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      Poetry I, below, was drafted in 2012 and languished for five years forgotten.  Now in 2017 I am working on books for my siblings, my husband and myself -  biographical, composed of captioned pictures, writings including letters, timelines and memorabilia.  Very little of my production of family history books has been my own writing; to a very large extent they are collections of the writings of my family, past and present. My plan now is to provide commentary about the process of writing the books not covered in previous blog entries, as a sort of contribution to the "writing" section of my own "Life of..." book, as well as to the Niebuhrgathering web site.

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      One of the five books I worked on in 2011 was transcription and footnoting of my paternal grandmother's notebook, wherein she entered, between 1884 and 1894, the poetry she liked.

      This notebook of my grandmother's gave rise to much thought about poetry and also about education, and whether an ancestor's choice of poetry can give some entry into her mental landscape.

      I write now of the impact working on my grandmother's notebook has had on my own mental landscape.

      She was a girl of fifteen in a country village in England when she started the notebook; a young mother of two in the industrial city of Birmingham when she filled it.  I don't know if she continued with other notebooks thereafter; no others have come down in the family, just this one - to her son my father, then to his eldest child, my sister Mary, who lent it to me. 

      My daughter undertook to transcribe the poetry into the computer. She had a difficult time of it, not from the quality of the handwriting which was fully legible if not quite copperplate.  Her difficulty lay in the content, which was  of Victorian sentimentality  and of Quaker sensibility.  My grandmother was a birthright Quaker, brought up in a Quaker home where there was no music, no decoration of home or person, no card games.  Meeting (that is, church) attendance twice a day on Sundays and once on Wednesdays.  Entertainment was what could be made at home - word games and all manner of parlor games. Chess, checkers, drawing, serious conversation, carefully selected books, including books of poetry, especially that of Wordsworth and Longfellow, and Whittier, himself a Quaker. Poetry was read quietly or aloud; memorized poetry was recited. Memorization of poetry was expected not only at school but also at home. My grandparents lived across the garden in the Big House.  We - my parents and three siblings and I, lived the other side of the garden in the Cottage. Our grandparents were very much part of our lives, Grandpa a kindly presence, rarely speaking; Grandma always THERE, always busy, always ready to talk to us. She recited or read poetry to us, she coached my sister and me with stitchery…

      When I was first in public school - a one room, ten grade, one teacher school - I loved the poetry.  The curriculum as I remember it (to the limited extent I do remember it)  was Bliss Carman and Archibald Lampman and E. Pauline Johnson. I  enjoyed the rhythms and the rhymes and the ideas they expressed so beautifully.

      I didn't realize how different this part of my upbringing -- particularly at home, but also in school -- was until many decades later. Then, I did an informal survey of my email correspondents, asking the question, "To what extent was your childhood and youth  at home and at school  influenced by poetry?" The answers came back, ranging from not at all to very little, except for one, whose education had been in a private girls' school in England before the war. For her, poetry was in her childhood and remained in her old age important to her.

      The general lack of a habit of poetry from childhood tended to explain in part the comments I heard when I tossed poetry quotations into my conversation.  While from some it had the tone of accusation, I took it and indeed continue to take it as a compliment, being in part a tribute to my revered elders, when I quoted scraps of poetry relevant to a given conversation.

      Shakespeare is poetry.  Large parts of the King James Bible are poetry.  My father writes in his memoirs of one winter in the sod homestead shack on the prairies of Central Saskatchewan which he shared with his older cousin, when they read an entire set of Shakespeare.  My sister Mary remembers a day when Dad was at home and lying down - a GREAT rarity - men in those days - as is said of them now too - "played hurt."  But he had taken an almighty clunk on the head and HAD to lie down.  Was it a horse's hoof? I don't recall.  While lying down at home, he offered to my sister to read to her one of Shakespeare's plays.  She felt awed and honored - not only because of the reading of the play, which he did beautifully, but because for the length of some hours she had him all to herself.  She was one of four children; time alone with a parent was also a rarity.

      Every morning after breakfast, Dad read a chapter of the King James Bible.  I wonder if  any other translation could properly be regarded as poetry.  I have examined a dozen or so translations in the course of transcribing my great-grandfather's journals.  He was an antiquary, specializing in ancient books, particularly those which were written after the Reformation and after the foundation of the Quaker faith. Every time he mentioned a Bible translation, I looked it up on the Internet and often found passages quoted, which in comparing them to the King James version I found not only to lack poetry but to be clumsy uses of the English language.  This was not a scholarly analysis on my part  but rather the impression of one whose lifelong ambition has been to master the beautiful complexities of expressing oneself well in one's mother-tongue.

      I cannot say - in my ninth decade - that I have yet achieved anything approaching mastery.  I'm still working on that. The best I can say is I recognize mastery when I see it, and most often, that is in poetry.   My daughter, a writer herself, defines poetry as the best ideas expressed in the best words, in the best order.  I like that definition.

 

 

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      Some months ago I had word that a woman I knew was in the last stage of her life.  I didn't know Lyn well but had met her a few times; she was cousin of my beloved friend Sue who had died earlier.

      What can one do for a person who is dying, at a great distance, and not deeply well known?  I asked her by email if she liked poetry.  When she enthusiastically answered YES! I began writing to her every few days, including in my emails poetry that had meaning for me. Lyn was delighted, and this continued until she died, peacefully in her senior's residence suite, among friends.

       The process of selecting poems for Lyn had its challenges.  At first, realizing that many of my favorites referred to death directly or allegorically, I thought this might cut too close to the bone, but Lyn was pleased with my selections, commenting on them in detail. One of them, a childhood poem from my English grandmother, had Lyn analyzing the underlying theme, inclusiveness, which had been quite invisible to me before Lyn pointed it out. To me it just brought memories of my  grandmother reciting it, without consideration of any deeper meaning.

      Years earlier, in the fall of 2009, when my brother David was dying, cheerfully philosophical to the end, I wrote letters to him every few days, illustrating them with pictures of our shared childhood, and my favorite pictures of him as an adult. And years again before that, it was letters to my dear friend who had retired to England, and found that her cancer had returned after more than a decade silent and was now killing her. 

      Knowing what to say to a dying person, or  what to do for him or her, is a problem for most of us, and we may resort to greeting cards which we hope may at least tell the dying that they are remembered.  I recall going from card shop to card shop looking for one for a particular kinsman, and failing to find anything I could think of as appropriate.  This triggered the thought that perhaps my own words are POSSIBLE, if I can only figure out what to say.

      It helps when the dying are well aware of their situation, and expressions of hope from friends and relatives are simply wrong.  It helps when you feel it possible to talk to them (email or letter or in person) about their situation.  I have before me an email from Lyn in which she says in effect, "Yes, send me poetry.  I know exactly where I am on my journey, and poetry will ease my separation from this world and give me something to think about other than whether it's time for my next pain pill."

      So I sent her poetry.  And earlier I sent my brother and my friend letters.  I know that to the last, these emails and letters were read to the recipients by friends and family, the recipients being too weak to do so themselves.

      I think that in this, there is an element of offering the dying a sense of what their legacy is in this world. Not just THAT they will be remembered, but HOW they will be remembered.  I don't think many of us will be  like Alexander Pope in our latter ends, in his poem Ode to Solitude, the last verse of which is:

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown,

Thus unlamented, let me die.

Steal from this earth and not a stone

Tell where I lie.

       I think most of us would like to think there will be a memorial of some kind  where those who knew us can go and commune with their memories of us.  Less often now this is a gravestone, with people increasingly choosing cremations and natural burials, and burials at sea.  My niece got a cherry tree in Beacon Hill Park, overlooking a rose garden where as a Guide she had planted roses. For us, we built a Memory Gazebo, with plaques in memory of those of our relatives and dearest friends, including pets, who have died.  There we sit in fine weather, which here in Victoria, BC is early spring to late fall and indeed at times in winter.  In high summer, surrounded by the memorials, we float on tides of memory with the scents and colors of  flowers,  the butterflies wafting on the breeze, and the gentle conversation and calls of the birds in our ears.