This post was written by Aaron Eastley, a Humanities Center faculty fellow.
On a recent research trip, I found myself in a place even quieter than the library archives I have sometimes visited. I was on Cranberry Island off the coast of Maine, following in the footsteps of Leslie Norris, a Welsh poet I am writing a biography about. Norris taught at BYU from 1983 to 2003. On several occasions in the 1970s and 1980s, he visited Cranberry at the invitation of his friends Charles and Jeanie Wadsworth: Boston-based artists who had built a home on the island with their own hands in the 1960s and later added a separate garage with a small upstairs carriage house for guests.
At the invitation of the Wadsworth’s daughter, Laurie, I stayed for a couple days in the carriage house as I accessed a file cabinet full of letters kept by the family, as well as the local archives of the Great Cranberry Island Historical Society. I also explored places on the island that featured in Norris’s collection Islands Off Maine. I got a good haul of letters and useful contextual material from the trip, but what has lingered in my mind is the silence I found.
The silence inside in the isolated carriage house was as profound as any I have ever experienced. It was noticeably silent, and upon listening, absolutely silent. So much so that stepping out the back door my first evening, I was struck by the lapping of waves on the seashore a hundred yards or more away. I also slowly became aware of another sound, barely audible but seemingly never-ending.
As if from a great distance, there floated on the air the ghostly ringing of bells. Unsure at first what I was hearing, I discovered upon inquiry that bells are set atop buoys bobbing in the water all along the coastline. When the wind and waves pick up, these bells clang loud warning to approaching boats. But even on calm days their faintly echoing music never entirely fades away. The tolling, I quickly connected, had found its way into the final stanzas of Norris’s collection:
water bell
sea’s angelus
anchored edge of rock
and steep of water
swing for us
audible hanging wave
simple element
mouth of the round tide
storm’s voice
swing for us
in our leaving
water tongue
clapper and safe hammer
sea’s elegy and sound
celebrate our passing
swing for us.
A “sea’s angelus,” rung not by human hands, but by the wind and waves, gives an impression of Nature itself paying homage to the ephemeral ways of all living things. Norris poignantly contemplates this earlier in the collection, when he describes a tiny local burial ground: just “twelve low headstones among the spruce”.
“Here lie the old,” the poet notes, observing the grave of an aged couple who died within a year of each other: Thomas Manchester, aged “92 yrs 3 mos” and Hannah, his wife, aged “87 yrs, 5 mos.” But here, too, is a marker for Gilman Stanley, “a boy” who “sailed east and north / Out of Cranberry, past Nova Scotia” and came on June 16, 1861, to “Belle Isle.” There, the poet recounts, “the boy at once went / Down. The sea took him.” The stone lists Gilman’s age at death as “16 yrs, 8 mos, 28 dys.” So, in January 1861, Thomas, oldest of all, died first. Then Gilman, the youngest, drowned in June, and finally Hannah passed in November. Next to the empty grave of Gilman and the shared grave of Thomas and Hannah is the final resting place of a woman named Irene Stanley, who joined them in death decades later, in 1889.
As I compared the names on the headstones with information gathered from records preserved by the Historical Society, I realized that the full story was larger and more closely fitted to Norris’s vision of cyclical life and tragic loss than even he had realized. Norris told a friend that Islands Off Maine was “a dawn to dusk poem, a life to death poem, a ‘native’ and ‘visiting’ poem, a meeting and parting poem, all these.” Norris saw this in the contrast of old and young in the secluded graveyard not two minutes’ walk from the carriage house door. But the most poignant figure in the cemetery, to me, is Irene, who my research revealed had been taken in by Thomas and Hannah when she was 9 years old, becoming their daughter after her own mother died. Gilman, I learned, was Irene’s son. In the middle of her life, at age 54, Irene lost in quick succession a father, a son, and a mother. I am haunted by this triangle of seemingly indiscriminate endings—as Irene must have been. “Swing for us / in our leaving,” indeed.
Norris was from his boyhood particularly attuned to the poignancy of loss. I consider the deep feelings of empathy that come to me as I read Norris’s work one of the greatest gifts in my life. But a blessed counterpart to this gift are his humble expressions of hope. Many of these are found in his poems and stories about Christmas. Though written ostensibly for children, I find their matter-of-fact miracles wonderfully encouraging. I’ll share two of my favorite examples.
Norris’s story Albert and the Angels is all about loss. In the story, we meet a boy, Albert, and his little dog, Lucille, whose voice only Albert can hear. Albert learns from his mother one Christmas that the thing she wishes for most in the world is a gift that she lost long ago: a small gold medallion on a delicate gold chain. Albert sets out to replace this treasure, but his best efforts repeatedly fail. He fails to earn anything like enough money to buy such a gift, and the tawdry replacement he does secure, he then loses. His setbacks ring with the force of metaphor. Then comes the miracle. As Albert heads out in darkness the night before Christmas to try to find what he has lost, he is met by a jovial but businesslike boy not much older than himself. The boy leads Albert to a kind of storehouse of all the lost treasures in this world, where he is given the very medallion his mother once lost. His guide, he discovers, is one of the angels. The redeeming message is clear: though things that are dear to us may seem irredeemably lost, perhaps they are not. They may be cherished by us again if we don’t lose hope.
It is Christ and His resurrection and atonement that ultimately make this real. His birth brought with it hope for deliverance, even from life’s cruelest sorrows—such as the grief Irene must have felt in 1861. More immediately, the influence of Christ and His teachings can bring peace into our lives. Jesus, bringer of peace, is heralded in perhaps my favorite of all Norris’s poems: his deceptively simple offering, “The Stable Cat.” This poem, along with several other Norris Christmas poems, focuses on the animals that witnessed Christ’s birth. Norris writes:
I’m a Stable Cat, a working cat,
I clear the place of vermin.
The cat at the inn,
Is never thin
But I am never fat.
But I don’t complain of that.
I’m lithe and sleek and clever.
The mice I chase
About the place
For I’m a Stable Cat.
But tonight, well things are different.
I make the small mice welcome.
I ask them all
To pay a call
And keep my claws in velvet.
Sparrows out of the weather,
The mild, roo-cooing pigeons,
These flying bands
Are all my friends,
We’re happy together.
All live things under this roof,
All birds, beasts and insects,
We look with joy
At Mary’s Boy,
Are safe in His love.
Neither as shy as the “Mice in the Hay” nor as haughty as the “Camels of the Kings,” the stable cat is a pragmatic sort, dispassionate but accustomed to killing. It is ordinary for him to chase mice and catch birds. How refreshing, then, to realize that “tonight, well things are different.” In Christ’s presence the lion can lie down with the lamb. We—all of us—are safe in His love.
