Some brief thoughts (other than “Kyrie eleison”)—I suspected before I even got to paragraph three that any novel whose main character’s name is “Miltiades” is either going to be excellent or awful.  Seriously, isn’t “Miltiades” a name you expect from a novel set in the magical land of Eregoss, where the evil lord Dwildrim will be vanquished by Prince Miltiades’s mighty blade?  I presume his mother called him “Milt”.

This is yet another (saints preserve us) middle book from a ponderous trilogy—the Victorians had the three-volume novel, Americans (in the 20s and 30s, at least) have the trilogy set in the same little town.  I know that The Magnificent Ambersons (awful) and Early Autumn (decent but shaky) were Pulitzer-winning middle novels.  I think there was at least one other, so far.  I can’t help but see it as dirty pool: it’s hard enough enjoying most of these, without being disoriented also.

This is at least (I can say one good thing about it) a person writing what they know.  Stribling’s setting his novel in the north Alabama country where he grew up, and this particular novel’s set in the late Gilded Age of his childhood (the action begins when he would have been three years old).  An Alabaman writing about Alabama right after the Yankees were sent home and the white folk “took back their state”?  Well, I’ll get some insights into a worldview, I guess.  Keep your head low, though, Stribling.  I sense a disaster of McLaughlin-level proportions in the near future, and I won’t be shy about my opinions.

The thing I wonder is, how early does a book actually get race “right” in America’s history?  What is the first book you’ve read that seems to you to handle race appropriately—avoiding stereotype, considering characters as people in their own right, etc.?  (It doesn’t have to totally avoid the depiction of unpleasantness, obviously: it just needs to be a book that here in 2012 we don’t have to apologize for with “oh, but if you remember the times in which it was written” every time we recommend it to someone.)

In this situation, I think what I’m looking for is a novel (that’s our genre of choice) and ideally a novel that deals with more races than just the author’s own race.  My baseline nominee is To Kill A Mockingbird (1960), which happens to be a Pulitzer winner—but your nominees can definitely come from anywhere!  Is there an earlier book that does this well?  Am I, in fact, being too kind to Mockingbird, and the first novel to meet my criteria came later?  I’m hoping not to just hear the title and author of a book you’re suggesting, but to hear a little about what works about it for you.

Why ask this?  One of the central issues in America in the 20th century (in seemingly every century until we get it right) is race, and I’ve made no secret of my sadness/anger that so many of the novels I’m reading use race very cheaply and with real callousness.  I’m wondering when the “it was the times” excuse should fairly run out on these authors….and of course I’m also very curious who did it first, since I’m going to want to think about that person and their book.  Please don’t be shy (and comment even if you didn’t see this right as I posted it).  I look forward to hearing from you.

Having sped through the last 1/4 of this novel, I think I can soften some of my criticisms of Buck’s work, but I’m still fundamentally dissatisfied by the reading experience I’ve been through.  To cast things positively first, though, I think she ultimately does a nice job weaving together a lot of different elements to the story.  There are some actions that “come full circle”, so to speak, and I feel she’s pretty successful with them.  And honestly, the more I think about it, the more I think her central character, Wang Lung, is pretty well described—we do get inside his head.  It’s what’s inside there that limits the novel, in my opinion.

Chekhov famously suggested that happy families are boring, and that it’s unhappiness that makes for interesting art.  I think Wang Lung’s a good counter-example—his unhappiness, his cruelty, his selfishness, is simply really boring.  He’s not a charismatically fascinating villain (like Milton’s Satan, say, or Shakespeare’s Iago).  He’s not even really a usefully pitiable villain (Tolkien’s Gollum, or Shakespeare’s Shylock).  The combination of his banal personality with his casual complicity in a whole lot of sadness and suffering is depressing without feeling purposeful.  There’s very little character development outside of Wang Lung—characters do change a bit as they age, but Buck seems uninterested in explaining or even trying to understand why or how they do.  So we’re stuck inside a man who maybe does learn and grow a little, but in a fundamentally unsatisying way.

And towards the end, Buck really lays it on thick with her symbolic! phrases! about the goodness! of the earth!  It’s clear to me that she thinks this is the real heart of the story—the relationship of Lung to “his” earth, and of his family to the earth, and how their detachment from their land ultimately works to their destruction (a cycle we saw, in part, in the fall of the house of Hwang early in the novel).  But it just doesn’t land for me, principally because it’s not at all clear that any of them were better people for being tied to the land.  They were less decadent people, they quarreled less…I can see that.  But Lung wasn’t any less cruel to his wife or his sons, he wasn’t any less selfish or myopic, when he was working the land every day.  If Buck wants to do something with the importance of the land, I grant that there are threads to work from here.  Lung’s most admirable quality is probably his work ethic, or else his foresight in knowing that the land will matter.  His finest moment in the book has to do with his devotion to the old servant who, if anything, loved the land even more than Lung did.  But Buck’s throwing around a lot of strands that try to make the earth into this iconic symbol that explains most of the events of the novel, and it’s not working that way for me.

I recognize that Buck had a different audience in 1932 than she does today.  Her decision to foreground Wang Lung would almost certainly be different for today’s reader—this would have been O-Lan’s (sad) story, or Pear Blossom’s, or even Cuckoo’s.  She might feel a freedom to get further inside the head of more than one character, or to ease up a bit on the importance of “selling” the title’s significance.  But for me, I just can’t pretend a novel works when it doesn’t, no matter how “of its time” it is.  I can read and enjoy plenty of novels from earlier times, even novels whose attitudes about race or gender are more backwards than Buck’s tale.  Those books work on me because I feel they still have things to say to me, and I can hear them speaking.  Despite the fact that I think Buck’s a capable enough craftsman in prose, I can’t hear much of what she wants to say here—that may be my issue more than hers, but it’s my review and that’s the way it fell for me.

Historical Insight:

This is normally where I talk about how this book helps me gain an insight to America at the time.  I’m not sure how far I can take it with this book—obviously the setting is China at some indeterminate time in the recent past (seemingly early 20th Century, but honestly I couldn’t quite read the cues I’m pretty sure Buck was dropping, since my mental timeline for China’s history just isn’t fine-grained enough).  I do think it’s no real accident that the winning novel for the (arguably) worst year of the Great Depression is a novel about a struggling farmer and his relationship to the land.  It’s a shame, in my opinion, that the novel doesn’t do more to empathize with the people who struggle and fail—we really don’t get any sense of them, and instead get Wang Lung, who seems to represent the idea that if you’re canny and work hard enough, you can always get ahead (not a very realistic notion in America circa 1932).  But I think it’s clearly at least nodding towards some ideas and some realities that other American authors (cough-cough-John Steinbeck-cough)  examined with more clarity.

I do agree with some of my commenters that this is the book’s real strength: I feel I know more about a lot of elements in Chinese society at the time than I previously had.  I’m admittedly having to trust that Buck got it right (as I had to with Laughing Boy…and which I could not possibly believe of Scarlet Sister Mary).  But I’ve heard enough from enough people to assume that’s at least plausibly fair.  Personally, if I wanted to get a handle on Chinese society, this is not the book I’d start with.  And if I was handling China for middle schoolers, this is not the book I’d start with (though it’s certainly played that role for decades)—I don’t think it gives China much credit at all.  Chinese religion, social structure, economic opportunity….all of it is pretty soundly looked down on by the implied narrator.  I can correct for that bias in my head—for example, imagining what it’s like for the many peasants who believe in the importance of temple offerings, unlike Wang Lung—but I wouldn’t want to try and get 8th graders to do the same.  Anyone who is trying it, I salute you: it’s got to be a difficult road to walk.

Review:

By my non-scientific and totally-irregular ratings system, The Good Earth gets a “find a better book than this”.  Seriously, if you want some good examinations of the farming life, read Steinbeck.  If you want to examine how wealth corrupts ordinary people, read Fitzgerald or Wharton or James or any of the dozen other American novelists who tackle that issue with regularity and skill.  And if you want to learn something about China, read a book by a Chinese author, or else a book written recently enough that the Western author is more aware of their cultural baggage and more able to correct for (or acknowledge) it.  This isn’t a bad book.  But if it’s the best book of 1932, I’ll purchase a hat, and eat it.

