Sipping Beauty: "Because life is short and you too are thirsty."
Cultivating a love of the beautiful in small ways and brief moments, however and whenever possible
“I can’t give up wishing,” said Philip, impatiently. “It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them. How can we ever be satisfied without them until our feelings are deadened?
“…I don’t think any of the strongest effects our natures are susceptible of can ever be explained. We can neither detect the process by which they are arrived at, nor the mode in which they act on us. … I think there are stores laid up in our human nature that our understandings can make no complete inventory of. Certain strains of music affect me so strangely—I can never hear them without their changing my whole attitude of mind for a time, and if the effect would last, I might be capable of heroisms.”
The Mill on the Floss
I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove
warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your
hand
because life is short and you too are thirsty.
- Adrienne Rich
I read poetry much differently now than I did when I began. I used to think that poetry was all about self-expression, and that the poet a kind of priestly oracle, furnishing us low-brow common folk with visions of Higher Things known only to the chosen ones.
I have moved away from that. I don't see the poet as a priestly visionary but as a synthesizer, a person gifted with words as another is gifted in music or drawing or dance, and whose poems name what we experience and help us see reality more clearly, help us recognize the connections between things. I try to read a poem apart from the poet, as a thing unto itself, without dependence on the one who made it - or without much dependence. You can always trace at least a shadow of the parent in the child, if only in the features. And yet, I have come to believe that just as children are born their own persons, poems are born, too, with a self beyond the poet.1 If I read a poem only in the poet's shadow, always looking for references to the author's personal life, if I read it mainly through a biographical lens, I cut out the tongue of the poem. It can no longer speak for itself. It becomes only a hollow thing to amplify the poet.
Art always transcends the artist. Even the particular details of a poem drawn from the artist’s personal experience are translated by Art from the realm of the Actual and Individual to the Realm Poetical and Universal. Once that happens, those particulars belong to everyone who experiences the work and recognizes something of the universal human experience in those details.2 It’s not that biographical details can never give us insight into a work of Art, but that it is only a keyhole's worth of insight. The language of symbol, the literary allusions, the conventions and tradition which the poem is rooted in are much stronger beams of light illuminating the poem.
I like “Dedications” by Adrienne Rich, partly because the only mention of herself is the “I know” at the beginning of each verbal sketch and that feels rare for a modern poem. She is reaching out through the poem to the reader, communicating a vision and validation of them to them. I like it because she gives several very specific examples of folks hungry for an experience with Art, and through Art she invites every reader into these examples. Whether we have actually lived experiences like what she writes about doesn't matter. They are experienced by us through the poem. Her sketches hold up a mirror, but it isn't just my face I see looking back. It's Everyman's.
When I first met the poem, the lines about the mother holding a crying child, reading by the stove as she waits for the little one's milk to warm, were exactly what I was living. Reading them was like seeing my private life on public display; it was jolting and uncomfortable, but also comforting. She put words to something that I was struggling with without realizing it, something I was trying to ignore or keep quiet, a part of me that was surviving on crumbs and sips. Those lines formed a vivid image of the real hunger of the inner life, and the small, almost desperate ways we find nourish it, sometimes in spite of ourselves.
But the rest of the poem is like that, too. I can see that more clearly now that I am out of the little children phase of parenting. (Now I'm reading snatches of Homer while I make these boys-who-are-nearly-men quesadillas and grilled cheeses; I guess it's not much different.) She paints clear, poignant portraits of people who know there is more, who are hungry for more, who make time for more when it isn’t easy or convenient but find it necessary anyway. She reminds us all we that aren't alone in our hunger.
I think it’s worth remembering that nourishing our love and appreciation for beauty is not a bonus to life; these are the things we live for. They are the weighty realities we gravitate to and orbit around. We were made to love what these beautiful things point us toward. It is right that we make time for them.
C.S. Lewis, so articulate and so quotable, has a lovely section from the last chapter of his book, The Problem of Pain, that speaks to why we find ourselves drawn to certain beauties. I think he helps clarify why it matters that we continue reading beside the pot of milk, or when our eyes start to fail us. It is because we have a note to sound in the chorus of Heaven, and our rehersal begins now:
There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else. You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw—but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of — something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat’s side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from child- hood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it—tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest—if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself—you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say ‘Here at last is the thing I was made for.’ We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.
