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Thursday – First Day of Summer
As this is the first day of summer, I’m sharing two delightful summer poems, one celebrating summer moonlight and one summer mornings. In “Moonlight, Summer Moonlight,” Emily Bronte pictures herself lying a bower such as we might encounter in Midsummer Night’s Dream. From that vantage point, she looks up at the moon and at the swaying trees while “the solemn hour of midnight/ Breathes sweet thoughts everywhere”:
Moonlight, Summer Moonlight By Emily Bronte
Tis moonlight, summer moonlight, All soft and still and fair; The solemn hour of midnight Breathes sweet thoughts everywhere,
But most where trees are sending Their breezy boughs on high, Or stooping low are lending A shelter from the sky.
And there in those wild bowers A lovely form is laid; Green grass and dew-steeped flowers Wave gently round her head.
Mary Oliver, meanwhile, reminds her heart that “it’s time to come back from the dark” given that it’s a summer morning, with the hills pink and the roses “opening now their soft dresses”:
Summer Morning Mary Oliver
Heart, I implore you, it’s time to come back from the dark, it’s morning, the hills are pink and the roses whatever they felt
in the valley of night are opening now their soft dresses, their leaves
are shining. Why are you laggard? Sure you have seen this a thousand times,
which isn’t half enough. Let the world have its way with you, luminous as it is
with mystery and pain– graced as it is with the ordinary.
In life Oliver appears to have been bipolar—at least that’s one way to explain her ecstatic highs and depressed lows—and on this summer morning it sounds like she’s reconnecting with a world she lost sight of when she was wandering “in the valley of night.”
Indeed, she’s offering up a summer morning as a way to negotiate our experiences “with mystery and pain.” She assures readers that if they let such a moment “have its way with you, luminous as it is,” they will find grace even in the ordinary. This goes even for things we have seen “a thousand times.”
So yes, give over your heart to both summer moonlight and summer morning.
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Wednesday – Juneteenth
In observance of Juneteenth, the now official holiday celebrating the ending of slavery in the United States, here’s a powerful Margaret Walker poem expressing appreciation for Martin Luther King. First, however, I share a strange connection that my hometown of Sewanee, Tennessee has to the events that transpired in Texas back in 1865.
I grew up surrounded by Kirby-Smiths, who were descendants of the last Confederate general to surrender to Union forces. Our obstetrician, our surgeon, my seventh-grade English teacher, and one of my best friends were all descendants. There was even a Kirby-Smith monument in the middle of town which, mercifully, was finally renamed—and the plaque taken down—a few years ago. First branded a traitor and then receiving a pardon, Kirby-Smith came to Sewanee to become a math professor at the newly opened University of the South.
Kirby-Smith had surrendered in Galveston on June 2, 1865, and it was in Galveston 17 days later where Major General Gordon Granger arrived to inform the slaves that they were all free. Although Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox on April 9, news traveled slowly in those days. Kirby-Smith had been in fact cut off from the rest of the Confederacy ever since Ulysses S. Grant captured Vicksburg in 1863, which meant that parts of Arkansas, Missouri, Texas, and western Louisiana became their own department, known as Kirbysmithdom.
Our featured poet today was born in 1915 in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1963, in response to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, she wrote the following in which she compares King to the Hebrew prophet Amos. As King was well aware, social justice was Amos’s central mission, and the prophet didn’t hesitate to call out anyone who trampled on the poor. At one point in her poem Walker quotes from his angry words:
You have sold the righteous for silver And the poor for a pair of shoes. My God is a mighty avenger And He shall come with His rod in His hand
Even if you don’t know about Amos, you’ll recognize the line that shows up in King’s speech. It was a line that buoyed oppressed Israelites in Amos’s time and it has buoyed millions ever since it was delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial:”Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”
Here’s the poem:
Amos, 1963 By Margaret Walker
Amos is a Shepherd of suffering sheep; A pastor preaching in the depths of Alabama Preaching social justice to the Southland Preaching to the poor a new gospel of love With the words of a god and the dreams of a man Amos is our loving Shepherd of the sheep Crying out to the stricken land “You have sold the righteous for silver And the poor for a pair of shoes. My God is a mighty avenger And He shall come with His rod in His hand.” Preaching to the persecuted and the disinherited millions Preaching love and justice to the solid southern land Amos is a Prophet with a vision of brotherly love With a vision and a dream of the red hills of Georgia “When Justice shall roll down like water And righteousness like a mighty stream.” Amos is our Shepherd standing in the Shadow of our God Tending his flocks all over the hills of Albany And the seething streets of Selma and of bitter Birmingham.
