A FINE crisp morning, a little cooler than usual, and a slight scattering of leaves on the path, all seem to say “It’s September now; the long leisure of summer is gone. Look! The Granta hurries a little faster on her journey into Cambridge, the apples are round and full enough to leave the tree. You, too, should quicken your step, put aside your summer meanderings, pick up some motion, excitement, and purpose from these first swift rushes of the west wind, the ‘breath of autumn’s being’, and be stirring about your business, getting on with your life.”
It’s strange how meaning seems to flow back and forth between ourselves and the scenes we observe, how the internal weather seems to seep into the outer, and the outer into the inner. Do these stirrings and renewal of purpose in my mind and heart come out from me to clothe and interpret all I see? Or do the stirrings and changes in nature herself breathe and speak into me, to change my mind and heart?
Coleridge certainly experienced this exchange in both directions, and reflected deeply on both experiences. In “Frost at Midnight”, he invites us to recognise the glories of nature around us as
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible,
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters. . .
But, later, in his poem “Dejection: An ode”, he experienced it the other way round:
O Lady! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live. . .
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud. . .
But, either way, there is an exchange of meaning, a kind of enlightenment, some sense in which what’s “out there” tells us a little more about what’s “in here”, articulates what’s unspoken, makes visible what’s invisible. And, at the same time, all that is “in here” — all the memory and experience we carry — enables us to see the world “out there” as so much more than a mere agglomeration of physical stuff, but rather as something alive with truth and mystery.
I’ve recently been reading a new volume of poetry, Eye of the Beholder, by the American poet Luci Shaw. She has a wonderful poem in that collection called “Bird Psalm,” in which she reflects with great clarity and precision on both sides of this experience. The poem starts with the sound of birdsong just before dawn:
Early light, before
sun, and I hear an unknown bird
singing his morning syllables —
pitiful, pitiful, pitiful — in a voice
too plaintive to be believed.
She goes on to describe birds as “music with feathers”, but confesses that, although she senses meaning, she may not have heard deeply enough to understand it:
. . . We pick up clues
but translation depends on our
willingness to hear, to listen.
And then, in the final verse, she opens herself, and her reader, to a new possibility, a new interpretation of the experience, in which she sets aside her own preoccupations and hears the bird-psalm differently:
Maybe
I’ve let last night’s bad dream
misinterpret his message.
Maybe he’s telling me this new day is
beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
