… English Masterpieces series of books
that came out in the ‘sixties.
She used them when was she was an
undergraduate at Northwestern;
and her sister-in-law, Joanna, used
them as an undergraduate at Boston
University. UD found
on the shelves in Shady Hill Square
(she’s just back from Cambridge for
Easter) this volume:

It includes a great poem by Archibald
MacLeish that she’d never seen before.

*******************************

Eleven

And summer mornings the mute child, rebellious,
Stupid, hating the words, the meanings, hating
The Think now, Think, the Oh but Think! would leave
On tiptoe the three chairs on the verandah
And crossing tree by tree the empty lawn
Push back the shed door and upon the sill
Stand pressing out the sunlight from his eyes
And enter and with outstretched fingers feel
The grindstone and behind it the bare wall
And turn and in the corner on the cool
Hard earth sit listening. And one by one,
Out of the dazzled shadow in the room
The shapes would gather, the brown plowshare, spades,
Mattocks, the polished helves of picks, a scythe
Hung from the rafters, shovels, slender tines
Glinting across the curve of sickles—shapes
Older than men were, the wise tools, the iron
Friendly with earth. And sit there quiet, breathing
The harsh dry smell of withered bulbs, the faint
Odor of dung, the silence. And outside
Beyond the half-shut door the blind leaves
And the corn moving. And at noon would come,
Up from the garden, his hard crooked hands
Gentle with earth, his knees still earth-stained, smelling
Of sun, of summer, the old gardener, like
A priest, like an interpreter, and bend
Over his baskets.

And they would not speak:
They would say nothing. And the child would sit there
Happy as though he had no name, as though
He had been no one: like a leaf, a stem,
Like a root growing—

*****************************

And is a great poetic word. And death shall have no dominion, etc., etc. You first meet it maybe in the Bible. And God spoke… and… and… See how every sentence in this poem starts with and? And why?

Why? Because the poet wants to convey the spontaneous, stream of consciousness, sudden memory trace feel of the mental and emotional moment the poem captures. It’s how we narrate, isn’t it? I remember I’d run from the porch and my books and my schoolwork and I’d run across the part of the yard that only had trees in it and I’d flee all that emptiness and abstraction for the bracing reality of the objects in the shed and I loved the way they slowly emerged from the darkness of the shed, and the way my summer-saturated eyes had to adjust to the darkness… And the way they rose from the dark world and took on a kind of super-existence… I remember that…

These were the wise tools, earth-friendly; not like my effortful cerebral exercises, my noisy verbal efforts to make the world mean something. They just were, sustaining silently on their surfaces the old truths of life. The gardener, adept in the soil and the soil’s tools, was the priest of the real world, interpreting its meanings with his gestures. I felt the real world inside myself as I sat there silently with him, felt my own plantlike stirrings and vibrancies. My sheer life – needing no name, and, like the leaves, happily blind to the convolutions of the human realm – began to twine upward into the real sunlight in that shed.