I always have to stop when I see the name William Cowper.  Firstly, because Cowper, despite its resemblance to a common appellation of bovine beasts, is actually pronounced Cooper.  Secondly, because, in an old BBC television version of Sense and Sensibility, Mary Ann insists that Edward read Cowper’s poetry aloud.  And, lastly and most importantly, because, besides writing a quantity of romantic poetry, Cowper also wrote a quantity of wonderful hymns.  One of which I have put below:

God of my life, to Thee I call,
Afflicted at Thy feet I fall;
When the great water floods prevail
Leave not my trembling heart to fail.

Friend of the friendless and the saint,
Where should I lodge my deep complaint?
Where but with Thee, whose open door
Invites the helpless and poor!

That were a grief I could not bear,
Didst Thou not hear and answer prayer;
But a prayer hearing, answering God,
Supports me under every load.

Poor though I am, despised, forgot,
Yet God, my God, forgets me not;
And He is safe and must succeed for whom
The Lord is sure to plead.

They came there regularly every evening drawn by some need.  It was as if the water floated off and set sailing thoughts which had grown stagnant on dry land, and gave to their bodies even some sort of physical relief.
-Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Dr. Mac told us that this book is “as much like poetry as any novel [he's] ever read.”  I agree with him.  It takes more concentration than ordinary prosings, but the concentration is rewarding.  After reading the above passage, I was no longer content at my library desk, and cut my reading short by ten minutes so that I could take in the fountain on my way to my room.  Of course, the fountain is not the bay Woolf refers to, but in the heart of Mississippi, with only ten minutes, what can one do? 

The fountain always attracts me, particularly in the evenings, when I am feeling long and stretched and stagnant.   The sound of the water, the long ripples on its surface, do bring rest, both mental and physical.  Woolf does not speculate upon the why of it, but I do:

Then I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me, and … I saw … one like a son of man … his voice was like the roar of many waters.
-Revelation 1:12-15

Perhaps, if His voice is like the roar of many waters, than the tinkling of a few waters is a bit like His voice … 

As for me, I shall behold your face in righteousness; when I awake, I shall be satisfied with your likeness.  -Psalm 17:15

If His likeness, seeing His face, is satisfaction, perhaps the echo of His voice is an echo of that satisfaction … and I suspect that that satisfaction involves a rest such as we can hardly begin to imagine. 

Does the fountain, then, bring an echo of that rest?  Perhaps it does.

explicating the nursery rhyme book

Gray goose and gander,
Waft your wings together
And carry the good king’s daughter
Over the one-strand river.

The good king’s daughter has curling hair which floats round her head and against a rosy orb — moon or sun it might be, but it is large and seems to rest upon the gray mountains which are across the one-strand river wrapped in mist.  The river sparkles, and the daughter wears a flowing blue dress.  There is a golden chain round the neck of the goose she rides. 

Why should she be carried over the river?  What is on that other side to which she goes?  It looks as though it must be something wonderful.  Is it a safe haven from something that threatens?  A reward?  We do not know that this girl has done anything to deserve a reward; we do not know that she is worthy even of a safe haven.  But she is the daughter of the “good king”.  Perhaps she is not good herself.  The goose and gander do not need to know more about her.  Her status as his daughter ensures all good things for her. 

It is the good king who has clothed her in her blue gown.  It is the good king who has placed the golden chain upon the goose’s neck.  It is the good king, no doubt, who prepared a place for her over the one-strand river.  And he has decreed that she go. 

Perhaps she did not want to go on the goose.  Perhaps it is cold.  Perhaps on the side she is leaving, there is someone she does not want to leave.  She does not know what awaits her, does not know what she gains by going.  But she goes, wafted on goose-wing, and does not waver.  She is the good king’s daughter; what awaits her is certainly good.

i like poetry

Not that that is a surprise to readers of my blog.  This week, I found the following from Gerard Manley Hopkins (whom, if you haven’t noticed, I also like):

My own heart let me more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst’s all-in-all in all a world of wet.
Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
‘S not wrung, see you; unforeseentimes rather — as skies
Betweenpie mountains — lights a lovely mile.

It takes a few readings to get the sense of it, but it does open up with reading.  I love Hopkins’ use of words and repetition of sounds: “this tormented mind / With this tormented mind tormenting yet.”  His coining of words always delights me: “unforeseentimes,” ”betweenpie”.  I also love the persuasive tone he takes toward his soul, as though wheedling a stubborn child away from something; he is good-humored about it, but seems to pity his soul’s stupidness.  Certainly, he is being kind to himself.  And what he says is true. 

It also reminds of a passage from one of my other favorites, T. S. Eliot, in the first section of  “Ash Wednesday”:

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And I pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain.

I think it is tendency of literary people — and probably others – to “too much discuss” things with themselves, “[casting] for comfort” in their comfortless minds, when, surely, it is best “to call off thoughts awhile / Elsewhere.”

And the place to which Hopkins calls thoughts is that Source of the mercy for which Eliot prays, the God “whose smile … unforeseentimes … lights a lovely mile.”  To quote one more poet:

Who is wise? Let him give heed to these things;
And consider the lovingkindnesses of the Lord.
-Psalm 107:43

He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High
Will abide in the shadow of the Almighty.
I will say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress,
My God, in whom I trust!”
For it is He who delivers you from the snare of the trapper,
And from the deadly pestilence.
He will cover you with His pinions,
And under His wings you may seek refuge;
His faithfulness is a shield and a bulwark.

I take, O cross, thy shadow for my abiding place;
I ask no other sunshine than the sunshine of His face.
Content to let the world go by, to know no gain or loss;
My sinful self my only shame, my glory all the cross.

