For the past week or so, it’s been chilly, gray, and wet in New York. That should not have mattered much to me, as I was stuck inside recuperating from surgery. But the encompassing blahness day after day slipped through the tiny spaces around windows and made itself felt inside the apartment and inside me.

For several days, I had wanted to ask Ann to help me take a short therapeutic walk, but the weather discouraged that. Toward the end of Tuesday, though, I had reached my limit of being homebound. Ann was too busy to go with me, so I went out by myself.

Despite the dispiriting weather, stepping onto the sidewalk on 91^st Street was immediately refreshing. Any number of welcome feelings crowded their way into the moment. I was no longer confined. I was outside. The weather was dreary, but not winter dreary, and the possibility of spring was vaguely apparent. I was walking. By myself. With minimal pain. Tomorrow, I’d be able to walk a little farther.

About fifty cane-aided steps from the building’s door was Riverside Drive. Across it was an entrance to 330-acre Riverside Park. Standing at the entrance like an usher was a cherry tree – large, mature, and resplendent in spring white. On the slope toward the Hudson, the tops of more were visible. As always, A.E. Houseman came to mind,

 

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,

And stands along the woodland ride

Wearing white for Eastertide.

 

The tree and the poem spoke of spring and rebirth and redemption. It also transported me back sixty years or so to a way of being, a form of community that will, I have no doubt, be forever then and never now. In college, a fairly sizeable number of us had an absorbing love of poetry. We read poems for pleasure. We studied poems for understanding. We memorized poems. We filled auditoriums when visiting poets came to read.

Once in an apartment crowded with young people drinking and sniffing out the possibility of a tryst and being party rowdy, someone pulled a book off a shelf and began to read aloud The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The reader skipped the Italian epigraph from Dante, and by the end of the next few words, “Let us go then you and I,” the party goers had gone dead silent in rapt participation. It was like an old-school Episcopal priest signaling in a ceremonial voice, “The Lord be with you,” and his socializing parishioners responding, “and with thy spirit” and bowing their heads.

The Prufrock listeners sometimes mouthed along with the reading. “In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo.” And even at our young ages, knowing little yet of disappointment, “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.” Or mortality, “I grow old…I grow old…I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled.”

No one spoke until the reading was completed. By my timing this morning, it lasted a bit more than seven minutes.

To be so in the thrall of poetry was magical and life-giving. Poetry connected us. It was something we held in common. It helped us talk to each other and understand each other.

I’m pretty sure poetry no longer has such a place in the lives of young people. It seems few people of any age value it much these days. But perhaps that overstates the case. Someone did hang a plastic-covered poster on the trunk of the cherry tree by the park entrance. On it, was Houseman’s poem – all of it – including the last stanzas, the ones about capturing the moment and time passing and mortality. To an old man out to regain some strength and claim the day, they were a gift.

 

Now, of my threescore years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,

It only leaves me fifty more.

 

And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow.

 

If I get strong enough before it’s too late, I’ll walk down into the park and visit the daffodils and Wordsworth. Forsythia is blooming too. I don’t know any poems about forsythia.