Читать книгу Cape Ann and Beyond the Cut Bridge - Sharon R. Chace - Страница 6

This book is about Cape Ann, Massachusetts, and places in the wider world that have entered my heart. Sometimes place is in my inner world as in the poem “Punctuation,” in which pause to rest invites sightings of beauty. “Infusion” is about personal interiors.

The context of the poems is beauty as revelation to poets and others. Revelation or disclosure of meanings that are expressed in poems or other forms of art can be subdivided into celebration, protest or lament, and mystical moments. That which is revealed may be the importance of the ordinary, the spiritual in the profane, a sense of place, humanity run amok, or conversely a glimpse of humanity on tiptoe, or even God in whom we “live and move and have our being.” Beauty is found on Cape Ann and in the world beyond our island. Beauty can be friendly and a cause for mystical celebrations, as in pastoral poems about nature. Beauty may also be found in incongruous expressions of pain and lament when suffering touches hearts and flows into words or painterly images. “Plant Life” deals with sin and suffering. There is a hint of prophetic protest in “Winged Warrior” and in “Etheree of Tides.”

Readers who have not visited Cape Ann may want to know more about it, especially Rockport, which is my hometown. Situated on the northern point of the cape, Rockport is a small town of less than seven thousand people. We have a board of selectmen and various committees. Please note that the title of “selectmen” is a job description, not a gender designation. Depending upon when you read this book, either most or all of our selectmen will be women! Volunteer fire and ambulance services serve us well. My sister of heart and hearth, Rosemary Lesch, is one of our harbormasters, along with Scott Story. Rosemary’s mother, the late Eleanor C. Parsons, brought me up from the age of four along with Rosemary after my first mother, Katharine Rogers Parsons, died. Eleanor was the author of books about Rockport; Katharine was a librarian and artist who worked in oils. Eleanor “Ellie” gave me a love for words; my mother gave me the joy of colors.

Rockport is a popular tourist destination, and the season officially opens with the celebration of “Motif No.1 Day.” “Motif No. 1” is an iconic red fish shack, given this name due to its popularity as a subject for artists and photographers over the years.

It took a while, however, for Rockport’s famous fish shack to be recognized. In 1932, two Rockporters, Dr. Earl Green and Mr. A. Carl Butman, a businessman, watched the American Legion Convention’s parade in Detroit. Inspiration struck and a plan emerged with the goal of promoting Rockport. They decided that a float with a replica of Motif No. 1 should be in the next year’s parade in Chicago.

After enlisting talented townspeople from Rockport to build the amazingly realistic float, they entered their “Motif No. 1” into the parade in Chicago a thousand miles away. On their way home right afterwards, bound over roads that must have been as bumpy as the choppy ocean that fisherman navigated, they learned en route that they had won first prize! Reception committees formed back in Rockport to honor the crew and celebrate the victory.

Unfortunately, the blizzard of 1978 destroyed the original shack. But since the director of public works, “Salty” Owens, had the foresight to draw up plans, the building could be rebuilt in its original form after the devastating storm.1 It is this special fish shack that makes its way into my poems, “Art Class Sonnet” and “Variation on Motif #1.”

The three main sections of Rockport are downtown, the south end, and Pigeon Cove, which is also known as the North Village. “Petite Ode to Pigeon Cove” expresses the essence of my days in Pigeon Cove between third and seventh grade. As the tide comes into the natural rock pool at the edge of the ocean, the pool like a bathtub fills up with water. At age eight sitting in the pool soaking in the beauty, I had no idea that in sixty years I would write my favorite Cape Ann poem about it! Readers who find affinity with this poem will enjoy Betty Kielinen Erkkila’s book, My Little Chickadee: Coming of Age in the 1940s & 1950s Rockport, Massachusetts. Her description of Pigeon Cove lovingly captures a time past.

Like Rockport mothers before me, I took daughter Amy to Front Beach for swimming lessons (the other downtown beach is aptly named “Back Beach”). She provided inspiration for “Cloudy Beach Day” because she told me how much she liked the cloudy days of sweatshirts and more intense salt air. But the love of sweatshirts is not for girls only. In her meditation “The Preciousness of Now!” in Out of the Fog: Meditations for Believers and Skeptics, Sarah Clark describes a rainy Rockport day when her son Aram and cousins trekked down Bearskin Neck to buy sweatshirts.

Highlights of downtown are the Shalin Liu Performance Center, the Art Association, the Rockport Public Library, and the First Congregational Church that hosts the Old Sloop Coffee House. The church is nicknamed the “Old Sloop” because, like a large ship it is visible from offshore, its steeple guides sailors to the safety of home port.

