A couple years ago I received a phone call while I was driving in Santa Fe from a friend who had just read D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Under The Oak” and felt a sudden and irresistible urge to share it with me. I’d actually never read the poem before and it really pierced me. Surely my well-meaning friend had no idea that my driving under the influence of art was reckless at best.
Under the Oak
Have you ever been stalked by beauty? Have you ever had a magnificent work of art continuously revisit your life like a persistent recurrent dream? A symphony, a painting, a novel, a few lines of calculated prose…you know, that stuff that speaks more than the words which sometimes compose them…I have. There’s a poem by John Donne entitled “The Expiration.” I came across it one fateful undergrad day in the university library as I was vigorously searching to find that would-be rekindler of my love for Western poetry…a love that had swiftly faded since I started courting the likes of Rumi and Hafiz.
I opened it to The Expiration and remember being virtually paralyzed. I think I must have read it about 20 times before I shook my head and came to my befuddled senses. Of course, when you see a work of art that affects you like that you don’t just memorize it. You taste it, you swallow it, it flows in and out of you and in a real sense it becomes part of who you are. You know when you look at a painting and you can feel your brain stretching as that work of art, itself informed by that raw creative energy that intoxicates so many of us, changes your perception of how you view reality? I totally felt that. But the damn thing kept coming back to me.
‘Tis late this night you visit me
I lay upon my bed
Perplexed as how you know the time
I sink as molten lead
My mountain turns to rubble
‘neath the overcasting sky
The weight doth clinch my beating heart
my lash embrace mine eye
Oh angel ye of fire
Oh ye angel of the snow
Though you burn in brilliant passion
Yet the gap you see you know
Do you see the crystal vision
of that you wish to be
Whilst you drown in tears of sorrow
‘thin the shackles of reality