The Last Word:

As is our custom at Following Pulitzer, Buck gets the last word.  In this case, I chose a passage very late in the book, when Wang Lung is an old man.  I think it’s some of Buck’s best writing—it works pretty well, as do a number of her passages, though not consistently in my experience—and it does show some of the nods she makes at the symbolism she sees at the heart of the story.  It may well be there more than I guess, for her and for you:

Spring passed and summer passed into harvest and in the hot autumn sun before winter comes Wang Lung sat where his father had sat against the wall.  And he thought no more about anything now except his food and his drink and his land.  But of his land he thought no more what harvest it would bring or what seed would be planted or of anything except the land itself, and he stooped sometimes and gathered some of the earth up in his hand and he sat thus and held it in his hand, and it seemed full of life between his fingers.  And he was content, holding it thus, and he thought of it fitfully and of his good coffin that was there; and the kind earth waited without haste until he came to it.

I

The bronze General Grant riding a bronze horse in Lincoln Park
Shrivels in the sun by day when the motor cars whirr by in long processions going somewhere to keep appointment for dinner and matinees and buying and selling
Though in the dusk and nightfall when high waves are piling
On the slabs of the promenade along the lake shore near by
I have seen the general dare the combers come closer
And make to ride his bronze horse out into the hoofs and guns of the storm.

II

I cross Lincoln Park on a winter night when the snow is falling.
Lincoln in bronze stands among the white lines of snow, his bronze forehead meeting soft echoes of the newsies crying forty thousand men are dead along the Yser, his bronze ears listening to the mumbled roar of the city at his bronze feet.
A lithe Indian on a bronze pony, Shakespeare seated with long legs in bronze, Garibaldi in a bronze cape, they hold places in the cold, lonely snow to-night on their pedestals and so they will hold them past midnight and into the dawn.

A few thoughts arise.  The two halves are in an odd tension for me.  In the first, Grant is a sort of bully, his statue issuing schoolyard dares to passers-by.  In the daylight, in the bustle of a living city, he is a shrinking figure, but when the shadows lengthen he is empowered somehow.  Maybe Sandburg is drawing a sort of symbolic connection here—the shadowy parts of our own minds are where our more violent thoughts tend to remain.  But I think all in all the first half doesn’t reach me (am I misreading it?).

The second half, on the other hand, is so much more poignant.  I can imagine what it would be like for Lincoln to stand there, fixed in place as a world grows up to find itself so much more efficient at killing than he could have dreamed in 1862, even in his worst nightmares.  I feel like there’s a really rich subtext here—Sandburg gives me a lot to draw together.  Lincoln mute in the snow along with a Native American.  Garibaldi, Italy’s Lincoln (and no stranger to war), and the Bard of Stratford.  I wonder what it means that they all keep vigil through the long night.  What does that night signify, and what will they see in the dawn?  It feels very centered to me, as though the statues tie us to some of our noblest aspirations, and that in some way they will guard what is best and brightest about humanity.  It will survive this winter, the war and the darkness.  But why and how, I cannot say.

Recently I’ve been posting a lot of poems where I knew what I wanted to say, and where I wanted to take them.  Obviously tonight I’ve gone a different road, and I hope it will encourage at least one or two of you (if not more!) to offer your own thoughts.  Am I making too much out of a very simple (and maybe mediocre) poem, simply because I like some of Sandburg’s other stuff?  Or, conversely, am I too limited in my reading, especially of the Grant section—are there thoughts here I haven’t sorted yet?  And either way, why am I not seeing a more Chicago-specific read of a poem explicitly set here, and published in a book called “Chicago Poems”?  Even if you think I have it just right, I hope you’ll chime in.  Always good to know somebody out there still reads these, after all.  Peace to you tonight, wherever you are on a winter’s evening.

