Trespassing Golden Meadows
Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1881
I’ve been reading a lot of poetry lately. I was educated on poetry, foundationally from the Bible, where one finds the greatest poetry of all time, but later too, in my early teaching life, where I taught poetry, both old and new, from Chaucer and Shakespeare, Milton to Wordsworth, to the dark moderns John Berryman and Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, or the more hopeful voices of T. S. Eliot, Denise Levertov, Theodore Roethke, William Stafford, Wendell Berry. I wrote poetry for years.
I know I am a dying breed, though. I know poetry is not being read these days. I know our poets often become inaccessible, esoteric, so often stretching our reach of understanding or patience. And to be sure our give-me-only-the-facts mentality has obliterated the desire to read something for its own beauty, something that hints of the transcendent, something that brings us together with a common language, thrilling us with the right sound and the precise image, triggering our love for who we are and where we live.
Which brings me to R. S. Thomas, once again, one of the poets I’ve been reading lately, the poet and priest who lived and wrote and preached among the rough-hewn people of his beloved Wales. He begins his poem “The Green Isle” this way:
It is the sort of country that,
After leaving, one is ashamed of
Being rude about. That gentleness
Of green nature, reflected
In its people—what has one done
To deserve it?
Could it ever be possible again to love our own country this way? Too often we hear obsessive shame for the painful shortcomings in our history. That colors everything. Our language is often filled with self-hatred and distain.
Thomas is “ashamed of being rude about” his own land, noticing that the “gentleness / of green nature” has seeped into its people. Can we imagine once again thinking that the extraordinary beauty and majesty of our land—our rivers and mountains and beaches and cities—could be reflected in the character of our people? Our poets used to speak that way.
Thomas goes on to say this about his people:
They sit about
Over slow glasses, discussing,
Not the weather, the news,
Their families, but the half
Legendary heroes of old days.
As the gentle land has shaped the kind of people they are, what do they do? They sit around, “over slow glasses,” talking about the heroes of the old days. It’s slow, thoughtful talk. It speaks of legends without overinflating. It is not stained by the need to deflate what is honorable and worthy and important to admire. If we’re going to give up our history, our land, our heroes, I fear we will no longer be a people.
All of this causes Thomas to admire the people around him, the little people, people doing small things, people just sitting around talking.
That man shuffling dustily,
His pants through, to the door
Of the gin shop, is not as mean
As he looks; he has the tongue
For which ale is but the excuse
To trespass in golden meadows
Of talk, poaching his words
From the rich, but feasting on them
In that stale palour, with zest
And freedom of a great poet.
We’d be so much better off if we sought the “zest / and freedom of a great poet,” feasting on those words, mostly just sitting around with others sharing our love for who we are and the land where we live.
Sadly we are not trekking through golden meadows these days. We’ve lost an ear for the great language of the poets who could bring us there and bring us together. Our language has become crude and sharp and often empty. It rings hard with derision and division.
I yearn for the time when our poets could bring us together, talking about the gentleness of our green land, talking about half-legendary heroes, talking about what is worthy and good, reveling through it all by trespassing in those golden meadows of talk. We’ve been there before. What’s keeping us from going there again?