{"id":113,"date":"2009-10-07T15:34:07","date_gmt":"2009-10-07T10:34:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/?p=113"},"modified":"2009-10-07T15:34:07","modified_gmt":"2009-10-07T10:34:07","slug":"elizabeth-jennings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/2009\/10\/07\/elizabeth-jennings.html","title":{"rendered":"Elizabeth Jennings"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tMy 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<\/cite>. This work describes the poet’s times spent catching near-voyeuristic glimpses of “modest lives”.<\/p>\n

\n
Curtains Undrawn<\/i><\/b>\n\nLooking in windows down a night-time street\n\tIn Winter, I don't feel\nA voyeur<\/i>, no, I only seem to meet\n\tLives lived with love's good will.\n\nThere is a student with an angle-poise\n\tLamp. He's hard at work\nIn happy concentration. There's no noise\n\tAs yet and nothing's stark\n\nOr ugly. I've a sense of neighborhood,\n\tOf being near yet keeping\nA proper distance. Now I find it good\n\tTo think of children sleeping\n\nWith night-lights on. No doubt their parents will\n\tLater go up to bed\nAnd make love without speaking. There's a still\n\tDesign within my head\n\nAs if I were about to write a score\n\tTo fit these modest lives\nWhere there are quarrels sometimes but no more\n\tThan small ones which arrive\n\nBecause we are imperfect. I walk on\n\tUnder a full moon's stare,\nKnowing that elsewhere crimes are done -\n\tNot here, no, never here,\n\nAnd 'here' is much more usual, I believe,\n\tThan war and hate and dread\nSince here are still lives where the trust of love\n\tWill never be quite dead.\n\nSay I am sentimental. I don't care.\n\tThe rooted tree of trust\nI know is always flowering somewhere\n\tWhere people still are just.\n\nMaybe they could not tell you what they think\n\tTheir lives are all about.\nPhilosophies grow cold, most dogmas shrink\n\tHere where hope's not in doubt.\n<\/pre>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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<\/cite> 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.<\/p>\n
I agree with her when she says “‘here’ is much more usual, I believe, Than war and hate and dread”<\/b>, though I am skeptical that “the trust of love Will never be quite dead.”<\/b> 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.<\/p>\n
Another poem, A Chinese Sage<\/cite>, 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?<\/p>\n
\n
A Chinese Sage<\/i><\/b>\n\n\tA Chinese sage once took every word distilled, altered and perfected\nIn private till for him it seemed a poem, yes he took this to a peasant woman,\n\tRead it to her softly and slowly and waited for her rough-voiced assurance that\nCertain words she could understand, others were meaningless to her. Very discreetly\n\tBut decisively, and with no arguments, this sage crossed out every word that was foreign to\nA woman of simplicity who knew labours of the soil and the house, who had no\n\tDealings other than this with poetry, art of any kind, yet by his\n\n\tMagnanimity, more, his humility, became his mentor, guided him\nOut of all obscurity, not with wearying argument or even quiet coaxing, but by the fact\n\tThat she was a world he could only enter through her. Hay, beds, crude meals, lust\nSubdued his wit, bodied out his verse, cancelled cleverness. And, I ask, was he\n\tMost poet or most philosopher in this uncrowned wisdom, writing\nIn the reign of Charlamagne, paring simplicities to a peace no\n\tEmperor was ever enticed by or even dreamed of?\n\n\n\n<\/pre>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-181-2","category-passages","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paumAn-1P","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}