Here's a different kind of post.  Most of the time I use this to talk about politics and religion and scholarship.  But much of my life is lived, in my head, in thinking about and remembering poetry.  I wanted to share a poem that's been haunting me of late.

We think of ghosts as spectral, immaterial, somehow apart from the world of matter.  Yet we also think of ghosts in discrete places; ghosts are not agents of international finance, flitting about the world.  They are anchored in spots, or at most to people whom they haunt, anyway to particularities.  I almost want to say: being haunted is being related to particularities in a specific way.

I am not haunted by ghosts.  But all of us know the experience of being haunted, of having places, or memories (affixed to places or people), that do not go away, even when we are far away, and that are always there, when we return to those places, waiting for us.  This I think is true: whether there are ghosts or not (and I think not), haunting is very real.

Why am I saying this?  Because in a very minor way, I am haunted by where we live right now.  Right now, in the pandemic, we live in Oxford, off the Iffley Road; today is May Day, the day here in Oxford where the choir of Magdalen College climbs up to the top of their tower and sings to greet the rising sun.  I've been in Oxford on one of those May Days; it was a strange experience, a kind of scruffy nerd Woodstock, at something like 6 AM, for about 45 minutes.  But the beauty of the morning, the promise of summer coming in, and the transcendent harmonies of the choir--when they could be heard above the mutterings of the crowd--stay with me more powerfully.

There will be no May Day this morning.  There is some kind of civic memorial, where you're supposed to go to your front door and sing something.  That's nice.  But it's not May Day and no one who knows it will be fooled into thinking it's some kind of replacement.  It's one of the things we've lost, this year.

Yesterday, in talking via Zoom to a friend, I was reminded of this poem by Keith Douglas, the English poet.  Douglas was a young man, a student in Oxford, when he wrote this poem in 1940; and he knew he would soon be off to the war.  The poem has, looming behind its words, a sense of the impending future, pressing in on the present: “whatever doom hovers in the background.”  And it turned out to be all too prophetic: Douglas was killed, in his tank, on June 9, 1944, in Normandy.  So he had several more summers after the one recounted in this poem; though whether those summers counted for him, is a question no one can ask him now.

This poem, which mentions Iffley, and is about the Thames, has a strangely personal feeling for me.  I haven't earned this feeling; I have only the slightest of acquaintances with this place, and it will never be one of my own, one of the places whose earth is part of my flesh and bone.  But it has certainly affected me.  And oddly, some of that affect is modulated through Douglas.  Most days—even now, in quarantine, on our walks—we see the Thames in which he paddled his canoe, and walk past the “grass and buildings and the somnolent river, / who know they are allowed to last forever.”  Doing so always reminds me of this beautiful, quiet, piece of verbal art.  And that it is possible to be haunted.

Canoe by Keith Douglas (1940)

 

Well, I am thinking this may be my last

summer, but cannot lose even a part

of pleasure in the old-fashioned art

of idleness. I cannot stand aghast

 

at whatever doom hovers in the background:

while grass and buildings and the somnolent river,

who know they are allowed to last forever,

exchange between them the whole subdued sound

 

of this hot time. What sudden fearful fate

can deter my shade wandering next year

from a return? Whistle and I will hear

and come again another evening, when this boat

 

travels with you alone toward Iffley:

as you lie looking up for thunder again,

this cool touch does not betoken rain;

it is my spirit that kisses your mouth lightly.