dual personalities

Daughter #2 here with a bit of a hodge podge of a post, but what I hope is the best kind of hodge podge.

Do you like poetry? I have found that I especially like to read poetry in the spring — there are so many good verses about this particular time of year, when everything is blooming (including, perhaps, our winter-worn selves). Anyway, I’ve come across many good bits of poems lately, in part because I’ve been spending time in the sun room where we have a bookshelf full of poetry collections. Nothing like casually grabbing the Rilke during naptime to make you feel like a mom who still has deep thoughts.

Spring has come again. The earth
is like a child who knows poems by heart;
Many, so many! … For the work
of such long learning, she wins the prize.

Her teacher was demanding. We’d grown fond
of the white in the old man’s beard.
Now when we ask what the green and blue are:
she can tell us, she knows, she knows!

Earth, lucky earth, on holiday, play
with the children now. We want to catch you,
happy earth. And the luckiest will.

What her teacher taught her! So many things,
and what’s imprinted in the roots and on the long
difficult stems: she sings it, she sings!

Rainer Maria Rilke, from Sonnets to Orpheus (translated by Edward Snow)

DN shared this poem with me:

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.

Louise Glück, “The Wild Iris”

Maybe it’s still snowy where you are.

Lambs that learn to walk in snow
When their bleating clouds the air
Meet a vast unwelcome, know
Nothing but a sunless glare.
Newly stumbling to and fro
All they find, outside the fold,
Is a wretched width of cold.

As they wait beside the ewe,
Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies
Hidden round them, waiting too,
Earth’s immeasureable surprise.
They could not grasp it if they knew,
What so soon will wake and grow
Utterly unlike the snow.

Philip Larkin, “First Sight”

Or maybe all of this budding and blooming and dew on green grass is too much for you. Maybe you are in more of a Edna St. Vincent Millay mood:

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough. You can longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing.
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Spring”

Yeesh!

I prefer Margaret Wise Brown’s crocus vibes.

And not in keeping with the theme, but another bit I read recently, and which obviously resonated:

You are my one, and I have not another,
Sleep soft, my darling, my trouble and treasure;
Sleep warm and soft in the arms of your mother,
Dreaming of pretty things, dreaming of pleasure.

Christina Rosetti

*From Walt Whitman’s “O me! O Life!”