Billy Collins old dog and the kind of love that's a form of knowledge

Posted Thursday morning, January 14, 2021.

“Just thinking about he honesty in her eyes, I realize I should tell you she's really not seventy-five”: Detail from the painting “Study of a Dog” by Rosa Bonheur, sometime in the 1860s. Via Wikipedia.

Last night I read myself to sleep reading Harold Bloom’s opening chapter, which he called “Prelude” of his last book, “Taking Arms Against a Sea of Troubles: The Power of the Reader’s Mind Over a Universe of Death”. The subtitle he gave to ‘Prelude” is “Reading to Stay Alive”, in case you didn’t get the message, which, as I drifted drowsily into dreams, I took as this: the theme of all great poetry is death and its attendant nightmares---death, pain, loss, sorrow, and despair---but ironically reading poetry, confronting those nightmares, makes life bearable, livable.

Bloom was quick to write within a few paragraphs of starting out:

[Reading poetry, which he considered includes all written art] does not abate my sorrow for the beloved dead, or requite my loneliness for many departed friends, yet it holds off any fears about my own vanishing. I do not want to fall yet once more and break another hip or leg, or even a rib, but a Keatsian ceasing on the midnight with no pain would not trouble me. When I say to myself and to others that reading helps in staying alive, I am aware that I am being metaphorical. Returning to Dante or Milton will not prolong my existence by a single minute, whereas endless exercise almost certainly will. But if life is to be more than breathing, it needs the enhancement by knowledge or the kind of love that is a form of knowledge.

The last paragraph of Bloom's prelude restates his thesis:

The great poem, plays, novels, and stories teach us how to go on living, even when submerged under forty fathoms of bother and distress. If you live ninety years you will be a battered survivor. Your own mistakes, accidents, and failures at otherness beat you down.

And his final sentence struck me as a command:

Rise up at dawn and read something that matters as soon as you can.

So that’s what I did. Actually, I rose up a two hours before dawn, and I had breakfast first. But as soon as I could I read this poem by Billy Collins. Death, pain, loss, sorrow, and despair figure from the first line, but the whole poem is informed throughout by the kind of love that is a form of knowledge...

She’s painfully slow,
so I often have to stop and wait
while she sniffs some roadside weeds
as if she were reading the biography of a famous dog.

And she’s not a pretty sight any more,
dragging one of her hind legs,
her coat too matted to brush or comb,
and a snout white as a marshmallow.

We usually walk down a disused road
that runs along the edge of a lake,
whose surface trembles in a high wind
and is slow to ice over as the months grow cold.

We don’t walk very far before
she sits down on her worn haunches
and looks up at me with her rheumy eyes.
Then it’s time to carry her back to the car.

Just thinking about the honesty in her eyes,
I realize I should tell you
she’s not really seventy five. She’s fourteen.
I guess I was trying to appeal to your sense

of the bizarre, the curiosities of the sideshow.
I mean who really cares about another person’s dog?
Everything else I’ve said is true,
except the part about her being fourteen.

I mean she’s old, but not that old,
and it’s not nice to divulge the true age of a lady.

---”Walking My Seventy-Five-Year-Old Dog” by Billy Collins, from “Whale Day”, via Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac.

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Bloom is gone. A battered survivor, he didn’t quite make it to ninety. His vanishing occurred in October of 2019 when he was still a kid of eighty-nine.

Preludes abound in poetry, plays, and novels. The most famous prelude in English is Wordsworth’s epic autobiographical poem "The Prelude". It’s unforgivably long. But “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” can taken in a gulp and it fits the bill here, being about how the nightmares of death and loss begin to submerge us in forty fathoms of bother and distress at a very early age and cause us to forget those clouds of glory with which we came trailing into the world.

The painting up top, "Study for a Dog" is by the French post-impressionist Rosa Bonheur who specialized in portraits and character studies of animals and whose work is experiencing a sort of "rediscovery". There's a good article about her by Elaine Sciolino in the November 2020 issue of Smithsonian Magazine. Follow the link to "The Redemption of Rosa Bonheur".