A Poem For Arbor Day

April is National Poetry Month in the US. Today is also Arbor Day, a day on which the poem “Trees” by Joyce Kilmer is recited all over the country during arboreal celebrations. Incidentally, Joyce Kilmer was a man. The first name led me to believe otherwise but on researching the poet I discovered, along with his gender, a lot of details about his life; he died during the fighting in the Second Battle of the Marne in 1918 in World War 1 at the young age of 31. He was an atheist who found faith when his little daughter was afflicted with polio and lost the use of her limbs. He was derided for writing simple and sentimental rhyming poems at a time when ‘avant-garde’ poetry was all the rage. He is best known for ‘Trees”, inspired perhaps by a view of fall foliage from the window of his home in Mahwah, NJ. Surprisingly, even this poem which succinctly captures Nature’s beauty and God’s hand in creation was dismissed as trite by many critics.

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

~ Trees, Joyce Kilmer

“Trees” is a short poem in iambic tetrameter with six rhyming couplets that make it flow in a sing-song fashion and make it easy to memorize. The rhyme scheme is aa/bb/cc/dd/ee/aa. The final words of the two lines in each couplet have the same sounds and the words of the last couplet have the same sounds as the first couplet.

Lines 1 and 2- The speaker starts by saying that a poem doesn’t compare to a tree. Humans can’t create anything as beautiful as God. It is interesting that being a poet himself, Kilmer is modest about his art.

Lines 3 and 4-  The tree depends on Mother Earth for sustenance. Nature is portrayed as a feminine entity who is generous, giving and nurturing. The roots of the tree suck water and nutrients from the earth as a child would milk from its mother’s bosom.

Lines 5 and 6-  The tree extends its limbs in supplication as if it were praying to God. The tree is personified in these lines and throughout the poem with human attributes like hair, arms, a hungry mouth and a bosom.

Lines 7 and 8 –  The tree is a place of refuge for creatures. The tree is the protector whose foliage offers shade and shelter to birds. The relationship of the trees and birds echoes the relationship of the tree and the earth. These lines beautifully highlight the interdependence of living things and the regenerative cycle of nature.

Lines 9 and 10- These lines describing the relationship between snow/ rain and the tree are vivid in sensual imagery. The tree with its bosom and knotted hair has feminine traits just like the earth. In describing nature, the poet resorts to anthropomorphic images which transport us to an emotional and spiritual plane. The tree is first portrayed as a child suckling from its mother and eventually as a young woman who lives intimately with the elements. The tree then could represent a person and God’s ingenuity in creating humans along with nature.

Lines 11 and 12-  The last two lines take us us back to the first stanza perhaps reinforcing the idea of the cyclical pattern of nature. Divine creation surpasses literary creation. The speaker/ poet is humble and there is a tinge of self-deprecation in his humility.

This poem is a hymn to nature’s beauty and bounty. The use of poetic devices like simile, personification, repetition and alliteration imbue it with a musical quality. In fact it has been set to music many times. It is also a poem with a spiritual bent, rich in religious symbolism. In a span of twelve brief lines, the visual and tactile imagery took me into the woods and up to the heavens and back. The poem is charming and striking in its simplicity. Let me not kill it by overanalyzing it. I’ll just end with this thought: I think that I shall never see a poem as pithy and profound as this poem.

Don’t you think the best way to pay tribute to this poet would be by going outdoors and planting a sapling?

 

Notre-Dame de Paris: Gypsies, Gargoyles and Grotesques

View of Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris from the Seine

My heart was ripped when flames ripped through the Notre Dame Cathedral a week ago. So many memories came flooding back as I helplessly watched images of smoke billowing over the city. As a medievalist and as an art history buff, I’ve never left Paris without visiting the Notre Dame. In fact it usually tends to be my first stop in the city. Standing as a beacon of hope and light on the banks of the Seine with the entire vista of Paris visible from its towers, it is undoubtedly the geographical and cultural center of this beautiful and historic city.

Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris, West View

Notre Dame is also a place of pilgrimage in more than one sense of the word. Along with being a place of worship for millions of devout Catholics from around the world, it is also a sacred site for literary pilgrims where Victor Hugo’s novel Notre- Dame de Paris known in English as The Hunchback of Notre Dame comes alive. Not surprisingly, Hugo’s book has soared to the top of the bestseller list in the wake of the tragedy.

Published in 1831 but set in 1482, Notre -Dame de Paris is the melodramatic story of the extraordinarily beautiful gypsy Esmeralda who is pursued by several men including Quasimodo, the deformed and deaf hunchback and bell-ringer of the cathedral. It is a touching and tragic story about ill-fated love. Hugo was inspired by the Greek word ‘anatkh’ which he found inscribed on one of the walls of the cathedral and which means Fate. This is a novel with a social conscience like Les Misérables, which he wrote a few decades later. It evokes medieval life in Paris and portrays people from all strata of life from kings to vagabonds and beggars and focuses on the themes of class divisions, social inequality and justice.

Notre Dame Cathedral has been through tumultuous times and has been on the brink of destruction on several occasions throughout its history – it has suffered the ravages of weather and has endured floods, famine and even fire. It has survived rioting Huguenots in the 16^thcentury, The French revolution of 1789 and two World Wars which had all resulted in widespread desecration of its statues and relics. It was also the victim of changing fashion trends as from the Renaissance through the 18^thcentury, classical architecture was in vogue to the detriment of gothic art.

Notre Dame de Paris is a plea for the preservation of this Gothic architecture that had been subjected to vandalism and neglect over the centuries. According to Hugo, the cathedral is the cultural and political center of Paris and the symbol of the city and its glorious past. Hugo felt that the arrival of the printing press was going to mean the death of architecture while ensuring that the written word would be indestructible. But ironically it was Hugo’s writing that saved the cathedral from further damage.

Flying buttresses

The novel was instrumental in initiating a massive renovation project by the King in 1844 to restore the dilapidated cathedral to its formal glory with the help of architects Baptiste- Antoine Lassus and Eugene Viollet-le-Duc. The project included rebuilding of

Gargoyles and Grotesques

the spire, the restitution of statues and the addition of gargoyles and grotesques which interestingly were not part of the original structure. The cathedral represents a 19th century vision of what medieval art is supposed to look like- spires, turrets, gargoyles, chimera and flying buttresses symbolizing ascent towards the heavens gave flight to the imaginations of architects and authors alike.

The English translation of the title doesn’t do justice to the novel.  This is not just the story of the hunchback Quasimodo’s unrequited love for Esmeralda but also the story of love for a cathedral. Chapters 1 and 2 of Book 3 are dedicated to the edifice and its architecture. Most of the action of the novel takes place in and around the structure and from the top of its towers. The cathedral sets the plot in motion and offers sanctuary and support to the pariahs of Parisian society including the orphaned Quasimodo:

After all, he turned his face towards men only with regret; his cathedral was enough for him. It was peopled with marble figures,—kings, saints, bishops,—who at least did not burst out laughing in his face, and who looked upon him only with tranquility and benevolence. The other statues, those of the monsters and demons, harbored no hatred for him, Quasimodo. He resembled them too much for that. They seemed rather, to be sneering at other men. The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends and watched over him. So he was in intimate communication with them. He sometimes passed whole hours crouching before one of these statues, in solitary conversation with it. If any one came, he fled like a lover surprised in his serenade.

And the cathedral was not only society for him, but the universe, and all nature still. He dreamed of no other shrubs than the stained-glass windows, always in bloom , no other shade than that of the stone foliage which spread out, loaded with birds, in the tufts of the Saxon capitals; of no other mountains than the colossal towers of the church; of no other ocean than Paris, roaring at their feet.

The North Rose Window

 

Après tout, il ne tournait qu’à regret sa face du côté des hommes. Sa cathédrale lui suffisait. Elle était peuplée de figures de marbre, rois, saints, évêques, qui du moins ne lui éclataient pas de rire au nez et n’avaient pour lui qu’un regard tranquille et bienveillant. Les autres statues, celles des monstres et des démons, n’avaient pas de haine pour lui Quasimodo. Il leur ressemblait trop pour cela. Elles raillaient bien plutôt les autres hommes. Les saints étaient ses amis, et le bénissaient ; les monstres étaient ses amis, et le gardaient. Aussi avait-il de longs épanchements avec eux. Aussi passait-il quelquefois des heures entières, accroupi devant une de ces statues, à causer solitairement avec elle. Si quelqu’un survenait, il s’enfuyait comme un amant surpris dans sa sérénade.

