readerjanedavis

Yesterday’s Poem of the Day was ‘Chorus Sacerdotum’ by Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke. Not only a good poet, he was a great administrator and from 1614 he was also Chancellor of the Exchequer. Ah, Renaissance man, thou should be living at this hour!

I thought I might want to return to it today and, reading it slowly, I got deeply caught up in Fulke Greville’s sense of the tense complexity of being human. But in the end I decided it goes against the spirit of Poem of the Day to come back  – ‘oh I kept it for another day,’ as Robert Frost nearly says in ‘The Road Not Taken’. So I turned the pages in The Oxford Book of English Verse – passing poems mainly about love: I don’t want them, love is not one of my  live subjects. That’s to say, it’s not something I’m engaged in learning about.

What am I saying? That’s not accurate. Of course I am learning about love! I’ve been married for over thirty years. I’m learning about love over a long time but there are not many poems about long love, love still glowing after thirty years, love beyond the early stages in the early pages of TOBOEV. So I kept turning until I came to a poem that I sort of know and don’t think I have ever read carefully, ‘Shadows’ by Samuel Daniel.

Are they shadows that we see?
And can shadows pleasure give?
Pleasures only shadows be
Cast by bodies we conceive
And are made the things we deem
In those figures which they seem.

But these pleasures vanish fast
Which by shadows are expressed;
Pleasures are not, if they last;
In their passing is their best.
Glory is most bright and gay
In a flash, and so away.

Feed apace then, greedy eyes,
On the wonder you behold;
Take it sudden as it flies,
Though you take it not to hold.
When your eyes have done their part,
Thought must length it in the heart.

It was the final line that arrested me. To be specific, it was the verb ‘length’, which is really about time but feels about space. For some reason, ‘length’ made me thinking of dancing, perhaps connected to the old word ‘measure’.

My reading process went something like – ah, yes, are they shadows, hhmm I know this one… skim down, yes…blah di done their part/thought must -wow, what’s this – length it ! – what?- in the heart. Read it again, Jane. Thought must length it in the heart.

Going back to the beginning, the first line now seems huge: how did he arrive at this giant question? ‘Are they shadows that we see?’ . I was thinking at first – he’s thinking of a woman he loves , or women he loves, he’s thinking of beauty, but then I thought of other beauties that come and go – trees in new leaf, babies, moments of loving friendship’s laughing face, reading to a child of six who will soon be sixteen and then twenty-six and then sixty-six…… all these pleasures must, sooner or later, go, passing, as  Hamlet says ‘through nature to eternity’.  Can we really take pleasure from such fast-moving stuff? We can and we must, says Daniel, perhaps because they are so fast-moving.

Because I have been thinking about some of the working (or not-workings) of my own mind, the poem touches a place of concern. Can I make or affect things by thinking about them?   I couldn’t have affected Storm Doris’s effect on our Bear Hunt by thinking about it. But can I affect my mind’s pained reaction to it?  I look at the  bud on the magnolia and feel pleasure. Is the pleasure somehow in the sense of transience?   Is it to do with being in the moment? I observe the loveliness of the bud. It is already passing:

But these pleasures vanish fast
Which by shadows are expressed;
Pleasures are not, if they last;
In their passing is their best.
Glory is most bright and gay
In a flash, and so away.

and so I come back to the end that got me interested in the first place:

Feed apace then, greedy eyes,
On the wonder you behold;
Take it sudden as it flies,
Though you take it not to hold.
When your eyes have done their part,
Thought must length it in the heart.

The moment ends because the thing you are looking at changes, moves through time, disappears, dies. Yet the part of it that is unaffected by that transience remains – ‘thought must length it in the heart’.

Whether that is sighing after the beloved when they are not present, longing for signs of spring or remembering a baby’s lovely fat wrists, thought – the action of our consciousness – takes it back home to the heart.

I will take this to a shared reading group for more thinking about. Terrific poem. Made me go over my time limit.