Fine Day in June

 

AND what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days; Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune, And over it softly her warm ear lays; Whether we look, or whether we listen, We hear life murmur, or see it glisten; Every clod feels a stir of might, An instinct within it that reaches and towers, And, groping blindly above it for light, Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers; The flush of life may well be seen Thrilling back over hills and valleys; The cowslip startles in meadows green, The buttercup catches the sun in its chalice, And there's never a leaf nor a blade too mean To be some happy creature's palace; The little bird sits at his door in the sun, Atilt like a blossom among the leaves, And lets his illumined being o'errun With the deluge of summer it receives; His mate feels the eggs beneath her wings, And the heart in her dumb breast flutters and sings; He sings to the wide world, and she to her nest,- In the nice ear of Nature which song is the best?

 

That is the first stanza of the first poem I remember studying and admiring.  In fact I still have snatches of it by memory.  Its author was James Russell Lowell, a once eminent figure of the mid nineteenth century and in his day considered one of America’s great poets, perhaps even our greatest.  Believe it or not he was once taught in the junior grades of American public schools.  So I have among my readers, several of them like myself of a certain age, who may at least have heard of the poet, but I think on the whole he is pretty well forgotten.  I doubt if any of my English majors at Princeton would even react to his name.  But when the first beautiful days of June arrive, I myself always remember his “June” poem, and am even likely to quote a line or two.  It is the perfect expression of June’s freshness and gentleness as it introduces the welcome doldrums of real summer.

 

The relevance of all this may become a little clearer when I turn to a little experience of the last two weeks.  First you have to know that we have on the long south side of our one-story home a bluestone patio, perhaps twenty feet square, fairly recently installed.  A long backyard slowly descends from the patio to a distant stone wall, beyond which is an open field and a quarter-mile path through woods to the lake.  There is quite a bit of small wildlife in the yard—squirrels, chipmunks and rabbits, mainly, but with foxes, deer, skunks, and opposums by no means unknown.  The bird life is prolific and varied.  And all this is highly visible from indoors through a wall of large sliding glass window/doors.  In spring and summer we have the delightful experience of viewing the Peaceable Kingdom from our living room sofa.

 

A bunny and a squirrel were independently cavorting on different sides of the stone patio.  They were apparently unaware, as was I, that a red-tail hawk was also watching their activities.  Suddenly, and with amazing alacrity this fellow swooped down upon the little rabbit, delivering a blow that was utterly incapacitating but not instantly mortal, leaving the rabbit feebly struggling within the expanded fullness of the bird’s expanded wing.  The hawk, while pinning the dying rabbit to the patio stones, tore at its furry underbelly with  its gruesome talons.  We watched all this with a kind of infirm fascination.  Though we did nothing to intervene, two bluejays, appearing out of I know not where, did.  They attacked the hawk mid-execution.  I doubt that they were motivated by an innate love of rabbits, but they clearly did not want this raptor anywhere around their own bailiwick or accustomed turf.  With amazing dexterity, they repeatedly dive-bombed the hawk.  The attack was doubtless more annoyance than mortal danger, but a serious annoyance.  After a brief time the hawk flew up to a perch beyond our line of sight.  By then his prey was quite dead, its abandoned corpse visibly mangled.  The jays disappeared as suddenly as they had earlier appeared, not to be seen again that day.  We were left with a dead rabbit, its intestines visible at its torn stomach, and a couple of blood-smeared flagstones.  The episode was over—so we thought.  Certainly we hoped so. But even as we were clucking over the Darwinian drama, the hawk descended once more to the arena of his abattoir.  This time he was not alone.  He was accompanied by a trim female hawk, presumably his mate.  This pair then went seriously to work on the lapine cadaver.  They appeared to be tearing sizeable fleshy gobbets, including some furry ones, which they then swallowed down with apparent relish.  What remained after their energetic breakfast was a maimed but surprisingly tidy rabbit residue, with the vague appearance of a tee-shirt as it comes out moist but not dripping from the spinning cycle of a washing machine.

 

Small things may remind you of larger ones.  On All Saints’ Day of 1755, at about 9:30 in the morning, there occurred an event in Lisbon that perhaps permanently undermined the old Christian idea of a providential universe.  A devastating earthquake, accompanied by uncontrollable conflagrations, pretty well leveled the city with enormous loss of life.  Many died in the crowded churches, where masses were being conducted in celebration of the major religious holiday.  Death was dealt out by fire, flood, and hundreds of tons of falling stone.  News of this disaster, as it rapidly spread throughout Europe, had a devastating effect on what might be call conventional Christian morale.  For many throughout Europe, including the six-year-old Goethe who was one of many to have later written about its effect on his tender world view, it was an event that seemed to challenge the most fundamental belief in divine Providence.

