In The Lake Before Rosh Hashanah Poem by gershon hepner

When into lakes we choose to drive
it’s not to swim from a to b,
but just to feel that we’re alive,
which also is the reason we
have plunged so fully in each other,
as if together we’d dived in
a lake in which we do not smother
our feelings as on Yom HaDin,
when we’re immersed in prayer to God,
love-soaked, undried, which helps us be
a couple that does not find odd
the romance of its repartee.


Written for Linda on the eve of Rosh Hashanah 5770 for Linda after reading Joe Morgensten’s review of Jane Campion’s movie “Bright Star” (“Ode to a Romantic Biopic: ‘Bright Star’: Cornish inspires as Keats’s love, ” WSJ, September 18,2009) :
In “Bright Star, ” a dramatization of the intense though unconsummated love affair between the young Romantic poet John Keats and his younger neighbor, Fanny Brawne, the filmmaker Jane Campion has performed her own feat of romantic imagination. The production is modest in physical scale, mostly reserved in tone and touchingly simple in design (apart from Fanny's dazzling wardrobe, which is justified by her gifts as a seamstress) . Yet the effect is exhilarating, and deeply pleasurable. It's like the dive into a lake that Keats evokes to explain the experience of poetry. The point, he explains to Fanny, is not to get to the other side, but to luxuriate in the lake.
On Poets.org a reviewer writes:
One of the most intimate early scenes of the relationship takes place over an impromptu poetry lesson, though Keats is suspicious of Brawne. When she asks for an introduction concerning “the craft of poetry, ” Keats dismisses the notion: “Poetic craft is a carcass, a sham. If poetry doesn't come as naturally as leaves to a tree, then it better not come at all.” As the conversation continues, however, Brawne earns Keats's trust, and he offers a more useful explanation: “A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it’s to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.”


9/18/09