The Garden of May: A Setting for the 'Immortality Ode

The best of poets have always philosophized over flowers. Spring, perhaps the month of May especially, is as good a time as any to consider the mysteries of birth, time, and decay.

Where do we come from? And the equally fundamental question: Why is there something rather than nothing?

William Wordsworth, perhaps the greatest of the English Romantic poets, also known as a poet of Nature par excellence, considered these questions in his  celebrated Immortality Ode (full title: "Ode: Intimations of Immortality").

Like the works of Shakespeare, the poem is full of phrases that step out of their original context to find a life of their own in common language (sometimes in an ironic fashion). Ever hear, or read, "trailing clouds of glory"? Here's the sentence in which it appears in the Ode. We are born into this world, the poet says,  

                      Not in entire forgetfulness, 
                      And not in utter nakedness

But trailing clouds of glory do we come         From God, who is our home:  Heaven lies about us in our infancy.

The poem appears to say that when a new "soul" is born into this life, it carries some initial remembrance of the eternal realm from which the child came. That remembrance, or "glory," trails some ways through our childhood on imperfect earth, this realm of growth and decline, birth and death: "...he beholds the light, and whence it flows,/ He sees it in his joy." 

          Which (to me) glances at that sense new parents sometimes have of the otherworldly aura of a newborn. What are those eyes looking at that we cannot see?

            For Wordsworth, it's that special connection with the higher realm from which we are "thrown" at birth that cements a young child's oneness with nature. In this poem, the poet conjoins his 'religion of nature' -- his belief in nature as the source of human goodness -- with the orthodox Christian faith that was the be and end all of religion in his society. Not to believe in this orthodoxy was to be damned as an atheist, the charge Shelley and other English "free thinkers" would face. Wordsworth bows openly to orthodoxy in his reference to God as "our home."

            But the poem's assertion of the that infantile apprehension of the holy, of "heaven" lying about one, is pure Romantic. It's akin to Rousseau's belief that children are born not in sin, but in purity -- anathema to the religious in his own country. To Wordsworth, those God-given 'clouds of glory' empower the child's love for the physical world, the unself-consciousness embrace of nature often noted in very young children. Rolling in the grass, playing in the mud, carrying bugs around in a pocket, delighting in the presence of animals. The heavenly "light" the child beholds in nature, the poem continues, transforms him into "Nature's priest."

            In those early years of mortal existence, Wordsworth writes, he "still is Nature's priest/ And by the vision splendid/ Is on his way attended..."

            The Immortality Ode is Wordsworth's fullest statement of reconciliation between his belief in goodness of nature and the facts of life. Those infantile heavenly clouds dissipate in the full light of day -- the mortal, material world that Wordsworth says in a much quoted phrase from another poem "is too much with us" as we grow into our mature lives. We're no longer one with nature, no longer its devoted  priest, as the demands of 'real life' rub their daily erasures over the magic of the wonder years.

             And yet, and here is the poem's great and moving attempt to reconcile transcendent belief and sad experience, as the poet wrestles with the Romantic problem of mortal life -- how to accept that youthful "light" (vigor, hope, optimism) grows progressively dim as we mature and age and suffer losses. In short, if what Wordsworth has told us about the human state in the early part of this poem (and the best of his other poems) is true, then life inevitably goes downhill.

            The ode turns then to what we might call 'the consolations of philosophy.' (A phrase not invented by Wordsworth, or Shakespeare, but by a Saxon forebear named Boethius.) When -- and this is where I began this consideration, with the special appreciation of May as the most transformational, generative, birth-happy month -- the Immortality Ode stages the reconciliation of mortal man with the inevitable loss of exaltation and ecstasy (whether spiritual or poetic or simply 'natural'), he chooses May for his epiphany.

            "Then sing, ye birds," the poet writes, invoking the spirits of the season, then adds bounding lambs, and the music of the "tabor" to summon those those able to perceive through the "heart" (that most poetic organ):

Then sing, ye birds, sing, sing a joyous song!

And let the young lambs bound

As to the tabor's sound!

We in thought will join your throng,

Ye that pipe and ye that play,

Ye that through your hearts to-day

                                    Feel the gladness of May!

