Romantic Realism

Every year I try to come up with a theme to govern my classes. Most of the time I forget what this theme is in the hubbub of the year and come back to it in the middle of May with a "hey, did you guys remember this?" moment right before finals. This year one of my goals is to be a bit more attentive to the stated theme and hopefully to carry it throughout the year. Perhaps I'll do another post on the theme for my sophomore Honors class, but the theme for my juniors--who comprise the bulk of my students--is "Romantic Realism." I want to explain what that means, but I want to do it--fittingly, for an English teacher--through a poem. So, enjoy this absolutely brilliant envisioning of Romantic Realism by Mary Oliver.

The Ponds

Every year
the lilies
are so perfect
I can hardly believe

their lapped light crowding
the black,
mid-summer ponds.
Nobody could count all of them —

the muskrats swimming
among the pads and the grasses
can reach out
their muscular arms and touch

only so many, they are that
rife and wild.
But what in this world
is perfect?

I bend closer and see
how this one is clearly lopsided —
and that one wears an orange blight —
and this one is a glossy cheek

half nibbled away —
and that one is a slumped purse
full of its own
unstoppable decay.

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled —
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing —
that the light is everything — that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

Gah! Isn't that perfect, so to speak? At the beginning Oliver wants to romanticize the scene. The "perfect" lilies in their hyperbolic plenitude crowding out the darkness of the abyssal waters and enlightening the world. But she shifts in the middle of that fourth stanza with a rhetorical question: "But what in this world/ is perfect?" The answer of course is nothing, least of all the lilies.

Upon further scrutiny each bears some mark of imperfection from the minor--"lopsided"--to the decidedly more serious, "a slumped purse/ full of its own/ unstoppable decay." You think this flower is pretty? Well, guess what? It's DYING!!! And so will you, loser.

The rhetorical question shifts us into decidedly realist territory. No romanticizing here. And a starkly realist poem would end with the word decay. Sucks to you for thinking this was a beautiful scene. But Oliver doesn't do that. She transitions yet again with the word "still," as if to say, hold on, decay is not to be the last word. And then she has line that knocks me off my feet: "what I want in my life/ is to be willing/ to be dazzled." Oliver doesn't just want to be dazzled; she wants to be willing to be dazzled. In other words, she doesn't expect the dazzling to just happen. She does not resign herself to being merely a passive agent in this process. She wants to be willing. She wants to open herself up to the possibility of being blown away by the beauty and majesty of this world. She wants to be willing to make a choice. 

A choice “to cast aside the weight of facts” (28). A choice to “believe that the imperfections are nothing” (34). A choice to, in a conscious nod to William Wordsworth's famously Romantic "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," “maybe even/ to float a little/ above this difficult world” (29-31). Oliver acknowledges the brokenness of the world, the decay of the flowers, the marred nature of creation. But she returns to the choice of seeing the beauty. In the final three words of the poem, in language reminiscent of the marriage vow, Oliver weds herself to this vision of the world, saying “And I do” (36). She is accepting the flaws with the glory that still remains present in this world. She is clear-eyed to the true condition of a fallen world, but chooses the “lapped light” over the abyss of the “black” waters.

This is what I mean by Romantic Realism. It is a view of the world that does not deny an often harsh reality and its pain and decay and degradation. But it doesn't stop there. It chooses to see the world as, in Hopkins' phrase, charged with the grandeur of God. A world that maintains its beauty and glory and God-infused nature despite its flaws, in the same way we maintain God's image within us despite our sin. This is what I want my students to believe about the world; this is what I want my own children to believe about the world; this is what I want to believe about the world. 

And I want this so badly because I think it is the Christian view of the world. And, in my own Romanticism, I think it's possible to win people over to seeing the world this way.