Ruth Pitter

I blindly bought a beautiful (there are actually mica flecks in the dust jacket---and you know how I like shiny things) book of poetry by Ruth Pitter about seven years ago. Even though some of the poetry still goes right over my head, I have long felt the lines reverberate in my soul.

By now I know that Ruth Pitter lived a daring life, true to her soul. There is something so pure, so solid about this that is clearly evident in the great span of Ruth Pitter's life/poetry*. I'm not sure what I am more impressed with---her life or her life's work. Thankfully I do not have to decide, since the two are ultimately the same. Here are some of her words:

"I was sitting in front of a cottage door, one day in spring, long ago; a few bushes and flowers round me, a bird gathering nesting-material, the trees of the forest at a little distance. A poor place---nothing glamorous about it, except that it was spring in the country. Suddenly everything assumed a different aspect---no its true aspect. For a moment, it seemed to me, the truth appeared in its overwhelming splendor. The secret was out, the explanation given. Something that had seemed like total freedom, total power, total bliss----a good with no bad as its opposite---an absolute that had no opposite---the thing, so unlike our feeble nature, had suddenly cut across one's life---and vanished."

"But Love in his own person, I say, is lord of all, forever; and the glimpse of glory, so far as it goes, is the truth. I'd stake my life on that. I do stake it....Whether the revelation comes by sexual love, or seems to be directed through the arts, through science, or through religion---and it can seem to be coming from every direction at once---in whatever way it comes, for someone who has had such moments...from a single flash---[she] can determine the values of life and death. We are then, in the words of Scripture, 'strangers and pilgrims, seeking a country.' The ordinary pleasures and pains of life are not undervalued, but they are pleasures and pains by the way. The way is the thing; we can't be anchored to the world's values, or we shall begin to rot. We follow the gleam, hunting the thing wherever we can get new of it. The world's goods and the world's ills are marginal, are secondary, because far beyond, we have seen something." 

"For many of us this makes life entirely different, at least for a time... We are so amazed at the transformation, so astonished by what we see, at the different quality life can assume, that we go about in a dream...I can remember, at no more than fourteen years old, seeing that altered landscape; looking at the very grass in the fields with stupefaction, because apparently it had changed its nature, and 'put on immortality' to quote St. Paul."

Wild Honey
You, the man going along the road alone,
Careless or wretched, rarely thoughtful, never serene
Possessing nothing worth having; man of the sickly pleasures,
Man of the mawkish, wrong-headed sorrows, typical man
...
There in the riddled tree, hanging in darkness,
There in the roof of the house and the wall-hollow,
The new like pearl, the old like magical amber,
Hidden with cunning, guarded by fiery thousands
(See where they stream like smoke from the hole in the gable),
There in the bank of the brook the immortal secret,
In the ground under your feet the treasure of nations,
Under the weary foot of the fool, the wild honey.

*Special thanks to Don W. King for the great knowledge he freely shares about Ruth Pitter's life and for the biography he has written about her. Since I only own one of Ruth Pitter's books (1936---and can't afford to buy the others right now b/c of the textbooks I am buying) I loved reading his interpretation of bits of her poetry sprinkled throughout the bio.

Also, I'd like to mention my great grandfather (1886-1985) lived near the same life-span as Pitter. Though Ruth Pitter (1897-1992) lived in England and GD Ensz lived in Inman, KS, they both lived through some pretty amazing times of discovery, peace and war.