Weeks ahead of Helen’s demise and what would have been her 91st birthday, we exchanged letters. I had sent her an essay I’d just published on the beauty of ponder, stemming from the surprise so a lot of men and women felt on viewing the whole photo voltaic eclipse earlier this thirty day period.
I generally sent Helen factors I wrote. Some she liked fewer than many others, and she was under no circumstances shy to say so. She favored the essay on ponder, however she reported she was by no means a wonderer herself, but a “hopeless pragmatist,” not issue to miracles, other than upon two occasions. One was the start of her son, David, whom she mentioned in letters frequently. She loved David deeply, and both of those were being pleased when she moved from epic Cambridge to lyrical Laguna Niguel, Calif., to be close to him, as she grew infirm.
Her second wonder, coincidentally, occurred when Seamus Heaney drove her to see a solar eclipse at Tintern Abbey. There, amongst the Welsh ruins, Helen had an astonishing encounter, one that she described to me in a way that seemed practically to evoke Wordsworth:
I experienced of program examine descriptions of the phenomena of a full eclipse, but no phrases could equivalent the overall-entire body/overall landscape effect the ceasing of chicken music the inexorability of the dimming to a crescent and then to a corona the whole silence the gradual salience of the stars the iciness of the silhouette of the towers the looming terror of the steely eclipse of all of mother nature. Now that quelled completely any purely “scientific” desire. Just one turned pure animal, only animal, no “thought-process” getting even conceivable.
A person who statements not to know miracles shows herself to be one.
She was so intent on the beauty of the poets she recognized so deeply, she never ever could see why many others located her appreciations remarkable. After, when I despatched her a take note complimenting her on a wonderfully primary observation she’d built in a recent article, she wrote: “So sort of you to inspire me. I constantly come to feel that every thing I say would be obvious to anybody who can read, so am generally impressed when another person praises something.”
Only an innocent of the greatest order would say these a attractive, preposterous thing.
When lately the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded her the Gold Medal for Belle Lettres and Criticism, Helen was stunned.
“You could have floored me when I obtained the connect with,” she wrote to me, incorporating: “Perhaps I was picked out by the committee because of my innovative age if so, I can’t complain. The quotation that arrived to intellect was Lowell’s ‘My head grizzled with the years’ gold rubbish.’”
She was usually doing that — attaching a quotation from poetry to a considered or practical experience of her individual, as if she occupied the exact place as all the good poets, living with them as intently as beloved types in a tenement.
