As Should We All

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

To whomever of whatever one gives thanks and praise, be it the earth, random chemistry, or a named or unnamed deity, dappled things merit gratitude. Hey, we're not perfect.

The Japanese (I remark upon this from time to time, hoping to attract the word back to my brain) have a phrase for that which is beautiful precisely because it is transient. All that talk about butterflies and autumn leaves. Of course, I'm inviting a Jesuit -- Gerard Manley Hopkins -- to expand and expound upon this theme.

Hopkins, of course, gave his thanks to a Catholic God --

God’s Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

-- but that does not mean that those who are not Christians should dismiss him. Like Ackerman and Eiseley, both scientists, like Andy Goldsworthy, like children as yet unschooled to sophistication (not yet taught that patterns of shade on grass hold less beauty than mosiacs, bias-cut fabric or a carefully composed painting), Hopkins saw wonder in the mundane --

Repeat that, repeat

Repeat that, repeat,
Cuckoo, bird, and open ear wells, heart-springs, delightfully sweet,
With a ballad, with a ballad, a rebound
Off trundled timber and scoops of the hillside ground, hollow hollow hollow ground:
The whole landscape flushes on a sudden at a sound.

-- as should we all.

Donne and Done

The Expiration
John Donne

So, so, break off this last lamenting kiss,
Which sucks two souls, and vapours both away ;
Turn, thou ghost, that way, and let me turn this,
And let ourselves benight our happiest day.
We ask none leave to love ; nor will we owe
Any so cheap a death as saying, 'Go.'

Go; and if that word have not quite killed thee,
Ease me with death, by bidding me go too.
Or, if it have, let my word work on me,
And a just office on a murderer do.
Except it be too late, to kill me so,
Being double dead, going, and bidding, 'Go.'

When I first met John Donne, he was in his lush and tactile phase. For a long time, that was all I knew of him. (It was all I was ready to know. The comment is not about him, but me.)

The first (and second, and third) time I read that poem, it was from a slender, slipcased volume given to my mother by her university-life lover. Love gave to love gave a daughter a gleam of love -- and of the swift pain it can inflict.

That turnaround: Any so cheap a death as saying, 'go.'/Go . . . and that flagellant's anguish of an ending, bidding 'Go' and walking away (without, I thought, the strength to turn for a final glance) from the beloved.

When I had tucked a few more years under my belt, I ascribed to the poem meanings of death. It was an easy stretch from the parting of two -- perhaps twinned -- souls to the parting of soul from body: a terminal lover's parting, life from life. Later still, after I spent some time with the bawdy bard a sexual meaning to the mentioned 'death' (ease me with death). Overall and over time, I have remained faithful to my first interpretation: lover parting from lover, one last kiss held and held although not held long enough and then finally -- Go -- because a heart can take only so much slow dying.

Parting is death. All endings are deaths. Mourning, grief; we weep not for the dead, who are past sorrow, but for ourselves, who live now incomplete, without those gone. It's close to literally true. We take different roles in different circumstances and with different beings: mother, father, older sibling, younger, employer, new lover, long-term beloved, spouse, employee, servant, artist, injured dog, rearing horse, newborn infant, dying kinsman, friend, confessor, deity. It is hard when you are a child and your cat dies. It is harder to lose, of necessity, one the taste of whose lips is as familiar as your own, whose rhythms have joined, adapted to and altered yours, whose voice stills your sorrows, whose touch is everything.

Leave off . . .

I hear it quiet and pained. More than pained: anguished, but anguish without an outward cry. There is strength in bidding go, in calling enough and in walking away.

Who knows, though, whether that was the right choice? Perhaps two lives -- maybe many -- would have been better lived had the two embodied souls stayed here united.

The man could have talked a saint into worldly unity. This is from Elegy XX (To His Mistress Going to Bed): As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be/To taste whole joys.

That kind of talk would turn me into a girl who cain't say 'No' and I'm a thick and obdurate little biscuit.

John Donne, a Metaphysical Poet and compelling clergyman, was born in 1572, on Broad Street in London, to a Roman Catholic family. This was the era of the Protestant Reformation. During that time, Catholics were subject to persecution.