            (And indeed the month of May has been unusually birdful around these parts. We've had a mockingbird camp out for half-days at a time. The cardinal and the other songbirds have been spring-singing steadily, and some little creature chirped for days on end in the tree or the telephone line above the driveway, seldom taking wing for more a half dozen feet.. though I suspect the burden of his song might be something like "I am so lost." )

             In what would later be called the confessional mode, Wordsworth then speaks in the first person to acknowledge the "lost" radiance even a fulltime poet must acknowledge as mortal's fate.

What though the radiance which was once so bright

Be now for ever taken from my sight,

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

How about "splendor in the grass"? Have you heard that one; the title of a book (and soon after a major movie) that 60 years ago made bold to treat the sex motive in human conduct. As for the absence of "glory in the flower," don't take this too much to heart, as we will see.

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind;

In the primal sympathy

Which having been must ever be;

In the soothing thoughts that spring

Out of human suffering;

In the faith that looks through death,

The consolation appears to lie in improved morals, plus some wisdom. We find "strength in what remains behind," in sympathy, in the hard to buy notion that "soothing thoughts" that spring from suffering are a source of strenght, and in a faith stronger than death.

              And then, at the end, if all else fails -- to pierce the shell we necessarily thicken around ourselves to defend against "human suffering" and, I suspect, the growing awareness of oncoming death  ... there are flowers.

However tepid some of these prior consolations may appear to us, the last stanza pays for all. After the tone of these rationalizations ("which having been must ever be"), what bursts forth is tried and true lover's love song.Wisdom colors the poet's vision, but an aging, studied, lived passion is even more passionate, these lines tell us, even more life-affirming. How about that little phrase "too deep for tears"? Heard that one? Here it is, fully earned. And you can't miss the blossom in this final vision:    And O ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves, Forebode not any severing of our loves! Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might; I only have relinquish'd one delight  195 To live beneath your more habitual sway. I love the brooks which down their channels fret, Even more than when I tripp'd lightly as they; The innocent brightness of a new-born Day             Is lovely yet;  200 The clouds that gather round the setting sun Do take a sober colouring from an eye That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality; Another race hath been, and other palms are won. Thanks to the human heart by which we live,  205 Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears, To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

The Garden of Verse: More Poems Blooming, So Quickly in May

            As the month advances I discover more poetic flowers blooming in the May's Verse-Virtual.com, the online poetry journal:
            The poetry of great truths in J.C. Elkin's moving and formally appealing poem "Keening for Eve" found in lines such as:

"...if progress can ever describe modern deaths as acceptable third world reality.
Caesar, Robespierre, Frankenstein’s Shelley lost moms. Stonewall Jackson, too.
And half a million more this year will die in every locality."

          Mary Shelley's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft (just to mention one such death), was probably the first successful professional author in the English language, and certainly one of the first feminists, her early death an incredible loss.  

           Elkin's poem "Almost Fledglings" about two baby birds blown from their nest draws on the truth that we feel the little tragedies that cross our path just as we do the big ones -- and sometimes even more deeply.

. "...one is white as an angel, skim milk shades drawn over eyes. The other, purpling,
inflates – deflates, an avian respirator." Beautiful writing puts a face on an ordinary disaster.

David Chorlton's poem "Lyric Botany" imagining "the namers of flowers" is a thorough pleasure, with its elegant allusions to an imaginary etymology. The poem's language is a joy:

"Their work
is to cross-breed language

so that beavertail lives in earth
as it does in water,

plant alliteration
or roadsides with the brittlebush,
and experiment with consonants
until fleabane and madrone grow
from the alphabet's old loam."

His poem "Nyctophobia" (an "irrational fear of night" a new word for me) gives us the poetry of the horror film. The elegance of the language here has the quality of a guilty pleasure as we sense a shudder of truth in the poem's description of 'the mechanical night':

"even the mechanical night
is a low hum
along the freeways, broken
by emergencies,
spinning lights
and insomnia running out
of control."

The entire beautifully packaged group of DeWitt Clinton's poems illustrates the available range of working on a theme such as flowers, or gardens, or spring. Along with their perfectly chosen illustrations and title allusions to the poems of Su Tung Po the group captures the wonder of an everyday world it's easy to lose sight of.

