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Foreword

JANE TYSON CLEMENT was born on October 1, 1917, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Though she lived there until she was nineteen (her father worked at Columbia University), she was never truly at home in the city but preferred Bay Head, New Jersey, where the family owned a summer house. Bay Head’s windswept shore drew Jane back year after year; as she confided in her seventies, “There was something eternal about it that was always a rock and an anchor for me.”

After graduating from the Horace Mann School in 1935, Jane went on to Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, where among other things she studied poetry under Grace Hazard Conkling. Scholar Howard Patch, whose lectures on Chaucer often digressed into conversations about faith, influenced her too. Jane left Smith in 1939 with a degree in English, but she felt her real education still lay ahead. Privately she yearned to move beyond the “frivolous, self-centered side of my nature…and to do something – anything – about the unfair treatment of workers, the hoarding of wealth in the hands of a few…and the prejudicial notion of the superiority of the white race.”

Eventually this search led her to God, though first through disillusionment and confusion, and the frustrating recognition that the world’s evil was as deeply embedded within organized Christianity as in secular life. Nevertheless, she found herself increasingly drawn into the quest for spiritual truth, particularly after reading the Journal of George Fox, which she discovered in a class on comparative religion: “Fox was a revelation to me, because I found I could respond to everything he believed and acted upon. And to think that there were still Quakers!”

World War II brought a series of teaching jobs in Pennsylvania, first at Germantown Friends, a private academy where she worked as an intern, and later at the Shippen School for Girls in Lancaster. It also brought marriage to Robert Allen Clement (the “R.A.C.” to whom several poems in this collection are dedicated), a Quaker attorney and fellow pacifist.

In 1942 the Clements settled in Haddonfield, New Jersey. Bob practiced law in nearby Philadelphia, while Jane busied herself as a housewife and mother (they eventually had seven children) and did work for their local Friends Meeting, the Arch Street Yearly Meeting, and the American Friends Service Committee, a humanitarian organization. With one new responsibility after another, the demands on her time grew continually, and she began to feel pulled in all directions. Worse, she grew conscious of a nagging doubt that something about all her worthy activities was radically wrong: “Some subtle shift in base was necessary to jar the whole structure of my life into its God-given place.”

In late 1952 the Clements came into contact with the Bruderhof (“place of brothers”), a Christian community movement with origins in Europe. Soon afterward they opened their home to itinerant members from the movement’s South American base. Externally, the Bruderhof was a far cry from the Clements’ milieu. Of one couple they hosted, Heinrich and Annemarie Arnold, Jane wrote, “They were obviously poor, obviously different as night and day from middle-class America…But their simplicity, warmth, naturalness, and self-effacement were like a refreshing wind.” And their insistence on countering materialism and war not with words but by practicing voluntary community of goods offered a convincing – if unexpected – answer to her and Bob’s growing frustration with the deadening complacency of post-war suburbia.

In late 1954 the Clements packed their belongings, put their house on the market, and moved to Woodcrest, the Bruderhof’s new center in Rifton, New York. (They had already tested communal life during a visit to one of the group’s South American settlements some months before.) They stayed for good. Jane explained:

The undergirding facts were joy and love. And because of that we did not care how poor, how crowded, how (humanly speaking) precarious our situation, how much opposition we faced from family and friends, how physically tired we became, how sometimes we simply could not cope…Sometimes we were called upon to do the things we thought we were least fitted for, and discovered that by some power not of our making we could do them.

We learned to trust, not merely in our human brothers and sisters, but in what had called us together and gathered us all out of our former ways, and in what lay behind and above and underneath everything: surrender and service to our Master, Jesus. His love upheld us…

We were a small circle, from the most varied backgrounds and circumstances. Yet whenever we met, we felt something immediately – an inner authority that did not come from the human individuals gathered there. We felt this inner security every day, in spite of all the uncertainties and unsolved situations; and this security did not come out of human confidence…

All of us who joined hands had dared something, had taken a leap into the unknown. How little we actually knew of what would be asked of us! How little we still know…

Though Jane never wavered in her dedication to the community she felt called to, she never stopped looking for a fuller, more genuine way to express her commitment. Practically, she found fulfillment in her work as a teacher at Bruderhof schools in New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and England, where her passion for literature and history left its mark on an entire generation of students. In artistic terms, her seeking found an outlet in the never-ending search for a new image or an apt turn of phrase with which to capture a longing, a struggle, an illuminating moment.

It was not a self-important quest. As she wryly notes in one poem:

I stir no hands; I light no eyes from mine,

nor will my music ever shake the stars…

But in spite of such modesty, she could not escape her need to create – an urge so deep-seated and clear that she could assert:

Oh, but I share the consciousness of breath;

I have my purpose – I fulfill my days.

Somewhere within me is the invulnerable flame

which hissed and flared the day man first took fire…

There is nothing ostentatious about the poems in this book. In many, the word-pictures are drawn straight from the natural world: sunsets and surf, breaking ice, budding trees, and wheeling gulls.

Metaphors abound – the endless running of the tide a reminder of the endless cycle of life, the weathers of the heart mirroring the weathers of the sky – yet much of the verse works on an even simpler level: its sole purpose is praise. “Christ the Shepherd,” for instance (a poem inspired by a trip through Wales), is first and foremost the outpouring of a devout heart.

Aside from Strange Dominion, a prize-winning narrative poem completed at Smith College in 1939, and The Heavenly Garden, a cycle printed by the Society of Friends in 1952, most of Jane’s poems never traveled beyond the hands of her family while she was alive. She was less guarded with her plays and short stories, several of which appeared in The Sparrow (Plough, 1968, reissued 2000 as The Secret Flower). Yet as one of her sons remarked after her death on March 21 of this year, his mother was so routinely dismissive of her gifts that he never even thought of her as a writer: “She certainly never seemed to think of herself in that way.”

In a verse that laments the inadequacy of language to convey the stirrings of the soul, Jane writes:

Words are the symbols of a mind’s defeat,

they shape the hollow air with transient life,

and trick and twist; and make the spirit reel,

vanish like ember’s fire; devour and leave

brave husks, and echoes of lost majesties.

Such ironic frustration is an inescapable part of practicing the writer’s craft. But it is not the whole story. For if it is true (as it is often said) that a work of art bears the stamp of its creator, it must be that the creation of a poem involves the expenditure of love. And such love does have power, if only to alter the lens of the mind’s eye and thus open it to new ways of seeing. Whether such claims can be made for the verses in this book, only the reader can decide.

C.M.Z.

July 2000