Paul Smyth, “Netley Hospital – 1918”
Friday
Yesterday I had something very special to be thankful for. After spending 18 days in the hospital recovering from back surgery, my 91-year-old mother returned home, just in time for Thanksgiving.
The surgery, which involved cutting away some arthritic growth and some scar tissue build-up from previous surgeries, was successful. For the first time in a long time, my mother doesn’t wince in pain every few seconds. The recovery, however, took a while. We thought at one point that she would have to be returned from Sewanee’s local hospital to the hospital in Nashville when spinal fluid started leaking from where they had opened her up. But a second round of stitches appears to have done the trick and now she’s home.
Given the ups and downs of her recovery, I suspect she will appreciate this Amy Lowell poem about “Convalescence.” At one point the survivor is up, then down, and even when he appears to have reached the shore, there is a moment of panic when the retarding waves suck at the weeds that have enmeshed him.
In the end, however, my mother is back where “poppies glow/And sandflies dance their little lives away.” Maybe there is some irony here: we are but short-lived sandflies and our “little lives are rounded with a sleep” (to quote Hamlet). Nevertheless, when we experience the land-winds and feel the sun on our face, we know that life is good.
Welcome home, mama.
Convalescence
By Amy Lowell
From out the dragging vastness of the sea,
Wave-fettered, bound in sinuous seaweed strands,
He toils toward the rounding beach, and stands
One moment, white and dripping, silently,
Cut like a cameo in lazuli,
Then falls, betrayed by shifting shells, and lands
Prone in the jeering water, and his hands
Clutch for support where no support can be.
So up, and down, and forward, inch by inch,
He gains upon the shore, where poppies glow
And sandflies dance their little lives away.
The sucking waves retard, and tighter clinch
The weeds about him, but the land-winds blow,
And in the sky there blooms the sun of May.
Further thoughts: I should have mentioned that this particular convalescent would be a wounded World War I soldier,which means that there is additional irony in the poppies (the killing fields of Flanders) and the sand flies (perhaps, depending on when the poem was written, Gallipoli Beach). In other words, the soldier may convalesce only so that he may be sent out to be wounded again.
Irony allows us to hold on to two ideas at the same time, however. Just because the joy of the moment may be tempered by foreknowledge of what is to come doesn’t mean that it is any the less precious. In fact, just the opposite.