This signature on each soul may be a product of heredity and environment, but that only means that heredity and environment are among the instruments whereby God creates a soul. I am considering not how, but why, He makes each soul unique. If He had no use for all these differences, I do not see why He should have created more souls than one. Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you. I am not, of course, suggesting that these immortal longings which we have from the Creator because we are men, should be confused with the gifts of the Holy Spirit to those who are in Christ. We must not fancy we are holy because we are human. The mould in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the Divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you— you, the individual reader, John Stubbs or Janet Smith. Blessed and fortunate creature, your eyes shall behold Him and not another’s. All that you are, sins apart, is destined, if you will let God have His good way, to utter satisfaction… Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it—made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.
“The thing you long for summons you away from yourself,” Lewis writes. Notice that each person in Ms Rich's poem is unaware that they belong to a society of people looking outward, even as they remain in their individual situations. They are seperate and unknown to each other in the context of the poem, but we see them connected by the same action: “reading this poem.” In reading her words, we join them. We prove that we too are among those who are thirsty.
XIII (Dedications)
- from An Atlas of the Difficult World
by Adrienne Rich
I know you are reading this poem
late, before leaving your office
of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window
in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet
long after rush-hour.
I know you are reading this poem
standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean
on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven
across the plains’ enormous spaces around you.
I know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
and the open valise speaks of flight
but you cannot leave yet.
I know you are reading this poem
as the underground train loses momentum and before running up the stairs
toward a new kind of love
your life has never allowed.
I know you are reading this poem by the light
of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide
while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.
I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room
of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.
I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light
in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,
count themselves out, at too early an age. I know
you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick
lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on
because even the alphabet is precious.
I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove
warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your hand
because life is short and you too are thirsty.
I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language
guessing at some words while others keep you reading
and I want to know which words they are.
I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn
between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.
“The unity of work of art, the basis of structural analysis, has not been produced solely by the unconditioned will of the artist, for the artist is only its efficient cause: it has form, and consequently a formal cause. The fact that revision is possible, that the poet makes changes not because he likes them better but because they are better, means that poems, like poets, are born and not made. The poet's task is to deliver the poem in as uninjured a state as possible and if the poem is alive, it is equally anxious to be rid of him, and screams to be cut loose from his private memories and associations, his desire for self-expression, and all the other navel-strings and feeding tubes of his ego.” Northrop Frye
And
"The process of poetic composition is a work of civilizing. A barbaric horde of emotions which cannot rule themselves are transformed into a just, loving, and self-ruling polis. Unless, however, there is already present in the initial horde a nucleus of self-rule, an idea, a phrase, the poet has no point from which to start. The degree of justice and self-rule possible in a poem is very much higher than in any historical political society. Every good poem is very nearly a Utopia.
"In the earlier stages of composition, the poet has to act like a Greek tyrant; the decision to write this phrase rather than that must be largely his, for the demand of the poem are as yet inarticulate or contradictory. As composition proceeds, the poem begins to take over the job of ruling itself; the transeunt rule of the poet gets weaker and weaker until, in the final stages, he is like the elected representative of a democracy whose duty it is to listen to and execute the demands of the poem, which now knows exactly what it wishes to be. On completion, the poem rules itself immanently, and the poet is dismissed into private life."
W.H. Auden, Squares and Oblongs
The allusiveness of literature is part of its symbolic quality, its capacity to absorb everything from natural or human life into its own imaginative body. Another well-known poem, Wordsworth's I wandered lonely as a cloud, tells how Wordsworth sees a feld of daffodils, and then finds later that:
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
The flowers become poetic flowers as soon as they're identified with a human mind. Here we have an image from the natural world, a field of daffodils: it's enclosed inside the human mind, which, puts it into the world of the imagination, and the sense of human vision and emotion radiating from the daffodils, so to speak, is what gives them their poetic magic. The human mind is Wordsworth's individual mind at first, but as soon as he writes a poem it becomes our minds too. There is no self-expression in Wordsworth's poem, because once the poem is there the individual Wordsworth has disappeared. The general principle involved is that there is really no such thing as self-expression in literature.
“In other words, it isn't just the historical figure who gets taken over by literature: the poet gets taken over too. As we said in our first talk, the poet as person is no wiser or better a man than anyone else. He's a man with a special craft of putting words together, but he may have no claim on our attention beyond that… We relate the poems and plays and novels we read and see, not to the men who wrote them, nor even directly to ourselves; we relate them to each other. Literature is a world that we try to build up and enter at the same time.”
Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination