A short poem today, short but powerful. One of the band directors at the music camp which featured in yesterday’s post actually wrote a piece for symphonic winds based on this poem, which packs tremendous imagery and emotional power into just four lines. The Western wind has many connotations, few of them bad, and in this case, the speaker is praying for its return so that the “small rain” can return, bringing cleansing and healing. And then, the wish for a return to a familiar warm bed and the arms of a beloved. This is a very old poem, and nothing is known of its writer; in fact, it may be just a fragment of a larger work that is lost to us now. If so, and if the remaining work is as good as this quatrain that has survived to our time, what a loss that must be!

Western wind, when will thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?
Christ! If my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again!

OK, story time. In high school, I attended a summer music camp several times, and then in college, I served there as a camp counselor. This was almost your canonical summer camp, with cabins in the woods and campfires and singalongs and all that stuff, but for music students.

When I was heading into my senior year, I developed a big crush on a bassoon player there, and I tried flirting, which failed badly because I’m terrible at flirting. She was pretty and she had this hippie thing going on that I liked enormously, though, and when I actually conversed with her about stuff, we became pretty good friends, and we exchanged letters during the next couple of school years. All in all, typical. The first letter in the chain came from her, and she was the type to put pretty doodles and jot down poems on the outside of her envelopes, the first of which was the first stanza of this poem by Thoreau.

For that reason, I’ve loved this poem ever since.

Like any writing, poetry should have a personal dimension to it. I can trace many of my favorite books to times and places that are dear to me, for one reason or another; why shouldn’t it be so with poetry?

To the Maiden in the East,
by Henry David Thoreau

Low in the eastern sky
Is set thy glancing eye;
And though its gracious light
Ne’er riseth to my sight,
Yet every star that climbs
Above the gnarled limbs
    Of yonder hill,
Conveys thy gentle will.

Believe I knew thy thought,
And that the zephyrs brought
Thy kindest wishes through,
As mine they bear to you,
That some attentive cloud
Did pause amid the crowd
     Over my head,
While gentle things were said.

Believe the thrushes sung,
And that the flower-bells rung,
That herbs exhaled their scent,
And beasts knew what was meant,
The trees a welcome waved,
And lakes their margins laved,
     When thy free mind
To my retreat did wind.

It was a summer eve,
The air did gently heave
While yet a low-hung cloud
Thy eastern skies did shroud;
The lightning’s silent gleam,
Startling my drowsy dream,
     Seemed like the flash
Under thy dark eyelash.

Still will I strive to be
As if thou wert with me;
Whatever path I take,
It shall be for thy sake,
Of gentle slope and wide,
As thou wert by my side,
     Without a root
To trip thy gentle foot.

I ‘ll walk with gentle pace,
And choose the smoothest place
And careful dip the oar,
And shun the winding shore,
And gently steer my boat
Where water-lilies float,
     And cardinal flowers
Stand in their sylvan bowers.

(Oh, and that girl? The bassoon player? We’re friends on Facebook and she’s still really cool; she works in ecology. And as luck would have it, I still ended up spending my life with a double-reed player.)

Sometimes there’s a poem whose verse is wonderful, but with whose message you disagree. Such is the case here, for me. Walt Whitman was one of the great poets of all time — in fact, he was probably one of the greatest human artists of all time, in any field — but this poem falters for me.

I first heard this poem read by a faculty member when I was at Wartburg College — I think it was my senior year — when our school’s beloved physics professor, Dr. Donald Roiseland, passed away after a fight with cancer. I heard this poem at his memorial service, and I thought “Well, that was lovely,” and went about my day. Later I dug out my collection of Whitman and looked the poem up…and when I read it back to myself, I wondered about it.

The poem seems to be arguing that the scientific way of looking at things is somehow lacking, and that it removes the beauty inherent in our universe by burying it under numbers and graphs and charts and diagrams; that to hear what science has to say about the world is dispiriting and that one should atone by going out and looking silently upon the world’s beauty.

Well…I have a problem with that, and I have a feeling that Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Jacques Cousteau, and many others would as well. The learned astronomer has not abandoned the beauty of the world; the learned astronomer has exposed more of it.

I think Whitman can be forgiven his view here, given the time in which he lived, but still…I wish he’d have been able to attend upon some of the beauty in those diagrams and charts and figures.

When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
by Walt Whitman

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

I find prose poems interesting. At first they seem formless, and one wonders why the poet didn’t just write a straight-up story or paragraph, but as you read a good prose poem, the melding of the two forms clarifies. This poem is a good example: it starts as simple description of a small town, but then, the speaker enters a fantasy that spins out as he drives through the town and out the other side. There are echoes of history and Shakespeare in here, all suggesting the kind of life one might live in a small town where the bronze Civil War general stands above the little park in the village center.

Passing Through a Small Town
by David Shumate

Here the highways cross. One heads north. One heads east
and west. On the corner of the square adjacent to the
courthouse a bronze plaque marks the place where two Civil
War generals faced one another and the weaker surrendered.
A few pedestrians pass. A beauty parlor sign blinks. As I turn
to head west, I become the schoolteacher living above the
barber shop. Polishing my shoes each evening. Gazing at the
square below. In time I befriend the waitress at the cafe and
she winks as she pours my coffee. Soon people begin to
talk. And for good reason. I become so distracted I teach my
students that Cleopatra lost her head during the French
Revolution and that Leonardo perfected the railroad at the
height of the Rennaissance. One day her former lover returns
from the army and creates a scene at the school. That evening
she confesses she cannot decide between us. But still we spend
one last night together. By the time I pass the grain elevators
on the edge of town I am myself again. The deep scars of love
already beginning to heal.

(Text via.)