I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – too? Then there’s a pair of us! Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know
How dreary – to be – Somebody! How public – like a Frog – To tell one’s name – the livelong June – To an admiring Bog!
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
(Photo Collage by Karla Schultz; Used by Permission)
After I wrote today’s poem, “The Quest,” about names, I realized that there was only one poem to spotlight today–this classic by Dickinson. It is one that I have memorized, that I repeat aloud irritatingly often, and in which I was see and hear something new each time.
Background for My Poem “The Quest”:
This week, I talked with a friend who needed to adjust her middle name legally on some documents, so that got me thinking about names and name changes. Then, this morning, I was reading Chapter Ten: “Our Real Names” from one of my go-to books on the craft of poetry (Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life with Words by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge) and a memory from childhood resurfaced.
I rather think I might eventually write a series of poems about dream names, pen names, nick names, secret names, unspoken names, the names of characters, children, and pets, and place names.
Naming is such a rich topic. Perhaps the naming instinct is what gave rise to language itself? Is a name something we are given or something we make?
William Shakespeare, Bard of Avon and fountainhead of Early Modern English poetry, died on this day in 1616 and was likely born on this day in 1564. It was unlikely that he ever celebrated with the kind of sugary confection we call a “birthday cake.” (One wonders how he would view such modern beloved spectacles as “The Great British Baking Show“!) He would, however, have known about refined sugar from both the East Indies and the West Indies even if it rarely crossed his own lips, and been aware of the problematic politics and the human cost of the sugar trade.
This article from by food historian Tasha Marks, posted by the British Museum, purports to tell the story of sugar in five objects from the collections. She notes that the British Museum was founded by Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753), a successful physician, who counted King George I, King George II, and Queen Anne among his aristocratic patients and whose forward thinking helped to promote early practice for small pox innoculation and the use of quinine to combat malaria. And yet, it was this healer whose vast wealth came directly from slave holding and sugar production in Jamaica, whose collections in so many areas–manuscripts, artifacts, and art objects–served as the nucleus of the current British Museum. Today, the British Museum’s holdings include nearly 5,000 objects connected to William Shakespeare and his work; in 2012, the Museum mounted an exhibit titled “Shakespeare: Staging the World,” one that examined the tide of Shakespeare’s popularity and influence from the 19th century to our day. “Sugar,” she notes, “was not just a food, it was an artistic medium of tremendous flexibility.” Marks also includes this intriguing quote from another scholar:
Initially, the displays were important simply because they were both pretty and edible. But over time, the creative impulses of the confectioners were pressed into essentially political symbolic service, and the subtleties took on greater significance. ‘Not only compliments,’ writes one commentator, ‘but even sly rebukes to heretics and politicians were conveyed in these sugared emblems.’
Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, Sidney W Mintz (1986)
(For more on sugar as art, search on Tasha Marks Sugar!)
Certainly sugar is an even more prevalent part of our modern world than the works of the Bard. (The biggest consumer of sugar in the world today? You guessed it: the U.S.A.) Just as certainly, Shakespeare had awareness of its double nature, as medicianal and celebratory at times, and as poison to human bodies and corrupting of human values just as often. His poems and especially his plays are full of references to sweetness that lifts but also cloys or acts as a surface decoy for devious designs.
(Photo: Congerdesign@web.de Used with permission)
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for instance, the frivolity and fun and high comedy are a confection created on the top of dark materials from a world where the marriage plot recognizes that fathers can compel daughters to marry on pain of death. And consider this passage from Act III, scene 2 of the history play, Henry VI, Part 2, a play rife with hidden and public treasons, spying, self-interest writ large, civil rebellions, and murderous double-dealing–and pointed metaphors, including:
“Hide not thy poison with such sugar’d words;”
Spoken by the King as a rebuke to his courtier, the murderous and duplicitous Lord Suffolk, the doomed King makes clear that he sees through surface sweet phrasings.
