A Gift

This cancer has brought many gifts, not least of which has been reconnecting with old friends. One of these, Doug Wilson, was my professor at Knox. I studied American poetry with him, and also took a seminar on Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" and the poetry of Wallace Stevens, surely one of the best classes of my college career. In January I had the pleasure of dining with Doug and his wife, along with classmate Bill Barnhart and his wife Kate, at the Chicago Literary Club, where Doug gave a talk based on research for his latest book, "Lincoln's Sword." We had a conversation about the value of a liberal arts education, especially literature, in coping with life's challenges. Afterward, he sent me the following, which I pass along as a gift to you: W. H. Auden's Preface to his long poem "The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest."

Says Doug: "This is Auden's ars poetica, a brilliant and inexhaustible poem about art and how it relates to life, science, and the great imponderables. In a way, they are all summed up in this Preface, the last part of which you may recognize as being woven from severaI of Shakespeare's key lines. So here it is:"

Preface
(The State Manager to the Critics)

The aged catch their breath,
For the nonchalant couple go
Waltzing across the tightrope
As if there were no death
Or hope of falling down;
The wounded cry as the clown
Doubles his meaning, and O
How the dear little children laugh
When the drums roll and the lovely
Lady is sawn in half.

O what authority gives
Existence its surprise?
Science is happy to answer
That the ghosts who haunt our lives
Are handy with mirrors and wire,
That song and sugar and fire,
Courage and come-hither eyes
Have a genius for taking pains.
But how does one think up a habit?
Our wonder, our terror remains.

Art opens the fishiest eye
To the Flesh and the Devil who heat
The Chamber of Temptation
Where heroes roar and die.
We are wet with sympathy now;
Thanks for the evening; but how
Shall we satisfy when we meet,
Between Shall-I and I-Will,
The lion’s mouth whose hunger
No metaphors can fill?

Well, who in his own back yard
Has not opened his heart to the smiling
Secret he cannot quote?
Which goes to show that the Bard
Was sober when he wrote
That this world of fact we love
Is unsubstantial stuff:
All the rest is silence
On the other side of the wall;
And the silence ripeness,
And the ripeness all.