During the past couple of months, I have found that at random times of the day, a line of poetry will drop into my head as though out of nowhere.
Like these words from Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day”:
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass. How to kneel down in the grass.
Or these opening lines from the poem “Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye:
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things
These are words from poets and poems I’ve read and loved over the years but haven’t necessarily spent time with recently. So I’ve been caught a bit by surprise when, while standing on the platform waiting for the train or sitting briefly with a cup of coffee, the words glide wide and slow like a breaststroke across the pool of my already full mind.
But when I’ve stopped to think about it I realise how each line somehow is speaking to something I’ve either experienced recently or been mulling over. And I’m reminded about the strange way our subconscious works, pulling things from the storehouse of our memory to help us make sense of present moments.
To me, poetry is like visual art in how it can sometimes offer up a starting point to express parts of our lives and our experiences that are sometimes just too hard to explain otherwise. Returning to the poets on my bookshelf has also got me thinking again about how poetry can be a quiet but powerful way to hold the myriad feelings that come and go as we try to hold the oftentimes dissonant realities of what is happening in our individual and collective lives. A poem can speak to grief and to sorrow as much as it can speak to hope and to gratitude.
In the 1940s, the Welsh artist Ceri Richards, who once represented Britain at the Venice Biennale, began making works influenced by the poet Dylan Thomas. Both were born in Swansea and Richards felt a deep affinity for Thomas’s themes of the cycles of life and death and humanity’s relationship with the rest of the natural world.
A few years after Thomas died, Richards created the oil painting, “Do not go gentle into that good night”, one of a series of images inspired by Thomas’s famous poem of the same name. In Richards’ painting, a naked man is tumbling over himself at the bottom of the canvas. It looks like he has been unwillingly tossed out of the large white shroud torn off of him by flying owls, one of which grips the edges of the cloth in its mouth.
In the poem, Thomas urges the reader to fight against the inevitability of death, listing in each stanza a reason why the “wise men”, the “good men”, the “grave men” and the “wild men” have all found good reason to want to keep death at bay, all some variation of still imagining there is more to do and to be. I imagine these might be thoughts most people would have, the desire to still experience more of life. Owls in many different cultures are symbolic of wisdom and knowledge but in Celtic mythology they are also symbols of death and transition.
It is in the first line of the final stanza that Thomas brings the poem intimately home to himself and to the reader by turning the general urging into a plea to his father.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Some critics have suggested that here Thomas is also acknowledging the loneliness that befalls the one fighting with death. And Richards’ painting of the solitary figure falling gives something of a similar feel. That no matter the circumstance, there is a solitude to death that cannot be escaped. To read the poem while gazing at Richards’ depiction of the fierce casting out of the figure from the shroud, we also know that to rage against death is futile. We are reminded of the impermanence of our lives. Death comes for all of us without exception, and the timing is largely beyond our control. Richards and Thomas only ever met once but they died on the same day, November 9, 18 years apart.
I was taken by the 1859 painting “Entrance to Cadzow Forest, near Glasgow” by the 19th-century English self-taught painter Samuel Bough. It shows two ancient trees growing side by side with thick aged trunks and large boughs full of flourishing leaves that overhang a pathway and a field as a canopy of shelter. Bright sunlight filters through the branches, casting shadows on the grass to the side of the little cottage and on the path. Then the sunlight spills out in radiance further down the trail.
I have spent many afternoons and early evenings this summer walking through the woods and Bough’s painting reminds me of those walks and how there is something ethereal and awe-inspiring about the bright light of summer caught coming through a canvas of leaves and reflecting off them.
The painting has made me think again of “When I am Among the Trees” (from the collection Thirst, published by Bloodaxe Books/Beacon Press), another poem by Oliver that has been replaying in my head lately. Oliver had such a way of reminding readers that there is so much wellness and life to be found in seeking and maintaining our connection to the rest of the natural world:
When I am among the trees . . .
they give off such hints of gladness,
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
On the left of Bough’s canvas, we can make out two figures and a dog standing outside the cottage drinking in the scene and, we can imagine, acknowledging “such hints of gladness”. And I think time in the forest has a way of also helping to settle and calm us and shift our perspectives to remember what is possible despite the current conditions of our lives and of the larger world.
We are more likely to be reminded of the richness and abundance and sustenance of life that carries on in the midst of everything else seemingly in and out of our control. Bough’s painting seems like one small visual affirmation of this, alongside the stirring words of Oliver’s larger body of poetry.
Between 1615 and 1656, the Dutch still-life painter Floris van Schooten made the somewhat comic work, “A kitchen still life with pots and pans on a stone ledge and animated figures in the background”. Just as the lengthy title informs us, in the foreground of the painting is a still life of copper and cast iron pots and pans on a wooden table, and in the background, almost as though looking through an opening in a wall we see a scene of two women in the kitchen, one of whom is running frantically towards the other, who is tending a pot on the open fire. It looks like she is about to scold her. And then a third woman is seen through a doorway, sitting alone and perhaps mending something.
As viewers we can’t ignore the drama of the daily lives of these women played out in the background but none seems aware or concerned about the viewer. They are each consumed with whatever it is they are doing. It is the pots and pans placed directly before us that seem to want to get our attention, and that offer us their own attention.
I was drawn towards this still life because of another poem that has been in my head as of late. It is called “Everything is Waiting for You” (from the collection of the same name published by Many Rivers Press) by the contemporary Anglo-Irish poet David Whyte. It begins with the lines:
Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings . . .
The poet then goes to beautifully suggest how the most commonplace items in our household, “the soap dish”, “the window latch”, “the stairs”, even “the kettle” and “the cooking pots”, are somehow privy to the details of our lives and call us away from our despairing.
I could imagine this in van Schooten’s painting, the way the work foregrounds ordinary pots and pans that shine and seemingly beckon, calling us away for a moment from how we perceive and enact the drama and frustrations of our lives, often tinged with some sense of not doing enough or even being enough. In the last stanza of Whyte’s poem there are the closing lines,
. . . the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.
Could we sit with van Schooten’s still life long enough to consider the bronze and golden-coloured glowing invitation from his pots and pans to shift our attention for a moment and recognise that, sometimes, everything is waiting for us to simply find a peace with our own selves?
Email Enuma at [email protected]
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