Rachel Hadas
ON TIME
A line from George Seferis's poem, 'Thrush" has been
haunting me: "Houses, you know, grow stubborn easily, when
you strip them bare." At first the line seems neither advice nor
warning-just neutral generalization. But the generalization is
also a trope, and a rather somber and hermetic one at that. One
way to read it is to push "strip bare" over toward a darker
connotation, such as that of violent abuse or heartless neglect.
Read that way, the stubbornness that Seferis tells us is a result of
this stripping immediately takes on the pathetic, dishevelled
wildness of a neglected child. This reading is bolstered by an ad–
jacent passage in "Thrush" which compares houses to babies:
New at first, like babies
who play in gardens with tassels of the sun,
they embroider colored shutters and shining doors
over the day.
Is the poet telling us that houses grow stubborn when they're
neglected? Not necessarily. "Strip bare" can be taken as merely
an emptying out, a clearing of the accumulated debris human
habitation creates. Thoreau's passion for spareness comes to
mind, though he would strip more than merely the house: "At
Author's Note: Works cited in this essay are "Thrush" by George Seferis (translated by
Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard), from
George Seferis: The Collected Poems
(Princeton
University Press, 1981); "Souvenirs" by Jane Cooper, from
Scaffolding: New and Selected
Poems
(Anvil Press, 1984);
Walden
by Henry David Thoreau (Norton, 1951);
Cranford
by
Elizabeth Gaskell (Macmillan, 1907) ; and "Hotel de L'Univers et Portugal" byJames
Merrill from
The Country of a Thousand Yean ofPeace,
(Atheneum 1977) . "On Time" is the
first half of a two-part essay in the completed collection,
In and Out of
Books.
