a poem remembered

i had an interesting conversation with someone who I didn't know thought the same way about death as me - we both appear to have a near-unhealthy obsession, probably more honest to say a terror, with death being the end, there being nothing more, that awful notion of eternity, and reconciling that with a certain healthy agnosticism about an afterlife, heaven, whatever keeps you warm at night and makes you think you're going to see your dog and your grandma again. It probably stems from the issue that we're both tremendously self-obsessed - not in a selfish way, per se, but in a Whitman, Ayn Rand, exaltation-of-the-individual kind of way (in my more generous moments towards myself, of course) - and anyway, the notion of there being no more me is, quite obviously, difficult for me to imagine. Not that I really would have to, would I - but the abstract notion - coupled with the sad reality that some of my most treasured possessions, for instance certain books - might wind up unnoticed in someone's attic or just thrown away, no one remembering that someone revered them and kept them close through moves, and relationships, and numerous accidental dunks in the bathtub - the way some of my grandmother's things--letters, photos--were just discarded by my grandfather in his grief, and I wish we'd known he'd immediately go home and make good use of a dumpster in the few hours he was alone so we could save them.

But anyway - this all reminded me of a poem from Aspects of Love, a book that was turned into a play most famous, from what I remember in the New York Post during high school, for an all-too-quick full frontal nudity moment well before Nicole Kidman bared her Botoxed limbs for a Broadway audience. But I digress again, because I loved this book for its rustic south of France setting and its quintessentially French and British characters--the French women passionate and quick to despise as well as love and the British men who had no idea how to handle such emotion--for all their moral ambiguities and willingess to fall madly in love and into bed after eating omlettes and drinking beaujolais. Although I can see it right now, unopened for years, on the top shelf of my bookcase, I think I'll stay tucked in on the couch and see if I can remember the lines that conversation triggered a memory of:

Set down the wine and the dice, and perish the thought of tomorrow!
Here's Death twitching at my ear. "Live," says he, "for I'm coming".

Alice and Maud

....because who cares about why I am dedicated to public service and plan to continue in this field when I graduate from whatever law school is drunk enough to admit me, when there is Alice to be pored over again and again? I offer the parody before the original, but I love both equally.

"'How is it you can all talk so nicely?' Alice said...'I've been in many gardens before, but none of the flowers could talk.'
'Put your hand down, and feel the ground,' said the Tiger-lily. 'Then you'll know why.'
Alice did so. 'It's very hard,' she said; 'but I don't see what that has to do with it.'
'In most gardens,' the Tiger-lily said, 'they make the beds too soft--so that the flowers are always asleep.'
...(discussing the Red Queen) "'She's coming!' said the Larkspur. 'I hear her footstep, thump, thump, thump, along the gravel-walk.'"

And the original, at which Carroll was poking a little fun. I don't know if I've posted it before but it comes from one of my favorite poems, Maud by Tennyson. Being not much the poetry lover, as I tend to speed through my books--I tend to speed through everything, that's how my mind works, keepgoingkeepgoing, we'll make sense of it later--and the time needed to unpack each line when I can see the bottom of the page just there!!, it's always been a bit difficult for me to appreciate poetry. I have to confess that I usually skim through quite a bit of the opening to Maud. But I've seen it pop up again and again in the prose that I love the most and read and re-read, namely A.S. Byatt's Possession, which I think is quite an accomplishment of a book, and of course Alice. The line used in Possession to describe one of the main characters, Maud (hey! took me long enough to put those two together), as it is in the poem:

Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null

and he calls her face "cold and clear-cut" which doesn't sound like much of a compliment, but this icy beauty--well, either way she's icy, because she ends up dead--is drawn with flowers, is weaned on flowers: "You have but fed on the roses and lain in the lilies of life" and the floral theme runs throughout the poem, and my favorite stanzas take place while he is waiting for her in the garden, which is also where Carroll chose to have his fun:

Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls,

Come hither, the dances are done,

In gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls,

Queen lily and rose in one;

Shine out, little head, sunning over with curls,

To the flowers, and be their sun.

There has fallen a splendid tear

From the passion-flower at the gate.

She is coming, my dove, my dear;

She is coming, my life, my fate;

The red rose cries, ‘She is near, she is near;’

And the white rose weeps, ‘She is late;’

The larkspur listens, ‘I hear, I hear;’

And the lily whispers, ‘I wait.’

I love these lines for so many reasons...the gardens, the flowers with voices waiting for her just as she is, she's their queen, the most beautiful of all of them. I think of bright greens and low lights and climbing roses and high hedges, and a girl in a gown, carrying her shoes. And someone is waiting for her, he's been waiting all night, they all have.

It makes me think of England and Scotland, where I've lived for enough of a time to know that when the weather is nice, the gardens are unmatched by anywhere else. This poem calls to mind a wedding I went to in western Scotland, a truly Scottish wedding - it was at the groom's parents estate, which had the requisite sweeping lands and claw foot tub and musty portraits and the church, although we missed it, was on the grounds. And the men wore kilts and the women hats and we danced in the cleared-out dining hall to a Scottish band and the land was so green and the gardens in bloom. And then I also think of one night in May of that same year, by then I was living in Oxford and we agreed to work at the Magdalen Ball--unfortunately the jerk I was dating at the time saw this as a cash-garnering opportunity as opposed to a night to put on a gown and walk through the gardens--but I digress, and it was actually quite fun, the weather was lovely and we stayed out all night and in the morning the dew was so wet and the grass, so pungent and it was everything lovely anyone has ever said about England. And lastly I think about my high school boyfriend, now the DJ of my Miami posts, and his family's house in Surrey, and how we would sit in their thriving English gardens playing soccer and drinking tea, and everything I think of since that is civilized somehow relates to that.

So there you have, Alice and Maud and me and England. Happy reading! No need to wish me happy procrastinating, I need no such prodding.