When I went outside this afternoon to see if it had stopped raining, three little girls were walking, running, skipping home from school. And there on the sidewalk right in front of my house, they were raising a ruckus. There was shouting, laughter, dancing, splashing in puddles, and yes, squealing in that earsplitting manner we all know and usually hate. They were having a rip-roaring good time. It was impossible not to laugh, impossible not to feel the boost from the energy pulsing around their antics.
I thought about the expression “to be full of one’s self” and how it was used pejoratively when I was little. “Don’t get too full of yourself!” That was a warning. But really, what better thing for a child to be full of? And I thought too, of this short poem by Denise Levertov. I love her image of “a bell, awakened” — you can feel the vibration go right through you.
VARIATION ON A THEME BY RILKE
(The Book of Hours, Book I, Poem 1, Stanza 1)
A certain day became a presence to me;
there it was, confronting me — a sky, air, light:
a being. And before it started to descend
from the height of noon, it leaned over
and struck my shoulder as if with
the flat of a sword, granting me
honor and a task. The day’s blow
rang out, metallic — or it was I, a bell awakened,
and what I heard was my whole self
saying and singing what it knew: I can.
—Denise Levertov
This poem by Richard Wilbur is an old favorite of mine. It startles me to realize how much this cherished simile: “the commotion of typewriter-keys/like a chain hauled over a gunwale” dates me. Whoa. Ancient history. I think of Jean McCrosky, who told me when I was 13, “You girls, you young girls, there are so many things you’ll never experience…the world is changing so much — you’ll never know what it’s like to try to put on a girdle in the upper berth of a train.”