The Poem I Would Have Writ

Meandering down memory lane with Henry David Thoreau...

Artist unknown. From literacyiseverything.com.

Maybe / it’s time for me to practice / growing old. The way I look / at it, I’m passing through a phase: / gradually I’m changing to a word. —From “Passing Through” by Stanley Kunitz, on his 79th birthday

I. When I was a grad student at Berkeley in the 1960s—as Vietnam, political assassinations and racial injustice were taking the bloom off the American rose—Henry David Thoreau was all the rage. Everyone was reading Walden, his classic account of moving to the woods, building a shack and spending two years trying to live “deliberately and simply.”

Thoreau’s vision of an ethical life, including civil disobedience, appealed to those of us who saw the American myth dying before our eyes. His story energized our quest to cut loose from the violence of predatory capitalism and become more self-reliant. Later, when we learned that Thoreau’s mother frequently brought food to his shack, especially pies and donuts, his myth took a bit of a hit. But, hey, being fond of baked goods does not make a person a total sell-out, right?

II. A decade after grad school, at a time when I was working hard on becoming a writer, I decided to read Thoreau’s first and lesser-known book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. That book sold so poorly that Thoreau had to buy back most of the 1,000 copies published, leading him to quip, “I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.” Reading the book, I soon saw why it had not topped the charts, but I persisted and I’m glad I did.

Toward the end of the book, as Thoreau reflects on his life as a writer, he says, “The true poem is not that which the public reads. There is always a poem not printed on paper… It is what [the poet] has become through his work.” Then he drops this little couplet into the stream of prose: “My life has been the poem I would have writ / But I could not both live and utter it.”

III. As I struggled to learn the art of writing, that little couplet mesmerized me. Thoreau was saying that true artistry does not depend on one’s capacity to create works that achieve commercial success. The finest form of artistic expression is in the way we live our lives—and that gives everyone a chance to be an artist.

For Thoreau, “art” meant more than beauty and light. A meaningful work of art contains the “dark thread” of adversity, loss, fear and suffering that is woven through every life. Just as great writing, music, and painting are animated by the creative tension between their elements, it’s the way we hold the tension between life’s challenges and possibilities that makes our lives works of art. Science offers no formula for how to do this, but artists give us clues by circling around such mysteries and evoking our intuition.

Photo of me writing by David Nevala—DavidNevala.com

IV. Given Thoreau’s hold on my imagination, you might think that his couplet would have led me to dial down my focus on learning to write and dial up my focus on learning to live. Well, that’s exactly what it did—for about 24 hours. Then it came to me: “This is a really interesting idea. I bet I could make a nonfiction book out of it, a book that would do a lot better than A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.” I am not making this up.

So I set out to write a book titled The Poem I Would Have Writ. I re-read Thoreau, collected quotes and footnotes, read contemporary writers on similar subjects, made outlines and sketches, wrote and rewrote chapters, and bothered my friends about it until they must have wished I’d get a new idea. Or new friends. After months of pushing boulders uphill, it became clear that the book I’d imagined wasn’t going to happen. I abandoned the project feeling defeated by my failure to get a book out of all this kerfuffle—and foolish about having missed a lot of living during my time down the rabbit hole.

V. Years after I resurfaced and moved on to other projects, Thoreau’s couplet came back to me as I was journaling one morning. This time, it returned in the form of a poem, and within thirty minutes, I had a rough draft. A week later, I had the poem as it appears below, one that helps me understand what it means to write a poem with one’s life. It took a long and rambling journey to come up with a handful of words, but I’m grateful for every moment of living that delivered me there.

Memo to Self: Live “deliberately and simply,” knowing that everything you say and do is written in the book of life. Keep writing until the end, writing with your life, even when you can no longer put pen to paper. Let your life speak of love, truth and justice, and join with others who speak that language. Do it all with gratitude for the daily chance you have to help write a poem that celebrates life. And if, along the way, someone offers you baked goods, be glad and rejoice!

"The Poem I Would Have Writ"

My life has been the poem I would have writ
But I could not both live and utter it. —H.D. Thoreau

Those gentle whispers in the womb
become insistent when you’re born.
You listen, for the day will come
when you must speak words, too—
that’s how we make our way across
this trackless landscape called
the world.

But how? And what to
say? And what does saying do?

The first words are the hardest.
Later, words come easily. You learn
to speak the language of your wants
and needs—looking for safe passage,
reaching out for friends, finding
work to do, allaying fears, healing
wounds, offering chance on chance
to give love and receive. Sometimes
words escape your lips in ways you
soon regret—or appear out of the
blue, begging to have life breathed
into them by you. 

Then you learn that first words aren’t
the hardest. The hardest are the last.

There’s so much you want to say, 
but time keeps taking time and all
your words away. How to say—amid
this flood of gratitude and grief—
“Thank you!”, or “How beautiful,
how grand!”, or “I don’t know how
I survived”, or "I miss you so," or
“I was changed forever the day
we two joined hands.”

As you reach for your last words,
you realize this is it—this ebbing tide
of language called your life, words
trailing into silence, returning to
the source—this unfinished poem
you would have writ, had you not
been awash in wonder, grateful
to be living it.

—Parker J. Palmer

[NOTES: My 10 books are HERE and HERE. The Center for Courage & Renewal is HERE. I post on Substack every Friday, as time and energy allow. Free as well as paid subscriptions will always have access to everything I post.]