Perhaps, at the beginning, every poet thinks, like Keats, that
“I am however young writing at random—straining at particles
of light in the midst of a great darkness . . .”
—Stanley Plumly, “Early Nineteenth-Century English Poetry Walks”
Begin with a walk. Through the brick and grassed-in grounds enclosing Winchester Cathedral, past the towering yews and red-twigged limes, their canopy of greenery swaying and hissing in the wind. June, 2019. Father’s Day. The forecast calls intermittent rain. But this is England—when isn’t rain part of the equation? Perhaps, then, choose a different walk. In brighter weather. Say, decades earlier through a university’s botanical nucleus. Over what was once open pasture for cattle: nineteen circular acres whose eleven thousand trees grasp and tug at the autumnal light of Southern California. When classes let out late afternoons, abandon the platformed Humanities Hall, whose Brutalist design once attracted location scouts for 1972’s Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. Saunter down the terrace’s concrete steps; take the dirt paths that lead to the campus’s heart. It’s there, in Aldrich Park, propped against the exposed roots of a Moreton Bay fig or sprawled under a cluster of eucalyptus, you’ll arrive at that place somewhere between restlessness and stillness, a place where, when the body is finally unmoving, the mind, too, can begin to wander. Toward idea. Or memory. A feeling, perhaps. An observation. About the drowsiness of clouds, or the pumpkin-throated swallows darting across the skyline to feed on mosquitoes and gnats. Begin with a walk.
• •
There are days so ordinary we simply don’t pay attention to their passing. It’s difficult for me to picture some younger version of myself making her way from Lot 1B toward Stanley Plumly’s office at University of Maryland’s Susquehanna Hall. It would have been spring, 2002, a semester past 9/11. I might have been hauling two sections worth of graded papers for English 101. Or, maybe that was the term I taught Intro to Poetry, which meant that, twice weekly, I spent ninety minutes parroting for undergrads what I’d learned in graduate workshop the year before. Stan’s observation, for instance, that the lyric’s essence is moment and memory, or his belief that if you find the proper form, the poem will begin to self-edit. “Narrative loves the extra word,” he’d chide from the head of the seminar table. “Too much talking in this line!” Although his pronouncements spring readily to mind, I can’t remember the exact circumstances of that day. Only, that I was eager to see him. That we all were—a recent health scare had prompted some sort of “procedure,” whose details (minor or major) the department withheld. Speculation was the trouble was cardiac. As admirers of Stan’s work, which often draws on the poet’s Ohio childhood and family history, we knew his lumberman father died of coronary failure at fifty-six. His mother, who’d undergone three open-heart surgeries, likewise succumbed to the disease. “I sat in the dark inside the feeling,” Stan would later write of his own congestive trouble. “I was turning into stone, or, if I turned / around, to salt, salt crystals diamonding / the blackouts . . .” (“Silent Heart Attack”).
Whereas some faculty members turned up afternoons they taught, on his days off it was odd not to find Stan stalled at the water fountain near the bulletin board, or to catch a glimpse of his white shock of hair in the department stairwell. During his illness, I remember missing especially the long note of his laugh—that scoff of joy, Ha!—followed by a rolling chuckle. The truth is I can’t remember the precise length of time Stan disappeared from campus, only that his absence was deeply felt. Which is why, hearing that he’d returned, that he was not only back but doing well, I made the long walk from Lot 1B to his office, carrying my books and papers and microwavable lunch, as well as a dozen purple irises wrapped in brown paper tied with a pale yellow ribbon. Stan’s response—light-hearted mockery—wasn’t exactly surprising. He often poked fun at my impractical shoes and girlish plaits. He was also the only teacher that I ever had who recommended personalized reading lists devoted exclusively to women writers he held in esteem: Deborah Digges, Rita Dove, Linda Gregerson, Natasha Trethewey, Elizabeth Bishop, and Louise Glück among them. “Who gives a man flowers?” he jeered that afternoon, leaning the bouquet upright against the wall on top of a pile of books. And, as was often the case during the years he was my mentor, I didn’t know quite how to answer.
• •
2016: Friday morning, late September. Winchester Cathedral’s great west window dominates the nave, its vertical compartments converging in a massive arc. A shape one recognizes. Not unlike a sonnet, identified on the page without counting the syllables. But move closer to the wall of glass and what’s familiar disappears. It’s here, beneath the ribbed vaulting that, four centuries ago, Roundheads attacked the Royalist city. The building broken into, rebels beheaded the alabaster statues before looting the library and mortuary chests. In the dead of night, teams of commoners hammered the church’s medieval glass with the femurs of kings. So what we see—or rather, what I see just weeks after moving overseas—isn’t the great west window but the interior of the great west window remade: thousands of shards salvaged and later reframed during the Restoration. The panes’ random mosaic of color interrupted by oddly-cut transparent pieces retrofitted, not only to make up for glass that’s gone missing, but also to help usher in natural light.
