Poetry, Pleasure, and Loss (With a Word about Desire Thrown in for Good Measure)
You need a lovely word like “refulgent” to capture the visionary gleam of a Magnolia Jane tulip tree in springtime. The more literal sense of the word (from the Latin fulgēre, “to shine”) is “shining with or reflecting a brilliant light”; the more figurative sense, which in early usage was frequently applied to a beautiful woman, is “resplendent, glorious, illustrious, sumptuous.” You may recall that Emerson, in his Divinity School Address, used it as an epithet for summer.
In this case as in many others I find it useful to have in my head not just the word but the word as it is used by poets of vigor and verve. Francis Quarles in his Emblems (1635) used “refulgent” in its first sense—“Enrich mine eyes with thy refulgent Ray”—and Shelley, in his elegy for Keats (1821), in its second: “Others more sublime … / Have sunk, extinct in their refulgent prime.” (This literal-figurative succession is common in English, and the dates are not atypical of the shift.)
Such were the phrases twirling about in my head as I beheld the tulip tree outside our kitchen window this spring. The tree was about as magnificent—about as refulgent—as we’ve ever seen it, especially on those rare cloudless days when the sun turned nature’s dimmer switch all the way clockwise. And although we no longer have a redbud foregrounding an apple to give us the spectacular combination of purple and white, we do have several apple trees of both the edible and inedible kinds. As I write the Crabapples are at peak. The Macintosh and the four other mystery varieties, all large, all beautiful, will peak in a few days, as will the flowering Kwanzan cherries. These line our driveway for about 150 yards. They provide us with all the red-carpet reception our homespun celebrity requires.
And of course, they get me thinking about certain poets.
Hopkins and Nature Poetry
The brooding Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who as a denizen of those damp islands we call Great Britain probably had a psychological need for springtime and sunlight, began one of his sonnets with the declaration “Nothing is so beautiful as spring.” And elsewhere, in one of those impatient lines of his, a line with no time for unneeded words, he said, “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” Adding “in” or “inside” before “things” (there lives the dearest freshness deep down inside things) may help you to get the immediate meaning, but doing so also compromises another sense Hopkins seems to intend: not only is freshness deep down, intrinsic, but there is a deep-down-ness to everything. And Hopkins, who could really make words jump from the page, requires of himself the active verb: freshness lives in the very deep-down-ness of nature herself. It follows that there is no such thing as mere surface, mere appearance. Either there is depth and mystery or there is nothing. All this from omitting a preposition.
And for Hopkins nature always flings itself, asserts itself, selfs itself: it has an urge to express in the etymologically precise sense of the word, which is to press out what’s inside, to make visible the essence—indeed the quintessence—that lies hidden but latent and eager within. The human face wears an expression, a material pressing out, of a person’s immaterial disposition, be it sorrow or joy or whatever. When we press an orange or a lemon to move the juice from the inside of the fruit to its outside, we in fact express it. That is the more exact way to say what we do. But with Hopkins you get the sense that the orange, if it could, would leap into the press and do the work for you. When it comes to the created order, what’s in wants out.
So in the same poem about springtime he says,
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness.
No doubt he would say that all the colors of spring are in a rush with richness, that they are all in a torrential hurry to show their wealth. The whole world, as Hopkins famously said, “is charged with the grandeur of God” and “will flame out like shining from shook foil.” And note that “peartree” isn’t “peartree’s.” The possessive would prevent “leaves” and “blooms,” which are nouns, from also doing part-time work as verbs suggesting action. Any tree that leaves (that is, that leafs) and blooms is also a part of the active ordered frenzy of springtime and of life itself, which is intent on expression, on pressing out what’s on the inside.
Do it Again
The exuberance here might put you in mind of Chesterton’s quip about daisies:
Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
On this view the flowers in springtime fairly shout out—they advert—a kind of superabundance. Of course you could say that a species is trying to gain a competitive advantage, but to the imagination the superabundance and the “dearest freshness deep down things” call for a different kind of metaphysic. They call for a different view of nature herself. This isn’t mere propogation or survival of the fittest, which is a phrase far too dull and narrow for a world that selfs itself. This is something more.
Now it may be that you cannot countenance a different kind of metaphysic; it may be that all Chesterton’s “do it again” or Hopkins’ “dearest freshness” does nothing for you. It may be that for you there is no depth or mystery, only surface. In that case you’re done with the matter and needn’t bother with poetry or beauty in any form. But I’d call that a damn shame, because it means you don’t know what to do about the interesting problem you’ve just been confronted with.
The problem is nothing less than what to do about the heartbreaking transience of beauty, because the transience itself is nothing less than a challenge to the dull narrow approach. It is an insistent voice, a heckler, saying, ‘You’ve stopped thinking right at the moment you were supposed to start thinking.’
Nature’s First Green
One of our own poets troubled by transience observed that nature’s “early leaf’s a flower, / But only so an hour.” This of course is Robert Frost, who always got the visual details right. “Nature’s first green is gold,” he said—“Her hardest hue to hold.” The transience troubled him. How, he seems to ask, is this not vexing?
In springtime pretty much everything that is going to be green starts out more like gold or yellow. The leaves forming on the maple outside my window are, at this moment, less green than gold. And wait until the pollen starts to fly. In springtime we move about in a kind of literal golden age. Of course a poet would ask us to take this figuratively, but Frost’s sleight-of-hand is very clever here: he actually asks us to take it literally as well. Nature’s first green is gold. That’s a metaphor and also not a metaphor. Who knew a poet could be guilty of plain-speaking?