Background on My Poem, “Elizabethan Sugar Work”:
This is the seventh year in a row that I have written something to acknowledge Shakespeare’s influence on me. (If you want to see the first five of these efforts, you can check posts for April 23 from 2016-2020.)
It was a visit that Julia and I made to the Minneapolis Institute of Art in December of 2012 that came to mind today, and that memory led to the poem for today, as well as the post above. Here are some photographs I made in 2012 one of the period rooms that then held a mini-exhibition on Elizabethan sugar works.
The newest issue of the young journal, Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality and the Arts is now published. It can be read online, or downloaded as a pdf for free. My own poem, inspired by Wallace Stevens koanic classic, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” can be found on pages 42-43. I am thrilled to have my work, especially this poem, included in this journal.
Pensive, published twice a year by Center for Spirituality, Dialogue, and Service (CSDS) at Northeastern University in Boston, is currently accepting submissions for its fifth issue. The deadline is May 15, 2022.
A friend who is creating a pollinator meadow in her home brought my attention to the April 3, 2022 article in the New York Times about a movement in Appleton, Wisconsin, begun two years ago, now is becoming nationwide. It is called, “No-Mow May.” By chance this week I saw two minutes of a local news broadcast, and the lead story was the adoption of “No-Mow May” by households in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina.
After only two years, the data is very encouraging. This small practice of restraint is allowing the increased health, diversity, and vigor of that workhorse pollinator, bees. This kind of news is the kind we need in April on Earth Day–one simple but powerful step that all of us can consider taking right now and in the sweet spring days ahead. My poem today (“No-Mow May”) is a mediation of this set of ideas and actions. The photographs above come from the warmer April of 2017. The ones below from our chilly house and garden here in 2022.
Wedding Dress and Apple Blossoms (Photo: Leslie Schultz)
There really is no one quite like Mary Oliver (1935-2019), and her book, American Primitive (Back Bay Books, April 30, 1983) contains a poem I have almost gotten by heart (but not quite!) “John Chapman” both sums up and enlarges the familar story of an American legend, Johnny Appleseed. In a similar way, for me Oliver has seeded my mind with images and new understanding of the natural world.
JOHN CHAPMAN
He wore a tin pot for a hat, in which
he cooked his supper
toward evening
in the Ohio forests. He wore
a sackcloth shirt and walked
barefoot on feet crooked as roots. And everywhere he went
the apple trees sprang up behind him lovely
as young girls.
No Indian or settler or wild beast
ever harmed him, he for his part honored
everything, all God's creatures! thought little,
on a rainy night,
of sharing the shelter of a hollow log touching
flesh with any creatures there: snakes,
raccoon possibly, or some great slab of bear.
Mrs. Price, late of Richland County,
at whose parents' house he sometimes lingered,
recalled: he spoke
only once of woman and his gray eyes
brittled into ice. "Some
are deceivers," he whispered, and she felt
the pain of it, remembered it
into her old age.
Well, the trees he planted or gave away
prospered, and he became
the good legend, you do
what you can if you can; whatever
the secret, and the pain,
there's a decision: to die,
or to live, to go on
caring about something. In the spring, in Ohio,
in the forests that are left you can still find
sign of him: patches
of cold white fire.
Mary Oliver
Background for My Poem, “Seva”:
Coneflower in Full Bloom (Photo: Leslie Schult)
The word “seva” comes from Sanskrit. It is pronounced “SAVE-a.” In Yoga philosophy, it means selfless service, the kind done without any expectation of recognition, reward, or even the satisfaction of knowing it was effective.
I have been thinking about this a lot, lately, especially as regards to planetary interconnectedness. Perhaps this kind of selfless service is the most enlightened form of self-interest, too? Sometimes, I think, selfless service means getting myself out of the way so that I can see the next right thing to do and then do it!
I wish that I could have photographed the goldfinch itself, but here are two images of her temporary perch and feeding station.