Light enough, I note, to read by. A tourist’s pamphlet perhaps, or a sermon. Or maybe, however unlikely, a letter from a lover. Which is what John Keats read at this very site in the fall of 1819. Less than a year of his life left in England. As he paced the then-seven-centuries-old aisles, Fanny Brawne’s dark cursive sloping brightly in his hand. I first studied Keats as an undergraduate at the University of California, Irvine. A dancer then who spent more hours in the studio or rehearsals than the lecture hall, I was slowly abandoning life on stage for one on the page. Afternoons when I could spare the time, I’d make my way into Aldrich Park to pore over Keats’s sonnets and odes—nightingale, mostly, and the Grecian urn, “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be.” It was the deep sublimity of the writing that attracted me, though at the time I knew little about its author. It would be years, in fact, before I learned of the dilapidated neighborhood in which Keats trained as a surgeon-apothecary, or the hours he dedicated to nursing his younger brother, Tom, who succumbed to tuberculosis. I hadn’t yet encountered the term “posthumous existence,” nor was I familiar with the poet’s habit of riding atop coaches throughout England’s icy countryside in order to cut the fare. Descriptions of those Hampstead evenings Keats passed with his beloved Fanny Brawne were still out of reach, as were scathing reviews of Endymion, the ill-fated walk in which he forgot his winter coat, as well as the poet’s final voyage from London to Italy, accompanied by his friend, the aspiring artist Joseph Severn, who rented the small apartment overlooking Rome’s Spanish Steps where the twenty-five-year-old poet took his last breaths convinced that (as his headstone suggests) the name Keats “was one writ in Water.”
And so, although I was familiar with a handful of Keats’s poems when I arrived on the East Coast several years after graduating from UCI, it wasn’t until I heard Stanley Plumly speak about “To Autumn” (though “speak” is far too flat a term to describe how he entered the world of that poem) that the writing really came to life. Part of it had to do with the way Stan emphasized certain formal elements—the temperature of the poem’s diction, its imagistic accumulation, consonance as a means of enacting the lines’ movement between abundance and grief—but, even more so, the passion with which he engaged the rich interiority of “To Autumn.” It was as if he himself had somehow entered fall’s failing light that fateful day when Keats first set down his verse; as if he’d been there that afternoon in Winchester, mid-September 1819. Yet, it wasn’t just that Stan described “To Autumn” as if he’d witnessed Keats firsthand traipsing the riverside path along “the stubble-plains.” Rather, it was as though he’d seen into the very heart and mind of the poet—discerned his observations, his very thinking. Stan could pinpoint, for example, why Keats’s restlessness and the realization that he’d “led a very odd sort of life for the two or three last years—Here & there—No anchor—” (letter, “To J. H. Reynolds, 21 September 1819”) manifested itself in the transitory feeling that emanates from the “wailful choir” of “small gnats” that “mourn / Among the river sallows, borne aloft” in the poem’s final stanza. To say that Stanley Plumly knew Keats’s poetry, in other words, doesn’t go far enough. Through decades of meticulous study and reflection, he’d absorbed the life lived behind its very making. While Stan recognized what characterized a Keatsian line, he likewise knew what constituted Keatsian loneliness, longing, failure, and overall temperament. Pointing to “gathering swallows” on the “soft-dying day,” he could rattle off tidbits about the poet’s ill-health, isolation, financial shortcomings, mood swings—whatever helped him (and by extension, his students) more fully enter the “season of mists.” As a young writer, I was awed by this level of intimacy, which I gradually came to recognize as a radical act of empathy. One I very much wanted to emulate. And so, using my teacher as a model of what Elizabeth Bishop calls “a believer in total immersion,” I promised myself that when it came to the poetry I felt mattered most, I, too, would devote myself wholly.
• •
During office hours Stan prescribed not only authors but also movies and art. If he recommended a particular painting at the Smithsonian (The emotion in pictures lives in the sky, kiddo!), I’d comb the National Gallery to find it. I remember wandering the aisles of Blockbuster Video searching for his suggested viewing, a parade of Hollywood faces staring out blankly from the cases of shelved DVDs. Of all Stan’s directives, however, it was 1963’s Hud that perplexed me most. The bleak Western is gritty and fraught. There’s drunkenness, an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, deep familial resentments, an attempted sexual assault. Maybe Stan chose it because I was struggling to write the agriculturally driven San Joaquin Valley of my adolescence, those dusty fields in which my migrant grandparents picked cotton and fruit. Perhaps it was what I’d disclosed in verse about my biological father, who, like Paul Newman’s character, was handsome and mean, monstrous and self-important. No matter how hard I scoured Hud, however, I remained at a loss. Was the intended lesson exposition? Metaphor or plot? “Film the language!” Stan often charged in workshop, echoing Donald Justice: “What you can’t see doesn’t exist for the reader . . . Don’t give up the landscape!”
It was only after Stan died in the spring of 2019 that I flashed on Paul Newman pacing the Texas countryside in a pair of cowboy boots and hat. For some reason, I couldn’t let the image go and so pulled up a clip of Hud on YouTube. Shot in the Panhandle, the film is flat and bleak. Devoid of trees, scant bits of scrub-brush and barbed fencing account for the screen’s rough strokes of texture. Everything exists in black and white: a Chevy pickup stalled on the dark, country road; the sick longhorn, downed on its side. Playing the unprincipled son, Newman shoots a wake of buzzards that have come to feed on the rotting steer, tells his father to sell off the remaining livestock before state inspectors mandate the quarantine that will spiral their ranch toward ruin. There’s something archetypal at work here, something about generational tension, and the witnessing of nature’s brutality and destruction. “I always try to interpret the law in a lenient matter,” drawls an irritated Newman. “Sometimes I lean to one side of it, sometimes I lean to the other.”
Reviewing the scene after more than a decade and a half, I wonder if what Stan had been getting at has less to do with story and more with sensibility. No doubt he advocated strongly for concrete image as a means of generating lyric pathos, but what I notice now about Hud are subtle markers that reveal what Robert Frost describes as “inner weather.” It isn’t so much what the actors say, in other words, but what the silence between each utterance suggests and how the natural world of the stark, gray landscape amplifies the rhythm of this unspoken psychological tension. Of course, there’s no way to know what Stan intended. Still, after his death, I’ve come to think of Hud as a deeply haunted work of inner desolation, one whose elegiac mood and thorny beauty isn’t entirely unlike the poetry Stan himself admired and wrote. For an hour and fifty-two minutes on screen, Hud and Homer Bannon circle each other in an ambiguous dance of connection and withdraw. While the script presents the Bannons as unique characters who live in the fictive town of Vernal, the actors perform father-son tropes viewers recognize all too well. Outwardly, the respective pair is lively, aggressive and rough, or steadfast, apprehensive, and fair-minded; the landscape, meanwhile, which seems to represent all that’s felt but left unexpressed between them, hangs quietly in the background—gray, pensive, generative and ruined. Although I was too green to make the connection when Stan first recommended Hud, I wonder if the country of our poetic imagination likewise navigates a similar ruggedness: its antagonistic figures shadowy versions of the self. Dimension, after all, comes by a combination of what’s familiar and adversarial. “I sat in the dark inside the feeling,” writes Stan. A picture’s emotion resides in the sky.
• •
The years I lived in England, I made a series of pilgrimages. I wandered the alley where it’s said John Donne’s parents rented public rooms. Toured Hardy country in Dorset. I photographed Tintern Abbey and explored the Lake District. New Year’s Day, I made a tradition of lighting a devotional candle at the Oxford church where Gerard Manley Hopkins was stationed. For Auden, I toured Christ Church. I sketched the drowned Shelley sculpture at University College. I dragged my family to Sylvia Plath’s gravesite in Heptonstall. In drizzling rain, over several days we hiked Hardcastle Crags and the surrounding area, logging more than twenty miles across the windswept moorlands that figure poems like “Wuthering Heights” and “The Great Carbuncle.” On another trip to London, I walked our dog past the house where Yeats once lived and Plath later died, then rounded the corner to see the flat where, less than two years before her suicide, she and Ted Hughes had heard from their sitting room seals barking in nearby Regent’s Park Zoo.
There were other pilgrimages, too. Side-trips. A few curiosities. Some mattered more than others. But the house at Hampstead—the place where Keats had written The Eve of St. Agnes and his great spring odes, especially nightingale—was another matter altogether. What surprised me most about the semidetached villa wasn’t the dwelling itself, but the fact that although we hadn’t spoken in person for several years, I saw Stan in every room I entered. I imagined him standing near the shelf that held the Etruscan oil lamp Keats may have improvised as an inkwell; examining the brooch designed by Joseph Severn after the poet’s death, its lyre strings threaded with the poet’s hair. I pictured him downstairs in the converted whitewashed cellar Keats had used as a coal store. Knowing Stan spent almost every day for a year at the property while researching his meditative biography, Posthumous Keats, I wondered what he’d thought of the taxidermied pheasant curiously slung by its neck from a wooden beam beside bundles of dried lilac, the bird’s talons curled like a series of commas. At an upstairs window I looked down into the garden, amused by the thought of how easily Stan would have been able to identify the trees that stretched their barren winter branches toward London’s slate-gray sky. I wondered how long he gazed at the framed reproduction of Keats’s “To Autumn,” studying the egg-brown paper, its visible pocket-folds, the crossed-out lines and x-ed through phrases (“whoever seeks for thee” becoming “whoever seeks abroad”). Entering the pale pink bedroom into which a feverish Keats stumbled in February 1820, I wondered what Stan felt, knowing it was here that, seized by a violent fit of coughing, Keats first saw a single drop of blood on the bedsheet and flatly declared it his “death-warrant.”
Before leaving the house in Hampstead, I snapped a picture, a self-portrait of sorts, at the end of a second-story hallway: some ghostly version of my body reflected in the glass case displaying Keats’s life and death masks. In the photo, the bright white plaster of the poet’s once-living head rests on my shoulders; his posthumous mask, painted bronze, sits just below my heart. Although the image reveals the camera in my hands and the length of my olive-green wool coat, I am faceless. Or, rather, I wear two faces—the mouth through which Keats breathed life into his poems on outings when he composed his drafts, as well as the sunken cheeks that held the last bit of air that eventually freed the death rattle. In the portrait, Keats has been fully absorbed in me, or maybe I have been absorbed by him. Although I can’t pinpoint why, I find this spectral ambiguity pleasing. Held in a particular moment, as well as in memory, Keats and I are both present and absent. Via the image, we hover together a few feet above the grounds the poet paced two centuries ago “in embalmed darkness” before settling beneath the plum tree where he heard “. . . the self-same song that found a path / Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home, / She stood in tears amid the alien corn” (“Ode to a Nightingale”).
• •
I was on holiday with my family in Germany when I heard the news—a ping that came by phone within hours of Stanley Plumly’s passing. I’d just taken a photo of my children in front of the Beethoven Monument in Bonn: the fact of my teacher’s death now fixed in memory along with the bronze statue, a nearby building’s bright yellow facade, my kids hamming for the camera, the after-scent of rain. A few hours later, after touring Maria Laach Abbey, we passed a field, and I asked my husband to stop the car. I got out, alone, dropped a few euros into a wooden box and took one of the small designated knives from its peg. As I moved between the flowered rows, I didn’t then know that tulips are planted in autumn before the season’s first hard frost. I hadn’t read that regeneration begins after the blooming ends, the daughter-bulb relying on the plant’s old leaves to grow. They’re dormant for several seasons, tulips. But, like most living things, continue to work in silence despite their apparent stillness. I’m not sure how long I paced the rows of that field, only that the arrangement I made contained a red bloom, two white, some veined, a golden pair, and one whose deep purple seemed to me like a through-line back to the bouquet of irises I’d gifted Stan all those years ago in Maryland. From a distance, I must have looked ordinary: a woman carrying a handful of color. “When he’s kneeling he’s really / listening at the very mouth of the flower”—I always loved those lines. Stan first published them in 1999 in a poem dedicated to the poet and master gardener, Stanley Kunitz. Late that afternoon, leaving, his words rushed to mind. The phrases’ cadences a small comfort plucked out of memory’s air that easily, though surprisingly, seemed to come from nowhere.
• •
More than its winding streams or tranquil lakes, its limestone gorges or coastal cliffs, I fell deeply in love with England’s trees. I still miss the country’s oaks and yews, their storied crowns, and the ancient forest of Wytham Woods where, Christmas Eves, we walked with our children, stopping every so often to play in the dens built with fallen branches by previous visitors. I miss, particularly, my most-loved tree: a squat ash lifting up past the bridge that linked our neighborhood to Oxford’s Port Meadow; how, unlike those poplars planted generations ago to form a decorative border along the River Thames, it stood quiet and alone. I photographed it in changing seasons and times of day. Over the years, I came to know that tree more intimately than most of the people with whom I met for tea or regularly spoke with at my children’s school. As I crossed Aristotle Lane and wandered down the bridge, the ash’s distant presence became one on which I depended. Now 4,500 miles away from Oxford and living in Dubai, I can still sense its branches stretching across the worn path I walked toward the public acres where horses and cattle grazed.
It might seem strange to say, but although I loved England’s trees for their intricate forms and faithful company, I loved them, too, because they gave me a deeper relationship with Stanley Plumly’s poetry. As his student, it was Stan’s verse of winged things (starlings, waxwings, cardinals, vesper sparrows, hawks, pelicans, and assorted shorebirds, the long o-ed notes of his doves) and his poetry written from the perspective of the adult child to which I paid most attention. My own poem, “To My Father Two Years into Death,” for instance, which recounts witnessing my biological father being kicked in the ribs by a runaway steer, echoes the opening cadences of Stan’s “To My Father, Dead at Fifty-six, on My Fifty-sixth Birthday.” For years, I admired Stan’s talent as an elegist attuned to the natural world and appreciated his formally varied work, particularly the way he attends with tenderness and apprehension to experiences of isolation and resilience. But it wasn’t until I began taking long walks down Oxford’s tree-lined streets, began trekking the chalky English footpaths winding through woods and village orchards, that I felt pulled toward poems like “Humility Elm,” “American Ash,” “The Marriage in the Trees,” “Boy on the Step,” and “Wistman’s Wood.” “I miss the elms,” I’d read to my son and daughter before wishing them goodnight, “their ‛crowns of airy dreams,’ / as Virgil calls them, their towering cathedral branching / spread into a ceiling above the lonely sidewalks of Ohio / where the first elm deaths were reported in America” (“Dutch Elm”).
Given that his grandfather and father were farmers of trees—growers of apples and proprietors of the P. W. Plumly Lumber Corporation and sawmill—it’s not surprising that a consistent “towering cathedral branching” populates Stan’s work, a pattern that continues from his 1970 debut, In the Outer Dark, through to 2020’s Middle Distance. “I believe in death,” he concedes in “Jesus Wept,” a poem that appears in his posthumous collection, “I believe in the last tree I will / ever see, perhaps with wind in it just as it’s turning color.” I wonder about that tree—the final one he saw last spring. Was it a walnut? An oak? Was it even real? Or was it a flash of memory tuned toward one of the “the big-leaved maples” or most-prized “shagbark hickories” felled at his father’s hands? Stan, I know, believed trees, like poetry, to be “potentially immortal,” as the end-rhymes of his sonnet, “Dutch Elm,” suggest: whatever the distance in geography or time, we can sense our most beloved forms branching there, disappearing never, becoming forever.
• •
He kept them. The irises. Not only kept them but removed the ribbon and brown paper and transferred what was left to an oversized ceramic mug. Shortly before I graduated with my MFA, I saw the dried arrangement—was surprised to see it, frankly—about a year after I’d gifted it, the bouquet resting in its own “posthumous existence” on a bookshelf in Stan’s office. And though I never said a word about it (Who gives a man flowers?), his keeping them meant a lot. Which is why, last spring, upon hearing that, after a months-long hospitalization for pneumonia, complicated by his ongoing treatment for cancer and multiple myeloma, he was finally being released, I sat in my kitchen in England and ordered a large vase of purple calla and Peruvian lilies, lavender and orange roses, statice and gypsophilia, and sent them to Maryland. There was a card. A few short words (restricted by character count)—some gesture toward the old joke between us.
Three weeks later he was gone.
• •
The more I reflect on Stanley Plumly’s mentorship and the long arc of his writing, the clearer it becomes how much his example will continue to teach me. Not only about lyric poetry, but also apprenticeship and loss. His death has been difficult. Yet, I wonder about my claim to such grief and whether I have any right to say anything about him at all. The truth is that when I was his student, I never knew what Stan thought of me. Granted, he teased me with as much affection as he did any of my classmates, greeted me with his customary “Hello, kiddo!” (with the long o’s held for emphasis). During office hours, he cracked jokes about my shortcomings—a friendly reminder, which I greatly needed, to take the writing, but not myself, too seriously. Above all else, I think he recognized in me a shared history of rural violence. Although the Central Valley of my California childhood differed from his native Ohio and Virginia upbringing, our relationship with the past remains irresolvable. I also had the impression that he carried a soft spot for those of us pushed up from the working class. Perhaps it was our earnestness. Or vulnerability. This connection, too, seems to extend to his beloved Keats. Unlike the privileged ancestry of Romantic contemporaries like Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Keats had had the odds stacked similarly against him—from an early age, he, too, had known familial instability and financial despair, and long believed himself to be a failure.