For you have made the Lord, my refuge,
Even the Most High your dwelling place.

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?

Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me?

“Because he has loved Me, therefore I will deliver him;
I will set him securely on high, because he has known my name.
“He will call upon Me, and I will answer him;
I will be with him in trouble;
I will rescue him, and honor him.
“With a long life I will satisfy him,
And let him behold my salvation.”

*from Psalm 91, Elizabeth C. Clephane, and Gerard Manley Hopkins

The following is from a journal entry in which I attempted to express one of my home-places.  I have visited there every year of my life, but have not, until recently, tried to figure out what it all means:

December 18, 2008
How do I put it into words?  A bumpy pasture with this, its nether end, littered with rusted machinery and construction materials.  I-beams, and tires, and telephone poles.  Four cement bridge spans lie parallel to one another, each with its unique collection on top.  The first has just a few boards.  The second has what appear to be rusted-out power tools, the metal tracks off a track-hoe, and a tower of short 4-by-4’s.  The third has more stacked beams, a set of wheels, and metal piping – maybe it used to be a portable cow pen?  This last has more rusty tools, a mound of old PVC pipe, and me.  For there are few dry places on a Florida morning, particularly places that are both dry and sunny.  And so, rather than sit in the wet grass or a shady porch, I am come here.  There were cows here when I first came.  They mistrusted me, I think, at first, then forgot me and wandered away.

I do not think that stranger’s eye could find much of beauty here.  Grass covers the uneven sand like some scabby rash on dry skin.  Brown weeds and old wires spring up together from the rotting corpses of telephone poles.  Long-stationary semi-trailers stand against a background of leggy pines which lost all their lower limbs in a fire several years back.  Under the overhanging edges of the cement spans, beauty berry bushes bend sickly branches, and behind me, hidden in a the glory of the sun, is a rotting barn and a dead mulberry tree.  But the air is full of bird sounds, and even a half-dea orange tree has good fruit hanging among the thin leaves and Spanish moss on its living half.

We talked, in one of my classes last semester, of how joy and pain are inextricably linked, of how we recognize what is ugly because we know what is beautiful.  So that the things that are broken, the things that hurt us are always hearkening back to the things that are whole, to healing.  And all of the beautiful things are weighed with the recognition that they must end, that they are not all that is in the world.

Redemption.  If there was not the possibility of redemption, could we feel that things are so far from right?  If we had no notion of what a living tree looked like, would we recognize the dead trees as dead?  In some sense, then, the things that bring pain must also bring hope.  All is not right, but we know that because all has not always been wrong.   Nor, I believe, will it continue wrong forever.

damp paper

“It is a paradox palpably true that an original thing cannot at once be successful and still seem original.   We can never appreciate how startling it might sound to be told that theearth was round, if we had really and invariably thought it was flat.  By this time, so to speak, its roundness has become more flat than its flatness.  It has become a dull platitude and only the denial of it would disturb us.” 
- G. K. Chesterton, in that tremendously interesting book, The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton

(Sydney Dark described it as “tremendously interesting” before I did.   He also said “it is a draught … of human and literary champagne.”  His remarks are printed upon the back of the book, and I read them there.  I also agreed with them.)

Perhaps this palpably true paradox is the reason that I so often merely type the words of other people upon my page.  That, and the advise I heard somewhere, that good writers read a great deal more than they write.  I find that my day generally has time enough for reading or for writing, but seldom for serious attempts at both.

Today the sun capitulated to popular demand and made its first appearance of the week.  I find myself much better able to be sanely cheerful when I see the sun with decent regularity.  When the sun declines to see me, I am often gripped by a more hysterical variety of cheer bordering on utter woe, even when there is nothing to be either so cheerful or so woeful about.   And yet I enjoy the gray days, the constant misting and moisting, the cold deep puddle in the driveway, the cold shallow puddle in the mailbox.  Yes, in the mailbox.  Rather inconvenient if you want dry mail. 

Speaking of cold rain, and to return to the palpable paradox, here is a poem from Luci Shaw, to close my post:

Freezing rain

Most of the things a poet has to say
are tentative, lists of foggy clues
and suppositions — an unattested version
of the way the wind breathes at night,
an essay at atmosphere, predictions
as unreliable as weather forecasts.  I stab
at the truth with a pencil sometimes,
moved too suddenly to words by
the shadings on a cloud, or its shape,
shivering at a hint of thunder (sure
that it means something).

But in the lines set down on paper
all suggestions become categorical –
intuition or illusion edited to sound
like logic.  Naked ideas turn assertive
in print, sharp, as intricate as the edges
of woods in winter seen against
a black sky.  The most fluid
of impressions hardens like frozen rain.
A cold front is passing over: I hazard
a guess; you take it for reality.
-from Luci Shaw’s Water Lines: New and Selected Poems

The year is new, but shadows still fall across the roads as they did yesterday, and time not sleeping in the old year last night makes me tired.  There shouldn’t be any leftover tiredness between years. 

I was awake to see the new year in, but did not see the clock change, as I was absorbed with one of my newest friends, Gilbert Keith Chesterton.  This friendship holds promise of greater duration than the new year, and so I am not sorry that I was two minutes late in welcoming that new acquaintance — the year — upon its arrival. 

And so, from my new friend — Chesterton, not the year — here are some words:

“From the first vaguely, and of late more and more clearly, I have felt that the world is conceiving liberty as something that merely works outwards.  And I have always conceived it as something that works inwards.”  – The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton

Think on that for while, if you will.