Friday

21 April 2017

— Under low hanging, leaden skies the birds are queueing up at the feeders

Good Morning All,

I probably should have mentioned sometime ago I was as much a card-carrying poetry-phobe as any other red-blooded, egg-head hating, American male. I was proud of it. I shared the commonly held belief that poets were contrary and subversive types who pretended to give us, unasked, Secret-of-Life messages, but did so in language so convoluted and highfaluting normal people could never understand it.

Despite good old Edgar Lee Masters and Robert Frost, two exceptions that proved the rule, I pretty much held this view right up to and through the English 101 mid-term exam freshman year at college. The sadist who concocted the exam slapped in a Thomas Hardy poem upon which we were asked to make extensive comment as to poetic devices used and thematic concerns addressed. Here’s the poem:

Snow in the Suburbs, Thomas Hardy

Every branch big with it, 
Bent every twig with it; 
Every fork like a white web-foot; 
Every street and pavement mute: 
Some flakes have lost their way, and grope back upward, when
Meeting those meandering down they turn and descend again. 
The palings are glued together like a wall, 
And there is no waft of wind with the fleecy fall. 

A sparrow enters the tree, 
Whereon immediately
A snow-lump thrice his own slight size
Descends on him and showers his head and eyes, 
And overturns him, 
And near inurns him, 
And lights on a nether twig, when its brush
Starts off a volley of other lodging lumps with a rush. 

The steps are a blanched slope, 
Up which, with feeble hope, 
A black cat comes, wide-eyed and thin; 
And we take him in.   

I can remember looking at that sucker in sheer panic and for a few long seconds being unable—as though gazing at Arabic—to make any sense of it all. Then, after two or three run-throughs: Okay, it snowed, big deal. What’s it really about? What’s a paling? What the heck does inurns mean?  How come it’s a sparrow and not, say, a black-capped chickadee? Or why not a yellow-bellied seersucker? Or a great horned owl? What’s the significance of that? Why does some of the snow head back up again? Is that supposed to be some sort of return-to-the-womb image, like Mr. McQuade is always saying? Is that supposed to be nether or neither? A misspelling, maybe?  Not to mention what about that damned cat? Is that maybe the prodigal son all these poet types like T.S. Bleeding Eliot are always going on about? And why a cat? Why not, say, a “wide-eyed and thin skunk?" Or better yet, a frigging moose? And most of all, why did Thomas Dick-nose Hardy ever have to be born, other than to cause me all this grief just before Christmas?

I vaguely remember scribbling something about the existential angst caused by living in suburbia, as symbolized by the cold anonymity of the snow erasing the borders and identifiable signposts upon which we all rely. I compared it to several other poems including Joyce Kilmer’s Trees, Milton’s On His Blinds, Longfellow’s Midnight Ride, and just to be on the safe side Stopping by Woods on a Suicidal Evening.

I think Mr. McQuade gave me a D-, but that was only because he had designs on seducing me once the second semester began.

And now? Having spent for the past two years a couple of hours nearly every day reading around in poetry. Getting used to it? No longer feeling threatened by it? Basking in it!

Well, as I said, back then: “It snowed, big deal.” Except now I say it without the irony. It did snow, and it was a big deal, which Hardy renders with such delicate and precise imagery you can’t help but be looking out the same window with him. Well, if you can relax, anyway. 

Today, were you to ask me, I’d say it’s mostly nothing more nor less than a shared-moment poem, which are my favorite kind. And then on top of that there is the lovely surprise of that last stanza when the black cat against the white snow shows up, and for some reason that probably has to do with the beauty and transforming grace of the snow—we let him in. Whoever we are. 

So the theme, if any, might have to do with the old romantic idea of the redemptive quality of nature. Even in the suburbs.

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron