Of clods and pebbles and deep thoughts…
I’m asked quite often what drew me to literature and to love the english language. When I’m teaching poetry, invariably the question arises: “What was the poem that made you love poetry so much?” I usually qualify my response with an explanation that it wasn’t just the language alone, but the passion of the professors teaching it, the way it sounded when spoken aloud, and my understanding of the complexities of stringing together images, ideas, and emotions with only a handful of words, punctuation, and white space on a page.
There wasn’t one poem that made me fall in love with poetry (While Shakespeare wrote poetry, I tend to keep drama seperate from “poetry” in my mind, by the way). It was three. John Milton’s Paradise Lost captured my attention in a way that no other piece of literature had. But that’s an epic poem, and I don’t know that it should count in this estimation. Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” became my favorite poem the minute I finished reading it, and has been so ever since. The imagery, symbolism, medieval subject matter, high romanticism, and the simple, yet perfect structure are unparallelled in my mind. For years a single line from that poem was my signature on IM’s and Emails: “I am half sick of shadows…” Beautiful. It’s tragic, sad, and almost unbearably beautiful. How couldn’t I love that?
But the one poem that shakes the very foundation of me–the one that once I heard it, and then read it, became as much a part of my idea of the world as my own name was–is “The Clod and the Pebble” by William Blake:
“Love seeketh not Itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care;
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.”So sang a little Clod of Clay,
Trodden with the cattle’s feet:
But a pebble of the brook,
Warbled out these metres meet.“Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to Its delight:
Joys in another’s loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.”
To me, that poem sums up the two distinctly different outlooks on love and life. That the selfless, persistent love is spoken by an ugly, usually invisible to most piece of clay smashed, tramped on, and thoughtlessly disregarded by the individual doing it is a notion that resonates profoundly. And though it experienced those things, the Clod of Clay maintains that selfless, beautiful idea of what it means to love.
The polished, pretty pebble has quite a different view, doesn’t it? It’s a much more selfish love, isn’t it? It would rather take the joy and happiness and ease from someone than be alone, regardless of the cost to the other person. That’s not to say it’s wrong. I don’t think that’s the point. The pebble in the brook is worn down constantly, and is forced to experience the constant rush of water, slowly eroding and slowly wearing it down until it develops a protective, polished shell. The Pebble is the very definition of the emotional defense mechanism.
There are plenty of ways to look at that poem. The positioning of the stanzas on the page indicate the preferred notion of love. The differences between the objects speaking, a clod of clay and a pebble of a brook, infer that you can’t have that selfless kind of love if you are unmoving and unyielding–only if you’re malleable and if you’re willing to bend and change to the shape of the troubles that come like the clod of clay. And if you’re cynical, you can easily view this poem as representing the natural transition and progression of love over the course of time. It’s an easy interpretation to make. The selfless love comes first in the poem and then leads to the selfish. But it can also be an exposition on what happens when troubles multiply. The cattle tramping on the clod of clay is by happenstance. It happens only occasionally when the clod of clay accidentally falls under foot. The constant rushing of the water in the brook is overwhelming and unavoidable; it forces the pebble into a self preservation mode. Eventually, those waters can flow over the pebble and it won’t notice.
Maybe the clod and the pebble are two different sides of the same coin. I’m not surprised when people experience both. But what that poem helps me to realize every time I think about it is that you have a choice. They aren’t easy choices, and they’re easy to drift between. It’s not glamorous, and it’s easy for me to be the pebble, but I much rather prefer to be the Clod of Clay.
Write Well,
Dawn
