With spring having not yet completely taken hold, I’m still dependent on books to keep me occupied on the days when I can’t be out in the garden. But as the days grow milder and longer, the time I spend reading will grow less and less. Even so, last week I hit a snag in my reading plans. A few weeks back, during the most aggravating part of the winter doldrums, I set myself a new project to re-read the novels of Charles Dickens in chronological order. That meant starting with The Pickwick Papers and that quickly became a problem. It didn’t work. I got bogged down in the first chapters. I love Dickens, but I just wasn’t in the mood for it. I haven’t scrapped my project, I’ve just put it on hold. In the meantime, I needed to find some other literary adventure to keep me distracted on the dreary days, but something less ambitious. I turned to poetry. Poems are (usually) short. You don’t usually read a book of poetry like a novel. You take it in small bites and ruminate on it. I love poetry. The sort of poetry I love most has gone out of style. Most modern poets don’t interest me. They have abandoned the things I love most in a poem - structure, rhythm, and rhyme.
I’ve read a lot of poetry. My love for it was born in my infancy with nursery rhymes taught to me by my mother and my interest in it accelerated at age nine when I was blessed to have an amazing fourth grade teacher, Miss Charlotte Conley, who passed her love of poetry on to me. Beginning with my mother’s Mother Goose and moving on to Miss Conley’s A Child’s Garden of Verses and Longfellow, my explorations into the world of poetry have been a wonderful adventure. Over the years my path has taken me through Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, the Metaphysicists, the Classicists, the Romantics, and Symbolists. I’ve read allegories, ballads, eclogues, elegies, epics, and odes. I’ve studied its forms and patterns. Meters with Greek names – iambic, trochaic, anapestic, dactylic, pentameter, tetrameter, hexameter. Forms with Latin names – couplet, quatrain, sestet. From sonnets to limericks, I’ve been fascinated by them all.
For my first foray into poetry this time, I was still feeling ambitious and I chose a very long poem. I’ve had a copy of Lord Byron’s Don Juan on my book shelf for forty years and never read it. I felt it was time to change that. It is an epic poem written in seventeen cantos, 335 pages long in my edition. I thought I’d take it in sections. I knew the legend of Don Juan from Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, the wealthy libertine who spends his time seducing women, kills the father of one of the girls he has seduced, and ends up being dragged down to hell at his death. Pretty juicy stuff, right? Not when Byron gets a hold of it. I only made it halfway through the first canto. Byron was a brilliant poet – most of the time – and a bit of a Don Juan himself – but his poem drags on and on. And his rhyming was pretty sketchy sometimes. In order to make the meter and rhyming work, you have to pronounce the title character’s name as “Ju-an” in two syllables with a hard “j”, not one syllable with the soft Spanish “h” pronunciation, and that was really annoying. Sorry Lord Byron. I like your other poems better.
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| Lord Byron and Errol Flynn as Don Juan in a 1948 movie. |
So I abandoned Don Juan and came up with a different reading scheme. I have over thirty books of poetry ranging from poems by single authors – The Illiad and Odyssey, Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, The Sonnets of Shakespear, Keats, Shelley, Frost, Dickinson, Longfellow – to anthologies like The English Romantic Poets, A Treasury of American Poetry, and The Penguin Book of Poetry of the First World War. I decided to select a book at random every day and open it at random and read whatever poem or poems happen to be on the page. It’s fun. Each day I can hardly wait to see what my poem of the day will be. Last week some of the poems that fell to me by chance seemed uncannily appropriate. One day it was Emily Dickinson:
Than another hue;
Saves she all of that for sunsets, --
Prodigal of blue,
Yellow she affords
Only scantly and selectly,
Like a lover’s words.
Another day it was William Blake’s The Echoing Green which begins
And make happy the skies.
The merry bells ring
To welcome the Spring.
The sky-lark and thrush,
The birds of the bush,
Sing louder around,
To the bells’ cheerful sound.
While our sports shall be seen
On the Echoing Green.
And another day it was Alexander Pope’s Ode on Solitude which begins
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
In his own ground.
It was a week of fine and intellectually stimulating adventures. I think I will continue my random Poem A Day selection until I run out of poems, which I hope will never happen.
The weather was variable all week. We started with snow on the ground on Monday morning – just a thin crust that didn’t last long. On the days when the weather warmed a little, it usually rained. Tuesday was the finest and driest day of the week. When I got home from school, it was 64° and sunny and there was a package waiting for me – my onion plants. I recruited the help of Stacey, Miriam, and Hannah, and we planted 500 onion plants and 70 shallots. It felt good to get one of our substantial crops in the ground. And that night, with perfect timing, it rained. It continued to rain off and on for most of the rest of the week.
