When we are in high school, we are forced to read poetry. “Forced,” that’s the way many of us feel though a happy few develop a love of verse. Yet, despite the “forced feeding,” some of the poems get through and stick for life, returning at unexpected times or dogging us with lines that we can’t get out of our heads, like a song heard on the radio in the morning, that follows us through the day.
I was one of those who had to be “forced fed.” I loved big thick novels, plots that made me think or puzzled me. With Ms. Cheryl Silberling, in our advanced literature class, we read “Crime and Punishment.” I loved that big thick book and was haunted by the questions it posed about forgiveness and salvation. And I remember Raskolnikov’s bloody socks. In high school, few things were as important as our appearance. I imagined wearing those socks to school and how bad they would have smelled! No one in their right mind would have wanted to be seen with me.
With Ms. Silberling, we also read poetry in English Literature. I liked “The Ancient Mariner.” Picture yourself wearing a dead albatross slung around your neck! We also read excerpts from Wordsworth’s “Prelude,” where the poet declares “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.” That appealed to the mystic leanings that were a part of my adolescence.
Keats, though, was something else. I can’t say I understood everything I read, but the sounds entranced me and I liked to read his odes aloud. I still read them aloud and today hear a much different tune. In high school we read “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Love, youth, frozen forever in clay, what can that mean to someone who is 17-years-old? At that age, eternity, be it eternal love or eternal beauty, does not appear beyond our grasp, at least it didn’t to me. I thought I’d always be thin, I’d always have long flowing brown locks, and my face would always be wrinkle-free.
Now when I read that ode, it cuts me to the quick. The lover in the poem remains ever poised on the threshold of love, his lady-love, forever young. They never kiss yet their love will never undergo the test of time.
Keat’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” has undergone that test, as beautiful today as when he wrote it in 1819, and if you haven’t read it since high school, I’d recommend you go back and have a second look. Its final lines, by far the most famous, are limpid in their simplicity yet enigmatic: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
Only yesterday, during an early evening walk, those lines came back to me. Despite a menacing sky to the east, it was the end of a perfect autumn day. The air was crisp and cool and low-riding cumulus clouds were tinged by the setting sun. Then it started to rain, a beating and cold downpour. I pulled up my hood and kept walking with, at my back, a still brilliant sun. In front of me, before my very eyes, a double rainbow appeared and I could even perceive its base (though I did not find the pot of gold). It was an overwhelming spectacle of natural beauty that made me feel grateful to be alive.
Beauty is truth, truth beauty, I thought, my mind returning to Keats, and then wondering what those lines mean to me today.
The rain stopped, the air was crystalline and every tree shimmered in the evening light. Once the rainbow disappeared, a breathtaking sunset took its place.
The natural world is not like us. It does not lie or create “fake news.” Its beauty is entire and its destruction all the more heart-wrenching. Some Americans, and among them, many who belong to the religious Right, doubt the reality of climate change. Yet, for people who consider themselves religious, isn’t it a duty to protect the natural world, a gift from God? Isn’t it a duty to look seriously at the climate change taking place in the world today and seek to understand its causes? “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” but acquiring knowledge requires effort and good will.
Today is Sunday. Many residents of Schuylkill County go to church. It’s a good day to reflect upon beauty and truth. It’s also a good time of year. How I miss the explosion of color on the trees in autumn! There’s nothing in France to compare to a beautiful autumn day “in the Skook.”
But it is Sunday and somewhere deep inside me a preacher is lurking. Don’t worry. I will not preach, but I will quote a theologian and thinker who is important to me, Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI. On the subject of truth he writes, “Any authentic search for peace must begin with the realization that the problem of truth and untruth is the concern of every man and woman; it is decisive for the peaceful future of our planet.”
When Joseph Ratzinger was 16, he was drafted as an auxiliary member of the Luftwaffe. Though anti-Nazi, he was forced to serve the Reich. Reflecting in the 21st century upon World War II and the millions of deaths directly linked to the lies of the Nazi regime, he writes, “How can we fail to be seriously concerned about lies in our own time?”
As I write, it is once again a beautiful autumn day. The natural world is decked out in her Sunday best and her beauty brings home a resounding truth: Nature has nothing to hide.
Since the 17th century, scientists have sought to uncover her secrets and take control of her powers, and beyond their wildest dreams, they have succeeded. Yet Nature continues to show us her true face, in creation and destruction alike.
Legend has it that confronted with his father’s felled cherry tree, George Washington said, “Father, I cannot tell a lie. I chopped it down.”
The real world is not like legend, yet wouldn’t there be great beauty in a President who aspired to tell the American people the truth?
As Keats wrote, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
