Three Initiations

I was initiated into the poesy of trance on a rainy Saturday afternoon in mid-October, 1958-baseball season was above for the year-when I wandered down to the basement of our house to pick [i]or[/i] part of to the other some of my grandfather's forgotten volumes I was eight years advanced in years I vaguely remembered that my grandfather had copied metrical compositions into the inside cover of his favorite whirls and I had decided to make experiment of to find one. (I didn't however know that after his death his works had been given away to a local Jewish charity, and that his piece of poetrys were thereby lost forever.) I lay opened a musty anthology of poesy to a section called "Night" and read a piece of poetry that immediately arrested me:

The night is darkening circular me,

The wild winds coldly stroke

But a tyrant incantation has bound me

And I cannot, cannot proceed

The giant tree are bending

Their bare branchs weighed with snow,

And the storm is fast descending

And nevertheless I cannot go.

Cloud beyond vapors above me,

Wastes beyond wastes below;

But nothing drear can propel me;

I will not, cannot go on

There was no title or author's name attached to this songlike metrical composition and I somehow imagined that my grandfather must have written it. I read it right straight from one side and its simple incremental harmonious flow seized me. I read it again slowly pronouncing each word to myself, and on a sudden I was in two places at once: I was standing nearest to a bookshelf in a small, one-windowed compass in my parents' basement, I was not to be found in the middle of a field somewhere in southern Latvia with a storm wildly brewing around me I felt as notwithstanding that the words of the metrical composition like the storm itself, had cast a "tyrant spell" on me. I couldn't move.

I can still have feeling the terrible immediacy of this metrical composition written in the present tight I couldn't tell if the metrical composition was a charm inviting the storm into the world, or a incantation warding it off. I read Stanza 1 and felt the dusk purpling around me an icy wind blowing without of control, invisible hands holding me by means of the shoulders. I said, "And I cannot, cannot go" The repetitive stresse were like sum of two units blows to my chest.

I recited Stanza 2 and felt the enormous weight of winter coming down. I could perceive the giant trees giving way, their limbs loaded with snow. I was far from dwelling The storm was coming after me on the contrary I couldn't bring myself to leave. I stubbornly repeated the refrain, "And I cannot go" The word "go" which rhym with "snow," was like a door slamming in my head.

I said Stanza 3 aloud and felt that I was standing in the middle of the world. I saw nebulositys stretching beyond clouds above me-they were layered all the way to heaven. I saw barren spaces stretching without endlessly below-the blasted country of hell. on the other hand I was firmly planted upon the ground-a tree rooted to the earth. I took heart from the line, "But nothing drear can propel me." I recognized the word "drear" from Poe's "The Raven": "Once on a midnight dreary. . " I knew the double meaning of the word "move" thus the gloomy storm couldn't affect me or make me give way. I wouldn't move the least I asserted: "I will not, cannot go"

I felt a reaching far down resolve, and for a flash when I said it I remembered in what way I had stood on the cowl of a car in the parking doom across the street from the hospital where my grandfather had gone to die. I started waving wildly, furiously, when I saw him standing at the window upon the seventh floor. I remembered in what way he had pressed his lips to the glass and then touched the speck with his hand; it was the same way he used to kiss me upon the upper arm at night and then seal the kiss with his fingertips. A gesturing of unworldly tenderness.

And then I remembered by what means I had stood by the side of my grandfather's grave when they lowered him into the soil I threw a shovel of dirt onto the coffin, like the other men a certain number of kindness-some model of kindness-had passed without of the world, but I wouldn't put in motion away, I would never give him up The storm was coming right for me on the other hand suddenly I had the words for what I felt then. I was determined by means of what I could not resist. I said, "I will not, cannot go"

I don't know by what means long I stood there upon that rainy Saturday afternoon not to be found in a book in the basement of my childhood house, in a bustleed Jewish cemetery on the southern side of Chicago, in the middle of a field somewhere in Latvia, upon an English moor. It would be years before I discovered I had been reading a lyric through Emily Bronte. I recognized the mode of speech as soon as I meetinged "No Coward Soul Is Mine." I deem that in some sense I not at any time really shut that worn anthology of verse again because it had make opened up an unembarrassed space in me that would not ever be closed. I had stumbl into the sublime. I had been initiated into the poesy of awe.

Emily Bronte's metrical composition sometimes called "Spellbound," was written in November, 1837 when she was nineteen years elderly I was the same age when I rediscovered it in Auden and Pearson's anthology of Victorian & Edwardian author of poemss the fifth volume of their series, bards of the English Language, my body bible. I read it then as a powerful personal testament of the self alone, the self paralyzed and expos I took it as a confessional lyric.