And what is so rare as a day in June?
Then, if ever, come perfect days;
Then Heaven tries the earth if it be in tune,
And over it softly her warm ear lays:
Whether we look, or whether we listen,
We hear life murmur, or see it glisten . . .
The little bird sits at his door in the sun . . .
His mate feels the eggs beneath her wings,
And the heart in her dumb breast flutters and sings;
He sings to the wide world, and she to her nest,—
In the nice ear of Nature which song is the best?
James Russell Lowell, “The Vision of Sir Launfal”
— one of the knights who quested for the Holy Grail.
he season of daffodils and lilacs has passed, and we are at the time of roses. It’s a perfect blue-sky June day, and our wren trills his silvery song while little Jenny wren sits in their house. A rabbit placidly nibbles grass nearby. For a few years we had no rabbits. Evidently the fox and the hawk who were here have moved on. Seeing them was exciting, but I’m glad to have rabbits again.
Last week I quoted Proust’s story of how the vision of his aunt’s village sprang up like a stage set from a teaspoon of tea. We never know which memory will be dredged up from the jumble in our mental attic until we are suddenly swept by nostalgia.
My nephew, John, sent an e-mail that included this interesting take on memory: There are studies underway that seem to prove a lot of our memories may be coded with input from our other senses in such a way that the merest hint of a particular smell, sound or visual will trigger memories with precision. So the story of the spoonful of tea with the cookie crumb in it has a basis in fact. Strange and powerful thing the human brain.
Many things trigger memories. One time all that I could remember was “What is so rare as a day in June,” so I called my friend, Phyllis Otto, who had many poems stored in her mind. Now as I write, I hear once again her voice. That memory carries me to a wintry afternoon when we sat in her den and took turns reading poems to each other. It was especially precious because we both knew that the time remaining to her was brief.
One reminiscence begets another, and we piggyback on each other’s memories. My college chum, John, wrote that people used to sit on the courthouse lawn in Kentland to watch the traffic on race day. Also, when he was a teacher he had his students memorize poetry. One of them learned “In Flanders Fields.” Years later, John was touched when he wrote that during a vacation he went to Flanders in Belgium and recited the poem.
Inspired by the line “In Flanders Fields, the poppies blow,” veterans’ organizations sold little crepe paper poppies that people wore on Memorial Day.
I received an e-mail from Rita who wrote about an experience that she had with the poem “Abou ben Adhem” that I used in a recent column. One day a teacher lined her students up around the classroom, and announced that they were to recite the poem “Abou Ben Adhem” that she had told them to memorize. “Now, she had done no such thing. She had either forgotten to tell our class or knew perfectly well what she was doing . . .”
Rita said, that the teacher paid no attention when the first student in line tried to explain and just fed him the first line, proceeding thusly around the room with the following lines. Out of all the poems that Rita learned and subsequently forgot, that’s the one that she remembers after 60 years. wclarke@comcast.net