His father, also named John, was a warden of the ironmongers. His mother was, to my eye, more interesting: a great-niece of Thomas More, daughter of playwright Thomas Heywood and -- this will become pertinent later -- sister of Jasper Heywood, a translator and Jesuit.

John the elder joined the majority when his son was four years old. I think his influence can be dismissed.

In 1591, Donne's brother Henry was arrested for giving shelter to a Catholic priest. Henry died in prison. This death may mark the insertion of the wedge between John Donne and the Catholic Church. In the 1590s, Donne converted to Anglicanism.

His poetic gifts were plain, but did not bring him cash. He depended on the kindness -- not of strangers, but of friends. In 1615, Donne became an Anglican priest; later that year, he was appointed Royal Chaplain. In 1621, Donne was appointed Dean of St Paul's (Not in the 'current' building, which was designed by Christopher Wren in 1673.) (How is that current? It's still standing.).

Let me take a longer road along his life. At the age of 11, Donne entered Oxford University. After three years there, he went on to Cambridge, where he spent another three years. Neither institution can claim to have conferred a degree upon him. It wasn't a question of intelligence or competency. Donne refused to take the oath of supremacy recognising the monarch of England as the head of the Church of England. His parents (consider, here, the possible ramifications) had Donne educated by the Jesuits. He studied law in London: sound preparation for a diplomatic career.

Students are students have always been students (with a nod and a raised cup of chamomile tea to the acknowledged proofs of the rule). Donne spent his study years learning -- not only about books, but also about wine, women and travel.

Donne became secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal (no small office in those times). Donne, in his twenties, began a secret courtship with Egerton's teenage niece, Anne More. They married in 1601. A challenge to the validity of the marriage landed Donne in jail, together with the minster and witness to the wedding. When the marriage was shown to be valid, Donne was released; he saw to it that the others were set free, as well, showing that he remembered a thing or three from law school.

Back to the kindness of strangers. Donne, his wife and their increasing brood lived with Anne's cousin, Sir Francis Wolly. Donne worked as a lawyer: a far less profitable generator of income in those days.

Donne died without a single published collection of verse (Staggering, isn't it?) in 1631. It's difficult to put his work in order, as it was all published, as it were, post mortem. Sin, death, sensuality, romance; in whatever stage of his life he contemplated each, each came under the same intelligent, passionate and tender observation.

In Meditation XVII in his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and Several Steps in my Sickness, Donne wrote

NUNC LENTO SONITU DICUNT, MORIERIS.

Now this bell tolling softly for another,
says to me, Thou must die.

Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill that he knows not it tolls for him. And perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as they who are about me, and see my state, have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that.

(You know where this is going.) Donne's meditation continues until it finds a shore in this:

No man is an island. entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

(No, kids, Hemingway did not mint the phrase. No, it is not plagiarism when you nick a phrase for a title -- although you'd best be certain as to the pertinence of your reference.)

Donne's bringing me back 'round to my earlier realisation: every death (however large, however small) is, in some way, mine. (There's a good reason for volunteering in a soup kitchen or an animal shelter, or chucking that Saturday night movie cash at one of Kiva's borrowers.)

How could a death bell not jolt the most unwary into a sudden remembrance of his or her own mortality: Oh, yes, that's right. My time, too, is less than it was, shorter than I think. (Better get a move on, then. Tomorrow doesn't come with guarantees that it will come at all.)

Intellect can increase or decrease distance. It is to Donne's credit that he used his mind to delve rather than to deny.

There's a play, profoundly moving (I encourage you to bypass the film and to make a pilgrimage to the Lincoln Center Library and beg the librarians to let you watch a tape of the Broadway show.), wrenching Pulitzer Prize-winning play called Wit. It was written by a kindergarten teacher (which should be an unbound set of life lessons to us all), Margaret Edson. It opens when the lead character, Vivian (fifty, bald, hospital gowned and braceleted, attached to an IV drip) enters the empty stage. Skipping the stage directions, here's what follows:

Vivian: (In false familiarity, waving and nodding to the audience) Hi. How are you feeling today? Great. That's just great. (In her own professorial tone) This is not my standard greeting, I assure you.

I tend toward something a little more formal, a little less inquisitive, such as, say, 'Hello.'

