Dreaming the World

A cloudy, warmish day, quite a change from recent weeks. Maybe some showers later. Perhaps a walk this afternoon.

I’ve been reading Jane Kenyon’s Collected Poems. She lived the last couple of decades of her leukemia shortened life in a New Hampshire valley. Her house, the weather, farming, the natural world, pets, and her relationship with Donald Hall are themes central to her work.

Another thread is the seemingly unshakable presence of cancer in her life, as friends, Donald, and finally, she herself come face to face with the illness and their mortality. In spite of this, or maybe to some extent because of this, her poems are often playful, whimsical, and warm. Perhaps the presence of illness contributed to the melancholy that appears so frequently in her work.

Reading through her many published poems it is difficult to miss the loneliness that permeated her childhood or the joy that her marriage to Hall brought her. She was a sensitive, aware, highly intelligent child in a world where few people understood her. She chose Hall with the full knowledge that he, being twenty years older, most likely meant great loss to come. Clearly her illness and death in her late forties was a great rupture in the order of things, heartbreaking for both of them.

I’ve also been reading Roethke, who drew extensively from his experience of, and love for, nature. Roethke’s work is often dense and complex while Kenyon’s is direct and often minimal, reminding me of the Tang Dynasty poets I have long loved. Both poets have been described as lyrical and pastoral yet their work could not be more different.

The word that comes to mind while reading Kenyon is “domestic” in the widest and wildest sense. She is concerned with making love and beds, cooking, and sweeping the house. She is engaged with the cat and the world outside, looking through windows and walking the hills, forests, and meadows surrounding her home. She is also deeply aware that others do not have home, having been displaced by luck or malice, and her heart breaks for them.

While Roethke tends metaphysical in the sense of Emerson and the Transcendentalists, Kenyon settles into a profoundly engaged Christianity that both offers comfort at times and calls her into action in an unfair world.

When I was much younger I was drawn to Roethke and Thoreau. I also loved the mountain beats like Gary Snyder, maybe because they were so influenced by Chinese poetry and Zen. Then there were poets writing in Spanish, lush and human even in translation. The only real book in our home growing up was a thick collection of American poetry, and in grade school I read and reread Sandburg and Frost.

Now, in my mid-seventies, living in a world uprooted and gone mad, I am most drawn to the direct, everyday profoundness of Kenyon, Heaney, Tu Fu and Lao Po, and the Japanese zen poets. Each lived in challenging times and drew inspiration from the domestic and nature. All experienced some form of dislocation, knew the value of the natural world and home, and held them dear.