Whatever a moon has always meant

Today a poet with a sublime creative disregard for rules: e e cummings. His poetry often looks whimsical or childish for its breaking of rules, but it's often, as here, terribly beautiful and full of wonder. Enjoy this bit of unpunctuated ecstasy. 

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you 

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart) 

Spelling trouble

In year 2, spelling tests were not uncommon. One day, introducing one of these tests, and doubtless to take the sting from it, my teacher said it was ok if we spelt the words wrong. Accordingly, I deliberately misspelled every word on the test with, as I remember, some glee. Later in the day, we were in the library having a story read to us when I was summoned back to our classroom for an interview with the teacher. Disappointed and terrified, I made my way back alone through the deserted school grounds. My teacher asked with concern why I had spelled wrongly words he knew I could spell correctly. Through my sobs I answered ‘You said we could!’  

At the time I was mostly grief-stricken that I had misunderstood, and that I had missed the end of the story. Looking back, I’m intrigued by this episode and what it was that motivated me to misspell. (And I wonder what my teacher made of it.) During the test I think I enjoyed the creative act of coming up with novel ways to spell known words; experimenting with - had I known it - morphology. Perhaps some part of me enjoyed the act of impersonating a child who knew less than I did, inhabiting for a time the world and intelligence of an other.  More than this, I think I enjoyed the freedom of what I (mistakenly) thought was a momentary reprieve from the whole scholastic morality, from the knife-edge between accuracy and failure that so dominated our days and separated us into impenetrable categories of ‘good’ students and bad ones. For once, it seemed, we were offered the freedom of artists and the communion of brothers. Who could resist such grace? Not I, though I paid for my error with bitter tears. And I never found out how the story ended. 

On earth as it is in heaven

James Wood had an interesting piece in last week’s New Yorker about Rick Santorum’s objection to environmental conservation. Radical environmentalists, Santorum has claimed, act as though man were here to serve the earth instead of ‘husbanding its resources’. Wood’s angle is that the candidate sounds more like a fiery eighteenth-century puritan than the Catholic he is, and he dusts off a stack of influential protestant voices as the tradition from which Santorum’s ideas come: Bunyan, Hooper, Jonathan Edwards, even Herman Melville. Unlike biblical Judaism, rooted in the earth, protestantism has cultivated detachment from the earth and the hope of heaven as a reason not to get too settled here. I’m familiar with the contemptus mundi as a branch of the protestant psyche; like Wood, I grew up in a low church that aimed high. And I am sympathetic to the aim. I want to go to heaven too.

But I think Wood via Santorum exposes a gap in protestant thinking about how to be in and of the earth. To many, creation has to do only with a fight about when and how the universe began, not with what the earth is and how to live in it. Language about the sacredness of the earth seems to border paganism in a confusing way, and to present just that temptation that world-renouncers are trying to avoid. A view of the earth as foredoomed has led to a lot of apathy about injustice and destruction, and a failure to reckon with how embodied our religion is, how much of the creator is more than metaphorically in the creation. Elisions of creation like Santorum's don't reflect the reality of who, what and where we are, nor how long we are here. And I think we protestants do share this particular border with the pagans. If their grass is greener, it’s only because we haven’t watered ours.

Within the hollow crown

‘Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown,’ Shakespeare has Henry IV say. It’s one of many meditations on the frailty of human authority. Another comes earlier, from the king Henry dethroned: Richard II. These well-known lines are a rare moment of vulnerability for a king convinced of his divine right to rule, but they ring more true than his more brave state. For some reason they came to mind today. 

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war;
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd;
All murder'd: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence: throw away respect,
Tradition, form and ceremonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while:
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king? 

And so the light runs laughing

I’m not a big TS Eliot fan, so I was glad to find this Ash Wednesday poem by Louis Untermeyer, 1961's poet laureate, but better known to Americans as an anthologist. As Lent begins, I love the joy in this pair of sonnets, light escaping through holes in Larkin’s “vast, moth-eaten musical brocade.”

I (Vienna)

Shut out the light or let it filter through
These frowning aisles as penitentially
As though it walked in sackcloth. Let it be
Laid at the feet of all that ever grew
Twisted and false, like this rococo shrine
Where cupids smirk from candy clouds and where
The Lord, with polished nails and perfumed hair,
Performs a parody of the divine.

The candles hiss; the organ-pedals storm;
Writhing and dark, the columns leave the earth
To find a lonelier and darker height.
The church grows dingy while the human swarm
Struggles against the impenitent body’s mirth.
Ashes to ashes. . . . Go. . . . Shut out the light.

II (Hinterbrühl)

And so the light runs laughing from the town,
Pulling the sun with him along the roads
That shed their muddy rivers as he goads
Each blade of grass the ice had flattened down.
At every empty bush he stops to fling
Handfuls of birds with green and yellow throats;
While even the hens, uncertain of their notes,
Stir rusty vowels in attempts to sing.

He daubs the chestnut-tips with sudden reds
And throws an olive blush on naked hills
That hoped, somehow, to keep themselves in white.
Who calls for sackcloth now? He leaps and spreads
A carnival of color, gladly spills
His blood: the resurrection—and the light.