King’s speech was delivered almost a century after Texas slaves learned they were free, sad evidence that the arc of history, while it may bend toward justice, bends with excruciating slowness. Walker, however, is heartened to see it bending.
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Tuesday
“The Supreme Court just effectively legalized machine guns,” read the Vox headline while Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne wrote, “Conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court have decided that more Americans must die in mass shootings because they have a quibble over the word ‘function.’” At issue was a 6-3 ruling by the Court’s rightwing justice overturning a Trump-era ban (!) on bump stocks.
In 2017 a Las Vegas killer carried out America’s deadliest mass shooting in its history (which is really saying something) after using a bump stock to convert his rifle into a super deadly weapon. He killed 58 people and wounded over 500 in mere minutes.
I think of a poem that my father wrote years ago critiquing the NRA. Due to corrupt leadership, the NRA is now only a shadow of its former self, making the poem somewhat dated, but the organization succeeded in its major mission, which was getting the GOP to internalize its fanaticism. It even got the rightwing members of the Supreme Court to sign on.
Referring to a 1986 law banning machine guns, liberal Justice Sonia Sotamayor lambasted her colleagues for using an “artificially narrow definition” to “hamstring[ ] the Government’s efforts to keep machineguns from gunmen like the Las Vegas shooter.” She predicted “deadly consequences.”
I’m reposting my father’s poem, along with my previous commentary. He was familiar with toxic masculinity, having seen instances of it when a soldier in France and Germany during World War II.
Reprinted from Oct. 3, 2017 (slightly amended)
I share today the angriest poem my genial father ever wrote, which takes America’s leading gun organization to task. In “Ballad of the National Rifle Association,” he unloads on the gun group for the ways that it exploits white male anxieties. The poem was “triggered” by a gun ad in Gun World that guaranteed “shooting satisfaction.”
“Ballad” is a complex mixture of fantasies and fears, combining macho displays of supremacy, erotic dreams of manly sexual performance, and various emasculation anxieties. Stanza two is filled with power rape fantasies (“Whang her bang her get your action”).
At one point my father imagines Hollywood scenarios of protecting virginal daughters while cleansing the world of urban “putrefaction.” In this drama, which one sees in D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, the virginal daughters are the longing for a lost innocence while putrefaction is the black Other that makes anxious whites feel small and fearful. Donald Trump, of course, plays on fears of threatening African Americans (for instance, his description of urban neighborhoods as “hell holes”), and, right on cue, after the Las Vegas shooting Trump spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders mentioned Chicago violence as a reason not to enact gun control measures.
The poem’s deep dive into the psychology of gun fanatics also examines revenge fantasies against chaotic nature and against parents—which is to say, against the fathers who mock their sons’ sensitivity and the mothers whose sensitivity they both long for and hate (because it makes them feel vulnerable). “Pistol Pentheus” is Euripides’s uptight control freak in The Bacchae, who tries to assert his manhood and is torn apart by his Dionysus-crazed mother. There is also an Oedipal reference to shooting the castrating father before he shoots you and adds your “skin” to his collection.
The utopian vision of a new Jerusalem is a power fantasy designed to override anxieties: a militarized America is very good at “winging rockets,” whether at enemies or at the moon. (“It’s natural the boys should whoop it up for so huge a phallic triumph,” W. H. Auden wrote about the moon landing.) My father’s ballad was written in the 1990’s but is impressively prescient given how commonplace apocalyptic language has become among many Christian gun-toting enthusiasts.
