Thursday

28 December 2017

— having just made the rounds of watering all the windowsill plants.

Good Morning All, 

When I opened up my e-mail box early Christmas morn, still hours before Johs and Holly were up, there was an extraordinary gift for me … for me as a person, but especially for me as a teacher.

It was from a former student and Labyrinth poetry contest winner. She and I exchange e-mails on a fairly regular basis, often swapping poems, poems written by ourselves or poems from our favorite professional poets. She is one of my most insightful critics in that she has never found any of my poems to be anything short of miraculously perfect. I get favorably compared to Shakespeare and Edna Saint Vincent Millay, who is probably her favourite poet.

She sent me a Jane Kenyon poem she’d come across. She knows Kenyon is one of my favorite poets. She also knows that Kenyon had to struggle with and against her bipolarism all her life. Good old Jane could write poems that take readers to the stars, and then turn around the next day and write poems so sour you needed a lemon to sweeten them.

Here in its entirety (except for the pseudonym at the end) is the e-mail I opened Christmas Morning:

Hi Bheka,

Here is a poem I came across today from a book of Jane Kenyon's poems

The Pear
Jane Kenyon

There is a moment in middle age
when you grow bored, angered
by your middling mind, afraid.

That day the sun
burns hot and bright,
making you more desolate.

It happens subtly, as when a pear
spoils from the inside out,
and you may not be aware
until things have gone too far.

Merry Christmas, Bheka.

Love always,

Wynola

I suspect that you and I could agree The Pear is not one of Jane’s take-you-to-the-stars poems. In fact, I’d be hard pressed to find a more morose and sour poem in her ouevre. You might even say that on the surface, at least, it’s an ugly, mean-spirited little ditty.

But I like it a lot! It takes a hard and honest look at the sort of mood we can all lapse into, at least occasionally, and makes no attempt whatsoever to sugarcoat anything. On the contrary, it builds the mood into the metaphor of that sadly ruined pair.

The truth is, I find it to be a beautifully realized poem.

And I was so touched by my former student’s ability to see past the poem’s surface ugliness to the beauty underneath. Certainly central to all my teaching over all those years was to do my best to help students learn to penetrate the surface ugliness to the beauty beneath.

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron

P.S. I commend you to Pope’s poem in today’s Day Book, but ask you to actually read it aloud so that you can best hear what he is illustrating.

P.P.S. One Holly snap and one Johs snap (Venice).