Good Lord!

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92)

My grandfather Osborn loved Tennyson. Grandpa owned a leather-bound copy of his complete poems, a volume featuring Grandpa's neat annotations and many oft-turned and -considered pages. Later, that book came to me, and I recently passed it along to our son.

My great-grandfather Warren A. Lanterman died on March 30, 1963, the spring of my freshman year in college. Although he had been living the previous five years in Enid, Oklahoma, with his daughter and her husband (that Osborn grandfather I already mentioned), his body came home to Youngstown, where there was a service for him at the Lane Funeral Home, and he now lies, with his wife and son, in the cemetery near the Four-Mile Run Christian Church near Youngstown. Great-grandpa had lived on (and later operated) a farm on Four-Mile Run for  ninety years--though the farmhouse is now gone. As a little boy, I saw him behead a chicken there and learned--too early?--the reality behind "ran around like a chicken with its head cut off."

But I still ate one of its legs an hour later ...

Oh, and he was related to the Lantermans who ran Lanterman's Mill, still operating in Mill Creek Park in Youngstown. (Link to information about the mill.) Years ago, I mixed into my sourdough starter some flour from that mill. A little bit of family history in every bite ... My grandmother had--then my mother had--and now my brothers have an old painting of the mill hanging on the wall ...

Anyway--patience, patience--there is a connection here. At Grandpa Lanterman's service at the funeral home on a Tuesday, early in April 1963, the gentleman leading the service (a minister? a funeral home manager?) read aloud Tennyson's poem "Crossing the Bar."

Sunset and evening star,

      And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

      When I put out to sea,

   But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

      Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

      Turns again home.

   Twilight and evening bell,

      And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell,

      When I embark;

   For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place

      The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

      When I have crost the bar.

I thought at the time it sounded a little ... sing-songy, and with the sophistication of a fresh freshman, I dismissed it.

Years passed. Decades. Along the way some other Tennyson poems popped up in the stew of my life: "Charge of the Light Brigade," "The Kraken." Some others.

Between 1979-81 I taught freshman English at Western Reserve Academy in Hudson, Ohio, and it was there (I think) that I first encountered Tennyson's poem "Ulysses." Required to teach The Odyssey, I was always scrambling around for things that ... related.

And "Ulysses" clearly did. The old hero has had enough of home life--he's ready to sail off on adventure again. (Loyal Penelope he dismisses with a single phrase "an aged wife"; how sweet and PC!). He is urging his (also old) followers to join him once more.

Years passed. And--as some of you know--I began slowly--then obsessively--to memorize poems. A few, a few dozen, a few score, a couple of hundred.

And just today I (sort) of finished "Ulysses" and recited it to Joyce, who, holding the text, prompted me when I needed it. (No comment about how many times she prompted me.) I will keep at it--will get it down more smoothly.  It's taken me weeks to get this close. My excuse(s): It's long; I'm old.

That poem moves me (despite that dismissal of loyal Penelope), and why wouldn't it? An aging man, refusing to surrender, until (and these are the poem's last words) "I die."

Works for me.

And by the way ... I learned "Crossing the Bar" a few years ago--and think about Grandpa Lanterman every time I mumble it in the coffee shop. (Other patrons nearby probably have other thoughts.)

Link to "Ulysses."

Hiram, Ohio 1957 (?)
Grandpa Lanterman is to the far left; I, to the far right (front)