My father writes the poem in a southern accent. Having spent most of his life in southern Tennessee, he saw up close how susceptible poor Appalachian whites are to NRA fear mongering. The poem appeared in his collection The ZYX of Political Sex (Highlander Research and Education Center, 1999) so expect the language to be explicit.
Incidentally, Lucille Thornburgh, to whom the poem is dedicated, was a longtime union activist.
Ballad of the National Rifle Association By Scott Bates
In memory of Lucille Thornburgh, dedicated worker for social justice, who liked this poem.
“For your shooting satisfaction . . .” –from an ad in Gun World
Pistol small arm handgun gun Trooper Trailsman Frontier Scout Smith & Wesson Remington Combat Cobra Knockabout Browning Sheridan Colt Snap-Out Single-six and Double-action TOP PERFORMANCE SUPER CLOUT Give you shooting satisfaction.
Pistol short arm peter prick Rod avenger redmeat dong Johnnie joystick reamer dick Dummy fixer hicky prong Swinging sirloin two feet long Have a similar attraction Every boy can be King Kong With a shooting satisfaction.
Pistol-heist her hunt her down Line her up and ream her right Ride her home get off your gun Shag her shoot her up tonight Jump her hump her out of sight Whang her bang her get your action Fill her full of dynamite For your shooting satisfaction.
Pistol Po-lice save your pity For the dirty rotten hood Gun him down in Inner City Like they do in Hollywood Save your daughter’s maidenhood And pulverize the putrefaction Trash him baby trash him good For your shooting satisfaction.
Pistol Pentheus git yer maw Afore she tears you limb from limb Beat yer pappy to the draw And incidentally get him The sonavabitch who wants yer skin To add it to his rug collection Blast yer pappy Jungle Jim Fer yer shootin’ satisfaction.
Pistol Patriot shoot your wad The world the moon your mouth your brother Build Jerusalem by God Winging rockets at each other Love your country like a mother Love your enemy dog-fashion Love your neighbor till he smother In your shooting satisfaction.
Envoy
Pistol pirate cool tycoon Do us all a benefaction Go take a flying fuck at the moon For our shooting satisfaction!
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Monday
A former colleague at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, Jennifer Cognard-Black, is out with a beautiful new anthology entitled Good Eats: 32 Writers on Eating Ethically. As the book jacket announces, the essays “seek to understand the experiences, cultures, histories and systems that have shaped their eating and their ethics.”
In her introduction, Jennifer and her collaborator Melissa A. Goldthwaite say that their selections have been guided by four ethical principles. These are protecting and helping others, seeking to do no harm and to limit pain and suffering, respecting rights of choice and self-determination, and furthering justice, “which includes fairness, equitable distribution, and recognition of both need and contribution.” The essays range “from factory farming and the exploitative labor practices surrounding chocolate production, to Indigenous foodways and home and community gardens.”
The book opens with a Naomi Shihab Nye poem that beautifully captures the spirit of the writers. By intermixing food with its natural and cultural setting, “Truth Serum” goes to the heart of ethical eating. When one is intentional and mindful in making one’s food choices, Nye tells us, sorrow lifts in small ways.
Truth Serum
We made it from the ground-up corn in the old back pasture. Pinched a scent of night jasmine billowing off the fence, popped it right in. That frog song wanting nothing but echo? We used that. Stirred it widely. Noticed the clouds while stirring. Called upon our ancient great aunts and their long slow eyes of summer. Dropped in their names. Added a mint leaf now and then to hearten the broth. Added a note of cheer and worry. Orange butterfly between the claps of thunder? Perfect. And once we had it, had smelled and tasted the fragrant syrup, placing the pan on a back burner for keeping, the sorrow lifted in small ways. We boiled down the lies in another pan till they disappeared. We washed that pan.
I think of how Salman Rushdie once described literature as a “no bullshit zone,” an essential antidote to the non-stop lying and gaslighting we get from various political figures. Nye has a place for those lies on her stove: she boils them down “in another pan till they disappeared.”
