Emmonsail's Heath in Winter

          

                                                                        Denise Coble

Emmonsail's Heath in Winter

I love to see the old heath's withered brake
Mingle its crimpled leaves with furze and ling,
While the old heron from the lonely lake
Starts slow and flaps its melancholy wing,
An oddling crow in idle motion swing
On the half-rotten ash-tree's topmost twig,
Beside whose trunk the gypsy makes his bed.
Up flies the bouncing woodcock from the brig
Where a black quagmire quakes beneath the tread;
The fieldfares chatter in the whistling thorn
And for the haw round fields and closen rove,
And coy bumbarrels, twenty in a drove,
Flit down the hedgerows in the frozen plain
And hang on little twigs and start again.

John Clare 

 Clare is such a treat for word-lovers. He works beyond mere description and sense to give us something I can only think to call texture. Every word in this poem jumps and jostles against the others, is alive with meaning and sound - very like birds on a branch. He makes it look easy, but my gosh, it is not. He is nothing short of a master. Very few people can write an excellent poem, even fewer can write a poem that flies off the page. 

 

Heath: a broad area of level or rolling treeless country

Brake: rough or marshy land overgrown usually with one kind of plant

Furze: gorse, a bushy plant

Ling: heather

Brig: bridge

Quagmire: marsh

Haw = hawthorn or fruit of the hawthorn

Closen rove: an enclosed field?

Bumbarrel: a longtailed tit

Drove: a flock

 

 

Shadows

Linda Bennett

Shadows

And if tonight my soul may find her peace
in sleep, and sink in good oblivion,
and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower
then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.

And if, as weeks go round, in the dark of the moon
my spirit darkens and goes out, and soft strange gloom
pervades my movements and my thoughts and words
then I shall know that I am walking still
with God, we are close together now the moon’s in shadow.

And if, as autumn deepens and darkens
I feel the pain of falling leaves, and stems that break in storms
and trouble and dissolution and distress
and then the softness of deep shadows folding,
folding around my soul and spirit, around my lips
so sweet, like a swoon, or more like the drowse of a low, sad song
singing darker than the nightingale, on, on to the solstice
and the silence of short days, the silence of the year, the shadow,
then I shall know that my life is moving still
with the dark earth, and drenched
with the deep oblivion of earth’s lapse and renewal.

And if, in the changing phases of man’s life
I fall in sickness and in misery
my wrists seem broken and my heart seems dead
and strength is gone, and my life
is only the leavings of a life:

and still, among it all, snatches of lovely oblivion, and snatches of renewal
odd, wintry flowers upon the withered stem, yet new, strange flowers
such as my life has not brought forth before, new blossoms of me

then I must know that still
I am in the hands of the unknown God,
he is breaking me down to his own oblivion
to send me forth on a new morning, a new man.

 

D.H. Lawrence

 

 "...then I shall know that I am walking still/ with God we are close together now.."

There are so many distractions and stresses, there always have been - coming in from in so many directions. These days I look for the constants, the things that don't change. I find so much comfort there. Like the speaker in this poem, I go to sleep at night committing my existence into the hands of the God I trust with everything. The God who remains Himself no matter what dark cloud I find myself under, no matter what I don't know and can't control. The God who knows me fully and loves me entirely and who is able (and willing) to re-create me, transform me, lift me up beyond cloud or circumstance. The God with whom all good things are possible. "

"New blossoms of me." for instance, 

"strange flowers such as my life has not brought forth before."

 

 

On Parting

Andrew Wyeth

On Parting



It's over you know, the summer's over.
Clouds of dust as the last vehicle went out.


A jeep hauling a small boat on a trailer
Through the dust of the grey country road.


Patterns of tires, patterns of cast leaves
Printed in ashen dust


The next day clouds of snow, the crumbled sky
Falling and settling on the trees
Of the bare abandoned forest.


They have all returned to the city, while I remain
Sorting my summer notebooks:


Drawings of tender plants begun in the spring
Pressings of leaves


Which are prints of tough early autumn, before
The rot comes that thickens
The floor of the woods.


