Sunday morning

19 February 2017

— coffee machine merrily gurgling in the kitchen

1600: Stratvolcano Huaynaputina explodes in Peru, the most violent eruption in the recorded history of South America.

1674: England and the Netherlands sign the Treaty of Westminster, ending the third Anglo-Dutch War; into the deal the Dutch hand over a remote colony in the new world called New Amsterdam.

1807: Aaron Burr, former VP, arrested for treason in Wakefield, Alabama.

1847: The first group of rescuers reach the Donner Party, but take a rain check on dining with them.

1859: Daniel E. Sickles, a New York Congressman, beats a murder rap on the grounds of temporary insanity, a first in the U.S.

1878: Tom Edison patents the phonograph.

1913: Pedro Lascuráin becomes President of Mexico for 45 minutes, still the world record for brevity.

1942: Japanese war planes attack Darwin, Australia, killing 243 people.

1942: FDR okays Japanese internment camps.

1949: At Yale, Ezra Pound is awarded the first ever Bollingen Prize for poetry.

1963: Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique is published.

1985: William J. Schroeder becomes first artificial heart recipient to actually leave the hospital not feet first.

1985: The endless EastEnders begins.

 

Good Morning All,

One of the quotes in today’s Day Book entry is from Carson McCullers, a novelist I have long admired and turned to when things in my life could have been going better. She says: “I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.”

I think she either was or fervently wished to be a romantic, which is to say in the original sense of the word a person who could control her inner destiny by how she looked at the outer life around her, and in the more popular sense of the word by how she could by courage and grit take control of her destiny in the outer life around her. 

An excellent example of the—dare I say—classical Romantic is provided by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his poem The Lime-tree Bower My Prison. You may remember from your high school days that Coleridge and Wordsworth, two people with personalities about as alike as, say, Humphrey Bogart and Woody Allen, teamed up to publish in 1798 Lyrical Ballads, a collection of their poetry that would usher the Romantic Age into England and change forever the way English people see the worlds on both sides of their eyeballs. (Imagine that! Not politicians. Not scientists. Not sports figures or rock stars. A couple of poets!)

Anyway, in the first stanza of the poem, which is addressed to his friends Charles and Mary Lamb, the two essayists who did such a dynamite job with their short prose retellings of Shakespeare’s plays, Coleridge is bitching mightily about his fate. Here he’d invited his two friends down from grimy London to enjoy the countryside with him, nature in all its glory, and then he sprains his ankle so badly he is unable to accompany them on the walk they have just set out on. “Well, they are gone,” he says, “and here I must remain, this lime-tree bower my prison.”

He goes on bitching throughout the first stanza as he imagines Charles and Mary enjoying different places along the path he knows so well. He describes the places in his mind. In the second stanza, his focus begins to shift from his own bad luck and self pity to his friends' enjoyment. At least, he says, my friends down from the city are getting to enjoy being out in nature. Again he describes what his friends must being seeing, though now his tone is no longer bitter, but joyful, as though he is seeing the flowers on the heath and the sunset through the eyes of his friends.

The third and final stanza begins: “A delight comes sudden on my heart, and I am glad as I myself were there! Nor in this bower, have I not marked much that has sooth’d me.” And off he goes describing the lime-tree, now no longer his prison, but a part of the beauty of the natural world. He speaks of birds flying across the sunset, birds that Charles and Mary and he can see together.

And thus the dynamic of the romantic sensibility is at work, namely that by a combination of nature’s presence, of our own imagination, and of our love for other people, as well as a love for beauty itself, we may not only escape what McCullers refers to as our “essential loneliness”, but we may also have some control over our mood and inner destiny.

Yikes! I figured I could get that done in two hundred words, tops, and get back to the wonderful Miss McCullers. 

Oh well, there is—knock on wood—always tomorrow.

Until then, Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron

P.S. What the heck, I’ll attach the poem. You don’t have to read it. Coleridge is dead. He will not mind.

 

This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison
[Addressed to Charles Lamb of the India House, London]
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,
This lime-tree bower my prison! I have lost
Such beauties and such feelings, as had been
Most sweet to have remembrance, even when age
Had dimm'd mine eyes to blindness! They, meanwhile,
Friends, whom I never more may meet again,
On springy heath, along the hilltop edge,
Wander in gladness, and wind down, perchance,
To that still roaring dell, of which I told;
The roaring dell, o'erwooded, narrow, deep,	10
And only speckled by the mid-day sun;
Where its slim trunk the ash from rock to rock
Flings arching like a bridge; —that branchless ash,
Unsunn'd and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves
Ne'er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still,
Fann'd by the water-fall! and there my friends
Behold the dark green file of long lank weeds,
That all at once (a most fantastic sight!)
Still nod and drip beneath the dripping edge
Of the blue clay-stone.
Now my friends emerge	20
Beneath the wide wide Heaven—and view again
The many-steepled tract magnificent
Of hilly fields and meadows, and the sea,
With some fair bark, perhaps, whose sails light up
The slip of smooth clear blue betwixt two Isles
Of purple shadow! Yes! they wander on
In gladness all; but thou, methinks, most glad,
My gentle-hearted Charles! For thou hast pined
And hunger'd after Nature, many a year,
In the great City pent, winning thy way	30
With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain
And strange calamity! Ah! slowly sink
Behind the western ridge, thou glorious Sun!
Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb,
Ye purple heath-flowers! richlier burn, ye clouds!
Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves!
And kindle, thou blue Ocean! So my friend,
Struck with deep joy, may stand, as I have stood,
Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round
On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem	40
Less gross than bodily; and of such hues
As veil the Almighty Spirit, when he makes
Spirits perceive his presence.
A delight
Comes sudden on my heart, and I am glad
As I myself were there! Nor in this bower,
This little lime-tree bower, have I not mark'd
Much that has sooth'd me. Pale beneath the blaze
Hung the transparent foliage; and I watch'd
Some broad and sunny leaf, and loved to see	50
The shadow of the leaf and stem above
Dappling its sunshine! And that walnut-tree
Was richly ting'd, and a deep radiance lay
Full on the ancient ivy, which usurps
Those fronting elms, and now with blackest mass
Makes their dark branches gleam a lighter hue
Through the late twilight: and though now the bat
Wheels silent by, and not a swallow twitters,
Yet still the solitary humble-bee
Sings in the bean-flower! Henceforth I shall know	60
That nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure;
No plot so narrow, be but Nature there
No waste so vacant, but may well employ
Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart
Awake to Love and Beauty! and sometimes
'Tis well to be bereft of promised good,
That we may lift the soul, and contemplate
With lively joy the joys we cannot share.
My gentle-hearted Charles! when the last rook
Beat its straight path along the dusky air
Homewards, I blessed it! deeming its black wing	70
(Now a dim speck, now vanishing in light)
Had cross'd the mighty Orb's dilated glory
While thou stood'st gazing; or, when all was still,
Flew creaking o'er thy head, and had a charm
For thee, my gentle-hearted Charles, to whom
No sound is dissonant which tells of Life.