‘When the wind stops’

At the Rhode Island Veterans Memorial Cemetery, in Exeter

“The March of Time” (Decoration Day, later renamed Memorial Day) in Boston, by Henry Sandham (1842-1910), Canadian painter who lived in Boston for 20 years.

Life contracts and death is expected,

As in a season of autumn.

The soldier falls.

He does not become a three-days personage,

Imposing his separation,

Calling for pomp.

Death is absolute and without memorial,

As in a season of autumn,

When the wind stops,

When the wind stops and, over the heavens,

The clouds go, nevertheless,

In their direction.

 — Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), famed American Modernist poet. He was also an insurance executive and lawyer. He lived and worked in Hartford.

An unhearing God

St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, where famed poet Wallace Stevens is said to have converted to Catholicism in his last days.

“If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness,

“A vermilioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.’’

— From “Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit,’’ by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), Hartford-based poet, insurance company executive and lawyer.

'Blowing in the same bare place'

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

— “The Snow Man,’’ by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), Hartford-based lawyer, insurance executive and famed poet

Earliest known photo of a snowman, taken in Wales in 1853

Very strange summer and now a fearsome fall

Time to jump? Fall foliage at Lake Willoughby, in Vermont

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

As we slip into the mellow season (except for politics), and we start to crunch dry brown fallen leaves on the sidewalks, I’ve been thinking about how we lived during this pandemic summer.

Yes, it was sometimes claustrophobic and included far too many repetitive activities (recalling the movie Ground Hog Day) but the warm weather made it easier to spend a lot of time outside, when it wasn’t too warm. It was also easier because there’s been little rain, which is mostly bad: We’re in a severe enough drought that woodland fire warnings were posted last week for southern New England. (You start to unduly worry about global warming and something like the West Coast fire catastrophe happening here. The lawns have looked as if desertification is getting started.)

Thank God that the pandemic didn’t start last November, at the start of our mostly indoors season.

Many of us fortunate enough to have a porch or backyard have found seeing friends there very pleasant, and safe enough to please most worrywarts about COVID-19. That’s not to say that social distancing and marks don’t make it harder to understand each other.  I wonder if hearing-aid sales have surged since last winter.  I hear a lot of shouting, including my own.

Meanwhile, we walk, walk, walk and wear out our dogs.

As for dining out at restaurants, we’ve done it inside and out. I prefer inside to avoid the street noise, car fumes, yellow jackets, jackhammers, leaf blowers, sidewalk lunatics and other distractions. Ignore the theatrics of “deep cleaning.’’ The chances of getting COVID from touching something are remote. It’s an air problem! Does the restaurant has a good HVAC system? Can all its windows be opened wide? Of course, some people won’t go to any public places. How long will they keep that up? I confess I’m not much of a COVID alarmist and do have claustrophobe tendencies. But often when I suggest  meeting people at a restaurant or coffee shop the response is an anxious “no, not yet.’’

It’s been tougher  than we had expected early this summer to travel even within New England because of testing rules, with frequent delays in getting results, and the 14-day quarantine orders. Maine is particularly draconian – very heavy fines. Still, after adjusting to that challenge, consider that there’s lots to see in our compact region, a relief for those for whom the pandemic makes traveling further afield impossible. Consider that maps show that Americans aren’t welcome in most of the world now, including – how embarrassing! – Canada. Close to home, the likes of the Maine Coast and the Green Mountains are well worth the aggravation of a test. However, that COVID has closed many roadside attractions (my favorite are old-fashioned diners for breakfasts) is dispiriting.

This is an anxious time in America: A vicious pandemic that has killed almost 200,000 and clipped everyone else’s wings, a deep recession, a mobster/treasonous  president and his sycophant enablers, the expansion of dictatorship around the world and scary symptoms of man-made global warming, of which the West Coast fires and the population explosion of tropical storms are just current examples.

(Speaking of Trump’s enablers, read about Michael Caputo, the Looter in Chief’s  propaganda minister  and re-election-campaign manager at the Department of Health and Human Services:

https://www.salon.com/2020/09/14/federal-official-who-interfered-with-cdc-reports-on-covid-19-has-deep-ties-to-russia-report_partner/

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/09/15/michael-caputo-election-violence-conspiracy-theories/5802225002/

He’s a fitting representative of the Trump regime.)

Whatever, it’s a beautiful time of the year hereabouts – mild, still verdant (where watered) and increasingly colorful until that first heavy frost silences the cicadas and crickets for good. Let’s wander outdoors as much as we  can.  In the long run we’re all dead.

The late Hartford-based poet and insurance executive Wallace Stevens wrote: “The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.’’

'The world itself'

“The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.’’

— Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), Hartford-based poet, lawyer and insurance executive

Mr. Stevens enjoyed wandering in Elizabeth Park. With more than a hundred acres of gardens, lawns, greenhouses and a pond, the park often appeared in his poems, including "The Plain Sense of Things," which includes the lines:

“Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflection, leaves,
mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence…’’

— Photo by Ragesoss

The Rose Garden at Elizabeth Park in West Hartford, Conn., with a greenhouse in the background on the left. Part of the park is in Hartford.

'Single emptiness'

— Photo by Lumulus

“It is deep January. The sky is hard.
The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.

It is in this solitude, a syllable,
Out of these gawky flitterings,

Intones its single emptiness,
The savagest hollow of winter-sound.”

Wallace Stevens.

