My memories of nights spent pacing the silent suburban streets of Florida were complemented today when I opened a book of Elizabeth Jennings poems and found Curtains Undrawn. This work describes the poet’s times spent catching near-voyeuristic glimpses of “modest lives”.

Curtains Undrawn

Looking in windows down a night-time street
	In Winter, I don't feel
A voyeur, no, I only seem to meet
	Lives lived with love's good will.

There is a student with an angle-poise
	Lamp. He's hard at work
In happy concentration. There's no noise
	As yet and nothing's stark

Or ugly. I've a sense of neighborhood,
	Of being near yet keeping
A proper distance. Now I find it good
	To think of children sleeping

With night-lights on. No doubt their parents will
	Later go up to bed
And make love without speaking. There's a still
	Design within my head

As if I were about to write a score
	To fit these modest lives
Where there are quarrels sometimes but no more
	Than small ones which arrive

Because we are imperfect. I walk on
	Under a full moon's stare,
Knowing that elsewhere crimes are done -
	Not here, no, never here,

And 'here' is much more usual, I believe,
	Than war and hate and dread
Since here are still lives where the trust of love
	Will never be quite dead.

Say I am sentimental. I don't care.
	The rooted tree of trust
I know is always flowering somewhere
	Where people still are just.

Maybe they could not tell you what they think
	Their lives are all about.
Philosophies grow cold, most dogmas shrink
	Here where hope's not in doubt.

I only know Jennings for having read several dozen of her poems these last weeks. I feel a presumption of decency from her, a tranquil foundation wrenched gently asunder by her travels through poetry, the Bible, writings about the Bible, and philosophy. In Curtains Undrawn I expected a foreboding rumble under the placid presumptions, but I am biased by my natural inclinations toward emotional slosh. The line “Not here, no, never here” teased me into thinking she was taking this to a level of dismay or conflict, but she stayed the course of equilibrium.

I agree with her when she says “‘here’ is much more usual, I believe, Than war and hate and dread”, though I am skeptical that “the trust of love Will never be quite dead.” She finds pockets of decency, these paradises summoned from absence created by her voyeur-like glimpses into neighbors’ lives. Calmness at the base of things is foreign to me.

Another poem, A Chinese Sage, describes a poet who whittles away his excesses and obscurities of cleverness by making a peasant woman his mentor. Anything she did not understand was excised from his work and the result, presumably, was of serene universality. I like the poem but ask: Was serenity common among ancient peasants? Is it common among today’s homeless?

A Chinese Sage

	A Chinese sage once took every word distilled, altered and perfected
In private till for him it seemed a poem, yes he took this to a peasant woman,
	Read it to her softly and slowly and waited for her rough-voiced assurance that
Certain words she could understand, others were meaningless to her. Very discreetly
	But decisively, and with no arguments, this sage crossed out every word that was foreign to
A woman of simplicity who knew labours of the soil and the house, who had no
	Dealings other than this with poetry, art of any kind, yet by his

	Magnanimity, more, his humility, became his mentor, guided him
Out of all obscurity, not with wearying argument or even quiet coaxing, but by the fact
	That she was a world he could only enter through her. Hay, beds, crude meals, lust
Subdued his wit, bodied out his verse, cancelled cleverness. And, I ask, was he
	Most poet or most philosopher in this uncrowned wisdom, writing
In the reign of Charlamagne, paring simplicities to a peace no
	Emperor was ever enticed by or even dreamed of?