Crossing over the Annisquam River to the mainland is symbolic of the pull of the world, which lies beyond our stretch of rocky shores. Even as a child I feared I might not get over the cut bridge, which at that time was literal as well as metaphorical. People often ask me why I went to Albion College in Michigan. Well, my attendance at Albion transported me to another viewpoint and provided me with an experience of Midwestern America, expanding ideas about art, and exhilarating academic study of religion. Still, every speech I wrote for a freshman speech class was about Rockport! The professor first thought, “Oh, no. Here she goes again,” but told me that every presentation was interesting and enjoyable. I missed the salt air but breathed in the oxygen of fresh study. The poems in the second section of this book, “Cart-wheeling across the Cut Bridge,” come from savoring the beauty and challenges of other places. Although I am grateful for the contours of Cape Ann that continue to mold me, expanding matrices beyond the circle of Cape Ann that also shape and sustain me are praise worthy.

Reading Lucy Larcom’s 1880 book, Wild Roses of Cape Ann, and Other Poems, I realized we have much in common. She is my Cape Ann literary and spiritual ancestor.

Because she lived in Beverly, she would have been described by my paternal grandmother Winifred Parsons as from “off the place.” Beverly is about twenty miles south of Rockport, which would have been a day’s walk for Lucy. Yet she was very much of the place called Cape Ann, which she visited and absorbed for her soul’s sake and her writing.

For most of her life, she was a Congregationalist. I am a member of the First Congregational Church of Rockport, and Larcom’s hymn “Draw Thou My Soul, O Christ” is in the Pilgrim Hymnal, which we still use. I feel we have a shared spirituality defined as openness to transcendent goodwill revealed in beauty, human friendships, nature, and God. Larcom understood deity in a gentler, more immanent, and fuller aesthetic sense than the Puritan piety of her day. As evidenced in the poem “R.W. E.” (May 25, 1880), Larcom found a breath of fresh air, opening doors, and widening worlds in the thinking of Ralph Waldo Emerson.2 My sense is that, like me, she had an Emersonian thought process but not many Emersonian conclusions. In “R. W. E.,” Larcom acknowledged that Emerson opened doors, stirred sluggish souls, and brought a sense of widening worlds and ample air. Yet she did not completely endorse his ideas. Combining Larcom’s diaries and letters with his insightful commentary, Daniel Dulany Addison published Lucy Larcom Letters, and Diary, in 1894. From Larcom’s diary of 1862, he provides us with the following:

I heard Ralph Waldo Emerson speak too. “Civilization” was his subject; nobly treated, except that the part of Hamlet was left out of Hamlet. What is civilization without Christianity? There was a kind of religion in what he said; an acknowledging of all those elements which are the result of Christianity; indeed, Emerson’s life and character are such as Christianity would shape. He only refuses to call his inspiration by its right name. The source of all great and good thought is in Christ; so I could listen to the Sage of Concord, and recognize the voice of the Master he will not own in words.3

Put most simply, God as “Unseen Friend” is more personal that Emerson’s divinity as “Over-soul.” In a letter of March 14, 1893, to Miss Fobes, whom Larcom met at Monticello Seminary in Illinois, Larcom writes, “Now the best seems to me the simplest:—to receive, and to give by living it, the life of Christ. That is the thought I have kept before me and in my little book, which I call ‘The Unseen Friend.’”4 It seems to me that Larcom must have missed out on the hymn “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” written by Joseph Scriven in 1857. Maybe this hymn that comforted so many, and still continues to do so, did not make it south of Canada into New England Puritan country. Larcom might be happy to know that today in the First Congregational Church of Rockport, a member of the United Church Christ that is open and affirming, we stress hospitality and friendship.

Larcom remained thoroughly Trinitarian and in 1890 was confirmed in the Episcopal Church.5 She became friends with Phillips Brooks, who is best known for writing the hymn “O Little Town of Bethlehem” and for his pastorate at Trinity Church in Boston. Inspired by Brooks, she wrote her book The Unseen Friend. Imagining a warmer and friendlier world, she asked, “What is the highest and purest human friendship, but a prophecy of the Friend who is both human and Divine?”6 Another friend, poet John Greenleaf Whittier, who was a Quaker and Abolitionist, helped Larcom forge with tensile strength her convictions expressed in The Unseen Friend. In 1892, Larcom wrote to Whittier about her book project and said that the thought is about seeing him who is invisible. She asked permission to dedicate the book to him and said, “I should like to have one book of mine indicate something of what your friendship has helped me to see and to be.”7 The dedication states,

To

John Greenleaf Whittier

Most Beloved and Most Spiritual of American Poets,

Whose Friendship Has Been to Me

Almost A Life-Long Blessing

I Offer This Little Attempt to Write Upon

a Great Theme.

