One Time, One Meeting

Last month the holiday season brought three small grandchildren to our home. Jack is six, Isla three, and Allegra two. Three may well be a crowd, but apart from an upset or two, this trio of tots played harmoniously together, and their brief presence brightened our lives.

A few days after the children and their parents had departed, I retired to my study to read a book I had bought just before the holidays: The Essential Brendan Kennelly, a richly varied selection of the Irish poet’s work, published on the occasion of his 75th birthday. I had left the book on a low table next to my reading chair. When I opened it, I found to my surprise a waxy red scribble on the title page. Someone had left me a souvenir.

Although I am not one to condone the defacing of books, I was amused by this discovery, and I suspect that Brendan Kennelly would be as well. One of Kennelly’s best-known poems, “Poem from a Three Year Old,” speaks in the voice of a child. Its exuberant verses dramatize the spirit of play, the incessant questioning, and the moments of wonder intrinsic to childhood. “The first moment of wonder,” Kennelly has remarked, “is an amazing moment, as if for the first time something is happening. And that is the moment on which poetry depends.” There is a “strange thing” in us, Kennelly asserts, that is destroyed by familiarity and experience. But through the successive acts of attention that constitute an authentic poem, the familiar can again become strange and the sense of wonder restored. “And I think that’s what poetry is about–a kind of permanent beginning.”

Kennelly’s view of poetry informs his poem “Begin,” written in the poet’s fifties while he was recovering from heart surgery. Set in central Dublin, this poem portrays the narrator awakening on a spring day to the sounds of birdsong and morning traffic. Observing a “pageant of queuing girls,” he celebrates the “exaltation of springtime” and the mood of hope the season affords. At the same time, he acknowledges that “every beginning is a promise / born in light and dying in dark.” And as he notes the bridges on Dublin’s Grand Canal, which “[link] the past and future,” he is reminded of deceased friends who remain alive in memory. In the remainder of the poem, the tone continues to darken, and literal observation gives way to general reflection:

Begin to the loneliness that cannot end

since it perhaps is what makes us begin,

begin to wonder at unknown faces

at crying birds in the sudden rain

at branches stark in the willing sunlight

at seagulls foraging for bread

at couples sharing a sunny secret

alone together while making good.

Though we live in a world that dreams of ending

that always seems about to give in

something that will not acknowledge conclusion

insists that we forever begin.

In these lines, as in the poem generally, images of sunlight, warmth, and intimacy coexist with images of isolation, distress, barrenness, and hunger. The sense of wonder that Kennelly associates with childhood is balanced against a seasoned adult’s experience of death and loss. And the sense of beginning, which the poem joyously extols, is tempered by a mature awareness of inevitable endings.

According to Zen teachings, each moment of our experience is unprecedented and unrepeatable. We would do well to accord it our full attention. But, as Kennelly’s poem exquisitely demonstrates, the light-filled wonder we may feel at any moment is of a piece with our darkest thoughts. On this sunny January morning, as I look out on our peaceful, snow-covered yard, I am struck once again by the beauty of the natural world. At the same time, I am mindful of the sufferings of family and friends. One is battling an aggressive cancer; another is mourning with dignity and grace his wife’s recent passing; and a third, who will soon turn ninety-three, is living alone with his cat and his memories of service in World War Two. With each new breath, they–and I–begin again.

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The Essential Brendan Kennelly, edited by Terence Brown and Michael Longley (Wake Forest, 2011) includes a CD of poems read by Brendan Kennelly. Mr. Kennelly’s remarks on poetry, quoted above, have been transcribed from that recording.