49/1001 - White, Lewis, and Coventry Patmore

 Tuesday, April 8th, 2025

Essay: "A Report in Spring" by E.B. White

I had completely forgotten I owned this collection of White's essays. I found them again while cleaning out my bookshelves. White's voice reminds me of Wendell Berry. He has a simplicity of delivery that perfectly offsets his finely turned phrases. Reading him feels a bit like sipping iced tea on a cool front porch in summer, and every once in a while, the way he says something stands out as exceptional, poignant, and nearly poetic. 

"No matter what changes take place in the world, or in me, nothing ever seems to disturb the face of spring."

"One never knows what images one is going to hold in memory, returning to the city after a brief orgy in the country. I find this morning that what I most vividly and longingly recall is the sight of my grandson and his little sunburnt sister returning to their kitchen door from an excursion, with trophies of the meadow clutched in their hands - she with a couple of violets, and smiling, he serious and holding dandelions, strangling them in a responsible grip. Children hold spring so tightly in their brown fists, just as grown ups, who are less sure of it, hold it in their heart."

Short story:  I finished the final part of Lewis's Till We Have Faces - I realize it's not a proper short story, but I'm counting it. It's almost a second story in itself, compared to the first part. It's a lift beneath the veil of the myth. I love this book. It's the least Lewis-sounding of his stories. I told a friend that it reminds me of Wendell Berry's Hannah Coulter; it may be hard to believe it was written by a woman if you think you have to be a woman to capture a woman's voice. But a woman is human, and anyone who can map the landscape of the human heart can imagine what the inner world of a woman might be like. Berry and Lewis both succeed, phenomenally so.

Poem: 

In the Woods

by Coventry Patmore

And then, as if I sweetly dream'd.

I half-remember'd how it seem'd

When I, too, was a little child

About the wild woods roving wild.

Pure breezes from the far-off height

Melted the blindness from my sight,

Until, with rapture, grief, and awe,

I saw again as then I saw.

As then I saw, I saw again

The harvest-wagon in the lane,

With high-hung tokens of its pride

Left in the elms on either side;

The daisies coming out at dawn

In constellations on the lawn;

The glory of the daffodil;

The three black windmills on the hill

Whose magic arms, flung wildly by,

Sent magic shadows o'er the rye...

And as to men's retreating eyes,

Beyond high mountains higher rise,

Still farther back there shone to me

The dazzling dusk of infancy.

Thither I look'd as, sick of night,

The Alpine shepherd looks to the height,

And does not see the day, 'tis true,

But sees the rosy tops that do...

Ah, happy hours, 'tis something yet

Not to forget that I forget!

Found in "Behold, This Dreamer!" - an anthology by Walter de la Mare