          The poem titled "In a Waiting Room Overlooking the Lake, I See a Bouquet of May Flowers, and Read Su Tung P’o’s 'Begonias'" seems to me to capture the eternal flicker in the temporal flow as the poet recalls bringing home a yellow hibiscus and leaving in wrapped in a plastic bag to protect against frost.

"Alone on the porch next to the snow
Shovel, rusting table and chairs,
the raccoons pause before the light
surprises them with blooms and eyes."

         The image of the summer-bloomer next to the snow shovel is practically a poem in itself. (And I admit being partial to the mention of this flower since I still have the yellow hibiscus I bought last year, keeping inside all winter and still hesitating over when it will be safe enough to put outdoors again.)

           Clinton's poem" After a Long Run Along the Lakefront,

I Try to Nap with Lu Yu’s “Phoenix Hairpins” speaks to this eternal longing as well.

"Daylilies have opened in our village
Soothing what I can’t do myself.

I’d like to be here
When there’s no more time
To let this ink seep into something
That you might want
As something precious, forever.​"

I love Barbara Crooker's personifications of flowers. Don't we all do this sometimes? See others -- or ourselves? -- in plants and other elements of nature, despite having been taught that anthropomorphizing was some sort of sin against reason. "The Hour of Peonies," a praise song for this showy favorite of gardeners, embraces the sensuality of this flower, comparing them to Renoir's fleshy bathers:

"And so are these flowers,
an exuberance of cream, pink, raspberry, not a shrinking violet among them.
They splurge, they don’t hold back, they spend it all."

          I like the other poems in this group too, as I also like their subjects. The big costume-party iris, a ballet in a flower, rising from a plant that works all year to give us one week of beautiful performance: "and sometimes we awaken [the poem notes]
from the dull green stalk of habit."

          And this inspired description of a dianthus:

"My mother comes back as a dianthus,
only this time, she’s happy, smelling like cloves,
fringed and candy-striped with a ring of deep rose
that bleeds into the outer petals."

            And of the Rosa Multiflora:

"Now they ramble unchecked, grow in waste areas, weeds, pests, nuisances.
In June, thousands and thousands of white blossoms light
my back path."

           I share this experience of the wild rose. I can't get rid of them; and then I don't want to.

           That's spring for you, too.

It's beautiful because it keeps moving,

but why does it have to move so fast?

The Garden of Experience: Libraries and Book Clubs

My thanks to Carver Library, and librarian Amy Shepherdson, for hosting "Suosso's Lane" and me on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. We had a lively question and answer session after I finally finished talking. 
           And I met a couple of folks who had strong family memories of life on Suosso's Lane or elsewhere in the North Plymouth neighborhood. 
           One person told me about living across from the Amerigo Vespucci Hall on Suosso's Lane. This Italian-American clubhouse had a low a profile when I lived in Plymouth, but back in the day (Vanzetti's day) it housed the 1916 strike meeting when charismatic Italian anarchist Luigi Galleani came to address the Plymouth Cordage Company strikers.  
             As an American place name, the Vespucci Hall retains its status because of its connection to Vanzetti. If you Google it, you find Beltrando Brini's marvelous oral history recollection of Vanzetti and his family (from the book "Anarchist Voices") in which he states: 
"There was also a social hall on Suosso's Lane, the Amerigo Vespucci Hall, but that was for the general community, not for the anarchists." 
              (Just for you information, Google's second mention of the Suosso's Lane Vespucci Hall comes from an earlier post in this blog.)
              I want to say thanks also to the "men's" book club in Plymouth that invited me to sit in at their meeting last weekend to discuss "Suosso's Lane" (and fed me). I was very flattered that a group that tends toward serious nonfiction chose my novel -- 'historical fiction' as one of the members referred to it (the terms 'mystery' and 'potboiler' also came up) -- as its book for discussion. 
           Their questions were penetrating. "Do you also write poetry?" one of the group's good doctors asked.
           Bing! Bing! Bing! A little birdie comes down with an envelope, and cash is awarded. 
           Other questions: Did I have a role model for the character of Lavinia? No, I just knew I wanted her to be very smart, very articulate, and the proto-feminist of her era, which is to say a suffragist. Someone who could stand up to Vanzetti on intellectual grounds, while brushing off the snubs of her own old-line Plymouth community. 
           Members also shared with me their personal acquaintance with the Sacco-Vanzetti case, mostly dating from older family members -- the left-leaning intellectuals of earlier generations. How is it that members of earlier generations could proudly call themselves adherents to the socialist workers party or progressive labor or even the American Communist Party -- but since mid-20th century America it has not respectable and in fact materially dangerous to acknowledge any of these connections -- or even these once widely-shared beliefs?
           The answer in practical, historical terms, of course, is McCarthyism and is proscription of 'Communist' ideas (for instance, atheism). But McCarthyism is sixty-five years old (ready to sit in a rocker and collect Social Security), so can't we finally get past this mental straitjacket fitted over the American political mind?
            Other questions. My 21st century character Mill -- was he based on myself. Oh no, I hope not... But yeah, there's something to that idea. I have a guy increasingly obsessed with the Vanzetti story, his time in America, his particular 'once upon a time in America...' 
           (Digression warning: Myths, legends, and folk tales all happen in "the past." We romanticize the past; it's the place we go to 'romanticize.' We're more likely to be afraid of the future. If we have a place in the culture for "Angels in America," why can't we have a place, intellectually at least, for "Anarchists in America"?)
            So, yes, as a reporter and then just as a reader before I started writing a book based on the Vanzetti experience, I did grow increasingly fascinated by the vivid history of his life and times. 
            And I'm flattered, and happy, that others have found something to engage their attention and provide some storytelling pleasure in the book that derives my own attraction to a largely forgotten piece of local, and American, history.

