Spring fever & Thirty-nine, continued

Spring Fever: We’ve had a few windy-sunny-snowmelt days here in northern Illinois, and adding this to the onslaught of spring fashion and gardening catalogs, Spring Fever is most definitely in the air.

While I wait for real spring—the first shoots of daffodils, a time to plant—I’ve been playing with my Magnetic Poetry: The Gardener kit again.

Listen.
Beneath the long night
of harsh rain
the earth breathes
reflects, here lets
a green tendril emerge
yellow bloom like morning.
In the quiet light I murmur
Who must know
this sweet wild secret?

Today’s Poetry Friday round-up is with Kelly at Big A little a.

Thirty-nine: Here are three more quotations I’m finding meaningful as I contemplate my upcoming 39th birthday.

4. It was his old love for a girl of twenty, standing proudly by her throne with the present of captives about her—but now the same girl was standing in other surroundings, the surroundings of bad make-up and loud silks, by which she was trying to defy the invincible doom of human destiny. He saw her as the passionate spirit of innocent youth, now beleaguered by the trick which is played on youth—the trick of treachery in the body, which turns flesh into green bones…The girl was still there, still appealing from behind the breaking barricade of rouge. She had made the brave protest: I will not be vanquished.
—T. H. White, The Once and Future King

5. Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.
—Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanac

6. Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point it, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
—Rainer Maria Rilke

Thirty-nine

I have been contemplating the impending arrival of my 39th birthday. Time is such a strange customer. Some days, I feel the years stretching out in both directions; but when I ponder the scope of the universe, my four little clusters of decades seem insignificant indeed.

Well! Gentle Reader, I won’t bore you with either laments or exultations over my brief life and accomplishments. Instead, I want to share some quotations that I have collected. Some are on life, some on writing, some on aging, some on faith. For the sake of gimmick (and math), let’s say 39 quotes in 13 days.

1. For the years, he felt, had not quenched his soul or hers. Their children, his writing, her household cares had not quenched all their souls’ tender fire.
—James Joyce, The Dead

2. There is a thing called knowledge of the world, which people do not have until they are middle-aged. It is something which cannot be taught to younger people, because it is not logical and does not obey laws which are constant. It has no rules. Only, in the long years which bring women to the middle of life, a sense of balance develops…when she is beginning to hate her used body, she suddenly finds that she can do it. She can go on living…
—T. H. White, The Once and Future King

3. ’Cause I wonder sometimes
About the outcome
Of a still verdictless life
Am I living it right
…..
So what, so I’ve got a smile on
But it’s hiding the quiet superstitions in my head

Don’t believe me
Don’t believe me
When I say I’ve got it down
—John Mayer, “Why Georgia”

Seventh day of Christmas books

Reading my beautiful new Arthur of Albion, by John Matthews and the library-borrowed Here Lies Arthur, by Philip Reeve, I started to feel nostalgic for my old favorite Arthur books, but for completely different reasons. Arthur of Albion, with its beautiful artwork and traditional tale of Arthur taking his sword from the Lady of the Lake, set me hankering to read Mary Stewart’s account of Arthur’s finding Caliburn, and the wonderful scenes between the young Arthur and Merlin (in The Hollow Hills). On the other hand, as I began reading Here Lies Arthur, I discovered that Reeve has stripped away the romantic trappings to give the Arthur stories a gritty historical feel, a la Bernard Cornwell—though in this case, even Arthur himself turns out to be no sort of hero at all. In fact, he’s a bloodthirsty, uncouth jerk. I wanted to flee to Stewart or to T. H. White to cleanse this image from my mind.

Now, just hold on here. Calm down. Can’t the cherished heroic image of Arthur in my heart and in those great books withstand Reeve’s assault? I think so. I am going to read the whole book. For one thing, my gut reaction got me wondering: What is Reeve trying to accomplish? There’s only one way to find out. If I have to occasionally restore myself with a few chapters of my old favorites, so be it.

(Incidentally, in addition to being great reads, the hardcover versions of Stewart’s Merlin Trilogy and White’s Once and Future King, along with another favorite, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, make excellent weights for pressing journal covers while the glue dries.)

Robin Hood and King Arthur

I have to confess, first of all, that I didn’t make it through Episode 3 of Monarchy last night. I got befuddled during the Wars of the Roses. I have a cold.

Instead of writing about monarchs, I’m going back to my theme of Robin Hood. I became attached to the character of Robin Hood at a young age. I’m not sure whose book I read as a child. When I recently read (or re-read?) the Howard Pyle version, it didn’t seem quite right, though the ending was the same delicious tragedy I remembered. Robin Hood, wounded and dying, shoots one last arrow to mark where he would like to be buried, and the desolate Little John grants his request. I love a good tragedy.

A few years ago I read Robin McKinley’s version, titled The Outlaws of Sherwood. It was OK. Something was missing; it lacked grand romanticism. (I’m not knocking Robin McKinley, by the way; I devoured The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown.)

Robin Hood makes a charming appearance in T. H. White’s Arthurian saga, The Once and Future King. Robin Hood and King Arthur in the same book. Yep. I have to say that The Once and Future King is a work of genius, and my top all-time favorite King Arthur book, which is saying a lot. In the first part, The Sword in the Stone (also made into a good Disney movie), young Arthur (nicknamed Wart) and his foster brother, Kay, get lost while hunting rabbits and meet up with the Merry Men.

Kay looked at him in blank surprise. “Who are you?” he asked.

“Naylor,” said the giant, “John Naylor in the wide world it were, till us come to be a man of the ’ood. Then ’twere John Little for some time, in the ’ood like, but mostly folk does put it back’ard now, and calls us Little John.”

“Oh!” cried the Wart in delight. “I have heard of you, often, when they tell Saxon stories in the evening, of you and Robin Hood.”

“Not Hood,” said Little John reprovingly. “That bain’t the way to name ’un, measter, not in the ’ood.”

“But it is Robin Hood in the stories,” said Kay.

“Ah, them book-learning chaps. They don’t know all.”

The Wart finally figures out that the outlaw’s name is Robin Wood. Then the boys help the Merry Men defeat the witch Morgan Le Fay (grown-ups can’t get into her castle made of lard).

You may well ask how the 13th-century Robin Hood gets involved in a book about the young King Arthur. Here is White’s genius at play: The Once and Future King is an alternative history that encompasses the romantic tradition of Malory (Le Morte d’Arthur, circa 1470s) and places Arthur firmly in the Age of Chivalry.

Another brilliant series about King Arthur is Mary Stewart’s Merlin trilogy. Stewart has Arthur back in the Dark Ages, after the withdrawal of Roman legions from Britain. The second book, The Hollow Hills, is my favorite portrayal of the young Arthur.

Finally, I must mention Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Lantern Keepers and Sword at Sunset, wonderful Dark Ages versions of Arthur and his Romano-British predecessors. Sutcliff is amazing at historical fiction of Roman and Dark Ages times.