In the decade and a half since I graduated from Maryland, I’ve heard several MFA students say that Stan used to describe me as the “worst in her class, but the hardest worker.” Given his assertion that no poet is truly original, and that “the best we can hope is to improve bad habits,” I take this as a mark of approval. I’m still falling short, of course, but trying to see such moments not as missteps but opportunities to shift perspective. Keats, for instance, landed in Winchester after a disappointing stay on the Isle of Wight. At the time, he needed money, badly, and schemed to write a stage tragedy with Charles Brown in an attempt to make his fortune. The play was never performed and Keats continued the pattern of “town-and-country walks” that helped him think. As we now know well, on one such outing he turned his focus to the landscape rendered in “To Autumn.” In his letters, Keats details a good portion of the Winchester itinerary that inspired the ode. Per his correspondence, the route moves from his rented room near the iconic church to a field-side river and neighboring chalk stream before finally arriving at St Cross’s medieval buildings. “I take a walk every day,” writes the poet to his brother in September 1819, “every day for an hour before dinner . . . under the trees along a paved path, I pass the beautiful front of the Cathedral. . . . I pass through one of the old gates and there you are in one College-Street through which I pass and at the end thereof crossing some meadows and at last a country alley of gardens. . . . [I arrive at] a very interesting old place both for its gothic tower and alms-square. . . . Then I pass across St Cross meadows till you come to the most beautifully clear river—now this is only one mile of my walk I will spare you the other two. . . .”
Nearly two hundred years after the “season of mists” during which Keats produced his purest ode—and eight weeks after Stanley Plumly’s death—it’s this route I return to the city to retrace. “To Autumn” is marked by what’s transitory. As Stan notes in Posthumous Keats, it’s a poem of farewells. And yet, what I love about the poem is that for all its loss, its rooms spill over with warmth and sweetness and abundance. This rich complexity enacts the poetic model Stan valued when I was his student: the idea, most especially, that lyric dimension arrives via contradiction. That day, the gray overhead gave way to blue, while the trail still held the puddles. An interesting tension, I thought, between what I saw and felt. Outwardly, all was beautiful: June’s lush greenery, the wildflowers in bloom, everything bright and gay; my children at play along the pathway, stopping every so often to squat beside the stream’s clear water to spot the fat, brown trout. The air was scattered with birdsong and the happy chatter of families celebrating the holiday. The first time I followed Keats’s footsteps just three years before, however, it was late September and close to the anniversary of the ode’s completion. On that trip, I saw “To Autumn” everywhere—the fall landscape like a living transcript. But now, in 2019, summer had come and I discovered only faint remnants of Keats’s stanzas: the “moss’d cottage-trees” and late spring lambs tearing at the grasses. Ironically, though the physical landscape didn’t match the poem’s rich autumnal setting, I more fully felt its shifting mood and temperament. At one point, as I waded into the waist-high vegetation, the living and dying breeze that Keats describes danced across the back of my shoulders and neck. I could detect its movement among the willows and reeds, and recorded a bit of it on my phone. Listening now, the sound makes me think of Stan’s argument about how feeling and idea manifest in the breath as we use words to translate what we see and hear into poetry.
When we reached the stony walls that enclose the Hospital of St Cross, marking the end of what scholars know of Keats’s walk, my son discovered a “wailful choir” of “small gnats” and began leaping into the air to try to catch them by the handful. I remember clearly the joy on his face. How it made me smile and laugh. And I remember, too, the collective beauty of everything exterior: the grand Cathedral and feathery yarrow, the chalk stream and clipped cricket pitches, a pheasant picking at something in the distant field—all of which ran counter to what I felt but left unsaid, which was deep melancholy. A different temperature, so to speak, in the inner weather. The walk, after all, was a procession of grief. For me at least. As we turned to go, a cloud system moved in quickly above us, barred and lovely and white. I watched it for a few minutes while the kids climbed a tree. As the parade of strange, faint shapes passed before my eyes, I took a photo. Later, on the ride home to Oxford, I looked at it and remembered what Stan used to say about where a picture’s emotion resides and how Keats ends “To Autumn” by drawing our attention upward toward the cold clear air where “. . . with treble soft / The red-breast whistles from a garden croft / and gathering swallows twitter in the skies.”