I wrote recently that I'd sidetracked myself while planning to write a short piece on Jane Kenyon. Sidetracking in my experience is more often a good thing than a source only of distraction: I like to think that the sideways skittle of crabs is the product of eons of natural selection. They got the hang of it before the rest of us did. In the instance at hand, the day before yesterday, I wrote about companionship and solitude, and included a Kenyon poem that memorably expressed her love of peonies.
In the darkening June evening
I draw a blossom near, and bending close
search it as a woman searches
a loved one’s face.
There is a world of difference between this experience and, say,
looking admiringly during a stroll in one's garden--or even more, not looking, or looking but not seeing. Mr. Ramsey, in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse,
is vaguely aware of color in some periphery of his vision but he neither looks nor sees while walking with
Mrs. Ramsey in her summer garden. In Kenyon's poem the experience is
one of genuine intimacy, bending close, searching "as a woman searches
a loved one's face." It is a kind of consciousness, an identity, a dimension of relationship that
Mrs. Ramsey has--with her children and other people, as well as with
the natural world. One can't imagine Mr. Ramsey, who has eight children and is devotedly dependent upon his wife, searching a loved one's face, except to determine if it can be turned to his own needs.
It is too much to identify this quality of consciousness with life and its absence with death-in-life. But not a great deal too much, for it is a quality of consciousness that is critical to nourishing life. It's absence does not necessarily destroy, abuse or deplete life, but without it life lacks, I'm convinced, a crucial depth of perception, of imagination, that has profound consequences for our capacities to care for ourselves, each other, the earth around us, and other people and creatures whose well-being depends on our capacity and will to attend to them.
In that context I want today to circle back on the writing of Jane Kenyon.
Jane Kenyon was born in Ann Arbor, Michgan in 1947. She married the poet Donald Hall in 1972, and three years later they moved to his family's farm in Wilmot, New Hampshire. She knew the suffering of depression, and the gift of love that can come to those who have known its death-in-life, and emerged: its theft of life, and the experience of renewal that recovery can bring. After a fifteen-month struggle with leukemia, Jane Kenyon died at her home in New Hampshire in April 1995.
Donald Hall wrote of their years in New Hampshire:
"Here, she read and reread certain authors with excitement and devotion--Keats to begin with, most strikingly Akhmatova (whom she translated with Vera Sandomirsky Dunham), later Chekhov and Bishop. Her poetry gathered resonance and beauty as she studied the art of the luminous particular. 'The natural object'--she liked to quote Pound--'is always the adequate symbol.'
"Her readers are aware of Jane's struggles with depression--and also of her joy in the body and the creation, in flowers, music, and paintings, in hayfields and a dog. We had almost twenty years together at Eagle Pond Farm, engaged separately in a common enterprise, commonly loving land and house and church and friends."
Otherwise: New and Selected Poems, was put together by Donald Hall and published posthumously in 1996 by Graywolf Press.
Jane Kenyon's poem "Let Evening Come" is incantatory in both language and spirit. The coming of evening is, as her first lines say, also the time of the dying of the sun's light, the coming of darkness. For those who live with nature's cycles, and those who have lived with depression as well, it is a particularly significant time, often one bearing its own distinctive air of apprehension. Those who know Stanley Kubrick's classic film "2001" will remember the image of three of our ancestors huddled fearfully in the mouth of their cave, listening for what darkness may bring. So we gather ourselves at evening time: homecoming, lighting the fire, evensong, storytelling, prayer. Kenyon once said of "Let Evening Come," "That poem was given to me." When she was asked, "By?" she answered:
"The muse, the Holy Ghost. I had written all the other poems in the book in which it appears, and I knew that it was a very sober book. I felt it needed something redeeming. I went upstairs one day with the purpose of writing something redeeming, which is not the way to write, but this just fell out. I really didn't have to struggle with it."
LET EVENING COME
Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.
Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.
Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.
Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.
To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.
Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.
Those who have lived with life-threatening illness, or who daily must anticipate the depradations of war or social chaos, who are chronically cold, hungry, precarious in shelter (more of the world than those of us who enjoy safety and comfort), know how precious are the gifts of life when they come, know, whether with full consciousness or not, "it might have been otherwise."
OTHERWISE
I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.
At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.
Have you accompanied anyone's dying? Have you listened with all your senses to the signs of the night journey upon which they are already embarked? How have you known the tangled pain--yours, theirs--of that slow, incremental leavetaking? They may want to go, they may be gone, before you're ready.
At the end they don't want their hands
to be under the covers, and if you should put
your hand on theirs in a tentative gesture
of solidarity, they'll pull the hand free;
and you must honor that desire,
and let them pull it free.
