What is possible

Madonna of the Evening Flowers by Amy Lowell

All day long I have been working,
Now I am tired.
I call: "Where are you?"
But there is only the oak tree rustling in the wind.
The house is very quiet,
The sun shines in on your books,
On your scissors and thimble just put down,
But you are not there.
Suddenly I am lonely:
Where are you?
I go about searching.

Then I see you,
Standing under a spire of pale blue larkspur,
With a basket of roses on your arm.
You are cool, like silver,
And you smile.
I think the Canterbury bells are playing little tunes.

You tell me that the peonies need spraying.
That the columbines have overrun all bounds,
That the pyrus japonica should be cut back and rounded.
You tell me these things.
But I look at you, heart of silver,
White heart-flame of polished silver,
Burning beneath the blue steeples of the larkspur,
And I long to kneel instantly at your feet,
While all about us peal the loud Te Deums of the
Canterbury bells.

-1919

I fell in love with this poem during my very first reading. I stumbled upon it while looking through the Norton Anthology of Contemporary American Literature for any trace of a modern "ode." I found very few titles that contained the word "ode," but found many poems that seemed to share in the sentimentality the "ode," as a historic literary form, often explores.

My very favorite part in the poem is that last, remarkably holy, image:

But I look at you, heart of silver,
White heart-flame of polished silver,
Burning beneath the blue steeples of the larkspur,
And I long to kneel instantly at your feet,
While all about us peal the loud Te Deums of the
Canterbury bells.

At once this seems like a prayer, or perhaps simply an invocation, that must understand that all-important gap between what is true and what it possible ("I long to kneel instantly at your feet"). Could it be that possibility is always in a state of longing, that the moment one stops "longing" the possible becomes another sector of the real? With this thought, then, a poem in which a bit of the real is idealized, or praised to the point of being 'holy,' is a poem that dreams in the possible, and never the real.

I tend to prefer this idealization over the "real." Might poetry achieve more honesty than living in the real does? Perhaps this means that honesty is only a version of what it possible, that honesty never enters what one might call the "real." If this is so, the unreal must be more real than the real.

To that end: what part of living is wrapped up in a poem? What world might one "live" in if the possibility of a poem were always as real as silence--could we want this?

It came as no surprise to me that one of Lowell's greatest influences was John Keats, a remembered contributor to the ode ("To a Nightingale," "On a Grecian Urn," "To Autumn," naming a few). Although Lowell's poem is not formally titled "Ode," and it does not participate in the complex rhyme and syllabic apparatus of the form, it still appears to me a sort of variation on the type. I see similarities in form between the ancient strophe-antistrophe-epode pattern, and Lowell's three stanza inquiry into the relation between the lonely and the beautiful.