Repose

Today, as I walked beneath a green-canopied tree tunnel, I remembered that the summer solstice will arrive later this week. Despite the vaulting, airy boughs above me, the late afternoon -- grey, windless, still -- felt  somehow stifled and close.  It did not seem as though summer was poised to make a grand and sweeping entrance.

Soon after I emerged from the green light of the trees, the word "susurration" floated up.  I have no idea why.  But, yes, the grey and breathless afternoon was indeed in need of a susurration.

I continued to walk.  A few minutes later, as I neared home, a brief breeze stirred the leaves of a pear tree next to the sidewalk.  Drops of water from an earlier rain shower pattered from the leaves onto my shoulders.  A susurration.

                    Repose

Repose is in simplicities.
Perhaps the mind has leaves like trees
Involving the luxurious sun
And tossed by wind's intricacies,
And finds repose is more than grief
When failing light and falling leaf
Denote that winter has begun.

James Reeves, The Imprisoned Sea (Poetry London 1949).

Charles Kerr (1858-1907), "Carradale"

All is well with the World.  Meanwhile, in this odd and wonderful country of mine, land that I love, there are those who are already in the thrall of next year's presidential election.  Every four years we witness a battle to the death between Absolute Good and Absolute Evil, with the Fate of the Republic at stake.  I have now lived through sixteen of these contests for the Soul and the Destiny of the nation.  I continue to wait for the sky to fall.

As I write this, the robins warble and chatter in the garden outside my window.  The sun will set before they stop for the day.  Tomorrow morning, they will begin again well before it rises.

                                Worlds

Through the pale green forest of tall bracken-stalks,
Whose interwoven fronds, a jade-green sky,
Above me glimmer, infinitely high,
Towards my giant hand a beetle walks
In glistening emerald mail; and as I lie
Watching his progress through huge grassy blades
And over pebble boulders, my own world fades
And shrinks to the vision of a beetle's eye.

Within that forest world of twilight green
Ambushed with unknown perils, one endless day
I travel down the beetle-trail between
Huge glossy boles through green infinity . . .
Till flashes a glimpse of blue sea through the bracken asway,
And my world is again a tumult of windy sea.

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, Neighbours (Macmillan 1920).

William Lamond (1857-1924), "A Coastal Village"

Perspective, Part Fifteen: Beetles

Yesterday was one of those expansive April days.  The slate-grey waters of Puget Sound were silver-ribboned and cloud-shadowed.  Across the fields, the young yellow-green leaves of the deciduous trees stood forth against the dark green boughs of the evergreens. The phrase "Pied Beauty" came to mind, thus:

                           Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things --
   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
   Landscape plotted and pieced -- fold, fallow, and plough;
      And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                                                    Praise him.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, in W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie (editors), The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Oxford University Press, Fourth Edition, 1967).  "Brinded" (line 2) is not a misprint: it is an "early form of 'brindled,' streaked."  Ibid, page 269.

John Inchbold, "The Moorland (Dewar-stone, Dartmoor)" (1854)

While the expansiveness of the day drew me outward and upward, I still had thought for the ground beneath my feet.  At this time of year it seems alive -- warm with life.  Lines from John Drinkwater's "The Wood," which appeared here a few months ago, are apt:

While everywhere, above me, underfoot,
And haunting every avenue of leaves,
Was mystery, unresting, taciturn.

Caught up in our own small worlds, we need to spare a thought now and then for the countless worlds above, around, and below us.

John Inchbold, "Anstey's Cove, Devon" (1854)

                              Worlds

Through the pale green forest of tall bracken-stalks,
Whose interwoven fronds, a jade-green sky,
Above me glimmer, infinitely high,
Towards my giant hand a beetle walks
In glistening emerald mail; and as I lie
Watching his progress through huge grassy blades
And over pebble boulders, my own world fades
And shrinks to the vision of a beetle's eye.

Within that forest world of twilight green
Ambushed with unknown perils, one endless day
I travel down the beetle-trail between
Huge glossy boles through green infinity . . .
Till flashes a glimpse of blue sea through the bracken asway,
And my world is again a tumult of windy sea.

Wilfrid Gibson, Neighbours (1920).

Gibson's beetle-world brings to mind the opening stanza of Geoffrey Scott's "All Our Joy Is Enough":

All we make is enough
Barely to seem
A bee's din,
A beetle-scheme --
Sleepy stuff
For God to dream:
Begin.

John Inchbold, "Bolton Abbey" (1853)