Happily for my purposes, King doesn’t just connect with the “American” interest for this blog—his use of language is poetic and powerful and of real interest to anyone who wants to be serious about American writers.  Most of us know his famous speech on the steps of the Lincoln memorial, and some of us probably know passages of his final speech or his letter from jail.  I thought today I’d share an excerpt of something you may never have encountered—a portion of his acceptance speech upon having received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.  I’ll make a few comments afterwards, but mostly I just hope you read this, and remember Dr. King today.  He believed in all of us more than we have ever given reason to deserve.  He had more faith in our ability to hear the better angels of our nature than any of our leaders, before or since.  May we make him glad of that faith.

“I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the “isness” of man’s present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal “oughtness” that forever confronts him. I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsam and jetsam in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.

I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. I believe that even amid today’s mortar bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow. I believe that wounded justice, lying prostrate on the blood-flowing streets of our nations, can be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men. I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down, men other-centered can build up. I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive good will proclaim the rule of the land. ‘And the lion and the lamb shall lie down together and every man shall sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid.’ I still believe that we shall overcome.

This faith can give us courage to face the uncertainties of the future. It will give our tired feet new strength as we continue our forward stride toward the city of freedom. When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds and our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, we will know that we are living in the creative turmoil of a genuine civilization struggling to be born.”

It’s a powerful speech: you can read the rest of it here, if you like.  What touches me most deeply is how profoundly American it is—for all that my country has to be ashamed of in the racism that Dr. King and the civil rights movement confronted, we can also be proud that we are a country that had raised up the banners King looked to as ideals.  When he says (in his more famous speech) that his dream is “deeply rooted in the American dream”, he’s being fully honest.  He was a man who believed in the freedoms this country guarantees to its citizens (however much we break that promise).  He was a man who was convinced in part by our nation’s history that a group of people dedicated to the right cause could never be defeated, not for good.  When America’s founding documents promised him the equality, opportunity, and liberty he had been denied, he didn’t see it as a cruel joke, but rather as an inherent element at the core of the American identity, which would one day have to win out over ignorance and cruelty and injustice.  His America could no more prevent the new birth of freedom than a child can stop itself from growing into an adult—it is carved into our destiny as a people.

I’m disappointed at the places where progress remains slow, and angry that justice still lies wounded in the streets for too many people.  But the message of this day is that Dr. King was right about us.  We have come farther today than we had in 1964.  We had come farther by then than we had by 1861.  This wasn’t inevitable—it took people to work and act and risk and sometimes give up their lives.  All of them committed themselves knowing that the final victory was far off.  So it is for us.  May we work and act and risk—yes, perhaps even our safety, our very lives, when necessary—for justice.  That city of freedom may still be a ways off, but I feel like we’re getting close enough to hear them singing, and it makes me want to run these last few miles.

To begin, the first stanza of a poem by Christina Rossetti:

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

I used to post this stanza on my online assignment calendar for my A.P. class in midwinter break, based purely on the use of the word “midwinter” (I thought I was being clever in a sort of literary way).  But over the years I came to enjoy that ritual, and to linger over the sounds of the words—the transformative power of the cold, which converts earth to iron and water to stone like some elderly alchemist, grown old and strong in his secret art.  The soft overwhelming feeling of that repetition in the 3rd line, as snow surrounds, immersing the world so fully that it consumes even itself, burying snows under snow.  Rossetti is a master of sound, and here she brings the tones together just perfectly for my ear, the long “o” of the wind’s moaning and the somehow gentler long “o” of the hushed snowfall reinforcing each other.  Gorgeous, and always on my mind this time of year, especially in weather like this.

