Midnight Ruminations

John Myers O'Hara

I woke in the middle of the night with some lines of poetry clanging in my head. Here they are:

Old longing nomadic leap,
Chafing at custom's chain;
Again from its brumal* sleep
Wakens the ferine** strain.

*wintry
**like a wild animal

Some of you (especially those of you former students of mine who read The Call of the Wild with me in 8th grade) will recognize this as the epigraph to London's most famous book, his 1903 novella about a dog stolen from a comfortable California lifestyle and taken to the Yukon where things are ... different.

When I was working on all my Jack London research back in the 1980s and 90s, I discovered that these lines were written by a poet-stockbroker named John Myers O'Hara (1877-1944 [the year I was born!]) and come from a much longer poem called "Atavism," which appeared in a periodical called The Bookman in November 1902. (See image of entire poem below--a photocopy of the original Bookman publication.)

As I discuss in my annotated edition of Wild (U of Okla P, 1995), when O'Hara realized these lines were adorning Chapter 1 in Wild (which was selling very well), he wrote to London, saying, basically, "That's my poem!"

No answer.

He wrote again: "That's my poem!!"

This time London answered, a bit disingenuously, saying he'd come across the lines as a "detached fragment" and hadn't known who the poet was. (Yeah.)

Anyway, London and O'Hara corresponded a bit--and met for dinner in NYC (Feb. 1, 1912). London's wife, Charmian, later called him "a character" in her diary.

BTW: In all the editions of Wild in London's lifetime, none identified O'Hara as the poet.

Okay--so these lines coursed and clanged through my head last night ... but why? Well, the entire poem, "Atavism," is about the arrival of spring; it urges people to get outside, to be "Conscious again of the green / Verdure beneath the feet." (Yeah, the diction is a bit ... much, eh?) It reminds me--thematically only--of Emily Dickinson's "A Little Madness in the Spring." (Link to her poem.)

And yesterday--Monday, April 22--here in northeastern Ohio it was a gorgeous day: 70s, sunny, hopeful. The kind of day that ought to make you want to spring outside and release your Ferine Self, you know? Who wouldn't want to do that?

Me.

Yesterday, Depression settled over me, and I spent virtually the entire day in bed, an entire day thinking dark thoughts on the brightest day in local memory.

Why?

I can always blame Lupron, one of the heavy-duty anti-cancer meds I'm on (quarterly injections; another is coming up soon). One of Lupron's side-effects?  There are many (none good), but down the list a ways is depression.

Recent events also don't help. The deaths of friends, the death of my mother on March 10.  My declining physical/medical state is also not an "upper." I'm on four big-time cancer meds, and it was only weeks ago that I completed a troublesome course of immunotherapy.

I try to fight it, this continuous threat of depression. And I've been doing pretty well.  Getting up early. Coffee-shopping, reading, writing. And--best of all--being with Joyce.

But sometimes I lose the struggle. And I shut the door, crawl back into bed, surrender to the darkness.

As the day wore on yesterday, I gradually emerged, and after supper even drove with Joyce over to Aurora to mail some birthday cards to a niece and nephew--and to snap up a Diet Coke at Mickey D's. Home, I read from several books on Kindle (the new Michael Connelly, thrillers about Longmire and Jack Taylor), streamed portions of some of "our" shows with Joyce.

And this morning I made myself get out of the bed at my wonted time (about 6), forced myself to commence my routines. And so far--it's about 10:15 a.m.--I'm doing okay.

And that's good enough for me right now--although my "ferine strain" still lies asleep.