Hope for late bloomers

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Friday, October 14th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: And I’m Paul Butler. Next up: hope for those who haven’t found their calling just yet. WORLD’s Steve West tells us about an author whose first poems weren’t published until she was in her 80s.

HOPPLE: You are the one who made us

You silver all the minnows in all rivers

You wait in the deep woods

To find the newborn fox cubs

And unseal their eyes.

STEVE WEST, REVIEWER: That’s my WORLD colleague, Claire Hopple, reading Anne Porter’s poem, “The Birds of Passage.”

…You walk alone in the wild royal darkness

In the heavens above the heavens

Where no one else can go….

Porter published her first book of poetry in 1994 at the age of 83. Born in Sherborne, Massachusetts in 1911, Porter wrote poetry throughout her life. In this 2011 interview, she describes the encouragement she received from an uncle in early childhood.

PORTER: “He would sit me on his lap and write down my poems….He was very supportive. There would be poems about Spring beginning: “I beg you sweet rosebud, I beg you arise/ Come lift up your head and open your eyes

Porter went on to study at Bryn Mawr and Radcliffe Colleges. She married early to painter Faircloth Porter, and they settled on Long Island, where they raised five children. Most of her adult life, she focused on raising her kids and supporting her husband’s career. But after his death, she published her first book of poems which became a finalist for the National Book Award.

Many of Porter’s poems reflect family life. In this poem titled “Music,” read by WORLD’s Kelsey Reed, Porter begins with a memory of her mother.

REED: When I was a child


I once sat sobbing on the floor


Beside my mother’s piano


As she played and sang


For there was in her singing


A shy yet solemn glory


My smallness could not hold

Unlike many modern poets, Porter’s sobbing doesn’t end in despair. Instead, it points her to God and his work in our lives. Here’s Suzanne Rhodes, the current poet laureate of Arkansas.

RHODES: In “Music,” she writes, we were made for Paradise as deer for the forest. And so she's has this double sided vision, where she perceives both transcendent realities, as well as present earthly realities

The natural world also plays a big role in Porter’s poetry. Sometimes she focuses on the beauty around her Long Island home. Other times she recalls summers spent on Great Spruce Head Island in Maine, a private island owned by her husband’s family. But her simple, concrete descriptions of real places and things anchor her poetry and make it more accessible. Rhodes points to “The Birds of Passage.”

RHODES: You wait in the deep woods to find the newborn fox cubs and unseal their eyes. That's such a glorious, beautiful, exquisite language unseal the eyes. And so you can just see God's intimate relationship with his creation. And you can see. Her astounding attention to the created world.

Porter wrote in the margins of her life, with a household swirling around her. She also wrote in a social scene in which atheism and Marxism were popular. She did struggle with her faith early on, later converting to Catholicism. But faith in Christ remains at the heart of many poems like “A Short Testament” which works as both confession and prayer. Here’s a short clip of that poem read by WORLD’s Jonathan Woods.

WOODS: Whatever harm I may have done


In all my life in all your wide creation


If I cannot repair it


I beg you to repair it.

And then there are all the wounded

The poor, the deaf, the lonely and the old

Whom I have roughly dismissed

As if I were not one of them.

Where I have wronged them by it

And cannot make amends

I ask you

To comfort them to overflowing

Rhodes says she finds that poem deeply moving.

RHODES: She realized that she can't make amends. And so often we feel like we've done things that we can't, we can't undo. And so this is a prayer that is worth printing out and putting on your wall because it reminds us of God's grace, and the mending that he does in our souls.

Porter isn’t equally clear on every theological or doctrinal point. She wrote her poems over many years at different places on her spiritual journey. But Christian readers will find much to appreciate in her book Living Things, still in print today.

In a world broken by sin, Anne Porter helps us slow down and pay attention, to be still and know that just as our God cares for the sparrow that falls from the tree, he cares for us.

You can hear that in the closing of her poem, “The Birds of Passage.”

HOPPLE: When the storks of Europe

Stretch out their necks toward Egypt

From their nests on the chimney tops

When shaking their big wings open

And trailing their long legs after them

They rise up heavily

To begin their autumn flight.

You who speak without words

To your creatures who live without words

Are hiding under their feathers

To give them a delicate certainty

On the long dangerous night journey.

I’m Steve West.

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