The spiritual journey from Puritan to Episcopalian was not without struggle. Rev. Brooks helped her navigate the sacraments and assured Larcom that she need not give up the good things she found in Puritanism such as the high regard for Sabbath rest.8 Larcom’s experience was that the Episcopal Church preached a practical, spiritual life—more than systems and doctrines—through the Christian year, repeating the story and spirit of Christ’s life.9 Larcom also thought that no church is perfect. Although she chose the Episcopal Church as a place where she could most fully live in Christ, she did not see her new church as the only door to Christ. To summarize, she spoke in March 1890 of the many doors of entrance into one vast temple.10

As skilled as Larcom was at synthesizing different faith communities, she was not enthusiastic about emerging critical biblical scholarship. In 1882, through her diary she voiced her objections to Renan’s Life of Jesus. She blames Renan’s thought on “some lack of perception in himself.” While fascinated with Renan’s book, she was strongly annoyed at the thought of Renan’s conclusion that the Gospel of John is partially composed of legends and memories transformed by the author of this gospel. She saw his book as based on beautiful yet inadequate concepts.

It is here that Larcom and I part completely harmonious company, because of different understandings about the nature of biblical language. While I believe that God is more than metaphor, human language for talking about God is metaphorical. Ultimately, God is beyond human language. The power of poetic metaphor and the sustenance of symbol is more help for me than literal interpretation in striving to participate in the life of Christ. Of course, I must remember that I live in a different century.

Larcom’s book An Idyl of Work is a 183-page poem that reads like a novel and far more compelling than I expected. Three girls befriend one another in their joys and challenges as workers in the mills in Lowell, Massachusetts. In addition to telling a heart-warming story, Larcom presents theology as autobiographically informed fiction. She describes God as “Heavenly Helper,” “Friend Divine,” and “All-Loving Heart.”11 She found God near in every kind thought of the human heart.12 She believed that souls meet more truly in love than in dogma.13 She thought that God is known in God’s gifts and that the “Invisible God” is recognized in all things visible. For Larcom, God was “Friend” and earthly friendships were hints and shadows of God.14 Larcom’s conception of God as “Invisible Guide”15 is like my feeling that God is often for me an inner editor. In addition to reading required material in college and graduate school, I have had a sense of other books and journals needed to further my writing life. In prayer, I imagine God as a Compassionate Editor who helps me think of many angles. Experiencing God as a Compassionate Editor helps me to understand and evaluate emotions and opinions. Sometimes those feelings are mine and at other times the feelings of other people. This image of God is explained more fully in my book, Protestant Pulse: Heart Hopes for God.

Our book titles are similar and reflect roots in the Cape Ann area and the pull of the world beyond. According to Addison, Larcom had plans for a book she did not live to write. It would have been titled Hither-ward: A Life-Path Retraced and one chapter would have been called “The Charm of Elsewhere.”16 This chapter title reminded me of my phrase, “Beyond the cut bridge.” The tension between rejoicing in ancestral place and exploring widening shores provides the emotional rhythm in Larcom’s poem “Horizon” and my poem “Horizons.”

Like Larcom, I am rooted north of Boston by the sea, yet am drawn to the mountains of New Hampshire and Maine. On September 5, 1861, Larcom asked, “Why do I not love to be near the sea better than among the mountains? . . . I believe I was born longing after the mountains.”17 In her poem “In a Cloud Rift,” she described sitting on the loftiest White Mountain peak (I’m assuming she meant Mount Washington) in silence eloquent for God’s presence.

Ocean dangers seem ever present in Larcom’s outlook, although mountains can be dangerous but not as constantly threatening. Larcom expressed strong contrast in her poem “From the Hills,” where she described the hills as religion and the sea as “doubt’s unanswered moan to thee.”18 There is incongruous beauty in Larcom’s crisp thought in well-honed words that bleed grief from lives lost at sea in “Rafe’s Chasm” and “At Georges.”

Lucy Larcom is most famous for her book A New England Girlhood: Outlined from Memory, republished by Northeastern University Press in 1986. This classic book is about her role as a textile worker, her friendships, memories of place, and the literary papers that she and other young women produced. She was sixty-five when she wrote about her girlhood days. No wonder in her poem “October,” she states that Septembers promise more than they can deliver and that “our latest years may be our best.”19 Likewise, my senior citizen days are my best writing years. She also stated in A New England Girlhood that her most natural expression was in poetry.20 In her letter to Phillips Brooks dated January 17, 1893, Larcom wrote, “I can truly say that the last ten years of my life have been better and happier than all that went before.”21 My last years here in Rockport are also my most productive and happy.