A recipe that includes night jasmine, frog song, a mint leaf now and then, “a note of cheer and worry,” and an orange butterfly “between the claps of thunder”–and that is watched over by “ancient great aunts and their long slow eyes of summer”–will stand up to a lot of bullshit.
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Sunday
As we move into the summer holidays, here’s a Mary Oliver poem reminding us that learning doesn’t have to stop at the end of the school year. Her mission in life, as she sees it is
to look, to listen,
to lose myself inside this soft world – to instruct myself over and over
in joy, and acclamation.
Oliver talks about herself as a good scholar, taking lessons from nature’s daily presentations. And those presentations don’t have to be exceptional, fearful, dreadful or “very extravagant.” She can learn all she needs from “the ordinary,/ the common, the very drab.”
The poem reminds me of William Wordsworth’s “The Tables Turned,” where the poet tells us to turn from our books and go for a walk in the woods. He informs us,
One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can.
Oliver’s use of “needle in a haystack” is interesting. Normally, we think that looking for such a needle is a hopeless task, but for Oliver, the haystack is a world made of light, meaning that every day she finds something in it that “kills me with delight.” “What I was born for” she essentially tells us, is to participate in the wonder of God’s creation. Prayers are made out of grass.
Mindful
Every day I see or hear something that more or less
kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle
in the haystack of light. It was what I was born for – to look, to listen,
to lose myself inside this soft world – to instruct myself over and over
in joy, and acclamation. Nor am I talking about the exceptional,
the fearful, the dreadful, the very extravagant – but of the ordinary, the common, the very drab,
the daily presentations. Oh, good scholar, I say to myself, how can you help
but grow wise with such teachings as these – the untrimmable light
of the world, the ocean’s shine, the prayers that are made out of grass?
The phrase “what I was born for” may be taken from, and a response to, a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a nature-loving poet that I suspect Oliver admires. The phrase memorably shows up in “Spring and Fall” where Hopkins asks Margaret why she is weeping in the presence of autumn’s leaf fall: “Márgarét, áre you grieving/ Over Goldengrove unleaving?” He concludes that she is thinking of her eventual death, observing, “It is the blight man was born for,/ It is Margaret you mourn for.”
Rather than focusing on the blight of death, however, Oliver focuses on “the untrimmable light of the world.” As she sees it, death won’t trim life’s candle because the world is bigger than any individual. Nor did Oliver ever have the experience that Hopkins predicts for Margaret: “Ah! ás the heart grows older/ It will come to such sights colder.” Up to the very end, Oliver described herself as “a bride married to amazement,” a phrase that appears in “When Death Comes”:
When it’s over, I want to say all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
And the conclusion:
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
There’s no doubt that Oliver would endorse an old rabbinical saying: “There’s only one question God will ask us when we meet him after death: ‘Did you enjoy my creation?’” As she advises in “In Blackwater Wood,”
To live in this world
you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it
against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the times come to let it go, to let it go.
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Friday
In a move that MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace compared to an arsonist returning to the scene of the crime, Donald Trump yesterday journeyed to Washington to address GOP Congress members for the first time since January 6. On that day, many of those now applauding Trump had cowered behind barricaded doors after he sent his supporters rampaging through the Capitol. As Wallace noted, while arsonists may enjoy revisiting their handiwork, normally the victims don’t themselves decide to celebrate the man who set their house on fire.
The GOP’s 180-degree turn—from condemning the attack to supporting Trump as he calls the insurrectionists “warriors” and promises to pardon them—recalls Winston Smith’s turnaround at the end of 1984. It’s always worth revisiting that passage because it reveals the lengths to which people will go to sell out their honor, integrity, dignity and core principles.
