Fall in New York

Today was New York City at its best—sparkling, clear, alive. After a very satisfactory mid-afternoon lunch at a neighborhood restaurant, a female friend and I walked down the east side of Broadway to get the sun, then over to the Fireman’s Monument on upper Riverside Drive and 100th Street, then down to the west side of lower Riverside Drive where we sat on a bench looking at the elms and sycamores and the grassy slope across from us lit up with the late afternoon sun. There was a big elm, its trunk spotted with shadows from the tree’s own leaves. I said, “Except that there’s no melody, this reminds me of, ‘in some melodious plot / Of beechen green, and shadows numberless’” (from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”). My friend, who is a literary critic, replied, “It was good when poets were closer to nature, then they had something to write about other than themselves.”

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Paul K. writes:

Your friend said, “It was good when poets were closer to nature, then they had something to write about other than themselves.”

I was friends with a Yale English professor, Richard Sewall, whose field of expertise was the poetry of Emily Dickinson. He noted that the references to nature in her poetry were always accurate, in contrast with those of his students, one of whom wrote of “the melodious song of the blue jay.”

LA writes:

After I posted this short (156 words) entry, I realized that it presents a progression from the lower to the higher: from the natural enjoyment of food, to the enjoyment of physical movement, to the enjoyment of light and air and pretty sights, to the enjoyment of the imagery and sound of poetry, to the enjoyment of my friend’s high level insight about the solipsism and emptiness of the modern self.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 01, 2012 05:45 PM | Send