But it is the standard greeting here.

There is some debate as to the correct response to this salutation. Should one reply 'I feel good,' using 'feel' as a copulative to link the subject, 'I', to its subjective complement, 'good'; or 'I feel well,' modifying with an adverb the subject's state of being?

I don't know. I am a professor of seventeenth-century poetry, specializing in the Holy Sonnets of John Donne.

So I just say, 'Fine.'

Of course it is not very often that I do feel fine.

I have been asked, 'How are you feeling today?' while I was throwing up into a plastic washbasin. I have been asked as I was emerging from a four-hour operation with a tube in every orifice, 'How are you feeling today?'

I am waiting for the moment when someone asks me the question and I am dead.

I'm a little sorry that I'll miss that.

It is unfortunate that this remarkable line of inquiry has come to me so late in my career. I could have exploited its feigned solicitude to great advantage as I was distributing the final examination to the graduate course in seventeenth-century textual criticism -- 'Hi. How are you feeling today?'

Of course I would not be wearing this costume at the time, so the question's ironic significance would not be fully apparent.

As I trust it is now.

Irony is a literary device that will necessarily be deployed to great effect.

I ardently wish this were not so. I would prefer that a play about me be cast in the mythic-heroic-pastoral mode, ut the facts, most notably stage-four metastatic ovarian cancer, conspire against that. The Faerie Queene this is not.

And I was disayed to discover that the play would contain elements of . . . humor.

I have been, at best, an unwitting accomplice. (She pauses.) It is not my intention to give away the plot, but I think I die at the end.

They've given me less than two hours.

If I were poetically inclined, I might employ a threadbare metaphor -- the sands of time slipping through the hourglass, the two-hour class.

Now our sands are almost run;
More a little, and then dumb.

Shakespeare. I trust the name is familiar.

Vivian's training allows her a brief distance from her death. Her knowledge, discipline and gathered information can be barricades or scimitars. It is not only intellect that calls this character to Donne, and Edson made no error in creating Vivian as a Donne scholar. In a later passage, earlier in Vivian's life, we see her as a student. Her tutor is E.M.

E.M. This is Metaphysical Poetry, not The Modern Novel. The standards of scholarship and critical reading which one would apply to any other text are simply insufficient. The effort must be total for the results to be meaningful. Do you think the punctuation of the last line of this sonnet is merely an insignificant detail?

The sonnet begins with a valiant struggle with death, calling on all the forces of intellect and drama to vanquish the enemy. But it is ultimately about overcoming the seemingly insuperable barriers separating life, death and eternal life.

In the edition you chose, this profoundly simple meaning is sacrificed to hysterical punctuation:

And Death -- capital D -- shall be no more -- semicolon!
Death -- capital D -- comma -- thou shalt die -- exclamation point!

If you go in for this sort of thing, I suggest you take up Shakespeare.

Gardner's edition of the Holy Sonnets reurns to the Westmoreland manuscript source of 1610 -- not for sentimental reasons, I assure you, but because Helen Gardner is a scholar. It reads:

And death shall be no more, comma, Death thou shalt die.
(As she recites this line, she makes a little gesture at the comma.)

Nothing but a breath -- a comma -- separates life from life everlasting. It is very simple really. With the original punctuation restored, death is no longer something to act out on a stage, with exclamation points. It's a comma, a pause.

This way, the uncompromising way, one learns something from this poem, wouldn't you say? Life, death. Soul, God. Past, present. Not insuperable barriers, not semicolons, just a comma.

Nothing but a breath, not insuperable barriers, just a comma. Which leads with sweet humanity to Donne's Holy Sonnet X (a semicolon-bearing, exclamation-free version):

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which yet thy pictures be,
Much pleasure, then from thee much more, must low
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men
And dost with poison, war and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

This is the Meanwhile

I shall marry the miller's son,
Pin my hat on a nice piece of property.
Friday nights, for a bit of fun, we'll go dancing.
Meanwhile...

It's a wink and a wiggle and a giggle in the grass
And I'll trip the light fandango,
A pinch and a diddle in the middle of what passes by.
It's a very short road from the pinch and the punch
To the paunch and the pouch and the pension.
It's a very short road to the ten thousandth lunch
And the belch and the grouch and the sigh.

