Danny Dumb, No. 1

I'm starting a new little series today--an occasional series (very occasional, I hope) about those moments in my life when I realize something I should have known all along--or should have noticed right away. But didn't.

I thought about calling it "Danny Duh," a name that's probably a (tiny) bit more flattering than "Danny Dumb." But this is an age of accuracy. No fake news here! So we'll go with "Dumb."

So here we go on what is really quite a Nerdy Realization I had yesterday morning.

Joyce and I were driving over to Panera--our Sunday morning routine for many years (from there we go grocery shopping: the Acme is only yards away). We like to go via a road that was cut through only a few years ago, a road that now has a city park (and cops waiting to catch those exceeding 25 mph--not I!).

It's a lovely little road, curving through little stands of trees, granting us views of the railway, etc. We've seen wild turkeys and deer there. We love it.

And one of my routines on that stretch of road is to recite for Joyce the latest poem I've been memorizing. And this week it was "Asides," a short poem I memorized in honor of  poet Richard Wilbur, who died on October 14 this year; he was 96.  (I've pasted the entire text below.) I had already recited it previously for her, stumbling and bumbling along in the early days of "knowing" it. But on Sunday morning, I was smooth ... confident ... eloquent (well, Wilbur was).

And when I finished it, I had a Danny Dumb Moment.

"Joyce," I said, "I think that entire poem is a single sentence!"

I'd not noticed.

I raced through it again ... yes, a single sentence holds three stanzas, each of which rhymes its first and fourth lines.

And as we were pulling up near Panera, I had another Danny Dumb Moment: Wilbur's use of "long sentence" in the second line of the first stanza has yet another meaning now: It's not just the long darkness of fall and winter; it's the "long sentence" of the poem itself.

I know that poets do this now and then--an entire poem in a single sentence. One of the ones I can recall right now is Robert Frost's "The Silken Tent" (also pasted below--one I've also memorized), an even trickier achievement: It's a Shakespearean sonnet: fourteen lines, iambic pentameter, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg. And still a single sentence.

Still, Wilbur's is something, He allowed himself only three feet per line (approx. six syllables), not the five feet (ten syllables) that Frost used to work himself toward his rhymes.

Anyway, memorizing famous poems has conferred upon me any number of Danny Dumb moments--things that the process of memorizing has allowed me to notice--things I had not noticed during the countless times I'd read the poem--even taught the poem.

Asides, by Richard Wilbur

Though the season's begun to speak

Its long sentence of darkness,

The upswept boughs of the larch

Bristle with gold for a week,

And then there is only the willow

To make bright interjection,

Its drooping branches decked

With thin leaves, curved and yellow,

Till winter, loosening these

With a first flurry and bluster,

Shall scatter across the snow-crust

Their dropped parentheses.

The Silken Tent, by Robert Frost

She is as in a field a silken tent

At midday when the sunny summer breeze

Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,

So that in guys it gently sways at ease,

And its supporting central cedar pole,

That is its pinnacle to heavenward

And signifies the sureness of the soul,

Seems to owe naught to any single cord,

But strictly held by none, is loosely bound

By countless silken ties of love and thought

To every thing on earth the compass round,

And only by one's going slightly taut

In the capriciousness of summer air

Is of the slightest bondage made aware.