Life must move on, and we have too many important problems to deal with for any of us to be permanently stuck in the muds of memory.
I woke up this morning thinking how meaningful a poem I dreamt of could be. Except I couldn’t remember what poem it was. Oh well, such are dreams, at least some times. However, the dream led me to reflect how meaningful some poems, or even a few lines from a poem, can sometimes be. Compare, for example, Robert Frost’s two-line poem “The Span of Life”—“The old dog barks backwards without getting up. / I can remember when he was a pup.”—with Marcel Proust’s seven-volume novel, In Search of Lost Time.
Although I have written on poetry, and occasionally a poem, on this Hollywood Progressive for about a decade, various poems took on special meaning for me as I went through the grieving process after the death of my wife, Nancy (or Nance as I usually called her) in early 2022—a process whose early stages I mentioned in a poem of August 2022.
About a week before this on Hollywood Progressive I detailed in "How Tennyson’s Poem 'Ulysses,' Helps Me Cope" how one poem helped me, calling attention especially to the lines “Death closes all: but something ere the end, / Some work of noble note, may yet be done, /...Tis not too late to seek a newer world.” And “We are not now that strength which in old days / Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; / One equal temper of heroic hearts, / Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."
About a month after Nance died, I quoted from another poem on LA Progressive in my “Lessons Learned as an Alzheimer’s Caregiver.” The poem was Conrad Aiken’s, “Music I Heard,” and the lines were:
Music I heard with you was more than music,
And bread I broke with you was more than bread;
Now that I am without you, all is desolate;
All that was once so beautiful is dead.
Your hands once touched this table and this silver,
And I have seen your fingers hold this glass.
These things do not remember you, beloved,
And yet your touch upon them will not pass.
For it was in my heart that you moved among them,
And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes;
And in my heart they will remember always,
—They knew you once, O beautiful and wise.
In the months immediately after the loss of Nance, I often mentioned her, and quoted poetic lines that reminded me of her. I wrote, for example, that words Wordsworth wrote in “Tintern Abbey”—“that best portion of a good man’s life, / His little, nameless, unremembered, acts / Of kindness and of love”—reminded me of her. And in an LAP essay I mentioned that I hoped in her post-earth existence, she was now free of Alzheimer’s pains and confusion. And that her existence was now like in Thomas Traherne’s poem “Eden”:
Joy, pleasure, beauty, kindness, glory, love,
Sleep, day, life, light,
Peace, melody, my sight,
My ears and heart did fill and freely move.
All that I saw did me delight.
The Universe was then a world of treasure,
To me an universal world of pleasure.
And, of course, I often thought of her at various times in our six decades of life together, sometimes in poetic terms. Remembering her when we first began dating in the early 1960s, I thought of W.B. Yeats lines in “Politics”: “How can I, that girl standing there, / My attention fix / On Roman or on Russian /Or on Spanish politics?”
Poet Gary Snyder once told TV journalist Bill Moyers that he “thought of poetry as a variety of song.” And sometimes words from songs came into my mind. Like these from “A Love Until the End of Time,” sung by by Plácido Domingo and Maureen McGovern:
I love you with a heart that knows no one but you,
A love I never thought I'd find.
A love that comes just once and never comes again,
A love until the end of time
Or from a guitar song I wrote for myself when seeing Nance over in a park with our three young children and our dog:
I sit here by the window
And watch the kids at play.
They’re over in the park now,
Not a quarter mile away.
Some are playing baseball
and some are riding bikes.
Some are shooting baskets,
And some are flying kites.
I see my Tom and Jenny there,
Our dog’s there too.
And Nanny’s chasing Danny,
Whose just lost his shoe.
But, of course, life must move on, and we have too many important problems to deal with for any of us to be permanently stuck in the muds of memory. There are, for example, the horrors of war and climate change. Thankfully, however, there are poems that help us deal with these problems. For Memorial Day, 2020 I quoted (on LAP) from Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est.”
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori [It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country].
Regarding environmental problems, we have the hopeful words of Gerard Manley Hopkins in “God’s Grandeur”:
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 . . . .
Or the more pessimistic humor of Ogden Nash, who parodied the famous “Trees” by Joyce Kilmer—like Owen, another victim of the foolish WWI. “I think that I shall never see / A billboard lovely as a tree / Indeed, unless the billboards fall / I'll never see a tree at all.”
And there are poems, or lines from them, that convey wisdom about life generally. Just a few of my favorites are these:
- W. B. Yeats’s “Wisdom is a butterfly / And not a gloomy bird of prey.”
- Wordsworth’s “The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.”
- Wordsworth’s “There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light, / The glory and the freshness of a dream. / It is not now as it hath been of yore;— / Turn wheresoe'er I may, / By night or day. / The things which I have seen I now can see no more."
- Keats’ “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
- Stephen Spender’s “What is precious, is never to forget / The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs / Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth. / Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light / Nor its grave evening demand for love. / Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother / With noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit."
In addition to individual poems, there are certain poets like Carl Sandburg, W. H. Auden, and Mary Oliver that I have analyzed in some depth, and still others like Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Yeats that I often turn to for wisdom and comfort. And there are certain poetic lines that I often repeat to myself. Like these from Wordsworth, “O evil day! if I were sullen / While Earth herself is adorning / This sweet May-morning.” How often—when I should be reveling amid a glorious day and good friends—have I mumbled these words to myself after plunking a golf ball into the water.
