After Reading Tu Fu, I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard by Charles Wright

After Reading Tu Fu, I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard

by Charles Wright

East of me, west of me, full summer.

How deeper than elsewhere the dusk is in your own yard.

Birds fly back and forth across the lawn                                       

looking for home

As night drifts up like a little boat.

Day after day, I become of less use to myself.

Like this mockingbird,                     

I flit from one thing to the next.

What do I have to look forward to at fifty-four?

Tomorrow is dark.                 

Day-after-tomorrow is darker still.

The sky dogs are whimpering.

Fireflies are dragging the hush of evening                                         

up from the damp grass.

Into the world's tumult, into the chaos of every day,

Go quietly, quietly.

Charles Wright is now 89 years old, and I wonder if he ever looks back on the line in this poem--"What do I have to look forward to at fifty-four?"--and moans in embarrassment, or if he is just grateful for the 35 years he has had since writing this. I am not picking on him. We all do this, thinking and feeling SO OLD when we are 30 or 45 or 54 or 62; poets write all that down, though, and it becomes evidence for how silly we all are sometimes.

I will stop taking Wright to task for that line, as I do love this poem. That first line! We are there with the speaker, immersed in summer! There are days in each season that feel this way, aren't there? Completely surrounded by everything that means that season.

The first stanza continues with more subjective and beautiful description. I especially love how "night drifts up like a little boat." It makes nighttime feel so calming and tranquil, which it often is, and it continues that sense of being surrounded by summer.

Stanza two gives us a speaker, and the stanza goes back and firth between his interior ideas and the backyard at dusk. The speaker is restless, feeling useless and quite possibly hopeless. But he still manages to comment on the mockingbird. Like how the speaker views the future, the poem takes a dark turn here.

I would not call the third stanza hopeful, but it does seem to offer some relief from stanza two's foreboding. We've got whimpering and dragging and dampness, but also "the hush of evening," which reinforces the tranquility that appeared in stanza one. Then the speaker, taking his cue from the nature that surrounds him, gives us/himself some very good advice: live, exist, get out there, but do it quietly.

This poem seems especially relevant now although it was written in 1990. Our current world can be described as tumultuous and chaotic. (Here is a link to a summary of world events in 1990; I will let you decide if it compares.) At times, a quiet resistance can be as powerful as a loud one. And looking to nature for how to behave is often a good idea.

Whether you agree with this poem's advice or not, I think you will have to agree that it is an amazing piece in its mix of the external and the internal, its descriptions, how it says so much in so small a space, and how it truly evokes summer, as well as how our thoughts sometimes go dark, along with the daylight.

I have no idea if this was the Du Fu poem Wright refers to in his title, but I think it might be. Wright's poem seems to be reacting in some respects. What do you think? A Toast for Men Yun-Ch’ing