Woods

 

 

 

Gina Signore

Woods

 

I part the out thrusting branches
and come in beneath
the blessed and the blessing trees.
Though I am silent
there is singing around me.
Though I am dark
there is vision around me.
Though I am heavy
there is flight around me. 

 

Wendell Berry 

Silence, darkness, heaviness.

Singing, vision, flight. 

There is an exchange here that is extraordinary.

 

How much does nature influence our being?

The movement and sound and light - these change us.

I don't know how, but they do.

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.

Mont Blanc

Oscar Droege

Mont Blanc



I

The everlasting universe of things

Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,

Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—

Now lending splendour, where from secret springs

The source of human thought its tribute brings

Of waters—with a sound but half its own,

Such as a feeble brook will oft assume,

In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,

Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,

Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river

Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.



II

Thus thou, Ravine of Arve—dark, deep Ravine—

Thou many-colour'd, many-voiced vale,

Over whose pines, and crags, and caverns sail

Fast cloud-shadows and sunbeams: awful scene,

Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down

From the ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne,

Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame

Of lightning through the tempest;—thou dost lie,

Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging,

Children of elder time, in whose devotion

The chainless winds still come and ever came

To drink their odours, and their mighty swinging

To hear—an old and solemn harmony;

Thine earthly rainbows stretch'd across the sweep

Of the aethereal waterfall, whose veil

Robes some unsculptur'd image; the strange sleep

Which when the voices of the desert fail

Wraps all in its own deep eternity;

Thy caverns echoing to the Arve's commotion,

A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame;

Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion,

Thou art the path of that unresting sound—

Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee

I seem as in a trance sublime and strange

To muse on my own separate fantasy,

My own, my human mind, which passively

Now renders and receives fast influencings,

Holding an unremitting interchange

With the clear universe of things around;

One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings

Now float above thy darkness, and now rest

Where that or thou art no unbidden guest,

In the still cave of the witch Poesy,

Seeking among the shadows that pass by

Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee,

Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast

From which they fled recalls them, thou art there!



III

Some say that gleams of a remoter world

Visit the soul in sleep, that death is slumber,

And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber

Of those who wake and live.—I look on high;

Has some unknown omnipotence unfurl'd

The veil of life and death? or do I lie

In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep

Spread far around and inaccessibly

Its circles? For the very spirit fails,

Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep

That vanishes among the viewless gales!

Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,

Mont Blanc appears—still, snowy, and serene;

Its subject mountains their unearthly forms

Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between

Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,

Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread

And wind among the accumulated steeps;

A desert peopled by the storms alone,

Save when the eagle brings some hunter's bone,

And the wolf tracks her there—how hideously

Its shapes are heap'd around! rude, bare, and high,

Ghastly, and scarr'd, and riven.—Is this the scene

Where the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young

Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea

Of fire envelop once this silent snow?

None can reply—all seems eternal now.

The wilderness has a mysterious tongue

Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,

So solemn, so serene, that man may be,

But for such faith, with Nature reconcil'd;

Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal

Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood

By all, but which the wise, and great, and good

Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.



IV

The fields, the lakes, the forests, and the streams,

Ocean, and all the living things that dwell

Within the daedal earth; lightning, and rain,

Earthquake, and fiery flood, and hurricane,

The torpor of the year when feeble dreams

Visit the hidden buds, or dreamless sleep

Holds every future leaf and flower; the bound

With which from that detested trance they leap;

The works and ways of man, their death and birth,

And that of him and all that his may be;

All things that move and breathe with toil and sound

Are born and die; revolve, subside, and swell.

Power dwells apart in its tranquillity,

Remote, serene, and inaccessible:

And this, the naked countenance of earth,

On which I gaze, even these primeval mountains

Teach the adverting mind. The glaciers creep

Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains,

Slow rolling on; there, many a precipice

Frost and the Sun in scorn of mortal power

Have pil'd: dome, pyramid, and pinnacle,

A city of death, distinct with many a tower

And wall impregnable of beaming ice.

Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin

Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky

Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing

Its destin'd path, or in the mangled soil

Branchless and shatter'd stand; the rocks, drawn down

From yon remotest waste, have overthrown

The limits of the dead and living world,

Never to be reclaim'd. The dwelling-place

Of insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil;

Their food and their retreat for ever gone,

So much of life and joy is lost. The race

Of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling

Vanish, like smoke before the tempest's stream,

And their place is not known. Below, vast caves

Shine in the rushing torrents' restless gleam,

Which from those secret chasms in tumult welling

Meet in the vale, and one majestic River,

The breath and blood of distant lands, for ever

Rolls its loud waters to the ocean-waves,

Breathes its swift vapours to the circling air.



