Remembering Jane Kenyon and the light of evensong

Three days ago, May 23, was the birthday of poet Jane Kenyon. Recalling my love of her poems and her love of the wonderful extravagence of peonies (a love I share), I dug around in my journal, and came up with something I wrote in 2006, in turn remembering back to an earlier entry of 2003. Here is something of a synthesis and some new reflections.

 

________________________

 

One of the pleasures of keeping a journal like this is the frequent experience of a certain kind of felicitous serendipity. (Jung would have called it synchronicity.) I set out this morning to find some old notes about the life and work of the poet Jane Kenyon, having in mind the prospect of a new piece of writing about her gifts. I couldn't find those notes, but instead ran across a journal entry I wrote over three years ago while on a solo kayaking expedition in the Canadian wilderness. Despite its largely waterborne character, I called that journey a walkabout, because it seemed to share with that Australian aboriginal practice a sense of going where one is moved to go, without preconceived itinerary or pace or even conscious direction.

 

In the days of that trip I frequently returned in my journal thoughts to discoveries I was making, or that my travels were reawakening, about the character of walkabout. In one of them, devoted to solitude and companionship, I found myself returning to an earlier reading of a poem by Kenyon. That I could have written those lines today was both reassuring and humbling--the latter because it brought to mind how few original thoughts I appear to have had in a lifetime, the former because those few seem, on the whole, to suffice. Their marination over the years has revealed dimension I'd earlier neglected, and sustained an experience of adventure. That marination continues as I circle back now upon the core themes I am slowly unpacking in these new Reckonings.

Here is what I wrote very early in that time of discovery, on Thursday, August 28, 2003, from the village of Bartlett, New Hampshire:

Walkabout as Companionship

When I first began to learn about the tradition and meaning of walkabout, I understood it as a solitary experience. I imagined a single person, laying down his ordinary, accustomed, everyday rounds to follow a mysterious calling; walking into some wilderness with no other guide than inspiration, care and alertness would provide.

There is truth in that image, especially if “wilderness” is regarded as a wide array of inner and outer territory that is unaccustomed and unpredictable. But it is the singularity about which I’ve come to have second thoughts, and the romantic notion of abandoning the everyday elements of our lives. Yes, walkabout entails the giving of oneself, the release of a self-imposed order that has gradually, over time, dug a narrow confining channel within which I’d grown used to living. And it’s already brought more sustained experience of solitude than I’ve ever known before.

But I’m coming to understand again in my heart and bones that solitude and aloneness are not the same, that walkabout, like authentic and wholehearted living under any circumstances, is essentially relational. I walk more slowly, over less familiar terrain—but it is the character and quality of my consciousness, my open invitation to linger, the following of tracks I have not laid down, nor even anticipated, that make the difference. Like Thoreau during the time he recounted in Walden, I can return to my own Concord, to friendships and meals and gardens I have tended, and remain on walkabout.

More and more I’m realizing that walkabout is of its nature companionable. When I think of our own culture’s songlines, I keep hearing the embracing, wonderfully extravagant voice of Walt Whitman, and of contemporary voices who sing of the compelling, astonishing intimacy of everyday.

Speaking of our companionship in the family of things, I hear Stanley Kunitz talking with Bill Moyers about his and others’ life and work: “The echo that mocks us comes from the Stone Age caves. The poem on the page is only a shadow of the poetry and the mystery of the things of this world. So we must try again, for the work is never finished. I don’t think it’s absurd to believe that the chain of being, our indelible genetic code, holds memories of the ancient world that are passed down from generation to generation. Heraclitus speaks of ‘mortals and immortals living in their death, dying into each other’s lives.’”

Jane Kenyon liked to write poems in the morning and tend her garden in the afternoon. She lived with the excruciating, immobilizing isolation of depression most of her life, knew as deeply as anyone the redemptive walkabout in her garden, especially with her beloved peonies. She said once to Bill Moyers: "It's odd but true that there really is consolation from sad poems, and it's hard to know how that happens. There is the pleasure of the thing itself, the pleasure of the poem, and somehow it works against sadness." I think particularly of her book, Let Evening Come, of her translations of the poems of Anna Akhmatova, and a final book of poems,Otherwise, published shortly before her death.

 

Writing of Otherwise in The New York Times, poet Carol Muske offered what serves well as a memorial:

Kenyon "sees this world as a kind of threshold through which we enter God's wonder."

Yes, as a threshold, a liminal stepping through into the mystery within and without, our source ground of nourishing loam, the ground of our being, our wilderness and our garden.

 

Jane Kenyon

1947–1995

 

 

Peonies at Dusk

White peonies blooming along the porch
send out light
while the rest of the yard grows dim.

Outrageous flowers as big as human
heads! They’re staggered
by their own luxuriance: I had
to prop them up with stakes and twine.

The moist air intensifies their scent,
and the moon moves around the barn
to find out what it’s coming from.

In the darkening June evening
I draw a blossom near, and bending close
search it as a woman searches
a loved one’s face.

 And this —

 

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.

 

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."

The light of late afternoon, of the darkening evening, is the light of evensong. Light the candle. Draw a blossom near. Listen for the step of homecoming. Move through the threshold into the safety and wonder of home.

 

For those of us, like Jane Kenyon, who know intimately the darkness of depression, it is also the dying of the light. So the incantatory cadences of "Let Evening Come" are a repetitive voice of prayer, attentiveness to the small wondrous indications — the necessary reassurance —that life goes on even with nightfall. The cricket chafes, the woman takes up needles and yarn to knit, the stars and moon appear. Even when the wind dies and the shed darkens, the fox returns to her den and those who wait in welcome. Even those inanimate objects, hoe, bottle, scoop, will warm to another day, find use, meaning. 

 

Remember, child, as I sit with you, my hand on your soft back until you sleep — I'll be near you through the night; God does not leave us comfortless.

 

"Guard and keep me through the night,

and wake me with the morning light."

 

Another day will come, precious as today. 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.