The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

[bodlon]

I’d been majoring in Computer Science for about a year when I met Dr. Pam McClure. It was one of those weird class sessions during which none of my major courses were available, so it was an opportunity to take care of some gen eds and electives. One of those classes was Creative Writing: Poetry.

I’d been an avid writer in school, and focused on literature, language, and journalism, but hadn’t done much with it since. Dr. Pam’s class changed all that. She had a rare touch. She worked us hard, critiqued us fairly, but she had a genius for finding the things about our work that were good. In her class, all the ways the world has of treating poetry like it doesn’t matter ceased to have any authority.

I changed my major.

About a year and a half after I went on hiatus from college in order to have time to really, really write, I discovered she’d been diagnosed with cancer. I’ve spent a lot of time regretting being prodigal, and about not finishing the thing I did because of her. I’ve been starting to work on ways to make it possible to go back this year or in 2011, and had been quietly hoping that my second stab at my undergraduate thesis course might be with her.

Yesterday, I got word from a friend that she’d passed away this week. Yesterday evening, a group of people gathered under the tree where she met with her daytime classes and read poetry and shared stories about her until well past dark.

Pam McClure was kind to me, and I don’t think she ever knew how much she saved my life. She gave me back my words and taught me that they meant something. She was a brilliant instructor and a gifted poet in her own right. I’m gutted she’s gone. I’m sorry I missed my chance to make her proud.

~*~

“Ode to the West Wind”
Percy Bysshe Shelley

I
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear!

II
Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky’s commotion,
Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine aëry surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith’s height,
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge

Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh hear!

III
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lull’d by the coil of his crystàlline streams,

Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know

Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: oh hear!

IV
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seem’d a vision; I would ne’er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chain’d and bow’d
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

V
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

This post has been mirrored from Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive. To see it in its original format, visit dimlightarchive.com