The feet of people walking home
With gayer sandals go -
The crocus – till she rises -
The vassal of the snow -
The lips at Hallelujah
Long years of practise bore -
Till bye and bye, these Bargemen
Walked – singing – on the shore

Pearls are the Diver’s farthings
Extorted form the sea -
Pinions – the Seraph’s wagon -
Pedestrian once – as we -
Night is the morning’s canvas -
Larceny – legacy -
Death – but our rapt attention
To immortality.

My figures fail to tell me
How far the village lies -
Whose peasants are the angels -
Whose cantons dot the skies -
My Classics vail their faces -
My faith that Dark adores -
Which from it’s solemn abbeys -
Such resurrection pours!

I like the last stanza especially. I think it’s talking about Heaven. Those three final lines are striking to me. She seems to be talking about how human intelligence and recorded knowledge can’t explain angels or heaven. But for her, not knowing (aka “that dark”) gives her room for faith.

The Wart did not know what Merlyn was talking about, but he liked him to talk. He did not like the grown-ups who talked down to him like a baby, but the ones who just went on talking in their usual way, leaving him to leap along in their wake, jumping at meanings, guessing, clutching at known words, and chuckling at complicated jokes as they suddenly dawned. He has the glee of a porpoise then, pouring and leaping through strange seas.

This reminds me of my own childhood. No, I was not nicknamed The Wart. My parents and their friends never talked down to me, so I learned the vocabularies of my schoolteacher mother and pastor father. I really appreciate that knowledge these days as I write my poetry and tutor a couple of students. I still love words; I still have the glee of a porpoise.

That got me thinking about poetic forms. Structuring a poem is difficult for me. I usually intend to write stanzas that follow a common structuring idea like past-present-future or beginning-middle-end or air-water-earth-fire. For instance, a poem’s first stanza could be about the past, the second stanza about the present, etc. However, I usually end up with a mutated structure that I only understand in retrospect, after the poem is finished. (Maybe for me, a structure is only useful as a starting point.)

Hillis’ point about the arbitrary 1’s and 0’s made me think that I am allowed use an arbitrary poetic structure. For instance, I can write a poem in which the first stanza is about blue things, the second is about red things, and the third is about purple things. Now, that structure might not be epic or universal, like the three structuring ideas I mentioned above. However, as I write the poem, the colours will become significant to me. Already, I am thinking of the red as a sunrise, the blue as water, and purple as the synthesis of red and blue. Who knows, maybe my red-blue-purple stanza pattern will become epic, famous, universal.

Red as your sunrise.
Blue as your water.
Purple is your name.

Okay, silly ideas to start with, a bit of nonsense, but let’s work with it. You can see that I don’t know what to do with purple, but I like where purple is going. It is strange and somehow touching, at least to me.

Let’s think of more stuff that’s red and blue.

Red as your sunrise, red as blood on a white stone, red as that bird you know the one.
Blue as your water, blue as somebody’s sky, blue as fresh jeans.
Purple is your name, may you never fade.

Okay, purple seems to be coming alone. Wasn’t purple an ancient dye that didn’t easily fade? Maybe, works for me.

I’m satisfied enough with the description of the colours. Let’s work on connecting the colours more directly to the person the poem is about. I don’t know who it is about, although it seems natural to write about a young woman. maybe I’ll write about someone I wouldn’t normally write about. Who’s caught my attention lately?  I just saw a Simpsons episode, “A Fish Called Selma.” Troy McClure, wearing an astronaut suit or uniform of some kind, performs in a musical based on Planet of the Apes. So maybe this poem will be about a person in uniform. How about a North American soldier fighting overseas?

Red as your sunrise, red as blood on a white stone, red as that bird you know the one. Your face is red as a new sunburn in an ancient land.

Blue as your water, blue as somebody’s sky, blue as fresh jeans. Your eyes are blue as the five dollar bill stuck in the webbing of your combat helmet.

Purple is your name, may you never fade. May grace be amazing.

Okay, enough for now. Poets need sleep.

The city of Burbank had exploded since Van’s childhood in the 1970s, eating every orange grove and rolling up the hills. The palmy streets near the airport were still vaguely familiar to him. Van sensed that he himself had transformed even more radically than the town of Burbank. From a little kid with a popsicle stick, a stammer, bad allergies, and a plastic Star Wars X-wing fighter, into a big, quiet, bearded geek with black glasses, smelling of sweat.

I was too smart for my own good. I could always argue myself into doing the sexy, futuristic thing instead of being a nice, mundane, nonaffiliated
individual. Too smart to settle down, take a job and watch TV after work, spend two weeks a year at the cottage and go online to find movie listings. Too smart is too restless and no happiness, ever, without that it’s chased by obsessive maundering moping about what comes next.

I can understand that restlessness, that rebellion against the mundane. For instance, watching TV every evening seems a waste of time to me, especially when the Internets are begging for my attention.

save

‘Why, only just now I saw a sardine-opener on the kitchen dresser, quite distinctly; and everybody knows that means there are sardines about somewhere in the neighbourhood.’

That’s my kind of logic. Or illogic. Whatever.

Rat really shines in this chapter, both as a good friend to Mole, and as someone who can improvise and make the most of things. Although they can only find sardines, crackers, beer and one sausage in Mole’s long-abandoned home, Rat considers those items a veritable feast:

‘There’s a banquet for you!’ observed the Rat, as he arranged the table. ‘I know some animals who would give their ears to be sitting down to supper with us tonight!’

Maybe the real reason I am impressed with Rat is that he uses exclamation marks often in this chapter.

. . . he took the opportunity to tell Badger how comfortable and home-like it all felt to him. ‘Once well underground,’ he said, ‘you know exactly where you are. Nothing can happen to you, and nothing can get at you. You’re entirely your own master, and you don’t have to consult anybody or mind what they say. Things go on all the same overhead, and you let ‘em, and don’t bother about ‘em. When you want to, up you go, and there the things are, waiting for you.’

This passage can work pretty well as a description of escapism. Escaping into a novel or movie is just like spending time comfortably underground.

In other news, I’m pretty convinced that the main theme of this book is the idea of home. I’m not even done Chapter Five yet, and so far, several homes have been mentioned or discussed:

• Mole’s home, which is named Mole End. I love that name.
• Rat’s home in the riverbank. Sometimes it floods, and Rat has to move out for a while.
• Toad Hall.
• Toad’s canary-yellow gypsy caravan.
• Badger’s impressive underground home.

. . . it was that regrettable sort of conversation that results from talking with your mouth full. The Badger did not mind that sort of thing at all, nor did he take any notice of elbows on the table, or everybody speaking at once. As he did not go into Society himself, he had got an idea that these things belonged to the things that didn’t really matter. (We know of couse that he was wrong, and took too narrow a view; because they do matter very much, though it would take too long to explain why.)

Why can’t fellows be allowed to do what they like when they like and as they like, instead of other fellows sitting on banks and watching them all the time and making remarks and poetry and things about them? What nonsense it all is!

To the moderately well-read person Kenneth Grahame is known as the author of two books written in the 1890s: The Golden Age and Dream Days. In his spare time he was Secretary of the Bank of England. Reading these delicately lovely visions of childhood, you might have wondered that he could be mixed up with anything so unlovely as a bank; and it may be presumed that at the bank an equal surprise was felt that such a responsible official could be mixed up with beauty.

Haha. I like the idea of being mixed up with beauty.