Good morning, book lovers! Last Friday I was traveling and therefore unable to swoop down like a hawk on innocent commenters who even hinted they might like to do a diary for “Books That Changed My Life.” Many thanks to our long-time friend and book lover Brecht, who hosted the discussion in my absence!
As we have no guest diarist today, we’ll have an open forum. Now, we all know about earworms—those snatches of music or even whole songs that get stuck in your head all day, causing you to swerve dangerously in traffic or go into trance during conference calls. Poetry isn’t as annoying, but it is persistent: sometimes, for no good reason, a stanza or couplet will float into your mind while you’re doing something quite unpoetic. It’s rather nice, really—like walking by a fountain on a blazing July day.
Speaking of blazing July days, it was too hot to bake anything this morning, so all refreshments will be cold. To quench your thirst we have banana lassi,delicately flavored with honey and cardamom. To your left—yes, that’s right, on the table normally occupied by the coffee urn—there’s a platter full of chilled melon slices. Grab a fork and help yourself to sweet pale green honeydew, fragrant deep orange cantaloupe, juicy red watermelon, and velvety gold mango. You’ll find me in the salon beyond the orange macramé knot below.
The poems that have stayed with me throughout my life are so many it would require a book to list them all, but this morning I’ll discuss that those that recur because they’re seasonal. To begin with, not a January goes by that I don’t remember my father’s voice reciting John Keats’ Eve of St. Agnes:
St. Agnes' Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman's fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seem'd taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith.
For me, no other literary work before or since has evoked the deep cold of winter as profoundly as this.
But in March, when the snow changes to rain and the winds begin to blow, it’s the chorus from Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon that haunts me:
WHEN the hounds of spring are on winter's traces,
The mother of months in meadow or plain
Fills the shadows and windy places
With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain;
And the brown bright nightingale amorous
Is half assuaged for Itylus,
For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces.
The tongueless vigil, and all the pain.
The following stanzas, with such lines as “For winter’s rains and ruins are over/And all the season of snows and sins” are an equal delight to read and savor. Gotta hand it to old Algernon Charles, he certainly knew how to create word-music!
One can only suppose that everyone “hears” either Shakespeare or Masefield when summer begins:
Sonnet XVIII: Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?
By William Shakespeare
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
The sonnet is so well known that it’s practically a cliché but then, that’s Shakespeare’s genius: he captured the essence of summer perfectly. For example, right now in the place where I live, “too hot the eye of heaven shines.” Big time.
And finally, I “hear” competing poems for autumn:
Sonnet LXXIII:
By William Shakespeare
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
Again, this sonnet of Shakespeare’s is so well known as to be an obvious choice for autumn. However, I do love the sound of the words as well as the sentiment.
But then in September, when I go out to the front yard to pick apples, this is what I hear in my mind’s ear, the first stanza of John Keats’ Ode to Autumn:
To Autumn
SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
To my mind, this captures the spirit of autumn as almost nothing else does: I can see the mists rising from the ground, inhale the scent of the apples “bending the moss’d cottage-trees,” and visualize the fat furry bumblebees dancing over purple Michaelmas daisies.
What about YOU? Which poem, or collection of poems, comes unbidden into your mind as you go about your daily round? Is it Wordsworth’s daffodils, Housman’s “colored counties,” Longfellow’s “forest primeval”? Tell us! We’re all ears!