Sunrise at the Equinox

I was watching the rising sun around 6:30 a.m. on Kailua Bay on Oahu on the March Equinox (by complete accident). I had just heard again the score to the “Making of Yeti” video on the Tippet Rise site, which features the exhilarating coda to Beethoven’s Egmont overture, where you can imagine the sun rising to repeated orchestral crescendi.

I was thinking how the sun bleaches out some of our human flaws every day with its restorative light. I was as well thinking about Auden’s line “Nights of insult let you pass / Watched by every human love,” and Wilbur’s end to “On the Marginal Way”:

. . . all things shall be brought
To the full state and stature of their kind,
By what has found the manhood of this stone.
May that vast motive wash and wash our own.

I felt that the joy flooding into my mind had to be balanced by the recognition that our delight happens simultaneously with so much tragedy in most of the world. How could we be so fortunate, how far did we have to travel to erase our limits, our defects with rustling palms?

The tragedy of the world is beyond poetry. But for most people there is no recourse, there is no salvation. Only the demented wandering of the mind when the heart breaks down. Poetry is the last resort of human dignity, when all else is lost.

We who are lucky to have lived in a country at peace for most of our lives, to live still so far away from human griefs, have an obligation to preserve that beauty so that it becomes a beacon, a standard, for whatever future worlds our grandchildren might hope to lighten with whatever tools, whatever vast motive of the universe, whatever blare of the new day, they have at hand.

The concept of wrong nights came from the concept of the balanced night and day, dark and light, on the equinox. Such perfect symmetry only comes twice a year. The rest of the time, our days are less than balanced. The wrong notes in playing music, our furies, our failures, Donne’s South and West winds that cause storms, are the flip side of the sun rising, like Donne’s poem to the dawn, “The Good Morrow”:

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres,
Without sharp north, without declining west?
Whatever dies, was not mixed equally;
If our two loves be one, or, thou and I
Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.

Behind all the equinoctial poems I’ve written (at least seven now) lie Donne’s equanimity, his astronomy, his music of the spheres, where for every act on earth there is a celestial model. Against all my failings I set its opposite, the clockwork gears that are reflected here on earth by music, by poetry, by sunrise on a deserted beach.