Thursday
26 October 2017

— trees this morning darkly silhouetted by a silvery sun behind clouds.

Good Morning All,

The poem in today’s Day Book is by Sara Teasdale, although she was not born on this day. Unfortunately, the great poets have not always cooperated with my request to spread themselves out evenly through the year. 

The upside of that being: when a free day shows up, I get to put in any poem I like by any poet I admire. Since way back in high school, thanks to good old, wonderful old, batty old Miss Krastin, I have admired Sara Teasdale. She shares my belief that Nature supplies the paths that take us both into and out of ourselves. 

Poetry pundits sometimes argued her poems were too simple and unsophisticated, “though first, last, and always a singer.” She did manage to win the first Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Probably my favorite Teasdale poem is the same one that  inspired Ray Bradbury's short story of the same title. 

There Will Come Soft Rains
Sara Teasdale

There will come soft rain and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound; 

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white; 

Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire; 

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly; 

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone. 

   

One thing I like a lot about that poem, other than its lovely lyricism, is that I cannot read it without being reminded of the final page of Albert Camus’s The Stranger (Variously, The Outsider.) The narrator, Meursault, is awaiting his execution by guillotine at some as yet unappointed time in the near future. 

He says: "I, too, felt ready to start life all over again. It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still.”

The benign indifference of the universe! Teasdale’s poem seems to suggest more the benevolent indifference of nature, but it is much the same thing, and profoundly liberating.

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron

P.S. Two Holly snaps: