Rock Island, IL
The earth’s “annual stunt of renewal”—to borrow a phrase from Updike—is fully underway here. It’s pretty far along, actually. The first “green” of nature, which as Frost said is actually gold, is no longer gold. It’s fully green now.
My apple tree blossomed so quickly this year, and with such speed and brevity, that I barely had a chance to regard its radiant flashing white against the regal purple of the Redbud tree in front of it, now also green.
And this puts me to thinking once again that Frost’s great strength as a poet was that he always got the details right: Nature’s “early leaf’s a flower, / But only so an hour.”
And yet some of that early gold of which he wrote still abides. You can see it in the air—if you can see at all. I can see it through a kind of liquid irritation that passes this time of year for sight and that will continue to pass for sight until the grass has finished going to seed. Until that time I’ll be the willing sufferer of itching eyes and sneezing fits—the willing sufferer, for the earth, thank God, is performing its annual stunt of renewal.
Each year at about this I’m a little nervous the stunt will fail. I always wonder whether this will be the year the big green thing doesn’t happen.
This wondering is more like an intellectual exercise or an occasion to indulge in what I would call a healthy little dose of fear. But things aren’t so bad yet. “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things,” as Hopkins said. “The Holy Ghost over the bent / World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.” Or, to paraphrase, there is shelter under the shadow of a wing but also a divine intention at work. You might say, if you were inclined to, that the three-personed God with whom Donne did battle acts for us but also thinks toward us.
True, it doesn’t appear we’re going to get a mulligan in the Gulf of Mexico this summer—and, oddly enough, no TV preacher has declared this technological disaster a vengeful act of God such as Katrina obviously was—but the big green thing does seem to be happening. We commuters and buyers of plastic have dodged another bullet.
Here at Casa Cashdrain our herbs are in. Most of our flowers are in—save for the sweep of Impatiens that by mid-summer will form a curving swath in a riot of colors along the front of the house. We’re waiting to put them in until we get our load of horseshit. The soil needs it. We all need it. If there are going to be annual stunts of renewal, we’ll need horseshit.
We’ll need it because springtime isn’t really a stunt. It isn’t an escape trick or a sleight of hand or anything like that. And it certainly isn’t a series of mechanisms responding to other mechanisms in the absence of dove-like brooding. It isn’t anything but what it is—a shadowy picture of that greater reality, death and resurrection—and we must be very careful when, in trying to understand it, we say it is, or is like, something else.
It is true that nature takes its color from the eye—a sober coloring from the eye, as Wordsworth said. And Pope reminded us that all seems yellow to the jaundiced eye.
But is it also true that there is little we can do about this relation of the eye to the world except be careful. There is little we can do about our participating the phenomena except be careful. There is little we can do about the fact that the world we have is, in part, the world that in naming we have conjured—except be careful.
The poet who said that the world “will flame out, like shining from shook foil”—he was being careful.
As was the poet who said that
leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief.
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
And I reckon they both knew the relation between apples and road apples.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
There is another poem by Frost which your post brings to mind: “A Girl’s Garden“. It begins:
A NEIGHBOR of mine in the village
Likes to tell how one spring
When she was a girl on the farm, she did
A childlike thing.
One day she asked her father
To give her a garden plot
To plant and tend and reap herself,
And he said, “Why not?”
In casting about for a corner
He thought of an idle bit
Of walled-off ground where a shop had stood,
And he said, “Just it.”
And he said, “That ought to make you
An ideal one-girl farm,
And give you a chance to put some strength
On your slim-jim arm.”
It was not enough of a garden,
Her father said, to plough;
So she had to work it all by hand,
But she don’t mind now.
She wheeled the dung in the wheelbarrow
Along a stretch of road;
But she always ran away and left
Her not-nice load.
As usual, Frost comes up with a perfect circumlocution to express some part of the reality of rural life, which “nice” people tend to want to bury. In the final analysis, Frost’s circumlocution may be more preferable to literary people than is your simple colloquialism.
Stay gold pony boy