
To waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by thy infinity,
So surely anchored on
The steadfast rock of immortality.
The stanzas that conclude the poem reiterate the persona’s vibrant faith in a deity who transcends the temporal, “Thy spirit animates eternal years,” and for all the volatile elements of impermanence, remains its arbiter, Who maternally “sustains, dissolves, creates and rears.”
Were the very cosmos to disappear, He would remain, for He is creation’s essence. The plural “universes” of the penultimate stanza intrigues. Did Emily believe in the modern concept of multiple universes? Whatever, God is infinite, boundless, present always:
Though earth and moon were gone
And suns and universes ceased to be
And Thou wert left alone
Every Existence would exist in thee.
How then can there be any cowering at death’s door? A deity synonymous with Nature, He is what has been, is now, and will be, the effulgence of it all:
There is not room for Death
Nor atom that his might could render void
Since thou art Being and Breath
And what thou art may never be destroyed.
Brontë dated her poems and wrote “No Coward Soul of Mine” on January 2, 1846. It would be her last poem (she passed two years later at age 30). At the time of the poem’s composition, she’d been completing Wuthering Heights. Emily Dickinson came upon this poem and loved it. She asked it be read at her funeral, her wish fulfilled by her friend and later editor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, at the funeral’s conclusion.
As for Brontë, following several labored days, she slipped into eternity on December 19, 1848, unafraid, and deeply mourned by her sisters, Anne and Charlotte, and canine friend, Keeper. As with Keats, a young talent struck down early by the same illness, her posthumous fame has restored her to us, though not without conjecture of future talent lost.
As I said at the outset, the poem endures as a favorite of mine, one I’d take gladly to a desert isle, or read repeatedly when my last day summons. It accompanies me, too, when I engage Nature in the present, the sense of a hovering spirituality, that everything is linked, and means, and infinitely bigger and grander than ourselves.
I’ve always admired Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as a supreme literary achievement. In teaching it over the years, its structural complexity, thematic depth, and passionate intensity never failed to astound me. Putting it another way, Wuthering Heights has haunted me, much like Catherine’s ghost at Heathcliff’s window.
Brimmings: up from the well 