After relentless pressure from Big Brother, Winston finally surrenders, and his reward is a profound sense of relief. Orwell invokes Stalin’s notorious show trials, some of which ended with his victims embracing their own deaths, as he writes that Winston
was back in the Ministry of Love, with everything forgiven, his soul white as snow. He was in the public dock, confessing everything, implicating everybody. He was walking down the white-tiled corridor, with the feeling of walking in sunlight, and an armed guard at his back. The long-hoped-for bullet was entering his brain.
Trump has provided GOP lawmakers with absolution for their previous sin of doubting him (although he will needle them about it from time to time), and for this they are profoundly grateful. The more they fought him, the more his current forgiveness feels like a gift. Whether we call this cult behavior or Stockholm Syndrome or brainwashing, we are witnessing it daily. The novel concludes with Winston drinking gin in a café and gazing up adoringly at Big Brother’s enormous face:
Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
Winston at least has an excuse: either he embraces his authoritarian leader or rats chew off his face. What excuse for Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, Nancy Mace, Mitch McConnell, and all those others who were at the Capitol that day?
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Thursday
Today is my father’s birthday—he died 11 years ago at 90—so in his honor I’m sharing one of his poems. Looking back, I’m so glad that he lived long enough to see the election of Barack Obama and somewhat relieved that he didn’t witness the rise of Donald Trump. He would have had poems for the occasion, however, including today’s poem on oil barons.
The poem appeared in his 1982 collection ABC of Radical Ecology, representing (you guessed it) the letter O. Even though we’re hearing of wonderful developments in the world of renewables—there are apparently days in California now when solar and wind-powered generators produce all the energy needed and then some—Big Oil has not given up the fight. If we increasingly hear about billionaires flocking to Trump, it’s because he making offers like the following:
Donald Trump dangled a brazen “deal” in front of some of the top US oil bosses last month, proposing that they give him $1 billion for his White House re-election campaign and vowing that once back in office he would instantly tear up Joe Biden’s environmental regulations and prevent any new ones, according to a bombshell new report.
According to the Washington Post, the former US president made his jaw-dropping pitch, which the paper described as “remarkably blunt and transactional,” at a dinner at his Mar-a-Lago home and club.
In front of more than 20 executives, including from Chevron, Exxon and Occidental Petroleum, he promised to increase oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, remove hurdles to drilling in the Alaskan Arctic, and reverse new rules designed to cut car pollution. He would also overturn the Biden administration’s decision in January to pause new natural gas export permits which have been denounced as “climate bombs”.
A follow-up story calculated that Trump’s deal would save the oil industry $110 billion in tax breaks.
This news comes a year after we learned that, as long ago as 1959, oil companies knew that burning fossil fuels was contributing to climate change and yet kept it secret. .
OZ in my father’s poem is ozone, and it’s worth noting that the international effort to protect and rebuild the ozone layer has been one of environmentalism’s more significant victories. (There’s still some ozone depletion but nothing like what we were suffering in the 1980s when this poem was written.) If the world accomplished this, maybe there’s hope yet.
Unless, that is, Trump and the dirty oil men get their way.
O Is a Dirty Oil Man
O look out for the Oil Barons the Omnipotent Outrageous and Obnoxious Owners of the O so delicate O- Zone
Officious Oligarchs of Order and Ordure they would Obliterate OZ for an Ocean of BUZZ business busyness bossiness booziness
Olympian Overbearing Opinionated and Omniversou they are also Obsolte (but they don’t know it yet)
O look out for the Oleaginous Oil-powerful (they think)
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Wednesday
Today I turn 73, a number that has special significance for me since in 1973 I both married Julia and graduated from Carleton. To celebrate, I’m sharing this fun poem on retirement lessons taken from King Lear. Although I retired six years ago, David Wright’s poem applies to aging as well. To love the play (as I do) is to appreciate the poem, especially its humor.
Lear’s problem is that he wants to abandon the cares of being king while surrendering none of a king’s privileges. To engineer this, he has come up with a “still untested pension plan.” An insecure control freak, he also tries to engineer the love of his daughters, which backfires spectacularly.