― Wallace Stevens, (1879-1955) was a Hartford-based poet, insurance executive and lawyer. He’d walk most days to and from his house, below, to his office at the Hartford Accident & Indemnity Co. Another big name in the arts who was an insurance executive was Charles Ives (1874-1954), who was raised in Connecticut and became one of America’s greatest composers.

The house of the late Wallace Stevens.

Get out there and look

"I

In my room, the world is beyond my understanding,
But when I walk, I see that it consists of three or four hills and
   a cloud.

II

From my balcony, I survey the yellow air,
Reading where I have written,
‘The spring is like a belle undressing.’

III

The gold tree is blue.
The singer has pulled his cloak over his head.
The moon is in the folds of the cloak.''

-- "Of the Surface of Things,'' by the late Wallace Stevens, Hartford insurance executive and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.

'Mind of winter'

-- Photo by Petritap

"One must have a mind of winter 

To regard the frost and the boughs 

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; 

And have been cold a long time 

To behold the junipers shagged with ice, 

The spruces rough in the distant glitter 

Of the January sun; and not to think 

Of any misery in the sound of the wind, 

In the sound of a few leaves, 

Which is the sound of the land 

Full of the same wind 

That is blowing in the same bare place 

For the listener, who listens in the snow, 

And, nothing himself, beholds 

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.''

-- "The Snow Man,'' by Wallace Stevens

Mr. Stevens was a Hartford insurance executive and  famed Modernist poet.

'All of paradise that we shall know?'

 Taken by fir0002 | flagstaffotos.com.au

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late 

Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, 

And the green freedom of a cockatoo 

Upon a rug mingle to dissipate 

The holy hush of ancient sacrifice. 

She dreams a little, and she feels the dark 

Encroachment of that old catastrophe, 

As a calm darkens among water-lights. 

The pungent oranges and bright, green wings 

Seem things in some procession of the dead, 

Winding across wide water, without sound. 

The day is like wide water, without sound, 

Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet 

Over the seas, to silent Palestine, 

Dominion of the blood and sepulchre. 

       II

Why should she give her bounty to the dead? 

What is divinity if it can come 

Only in silent shadows and in dreams? 

Shall she not find in comforts of the sun, 

In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else 

In any balm or beauty of the earth, 

Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven? 

Divinity must live within herself: 

Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow; 

Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued 

Elations when the forest blooms; gusty 

Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; 

All pleasures and all pains, remembering 

The bough of summer and the winter branch. 

These are the measures destined for her soul. 

       III

Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth. 

No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave 

Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind. 

He moved among us, as a muttering king, 

Magnificent, would move among his hinds, 

Until our blood, commingling, virginal, 

With heaven, brought such requital to desire 

The very hinds discerned it, in a star. 

Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be 

The blood of paradise? And shall the earth 

Seem all of paradise that we shall know? 

The sky will be much friendlier then than now, 

A part of labor and a part of pain, 

And next in glory to enduring love, 

Not this dividing and indifferent blue. 

       IV

She says, “I am content when wakened birds, 

Before they fly, test the reality 

Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings; 

But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields 

Return no more, where, then, is paradise?” 

There is not any haunt of prophecy, 

Nor any old chimera of the grave, 

Neither the golden underground, nor isle 

Melodious, where spirits gat them home, 

Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm 

Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured 

As April’s green endures; or will endure 

Like her remembrance of awakened birds, 

Or her desire for June and evening, tipped 

By the consummation of the swallow’s wings. 

       V

She says, “But in contentment I still feel 

The need of some imperishable bliss.” 

Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, 

Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams 

And our desires. Although she strews the leaves 

Of sure obliteration on our paths, 

The path sick sorrow took, the many paths 

Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love 

Whispered a little out of tenderness, 

She makes the willow shiver in the sun 

For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze 

Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet. 

She causes boys to pile new plums and pears 

On disregarded plate. The maidens taste 

And stray impassioned in the littering leaves. 

       VI

Is there no change of death in paradise? 

Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs 

Hang always heavy in that perfect sky, 

Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth, 

With rivers like our own that seek for seas 

They never find, the same receding shores 

That never touch with inarticulate pang? 

Why set the pear upon those river-banks 

Or spice the shores with odors of the plum? 

Alas, that they should wear our colors there, 

The silken weavings of our afternoons, 

And pick the strings of our insipid lutes! 

Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, 

Within whose burning bosom we devise 

Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly. 

       VII

Supple and turbulent, a ring of men 

Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn 

Their boisterous devotion to the sun, 

Not as a god, but as a god might be, 

Naked among them, like a savage source. 

Their chant shall be a chant of paradise, 

Out of their blood, returning to the sky; 

And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice, 

The windy lake wherein their lord delights, 

The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills, 

That choir among themselves long afterward. 

They shall know well the heavenly fellowship 

Of men that perish and of summer morn. 

And whence they came and whither they shall go 

The dew upon their feet shall manifest. 

       VIII

She hears, upon that water without sound, 

A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine 

Is not the porch of spirits lingering. 

It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.” 

We live in an old chaos of the sun, 

Or old dependency of day and night, 

Or island solitude, unsponsored, free, 

Of that wide water, inescapable. 

Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail 

Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; 

Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness; 

And, in the isolation of the sky, 

At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make 

Ambiguous undulations as they sink, 

Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

-  "Sunday Morning,'' by Wallace Stevens, the late great Hartford-based poet -- and insurance executive.

'Besides his reason'

"Tinsel in February, tinsel in August.
There are things in a man besides his reason."

--  Wallace Stevens