Come the hopeful season of Spring, one feels that gates which have been closed may yet be come to open, with what has often seemed to be inescapable fate becoming undone.
“What the Bird Said Early in the Year” by C.S. Lewis, a beautiful poem of hope set in stone on a wall near his old college in Oxford.
“What the Bird Said Early in the Year”
"I heard in Addison’s Walk a bird sing clear:
This year the summer will come true. This year. This year.
Winds will not strip the blossom from the apple trees
This year, nor want of rain destroy the peas.
This year time’s nature will no more defeat you,
Nor all the promised moments in their passing cheat you.
This time they will not lead you round and back
To Autumn, one year older, by the well-worn track.
This year, this year, as all these flowers foretell,
We shall escape the circle and undo the spell.
Often deceived, yet open once again your heart,
Quick, quick, quick, quick!—the gates are drawn apart."
“What the Bird Said Early in the Year” is a beautiful and profound poem. It is a poem that inspires hope in the hopeless. The poem has a great personal appeal for me, having spent a lifetime being confronted by closed and closing gates, unable to break certain debilitating cycles, no matter how hard I tried. Whilst I continue to strive, I am still facing gates that are closed, still trying to transcend the never-ending cycles that dissipate your energy to no productive end. Such, alas, is too often the fate of autistic people in a world that neither understands the condition nor has the time and resources to care. You know that there has to be more to life than this, yet struggle to find that elusive something that makes all the difference.
Keep hustlin' tomorrow
You might just find
Something to live for
Keep pushin' tomorrow
You might just find
That elusive something...
- Jack Bruce, Something to Live For
The 'something' that has kept me going over the years has been the feeling that the best is yet to come and, all evidence to the contrary, is both 'out there' somewhere and 'in here' certainly. I know my abilities, I know my potentials, and I know my hopes and dreams. I know them to be real and true. I have never doubted them, only their realisation in a world that often seems designed to frustrate the highest ideals and deepest desires. I have never accepted their denial and frustration as inevitable, final, and permanent. I have never given back my ticket to the universe and never been inclined to. This is indeed a triumph of hope over experience. Despite repeated set-backs, I have always picked myself up, returned to the field and tried again, full of that “Come Next Spring” feeling (to borrow the title of the Scott Walker song). Maybe this time it will be my time. And if not this year, then maybe next. Come next Spring. I keep going by cleaving to a transcendent hope, one that is attuned to the source and end of all things.
This poem goes a long way towards explaining why.
Addison's Walk is the forested path in Magdalene College where C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien had a long and deep talk that started Lewis towards believing that the story of Jesus Christ just might be true. The plaque containing the poem can be found on the first turn of the path, the other side of a small bridge, and pays tribute to the time that Lewis spent at Magdalene as student, scholar, and professor. It was at Magdalen that Lewis rediscovered his Christian faith.
Read the poem to yourself, listen closely to the words in an attempt to understand their meaning, and hear what its message in the lines 'this year, this year.' And feel your heart responding to the 'quick quick!' of hope.
As Lewis wrote in another place: “all the leaves are rustling with the rumor” that one day, the “new day” will dawn and the promise and hope of the Gospel will become reality.
Blaise Pascal gave expression to this longing:
“There’s something nostalgic and reminiscent in us, that longs to get back to the place from which we have come. And that is because we came from perfection and we were made for perfection. And that is why we have this sort of lingering memory of it, and therefore we long to return to that place where everything is as God intended it to be.”
Lewis expounds on this in his book The Weight of Glory:
“We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words: to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.
That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses and nymphs and elves-that, though we cannot, yet these projections can, enjoy in themselves that beauty grace, and power of which Nature is the image. That is why the poets tell us such lovely falsehoods. They talk as if the west wind could really sweep into a human soul; but it can’t. They tell us that ‘beauty born of murmuring sound’ will pass into a human face; but it won’t. Or not yet.
For if we take the imagery of Scripture seriously, if we believe that God will one day give us the Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendour of the sun, then we may surmise that both the ancient myths and the modern poetry, so false as history, may be very near the truth as prophecy.
At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Someday, God willing, we shall get in.”