Absolute Reality and Poetry

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality."―Shirley Jackson

How's everyone holding up?

I have to admit the "absolute reality" of our situation sank in this week, and I went a little stir-crazy. I don't think I'm the only one, judging by the number of neighbors I see wandering restlessly up and down our street.

I've had trouble sleeping at night and concentrating on my work during the day. I've been spending far too much time on the Internet, tracking local COVID-19 stats and reading grim tales of death ships, body bags, and mobile morgues.

April being National Poetry Month, I naturally tried to distract myself with poetry. But I kept coming up with poems about death and pestilence, like this one:

Adieu, farewell, earth's bliss;
This world uncertain is;
Fond are life's lustful joys;
Death proves them all but toys;
None from his darts can fly;
I am sick, I must die.
    Lord, have mercy on us!

Thomas Nashe, have mercy on us! His "A Litany in Time of Plague" goes on like that for five more stanzas, but I'll spare you the rest. Right now, we're all better off reading Wordsworth:

I wandered lonely as a Cloud
   That floats on high o'er Vales and Hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
   A host of golden Daffodils;
Beside the Lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
   And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
   Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they
   Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:—
A Poet could not but be gay
   In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the shew to me had brought:

For oft when on my couch I lie
   In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
   Which is the bliss of solitude,
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the Daffodils.

Poetry can be very be soothing, when it's not about the plague. So can nature, as Wordsworth and his fellow romantics knew. Looking out my window, in addition to our restless neighbors, I can see flowers, trees, birds, lizards, butterflies—even the occasional rabbit. And when I see such things my heart, like Wordsworth's, "with pleasure fills, And dances with the Daffodils." (Or, to be more accurate, "dances with the California poppies." Our daffodils have come and gone.)

Look, I realize how lucky Loretta and I are. Not everyone can look out their windows right now and see the things we can see. (I'm so grateful we no longer live in a townhouse, where the view from our front window was the dumpster enclosure behind a supermarket.)

The point is, in this terrible time of absolute crap reality, I hope everyone can find something to fill their heart with pleasure and make it dance.