     
            
             

The Garden of Local News: 'Why I Wrote This Book'

When I speak at libraries about "Suosso's Lane," I begin with a brief introduction connecting the novel to the infamous Sacco and Vanzetti case. (I'll be speaking at Carver Public Library, 2 Meadowbrook Way, Carver MA this Saturday, May 14, 1 p.m.)
To explain the origins of the case I read my account in “Suosso’s Lane” of the 1920 crime for which the two men, Italian immigrants and professed anarchists, were found guilty and later executed. The crime was sensational daylight robbery of a shoe factory payroll and the murder of two payroll officers planned and executed in the

way as a professional criminal gang would do it. The chief of the Massachusetts state police said as much to the prosecution after Sacco and Vanzetti were charged with the crime. You've got the wrong guys, he said. The state prosecutors responded by removing him from the case and putting it into the hands of a small town police chief whose theory that anarchists were responsible for the robbery led to the arrests.
           Next, I address the question that readers almost ask an author: Why did you write this book? A good question, requiring a somewhat lengthy answer. After an outrageously biased trial in 1921 Sacco and Vanzetti, both of whom had witnesses from their own immigrant community placing them elsewhere on the day of the crime — “the Italians?” the state's governor would later say, “you can't believe them” — were convicted of murder. Their defense raised money to pay for legal challenges, delaying their execution until 1927. By that time the case had become an international cause celebre. In Europe, everyone from Albert Einstein to the Pope signed petitions demanding a new trial or a pardon or the outright release of Sacco and Vanzetti. Their cause was taken up by worker movements worldwide and demonstrations in their behalf were held literally all over the world. American justice was widely condemned because of this case.
           I was aware of the Sacco-Vanzetti case in general terms when I moved to Plymouth MA, home of the Pilgrims, and began work as an editor and reporter for a community newspaper called the Old Colony Memorial. But I did not know that Bartolomeo Vanzetti lived in Plymouth at the time of his arrest. Plymouth is very conscious of its Pilgrim history, there are statues and memorials and plaques throughout the old town center, but it pays no attention whatsoever to one of the principals in the Trial of the Century 100 years ago. 
           As a reporter I knew that the Sacco-Vanzetti case had been a big deal everywhere and that many nonfiction books have been written about it. But ‘Vanzetti in Plymouth’ is the local angle — and I was a local reporter. Working on a local history project for my newspaper, I looked into what was known about Vanzetti’s life in Plymouth by  scanning through microfilmed editions of my own paper and other newspapers in the Plymouth library. (I do love libraries; I wouldn’t be speaking about this book if it wasn’t for libraries). 
          I also read the most influential books on the case. As I learned more I grew to believe that the story of Vanzetti’s life in Plymouth — he spent five years there — offered a multi-faceted opening into a bigger story of what life was like for the industrial working class in Plymouth, and the rest of America, a century ago, a story that later generations are forgetting. It's a story that raises raising enduring issues in American society and politics, such as immigration, the negative stereotyping of national (or ethnic and religious) groups as undesirable others, bias in the criminal justice system, and the growing gap between rich and poor.
