tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1470115786787140224.post7478686334194155332..comments2023-05-24T04:41:24.313-04:00Comments on heard, half-heard, in the stillness: This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.sarahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04796940410833284009noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1470115786787140224.post-85668558788431531932012-04-29T20:59:25.241-04:002012-04-29T20:59:25.241-04:00What, April's over already? Well, this is a po...What, April's over already? Well, this is a poem about the passage of time. And, if we're to judge by those lilacs, its particular slice of time must be April.<br /><i>When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed...<br />In the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near the white-wash’d palings,<br />Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich green,<br />With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong I love,<br />With every leaf a miracle</i>.<br /><br />But Whitman's America is gone, like Lincoln himself, like Frost's lost towns, like all the past.<br /><br />I like the way the poem can be read as either about a journey into a personal past, or a cultural one, or both. One's own childhood, or a supposedly more innocent past era, seem appealing to those who are worn out with the "too much for us" of modern life. Yet neither childhood nor the past looked simple at the time; we've just forgotten the details. We're our own unreliable guides on that road going backward.<br /><br />And nature outlives us all. People and towns are nothing to the glacier that wrote the rocks and is still sending its cold winds down the mountains. <br /><br />Neither the children's playhouse nor the house in earnest can be lived in forever. But beyond both of them-- farther back in time, farther forward on this journey-- maybe something "lofty and original," source and end, can still be found.<br /><br /><br />We can't go back to the simplicity of early childhood, or believe exactly as our ancestors believed, or lose our selves in an insentient natural world. Maybe that broken cup is a mockery and a travesty.<br /><br />But maybe, as another poet put it, <i>These fragments I have shored against my ruin</i>. Maybe, if we're our own unreliable guides, we're also the only ones who can retrieve that broken shard of our past selves and make of it a holy grail. <br /><br />Maybe it's still possible to<br /><i>Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.</i><br /><br />Eh, I'm waffling here. And in another day, it'll be time to bring out the May poems.Amaryllisnoreply@blogger.com