Poetry & Life

 

“He never knew what was wrong with him

Until one night

He chopped up his bed for firewood

It was more comfortable that way

 

And then another night a year later

It came roaring up the street at him

As a sunset”

 

            - Witter Bynner

 

 

            What sort of nonsense is this? Funny perhaps, but surely nonsense & without meaning. This might be our first impression.  However, I’d like to offer another more serious interpretation: A symbolic insight into our human condition.

            As complex human beings we are both part of nature - evolved biological creatures with enlarged brains – but also part of the deeper spiritual reality – connected to God via our souls. As such we have both a conscious, sensual awareness of the time-bound material world around us and also an inner conscience & spirit  that relates us to the eternal world of God.

            Like the person in the poem, at times we never know what is wrong with us. Some of us are in a constant state of anxiety, “troubled” with our life and life in general. We are conditioned by the demands and standards of the world  - be rich, be successful, be beautiful, be recognized, be smart, be famous. These cultural standards continually pull and push us out of our true calling, our true Self, created by God and for God.  So, like the person in the poem, we  “never know what is wrong” with ourselves.

            However, at a deep unseen level, our conscience - our soul – keeps calling to us in our dreams, night dreams or day dreams. And this inner disturbance may drive us, like the person in the poem, to “chop up our beds” - our place of dreams – for firewood in order  to relieve & rid ourselves of our troubled conscience.  It is “more comfortable that way.”

            Some of us do this physically.  We leave the church & religion & all things that remind us of values and morality, of truth-telling, compassion , honor, justice, and other constraints on our drive for “success.” Others do it privately, secretly pretending to be persons of honor and integrity but driven by weakness or ambition. 

 

            But sometime later, perhaps in another night of dreams - near “sunset” - it comes “roaring up the street” at us.  Of course, “at sunset” suggests that we have wasted our lives, our time, our energy, our talent, being “comfortable,” free of a troubled conscience,  because we cut ourselves off from our own soul – the “bed” we have “chopped up” -  the deeper eternal reality of our lives. 

            The poem is a call to wake up – to begin to understand what  “is wrong with us” and to let the sometimes uncomfortable voice of God in our hearts call us to a truer, deeper more integrated, faith-filled life of service in and to the Kingdom of God both within and around us.  May this poem be for all of us both a humorous but serious wake-up call to live more courageously even if less comfortably..