And of course, I cannot neglect to mention Wallace Stevens’ thirteenth way of looking at a blackbird—and my favorite way:

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

Of course the pinnacle here is his first line, one of the best lines in poetry (to my mind) and one of those lines that makes me want to trade in my right arm (well, maybe just a finger or two) to get access to that same Muse.  The oppression of these shortened Northern winter afternoons, with the low light and the feeling of clouds weighing on your back and the hasty feeling of sun setting much too fast, for me happens immediately in that tight little phrase.  And then he rides right over that feeling with the addition of two important facts—it’s snowing (easily observed) and it’s going to snow (which always delights me, whether I interpret it as his depressed conviction that it’s not letting up anytime soon, or his depressed conviction that even if it lets up, it’ll be back for more before too long).  Juxtaposed, as in the poem’s other 12 stanzas, is the blackbird—poised, distinct against the canvas of the cedar’s evergreen, remote somehow from the world of snow and yet identified closely for me with the hovering evening, the darkness at the heart of the winter light.  Stevens doesn’t do it for everybody, and he doesn’t do it for me often enough (no matter how many times Professor Brenner read “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” to us, I never got it), but in this poem it happens to me like Mozart, where I sit agape that a man can toss out this many sparkling images with such careless ease.

Lastly, a poem on which I can barely comment: Robert Frost’s tiny clockwork gem, “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”.  I wanted to excerpt, but I just have to give you the whole thing:

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

My personal history with this poem is a long one—it’s one of the first poems I ever memorized, it’s one of the first poems I ever tried to imitate.  It’s closely associated with my memory of the first time I ever went for a walk with the girl (then a friend) who became my wife.  The last lines were taped to the mirror in my bathroom for a year for reasons too complex (and in some ways personal) to get into.  Part of what I like about it is how grafted it is onto my mind—I can recite it at the drop of a hat, and do (to myself, usually under my breath) when I see the right scene, or feel the right breeze.  It is a joke (and one he himself had no problems telling) that America’s greatest poet of winter and ice was a man named Frost.  He was born to the work.

The snow in this poem is in some ways just a regular, real snowfall.  The speaker in the poem stops to watch it because he can, because it is one of the luxuries of being out for a long journey that time can be lost like this, a minute or a half an hour, without feeling the keen edge of the clock’s hand sweeping you forward.  The snow is also mythic, full of symbolic power.  It transfixes the speaker because it is the place he would like to be swallowed up by.  Here, far from the world, far from anyone who could lay claim to woods and lake and snow with some human piece of paper, the speaker would like to remain.  He is tethered loosely to the earth, drawn back to it only by the gentle sounds of his horse, the easy sweep of the snow that will bury him if he stays, and the knowledge of a promise he has made, if only to himself.  He feels a longing for the peace of death.

This isn’t morbid, or if it is, it’s entirely suitable.  The world’s seasons awaken these feelings in us.  The speaker in the poem moves on, returns to life and duty and promise as the world will in the expected spring, but he leaves a part of himself behind on that silent hillside.  Someday he will stop there again, and for good.

Snow, as you can see, plays on a lot of images and feelings for me.  Beauty, freedom, danger, death.  I expect it does the same for you.  If there’s a poem or a stanza or a line somewhere that “captures” winter or snowfall for you, I hope you’ll share it in a comment on this post.  I always like adding to my personal library.

I do like some new features: it’s MUCH easier now to see how to leave a comment (instead of a tiny link, it’s a big button), and I think the blog’s tags are much more visible now.  It seems to me that there’s a lot less wasted space on the margins, and the right sidebar looks a little less cluttered to me now.

I also am not happy with some changes—I feel like the expanded top sidebar (it’s not a “sidebar” if it’s on top, is it….what, is it a “topbar”?  I am almost painfully unhip about these things) is cluttered and I can’t fix that without a major reorganization of the blog’s page structure…although that structure, admittedly, was merely designed to fit the last theme’s oddities, and not based on some cool and careful logic on my part.  The text of the blog’s subtitle in the header is in a wretched font that is far too thin and I can’t alter it in any way other than its color.  Blech.  And at first, I was getting weird giant tildes in the middle of posts that obscured the text—word to the wise: if this is happening to you, update your browser to solve the problem.  If you’d rather not update your browser, and find the tildes irritating and troublesome, I feel your pain, but I’m afraid I can’t do anything about it.  It’s one of the vagaries of hypertext markup language with which a mortal cannot hope to contend.

