Playful Companionship

Not all love burns with white-hot passion. In fact, if love is ONLY white-hot passion it's likely consume itself, then fall to ashes like burning paper. Of course there's a love that smoulders, occasionally bursting into flame. But love for the long-haul is often that companionly love that rests easily and confidently... and sometimes manifests itself playfully.

Such is the love in "Year Day" by Jane Kenyon. Before her death, Jane and her husband, poet Donald Hall, lived on his family farm in New Hampshire where they loved, laughed, cried, played and wrote.

Intimacy in Jane Kenyon's world often mingled loving with playfulness as in the following poem.

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Year Day


We are living together on the earth.
The clock's heart
beats in it's wooden chest.
The cats follow the sun through the house.
We lie down together at night.

Today, you work in your office,
and I in my study. Sometimes
we are busy and casual.
Sitting here, I can see
the path we have made on the rug.

The hermit gives up
after thirty years of hiding in the jungle.
The last door to the last room
comes unlatched. Here are the gestures
of my hands. Wear them in your hair.


Jane Kenyon

As the Ruin Falls

It's funny how things come back to us at odd moments in our lives. Just yesterday, I heard someone read C.S. Lewis's poem, "As the Ruin Falls," on the radio. I'd not seen it, heard it, nor thought of it in years. Looking at it now, I'm certain I didn't understand it then--especially not in the way I do now.

In the 1950's C.S. Lewis was unmarried, a world-renowned writer and professor at Oxford. In Joy Gresham, a divorced American poet with a small child, Lewis discoverd an unlikely friendship and then, unexpectedly, surprisingly a deep and profound love. After finding great love, Lewis experienced great pain when Joy developed terminal cancer.

In the brief space of the poem, Lewis speaks of how Joy awakened true love in him and also of his grief as her ravaged body failed--thus the title, "As the Ruin Falls."

The true story of C.S. Lewis and Joy Gresham is wonderfully depicted by Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger in the Richard Attenborough film, "Shadowlands." If you've not seen it, do yourself a favor and rent or buy the DVD today!


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As The Ruin Falls

All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.
I never had a selfless thought since I was born.
I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through:
I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.

Peace, re-assurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,
I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin:
I talk of love—a scholar's parrot may talk Greek—
But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.

Only that now you have taught me (but how late) my lack.
I see the chasm. And everything you are was making
My heart into a bridge by which I might get back
From exile, and grow man. And now the bridge is breaking.

For this I bless you as the ruin falls. The pains
You give me are more precious than all other gains.

C.S. Lewis

A Tender Memory

A tender memory...

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Sonnet XVI


I love the handful of the earth you are.
Because of its meadows, vast as a planet,
I have no other star. You are my replica
of the multiplying universe.

Your wide eyes are the only light I know
from extinguished constellations;
your skin throbs like the streak
of a meteor through rain.

Your hips were that much of the moon for me;
your deep mouth and its delights, that much sun;
your heart, fiery with its long red rays,

was that much ardent light, like honey in the shade.
So I pass across your burning form, kissing
you--compact and planetary, my dove, my globe.


Pablo Neruda

The Passage of Time

Today I find myself thinking of two poems by the late Jane Kenyon. They’ve both been rolling around in my mind for a day or two now.

There are times in life when to simply wait is a great virtue. There are other times, however, when by waiting we lose “what might have been”—the dream, the hope, the aspiration—and thus are born regrets.

Some of the greatest regrets only become apparent when we realize time is inevitably, relentlessly slipping away. ‘The Pear’ puts me in mind of the passage of time.

Without further comment, the second poem ‘Heavy Summer Rain,’ touches me in it’s beauty and pathos.

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The Pear

There is a moment in middle age
when you grow bored, angered
by your middling mind,
afraid.

That day the sun
burns hot and bright,
making you more desolate.

It happens subtly, as when a pear
spoils from the inside out,
and you may not be aware
until things have gone too far.

Jane Kenyon

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Heavy Summer Rain

The grasses in the field have toppled,
and in places it seems that a large, now
absent, animal must have passed the night.
The hay will right itself if the day

turns dry. I miss you steadily, painfully.
None of your blustering entrances
or exits, doors swinging wildly
on their hinges, or your huge unconscious
sighs when you read something sad,
like Henry Adams’s letters from Japan,
where he traveled after Clover died.

Everything blooming bows down in the rain:
white irises, red peonies; and the poppies
with their black and secret centers
lie shattered on the lawn.

Jane Kenyon