An Appreciation Of Jane Kenyon On First Reading

Train up your children in the way they should go and when they are older they will teach you things you should know. So it is with my daughter Mary Kate who suggested I read Jane Kenyon. What follows is not scholarly or based on knowledge, but the emotional reaction of a man loving poetry by a poet that is new to him. If this does nothing else for you, perhaps you will find her poems and love them too.

Jane Kenyon was my mother’s era of America and became poet laureate of New Hampshire. The poetry I have found has used rural themes, dealt honestly with depression, and is gently religious. Her poem on a man dying at Gettysburg is human without forgetting or being overwhelmed by the greatest battle to take place in North America.

Kenyon is a poet that begs to be memorized because she uses old and simple words to say great truths. I read her words under my breath rather than reading silently because they felt like words to be spoken like self-evident truths. I wonder if she wrote her poems first on a typewriter because they read too quickly for a pen and too slow for a word processor. The few poems read so far are lovely without being overly sweet.

I began with Let Evening Come:

Let the light of late afternoon

shine through chinks in the barn, moving

up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing

as a woman takes up her needles

and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned

in long grass. Let the stars appear

and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.

Let the wind die down. Let the shed

go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop

in the oats, to air in the lung

let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t

be afraid. God does not leave us

comfortless, so let evening come.

I love the simplicity of the words that spell a plain truth: time passes and day ends. This is a poem about nature that is not romantic but realistic. It is spare and runs inevitably from one line to the next as it will. And this inevitability is frightening, depressing, and fully faced in the poem. There is a sense of grace not just in the final lines, God does not leave us, but in the cycle itself. Humanity should not defy what it cannot change and must accept that changeless rhythm to find grace.

This is an antidote to the times.

Modernity as pictured by harsh men like HG Wells can be a battle against twilight and a demand for a perpetual day. They will build works that will never end and projects that will outlast all frailty. Such men are most comfortable in garish lights we have created. Real dark is hard to find . . . or when moderns create darkness it is too total. The world scarcely ever is fully dark, moon and stars provide some light. Even on cloudy nights once the eyes adjust the darkness is not total: it is dark but not pitch black.We are an age of efficiency that can keep going when we should stop and let quiet happen.

But evening is growing even more rare in my experience under the reign of the Wellsian. A true natural twilight is not dark, but is a slow darkening to night. Without artificial light it is time to stop any work that requires strong light and head for home. This is natural and the prophets of modernity fought the tyrants like Wells. These noble prophets, musicians like Paul Simon or the poets such as Kenyon, saw the need for natural rhythms. If there is grace in the world, then it will not come at our time but God’s time. Kenyon is modern without the mistake of artificial lighting. Her poetry is colored by northern New England soft lights.

Jane Kenyon is writing of putting out the light of my iPhone and letting the evening come with the rest and end of labor that should come. Secular society may want me to be productive all the time, but God bids and Nature demands rest. Kenyon is modern without losing the natural things. This is not quite right, though, because Kenyon knows evening will come regardless. I can turn off the iPhone or wait until Natures makes me rest. I can submit with grace or fight foolishly.

Welles fights the evening, Kenyon accepts it with human grace.

Like the Enlightenment, the “Modern Age” (so happily ended) is much criticized by Christians and most of the criticism is justified. Calling oneself “enlightened” begs ridicule as does any era that thinks jumpsuits are the clothing of the future. Mostly the “modern” is forever dated the moment it proclaims itself modern, but not always. There was in modernity a reaction to the evils of Romanticism and the affectation of the Victorians.

There is a simplicity to modernism like that of Kenyon that is . . . dare I say classic? There was in much of it a lack of pretentiousness until it was spoilt by pretentiousness about being without pretension. And so I must not Romanticize Jane Kenyon but accept her 1960s and 1970s gracefulness, depression, and doubts. She is at the twilight of a time and it is good that she sees this truth and keeps going.

Night is coming, but first there is God’s comfort in the evening. Let evening come.

An Appreciation of Jane Kenyon on First Reading