I have enjoyed reading the poetry that was selected over the past month and was particularly helped by the final post referring to a piece by Todd Nelson in the Christian Science Monitor of May 18. It reminded me that I am often as nourished by enlightened responses to poetry as I am by the poetry itself. So Thank You, Todd, for amplifying my enjoyment of e.e. cummings’ delightful poem, written with such a special feel for childhood’s adventures and wonders.
Though I am a few days late, I would like to add my contribution.
There is a little treasure of a book called Doris Peel, Selected Poems 1955 - 1975 which I happened upon in my bookcase a day or two ago. The frontispiece to this book is like a light which illuminates my appreciation of Doris’s poems. It reads in part:
These poems are deceptively simple.
What may seem at first glance to be fragmentary, slight, casual, dipping and
wheeling like the flight of a gull, reveals in the context of its fellow poems
a remarkable centrality of vision, a
structure of relatedness that is both movement and rest, pattern and
unpredictability.
Doris Peel’s work brings to mind T. S. Eliot’s definition of wit in metaphysical poetry as “a tough reasonableness beneath the slight lyrical grace.” The subsurface tension in this case is between a quick-witted woman and a wide-eyed child - that child who, in New Testament terms, can alone receive the kingdom of heaven.
Here
is an extract from an early poem.
I
AM EASILY PERSUADED
by the arrival of angels.
The
feel of them: the sense of a melodious murmuring
in
the air, and the faint stirring
of
wings that will shelter me
if
I am good.
I am much comforted
by the intimation
of an authority
that
has nothing to do with the discipline of nannies.
Angels never scold. Or rap over the knuckles
Somebody who has stumbled. Being, themselves, shaped purely
from light, they are all lightness in performance and presence:
with song, not sermon, their special province
and laughter (I suspect) more native
to their nature than common--or even uncommon--speech. Not
that they resemble, for a split second, those sanguine earthlings
with their tedious insistence on Sunny-Side-Up. Angels
aren't optimists....
Oh, it is altogether otherwise with angels.
...
In what tongue tell
of
a murmuring, a stirring, and that sudden incandescent elation
in
the air? Or of how, long after the visitants have withdrawn
and
room or street appears usual again.
there is a lingering of intimations
all
about, and even the lilt - faint - faint - not yet quite gone -
of
law caught as laughter:
of
power as song.
And
another excerpt, this time from a poem called
WHEN
WILL THE FORGIVING OF IT COME TO PASS?
Palestinian
Village: Occupied Territory
This
gone-from place,
these
windows gaping in a golden glare
of
pitiless sun,
once knew (however poor it was)
life
going on.
Once
brimmed with breath.
Once
throbbed aloud with those
who
held it, passionately - Ishmael deep -
to
be their home.
