Dear Friends,
To be born is to appear in this world in a certain context and with certain gifts. This context and these gifts impose responsibilities on us.
As a dear teacher told me, “There are certain things only you can do, so you must do them, even if you don’t want to”.
When the gifts are great, so may be our resistance. Robert Bly points out that Winston Churchill, as a boy, stuttered! Something within him knew he would need to speak of “blood, sweat, and tears”.
A common way of resisting one’s own birth is in devotion to the birth of others. We think, “I must draw myself in so they have space”.
At a certain point, we say, “The hell with it — I will live. Within this cosmos is a region which is mine; I will defend its borders — will defend my mind, body, house, and people”.
That said, what does it mean to wish for death as does the poet in “Irish Love Song?”
Would God I were the tender apple blossom
That floats and falls from off the twisted bough
To lie and faint within your silken bosom
Within your silken bosom as that does now.
Or would I were a little burnish'd apple
For you to pluck me, gliding by so cold
While sun and shade your robe of lawn will dapple
Your robe of lawn, and your hair's spun gold.
Yea, would to God I were among the roses
That lean to kiss you as you float between
While on the lowest branch a bud uncloses
A bud uncloses, to touch you, queen.
Nay, since you will not love, would I were growing
A happy daisy, in the garden path
That so your silver foot might press me going
Might press me going even unto death.
This is a poem of love, not for an earthly woman, but for the Muse — that higher being through whom my destiny descends, that vessel through whom my essence is infused. With her, my duty is not to defend the walls, but to surrender the keep. To faint within her bosom, to die beneath her foot is to live.
Irish Love Song
Music: “Londonderry Air”, Traditional; Lyric: Katharine Tynan Hinkson (1859 — 1931)
Arranged and performed by Ishmael Wallace, tenor and pianist
Thank you so much.
With every good wish,
Ishmael
In The White Goddess, Robert Graves describes the Muse:
“The Goddess is a lovely, slender woman with a hooked nose, deathly pale face, lips red as rowan-berries, startlingly blue eyes and long fair hair; she will suddenly transform herself into sow, mare, bitch, vixen, she-ass, weasel, serpent, owl, she-wolf, tigress, mermaid or loathsome hag. Her names and titles are innumerable. In ghost stories she often figures as 'The White Lady', and in ancient religions, from the British Isles to the Caucasus, as the 'White Goddess'. I cannot think of any true poet from Homer onwards who has not independently recorded his experience of her. The test of a poet's vision, one might say, is the accuracy of his portrayal of the White Goddess and of the island over which she rules. The reason why the hairs stand on end, the eyes water, the throat is constricted, the skin crawls and a shiver runs down the spine when one writes or reads a true poem is that a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living, the ancient power of fright and lust—the female spider or the queen-bee whose embrace is death.”