If other weirdness arises from this (or if no weirdness arises and you think the new look is wicked—that’s “wicked!” in a cool way, and not malevolent as though originating from an ancient evil), let me know.  I will say, though, the old theme is gone.  I took a leap knowing there was no way back up.  So it’s this or one of WordPress’s even worse free themes.  I’m hoping this will do well enough to allow you and me to continue enjoying this little dialogue we have (it’s a bit one-sided, I know, but such are blogs).  Cheers to you all, and welcome to the new year.

Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake
The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell
And held in ice as dancers in a spell
Fluttered all winter long into a lake;
Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,
They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns
Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone
A million years. Great mammoths overthrown
Composedly have made their long sojourns,
Like palaces of patience, in the gray
And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze
The random hands, the loose unready eyes
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

For me, Wilbur captures with seemingly effortless beauty the bittersweetness of these thresholds in a way I marvel at. (And in end-rhyme that is perfectly understated.  There’s a reason he’s a Laureate and we’re not, my friends.)  Poetry should do this to us—open up words for the feelings we cannot frame, and push us to see something marvelous in our own lives.  The hushed, almost inaudible phrases with which he describes the glow in our houses—the “gathered light”, the “shapen atmosphere”—awake in me a realization of the comfort of being in a home, wherever that is.  Wilbur is dancing down paths Robert Frost knew well, which is part of what I love about the poem, since it’s clearly an homage to Frost’s view of the world but also clearly original and not remotely imitative of Frost’s structures (the ones I know, at least).

The description of the frozen leaves alone, a sight I know very well (I imagine most of us do), brought me up short with wonder at his phrasing.  I mean, come on—”graved on the dark in gestures of descent”?  What Muse did this guy bewitch to win these words, and where can I get her number?  And the thing about the poem that inspires perhaps the most elation, for me, is the way he ties these homely visions—the snow-filled streets, the living-room lamps, the leaves dancing in ice—to the grand motions of time.  To the ashen figures of Pompeii, the creatures of lost worlds adrift in unmelting snows, the fossils locked for epochs beneath the soil.  We become part of something greater as Wilbur links image to image with a steady hand and a bright eye.  He knows where he is going.

I’m still wrestling with the last stanza, but in this case I think it’s because it’s saying exactly what I want to say for myself, and I’m still figuring out how to do that.  Portions of it (“more time, more time”) feel like last words, and others (“the sudden ends of time must give us pause”) like a benediction.  Mostly I’m struck with the tension he is winding between the first and last stanzas—the way the new year’s bells do battle with the “settlement of snow”.  He’s doing good work, whatever it is he’s doing.  I’ll be pondering this one a while.

All of that is a rather cryptic and probably confusing way to say that I haven’t known what to say.  I went looking to see what poets have said about new years in the past, and found most of them saying all the things I can’t find right now.  This poet, though, got a hold of something somber that got my attention, at least.  I don’t think she and I are in the same place.  But I felt a connection with someone who (presumably) won’t be wearing a party hat tomorrow because that’s not what the new year will mean for her.  Her name is Linda Pastan, and this is a poem called “The Cossacks” that bears the inscription “For F.“

For Jews, the Cossacks are always coming.
Therefore I think the sun spot on my arm
is melanoma. Therefore I celebrate
New Year’s Eve by counting
my annual dead.

My mother, when she was dying,
spoke to her visitors of books
and travel, displaying serenity
as a form of manners, though
I could tell the difference.

But when I watched you planning
for a life you knew
you’d never have, I couldn’t explain
your genuine smile in the face
of disaster. Was it denial

laced with acceptance? Or was it
generations of being English—
Brontë’s Lucy in Villette
living as if no fire raged
beneath her dun-colored dress.

I want to live the way you did,
preparing for next year’s famine with wine
and music as if it were a ten-course banquet.
But listen: those are hoofbeats
on the frosty autumn air.

I warned you it was grim.  But I think sometimes we need to be honest—to acknowledge that beginnings are not always exciting because sometimes we are sorry to leave behind whatever is ended.  To acknowledge that sometimes we are people who dwell on sorrows because that’s the kind of people we are: we haven’t read a self-help book that tells us this is a good idea, we haven’t weighed our options and decided this is the most productive way to go, we are not proactive.  We simply enter the doorway in front of us.

