Adagiu?

It's about 10:00 A.M. and I'm trying to stay awake. I woke up early and am suffering from the consequences of staying up late, berating my eyes to melodrama and my ears to choruses of background laughter. So now this morning, with my head in hands and my legs stretched out the full extent, I flip open Wallace Stevens to a few different poems in the Ideas of Order, my eyes setting faster than a Montana sunset, looking for an idea that I could grasp and something that resonated with me. Nothing was really hitting the mark, so I shut my tome and clicked on the computer. Scrolling through the blog posts, I instantly chose the blog, The Rambler. I love the little quotes that Penwell chose and especially the first one, "An evening's thought is like a clear day of weather." It is such a beautiful sentence that even without trying, sums up imagery unique yet similar for all of us. It doesn't matter where we are, we can all remember that moment when we were completely at ease. Looking back on the day in harmony and peace, sitting in silence and joy.

It is ironic that these two events that feel so similar are also somehow intrinsically tied. I can remember my most peaceful moments of discourse in the hills of Lenox. It is a cool 65 degree day, the sun starting to set, and me in the middle of Massachusetts during the peak of fall season. Walking through the woods, and feeling everything and nothing, completely absorbed, looking forward. Smelling and sensing the trees around me, listening with rapture the swish of the leaves I step through; piles of multicolored, transparent, gatherers of light.

Yet, the darkness rises in me recalling this. A bitter pill is left to swallow. The next part of the story is that as I read this small sentence that brought so many pleasant memories to mind and took me to another place, reserved in the banks of my memory for joyous days and hours of reflection, I felt like I needed to investigate further. The quotes were so good that I needed more. I looked for the Adagia and found the Adagio. The poem goes like this,

Drone, dove, that rounded woe again,
When I bring her to-morrow.
The wood were a less happy place,
But for that broken sorrow.

Tell her in undertones that Youth
With other times must reckon;
That mist seals up the golden sun,
And ghosts from gardens beckon.

My golden sun dissolves under the shadow of something that I can't seem to shake off. A rough year it has been, with my Dad dying, my dog dying, and then my grandpa, in a span of less than 2 months. But life goes on and soon we are caught up with the strains of I and the daily business that this contains. Once you think you have shaken these things off and life seems to return to its normal flow, you are brought back to death. Is it a coincidence that when I look for life in the Adagia I find the death in the Adagio? I would think it is besides the fact that it has happened so many other times. We sometimes think that our "I" is all powerful, I am the only one that can choose my lessons. Yet, life is a giant lesson, or remembrance. We cannot choose our lessons, we can just be ready to receive them.

Something stuck with me when we read the sonnet by Spencer honoring his dead grandmother. I feel a bulge in my throat right now for some reason. Something is left to do, the dead need to be honored.