For the first 13 lines of his poem, Wright suggests things that Lear could do, and not do, to make his post-retirement life better:
“Lines on Retirement, after Reading Lear” ByDavid Wright for Richard Pacholski
Avoid storms. And retirement parties. You can’t trust the sweetnesses your friends will offer, when they really want your office, which they’ll redecorate. Beware the still untested pension plan. Keep your keys. Ask for more troops than you think you’ll need. Listen more to fools and less to colleagues. Love your youngest child the most, regardless. Back to storms: dress warm, take a friend, don’t eat the grass, don’t stand near tall trees, and keep the yelling down—the winds won’t listen, and no one will see you in the dark. It’s too hard to hear you over all the thunder.
At this point in the poem, however, Wright changes direction. “But you’re not Lear,” he tells us—or himself—and then suggests a different approach to the storm.
But you’re not Lear, except that we can’t stop you from what you’ve planned to do. In the end, no one leaves the stage in character—we never see the feather, the mirror held to our lips. So don’t wait for skies to crack with sun. Feel the storm’s sweet sting invade you to the skin, the strange, sore comforts of the wind. Embrace your children’s ragged praise and that of friends. Go ahead, take it off, take it all off. Run naked into tempests. Weave flowers into your hair. Bellow at cataracts. If you dare, scream at the gods. Babble as if you thought words could save. Drink rain like cold beer. So much better than making theories. We’d all come with you, laughing, if we could.
Wright is reminding us that we’re all going to die. “No one leaves the stage in character,” he notes, with “the feather, the mirror held to our lips” referring to Lear having to acknowledge Cordelia’s death. The storm that is coming is the final storm so “don’t wait for the skies to crack with sun.”
Rather, learn to love whatever time you have left, even if you are experiencing some version of cataracts and huricanoes blowing, cracking, drenching and drowning with “sulphurous and thought-executing fires” (to quote from Lear’s storm-defying rant). Since Lear’s useless orders to the storm can be seen as an attempt to persuade himself he’s still in control, Wright suggests taking another tack. “Feel the storm’s sweet sting invade you to the skin,” he advises, “the strange, sore comforts of the wind.”
In fact, open yourself fully to old age. Instead of trying to get those around you to tell you exactly what you want to hear, “embrace your children’s ragged praise and that of friends.” In fact, forget about dignity:
Go ahead, take it off, take it all off. Run naked into tempests. Weave flowers into your hair. Bellow at cataracts. If you dare, scream at the gods. Babble as if you thought words could save. Drink rain like cold beer.
The ”weaving flowers” is what Cordelia reports of her now-insane dad:
Alack, ’tis he! Why, he was met even now As mad as the vexed sea, singing aloud, Crowned with rank fumiter and furrow-weeds, With hardocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckooflowers, Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow In our sustaining corn.
Lear’s tragedy is that, by thinking he could have everything, he lost everything. Maybe that’s what Wright means by “making theories.” So since such planning doesn’t work—and wouldn’t even if Lear were far more careful than he was—then why not let it all hang out? Carl Jung, who feared that the figure of the wise old sage could become stultifying, talked about how an old fool could release new life energies. So did W.B. Yeats in his Crazy Jane poems. Wright may have this in mind when he says, “We’d all come with you, laughing, if we could.”
I can assure my loved ones that, having reached 73, I’m not going to start running around naked in the rain and weaving flowers into my hair. But I also have no illusion that I am some fount of wisdom that everyone should revere. I’m just someone stumbling through old age trying to make sense of things. And working to appreciate “the storm’s sweet sting.”
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Tuesday
Here’s a fascinating article that I somehow stumbled upon, maybe through Spoutible (which I now use instead of Twitter). The headline says it all:
100-foot ‘walking tree’ in New Zealand looks like an Ent from Lord of the Rings — and is the lone survivor of a lost forest
The article goes on to elaborate:
An unusual northern rātā tree that looks like it is striding across an empty field has been crowned New Zealand’s Tree of the Year. The giant plant, which looks strikingly similar to an Ent from The Lord of the Rings, is centuries old.
