I’ve been thinking a lot about Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon after having renewed my relationship with their poetry this weekend (See the posting below, The Third Thing.) I posted a poem by Hall yesterday that he wrote during her illness, but thought Kenyon deserved a few of her own too.
As Donald Hall wrote in The Third Thing, “poetry embodies the complexities of feeling at their most intense and entangled, and therefore offers (over centuries, or over no time at all) the company of tears.”
Here are two by Kenyon, each with their own blending of the melancholy and sorrow of life with a celebration of it (or in the second poem, a celebration of life after life.) Both moved me deeply this morning.
Happiness
There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.
And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.
No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.
It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.
Notes from the Other Side
I divested myself of despair
and fear when I came here.
Now there is no more catching
one’s own eye in the mirror,
there are no bad books, no plastic,
no insurance premiums, and of course
no illness. Contrition
does not exist, nor gnashing
of teeth. No one howls as the first
clod of earth hits the casket.
The poor we no longer have with us.
Our calm hearts strike only the hour,
and God, as promised, proves
to be mercy clothed in light.
Oh god, Deborah, how important this poem has been to me . . . an essential talisman in times of bleakness or despair. The third stanza rings so true with my experience of the way happiness searches for us, we never know when it is just around the corner, ringing doorbell, looking for us, out of the blue. Thank you. I needed this one today.
I must reciprocate with my favorite Jane Kenyon poem. I find it deeply comforting, though it contains no reassurance except perhaps in the next to last last line, “God does not leave us comfortless.” It overflows with acceptance and surrender; reading it has helped me at times when I needed to let tears come, an it seemed I couldn’t. It is a visual artist’s poem I think: “Let the shed go black inside…”
Let Evening Come
–Jane Kenyon
Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.
Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.
Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.
Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.
To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.
Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.
S, We are on each other’s wavelength…Let Evening Come has been my other favorite Kenyon poem too. Thank you for posting it here, a nice complement to the other two. She knew something both of us know about too, and I so appreciate her voice on these issues.