Beauteous Days

by Mary Potter

Below is an article written by our own Mary Potter that appeared in the Berkshire Eagle, June 19, 2001

I am driving home from an evening meeting in Ashfield. It is one of those long lingering evenings that cluster around the summer solstice when the light fades imperceptibly and one feels caught in the twilight. Maybe caught is the wrong word, suggesting, as it does, imprisonment or being held against the will. I will it; I have longed for it, imagined it, through the long winter of jagged- edged air and darkness descending before dinner.

The hot, humid day has cooled to a golden warmth. I allow the soft breeze that wafts through the car to lift away my tiredness and the talk of the meeting, talk that feels like a residual clatter inside me, all the airing of issues, all the cross-conversations, all the subtleties of speech devised to faithfully present ideas yet avoid clashes and hurt feelings. It all flows off me like the wake of air from my car and dissipates into the hazy sky.

“ It is a beauteous evening, calm and free…” I say to myself, the Wordsworth sonnet springing to life from Mrs Martin’s 11th grade English class. One of the boys in that class latched on to the word “beauteous” because of its archaic strangeness. Use of the word did not just spread; it was more a case of spontaneous combustion. Everything good, appealing, or desirable was described as beauteous, from an offhand comment to a friend’s new skirt to a group cheer of “Beauteous!” when one of our team sunk a basket with a clean swish of the net. The overuse of the word almost spoiled the sonnet for me. 

 But that has all been lifted away too. I now can very easily plunk myself down in Wordsworth’s time and feel comfortable with his use of the word. “The holy time is quiet as a Nun /Breathless with adoration.” The words whisper to me as I pass through familiar territory driving slowly, taking it all in. 

 On Steady Lane, a man stands, his legs spread, arms akimbo, amongst the tender shoots of green beans and the feathery lace of carrot tops and a big vegetable garden, then bends to pull an errant weed. He looks as if he has sprung up too, attached, rooted in the soil. Two brown horses, noses to the ground, crop the grass behind a fence, the picture of contentment. Through the gauze veil of the hazy twilight, I see these everyday things – the houses and yards and the rosy glow behind the Blue Hills – in Wordsworth’s sacred light.

At the potato farm in Plainfield, potato plants have already pushed up in the newly furrowed fields. Just as with corn fields, you look at the plants one angle and see randomly space growth. Then the road switches directions and you see the rows, the plants uniformly and systematically following the contours of the plows’ curving swing. Pattern, no pattern – it all lies in the eyes and then where we stand to see. I have used this idea in planting my own flower garden, sometimes tucking lower growing plants behind something larger to create a surprise, a discovery, when viewed from a different angle or from a pathway within. Revealing everything at once destroys the quality of a mystery. 

Near the swamp about a mile from our house I see a disembodied white T-shirt moving towards me along the side of the road. It is my husband Rich taking a walk. I pull over, roll down the window, and in my best Mae West invitation call over to him. “ Hey, Sailor, do you want to lift?” But I know the answer. Rich wants to be caught in the t

wilight too, moving through it, looking at close range. The evening constitutional is for more than just the body.

At home I find that our son Rob has four or five friends – all of them just home from college – upstairs in his room. I will bet my last dollar that they are not talking about long twilights or buttercups or the growth pattern of potato plants in a field. But that’s all right. They are in the beauty, surely part of it, and sooner or later it will press upon them, reveal itself.

 Whole days go by, whole weeks -even months – and we hardly ever stop to think this simple thing: how good – how utterly sweet – it is just to be alive. Tonight I give myself up to the evening; I follow the curving sweep as the season swings into summer and the pattern returns. All the elements are just right. The buttercups float in eyes-searing green grass, the bullfrogs at the pond blast out their throaty song, the last hoo-hoo-hoo of the morning dove is suspended in the air, then dies away. In the haze of twilight, my vision is clear; and this porch, with the scent of the first lilies passing through the screens, seems to me to be the perfect place to stand. 

It is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free

By William Wordsworth

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,

The holy time is quiet as a Nun

Breathless with adoration; the broad sun

Is sinking down in its tranquility;

The gentleness of heaven broods o’er the Sea;

Listen! the mighty Being is awake,

And doth with his eternal motion make

A sound like thunder—everlastingly.

Dear child! dear Girl! that walkest with me here,

If thou appear untouched by solemn thought,

Thy nature is not therefore less divine:

Thou liest in Abraham’s bosom all the year;

And worshipp’st at the Temple’s inner shrine,

God being with thee when we know it not.