On Not Being Everything

      Reading the work of ones younger than oneself, one can fall victim to delusions of grandeur. You know what I'm talking about-- the "I was smarter than they are" bit, a vanity and usually a lie on the part of the elder. So, while stumbling through a few old documents today, I landed on a now-weathered paper that I wrote for the same course that RK's young charges now attend, except that my paper was for a different instructor and written almost a dozen years ago. I offer it here with absolutely no pride; I offer it here with embarrassment, but in acknowledgement that wisdom, even obvious wisdom, is seldom innate; it is, in fact, something acquired with time and much bruising along the way. Fact is, I thought then the professor in question over-graded this paper, but it reminds of another lesson most of us learn but forget along the way, that more often than not we're quicker to see through ourselves than others are; and, just as importantly, we seldom have any realistic conception of who we are in relation to others. I can say this now with much more confidence than I could then. A simple thing to remember: we all look back on former selves with embarrassment (just remember your high school photographs!), but it takes time to come to terms with what we did and who we were. As Joe E. Brown, at the end of Some Like It Hot, learning that the woman with he's fallen in love is in fact a man, so appropriately says, shhrugging the facts off: "Nobody's perfect." Indeed.

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      Here, by the way, is the subject poem:

On Not Saying Everything

This tree outside my window here,
Naked, umbrageous, fresh or sere,
Has neither chance nor will to be
Anything but a linden tree,
Even if its branches grew to span
The continent; for nature's plan
Insists that infinite extension
Shall create no new dimension.
From the first snuggling of the seed
In earth, a branchy form's decreed.

Unwritten poems loom as if
They'd cover the whole of earthly life.
But each one, growing, learns to trim its
Impulse and meaning to the limits
Roughed out by me, then modified
In its own truth's expanding light.
A poem, settling to its form,
Finds there's no jailer, but a norm
Of conduct, and a fitting sphere
Which stops it wandering everywhere.

As for you, my love, it's harder,
Though neither prisoner nor warder,
Not to desire you both: for love
Illudes us we can lightly move
Into a new dimension, where
The bounds of being disappear
And we make one impassioned cell.
So wanting to be all in all
Each for each, a man and woman
Defy the limits of what's human.

Your glancing eye, your animal tongue,
Your hands that to mine and clung
Like birds on bough, with innocence
Masking those young experiments
Of flesh, persuaded me that nature
Formed us each other's god and creature.
Play out then, as it should be played,
The sweet illusion that has made
An eldorado of your hair
And our love an everywhere.

But when we cease to play explorers
And become settlers, clear before us
Lies the next need-- to re-define
The boundary between yours and mine;
Else, one stays prisoner, one goes free.
Each to his own identity
Grown back, shall prove our love's expression
Purer for this limitation.
Love's essence, like a poem's, shall spring
From the not saying everything.

--- C. Day Lewis, 1965

I love that "eldorado of your hair" line, though I'm thinking-- not entirely with tongue in cheek-- this poem should be used to explain why prenuptial agreements are good ideas after all.