On Letters and Letter Writing

I've decided to take a brief interlude from my monastery narrative while I decide exactly how much more of that story I should tell -- or rather, can tell. Always a touchy thing, writing something autobiographical when nearly everyone involved is still living. Moreover, the reasons for my eventual departure from the monastery are very complex and deeply personal. So I'll think about all that. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy these two sonnets I wrote a few years ago -- rather Victorian in tone, but maybe that serves the subject.

THE LETTER NEVER SENT

 

 

I'd write my true, unvarnished heart to you

If only I were sure you'd have it, dear,

In place of the mundane, detailed review

Of my small days and all that happens here.

I'd set my heart to music, write it out

On manuscript, each rhythm, note, and beat,

So clearly, that although it be without

A lyric, the intent would be complete.

The pen that I now hold so yearns to write

What stirs beneath the noncommital words

I send you, words I am constrained by right

As "friend" to say, all friendship's rule affords;

For if I dared to send my song, you'd hear

My heart, and all the love that's singing there.

THE MAILBOX

 

 

Some days it is so full of emptiness,

It seems to emulate the echo in

My hollow heart, the arid nothingness

Where once my dewy, eager hope had been.

On other days, it cruelly teases me

With letters, letters, like so many pins

To prick my bright balloons in callous glee.

No, none from you. The end of hope begins.

And so I tire of opening that door;

Its mockery I can no longer stand.

But just as I resolve to hope no more,

I glimpse my name in your belovèd hand!

My heart is like a brook that swells with rain;

I close the metal door and smile again.

********

 

 

My old friend, that amusing essayist "Alpha of the Plough," has this to say on the bygone art of letter-writing, all of which is just as relevant today as it was when he wrote it over a century ago:

 

 

     In the great sense letter-writing is no doubt a lost art. It was killed by the penny post and modern hurry.

     . . . .the telegraph, the telephone, and the typewriter have completed the destruction of the art of letter-witing. It is the difficulty or the scarcity of a thing that makes it treasured. If diamonds were as plentiful as pebbles we shouldn't stoop to pick them up.

     . . . .the secret of letter-writing is intimate triviality. . . .To write a good letter you must approach the job in the lightest and most casual way. You must be personal, not abstract. You must not say, "This is too small a thing to put down." You must say, "This is just the sort of small thing we talk about at home. If I tell them this they will see me, as it were, they'll hear my voice, they'll know what I'm about."

     . . . .A letter written in this vein annihilates distance; it continues the personal gossip, the intimate communion, that has been interrupted by separation; it preserves one's presence in absence. It cannot be too simple, too commonplace, too colloquial. Its familiarity is not its weakness, but its supreme virtue. If it attempts to be orderly and stately and elaborate, it may be a good essay, but it will certainly be a bad letter.