Lake Eva, Sewanee, Tennessee
Friday
Yesterday Julia and I buried the ashes of writer Rachel Kranz, a dear friend who died a year ago. Her remains were divided between three who were close to her, and I chose to bury those allotted to me on the shore of Lake Eva, which sits on the edge of a bluff in the Southern Cumberland Mountains. Rachel was planning to visit us there but died of ovarian cancer before it could happen.
As I dug into the ground, I thought of the second stanza of Wordsworth’s “A slumber did my spirit seal.” In the first stanza, Wordsworth writes that “Lucy,” the subject of several poems, seemed beyond “the touch of earthly years.” Now, however, she is firmly embedded in that earth.
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
Rachel wasn’t transcendent in the same way as the ethereal Lucy, but as one of the most vibrant people I have ever known, she too seemed beyond “earthly years.” As I joined her ashes with rocks and stones and tree roots, the lack of motion and force was all wrong. She was a woman of action, not one to be passively “rolled round.”
I contrasted Wordsworth’s chilling detachment with another passage, the final lines of Wuthering Heights. The narrator visits the graves of Catherine, Linton, and Heathcliff after having learned of their tempestuous histories. To his surprise, he finds a deep peace:
I lingered round [the gravestones], under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.
Since Rachel too was always enmeshed in some drama or other, the idea that she was “at rest” consoled me. And thinking this I surfaced yet another passage, this from Yeats’s “Lake Isle of Innisfree”:
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
Dear Rachel, may you be at peace in this quiet spot, the lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore. You reside forever in our deep heart’s core.