V

Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:—the power is there,

The still and solemn power of many sights,

And many sounds, and much of life and death.

In the calm darkness of the moonless nights,

In the lone glare of day, the snows descend

Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there,

Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun,

Or the star-beams dart through them. Winds contend

Silently there, and heap the snow with breath

Rapid and strong, but silently! Its home

The voiceless lightning in these solitudes

Keeps innocently, and like vapour broods

Over the snow. The secret Strength of things

Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome

Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!

And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,

If to the human mind's imaginings

Silence and solitude were vacancy? 

Percy Bysshe Shelley

This is Shelley in full force. He is so awed by Mont Blanc’s presence that an avalanche of thoughts tumbles through his mind. As I read this poem I feel as if I could be standing beside him, observing how he is thunderstruck by the immensity of what he sees, and what he knows is there but cannot see – and hear him ask out loud, “What are you?”, “What are you saying to me?”, “What does all this mean?” He knows that the mountain communicates something. “...this, the naked countenance of earth,/ On which I gaze, even these primeval mountains/ Teach the adverting mind.” Somehow, he feels that the truth - an answer, is within the mountain. “The secret Strength of things/ Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome/ Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!” 

 

I know that awe, that overpowering sense of the immensity of time and the universe hits forcibly when I stand before a mountain. I am flooded with unspoken questions and emotions. What a task Shelley set himself to, to put his thoughts into words!

 "Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal/Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood/By all, but which the wise, and great, and good/ Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel."

In November

"Goldfinch", Robert Bateman

In November

With loitering step and quiet eye,

Beneath the low November sky,

I wandered in the woods, and found

A clearing, where the broken ground

Was scattered with black stumps and briers,

And the old wreck of forest fires.

 It was a bleak and sandy spot,

And, all about, the vacant plot

Was peopled and inhabited

By scores of mulleins long since dead.

A silent and forsaken brood

n that mute opening of the wood,

So shrivelled and so thin they were,

So gray, so haggard, and austere,

Not plants at all they seemed to me,

But rather some spare company

Of hermit folk, who long ago,

Wandering in bodies to and fro,

Had chanced upon this lonely way,

And rested thus, till death one day

Surprised them at their compline prayer,

And left them standing lifeless there.

There was no sound about the wood

Save the wind's secret stir. I stood

Among the mullein-stalks as still

As if myself had grown to be

One of their sombre company,

A body without wish or will.

And as I stood, quite suddenly,

Down from a furrow in the sky

The sun shone out a little space

Across that silent sober place,

Over the sand heaps and brown sod,

The mulleins and dead goldenrod,

And passed beyond the thickets gray,

And lit the fallen leaves that lay,

Level and deep within the wood,

A rustling yellow multitude.

And all around me the thin light,

So sere, so melancholy bright,

Fell like the half-reflected gleam

Or shadow of some former dream;

A moment's golden revery

Poured out on every plant and tree

A semblance of weird joy, or less,

A sort of spectral happiness;

And I, too, standing idly there,

With muffled hands in the chill air,

Felt the warm glow about my feet,

And shuddering betwixt cold and heat,

Drew my thoughts closer, like a cloak,

While something in my blood awoke,

A nameless and unnatural cheer,

A pleasure secret and austere.

Archibald Lampman

“Weird joy”, “Spectral happiness.” “A nameless and unnatural cheer.” Really now. Unnatural cheer! Explain that! “Melancholy bright.” I wish I could have met Mr. Lampman. I know I would have liked him. He speaks my language. Can you find the goldfinch in the painting?

Evening

Clifford Webb

Evening

From upland slopes I see the cows file by,

Lowing, great-chested, down the homeward trail,

By dusking fields and meadows shining pale

With moon-tipped dandelions. Flickering high,

A peevish night-hawk in the western sky

Beats up into the lucent solitudes,

Or drops with gliding wing. The stilly woods

Grow dark and deep, and gloom mysteriously.

Cool night winds creep, and whisper in mine ear.

The homely cricket gossips at my feet.

From far-off pools and wastes of reeds I hear,

Clear and soft-piped, the chanting frogs break sweet

In full Pandean chorus. One by one

Shine out the stars, and the great night comes on.

Archibald Lampman

“Meadows shining pale with moon-tipped dandelions.”

“The stilly woods grow dark and deep…”

 I have an image of a box being passed to me with this poem inside it, a gift I can enjoy over and over again. I put it in my pocket and carry it with me wherever I go, wherever life takes me. I don’t know Lampman, and he doesn’t know me, but we share this place, this moment - and it’s beautiful.