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Excerpted Inspirations #197

  • Writer: Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
    Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
  • Oct 2
  • 0 min read
[Vicky Austin’s beloved grandfather is dying of leukemia. The family is staying with him in his island home to care for him and say goodbye.] I looked at the book lying open in his lap. “What’re you reading?” “Poetry. I felt rather tired this afternoon and not in the mood to concentrate for long spaces of time. So I went back to one of my old favorites.” He picked up the book. “Henry Vaughan. Seventeenth century.” “That’s your special century, isn’t it?” “One of them. Listen to this; I think you’ll like it: “I saw Eternity the other night, Like a great ring of pure and endless light, All calm, as it was bright, And round beneath it, Time, in hours, days, years, Driven by the spheres, Like a vast shadow moved, in which the world And all her train were hurled.” He paused and looked up at me, and when I didn’t say anything, because I was thinking about the words of the poem, and what they meant in connection with Leo, with Zachary, he flipped the pages and read, “There is in God, some say, A deep but dazzling darkness: as men here Say it is late and dusky, because they See not all clear. O for that Night, where I in him Might live invisible and dim!” I didn’t hear the last lines because my mind stopped with A deep but dazzling darkness. And then it picked up the first poem he’d read, with eternity being a great ring of pure and endless light. Grandfather looked at me. “He’s terrific, this Vaughan guy,” I said. “There’s no one like the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers for use of language.” […][Several days later] “Grandfather, you told us once that if we aren’t capable of being hurt we aren’t capable of feeling joy.” “Yes … yes …” “You were with Gram when she died.” He continued to pat my hand absentmindedly. “That is different. Caro and I were one. This – ” “It’s a different kind of oneness. It’s a deep but dazzling darkness.” Now he took my hand in his. “Poetry does illuminate, doesn’t it? Bless you for understanding that, and for remembering.” Madeleine L’Engle, A Ring of Endless Light (1980), pp. 64-65, 119

 
 
 
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