 

Tennyson, author of the indelible phrase “nature red in tooth and claw,” was perhaps in his own mind able to defang it with conventional pie-in-the-sky bromides.  There is a lot of that in his famous “In Memoriam,” his poetic monument to a once-in-a-lifetime friendship and the poignancy of early death.  We ourselves don’t like to think too deeply about the jungle morality we see exemplified every day in the popular press.  After all, there is indeed a special perfection to many June days, and I hope to be able to catch glimpses of it during the two weeks of June still to come.  The more sinister implications of the ruthlessness of the natural order but rarely force themselves onto your garden patio, but when they do I have to sit up and take notice.

 

 

 

April Poets

We have entered April, a month of poetic significances, but also of deceptions.  “April is the cruelest month,” writes Eliot in that part of his poem called “The Burial of the Dead.”   April comes “breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.”   It is in the mix of memory and desire, or at any rate in the imperfect ratio between them, that the danger of deception lies.  The last two days of March here were warm and sunny.  Some of the early daffodils were already out, but now they came on in a riot.   And the forsythia, until now a mere golden-green haze, popped overnight into full gold.  “The flowers have appeared in our land, the time of pruning has come” says the singer of the Song of Songs.   “The voice of the turtle is heard in our land.” That’s the King James Version, of course, where the “turtle” is Tudor English for the turtle dove. At the Fleming homestead, however, it was real turtles, two of them, Hector and Chloë, who were suckered into thinking that spring was really here.  They are not much for voice, actually, but they waddled out of their hibernation in our enclosed atrium to sniff the air and have a paddle in the pool.  As I have done no serious yard work for months, the atrium is a real mess; but it was still a jolly scene, turtles strutting in the sunshine.  Then, most cruelly indeed, at nightfall on Sunday, the temperature fell again to freezing; April Fool’s day broke bright but chill.  The turtles had returned to the drawing board stage of spring under their hibernatory blankets of dead leaves.

The greatest of April poems in English—to which Eliot obviously alludes--is undoubtedly the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer with its famous first sentence: “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote/The droghte of March has perced to the roote…”   As I used to make my living teaching this poem, its rhetorically gaudy opening has for me a special significance.  It is the one bit of Middle English known to the general public; most educated people of sixty winters or more learned it in high school, back in the days when people used to learn things there, and many can still quote a large portion of it.  Can and do.  It’s quite an opening line: nine couplets and a hundred and twenty words long.  Despite the fact that all it “says” is that people want to go on pilgrimage in April, a surprising amount happens in it, actually, and rather quickly.  Some of my fellow Chaucerians want to deny that Chaucer is an allegorist.  I am not quite sure what they make of “the drought of March.”  Just what March drought is that? I ask.  Chaucer is either an allegorist or a really lousy meteorologist.  The latest statistics I have are from 2018.  In February of that year 64.3 millimeters of rain fell on London, in April 86.3.  In March there were 104.4 millimeters.  Just saying.

There are other poetic months, especially May and June.  The first poem I can remember being made to memorize in school was by the American poet James Russell Lowell.  I don’t think it actually has a title, but our reader called it “June Day.” Lowell is pretty obscure these days, probably better known (if at all) as an abolitionist than as a bard.  He was big in the mid-nineteenth century, but I’m not sure that even I own his works.  To get the text I sought I had to turn to the Internet, where the subject of his poem is defined as “the weather”.  Just like Chaucer, I guess.  It begins by asking the question, “What is so rare as a day in June?”  As our summer vacation began in that month, it was a question some of us could get behind.  But our teacher had very interesting things to say about it.  She told us that the words in poetry often need a little more thought than “ordinary” words may call for. For example, what about the word rare in the first line? she asked.   What rare ordinarily meant was “seldom occurring” but it must mean something else here.  Otherwise the answer to the question, “What is so rare as a day in June?” would be a day in April, September, or November—other months of thirty days.  I’m still pondering the ingenuity of that one, meaning that she had achieved the teacher’s higher goal—getting a student to think, rather than simply telling him what to think.  Then there was the cook-out at which the host asked his friend, Will Shakespeare, how he liked his steak.  O rare Ben Jonson.   I also had to think a little about the third line (Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune), since the meaning of try was not the ordinary one and there was this rather fancy if it be, a form of verbal contingency I could recognize and was happy now to be able to name as “subjunctive”.

One special function of the subjunctive becomes increasingly important with advancing age, and that is the “condition contrary to fact”.  If I were you, blah blah blah.  If all were as it should be, one swallow would a summer make.  At the very least, two turtles would make a spring.