User:Dc.samizdat/Steepletop/Those hours

"What does entailed mean, mother?"

...

"But Vincent didn't have any children, did she.

Who is the one for whom Steepletop was entailed?

Does she mean she was going to leave it to Aunt Norm and Uncle Charlie?"

"No (amused), she wasn't even getting along with Aunt Norm very well when she wrote this poem,

near the end of her life.

Not like the way they were sisters so close when they were younger.

This poem is one of the ones Aunt Norm found in her cabin,

in the trees up behind the house at the edge of the field,

where she worked.

Poems that no one but us had read,

because she hadn't published them yet.

It's the one in which we found the proper title for her final book.

No, it isn't Norma she's talking about."

...

Find the subject in that first line; she names it twice.


 * Those hours when happy hours were my estate, --
 * Entailed as proper for the next in line

It's the hours. Her happy state.

I wonder what Mary Oliver felt reading this poem at Steepletop.

About the same time mother was reading it to me there for the first time.

She used to ride up from Vassar with us sometimes,

in the back seat of our car with me,

in those days when she was a student without a car of her own.

I wish I'd asked her.

I bet she knew she was the proper one, not Aunt Norm.

For whom it was entailed.

The next in line.


 * Yet mine the harvest, and the title mine --

They had the little dairy barn they built from a Sears Roebuck kit,

and the cows John Pinney still milked that he used to show me.

And they made a little wool from their sheep,

and those great heavy brown blankets from it that Aunt Norm gave us one of,

that I sleep under now,

in my own little house in the trees at the edge of mother's horse pasture,

in the summers of my happy hours,

long, long after hers.

It wasn't that much of a harvest they had,

for her to be so proud of.

And no title.


 * Unscathed I shall not go.


 * Along my body, waking while I sleep,


 * The scar of this encounter like a sword
 * Will lie between me and my troubled lord.

It's her title, not his.

It's not their harvest, it's all hers.

Mine the harvest, and the title mine.

Eugen was not lord of her estate, she was.


 * Those acres, fertile, and the furrows straight,
 * From which the lark would rise -- all of my late
 * Enchantments, still, in brilliant colours, shine,

See her in her little house by the field John Pinney plowed,

in those hours.

Writing, like this:


 * I view the lovely segment of a past
 * I lived with all my senses, well aware
 * That this was perfect, and it would not last:


 * There will be rose and rhododendron
 * When you are dead and under ground,


 * Brown sheep upon the warm green hill.


 * Saving the may-weed and the pig-weed


 * Nothing will know that you are gone
 * Saving alone some sullen plow-land
 * None but yourself sets foot upon;


 * Oh, there will pass with your great passing
 * Little of beauty not your own, --

She did.

She set foot upon it, every day, right outside her window.

See her walking its new-plowed furrow straight,

flushing the bird feeding in the fresh-turned earth,

as she nears the end of the line.

The lark that rises in sweet surprise

as you reach the sense of the rhyme

at the end of the line.


 * Those acres, fertile, and the furrows straight,

What's That Exactly

Steepletop a metaphor in iambic pentameter

for the very lines she is writing,

latest of her enchantments

straight from her fertile imagination

title poem of her estate itself,

the whole harvest of her happiest hours

the thing entailed


 * - David Brooks Christie, 2024