Happy Darwin Day

As Americans, February 12 tends to resonate for us as Abraham Lincoln's birthday, even if he does end up rolled in with George Washington under the banner of "Presidents Day." But for the secular-minded and the science-minded, another great figure's birthday (in the same year) comes to mind: Charles Darwin. Some even think of the day as Darwin Day. What with Presidents Day and all, Lincoln's hardly using it anyway.

Darwin, of course, is a controversial figure, because evolution is still a contentious issue, since it challenges a religious literalist's belief system. The theory of evolution by natural selection, however, is about as rock solid as any big-picture theory in science can be. And when I thought about this entry, I thought I might spend some time talking about that, or why the resistance is so strong, or about why Darwin is, warts and all, a great man to celebrate. But now we're getting to the end of the day and I still haven't done so, and I don't have the time, energy, or brain-power to do it justice.

All that said, whenever I think of Charles Darwin, I think of my friend Dorothy Sutton, a poet who wrote a collection of poems called Startling Art, which revolves largely around Darwin and the artist Matisse (I also think of her when I look at the Matisses we have framed around here!). I'd like to share with my readers one of her Darwin poems, and since I've found it on-line elsewhere, I trust she won't mind if I share it here (and I'll happily remove it if she or her publisher don't want it up!). For whatever reason, this one particularly struck me today. As it would happen, this is not one of the 2 1/2 poems of hers that I've written choral settings for:

BUZZARDS CIRCLE THE OLD CHURCHYARD

Edinburgh, 1826
Darwin and brother Erasmus
meet John James Audubon, there to enlist
subscribers for Birds of America.
 
Black wings of fear hover in the air:
the man in the street might come to embrace
the notion that human beings evolved
independent of Supernatural Source,
cracking the Church's One Foundation
to leave it in ruins. If people think
of themselves as animals, they'll act that way.
Civilization so long in building,
they whisper, reverting to savagery.
 
Audubon tosses his long black hair
back over his shoulder, explains, as he roughs
out the buzzard on the drawing board,
to the students here for medical school
the intricate steps of preserving a carcass
to capture on canvas each exact detail. 

--------------------------------------------------------

And, finally, I will let Darwin speak for himself, from the end of the first edition of "Origen of the Species":


It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank,
clothed with many plants of many kinds,
with birds singing on the bushes,
with various insects flitting about,
and with worms crawling through the damp earth,
and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms,
so different from each other,
and dependent on each other in so complex a manner,
have all been produced by laws acting around us.

There is grandeur in this view of life . . .
that whilst this planet has gone cycling on
according to the fixed law of gravity,
from so simple a beginning,
endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful
have been, and are being, evolved.

Harvest

Here I go, taking another prompt from Cafe Writing, this time option 2. I don't claim that this is particularly good stuff I'm writing, but it helped me get something out on paper. No-Prize to the first person who can identify the formal constraint I placed upon myself in this work of free verse. I could probably re-write without it and get a better poem, but if I hadn't done it in the first place I probably wouldn't have stumbled on most of the lines that I like, so there's some value there, I think.

The prompt was to write a poem about gathering together or scattering abroad, using for inspiration the following quotation by Edwin Way Teale:

"For man, autumn is a time of harvest, of gathering together. For nature, it is a time of sowing, of scattering abroad."

For a moment, think of the season beneath the rustling social fabric, to the bared,
     goose-pimpled flesh of the Earth;

Man: imagine him not in his own context, but in nature’s;

Autumn not as football games and world series and leaf-blowers and costumes and candy.

Is it possible for you to imagine what lies deeper?

A moment of your

Time, a moment of your imagination. Consider:

Of all the festivals of ancient humanity, buried in our genes and memes,

Harvest is deepest.

Of course, it is only as old, really, as agriculture, but

Gathering as it does something of an even older hunter-gatherer tradition

Together with the twining roots of civilization, it is as deep and rich as the best soil,

For Harvest is where Humanity and

Nature entwine mostly closely like sometimes-lovers. Or, anyway, where they did.

It was, 100 years ago, a third of the country who farmed; 200 years ago, 90%. Today the number

Is less than 3%.

A paltry few, and harvest festivals speak to us less as we speak to Nature hardly at all, estranged lovers.

Time was, we felt the season’s celebration in our pulses, in our bones, in our loins, and in Nature's.

Of what essential of the season could we be oblivious?

Sowing with our hands and feet, legs, arms, chests, our hearts and minds, and reaping the same.

Of what, today, are we even aware of this, when we see not our farmers, when we are not our farmers,
     when we know not our farmers,

Scattering them far and wide across the landscape? Seek them

Abroad, in the far country called the past, and in that other distant land, our future.

Green Farmhouse Chairs and Being Thirteen

I heard Billy Collins talking on the radio today about his view that poetry needs a certain amount of accessibility to draw the reader in and a certain amount of mystery or difficulty to keep us there and draw us deeper (I'm paraphrasing here). Just before April's National Poetry month started, I found myself totally taken in by a poem with these qualities, Donald Hall's poem "Green Farmhouse Chairs." It was a poem that took several reads for me to really appreciate, and I know that I still haven't gotten it entirely. Still, it's a beautiful poem. The poem's speaker is in his 90s, and stylistically the poem mimics the wandering mind, making connections over a lifetime. At the same time, of course, it's carefully constructed and circles back in interesting ways. One of the parts that caught me up in the poem was this section:

Idolatrous of this white farmhouse
since I was ten, in my ninth decade
I daydream that it burns to the ground

3. so that nobody will empty it.
My children comfort me with their care,
bringing five grandchildren to visit,
but none will settle in the country.

There's a part of me that wishes I was one of those grandchildren, that I did want to settle there, in the country. I mean, I do want to settle in the country, but as much as I'm looking forward to us building our own house, there's a part of me that wishes I had some old family enclave to inherit--not just because it's cheaper but because of the sense of place, the fragments of family history in the house: Hall refers to a number of these explicitly, the tokens that have come down of family members over generations.

What it comes down to, I suppose, is that I'm nostalgic for something that I never had but of which I can understand the appeal. I have a similar reaction to Stephen Kellogg's song "Thirteen," in which he looks back on the innocence of being 13 years old and, in essence, a naive player. Meeting all these girls over the summer, these girls "French-kissing boys into men," these brief but intense relationships that are destined to be over even before the summer is.

That was never my experience in any way, shape, or form, but when I listen to the song, I find myself getting nostalgic for that experience.

Isn't that a funny thing, though, looking back wistfully on something you never had? As if there isn't enough wist for the life you did have...

Here, for your listening pleasure, is Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers live with "Thirteen":

Fifty springs are little room

Somewhere in the world, the cherry trees are blooming right now. I presume. Everywhere in America, it's National Poetry Month, and I had limited time last Monday when I set up blogs to post. I fell in love with this poem in high school when our men's chorus sang a choral setting of this poem:

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,

It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow.

It was in the men's chorus that I really came to love singing, I think, though my college experience deepened that appreciation in very important ways. When I have more time to blog, maybe I'll talk more about that.

Welcome to National Poetry Month 2011

April is National Poetry month. I bring you an excerpt from John Keats' Endymion that, I think, says something about poetry:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

 That's one of the reasons why poetry endures, though it's not just for its beauty, typically, that a poem endures. Sometimes that's enough, but often it's something deeper that poetry offers--though that, too, is a sort of beauty, is it not?

What do you think of poetry? What are some poems that you find to be "a joy for ever"?