Remembrance

Todays blog is two parts – a fairly short poem and my notes for a sort of book report
1.
Remembrance

She was of an age to feel the sadness in that spring.
The white radiance of dogwoods sifting subtle
perfume was no longer enough.
Nor violets tender in cool rain.

All morning the mourning doves cooed.
Shades of new green amazing her eyes,
dazzling her spirit, weren’t drug enough to forget.
Nor crescendos of birds and bright flashes.

The gnarled dead tree stood
stubborn in the woods she walked.

1. Book Report

I’m just finishing Clare Carlisle, The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life. A really well-written provocative book.
I never knew the ending of Eliot’s life – her late marriage and Clare Carlisle’s questions about Eliot’s reasons.
Eliot wrote her astonishing books while she was not married to George Lewes. Then when Lewes died after a couple of years Eliot married long-time friend and 20 years younger, John Cross – rich, respected, wrote a three-volume autobiography of Eliot after she died. “In 1980, one hundred years after her death, George Eliot was finally admitted to Westminster Abbey. A stone was laid for her in Poets’ Corner, squeezed between memorials to Dylan Thomas and W.H. Auden. Here she is remembered as Mary Ann Evans, as well as George Eliot – a choice of names that represents a greater portion of her sixty-one years while setting aside both her marriages.” p 269

Jo Ann Lordahl
joannlordahl.com