We took a quiet walk this morning through an older neighborhood just a quarter-mile from our back yard—but over the creek and "in the county" from us "in the city limits."
Because it was Sunday, the walk reminded me that we plan to visit
Key West later this year. Only three degrees separate the walk and Key West, three links in the memory chain from the one to the other.
Sunday morning—at any rate, a quiet one outside rather than inside cleaning up the kitchen while my wife and Siegfried go walking alone—sometimes puts me into a spiritual mood, or at least a deeply reflective one. And what else is a "spiritual mood" than a deeply reflective one? (Well, sometimes it's hardly reflective at all, just a feeling of "being at one.")
Anyway, this morning's mood led directly to the poem "Sunday Morning," published in full in 1923 (and, I just learned from Wikipedia, "now in the public domain").
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights...
...
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
It was a quick step from there to
Wallace Stevens, the poem's author. Or maybe I thought of him first, and then of his poem.
And thence to Key West, which Stevens visited numerous times from 1922 to 1940, where he generally lodged at
Casa Marina, which opened in 1920. (We don't have reservations there.)
Harry S. Truman and Ernest Hemingway have historic sites in Key West, but so far I haven't discovered that Wallace Stevens has one (or Robert Frost, who tussled with Stevens there a time or two). I may have to take Stevens with me, in the form of his
Collected Poetry & Prose in the American Library edition.
It contains his essay,
The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. I might read it again, see whether it speaks to me differently after fifty years.
For a while on the walk I questioned my current plan (or recent plan, at any rate—the last time I told anyone it was my plan) to write a screenplay on the theme of animal rights. I wondered whether my spirit might be better served to try my hand again at poetry— birthed emblems of reflection (like most of Stevens's), or songs of feeling at one with one another human and with other animals and all life on Earth, and of the beauty of all, predator and prey alike.
