How great literature can change your life

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Saturday

In the film Dead Poets Society, the Robin Williams character informs his all-male English class that the purpose of poetry is to “woo women.” Needless to say, this is more a tactic to sell poetry to adolescents than a truth statement. Nor can I claim to have used poetry to woo my wife Julia, who today celebrates her 73^rd birthday today. Nevertheless, it did play a role.

We were in our junior year at Carleton College and Julia, through my roommate, had invited me to join a poetry reading group she had started. I dutifully came, read the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo”—the first stanza of which I recited by heart—but then informed her that my work on the school newspaper was so time-consuming that I could participate in anything else. And that appeared to be that.

The Hopkins poem, which is very bouncy and alliterative, is not exactly woman-wooing material, given that it is about the evanescence of beauty. Here’s how it begins:

How to keep–is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere
known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, láce, latch
or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, . . . from vanishing
away?

Although nothing further happened between Julia and me at that point, she was impressed with what she saw as my poetic soul. In other words, the seeds had been sown for our future relationship, which started up the following March. By the summer we had decided to get married.

Poetry has played a major role in our marriage, beginning with the erotic D. H. Lawrence poem that we had someone read at our wedding (“Tortoise Shout”). Sometimes poetry has entered in unexpected ways. I recall one time when I had been an insensitive jerk, going out with graduate friends on a sudden impulse and not asking Julia along. Julia was asleep in bed by the time I returned home, but she had left 20 angry poems plastered all over our apartment (numbered, so I knew what order to read them in) letting me know how she felt. For Julia, poetry has always been a major way of expressing her deepest feelings.

I too have always used poetry to celebrate special occasions with her (although not my own, not being the poet she is). Which brings me to today’s birthday poem.

I’m sharing one of the birthday poems that Jonathan Swift wrote for Esther Johnson (“Stella”), whom he first met when she was a girl (he was 14 years her senior) and to whom he may or may not have been married. (It’s crazy that we don’t know for sure.) Swift wrote a birthday poem for Stella each of the last ten years of her life, and although they always have the bantering tone that is characteristic of Swif’s poetry, the last one he wrote—not long before she died at 46—has an unexpectedly serious side. As he puts it, “Accept for once some serious lines.”

One of the wonderful things about being married to Julia for fifty years has been a growing tenderness. The highs and lows have evened out, mellowing (to borrow a line from Langston Hughes) to a golden note. Every day I find myself feeling grateful that she is in my life. I think that’s what Swift is feeling as well in this last poem.

To set up a contrast with what he wrote previously, here are the opening lines of his first birthday poem, written ten years earlier when Stella would have been 36. Note that he points out she’s aging and gaining weight:

Stella this day is thirty-four,
(We shan’t dispute a year or more:)
However, Stella, be not troubled,
Although thy size and years are doubled
Since first I saw thee at sixteen,
The brightest virgin on the green;
So little is thy form declined;
Made up so largely in thy mind.

And now for the last poem, written when he knew she didn’t have much time left. It begins by deciding not to talk about either her illness and his own aging:

This day, whate’er the Fates decree,
Shall still be kept with joy by me:
This day then let us not be told,
That you are sick, and I grown old;
Nor think on our approaching ills,
And talk of spectacles and pills;
Tomorrow will be time enough
To hear such mortifying stuff.Y
et, since from reason may be brought
A better and more pleasing thought,
Which can, in spite of all decays,
Support a few remaining days;
From not the gravest of divines
Accept for once some serious lines. 

If we can’t look forward, he then notes, at least we can look back:  

Although we now can form no more
Long schemes of life, as heretofore;
Yet you, while time is running fast,
Can look with joy on what is past. 

In a somewhat convoluted argument (so I’m skipping the first half of the next stanza), Swift examines different ways of looking at virtue. One of its advantages, he contends, is that it gives us something comforting to look back on. It leaves behind 

Some lasting pleasure in the mind,
Which, by remembrance, will assuage
Grief, sickness, poverty, and age;
And strongly shoot a radiant dart
To shine through life’s declining part. 

Stella, he says, has much virtue to look back upon, acting providentially to help people in need:  

Say, Stella, feel you no content,
Reflecting on a life well spent?
Your skillful hand employed to save
Despairing wretches from the grave;
And then supporting with your store
Those whom you dragg’d from death before?
So Providence on mortals waits,
Preserving what it first creates.
Your generous boldness to defend
An innocent and absent friend;
That courage which can make you just
To merit humbled in the dust;
The detestation you express
For vice in all its glittering dress… 

When I read these lines, I think of how Julia too works unstintingly on behalf of other people. I sensed that she had this commitment when I first met her (at the time she was training to be a middle school and high school teacher), and so it has turned out. Where she sees people needing help, she always steps forward. 

After a few comments on how Stella is stoically enduring her illness,  in part because she can look back at “a life well-spent,” Swift concludes by talking about how much she has meant to him. I “glad would your suffering share,” he tells her—and because she has taken such good care of him, he is in a position to express his appreciation:   

O then, whatever Heaven intends,
Take pity on your pitying friends!
Nor let your ills affect your mind,
To fancy they can be unkind.
Me, surely me, you ought to spare,
Who gladly would your suffering share;
Or give my scrap of life to you,
And think it far beneath your due;
You, to whose care so oft I owe
That I’m alive to tell you so.

I use this poem of appreciation to tell Julia how much she means to me. Happy birthday, beautiful!