Larcom had another late-in-life accomplishment that blossomed from her earlier experiences. In 1846, at the age of twenty-two, she moved with her sister Emeline and Emeline’s husband to Illinois. Larcom taught school and then enrolled in Monticello Female Seminary in Godfrey, Illinois. She graduated in 1852 and went on to teach in Wheaton Seminary, now Wheaton College, in Norton, Massachusetts. She continued to write. Wheaton alumna, United Church of Christ minister and member of First Congregational Church of Rockport, the Reverend Dr. Elizabeth Rice-Smith and I shared many conversations and e-mails. In summary, she says:

The legacy of Lucy Larcom is enduring. Her legacy continues to matter because her writings about her life, her faith, and her interests in nineteenth-century labor issues make her accessible to girls and women today. She inspires her readers through her character and activities. I became aware of Lucy Larcom’s presence on the North Shore as a girl growing up in Central Massachusetts, and then was delighted as an undergraduate student majoring in Religion, living in Larcom, to discover that the dormitory was named after her at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts! Sharon Chace enlivens Lucy Larcom for us here on Cape Ann, and for readers throughout the world.

For Lucy Larcom and for me, beauty is revelatory. Addison noted Larcom’s poetic hermeneutic:

Poetry, to her, was vastly more than word-shaping, or combinations of accented and unaccented syllables; it was an attitude of mind and soul towards all existence, a view-point of her being, from which she saw such visions, and heard such sounds, that the impulse was irresistible to record in recognized poetic form her ideas and feelings. She found poetry in everything around her; it was the atmosphere she breathed, the medium, like imponderable ether, through which she saw life. Nature had a more profound meaning to her than the charm of color, or the changing pleasures of the land or the sea. It was the visible evidence of the unseen, the prophecy of a greater fulfillment, the proclamation of the spiritual element within, which the senses of themselves could not perceive. She once said, “Nature is one vast metaphor through which spiritual truth may be read:”—

“The Universe is one great loving Thought,

Written in Hieroglyphs of bud and bloom.”22

In her poem “A Strip of Blue,” Larcom wrote: “Thy universe, O God, is home, / In height or depth, to me; / Yet here upon thy footstool green/ Content am I to be; / Glad when is opened unto my need/Some sea-like glimpse of Thee.”23 Looking at a world in snow, Larcom wrote: “A new earth, bride of a new heaven, / Has been revealed to me.”24In her poem “One Butterfly,” Lucy wrote about seeing colors hidden by sunshine yet revealed by shadows of clouds: “To read that revelation / There’s none save thou and I, / In all this noon-lit silence, / My white-winged butterfly.”25

I also have written about white butterflies in my poem, “Butterflies Braiding.” Over the years, white butterflies have given me delight and assurance of friendly beauty and even ongoing life beyond earthly existence. After my father-in-law’s graveside service, my husband, Ernest, and I stopped on the way back to Rockport from Mansfield, Massachusetts, at what must have been one of the last Howard Johnson restaurants. I seldom drink soda, or as older Rockporters say “tonic,” but that day I had a Coca-Cola. The restaurant was crowded, so we sipped our sweet drinks outside in the warm sunshine. A white butterfly landed on my check and stayed so long, it was as if he had something to say.

Color played an important part in Larcom’s spiritual life, as it does in mine. She told Whittier that she saw the original painting of “Dante and Beatrice” by Schoeffer at the Athenaeum. While she preferred the engraving to the colorful painting, she added that there would be much of the beauty of colors in the hereafter to make us glad. She believed that the soul sees the subtlest shades of beauty, and that in the hereafter the soul’s eyes will be fully open.

Oh, dear Lucy, I wish I could tell you about March 6, 2014. So in my imagination, I will speak to you. My husband Ernie and I went to the Haverhill Public Library so that I could read your letters to the Whittiers. That morning your poetry was mentioned by poet John Ronan, former Gloucester poet laureate, in the Gloucester Daily Times. The sun was shining and warmed our faces as we rode in our Prius, a vehicle that would be hard for you to imagine—a horseless carriage that runs partly by gasoline and partly by electricity. Most trolley-trains have disappeared. The Merrimack River that sustained you during you working days at the mill was a perfect shade of sapphire. I thought of the harebells you found on its banks, and remembered your sense of sacramental beauty in flowers.