Pastan here is wrestling with this because the one she misses, this new year’s night, is someone who (ironically) didn’t wrestle with this.  Pastan, at the brink of something new and full of possibility is struck by her apprehension and fear.  And that this absent friend of hers managed to walk to the edge of death—of the denial of possibility, the end of hope—with optimism and cheer is beyond her ability to take in.

She can’t get free of it.  In the end, for her, no music can drown out the sound of the approaching horsemen and what they bring with them.  I wonder how much of this is a choice.  We believe in free will as humans (and as Americans, in particular, I think)—we like to commit ourselves to the idea that we are in utter control of ourselves, at least.  That all our actions, our thoughts, our emotions are at our disposal at any given moment.  Pastan faces the fact that we do not have that kind of freedom.  Is this brave?  Is it wallowing in depression?  Maybe more importantly, can it possibly be both at once?

I don’t know.  I have a lot to be glad about, and yet I can’t shake the shadow this evening—the feeling of “growing gloom” that Thomas Hardy wrote about in his own New Year’s poem for 1900, “The Darkling Thrush”, where he goes for a walk in despair and is surprised to find that a little bird can sing so brightly, as though it has access to a hope he is denied.  No catalogue of my many blessings is an adequate response.

These feelings pass.  Sometimes in cliché fashion, when we see the sunrise or hear a baby laugh or smell a flower, but not usually.  Life is more complicated than that.  Complicated enough that I both understand Pastan tonight, feeling (like her) that a new year is a chance to reflect on the dangers of the possible, and I do not, because I am not overwhelmingly convinced that a Cossack is at my door.  When I reflect on the dangers of the possible, I am more likely to realize how far off the Cossacks really are.  The danger gradually dissipates.  Calm returns.  I’ll do that, tonight, and perhaps you will too—or perhaps you’ve been free of this kind of melancholy lately.  Either way, may 2012 exceed your expectations, and bring you (among other things) plenty of excellent poetry and prose.

The threefold terror of love; a fallen flare
Through the hollow of an ear;
Wings beating about the room;
The terror of all terrors that I bore
The Heavens in my womb.

Had I not found content among the shows
Every common woman knows,
Chimney corner, garden walk,
Or rocky cistern where we tread the clothes
And gather all the talk?

What is this flesh I purchased with my pains,
This fallen star my milk sustains,
This love that makes my heart’s blood stop
Or strikes a sudden chill into my bones
And bids my hair stand up?

Yeats is a powerful poet—probably most powerful when he deals with the real world, the world of muck and mire. He himself acknowledges this, charting the origins of his poetry to what he calls “the rag-and-bone shop of the heart”. (An aside: poets, who of us would not give up a limb to have coined that phrase?)  And what he touches in this poem is the physicality of what it might be like to experience what Mary does in the stories told in Matthew and Luke.  I am fascinated (and sometimes unsettled) by this sensory detail—the feeling of the Spirit fluttering at the eardrum as it arrives, the nostalgia for the tread of foot on wet cloth, the chill in her bones as she gives life to something not exactly human (yet hers).

Yeats spins his phrases again—I am as envious of “the three-fold terror of love” as I was of his heart imagery—and yet part of the poem’s beauty for me is that it feels somehow unstudied.  As though this woman is simply saying what happened to her—the fear, the wonder, the dreamlike quality that now pervades all her emotions.  She uses plain words to articulate something no one on Earth could really understand.

That’s the feeling I like best, and the one I want to begin to examine, as I reflect on the coming holiday.  Most of our public holidays—the ones I’ve written on before—begin with the mundane.  A country is founded.  A war is ended.  A people express their gratitude.  This holiday, however it may be celebrated in many homes across the nation, begins somewhere else.  It begins with the image of that solitary woman in a room.  The sound of wings unseen.  The idea that the ordinary may be raised up, that the mundane sometimes contains the miraculous.  It’s an idea that pushed Yeats to write this strange and ambiguous poem, and I hope it inspires something in you this coming week.