Poetry at the Breakfast Table

For decades reading the newspaper at breakfast nauseated me. A glance at the contents, and my mood turned dun while bile began to percolate, its grounds rough and almost tinny, as if my feelings were being shoveled into a burr mill. That has changed. A month ago I canceled my subscription to the morning paper. Now at breakfast I sip a cordial of poetry. The poems are not nepenthean—intoxicating and distancing me from life: instead the verse awakens and broadens sensibilities. Amid the granola, bananas, soy milk, and Russian tea, I pause and, if I don't smile, I nod, in the pleasure of words finding harmony. The world is always muddled, but living doesn't have to be as confused as the front page of a newspaper, a surreal blend of pathos and absurdity, of gossip and propaganda, of commerce, and of packaged heartache oozing artificial sweetener.

Now at breakfast Lydian airs freshen my spirit, and Childe Roland's approaching the dark tower is endlessly suggestive. Sometimes between spoonsful of All Bran I hum "native wood notes wild" and "sport with Amaryllis in the shade." Spring is months away, but when it arrives, weeds will spin "in wheels" and "shoot long and lovely and lush." Besides, beauty is wondrously present and ever-dappled, no matter the season, when I read lines such as Meredith's:

Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping       Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star.Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried,       Brooding o'er the gloom, spins the brown evejar.

As black type demanding attention and trumpeting importance vanishes from the morning, so one's perspective changes. "Greatness of soul," Montaigne writes, "is not so much pressing upward and forward as knowing how to set oneself in order and circumscribe oneself. It regards as great whatever is adequate and shows its elevation by liking moderate things better than eminent ones." The more modest the mansion the soul builds, to emend Oliver Wendell Holmes, the more satisfactory the life.

The view from a modest house is rational and comparatively happy. The owner realizes that no alterative can purge nationalism from the world, and that war and its cruel devices will always be "too much with us." "We often learn, when it is too late," L. P. Jacks wrote resignedly in 1917, "that the existence of an instrument for performing an action is the cause of that action being performed." Yet, when one imagines The Mikado's three little maids skipping away from school, "filled to the brim with girlish glee," and eavesdrops on Patience and hears Bunthorne singing about "a most particularly pure young man," pessimism and paralyzing spleen slip from mind, neither of them to "be missed." "I do not see what is wrong with being hostile and contemptuous toward one's fellow creatures," Gerald Gould declares in All About Women; "It is the attitude I am always trying to cultivate for myself." Gould's remark is an amalgam of the playful and the serious. Still Gould was a journalist, and every day he observed the sad and the foolish. For my part since I quit reading the newspaper, I have thought better of my fellows. Although poetry has not made me an optimist, blighted expectation no longer causes me to throw myself into a depression exclaiming, "Oh, willow, titwillow, titwillow."

In "Walking" Thoreau says there is a need for a "Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance." Knowledge is conventional and often so distracting that it obscures vision and prevents people from thinking and knowing. I didn't vote in last week's town elections—the only election in which I haven't voted since settling in Storrs thirty-five years ago. I missed both the election and turning the clocks back for daylight savings time. I had not kept up because I no longer read the newspaper. I neglected nothing significant. In Ecclesiastes the preacher mentions a time to be born and a time to die. I managed the first well, causing Mother little pain, and I'm not worried about the second. Although...