In the meanwhile,
There are mouths to be kissed before mouths to be fed
And a lot in between in the meanwhile.
And a girl ought to celebrate what passes by.

Or I shall marry the businessman
Five fat babies and lots of security.
Friday nights, if we think we can,
We'll go dancing.
Meanwhile...

It's a push and a fumble and a tumble in the sheets
And I'll foot the highland fancy,
A dip in the butter and a flutter with what meets my eye.
It's a very short fetch from the push and the whoop
To the squint and the stoop and the mumble.
It's not much of a stretch to the cribs and the croup
And the bosoms that droop And go dry.

In the meanwhile,
There are mouths to be kissed before mouths to be fed,
And there's many a tryst and there's many a bed
To be sampled and seen in the meanwhile.
And a girl has to celebrate what passes by.

Or I shall marry the Prince of Wales,
Pearls and servants and dressing for festivals.
Friday nights, with him all in tails,
We'll have dancing.
Meanwhile...

It's a rip in the bustle and a rustle in the hay
And I'll pitch the quick fantastic,
With flings of confetti and my petticoats away up high.
It's a very short way from the fling that's for fun
To the thigh pressing under the table.
It's a very short day til you're stuck with just one
Or it has to be done on the sly.

In the meanwhile,
There are mouths to be kissed before mouths to be fed,
And there's many a tryst and there's many a bed,
There's a lot I'll have missed but I'll not have been dead when I die!
And a person should celebrate everything passing by.

And I shall marry the miller's son.

Despite my references to Candide, which might mislead you, the Jesuits (who, despite my choice of link, are not in Britain alone) didn't get their hands on me during my formative years. At different distances, one of which became in-person contact (and no, I'm not telling which), Sondheim, Seuss, Keats (for whom I was far too young), Shelley & Co. (and yes, I know Keats to have been amongst them), Gorey, Addams and Thurber did. They didn't get their hands on me, but they got their words and music and images in me, and those seethed into and rewrote my DNA.

The same thing happened at later stages, with different artists, of course. (Shall we discuss visuals and Andy Goldsworthy, who is worth far more than gold? For a moving visual, look here.)

People get bickery about show music and I'm sure to cause the turning up of no few noses, citing a lyricist as a poet (There's worse to come, darlings. The bonnie blog is young, but a-growin'.), but Sondheim is far more than a hack lyricist -- and well-crafted songs are poems with more layers, nothing less or more.

Sondheim's words and music do much for me, even after the hundredth hearing. The day Pacific Overtures touches nothing in me, I shall no longer be me.

Call 'The Miller's Son' (sung by Petra in A Little Night Music) a pivotal influence. If you haven't heard it, then you can sample what you're missing here. I'll wait until you're back.) (Do you need a breather?)

'The Miller's Son' is primal and passionate, a full-blooded and throated vocalised urge, a rowdy behest for the living of life -- not a prayer for for mercy, but for full-on, 'Don't just embrace it; take it home and have its children' life. It puts down its glass, leans forward over its comfortably wide-spread legs (bugger conformity) and says, 'Jaayyysus, ya daft fool. Go do it.' Had Petra been Penelope, Ulysses would have had a shorter journey. That Petrafied Penelope wouldn't have waited at home. She'd have gone out there and brought back her man, leaving some sore and bewildered Sirens and other problems in the back-end of her path.

Shifting mythologies and legends and lores for a moment, the miller's son is no bad bargain. Puss in Boots worked with him.

Returning to Petra: She's a pragmatist. Babies make messes. Princes move in other strata (although they, too, come to beds at night). The road is short but this girl isn't going to creep or crawl (although she certainly plans to fumble). She's going to kick up her well-rounded heels and dance her way to the far end, however near or far it may be. And the gods have not invented that good night into which this girl is going to go gently. She's going to go out of life just the way she came into it and precisely the way she lived it while she was here: every pore open, each sense ready and every bit alive right up to the instant after the last exhalation. And I have no idea who's going to help anybody who gets in her way on this or any other side. Any song that gets that vitality pulsing through a hearer is doing a service for far longer than the timespan of a poem, with or without a score.