And what lies beneath the snow, the needle duff?
Cities of pebbles and crushed shells,


Kingdoms of beetles, republics of worms,
Forest of hyphae, tangled mycelium,


Roots of trees coming upon each other
In the dark.



Anne Zumigalski




"It's over, you know." Zumigalski is talking about summer - but these days I can't help but feel this poem's broader sense. Life has changed in such a way these last months that seems to mark a definitive "before" and "after", a change of season. What new weather will come, I don't know. I sit here, like the speaker in the poem, "sorting my summer notebooks", thinking over what I have heard and seen and experienced, wondering what it means, and how it will carry me through what is to come.


 

Reluctance

Andrew Wyeth

Reluctance

Out through the fields and the woods

   And over the walls I have wended;

I have climbed the hills of view

   And looked at the world, and descended;

I have come by the highway home,

   And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,

   Save those that the oak is keeping

To ravel them one by one

   And let them go scraping and creeping

Out over the crusted snow,

   When others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,

   No longer blown hither and thither;

The last lone aster is gone;

   The flowers of the witch hazel wither;

The heart is still aching to seek,

   But the feet question ‘Whither?’

Ah, when to the heart of man

   Was it ever less than a treason

To go with the drift of things,

   To yield with a grace to reason,

And bow and accept the end

   Of a love or a season?

Robert Frost

A dear family member of mine has recently died. With his passing, it feels as if a season of my life has ended. As if the time of plenty, of warmth is over; and I look around, surprised at the change, even though I expected it. Frost speaks so gracefully, “ I have climbed the hills of view/ And looked at the world, and descended;/I have come by the highway home,/And lo, it is ended.”. That‘s how I feel. And like he says, I don’t want to “bow and accept the end”, not so quickly or easily – no. I want to walk and look while thinking and remembering, I want to soak up all the benefits, all the riches of knowing and loving S, I want to stay here awhile and be still.

Falling Leaves and Early Snow

David Grossmann

Falling Leaves and Early Snow



 In the years to come they will say,
“They fell like the leaves
In the autumn of nineteen thirty-nine.”
November has come to the forest,
To the meadows where we picked the cyclamen.
The year fades with the white frost
On the brown sedge in the hazy meadows,
Where the deer tracks were black in the morning.
Ice forms in the shadows;
Disheveled maples hang over the water;
Deep gold sunlight glistens on the shrunken stream.
Somnolent trout move through pillars of brown and gold.
The yellow maple leaves eddy above them,
The glittering leaves of the cottonwood,
The olive, velvety alder leaves,
The scarlet dogwood leaves,
Most poignant of all.


In the afternoon thin blades of cloud
Move over the mountains;
The storm clouds follow them;
Fine rain falls without wind.
The forest is filled with wet resonant silence.
When the rain pauses the clouds
Cling to the cliffs and the waterfalls.
In the evening the wind changes;
Snow falls in the sunset.
We stand in the snowy twilight
And watch the moon rise in a breach of cloud.
Between the black pines lie narrow bands of moonlight,
Glimmering with floating snow.
An owl cries in the sifting darkness.
The moon has a sheen like a glacier.



Kenneth Rexroth
from The Collected Shorter Poems



"The year fades with the white frost."
"Deep gold sunlight glistens on the shrunken stream."
"Thin blades of cloud."
"We stand in the snowy twilight."

And then!
"An owl cries in the sifting darkness."


An owl cries in the sifting darkness? This is an accuracy of speech so exquisite I want to rave, make an idiot of myself, rant about poetry as an unparalleled instrument of clarity.
If snow is falling, it's like icing sugar being sifted. And it appears as if the darkness is being sifted. That's more than poetry, it's true. And what is falling? The snow or the darkness?

I love this poem. (I try not to say stupid things like that, but I'm stupid!) Every line is an image I know, that I recall from somewhere - an actual experience, a movie scene, a painting? Is there a collective soul? Is there a place where all beautiful memories and images converge? Where you and I remember the same moment, even though we have never met, and live half a world away? Is it possible? I need to think about this.