Thursday, December 11, 2014

Frozen Flowers, Living Poems

Winter is Poetry Out Loud season at Marshall. As I walked through the halls during the weeks leading up to last night's School Contest, I heard students practicing their poems, reciting them under their breath as they went about their days. Over the last two years, I've noticed that Cole B prefers to pace up and down the front hallway as he memorizes his poems. In the past, I've advocated walking outdoors as a memory-aid. This year, Alex M found that walking the school trails helped her to memorize her poem.

Whenever I walk outdoors, in any season of the year, bits of poetry often come to mind, but in the Winter this happens more frequently, perhaps because the cold and the lack of greenery drive my attention inward...

Winter came quickly this year, and I think it caught a lot of plants off-guard:  as I walked the Munger Trail a couple weeks ago, I was amazed at how many flowers were still visible. I kept coming across flowers that had been frozen in place.
Frozen flower on Munger.

I was especially happy to find residual evidence of the Bottle Gentian. I've never taken photos of this flower at this particular stage of its life, after the blue blossoms have faded and turned into seed-pods. 

Bottle Gentians on Munger, faded and gone to seed.
(One of my long-term goals, by the way, is to take photos of my favorite flowers at each stage of their lives, so these photos contribute nicely to that project.)
Bottle Gentians on Munger; photo heavily edited with Snapseed app.
Looking in Leif Erickson Park just last weekend, I found additional Bottle Gentians and was able to get a close-up that reveals the seeds inside the pods. 
Look closely, and you can see the Bottle Gentian seeds inside their pods; taken in Leif Erickson Park.
Then, on the Lakewalk that same day, down near Canal Park, I came across a group of flowers whose petals had obviously been blown by a strong wind. The angle of the petals and the remnants of color really caught my eye, and although it was quite cold out, I took off my gloves and starting shooting. I didn't get many shots, because my hands started to freeze, but I like the two below...
Petals blown by the wind and frozen in place in Canal Park.
All these skeletal flowers, reaching up out of the snow, reminded me of one of my favorite poems by John Keats, the great British poet of the Romantic era. It's just a little fragment, a draft of an unfinished poem, but I've never forgotten it since I first encountered it in college...
Another shot, edited heavily with Snapseed.
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood,
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm'd. See, here it is--
I hold it towards you.
                                 --John Keats

It's a genuine, heart-felt utterance, perfectly captured, as if from the middle of a really intense conversation. It's beautiful, and a little spooky, since the speaker is imagining how he might, once he's dead (as he knows he soon will be) haunt the person he's speaking to...

I recently came across a blog-post by a scholar who is likewise interested in this poem; he's written the best (and most in-depth) examination of this poem I've ever seen; I recommend (especially to my AP Lit students) the sections on the sensory imagery in the poem. 

Poetry often claims to keep the dead alive--alive, at least, in our memories (think of the last lines of Shakespeare's famous "Sonnet 18": "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see / So long lives this [the poem], and this gives life to thee"). And you never know--the poem you read in class today (even if you don't now understand it or see any value in it) might help you in the future to deal with loss, to understand pain, to make sense of your experiences.

"This Living Hand" by Keats has done all of that for me. 

I first read this poem in a Brit Lit course I took at UMD from a professor named Joe Duncan. I took several courses from Joe. He was my Advisor, and we became friends. Even after I graduated and went on to grad school, we stayed in touch, writing to each other until the week he died. 

Joe, who had written a book on John Milton (the blind 17th-century poet who wrote Paradise Lost), was himself almost totally blind. He always taught with the lights off because glare of any kind made it impossible for him to see or read. He used to wear a visor indoors, for the same reason. He was the only college professor I ever had who used a seating chart--without one, he couldn't really identify his students. We all had to sit in the front rows and pledge always to sit in the same spot. Whenever Joe read a passage to us, he had to hold the book about two or three inches from his eyes.

Joe was no taller than I was; he was very thin, with a crooked spine, and a funny, shuffling way of walking. He had some facial tics, probably as a result of his blindness but perhaps also because of some other ailments, and he used his hands a lot when he talked, but not necessarily in a way that clearly emphasized what he was saying. I remember how his hands would float slowly through the air as he talked...almost as if he were conducting music that none of us could hear. 

He was from Kentuky, and although he had lived in Minnesota for forty-some years, he still had a very pronounced accent. He also had a strange laugh--the noise came on the inhalations, not the exhalations--and he suffered from some kind of speech impediment. Certain consonants gave him a hard time. 

All of this made some students uncomfortable. I remember one classmate telling me she couldn't take the stress of watching and listening to him. Indeed, it was, at times, a bit painful because he often looked and sounded like he was suffering while he talked. You had to learn how to listen to him, train yourself to hear him. It was easy to dismiss him as strange, or weird, or not worth the trouble...

But if you took the trouble, you discovered that he was very perceptive--he often saw (or sensed, rather) more than we realized. He was an intelligent, conscientious, and compassionate teacher with a great sense of humor. 

He lived near campus, and I used to encounter him as we both walked to and from UMD (Joe couldn't drive, of course, and I didn't have a car then). On several occasions, I walked him home. I can remember one afternoon in particular when we were waiting to cross Woodland Ave. If I hadn't grabbed his arm and held him back, he would have walked right into the path of an oncoming car. Joe couldn't see much beyond a distance of three or four feet, and I think he generally just trusted drivers to stop for him. I remember thinking right then that he was going to get killed one day, crossing the street. 

Sadly, I was right. After he retired, he moved back to Louisville, Kentucky, and was hit by a car as he walked across a street. I never learned all the details. I don't think any charges were filed against the driver. 

As I mourned the loss of my friend, I was haunted by visions of his hands. Joe's hands always seemed to look younger than the rest of him--they were large, strong, and healthy. In the weeks after his death, I would catch myself staring at my own hands, thinking, "they're not mine--these don't look like my hands!" I would stop, mid-gesture, and look at these unfamiliar hands, turning them over and over, fingers outspread. After several such episodes of confusion, it finally struck me: I was seeing his hands, as if they were attached to my arms. Visual memories of his hands were superimposed over the sight of mine, as if he were speaking through my bones, saying,

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb, 
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood,
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm'd. See, here it is--
I hold it towards you.
                                --John Keats

Once I understood what I was seeing, these hallucinations stopped happening. I rather missed them. When someone you care about dies, you try to hold on to every little bit of them that you can, every possible memory, even when you don't realize that's what you're doing. Sometimes, your senses collaborate in that unconcious effort. It's also fairly common to feel a (completely irrational) sense of guilt when someone dies--why wasn't I there, to pull him back from danger? 

I no longer think of Joe when I look at my hands, but I always remember him when I read Keats's poem. These eight lines bring him right back to me:  I see his face, I hear his laugh, and I watch his hands, forever floating through the air as he stands before me in that unlit room, asking me what I think of "Lycidas."*

Poetry conjures the dead. As we walk through these cold, dark winter days, among the frozen flowers of a vanished summer, it would be wise to carry some poetry with us, lodged firmly in our memories. We might need it someday.



* If you want to read a great short story about a teacher learning to understand Milton's elegy with his students' help, try this link to John Berryman's "Wash Far Away."

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