Commonplace Book

A HOUSE WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

"It smells good here," she said.
It did. It had the indefinable smell of a perfectly - kept,
well - loved American home; the smell found nowhere else on earth.
A smell of cleanliness and polish and Ivory soap and potted plants
and baking bread -- the sweet warm smell of simplicity and abundance.
. . . everything in the room felt kind and gentle and safe."

~ Marcia Davenport ~
from The Valley of Decision, 407
[More on my Book Blog]

Regular as clockwork, yet another Fall Semester has arrived, with all the excitement and promise of course descriptions and syllabi! Risking repetition, I thought the beginning of the academic year (see previous post also!) would be the right time for a review of my fortnightly initiative. The following outline is drawn from several previous posts -- Mission Statement, The Second Page, Pastiche -- and was prepared as a presentation for the American Literature Club of West Lafayette, Indiana, where my dear friend Elizabeth offered me the opportunity to share my work with the club members at their annual spring dinner meeting.

Naturally, I began with a special thanks to Elizabeth for her constant support in our various shared endeavors such as music, parenting, exercising, and -- our focus of the evening -- reading, writing, and blogging. To narrow the topic, Elizabeth asked me to please answer the question for well - read audience, with varying degrees of computer savviness: "What is a Literary Blog?"

To define simply, a blog is a personal website or web page -- technically a WEB LOG (thus the shortened "BLOG") on which an individual can record opinions, proverbs, poems, letters, essays, movie reviews or book reports -- along with photographs and helpful links to other sites. Adding new material or updates on a regularly basis is called blogging: Web Logging!

It is a digital journal or Commonplace Book that will be unique to whatever its keeper finds of interest, e.g., the clean metallic lines of the graceful leaves above (photographed earlier this summer at the at the Wynn / Encore in Las Vegas) and Marcia Davenport's blissful description of early twentieth - century homemaking. How are these apparently random items related? The blogger gets to impose the pattern! That's the beauty of blogging! All you need to do is choose your topic, decide how you want to organize your material, master a few simple functions on the keyboard, and hit "publish."

Five years ago, as I was getting the blog underway, my friend Eve -- also a writer and a teacher of writing -- asked me if I had a Dream Job in mind for my Inner Scholar. Indeed I did! [Litterateur & Dilettante]

Always present in my mind whenever churning out an insight or two to share with a kindred spirit such as Eve, was the question, now how can I make that my work for the day? Because it feels so good, like an accomplishment. You know that old cliche that you know you're a writer if you just have to write every day? Well for me that doesn't mean I'm driven to lock myself in my room writing a novel, or stay up all night writing poetry; instead, it's more about articulating the daily worries and outrages and obsessions, then lining them up with the poems and stories and essays that will bring a little order to the chaos.

If I can take an hour or so to press beyond blathering, to organize all that angst and nonsense, channel all that anxiety into the written word, search out the literary parallels, send it out to an audience who "knows" (in manner of Carson McCullers), then I arise from my computer and say to myself, "Whew, that was a good morning's work," though I'm the first to admit that it's also play. The work of writing -- the discipline of daily expression, the task of scratching it all out, the quest of tracking down an old nearly forgotten poem or recovering a stray thought that's perfect for the moment before it gets away, the struggle with meaning, the satisfaction of connecting -- can feel so necessary yet also vaguely, if not blatantly, like a selfish indulgence, an undeserved luxury.

I wanted to create a space where the threads of art and life intertwine until a pattern emerges from the chaos; to generate some literary analysis -- scholarly yet painless -- about how literature fits into every hour of every day; to share and interpret what I have recorded and remembered over the years; to include a running update of my current reading; and to explain how it all fits together with the little things that actually happen in real life throughout the course of any given day -- in manner of Mrs. Dalloway.

