The Spring of Love

I’ve been reading poetry all my life, or at least ever since I was 16 years old and an English teacher named Robert Hollenbach, an army veteran and an athlete, shared his own love of poetry and made it safe for a teenaged boy to love poetry, too. There’s a lot of good poetry out there in the world, centuries of it, enough to keep one reading—well—for a lifetime.

During my lifetime, however, creative writing has become the province of academia. One can now earn bachelors degrees, bachelor of fine arts degrees, masters degrees, master of fine arts degrees, and even doctorates in creative writing.

The result has been a veritable blizzard of books and poems by all these people who are genuine certified creative writers and have the degrees to prove it. Some of these poets are pretty good. Most are—though I’m surely leaving myself open to being skewered as elitist and snobbish or worse—mediocre at best.

I’ve stopped buying or reading poets I’ve never heard of before because it is almost always disappointing.

I’ve stopped buying or reading poets I’ve never heard of before because it is almost always disappointing. I mostly read contemporary poets I already know or who are recommended to me by poets I already know and admire.

All of this is a longwinded way of introducing a first book of poems by Paul Woodruff, a man who is not even known as a poet. He has spent his entire professional life teaching philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. I have read and much admire his meditations on the ancient Greek world and what we modern humans can learn from them: First Democracy, The Ajax Dilemma, and Reverence.

I was first introduced to him through my sister-in-law, whose cousin is married to Woodruff. I’ve met him a few times, and we’ve had a sporadic correspondence for about thirty years. He has, from time to time, written poems about his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam, and I published several of them in my capacity as editor-at-large of the Veterans for Peace national newsletter.

But this winter, Woodruff published—at his own expense, apparently—a slim collection of poems called The Spring of Love: Poems for Jane. Though the book is available on Amazon, it is not likely to get much in the way of sales or attention. Certainly not what it deserves.

I must warn you that these poems are heartbreaking. They are painful to read. They will tug at your soul and leave you helplessly spluttering at the unfairness of life. Because Jane is Woodruff’s granddaughter who died of leukemia at the age of seventeen.

And what a wonderful, lively, caring person she was. In “The Cheerleader’s Cheerleader,” we learn that she tried out for cheerleading not because she wanted to be a cheerleader, but because a girl she knew “was heart-set on being a cheerleader, / but was afraid to try out. / Jane said, ‘I’ll do it with you.’ / And they both got in.”

In “The Teddy Bear’s Secret,” even as Jane lay dying, she managed to walk for the first time in days in order to save her attending nurse from getting into trouble for violating hospital procedure.

Woodruff asks in “Barometer,” “How many dawns must put color / Into a faded world to equal / The illness of one pale child?” In “Memory,” he asks, “To what serve mortal beauties? / She has them all, every one, / Beauty of soul and mind, / Beauty in her face and limbs, / And in her love of living things, / Beauty in her grace with friends, / In caring ways with younger sisters . . . But the wolf in her blood is not moved.”

Here is “Loveliness Increases as it Fades” in its entirety:
Against a sea of green
Three maple leaves on one sprig
Blaze with autumn colors,
Announcing, before all the others
Their mortality. Beauty is
The mother of death. The poets
Had it backward: each thing
Of beauty does pass into no-
Thingness. Transience
Is the mark of beauty,
Whether you see it or not,
Every falling leaf, every death
Follows a blaze of beauty:
Keep your mind’s eye wide,
For loveliness increasing as it fades.

The last two lines of the opening poem in the book are: “The spring of love will not run dry / So long as we remember where it is.” The last two lines of the closing poem are: “So long as we remember Jane, / The spring of love will not run dry.”

In between are poems that will do nothing to alleviate the grief of the poet or to allay your own fears of what in the end awaits us all. But these poems are also a powerful memorial to a girl much loved and a life all too brief but well lived. This is a book of poems I can recommend without reservation.