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Alighting on English Renaissance Poetry
The joy of outdoor reading, or How my little friend and I chose a Renaissance poem
I like to read outdoors. In particular, I like to read actual books there, hard copy in hand, because the natural lighting spreads evenly and brightly across the page. Or maybe it’s just the fresh air. The passing scent of flowers. Or maybe positive associations with summertime — reading in warm sunlight on the patio or the deck, at the beach, in the park.
But reading en plein air has its incidental distractions. On occasion, an unwelcome insect flies into my field of vision — a bee or mosquito or gnat. These encounters are momentarily distracting, ending with an empty swat in the air, then back to the book.
Sometimes a harmless, much smaller critter alights directly on my page, and it stays. It’s a big distraction but in a positive way: I don’t mind being distracted by Nature’s miniature miracles. How did something so utterly minuscule, as small as a comma, find its way here? And why? At such a scale how did it manage its epic voyage from bush to book? How does something so small even stay alive?
There is a world outdoors at the smallest levels, as William Blake famously said about seeing “a world in a grain of sand.” Blake did not need a microscope. With his radiated vision he could see that the world at our fingertips provides truths that are cosmic and mystic or simply miraculous.
