A poem about love?
I believe that’s already been done.
How about, instead of a poem about human romance, a prose passage of surpassing beauty about love of the world?
It’s by John Malcolm Brinnin, a writer who lived in Key West for many years, and died there a decade ago.
Brinnin described Key West as “a town at the end of the line that reveled in squalor, cultivated waywardness, and, calling itself Conch Republic, regarded Florida as an enemy country, somewhere toward the north.”
Here he recalls a high point from his life of travel on board ships. The passage starts with the September date. He’s on the Queen Elizabeth.
Sheepish, in the thrall of sentiment, the sentimentalist joins other sentimentalists on board to stand and stare with reverence at a sudden brilliant break in the seamless immensity of the ocean… You see I’m using his phrases, his beautiful words… How does he make his little narrative so beautiful?
First, concision. Each perfect-length paragraph contains only the moments and images and sentiments necessary to convey his exultation, his adoration of a world of stillness and a world of sublime interruptions of stillness.
[UPDATE: Here’s a little something I’m adding a day after I posted this.
Note one important reason Brinnin’s able to keep things tight and brief: His feelings don’t predominate. Nowhere will you find I felt; my heart went pitapat; I was reminded of my Aunt Tillie, my first sexual encounter, the Titanic, the souls who’d died in the construction of those ships; the majesty of God … Like all great writers, Brinnin knows that it’s mainly about the world outside yourself. You can certainly earn narcissism points. UD ain’t saying you can’t talk about yourself at all. But you’ve got to earn those points. And best of all is not having to do narcissism at all, but somehow letting the way you describe the world outside of yourself convey your history and consciousness. That‘s the ticket. Few people are naturals at this. That – aside from the intrinsic pleasure of the activity, of course – is why a serious writer will want to read someone like Brinnin.]
Next, close and sensitive observation of human emotions. I know so well that sheepishness, that sly glancing at other people gathered, like you, at a transcendent event. You know you and the others will stand there for hours if you need to, into the very late night if you need to, because you’re passionate about this experience. You want it very badly. Your passion somewhat embarrasses you, since it feels extreme, and intimate — private to you and your aesthetic and even spiritual obsessions. Yet here are these other strange folk who seem to share your strangeness… In few words, Brinnin captures the combination of determination to see, and awareness of how odd you are for the fierceness of the determination.
And then, you know — the prose.
They stand apart from one another and do not speak, their eyes fixed on the visible horizon to the west as the vibration of the ship gives a slightly stroboscopic blur to everything they see.
After the strobe goes off, and moving objects are suddenly stationary, they make a weird blur against a white screen… And this idea of pausing things, of the greatest experiences actually being those not of dynamism, but of the earth stopping for us, so we can really look, so we can for a privileged moment take in the truth of reality — this will be the central idea of the passage, and of Brinnin’s essay altogether about the wonder of travel.
The paradox of travel, as he would have it, is that by incessant motion we press toward immobility, toward Wordsworth’s spots of time in which things become clear.
But in terms of style: Notice the repeated use of the letter B: visible, vibration, stroboscopic, blur. Subtle, but it creates a soothing rhythm.
The mid-Atlantic sky is windless, a dome of hard stars; the ocean glows, an immense conjunction of inseparable water and air.
See the poetic glory of this prose: mid/is/wind… The internal sounds that gently repeat, creating a floaty trance-like effect in us, as we stand alongside the writer on the floaty trance-like ship. And then five one-syllable words: a dome of hard stars, their monolithic feel spectacularly right for the simple uncrackable hardness of that upper dome. The sound of the O‘s in the ocean glows… And then the idea of conjunction, natural conjunction between water and air, but also the conjunction the writer is about to witness, between the two enormous ships.
These ten or twelve of the faithful in their shadowy stances might be postulants on a Vermont hillside, waiting in their gowns for the end of the world.
Still the self-ribbing about the deep sentiment of the occasion. For clearly this is a religious moment, though the writer seems a secular person. He deals with his inner dissonance, if you will, by mild humor at his own expense.
Notice also, in terms of the greatness of the prose, the oddity of certain choices: Vermont, gowns.
Almost as if she were climbing the watery slopes of the world, the oncoming Queen shows one wink at her topmost mast, then two.
Well, so, this is brilliant, if you ask me. He’s already given us Vermont, so the slopes, even in the flatness of his surroundings, seem weirdly okay. And then we get this amazing fanciful image: climbing the watery slopes of the world. The watery slopes of the world! Climbing water. So strange, and so beautiful. I’ve never seen that image, that thought, before.
The huge funnels glow in their Cunard red, the basso-profundo horns belt out a sound that has the quality less of a salute than of one long mortal cry.
The ocean glows, the funnels glow — the world as an immense conjunction of inseparables aglow. Seeing the whole thing. The thing whole. Huge, Cunard, profundo, salute — playing out the long cry of the letter U as he then turns to the cry of the horns. A human cry as well as a non-human — a world in which all is conjoined.
As the darkness closes over and the long wakes are joined, the sentimentalists stand for a while watching the ocean recover its seamless immensity. Then one by one, like people dispersing downhill after a burial, they find their ways to their cabins and close their doors.
The Vermont hillside again, and people walking down the hill at the end of their vision. Yet still conjunction, as the long wakes are joined. And the word wake joined with the idea of burial makes us think of the two meanings of the word… This is an experience which has jolted sleepy people late at night on a soothing ship awake; but they have also just witnessed the end of something. They are standing at the wake of the final meeting of the two ships; they have just marked that burial. The flat ocean again covers all in its seamless immensity — a seamlessness that seems to shut us out. But the watchers have for a moment felt the earth and the ocean embracing them, taking them into a heart-stopping brilliance.