But Frost had another aim, which was to emphasize not only the superabundance of beauty that always comes early but also—and especially—the transience that attends it in its earliest manifestations. As you read the poem think of Eden; think of the Golden Age; think of childhood; think of morning; think of youth; think of spring. Think of all these “firsts” as you work your way to the poem’s final observation—that nothing of great value, nothing of supreme value, can stay. Try as we may, we cannot hold onto it.
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
In other words, there lives the dearest transience deep down things, and that transience is as painful, indeed as intolerable, as the thought of annihilation at death. You can dispense with intolerable ephemerality, or with the entirely reasonable human insistence on immortality, but only if daisies are mere daisies and not the great “do it again” of something (or someone) on the other side of them. Do flowers lean toward the light only because of a “mechanism” that botanists claim to have discovered? How dull and narrow that would be, how disrespectful to the interesting problem that the cosmos (a word that once meant “ornament”) has put before us.
Language and Rhythm
About a hundred years ago a young Owen Barfield, who was a close friend of C.S. Lewis’s and a far-reaching thinker in his own right, wrote a short but by no means modest book titled Poetic Diction. In it he remarked that there can be no aesthetic pleasure without what he called a “felt change of consciousness.” He was interested in that particular change we experience as the mind reacts to certain words and phrases or, by extension, to certain passages of music, even something as simple as the resolution of a nonharmonic, like a 4-3 suspension, or (further) the sight of a Magnolia Jane tulip trees in all its flowering refulgence. Consider the effect on the mind these lines of Shelley’s are capable of:
My soul is an enchanted boat,
Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float
Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing;
And thine doth like an angel sit
Beside a helm conducting it,
Whilst all the winds with melody are ringing.
It takes a fairly prosaic sensibility not to feel the ground move at least a little upon hearing these extraordinary six lines. The governing image, the scene, the music and pacing of (and within) the lines, the rhymes invested in both stressed and unstressed syllables, and especially the new and fresh meaning brought into human consciousness by means of both metaphor and simile (the soul as both boat and angel-helmsman)—all of this and more brings on an arresting and yet wholly agreeable alteration in consciousness itself. The result is aesthetic pleasure, but the alteration, the change, is indispensable to the pleasure.
Now to those for whom poetry is not merely an ornament on life but a mode of being in the world it is hardly a matter of indifference that change is the sine qua non of pleasure, for they solicit it, and in doing so they actually court the agony of transience. They solicit it because there is no way to avoid it in their pursuit of aesthetic pleasure.
But at some point transience steps in, and then we are all left with absence; at some point we are left with something like what Shelley called “the memory of music fled.” The mind may react with pleasure on the metrical arrangement of that phrase, on the image of beautiful sounds fleeing, even on the syntactical arrangement “music fled,” but still the music is gone, fled. The felt change of consciousness has come and gone. That change was the occasion of pleasure, its vehicle, you might say, but the pleasure too is gone.
Why Poetry Matters
Again, those for whom poetry is no mere decoration will not suffer to live without the felt change of consciousness, without “what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed,” as Alexander Pope put it. Coleridge, without irony or snark, defined poetry as, simply, “the best words in the best order.” He and Pope and Frost and Hopkins would not go about this life without the best words in the best order ringing in their ears. They would not have the bare experience without its most apt, felicitous, and poignant articulation. They would not be content to use such words as “refulgent” without knowing its meanings both literal and figurative, both concrete and abstract. Nor could a lovely word derived from the verb “to shine” be denied its eventual appropriate transfer from light to a beautiful woman. The imagination will not hear of such stinginess and neglect. It will have the world on its own terms or not at all.
As I write, about half of the flowers from our tulip tree have come down in the wind and rain. The tree has a lovely skirt of petals around it that in a sense mirrors its canopy. But the petals, whether on the ground or still on the branches, have lost their intensity. They’re curling now and tinged with brown. The early leaf, which is a flower at first, will soon be all leaf and no flower, and then leaf will subside to leaf, just as Eden sank to grief. The auroral hour dissolves into midday. Nothing gold can stay. You might say that the golden age has given way to what Emily Dickinson called “the hour of lead.” That’s not good news for alchemists and other fantasists, such as those still trying to outwit death and get out of live alive. Better to confront the interesting problem and divine the thing it’s trying to teach you.
A little reflection teaches us that pleasure is built into the very transience, and transience into the very pleasure, of all that is beautiful—indeed of all that is. And if change is built into the structure of life, and if there can be no pleasure without change, this means an essential part of that structure and of that pleasure is loss itself, as if the world—and at the moment springtime—is teaching us that in seeking pleasure, which we may legitimately do if our desires are properly ordered, we are also and in fact soliciting loss. And, on a proper view of things, loss, like springtime itself, is also a benevolent preceptor. Its lectures on the quickly passing have everything to do with desires rightly ordered. If it helps, remember that “transient” derives from a word that once meant “pilgrim.”
I used “visionary gleam” in my opening sentence. Wordsworth once asked, “whither is fled the visionary gleam?” He asked not because he wanted to know where thing had gone off to; he simply wanted to register the loss. “There hath passed away a glory from the earth,” he said. And Keats remarked that joy’s hand “is ever at his lips / Bidding adieu.” That’s a way of saying that joy, though here, though accessible, and though it effects a change in us, is always walking out the door.
Shakespeare, knowing this, advised his young friend: love “well”—not inordinately but well—that “which thou must leave ere long.”
Jason Peters joined Hillsdale’s faculty in the fall of 2021 after spending 25 years at Augustana College, where he was Dorothy J. Parkander Professor in Literature.
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