The Writing on the Wall A Novel - By W. D. Wetherell Page 0,27

us seemed so important that he could not bring himself to begin.

“Picture a girl, not much older than you Beth, standing on a hill above the coast looking out toward sea.”

I nodded, closed my eyes, not because I had to in order to imagine, but because I thought this would encourage him to start.

“Renascence,” he said quietly. “By Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay.”

At first I was more conscious of his voice than I was the poem, he read so wonderfully, but then the words disappeared and all I was aware of was being inside the experience itself. The girl in the poem looks out at the wide view of ocean, sensing the islands and the horizon, and it is very simple that way until, in a stanza of magic, the sky presses down on her and forces her into the ground, so it is as if she is dead. She has to suffer all the pain of the world. “I saw and heard and knew at last,” she says, “the how and why of all things past.” When the pain finally eases, when she begins to sleep serenely for evermore, a torrent of rain bursts from the same sky that crushed her and washes her back to life. She embraces all the sights, smells and sounds of the world she had once taken for granted, all the beauty after all the pain, ruing the day she ever thought of life as trivial and small.

Peter, reaching the last verse, closed the book and read by heart.

“The world stands out on either side,

No wider than the heart is wide

Above the world is stretched the sky

No higher than the soul is high

The heart can push the sea and land

Farther away on either hand

The soul can split the sky in two

And let the face of God shine through

But East and West will pinch the heart

That can not keep them pushed apart

And she whose soul is flat—the sky

Will cave in on her by and by.”

I would need Miss Millay’s gift for words to describe what her words did to me. Never had I heard anything that made me feel that the author has seen so deeply into my heart. I knew what smallness did to the soul, how difficult it was to fight this off. I knew that hunger for beauty and how alone it could make you feel. I trembled, literally trembled, to find she knew this about me and so much more.

Again! I felt like shouting but Peter had already moved on to read more poems. Ashes of Life one was called and When the Year Grows Old and then, as his gentle little finale, Afternoon on a Hill which made it seem like she was sitting there with us.

“I will be the gladdest thing

Under the sun!

I will touch a hundred flowers

And not pick one

And when the lights begin to show

Up from the town

I will mark which must be mine

And then start down.”

Laying beside me on the grass, Lawrence seemed as moved as I was. “Tell us about her,” he said.

Peter shrugged. “I don’t know much. She published her first poems when she was a student at Vassar College. She can’t be much more than twenty-five now. My friend in New York knows her slightly. Her new book of poems is coming out before Christmas.”

When he read poetry Peter trusted us to understand and he seldom offered us any interpretations. He seemed too moved to bother trying to teach us, or perhaps, prompted by the poem, he decided that he needed to teach us something harder and the only way to do this was by changing the subject.

Without any preliminary he started talking about his experience in France, something he had never done before. His regiment had been stationed west of a town called Romagne where the fighting was brutal. Night attacks mostly. Noise, blinding lights, poison gas. The wounded calling for their mothers. Hardly knowing which side was which.

“I did well there,” he said honestly, without the slightest trace of bragging. “The boys respected me, not because of any of my virtues, but because they needed someone to look up to and there were no other candidates in sight. I found I could take the shelling better than most, which I put down to my complete lack of imagination. We had men in the division from all over the country—that’s why they called us Rainbow. Many were poor farm boys from the high plains or the Appalachians who had run away just