Et la cathédrale ne lui était pas seulement la société, mais encore l’univers, mais encore toute la nature. Il ne rêvait pas d’autres espaliers que les vitraux toujours en fleur, d’autre ombrage que celui de ces feuillages de pierre qui s’épanouissent chargés d’oiseaux dans la touffe des chapiteaux saxons, d’autres montagnes que les tours colossales de l’église, d’autre océan que Paris qui bruissait à leurs pieds.

 

The cathedral holds a special place in my heart too as it instantly transports me to Hugo’s medieval world of gypsies, gargoyles and grotesques. Every time I saw gypsies outside the cathedral nursing their babies, playing with their children or accosting tourists for money, I was reminded of the captivating Esmeralda and I could visualize her dancing in the square or regaling her spectators with her tricks. And whenever I climbed the belfry, I could almost sense the presence of Quasimodo, the hunchback whose grotesqueness mirrors the cathedral’s own deformities. The hideous bell ringer whispered to the bells and caressed and loved them even though they had made him deaf for mothers often love best the child who has caused them the most suffering. (“les mères aiment souvent le mieux l’enfant qui les a fait le plus souffrir.”)

Stained glass windows inside the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris

The Notre Dame Cathedral is not just a touristic spot or a literary haven but a working place of worship pulsating with spiritual energy. Even if you don’t entertain any religious beliefs you cannot help but be moved by the grace and serenity the space emanates. The majestic edifice was engulfed in flames during the most holy week for Christians. Although Hugo ends the book with the grim prediction that the church will disappear from the face of the earth, it is hard to overlook the Biblical symbolism. The miraculous preservation of the relics of the Passion and the Crown of thorns is a prophetic reminder of the resurrection. I sincerely hope that The ‘Grande Dame’ as the French affectionately call their beloved cathedral ,will, as she always has, rise from the ashes.

*The translations are mine.

*The photographs are from my personal collection.

 

 

 

 

When Death Comes: In Memory Of Mary Oliver

The 18th of April is Poem in Your Pocket Day, part of the month-long celebration of National Poetry Month in the United States. The poem I chose to carry in my pocket yesterday was written by Pulitzer Prize -winning poet, Mary Oliver who left our earthly abode two months ago. Her soulful rapport with nature and meditations on the human condition have touched and transformed many lives. To mourn her demise or celebrate her life as the case may be, I fittingly selected a poem on death that teaches us to live. For, after all, aren’t life and death two sides of the same coin?

When Death Comes

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

–Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver imparts her wisdom in a gentle way in her poems. This poem is a meditation on mortality or immortality depending on your perspective; it is a mantra on how to live our lives. The speaker resorts to similes and personification to imagine the arrival of death which can take several forms. It can appear as a ravenous bear, as a merciless man with a coin purse, as a dreadful disease or as a huge and chilling mass of ice. Even if death charges at her ruthlessly, she wants to welcome it with curiosity. The “cottage of darkness” is an arresting metaphor as a cottage conjures up an image of a cozy, comfortable and warm place as opposed to death which is cold and frightening. It is interesting that she doesn’t capitalize death. It is just another ordinary and inevitable event in our lives.

The poem is written in free verse without a set rhyme or meter. The twelve stanzas of varying length convey a continuous flow of thoughts. You almost feel like she is having a conversation with you. The liberal use of the comma instead of a period enables us to read the poem without pausing. The use of poetic devices like the ‘enjambment’ or technique of continuing one thought beyond the end of a line to the subsequent line ( lines 11-12 ) and the ‘anaphora’ when a line is repeated at the beginning of a number of lines (“when death comes”) gives the poem an incantatory tone like a prayer chant.