The strange tree, which has been nicknamed the “walking tree” because it looks like it’s striding across a field, is a northern rātā (Metrosideros robusta) — one of New Zealand’s tallest flowering tree species that can live for up to 1,000 years.
After reading the story and looking at the photo, I had to go back and check out exactly how Tolkien’s Ents walk. Here’s what I found:
Holding the hobbits gently but firmly, one in the crook of each arm, Treebeard lifted up first one large foot and then the other, and moved them to the edge of the shelf. The rootlike toes grasped the rocks. Then carefully and solemnly, he stalked down from step to step, and reached the floor of the Forest. At once he set off with long deliberate strides through the trees, deeper and deeper into the wood, never far from the stream, climbing steadily up towards the slopes of the mountains. Many of the trees seemed asleep, or as unaware of him as of any other creature that merely passed by; but some quivered, and some raised up their branches above his head as he approached.
And then there’s this detail that caught my attention:
All the while, as he walked, he talked to himself in a long running stream of musical sounds.
This put me in mind of a book written by a biology professor here at Sewanee, David Haskell’s The Songs of the Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors. Looking at the different sounds connected with a variety of trees, Haskell describes such communication systems as the following, which involves a balsam fir:
This network of communication also includes leaves. There plant cells not only sniff the air to detect the health of neighbors but also use airborne odors to attract helpful caterpillar-eating insects. Sound plays a role in this communication. When a leaf senses the vibrations of a caterpillar’s moving jaws, those chewing sounds cause the leaf to mount a chemical defense against the insect. Leaf cells therefore integrate chemical and acoustic cues as they sense and respond to their surroundings.
The article mentioning that the rātā is “the lone survivor of a lost forest” leaves us to wonder whether it is searching for the lost Entwives. Treebeard recalls his last encounter with his own love:
Very fair she was still in my eyes, when I had last seen her, though little like the Entmaiden of old. For the Entwives were bent and browned by their labor; their hair parched by the sun to the hue of ripe corn and their cheeks like red apples. Yet their eyes were still the eyes of our own people.
Once, he says, the land of the Entwives
blossomed richly, and their fields were full of corn. Many men learned the crafts of the Entwives and honored them greatly; but we were only a legend to them, a secret in the heart of the forest. Yet here we still are, while all the gardens of the Entwives are wasted: Men call them the Brown Lands now.
That’s what the Ents discovered when they went in search. The passage may owe something to the fields of Flanders, scorched by World War I, which Tolkien witnessed first hand:
We crossed over Anduin and came to their land; but we found a desert: it was all burned and uprooted, for war had passed over it. But the Entwives were not there. Long we called, and long we searched; and we asked all folk that we met which way the Entwives had gone. Some said they had never seen them; and some said that they had seen them walking away west, and some said east, and others south. But nowhere that we went could we find them. Our sorrow was very great. Yet the wild wood called, and we returned to it. For many years we used to go out every now and again and look for the Entwives, walking far and wide and calling them by their beautiful names. But as time passed we went more seldom and wandered less far. And now the Entwives are only a memory for us, and our beards are long and grey.
So we now know what the Ents look like when they go out searching. The longing for a bygone era brings to mind a line by the World War I poet Wilfred Owen: “Now men will go content with what we spoiled.” But the wilderness that has been lost is, at least, recalled by elves in a song they have written about the Ents and Entwives. Here’s an excerpt:
Ent: When Winter comes, the winter wild that hill and wood shall slay; When trees shall fall and starless night devour the sunless day; When wind is in the deadly East, then in the bitter rain I’ll look for thee, and call to thee; I’ll come to thee again!
Entwife: When Winter comes, and singing ends; when darkness falls at last; When broken is the barren bough, and light and labor past; I’ll look for thee, and wait for thee, until we meet again: Together we will take the road beneath the bitter rain!
Both: Together we will take the road that leads into the West, And far away will find a land where both our hearts may rest.’
See this both as a lament for the environment we have destroyed but perhaps, also, as a spur to reforestation efforts.
