Last night, reading ‘Otherwise’ by Jane Kenyon, I came across a collection and poem entitled, ‘From Room to Room,’ and realized that I had inadvertently used the title of her work as my subtitle for this blog.
I realize it’s now rather fitting, as I came to love Jane Kenyon on those long Saturdays and days off I spent in Belfast, reading in the Linen Hall Library in the city centre of Belfast, when the sun set entirely at 4.30 p.m. Before those nights reading her, I had owned this book, and often read a poem, ‘Here.’
It starts:
You always belong here.
You were theirs, certain as a rock.
I’m the one who worries
if I fit into the furniture
and the landscape.
I’ve always related to this poem, and I even dog-eared the page. But across the page is the poem, ‘From Room to Room,’ which I read but to which I related less at the time. I think I partially entitled my blog this after a research paper on Virginia Woolf and John Donne that I wrote for a Donne research seminar last winter. I enjoyed the process of writing the paper (as much as one can enjoy sleepless nights, getting one’s car towed in the pursuit of research, and nearly turning down someone I later dated for the sake of my paper). But my roommate and I struggled through it, one night using Zen meditation at a Buddhist convent in Seattle as a stress-reducer, instead of our usual European ways (ie., sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll and skinny jeans).
The paper was, at least somewhat, on the symbolic and philosophical use of rooms in the writings of Donne and Woolf, both of whom lived with different sorts of depression. And our house that year was a series of rooms upon rooms, with little continuity, self-enclosed, but through which many people and many tunes passed. So it all comes together.
(Sorry this formatting is terrible, but WordPress will not allow for copy-pasting that maintains my spacing. People good with technology, enlighten me if you can. But for those of you professors or aspiring professors who desire extra space for red marks, here you go!)
Jane Kenyon:
From Room to Room
Here in this house, among photographs
of your ancestors, their hymnbooks and old
shoes…
I move from room to room,
a little dazed, like the fly. I watch it
bump against each window.
I am clumsy here, thrusting
slabs of maple into the stove.
Out of my body for a while,
weightless in space…
Sometimes
the wind against the clapboard
sounds like a car driving up to the house.
My people are not here, my mother
and father. I talk
to the cats about weather.
“Blessed be the tie that binds…”
we sing in the church down the road.
And how does it go from there? The tie…
the tether, the hose carrying
oxygen to the astronaut,
turning, turning outside the hatch,
taking a look around.