The speaker goes on to question conventional notions of time as linear and finite and considers “eternity as another possibility.” Each life is individual and unique like a flower. Yet all existence is interlinked and the speaker wishes to live with awareness and curiosity and to also live in close communion with nature and the universe. The individual human is a “lion of courage” fearlessly confronting the mysteries of life and the individual human experience is music which moves collectively towards silence or death. The juxtaposition of music and silence is akin to that of life and death.

The speaker wishes to make use of the gift of life she has been offered by embracing the experience fully. She doesn’t choose one or the other but wishes to be married to life both as a bride and a groom- to avail of all the experiences life has to offer. She doesn’t want to just visit the world but inhabit it and immerse in it fully with amazement and wonder. Bridal symbolism to convey the relation between earthly and spiritual love is a recurrent motif in many mystical traditions of the world including Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Sufism where the soul is the bride yearning for union with her divine beloved, the Universe. Mary Oliver was perhaps influenced by these spiritual traditions as in a radio interview she had revealed that she read Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet every single day.

Mary Oliver enjoyed going on long walks to seek solace in nature and to be one with the birds, flowers, forests and rivers- to contemplate tiny miracles whether it was a grasshopper moving her jaws back and forth, poppies swaying in the wind or mushrooms sprouting through the ground. In fact, many of her poems are used in workshops on mindfulness. I channel her sometimes when I go on nature walks, when I slow down to gaze at a dewdrop on a flower, or delight in the antics of a determined squirrel or observe a jewel of a dragonfly flapping its gossamer wings on a branch. I, too, hope that at the end of my life I can say that I was a bride married to amazement and that I didn’t end up simply having visited this world. I leave you, friends, to ponder this question that Mary Oliver asked us in one of her most famous poems:

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Life in Middlemarch: A Bibliomemoir or Biography?

There are books that remain with us throughout our lives-books we return to time and again for solace and guidance. But wouldn’t it be hard if you were asked to pick a single favorite? I could name 10 or 12 titles that I love and that have touched me deeply. But it would be impossible for me to narrow down my list to one choice. That’s why they say that asking a bookworm to pick a favorite book is like asking a mother to pick a favorite child. Not for Rebecca Mead, a staff member of the New Yorker who has no trouble in professing a preference. For her it was just one book that had such a lasting impact on her- the nineteenth century novel, Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life, written by the English author George Eliot. She has been fascinated with the book her whole life, has re-read it many times and has written a bibliomemoir entitled My Life in Middlemarch detailing her journey with the novel, her affinity with the author and how she can relate to the characters and experiences delineated. In the beginning of her book, Mead makes this profound observation about reading:

Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it’s a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself. There are books that seem to comprehend us just as much as we understand them, or even more. There are books that grow with the reader as the reader grows, like a graft to a tree.

Mead’s perception of Middlemarch changed with age and maturity as the book helped shape her life through its various stages. But the book is not a primer on Middlemarch. Read it only after you’ve read the novel otherwise you’d be lost. I read it as a companion piece to Middlemarch right after I finished reading the mammoth novel.

I have to admit that I trudged through the first few chapters of Eliot’s sprawling novel numbering almost 900 pages and divided into eight books. I was familiar with George Eliot’s Silas Marner and The Mill on the Floss from school days. I’m not one to be daunted by the size of a book. I’ve read the likes of Proust and Tolstoy. It wasn’t the size but the tedium of the first few chapters. There were too many characters and plots and an omniscient narrator with a didactic authorial voice with moral asides and digressions. But I was determined to persist as Middlemarch is widely believed to be among the 100 best novels of all time and I’m glad I did. The first three books were ponderous but once I started Book 4, I couldn’t put it down.

Eliot understands life in all its complexity- what we have on display is the full panorama of provincial life in Victorian England with piercing insights into human nature. Eliot highlights the preoccupations of the middle class- marriage, money and morals and skillfully captures the frailties and foibles of her characters. It is a vast canvas and a study of manners in the 19th century in the manner of Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine which also served as an inspiration to Eliot.

Virginia Woolf made the astute observation that Middlemarch is “…The magnificent book, which with all its imperfections, is one of the few English books written for grown-up people.” While a Jane Austen plot commences with a romance and courtship and ends with a marriage and a happily ever after, Middlemarch starts off with the idealistic Dorothea Brooke’s disastrous marriage to the scholarly and much older Edward Casaubon and continues with the equally idealistic Dr. Tertius Lydgate’s troubled romance and subsequent disappointment in marriage. Eliot dauntlessly subverts the commonplace tropes of Victorian novels. There are no characters that are inherently good or evil ; they are all flawed and human and therein lies the beauty of the novel. Each and every character evokes the empathy of the reader. I can understand how the book influenced the way Mead viewed life and how each reading left her with a new perspective. I am determined to revisit the book this year itself as it is the bicentennial of its publication and to re-read it slowly to savor the exquisite writing and reflect on the psychological insights.

Mead’s book is part memoir, part biography and part literary criticism. She dwells on George Eliot’s unconventional life and loves, her break with orthodox Christianity, how her writing developed and how she was perceived by her contemporaries. She was shunned by family and friends for her scandalous relationship with George Henry Lewes who was married to another woman and had a family. The book also details her emotional attachment to Herbert Spencer, the philosopher who believed in ‘meliorism’ and her marriage to John Cross, a man twenty years her junior who on their honeymoon in Venice jumped from the hotel window falling into the Grand Canal.

The book is replete with interesting details about Eliot’s personal life.  Eliot was renowned for her uncomely appearance lacking in feminine charm. In a letter to his father, Henry James described her thus : “She is magnificently ugly — deliciously hideous. She has a low forehead, a dull grey eye, a vast pendulous nose, a huge mouth full of uneven teeth, and a chin and jaw bone qui n’en finissent pas (never-ending)… But there was

Portrait of George Eliot by Samuel Lawrence, circa 1860

something disarming about her intellectual radiance for he continues to say,  “Now in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a few very minutes steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end, as I ended, in falling in love with her. Yes behold me literally in love with this great horse-faced blue-stocking.” The most fascinating tidbit for me was learning about Eliot’s epistolary relationship with a Scottish fan, Alexander Main, who had a stalkerish obsession with her and even wrote a book entitled Wise, Witty and Tender Sayings of George Eliot reducing her literary lines into pithy aphorisms. Eliot seemed to have been flattered by his idolization and even encouraged the relationship.

Mead first read the book when she was seventeen. She grew up in a provincial setting not too different from the fictional Middlemarch and like Dorothea yearned to pursue her ambitions and make sense of her life.  And like the heroine of Middlemarch, she has a relationship with an older scholarly man. She compares her parents’ stable marriage to that of Fred Vincy and Mary Garth’s loyal relationship. Not only does she find parallels with the characters but also with Eliot and her life. Eliot thinks of Lewes’ three sons as her own and Mead herself marries a man who has three sons whom she adores. I felt this was the weak part of the memoir. Some of the links she establishes with her own life seem tenuous and although she provides us with juicy details about Eliot’s life, she doesn’t disclose much about her own which seems so lackluster compared to that of the author she reveres. I would say that a memoir is somewhat of a misnomer for this book and it would fit better under the genre of biography.

What I did enjoy was discovering a kindred spirit- an avid reader whose love of the written word shines through every page. She frequents libraries and book stores poring through manuscripts- she delights in reading lines changed later by Eliot and analyzes how they would have altered the import of the plot. She spends hours looking through Eliot’s notebook in the rare book collection of the New York Public Library and embarks on literary pilgrimages to Nuneaton and Coventry to inhabit the world of her idol. I also found Mead’s excessive admiration of Eliot endearing when she jumps to her defence for all the criticism she faced from her contemporaries for both her personal and professional life.

Mead’s book illuminates her own life along with Eliot’s and shows us how the fictional world collides with the real world. Life imitates art just as art imitates life. It added a new dimension to my understanding of George Eliot and Middlemarch.  I thought about my own favorite books and what they mean to me. What a beautiful feeling it is to connect with a writer from another time and space and equally beautiful it is to connect with a fellow bibliophile from another time and space!