To accomplish these quasi - para - academic goals, I designed three blogs:

a Book List -- which I update once a month with a brief description of what I've been reading recently

a Quotidian blog -- which I update -- not daily, but every other day or so with seasonal snippets, light verse, photographs of my cats, whatever comes to mind

and -- the page you're reading now -- my Fortnightly Literary Blog of Connection & Coincidence; Custom & Ceremony:

I have to thank my husband Gerry for the "Fortnightly" suggestion. He pointed out that readers would need to know how often to expect a new post. Not only did a two - week interval seem reasonable, but the term "Fortnightly" which I no doubt learned from reading English novels in my girlhood -- would lend a British flair to the literary enterprise.

Next, I chose as my watchword Goethe’s suggestion that

“One ought, every day at least,
to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture,
and, if possible, speak a few reasonable words.”
Whenever my readers open The Fortnightly on their computer screens, I wish for them to encounter each item on Goethe's list:

a little song -- and amazingly, thanks to you-tube, I can include not just all of my favorite lyrics but also links for listening;

a good poem -- this would be my forum for sharing selections from all the wonderful poetry that I have been reading and collecting in notebooks for the past few decades;

a fine picture -- my favorite hobby has always been combining quotations and pictures into handmade posters, greeting cards, and scrapbooks for family and friends. On my blog, I could pursue this hobby, using my own photography or other beautiful photos and artwork found on the internet;

and last but not least -- a few reasonable words.

Goethe makes it sound so simple, I thought I'd give it a try, tying songs and poems together with just the right visuals and, hopefully, a few worthy observations of my own on the theme of connection & coincidence; custom & ceremony.

Connection: I wanted, if possible, to create a place of connections, in the spirit of E. M. Forster, who implores us in "Howards End" to connect: "Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect . . . ." I want to capture all the unexpected connections that amaze and surprise and suggest a pattern.

Coincidence: For me, nothing tops those moments when Life offers its own theme to a strand of apparently accidental events, and everything hangs together for a moment in such an uncanny way that you'd swear it was all planned out somehow! Those are the literary connections and coincidences that I am always on the lookout for, not that they require much tracking down, since they usually find me before I find them.

For example, I pulled together one of my earliest blog posts one morning back in 2009 when I came downstairs just in time to hear my son Sam saying: "It's my lucky rock; Mom gave it to me." Turns out, my husband was asking about the shiny rock that he had just seen Sam pick up from his desk and drop into his pocket. I was touched by Sam's belief in lucky rocks and by his sentiment of hanging on to a talisman from his crazy old mom. It was, however, no more than a fleeting morning moment -- yes, sweeter than most but still fleet -- until it suddenly took on a life of it's own.

Sam left for school and Gerry for work. I sat down to review my friend Jan's latest batch of short stories. I had read them earlier and was just collecting my thoughts to comment, when suddenly, my eyes fell on the title, "Pocket." How had I missed this entry, pocketed as it was, right there in between "Heart" & "Fable," which I had read several days ago? Can you imagine my astonishment when just a few lines into the story, the heroine exclaims: "Not even a lucky rock"?

A lucky rock? Like Sam's! What's the odds?

Sometimes, life is so full of coincidences that I think my head will split open trying to take them all in! It's enough to make me believe in the whole Universe at once! Here I was, sitting alone, reading a story about the very object my loved ones had been discussing a mere thirty minutes earlier. And not just any object, but a lucky, magic object, "something to keep forever." And now I know why I had previously overlooked "Pocket," -- because Fate was saving it up for me, a lucky story to read on a lucky Friday! Because, to quote Jan, we all need stories -- "clear, round, and easy to carry" -- in our hearts.

************
Back in college when I worked on the literary magazine, I was known as the editor with "a poem for every poem" because no matter what I read, I was always reminded of something else -- kind of like that "Scooby-Doo" episode -- if you remember the old cartoon -- when Daphne asks Velma -- the girl with glasses, the bookish one: "Do you have a book for every occasion?" And Velma answers, "Actually, yes." A poem for every poem, and a book for every book!

Along the same lines, just a few weeks ago, a couple of old friends shared the following funny, complete with sentiments such as

"Was there an old song written for every occasion?"
"Yes! I think there was!"
Or as my sister Di expressed it:
"Life is a musical!"

A poem for every poem . . . a song for every song.
Haha -- but true!
In addition to Connection and Coincidence, I wanted the blog to include my favorite passage from Yeats' poem "A Prayer For My Daughter." Naturally, he wants so many things for her, but chiefly a heart full of "radical innocence" and a life
"Rooted in one dear perpetual place . . . a house
Where all's accustomed, ceremonious."

"How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony's a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree."
From childhood -- perhaps impressed upon me when I first read The Little Red Story Book -- at any rate, certainly long before I ever read Yeats -- one of my goals was to organize the kind of home described in his poem, where order would triumph over chaos and no holiday would ever go unremarked: accustomed and ceremonious, familiar yet celebratory.

Thus the line from "A Prayer For My Daughter" has become the perpetual caption for the opening picture of every Fortnightly Blog Post. I hope that in some way (though not always in the same way) these photographs and illustrations will portray "a house where all's accustomed, ceremonious." Sometimes it's my own house (or former houses), other times, a cathedral, a log cabin, a playground, sites of historical interest or fame, a neighborhood mural, a village mosaic, a medieval tapestry.

In the early days of my blog, my older brother, who like me, studied English in college, asked me, "Do you have an encyclopedic memory of poems or a really good search engine? You seem to always find one that fits the occasion. Cool trick. Guess I shoulda paid more attention in one of those literature classes that I seem to have forgotten."

A funny question. But luckily, the answer is Yes, I have both -- the memory and the search engine! On the serious side of constructive criticism, he suggested: "You are a true master in linking nuggets of wisdom, wit, and rational thought, but I see so little of the inner Kit. Or perhaps, I just haven't been reading enough of your blogs."

I really liked his comment about my nugget - linking skills, because it's true -- some entries are just a quotation linked with picture, but it's always a good match, one that no one else would have thought of, or even found (because I'm the careful reader, that's the objective of my blogging). I took his words to heart and trust that, as he read further, he encountered to a greater extent my inner voice -- which I'm sure is there! -- in addition to the voices of so many writers whose work I admire.

My creative writing teacher in college once wrote in the margin of my paper: "What's at stake here?" I have never forgotten that comment and think that my brother may be asking a similar question. What I took away from his advice was the need to take more personal risk, go out on a limb, bare more of my soul, embarrass myself a little bit, move beyond "So what?" And, yes, I have tried to test these limits (see for example "Never Fear").

The blog is a good place to experiment and push the envelope. In the meantime, I strive to deserve the great faith that my friend Jes, who teaches in Boston, has placed in this enterprise: "How courageous of you to insist on beauty and thoughtfulness every day in this, the 21st century! What a brave blogger you are!"

I see now that Goethe (1749 – 1832) was asking his 18th & 19th Century audience to search for the same: beauty and thoughtfulness -- in a song, a poem, a picture, a few reasonable words.

Flower Gardens, Carosel, and Wall Art (above)
at the Wynn / Encore, Las Vegas

In closing,
many thanks to my supportive friends and readers
for their ultra - kind observations:
Nancy T.: "Sing! Thanks for all the blogs -- photos, poems, book titles. Some days you are my own only source or mental stimulation. May you keep on singing!"

Pat F.: "I just want you to know that your blog today was one of the most touching and meaningful ever! Actually, I have read it several times, and listened to the music. The first time through, I was absolutely in tears! It realllllly touched me on so many levels. Thanks for being a friend and such a talented writer. . . . Thank you for this beautiful article today. It really touched me!"

Barbara T.: "this is amazing. I learn so much from you and marvel at the beauty of the paintings, photographs, memorabilia and WORDS that you share. Thank you. Barbara T."

Tim Th.: "Thanks, Kitti for your unending eloquent endeavor; it is a reading pleasure I enjoy!"

Len O.: "Your collections of objects and archives of documents and photographs make you the FB Smithsonian. I am always struck by the high quality of your nature and celestial photographs (assuming you are not funded by NASA), as well as the archives of photos and objects you have from your life (including your friends)."

And in reply: "I am honored to serve in the capacity of facebook archivist! Would that I were funded by NASA! I just use a little Canon PowerShot recommended by my niece Sara & my friend Natasha. Len, thanks again for your kind words, especially about my friends. As Shakespeare / Bolingbroke says: "I count myself in nothing else so happy / As in a soul remembering my good friends" -- including you & everyone else on this post!"

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Sunday, September 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT ~ Course descriptions and syllabi!
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Life -- A Little Strip of Time

A HOUSE WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

MONK'S HOUSE ~ HOME OF LEONARD & VIRGINIA WOOLF

VIRGINIA WOOLF'S LIVING ROOM
For Mother's Day, I thought I would write about one of the most steadfast mothers in modern British fiction, Mrs. Ramsay from Virginia Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse. Virginia Woolf had no children, but Mrs. Ramsay has eight; and Woolf intuitively fills Mrs. Ramsay's head and the first half of the novel with touching motherly insights. Except for the youngest son James, the Ramsay children are rarely mentioned in literary criticism of To the Lighthouse. James, of course, figures prominently at the center of the conflict that opens the novel: will he or will he not be taken to the lighthouse the next day?

But what of James' siblings and Mrs. Ramsay's feelings for them: Andrew, Prue, Jasper, Rose, Roger, Nancy, and Cam? Sitting out on the yard, visiting with her guests and surrounded by her children, Mrs. Ramsay is the image of earthliness, providing spiritual and artistic inspiration to others. Her ability to inspire is rooted in her role as a living, earthly mother, caring for her children, experiencing conflict with them and for them, providing for them at present, and hoping they may find a solid happiness that will stand against the unknowable future of temporal existence. Monitoring the behavior of her brood, Mrs. Ramsay wonders at the early development of their capacity for strife and prejudice: "They were so critical, her children" (17).

One of the guests, Mr. Bankes, relates his singular method of distinguishing the children one from another: "As for being sure which was which, or in what order they came, that was beyond him. He called them privately after the Kings and Queens of England; Cam the Wicked, James the Ruthless, Andrew the Just, Prue the Fair -- for Prue would have beauty, he thought, how could she help it? -- and Andrew brains" (37). Mr. Ramsay, himself, makes the following assessment of his role as father: "The father of eight children -- he reminded himself. And he would have been a beast and a cur to wish a single thing altered. Andrew would be a better man than he had been. Prue would be a beauty, her mother said. They would stem the flood a bit. That was a good bit of work on the whole -- his eight children" (106).

From Mrs. Ramsay's point of view comes the one list in the book to mention every child. She presents a brief but full bodied portrait of each, thinking of James and Cam first with especial longing, for they are her babies:

"Oh but she never wanted James to grow a day older! Or Cam either. These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long - legged monsters. Nothing made up for the loss. . . . why should they grow up and lose all that? . . . She would have liked always to have had a baby. She was happiest carrying one in her arms. . . . Prue, a perfect angel with the others, and sometimes now, at night especially, she took one's breath away with her beauty. Andrew -- even her husband admitted that his gift for mathematics was extraordinary. And Nancy and Roger, they were both wild creatures. . . . As for Rose, her mouth was too big, but she had a wonderful gift with her hands. . . . She did not like it that Jasper should shoot birds; but it was only a stage; they all went through stages. Why she asked, pressing her chin on James's head, should they grow up so fast? . . . And, touching his hair with her lips, she thought, he will never be so happy again. . . . They were happier now than they would ever be again. A tenpenny tea set made Cam happy for days." (89 - 90)

She sees the mortality of her children; and despite the promise she sees in each one, she senses the fleeting quality of their happiness and their childhood. She questions the temporariness and the temporality of their existence, but she does not consider immortality, only their earthly happiness. She does not want them ever to grow away from the state of "radical innocence" that Yeats refers to in his poem "A Prayer for My Daughter":

Prayer For My Daughter
Considering that, all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is Heaven's will;
She can, though every face should scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellows burst, be happy still.

And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all's accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony's a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

William Butler Yeats, 1865 - 1939
Irish poet and dramatist
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1923

[See previous posts:
September 14, 2009
November 28, 2010]

Mrs. Ramsay's wish for her children is as fervent as Yeats' but not as hopeful. She wishes for a prolongation of childhood rather than a recovery of innocence. She has no faith in reparation for loss nor in any power which will guarantee happiness to her children in the face of unkindness and upheaval. Instead she wishes that neither she nor they would ever lose the days of their innocence. When she says, "Nothing made up for the loss," she thinks of her own loss as the mother of little dependent children. But knowing how they will slip away, she resigns herself, thinking of Mr. Ramsay's accusation that she is "pessimistic" and has a "gloomy view of life" (91). Though her view of life and time passing angers her husband, the nostalgia she anticipates and her clear sense of loss and finality ("She thought life -- and a little strip of time presented itself to her eyes," 91) is not unfounded. It is, in fact, confirmed by the detached narrator of the middle section of the novel who impartially and in merest passing records the deaths of Prue in childbirth, Andrew at war, and Mrs. Ramsay herself in the night.

Prue's early death, though, is quite the opposite of the future envisioned for her by her mother. For despite Mrs. Ramsay's private certainty that "there was no treachery too base for the world to commit" (98), she holds out hope and endurance to her children:

" . . . she must admit that she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance. There were the eternal problems: suffering; death; the poor. There was always a woman dying of cancer even here. And yet she said to all these children, You shall go through it all. To eight people she said relentlessly that." (92)

Tablescape by Katy Bunder

At the dinner party, Mrs. Ramsay notices that Prue is "just beginning, just moving, just descending" into the adult world (164) and protectively wills that Prue shall have a happy future. In her concern for Prue's contentment, Mrs. Ramsay mirrors another of the desires expressed in Yeats' "Prayer," his hope that his daughter will be blessed with a loving mate and a happy home, grounded on the stability and affirmation of tradition. She expresses her appreciation of a place "where all's accustomed." She knows the significance of being "rooted in one dear perpetual place."

Mrs. Ramsay joys in her children ("For one's children so often gave one's own perceptions a little thrust forward," 122); and she is sensitive to their aches and pains, especially their emotional woes. Her heart breaks at the thought of James' disappointment when the excursion to the lighthouse is cancelled. The novel is punctuated by her motherly concern for James's frustrated expedition and a desire to somehow make up to him what cannot be made up.

She is sympathetic also with her creative daughter, Rose, seeing that in some ways they are so alike. In the scene preceding the famous dinner party, Mrs. Ramsay is seen at her most intimate and relaxed with the two children, Rose and Jasper, who visit her room before dinner, ministering to her as she looks to them to inspire her perceptions. She is happy, teasing and indulging them as they help her decide what necklace to wear to dinner.

She urges them to hurry with the jewels, " 'choose, dearests, choose.' " She is not loathe to be associated with their choices. She is patient, knowing that Rose has "some hidden reason of her own for attaching great importance to this choosing what her mother was to wear. . . . And Rose would grow up; and Rose would suffer, she supposed with these deep feelings. . . . Choose me a shawl, she said, for that would please Rose, who was bound to suffer so." She identifies closely with Rose and realizes that her feelings for Rose are for herself as well. When exploring her own bewilderment over Rose's little ceremony of choosing the jewels, she thinks, "Like all feelings felt for oneself . . . it made one sad" (122 - 23).

Mrs. Ramsay is intuitive and creative, exhibiting love and care and motherly concern in numerous instances throughout the first section of the novel. She is filled with anxiety on her children's behalf, but also with pride. Fearing that the children are about to erupt in laughter over some private joke at dinner, she says to them -- by way of maintaining order and altering the dinner table dynamic: " 'Light the candles' " (145). Standing down the length of the table and illuminating an elaborate centerpiece designed by Rose, the tall candles number eight, just as Mrs. Ramsay's children do.
Happy Mother's Day!
Tablescape by Tina McCartney

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Monday, May 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

My friend Jill sent me the little wreath of roses a couple of years ago, and I put it inside this larger Easter wreath to make a summery candleholder.

A House Where All's Accustomed, Ceremonious

ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUSWho wouldn't want to live in Story, Indiana? Sounds like a place
right out of a book . . . or a place where you could read all the time!

