POETS Day! Thanks for God, Girls, and Growing Old

There’s no need for a traditional POETS Day this week. “Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday” doesn’t really resonate when so many have a long Thanksgiving weekend anyway. Maybe “Pig Out, Enjoy Tryptophan Slumber?”

I’m phoning this one in myself. I’ve got potatoes dauphinoise (Not potatoes Lyonnaise!) to make and since no one else eats or cares about string bean casserole but me, I have to make that too. “Have to,” is misleading. It is necessary that I cook because I told people that I’d be contributing the potatoes, but “have to” makes it sound like a chore. It isn’t. I like spending time in the kitchen.

It’s like this column. I don’t have to write it, but I like doing so. Two years ago, I started this weekly for OT with a smirk, a silly acronym I picked up from a Scottish detective novel, and a nagging suspicion that poetry was not as much an ivory tower property as it’s considered.

I didn’t know much about poetry then. I’ve been realizing the expansive bounds of my ignorance on the subject ever since. I knew some Graves, a bit of others here and there, and a little less about that stuff I read in school than I was taught in school. Now I’ve done nearly a hundred dives into poets’ lives and works and I’m comfortable discussing the subject, peppering conversation with things like “Actually, it’s ‘A little learning is a dangerous thing,’ from Pope, from An Essay on Criticism.”

I’m thankful I get to do this, thankful to those that edit, publish, read, and roll their eyes.

I mentioned that I’m phoning one in and part of that is that I didn’t pick a poet with a life and body of work to dive into. I Googled “Thanksgiving Poem.” Most of what I found fell into one of two camps. There were cutesy short bits of pillow embroidery-worthy rhyme giving general thanks or promoting stoicism. My son’s kindergarten teacher used to tell the kids, “You get what you get / And you don’t throw a fit.” That sort of thing. Then there were longer poems specifically about the Thanksgiving holiday, but my search seemed to call forth the Longfellows. Such writers are a big part of the poetic ecosystem but too earnest for me. I got ruined on the Moderns.

The Poetry Foundation has a page of Thanksgiving related poems. It’s The Poetry Foundation so if you’re hunting for a reflection on gratitude, expect to come across a few “colonialism bad” poems as you sift, but I skimmed through and, by far, most were pro-holiday. They just weren’t what I was looking for, so I went poking through my shelves.

If you want awe of the almighty, it’s hard to do better than Gerard Manley Hopkins.

God’s Grandeur
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

He doesn’t come right out and say thanks. He’s pretty despondent over the state of the world. The Industrial Revolution led man away from God, the way he sees it. But he’s not despairing. This is a “Take heed!” poem. “God is great and always with us,” he’s saying. “We’re in good hands.” So, he doesn’t say it directly, but that’s gratitude.

Richard Wilbur didn’t write any holiday poems that I know of, but he knew how to appreciate what he was given.

June Light
Richard Wilbur (1921-2017)

Your voice, with clear location of June days,
Called me – outside the window. You were there,
Light yet composed, as in the just soft stare
Of uncontested summer all things raise
Plainly their seeming into seamless air.

Then your love looked as simple and entire
As that picked pear you tossed me, and your face
As legible as pearskin’s fleck and trace,
Which promise always wine, by mottled fire
More fatal fleshed than ever human grace.

And your gay gift – Oh when I saw it fall
Into my hands, through all that naïve light,
It seemed as blessed with truth and new delight
As must have been the first great gift of all.

I’ve been reading Wilbur since high school. I worked the two weeks before Christmas a few times at a neighborhood bookstore. On Christmas Eve, the owner let us short-timers each pick out a hundred dollars-worth of books as a bonus. That’s how I got my copy of his collected works. It still has the now shuttered store’s bookmark in it. Wilbur’s voice as I’ve imagined it is very even. I’d be shocked to hear it yell.

I should have known that the antidote to all that Longfellowish earnestness Google gave me would be found in Kingsley Amis’s Collected Poems. Amis can be counted on as a gentlemanly rake to set himself above whatever Fortune’s up to. It’s obvious he’s not as unaffected by the state of the world as he puts on, but he has the decency to make light of what he sees and be grateful for what he’s seen.

In “Ode to Me,” like Hopkins, Amis is despondent but doesn’t despair. There’s stoicism from both men but good luck fitting either on a pillow. Some of what they have to say is a bit too on the nose. The poems have aged disturbingly well. I don’t know whether to take comfort that their troubles are still with us. Real or imagined, the consequences seem to hover on the horizon threatening, but they’ve stayed there.

That’s good. We should be thankful. Our warriors are happy and know when to go for a laugh.

Ode to Me
Kingsley Amis (1922-1995)

Fifty today, old lad?
Well, that’s not doing so bad:
All those years without
Being really buggered about.
The next fifty won’t be so good,
True, but for now – touch wood –
You can eat and booze and the rest of it,
While the shags with fifty or so
Actual years to go
Will find most of them tougher,
The going a good bit rougher
Within the Soviet sphere –
Which means when the bastards are here,
Making it perfectly clear
That all that double-think
(Both systems on the blink,
East and West the same,
And war just the name of a game)
Is the ballocks it always was.
But will it be clear? Because
After a whole generation
Of phasing out education,
Throwing the past away,
Letting the language decay,
And expanding the general mind
Till it bursts, we might well find
That it wouldn’t make much odds
To the poor semi-sentient sods
Shuffling round England then
That they’ve lost what made them men.
So bloody good luck to you, mate,
That you weren’t born too late
For at least a chance of happiness,
Before unchangeable crappiness
Spreads over all the land.
Be glad you’re fifty – and
That you got there while things were nice,
In a world worth looking at twice.
So here’s wishing you many more years,
But not all that many. Cheers!