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| Planting onions. |
Before the rains came, the crocuses reached their peak. They were late this year and they didn’t last long enough for me. They are looking bedraggled now. The next wave of flowers will be daffodils, glory of the snow (chionodoxa), squill, and tulips, but they are late too. The squill and chionodoxa are in bloom now. The tulips and daffodils are just beginning to bud.
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| Flowers before the snow. |
Tuesday night we heard spring peepers for the first time. Hearing these little frogs (Pseudacris crucifer) for the first time is celebrated as a Major Spring Event at our house. As soon as we heard them, we went out onto the front porch to listen. There weren’t many, they start out quietly on their first nights, but they will get louder as warmer weather settles in. They make a joyful noise.
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| Spring peeper (not my photo). |
On Wednesday, the rain let up during the day, which was perfect because new fruit trees and blueberry bushes arrived that afternoon. I went to work right away and planted three new blueberry bushes in the hedge between our house and the Shillig’s house. There are eleven bushes there now and that should give us plenty of fruit when they mature. Then I planted four new apple trees in the orchard. They are all dwarf trees, each a different variety – Honeycrisp, Northern Spy, Liberty, and Gold Rush. The orchard is almost full now – unless I extend it. Later that evening, the rain returned, which was just what I needed. It poured rain all night long.
On Thursday evening Josiah graduated from college. We watched the ceremony online, but Geoffrey, Daniel, and Raven were able to be there at BYU-I. So our youngest has graduated with a Bachelor of Science Physics degree. He’s trying to figure out what to do with it now. We’re very proud of him. He’ll be coming home for a visit in May.
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| Josiah at graduation. |
After a chilly and foggy sunrise, Friday morning turned out to be bright and sunny. I went out after it warmed up a little to walk the gardens and orchard and inspect the progress of the growing world. Things are coming along, springing up, budding out. When I came in from my walk, I had more things to add to my list of projects. It is never ending and I like that.
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| Sunrise across the front yard on Friday. |
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| Sunrise at the beaver pond on Friday. |
Along the roadsides, the coltsfoot has begun to bloom. And along the Genesee stream and other damp places, the willow catkins are blooming. I love pussy willows. I remember my delight as a child by a vase of them and I can still conjure the fusty smell of the water in that vase as the willow twigs grew roots. I’ve never grown them as a garden ornamental, but there are some very pretty varieties and I might try some one of these years. I do have an embarrassing memory associated with them. When we lived on Bridge Street in New Cumberland, our house was a few doors down from the Evangelical United Brethren Church and its parsonage. At one point the church got a new pastor and in their family was a daughter about my age. I must have been seven or eight. My brother, cousin and I played in the alley by that church all the time and one day we saw that girl playing in her yard. There was a pussy willow bush in her yard full of catkins. She approached us and asked if she could play. Being boys and rather obnoxious, we told her she could if she pushed some catkins up her nose. We laughed as she complied, but then became concerned when she began to sneeze violently. In a panic we took her to my father’s office (his chiropractic office was on the first floor of the building we lived in). My father took some long tweezers and using a scope, began to pull out not one or two, but eight pussy willow catkins from the girl’s nostrils. He was pretty mad at us boys. And I don’t remember ever playing with that girl again.
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| Pussy willows by the beaver pond. |
Saturday, yesterday, was chilly. The sun only shined briefly in the morning. The rest of the day it rained, snowed, and even hailed. It was frustrating to not be outdoors working, but the coming week looks better. I planted tomato seeds – a full tray of 60, nine different varieties. I transplanted cauliflower and broccoli from seed trays into bigger pots. The garden is going great as far as seedlings in the woodshed are concerned. Now if things would improve a bit outdoors, I’d appreciate it.
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| This morning before church. |
This morning we awoke to snow. As we drove up to Wellsville to church, we were surprised to see no snow on the ground anywhere else. On the drive home from church, there was no snow until we got to Keech, half way between Genesee and Gold. Of course the most snow anywhere around is here in Gold. So we are home. Hannah is making pizza for lunch. I keep looking at the weather for the week ahead to keep my spirits up. Starting tomorrow it’s supposed to get warmer. By Wednesday we’ll be in the high 60's. I’m scheduled to be in school all week, but after school I will be out in the garden, my favorite place to be, planting peas, building a new peacock pen, weeding, and loving every minute of it. We are going to the Foster’s house in Toledo this coming weekend for a big family celebration – Passover on Friday, a trip to the zoo on Saturday, and Easter on Sunday. It will be great to be there with the Thayns and the Fosters. We won’t be home until Monday, so next week’s Journal will be late. I hope you have a joyous Easter!
