Chance Burnings

It’s cold here, with an inch of snow and ice on the ground. Later today, an ice storm is expected, after which a warming rain should set in, freeing up the roads. Through it all, we marvel at the birds, the tiny ones especially, the hearty juncos; and then there are the romping squirrels, whose instinct for play hasn’t abated a whit.

I was prompted to write this morning by a passage I found in the second volume of Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son, wherein the poet is quoted directly from conversation in 1869:

“Yes, it is true that there are moments when the flesh is nothing to me, when I feel and know the flesh to be the vision, God and the Spiritual the only real and true. Depend on it, the Spiritual is the real: it belongs to one more than the hand and the foot. You may tell me that my hand and my foot are only imaginary symbols of my existence, I could believe you; but you never, never can convince me that the I is not an eternal Reality, and that the Spiritual is not the true and real part of me.”

These words are open, of course, to more than one interpretation, likely as many interpretations as there are those who read them. Some, for instance, might be offended or put off by the terms God and Spiritual, while others might question the validity of Reality or I. No doubt all can be made to mean whatever a reader wants or needs them to mean at this particular point in his or her life. That I daresay is the beauty of them.

In a lighter vein, here’s something from the Appendix to the first volume, a reminiscence of Tennyson by one Thomas Wilson, written after being a guest in the poet’s home:

“Not unfrequently I used to have evening talks with him on the way up to bed, looking at the many pictures that adorned the staircase: these he said he looked at far more frequently than the pictures in the room. On one of these occasions, as he was holding a candle to examine some book or picture (for he was very near-sighted), his wavy dark hair took fire. I was for putting it out: “Oh, never mind,” he said, “it depends on chance burnings.”

[ 1937 ]