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Sunday
On this New Year’s Eve I post a Kenneth Patchen poem that appears to be a prayer addressed to God the Father. But before you conjure up images of an old man with a gray beard, know that Patchen once wrote that “only an unbeliever could have created our image of God: and only a fake God could be satisfied with it.” We can never wrap our minds around God, even though we attempt to do so through anthropomorphizing.
“At the New Year,” which I’ll share in a moment, is not the only poem where Patchen associates God with the purity of snow. In “The Snow Is Deep on the Ground,” the poet assures us that “God shall not forget us./ Who made the snow waits where love is.” Seeming to echo The Song of Solomon only with snow instead of vineyards and apple trees, Patchen associates the whiteness of the snow with his beloved. Sewanee experienced a lovely dusting of snow last night, so I have a fresh sense of why a poet would link this whiteness to the woman he loves. Here’s the poem:
The Snow Is Deep on the Ground
By Kenneth Patchen
The snow is deep on the ground.
Always the light falls
Softly down on the hair of my belovèd.
This is a good world.
The war has failed.
God shall not forget us.
Who made the snow waits where love is.
Only a few go mad.
The sky moves in its whiteness
Like the withered hand of an old king.
God shall not forget us.
Who made the sky knows of our love.
The snow is beautiful on the ground.
And always the lights of heaven glow
Softly down on the hair of my belovèd.
Now to Patchen’s New Year’s poem, which also takes place on a snowy night. Looking out at the world, Patchen sees the bad along with the good. At the same time that he is gazing into the “deep throw of stars,” he is also seeing the horrors of war, with the dead lying in the World War I trenches.
When the poem starts out, we don’t expect this dark turn. Indeed, it seems more of an “Oh, holy night” type of poem. Then, however, it moves into a balancing act where “all that has been said bravely” is countered by “all that is mean anywhere in the world,” and where “all that is good and lovely” is followed by “every house where sham and hatred are.” The poet will not pretend that the world is other than what it is.
And yet he imagines a “clean moment” on New Year’s Eve when we await the ringing of bells that we pray will usher us into new possibilities and new hope. “Before this clean moment has gone,” he writes to the Father, “before this night turns to face tomorrow…there is this high singing in the air.”
The singing reminds me of the voices that the desperate speaker strives to hear and longs for in T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
For Patchen, this “little point in time” before the New Year bells brings out our best. Although he knows only too well that the bells will just take us into the same world we have left—“the sorrowful human face in eternity’s window”—he knows that he is sensing the numinous as he imagines “other bells that we would ring.” These inner bells, like the high singing, are our connection with “our Father, who art in heaven.”
In “the deep throw of stars,” in “the wide land waiting,” in “all that has been said bravely,” in “all that is good and lovely,” these are the “other bells that we would ring, Father.”
At the New Year
By Kenneth Patchen
In the shape of this night, in the still fall
of snow, Father
In all that is cold and tiny, these little birds
and children
In everything that moves tonight, the trolleys
and the lovers, Father
In the great hush of country, in the ugly noise
of our cities
In this deep throw of stars, in those trenches
where the dead are, Father
In all the wide land waiting, and in the liners
out on the black water
In all that has been said bravely, in all that is
mean anywhere in the world, Father
In all that is good and lovely, in every house
where sham and hatred are
In the name of those who wait, in the sound
of angry voices, Father
Before the bells ring, before this little point in time
has rushed us on
Before this clean moment has gone, before this night
turns to face tomorrow, Father
There is this high singing in the air
Forever this sorrowful human face in eternity’s window
And there are other bells that we would ring, Father
Other bells that we would ring.
In Tennyson’s “Ring Out, Wild Bells,” which has been my New Year’s poem for the past two years, the poet imperiously instructs the bells to “ring out the darkness of the land,/ Ring in the Christ that is to be.” In Raymond MacDonald Alden’s “Why the Chimes Rang,” my favorite Christmas story, the chimes are quieter. “So far away, and yet so clear the music seemed,” he writes, “—so much sweeter were the notes than anything that had been heard before, rising and falling.” Patchen’s bells are even more distant–imagined rather than actual–but no less powerful for all that.
We all of us have those chimes within us. I pray to the God that (in the words of Julian of Norwich) made, loves and keeps us to help me hear them.
