On the Road Between the Keats House and the Freud House
On the road between the Keats House and the Freud House
I found a feather,
nearly a foot long, unruffled, inky-iridescent—
Between the Keats House and the Freud House, along the top of a brick wall,
I found moss growing, floating up infinitesimal spores
from its dense, green velvet
and over the velvet, stretched out, the glistening links
of a delicate, silver chain,
punctuated by filigree rosettes, like tiny rose-windows.
How long had the chain rested there, along the top of the wall—
at one end, a dim crystal bauble,
at the other, the bracelet clasp, catching on nothing?
How long did I marvel at the moss, the spores, the chain?
Not as long as the creature whose path I marked
only at the last, as I was turned to go—
then turned back, leaned closer: there, alongside
the chain, a second, softer silver, left by a minute slug or a snail, long gone—
What did it make of the chain? It didn’t cross,
except where the chain was lifted by the curled up, hardened
stem of a dead leaf. There, the snail at last crossed over the leaf-bridge,
made its way past the bauble, then disappeared over the edge.
Surely this is the World or Elemental space
suited for the proper action of the Mind and Heart—
Surely, in mental life nothing which has once been formed can perish—
Where is the bird who lost the beautiful feather?
Of the memory-trace, there can be no annihilation.
Surely, the feather was placed in my path for me to write this down?
Jennifer Clarvoe is on the move—though the brief travelog she is offering us within her poem takes us through an internal landscape as much as any external. We are in London with this wise and keenly perceptive poet, coming out of the tube station, aiming for #10 Keats Grove, bordering Hampstead Heath. This is the house of the famed Romantic poet, John Keats, and it lies near one of the largest and most unspoiled green spaces in the English capital. But, consulting her map, Jennifer notices that Sigmund Freud’s house is also nearby—and suddenly her day has an itinerary. We find ourselves (virtually) wandering along with her—so perhaps I should make my commentary more succinct, a series of postcards (and, after all, who doesn’t relish receiving real mail!) Here: imagine the lovely photograph of a quaint cobbled street; and on the reverse side, penned in my crooked script:
Hampstead—tangled lanes, Georgian townhouses,
curious shoppes, elegant cafés—
home to famous writers, poets, thinkers across the centuries.
Should we stop for tea?
It’s spring outside our window today, but let’s dress this scene in autumn colors, as our poet-guide found them on her visit (two centuries, as she told me later, after Keats penned “Ode to Autumn” in those elegant rooms). But in the poem that was triggered by this experience, Jennifer offers no glimpse of what she saw within these houses-turned-museums honoring their famous occupants. She makes no mention of a single compelling artifact she studied inside their glass cases. And yet the world seems changed for her. Taking her time, she stops to investigate even the smallest aspects of her surroundings, looking for—what? Is it beauty she’s craving (perhaps a favorite Keats passage echoing in mind)? Or is it a sense of how the things of the world feel imbued with meaning—whether from our own unconscious past or that of the multitudes who preceded us? It wasn’t hard to track down the voices calling to her in that penultimate stanza—Keats, from one of his letters; and Freud from his Civilization and its Discontents. If Freud’s perspective is correct, each image or word maps a path back to some primal moment of experience we’ve lost access to (tinged, as was his inclination, with the incomprehensible forces of love and death). On the other hand, the work of poets seems focused more on invention and transformation—the mind’s power to process raw sensory data and turn memory into imagined realms, shaped for our own iconographic purposes. And so we, too, examine that single magpie’s feather, and imagine wings darting into tall pine. We notice that bit of lost jewelry and wonder about its owner who likely passed where we do now, a keepsake left behind. And we almost overlook the silvery map left by another fellow-traveler: a snail who had to navigate the obstacles in its path in order to go where it needed (as must we all). Where is Jennifer heading? Where are we? And by what are we guided?
Where are my manners! I should have made a formal introduction before we began tagging along: Jennifer is the author of two previous poetry collections—and a long-awaited third, PIANO PIANO, will hit the bookshelves any day now, issued by Unbound Edition Press. Professor of English, Emerita, from Kenyon College, she’s a richly-honored poet, including a James Merrill House Residency, the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy in Rome, and a Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Relishing her past work, my mind enrolls for any excursion of Jennifer’s I see offered in a literary journal’s table of contents.
On one of my own vacations, I remember a little framed bit of calligraphy hung beside the bed:
I am not the same person—
because I have seen the moon now
from the other side of the world.
The more I considered that high-flown yet ambiguous sentence, the further it took me. Of course, the Moon’s aspect is not radically different; it is only the viewer who has changed, been changed by what the journey has brought into their life. Or has the lunar artifact been permanently altered by generations of wonderers and writers, the poetic-cartography of ink on paper? At the moment I write this, astronauts are circling the Moon—perhaps looking back at us, at our startling and luminous Earth. Just entertaining such thoughts will forever make those one-syllable nouns feel different to the awakened traveler. The distance between Keats’ Grove Street home and Freud’s Maresfield Gardens is little more than half a mile (perhaps I ought to say 900 meters, a nod to the British folk passing by). The journey between Keats and Freud—between the magpie feather, the lost bauble, and the painstakingly slow pilgrimage of the snail—and between the neural avenues where much-loved poems are situated, fragments of dreams, sparks of intuition making unimagined connections: these distances confound even our sophisticated GPS. Today, we are given a map of nine tercets, containing the sort of landmarks that travel guides fail to mention. Setting down the poem, returning home to ourselves, I think we’re grateful for what a poet can offer us in her urgent lines. The message is unmistakable: