Abou Ben Adam, may his tribe increase,
Awoke one night from a dream of peace,
And saw within the moonlight of his room,
An angel writing in a book of gold…
•
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree…
•
Sunset and evening star
And one clear call for me;
And may there be no moaning of the bar
When I set out to sea…
•
‘Twas many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
There lived a maiden whom you may know
By the name of Annabelle Lee…
His treasures ran from the most poignant to the most jocular, and they certainly ran the gamut from the most accomplished – Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Hebrew Psalms, for example—to something very close to doggerel. ( He liked Ogden Nash, at least on occasion.) All of which means that, despite the fact that he was first a college professor and then, for many years, a university dean, my father was hardly given to elitism in his choices of which poetry to assimilate and which to ignore. There was, however, a very clear connection between his academic duties and all of the various and varying poetry with which he filled the late afternoons and early evenings of my childhood.
Poetry articulated for him the “why” behind the academic and professional duties that were his daily life. More to the point, though, the music and images of poetry held for him, as nothing else could, the substance and beauty of what he thought an education is supposed to do and be for human beings. He spoke often of “intellectual furniture.” What he meant by that phrase was, I suspect, much nearer to what we today would call “spiritual furniture,” though that wording would have been alien to both him and all the rest of his world sixty-five or seventy years ago. By either name, however, what my father really meant was a place within the self where the soul could sit down for a bit and rest, a place where what is best in our being “the image of God” delights itself in the gifts of that wondrously strange genesis…all of which is very much on my mind this holiday weekend
The months since we last observed our nation’s birthday have seen us, as a people, effect national and international changes in attitudes, accomplishments, and aspirations that my father would never have been able to conceptualize in their particulars, so alien would they have been to his place in history. But he knew intimately and from constant reverence, the beauty out of which those changes have now come to us. Were he alive this July 4th of 2009, however, he would say, rather than sing the words; for he was ever fearful that the power of their poetry might become lost in an easy grandeur or exaggerated tunefulness:
O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves
of grain;
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited
plain!
America! America!
God
shed His grace on thee,
And crown your good with brotherhood,
From sea to
shining sea.
O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating
strife,
Who more than self their country loved,
And mercy more than
life!
America! America!
May
God your gold refine,
Till all success be nobleness,
And every gain
divine.
O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond
the years
Your alabaster cities gleam,
Undimmed by human
tears!
America! America!
God
mend our every flaw,
Confirm our soul in self control,
Our liberty in
law.
Amen
America the Beautiful written by Katharine Lee Bates.
We do live in a special place with a very special ethos. Thanks be to God. But if poetry can represent the furniture, then unfortunately some grow up unaccustomed to its form, shape, and perhaps its purpose. Concealed by its unique phrasing, shape, and form, meaning and purpose is sometimes hard to discern. This is a shame -- particularly because I count myself among these. I have been assured by many that the Psalms contain the spectrum of human emotions, if not the human condition. Still they remain difficult to read and hard to understand. Many of these emotions and situations I have never personally experienced (dare I say "Thanks be to God'" Yet I am convinced that continually traveling this path will lead to a place, or yield a journey, that is more than worth the time and the price. But posts like this month's make me all the more grateful for people for whom the furniture is familiar, and maybe on occasion, comfortable.
Posted by: Stuart Lay 7/14/2009 7:10:26 PM
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