           “Suosso’s Lane,” named for the street in North Plymouth where Vanzetti lived in an immigrant neighborhood of mostly factory workers, dramatizes Vanzetti’s life in America, his outrage over the injustices he saw inflicted upon the working poor, and his growing commitment to the revolutionary anarchist cause. But the novel goes beyond recreating the historical past to connect Vanzetti’s story, and his world,  to our own world by also telling a 21st century story (also set in Plymouth) of people dealing today with many of the same issues. Despised "outsider" immigrant groups. An economic system that shuts the door to the “American dream” by exploiting the working poor. The centralization of political and monetary power in the hands of a few.
          The main characters in the contemporary story are Mill Becker, a young history teacher in his first real academic job, who moves with his wife into the house on Suosso’s Lane where Vanzetti once lived. A nosy local reporter named Mo Jeter (whose working life, by the way, is a lot more “adventurous” than mine ever was), who is investigating a real cold case, the 60-year-old suspicious death of a Plymouth policeman. How can this death connect to Sacco-Vanzetti case? Well, that’s what fiction is for.
And finally Ike Murisi, a ‘new immigrant’ who works at a big box store (I’m not allowed to name for legal reasons) and discovers parallels to Vanzetti’s story in his own life. While Ike takes low-paying service job to cobble together a living for himself and his wife, the criminal justice system complicates his life, and self-serving politicians seek only to make things harder for people like him.
           “Suosso’s Lane” is a big book. A frankly ambitious novel. It took me years to bring it to publication and I couldn’t be happier to see it finally in print. It’s now available as both an ebook and a paperback from the publisher, Web-e-Books.com.
           

The Garden in May: A Little Light on the Situation

Lots of greens, different shades of green, and lots of other colors too. What makes the spring garden come alive? A little sunlight. 
            I keep waiting for this month to begin. In the Boston area, it has rained at least a measurable amount every day this month. And every day last week the temperature was below average for the month of May. On Friday, a northeaster 
gale blew off the sea, with intimidating sound effects. I kept thinking very loud, low-flying jets buzzing the house for some reason, probably because they know I don't like them. This was the shocking music of a heavy wind day in a winter storm; not of the end of the first week in May.
              No part of which is bothering the plants. They all needed the moisture. And how rugged are, for instance, tulips? The opened their mouths and showed their tonsils, and the cool damp weather keeps the blossoms from drying out. They couldn't be happier. Is that the secret of tulip-growing in Holland? The daffodils fared worse. A number tall skinny stems holding elaborate narcissus variety flower heads have been crimped and loll to one side or another.
             The tiny Labrador violets (third photo down), I'm happy to see, are making a comeback. They fit into spaces unclaimed by larger species. They have dark purple violets, accompanied by dark leaves with purple in them as well, making for aesthetic interest close to the ground. You have to get low to visit them. It's worth it; they reward discovery. But I can never predict where they will from year to year.

The pictures on this page were all taken a week ago on a cool, but bright late Saturday afternoon, before the oppressive run of darker, wetter days began. Since they were actually taken on April 30, what they show is a pre-May moment. I like looking at plants in their youthful, immature state -- it's the change as much as the finished product that intrigues me.

The four last photos on this page, taken from wider angles, interest me just for the range of plant forms, shapes, and varieties of perennials in this half-grown or quarter-grown state.  Some of those reddish plants, Astilbe will launch tall stems with feathery flowers. Other low purplish colonies, called loosestrife, grow stems several feet high and produce yellow flowers. 
         Most of the low groundcovers that are flowering now will stop flowering by the end of the month. Many of them will scarcely be visible when their larger neighbors take up all the air space above them.