Weeks earlier than Helen’s dying and what would have been her 91st birthday, we exchanged letters. I had despatched her an essay I’d simply written on the great thing about marvel, stemming from the marvel so many individuals felt upon viewing the overall photo voltaic eclipse earlier this month.
I usually despatched Helen issues I wrote. Some she favored lower than others, and he or she was by no means shy to say so. She favored the essay on marvel, although she mentioned she was by no means a wonderer herself, however a “hopeless pragmatist,” not topic to miracles, besides upon two events. One was the beginning of her son, David, whom she talked about in letters usually. She beloved David deeply, and each have been pleased when she moved from epic Cambridge to lyrical Laguna Niguel, Calif., to be close to him, as she grew infirm.
Her second miracle, coincidentally, occurred when Seamus Heaney drove her to see a photo voltaic eclipse at Tintern Abbey. There, among the many Welsh ruins, Helen had an astonishing expertise, one which she described to me in a manner that appeared nearly to evoke Wordsworth:
I had after all learn descriptions of the phenomena of a complete eclipse, however no phrases may equal the total-body/whole panorama impact; the ceasing of hen tune; the inexorability of the dimming to a crescent after which to a corona; the overall silence; the gradual salience of the celebs; the iciness of the silhouette of the towers; the looming terror of the steely eclipse of all of nature. Now that quelled completely any purely “scientific” curiosity. One grew to become pure animal, solely animal, no “thought-process” being even conceivable.
One who claims to not know wonders exhibits herself to be one.
She was so intent on the great thing about the poets she understood so deeply, she by no means may see why others discovered her appreciations outstanding. As soon as, after I despatched her a notice complimenting her on a splendidly unique remark she’d made in a current article, she wrote: “So type of you to encourage me. I all the time really feel that every thing I say could be apparent to anybody who can learn, so am all the time amazed when somebody praises one thing.”
Solely an harmless of the very best order would say such a ravishing, preposterous factor.
When just lately the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded her the Gold Medal for Belle Lettres and Criticism, Helen was shocked.
“You may have floored me after I acquired the decision,” she wrote to me, including: “Maybe I used to be chosen by the committee due to my superior age; in that case, I can’t complain. The quote that got here to thoughts was Lowell’s ‘My head grizzled with the years’ gold rubbish.’”
She was all the time doing that — attaching a citation from poetry to a thought or expertise of her personal, as if she occupied the identical room as all the nice poets, residing with them as intently as family members in a tenement.