Rustic Hoosier Postcard of Stone Head, Brown County
by photographer Darryl Jones
See also The Spirit of the Place: Indiana Hill Country
As you may have heard me say before, my inspiration for designing this blog came from two writers: Goethe, who hopes that each day might include a song, a poem, some fine art, a few wise words; and Yeats who describes "a house where all's accustomed, ceremonious." This poem, particularly the closing, has been a favorite of mine for many years, decades:

Prayer For My Daughter

Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle
But Gregory's wood and one bare hill
Whereby the haystack- and roof-levelling wind,
Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;
And for an hour I have walked and prayed
Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.

I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,
And under the arches of the bridge, and scream
In the elms above the flooded stream;
Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come,
Dancing to a frenzied drum,
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.

Helen being chosen found life flat and dull
And later had much trouble from a fool,
While that great Queen, that rose out of the spray,
Being fatherless could have her way
Yet chose a bandy-leggèd smith for man.
It's certain that fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat
Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.

In courtesy I'd have her chiefly learned;
Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those that are not entirely beautiful;
Yet many, that have played the fool
For beauty's very self, has charm made wise,
And many a poor man that has roved,
Loved and thought himself beloved,
From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.

May she become a flourishing hidden tree
That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,
And have no business but dispensing round
Their magnanimities of sound,
Nor but in merriment begin a chase,
Nor but in merriment a quarrel.
O may she live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

My mind, because the minds that I have loved,
The sort of beauty that I have approved,
Prosper but little, has dried up of late,
Yet knows that to be choked with hate
May well be of all evil chances chief.
If there's no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Out of the mouth of Plenty's horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind?

Considering that, all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is Heaven's will;
She can, though every face should scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellows burst, be happy still.

And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all's accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony's a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

William Butler Yeats, 1865 - 1939
Irish poet and dramatist
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1923

The next two poems made their way into my notebook more recently. A few years ago, I discovered Louis Untermeyer's "Prayer For This House" in a poetry anthology that my children brought home from school; and around the same time, a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Family Prayer" was given to me by a neighbor in Philadelphia who told me that her mother read this poem every year before Thanksgiving dinner. Both are similar in tone and purpose to each other, and to Yeats' "Prayer for My Daughter":

Yeats prays for happiness, though "every bellows burst"
Untermeyer - for warmth, "though all the world grow chill"
Stevenson - for loyalty "down to the gates of death"

Yeats invokes "custom" and "ceremony" in the face of howling winds
Untermeyer - faith "to withstand the battering storm"
Stevenson - constancy in "all changes of fortune."

Yeats seeks a refuge from "arrogance and hatred"
Untermeyer - from "the raucous shout" of hate
Stevenson - from peril, tribulation, wrath

Yeats desires reprieve from the scowling face
Untermeyer - from "ill-fortunes," roar and rain
Stevenson - from "the lurking grudge"

Yeats hopes for the triumph of "innocence and beauty"
Untermeyer - for a "shrine" of peace and laughter
Stevenson - for "courage and gaiety and the quiet mind."

May their prayers be answered.

We Give Thanks
Prayer For This House
May nothing evil cross this door.
And may ill-fortunes never pry
about these windows; may the roar
and rains go by.

Strengthened by faith, the rafters will
withstand the battering of the storm.
This hearth, though all the world grow chill
will keep you warm.

Peace shall walk softly through these rooms,
touching your lips with holy wine,
till every casual corner blooms
into a shrine.

Laughter shall drown the raucous shout
and, though the sheltering walls are thin,
may they be strong enough to keep hate out
and hold love in.

Louis Untermeyer, 1885 - 1977
American poet, critic, anthologist
14th United States Poet Laureate, 1961 - 63

Prayers at Breakfast
A Family Prayer
Lord, behold our family here assembled.
We thank you for this place in which we dwell,
for the love that unites us,
for the peace accorded to us this day,
for the hope with which we expect the morrow;
for the health, the work, the food and the bright skies
that make our lives delightful;
for our friends in all parts of the earth.

Let peace abound in our small company.
Purge out of every heart the lurking grudge.
Give us grace and strength to forbear and to persevere.
Give us the grace to accept and to forgive offenders.
Forgetful ourselves, help us to bear cheerfully
the forgetfulness of others.

Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind.
Spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies.
Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavors.

If it may not, give us the strength to encounter
that which is to come,
that we be brave in peril, constant in tribulation,
temperate in wrath, and in all changes of fortune,
and, down to the gates of death,
loyal and loving one to another.

Robert Louis Stevenson 1850 - 1894
Scottish poet and novelist

Now you can store these poems somewhere safe, then take them out to share around the table next Thanksgiving!

Autumn Leaves
All paintings above by
Jessie Willcox Smith, 1863 - 1935
American illustrator of magazines and children's books

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT: www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

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KITTI'S LIST: www.kittislist.blogspot.com
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Not a Memo, A Mission Statement

ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

"One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song,
read a good poem, see a fine picture
and, if possible, speak a few reasonable words."
Back in February, when I clicked on "Create Blog," I picked this self - explanatory comment from Goethe to appear continuously as part of the header above. At the start I didn't think to explicate it any further, but now that my literary blog is six months old, perhaps I should.

When I designed this page, the space I had in mind was one where readers would encounter everything on Goethe's list: selections from all the wonderful poetry that I have been reading and collecting ever since forever, the song lyrics that make up the soundtrack of my life, and a few reasonable words of my own (or so I'd like to think!), tying it all together with the perfect visuals into an image that you won't forget.

Goethe makes it sound so simple, I thought I'd give it a try. For a title, I decided to start with my name. That would be easy enough: Kitti Carriker: A Fortnightly Literary Blog of Connection & Coincidence.

Fortnightly: Well, that just sounds so cool and literary, plus I felt pretty sure I could commit to an essay every two weeks.

Connection: I wanted, if possible, to create a place of connections, in the spirit of E. M. Forster, who implores us in Howards End to connect: "Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect . . . ."

Coincidence: As I wrote in an earlier blog post: "Sometimes life is so full of coincidences that I think my head will split open trying to take them all in! It's enough to make me believe in the whole Universe at once!" I stand by that. I want to capture all the unexpected connections that amaze and surprise and suggest a pattern.

Back in college when I worked on the literary magazine, I was known as the editor with "a poem for every poem" because no matter what I read, I was always reminded of something else -- kind of like that "Scooby-Doo" episode when Daphne asks Velma: "Do you have a book for every occasion?" And Velma answers, "Actually, yes."

A poem for every poem, and a book for every book! Those are the literary connections and coincidences that I am always on the lookout for, not that they require much tracking down, since they usually find me before I find them.

In addition, I wanted the blog to include my favorite passage from Yeats' poem "A Prayer For My Daughter." Naturally, he wants so many things for her, but chiefly a heart full of "radical innocence" and a life "Rooted in one dear perpetual place . . . a house / Where all's accustomed, ceremonious."

How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony's a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

From childhood -- perhaps impressed upon me when I first read The Little Red Story Book (more on that later), anyway long before I ever read Yeats -- one of my goals was to organize the kind of home described in his poem, where order would triumph over chaos and no holiday would ever go unremarked: accustomed and ceremonious, familiar yet celebratory.

Thus the line from "A Prayer For My Daughter" has became the perpetual caption for the pictures that change with every post. I hope that in some way (though not always in the same way) these photographs and illustrations portray "a house where all's accustomed, ceremonious." Sometimes it's my own house (or former houses), other times, a cathedral, a log cabin, a playground, an historical custom house, a neighborhood mural, a village mosaic, a medieval tapestry. I admit, these last two were not created by me, though I take most (not all) of the photographs and did help paint the mural!

And those raspberry parfaits you see up there? I didn't make them myself either (the credit goes to my dessert specialists, Ben and Karen . . . and to Gerry for growing the fruit). But I did line them up on the windowsill and photograph them. And I did eat one a little while later -- delicious!

So that's what's happening on this page every couple of weeks! Oops, I mean, every fortnight! Maybe it all made sense before. If it didn't, I hope it does now, perfect sense!

New Paint Colors: Silver Lace Vine and Raspberry Parfait