When I was a child I wanted to be a gypsy.
I was born in Vermont, and we spent the summers there when I was growing up.
Everything I knew, I knew because of Vermont.
―Purple mountains‘ majesty‖ was certainly Vermont. One of the first poems I learned by heart said all my heart. When I say it now, it still seems to do so. It is Bliss Carman‘s ―A Vagabond Song‖:
There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood –
Touch of manner, hint of mood;
And my heart is like a rhyme,
With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time.
The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cry Of bugles going by,
And my lonely spirit thrills
To see the frosty asters like smoke upon the hills.
There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir; We must rise and follow her,
When from every hill of flame
She calls and calls each vagabond by name.
I put down roots in Vermont when I had been uprooted everywhere else. Adolescence and its inevitable sense of total uprooting I learned there, too. It appeared to me in Wordsworth‘s ―Fallings from us, vanishing,/ Blank misgivings of a creature / Moving about in worlds not realized,/ High effects at which our mortal nature / Doth tremble like a guilty thing surprised…‖ Reading this, I trembled with recognition.
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Later I learned from Wordsworth the word ―restrain‖: Three years she grew in sun and shower;
Then Nature said, ―A lovelier flower
On earth was never sown;
This child I to myself will take;
She shall be mine, and I will make
A lady of my own.
―Myself will to my darling be
Both law and impulse: and with me
The girl, in rock and plain,
In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,
Shall feel an overseeing power
To kindle or restrain…‖
But in the end the poem which moves with me like the mood moving as one moves at night is Frost‘s ―Reluctance‖:
Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.
The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
While others are sleeping.
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And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question, ―Whither?‖
Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?
‗The heart is still aching to seek,/ But the feet question, ―Whither?‖‘ is the other side of,
―There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir;/ We must rise and follow her/
When from every hill of flame/ She calls and calls each vagabond by name.‖ It is the thing without a name, the ―blank misgivings.‖ That a fact can be a treason to the heart, I know well. It is what makes one a vagabond.
Much later I wrote, ―Even in Spring we fear for what comes afterward. The wisteria is only a way of keeping from being sad. I have been faithful to thee, cineraria, in my fashion:
And Emil said, ―That‘s very good.‖
Nature is nurture.
Or, you are what you eat, or, as Popeye says, sitting in the employment agency office, ―I yam what I yam‖ – he told me about this cartoon.
And the other side of that is the New Yorker cartoon which I told him about and which he remembered – the child at the dinner table saying, ―I say it‘s spinach, and I say to hell with it.‖
One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons is of a father jerking his thumb toward his young son who is seated at the piano and saying, ―Van Cliburn he‘s not.‖
But how did he know? Van Cliburn‘s parents were quoted in the Times as saying, ―We thought he was just an ordinary little boy. We didn‘t know he was Van Cliburn.‖
You don‘t know your father, and you don‘t know your son, evidently.
Nobody every loved this way before. Ever after.