the deepening ground

On Valentine’s Day I became a grandfather. Our first grandson! My wife was blessed to be there to prepare for and help with the delivery, as well as provide extra support for the first week of Liam’s life. By late spring, I will be a grandfather twice over when we welcome our second grandson into the world. We have much to celebrate and much to joyfully anticipate as June approaches.

Since Liam’s birth, the pace of life has only intensified with minor reprieves. I’ve not had the time, nor space, to visit the deepening ground. But that doesn’t mean I’ve been idle nor that I haven’t been deepening. True, I have not written anything for over a month. Tuesday’s lesson on love poetry by my field student encouraged me to write four lines lauding the nature of true love (think Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116). My daughter and I spent two wonderful days at the Christian Writer’s Conference at Grove City College where Wendell Berry was the focus. In my wife’s absence, I began reading two Gary D. Schmidt books (Orbiting Jupiter, myself, and Pay Attention, Carter Jones to the family). We’ve been savoring the 1995 film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice in my British Literature classes (and YES, high school boys have been engrossed!) and unpacking the importance of place and community in Shelley’s Frankenstein in AP English Literature. But I found today’s offering while reviewing my students’ responses on their most recent AP Classroom progress check (hardly what I would call a deepening ground).

With my own firstborn son poet (featured on the deepening ground – March 20, 2023) having his own firstborn son, the rediscovery of this poem by James Weldon Johnson felt timely. What many of my students missed (and what you WON’T) is that Johnson’s advice tastes of the bittersweet sarcasm of Wendell Berry’s Mad Farmer (see Berry’s poem – November 5, 2024). We don’t need more bankers or politicians or those who “join the big, busy crowd / That scrambles for what it thinks it wants / Out of this old world.” Nor does the poet want his son to follow the crowd that Berry tells us “[loves] the quick profit, the annual raise, / vacation with pay” — the empty, meaningless lives of “the hollow men / The stuffed men” (from T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”). The speaker in Johnson’s poem personally knows the price of being a poet (especially an African-American poet in the early 1900s). But don’t let the concise, simplified argument of the opening and closing tercets fool you: what the world needs and what every honest father desires are children who are “makers of songs, / Chanters of the gold and purple harvest, / Sayers of the glories of earth and sky, / Of the sweet pain of love / And the keen joy of living; / […] dreamers of the essential dreams, / And interpreters of the eternal truth, / Through the eternal beauty.”

That’s my prayer for you, Liam, and for you, too, Ryland.

A Poet to His Baby Son
by james weldon johnson

Tiny bit of humanity,
Blessed with your mother’s face,   
And cursed with your father’s mind.

I say cursed with your father’s mind,
Because you can lie so long and so quietly on your back,   
Playing with the dimpled big toe of your left foot,   
And looking away,
Through the ceiling of the room, and beyond.
Can it be that already you are thinking of being a poet?

Why don’t you kick and howl,   
And make the neighbors talk about   
“That damned baby next door,”   
And make up your mind forthwith   
To grow up and be a banker
Or a politician or some other sort of go-getter   
Or—?—whatever you decide upon,   
Rid yourself of these incipient thoughts   
About being a poet.

For poets no longer are makers of songs,   
Chanters of the gold and purple harvest,   
Sayers of the glories of earth and sky,   
Of the sweet pain of love
And the keen joy of living;
No longer dreamers of the essential dreams,   
And interpreters of the eternal truth,   
Through the eternal beauty.
Poets these days are unfortunate fellows.   
Baffled in trying to say old things in a new way   
Or new things in an old language,   
They talk abracadabra
In an unknown tongue,
Each one fashioning for himself
A wordy world of shadow problems,
And as a self-imagined Atlas,
Struggling under it with puny legs and arms,   
Groaning out incoherent complaints at his load.

My son, this is no time nor place for a poet;   
Grow up and join the big, busy crowd   
That scrambles for what it thinks it wants   
Out of this old world which is—as it is—
And, probably, always will be.

Take the advice of a father who knows:   
You cannot begin too young   
Not to be a poet.

Pulled from the AP English Literature Unit 5 MCQ Progress Check. Originally from James Weldon Johnson: Complete Poems, edited by Sondra Kathryn Wilson (2000).