Matthias Stom, “Young Man Reading”
Friday
Tomorrow is the fifth anniversary of my father’s death. To remember him, I share one of his poems about reading.
My father read to my brothers and me virtually every night when we were growing up, passing along a passion that became our own. In “The Retiring Candle,” he imagines an introverted candle retreating to a quiet place to read.
The poem plays off of Jesus’s words in Matthew 5:15:
Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.” In other words, do not hide your talents but share them with the world.
My father shared his talents with the world, including his teaching, his scholarship, his efforts on behalf of social justice (especially the civil rights movement), his poetry, his painting, his dinner parties, and his wit, intelligence and enthusiasm. I loved having him for a father and, as a child, I wanted to be exactly like him.
Yet I can understand why, for all his outgoing nature, part of him always wanted to retire and lose himself in a good book. He felt nurtured by literature, especially poetry, and would have found bliss at such moments.
The Retiring Candle
by Scott Bates
A Candle
Burned under
A bushel
He did not let his light shine forth
Among Men
He did not even let his light shine forth
Among Potatoes
The bushel was empty
(Being upside down)
And somewhat stuffy besides
They all called down to him
To come up on deck
And get some air
They wanted him to be the life of the party
To shine
Illuminate eternal verities
Set the world on fire
But no
He politely declined
He didn’t want to set the world on fire
All he wanted to do was stay down in the hold
And smoke
And curl up with a good book
Which he did
He smoked and curled up with
The poems of Yevtushenko
The Theory of the Leisure Class
Perrault the Duc de la Rochefoucauld
Erewhon and Through the Looking Glass
Also assorted Elizabethan sonnets
When he had finished
He put himself out
And went to sleep
Jorge Luis Borges once said that he “always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” When my father’s candle flickered out and he went to sleep, I imagine him making his way to that library.