Cancer/writing Journal #81-a
There was some unusual kind of balk advancing to the next line for #81 which prevented me from writing anything more than what appeared at the end of the poem. This is my comment to that entry.
My mother read Daffodils by Wordsworth to me in my early childhood along with maybe four or five others that were not children's poems. The poem has been in my head for 70 years, "I wondered lonely as a cloud..."
Among the things in my head has been the word "Jocund", a term that doesn't get used much nowaday. It has come to me particularly when I see the air filled with cottonwood seeds. "Now here's a jocund company." In the poem Daffodils, there's a line, " A poet could not be but gay in such a jocund company" Hence the ending of my poem. However, there have been suggestions that I change that word "Jocund" to something a little more common. That ruins the punchline, of course.
It makes me realize that probably others are not as familiar with the poem as I am. While it grieves me to have to explain my joke or whatever it is, it's probably better than than to leave people puzzled about what's going on.
We have a cottonwood tree in our yard. It probably prompted this poem along with an earlier poem I wrote about cottonwood leaves. My neighbor who has little tolerance for white things on a portion of ground that is supposed to be green would rather that it be gone, I'm quite sure. Sometimes, I think that my wife who has her own particular notions of tidiness would rather that it not be there as well. I say that a tree that has inspired two different poems is no ordinary tree and really needs to stay there. Here's the earlier poem:
Charlie Schaefer
Writer’s Group
October 1, 2020
Leaves in the Breeze
I see the rapid flutter of leaves
From our cottonwood tree,
I think of the Merry Little Breezes,
Old Mother West Wind’s children,
Full of fun and mischief.
The breezes come,
The tree is all ashimmer,
Twinkling in the sun.
The leaves in quick tremor
At the merest breath of air.
In Mother West Wind’s alternative universe,
A place of happy anthropomorphia,
There’s a play date
Between the leaves and the breezes.
It is there in our universe too.
The apparatus holding leaf to branch
So limber, so loose, so meant for play.
I know fun when I see it.
These leaves are having fun.
Perceptive readers who have read my earlier blogs will note that I speak of Mother Westwind and her Merry Little Breezes here as well as in an earlier poem. It's also the second time that I used the word "Anthropomorphia", a clever enough word that I thought I was kind of coining. It loses cleverness with repeated use. It is my second poem about wind in trees as well. All I can say is that I am getting old (73 years) and that old people repeat themselves.
I love "there's a play date between the leaves and the breezes.
ReplyDeleteWrite about wind in trees as much as you want to! How many different ways can you describe it? How many different messages does it speak to you?
Regarding the other poem, thank you for educating me about that Wordsworth line and its use of "jocund." My bad, not yours.
You know I love the cottonwoods!
Ok. If I find more poetry in wind in trees, I'll let that door open. As much as anything, I found it odd in a world so full of a number of things, to be writing about the small detail of wind in trees more than once. But Ok, I will welcome a 3rd one, should it be there. I think I'm depleted but who knows.
DeleteLet me say something about my attributing it to old people repeating themselves. I do that in fun, of course. Much of it is that I find it so odd to be that old. I sure don't feel it and I don't suppose I look it or act it either. It has become a kind of standard joke for me to refer to my age and maybe that's not such a good idea. Do it too much and maybe I will think I'm 73 and start acting my age. Don't want that.
At least you still remember you've already told the story. Sometimes I get the sneaking suspicion that I've told a story before but I can't for the life of me remember. It IS odd to be any age over, what, 30? :) Keep acting and living young at heart!!
ReplyDeleteMy trouble with the idea of being young at heart is that it conjures up an image of a none too healthy old codger who is behaving with childish foolishness, just possibly due to dementia, whose failure to act like a grown-up is excused on the basis that he is young at heart.
DeleteThat's probably unfair. Young at heart is the term we use. However, I remember my mother when she was 90 received a descriptive diagnosis from a doctor who was making no effort to complement her and who said she was 90 with the body of a 70 year old. To say that she was "young at heart" while true enough, didn't really get at the situation.
Fair enough. Ok, what term would be better? Maybe "Keep living vibrantly"? "Keep cultivating inner joy"? My son's fiancee was telling me her 84-year-old aunt swims four miles across and back on a lake near her home every morning. Not sure we need to be that physically fit, but maybe that mentally fit? Emotionally fit? Spiritually fit? Not sure. Another friend, 75, keeps saying, "Just don't settle and don't give up," whatever that might mean for each of us. To me, you seem to have a zest for life. That is certainly something I strive for.
DeleteYeah, we really don't have the right term for the case when the physical body and the mental capability have not deteriorated as much as chronological age would ordinarily indicate. And surely a significant element of that is maintaining a capacity for fun and enthusiasm which we would generally call being "young at heart" I do like "Just don't settle and don't give up,"
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