READING ALOUD TO MY FATHER
I chose the book haphazard
from the shelf, but with Nabokov's first
sentence I knew it wasn't the thing
to read to a dying man:
The cradle rocks above an abyss, it began,
and common sense tells us that our existence
is but a brief crack of light
between two eternities of darkness.
The words disturbed both of us immediately,
and I stopped. With music it was the same --
Chopin's Piano Concerto -- he asked me
to turn it off. He ceased eating, and drank
little, while the tumors briskly appropriated
what was left of him.
But to return to the cradle rocking. I think
Nabokov had it wrong. This is the abyss.
That's why babies howl at birth,
and why the dying so often reach
for something only they can apprehend.
At the end they don't want their hands
to be under the covers, and if you should put
your hand on theirs in a tentative gesture
of solidarity, they'll pull the hand free;
and you must honor that desire,
and let them pull it free.
If we only knew more of who we are... One morning, when you wake and your mind is still clear of the weight that settles so easily upon it, sit with paper and pen, write without censor or ceasing whatever comes when you repeatedly begin, "I am..."
BRIEFLY IT ENTERS, AND BRIEFLY SPEAKS
I am the blossom pressed in a book,
found again after two hundred years. . . .
I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper. . . .
When the young girl who starves
sits down to a table
she will sit beside me. . . .
I am food on the prisoner's plate. . . .
I am water rushing to the wellhead,
filling the pitcher until it spills. . . .
I am the patient gardener
of the dry and weedy garden. . . .
I am the stone step,
the latch, and the working hinge. . . .
I am the heart contracted by joy. . .
the longest hair, white
before the rest. . . .
I am there in the basket of fruit
presented to the widow. . . .
I am the musk rose opening
unattended, the fern on the boggy summit. . . .
I am the one whose love
overcomes you, already with you
when you think to call my name. . . .
Now return to where these ruminations began, with Jane Kenyon's love of peonies. She wrote early in one New Hampshire spring about "the moment of peonies."
It is the month of peonies—the week, the day, and the hour of peonies. In late March their red asparagus-like shoots began to push toward the intensely blue spring sky with its scudding clouds. Through April and May the stalks gained height and turned green; buds formed and swelled tantalizingly. Ants crawled over the veined globes with gathering excitement, and now, at last, comes the hot day after a warm rain when the flowers open. And we are blessed, we are undone by them....
This year the plants exceed every expectation. Suddenly they've come into their full adult beauty, not strapping, but statuesque—the beauty of women, as Chekhov says, "with plump shoulders" and with long hair held precariously in place by a few stout pins. They are white, voluminous, and here and there display flecks of raspberry red on the edges of their fleshy, heavily scented petals.
These are not Protestant-work-ethic flowers. They loll about in gorgeousness; they live for art; they believe in excess. They are not quite decent, to tell the truth. Neighbors and strangers slow their cars to gawk...
I suppose if I had to declare a favorite flower, it would be peonies, and here I find myself in the moments just after their great, abandoned splurge. They seem like the diva in her dressing gown after the opera—still glistening, but spent. "Death is the mother of beauty," the poet Wallace Stevens tells us. Maybe never again will all the elements conspire to make another such marvelous moment of flowers. I'm glad I wasn't away from home or, as the Buddhists say, asleep.
Jane Kenyon, as Donald Hall wrote, as is evident in her poetry and prose, knew joy as well as darkness. When I first read her prose ode to the peony above I wanted to believe that she knew this haiku of Basho:
A bee
staggers out
of the peony.
Finally, let's come back to Jane Kenyon's love—and her translation—of the poetry of Anna Akhmatova. Akhmatova's writing is less manifestly personal than Kenyon's, less explicitly expressive of her own experience: not abjuring herself but allowing the object of attention its own reality, allowing the reader to realize it is hers as well. Robert Bly writes of such poetry as "sparing, so that space opens behind the details.... so that through the space the reader may see the outer world, may see the mountain night." Akmatova, he says, "is a master of this "sparing use of personal detail. The poems clearly come from her 'life,' and yet through them we glimpse something else, not 'hers.'" Here is an example, more characteristically sparing in its first stanza than its second. The translation is Kenyon's, the poem beautifully conveying a shared spirit.
Sand on the bottom whiter than chalk,
and the air drunk, like wine;
late sun lays bare
the rosy limbs of the pinetrees.
Sunset in the ethereal waves:
I cannot tell if the day
is ending, or the world, or if
the secret of secrets is inside me again.
_____________________________________
