ecstasy of the lady of avila

Why the energy, the anger, the ferocity? Eberhart here ruminates on the permanence of man's actions, on the ways in which our intellectual, architectural, artistic, and spiritual endeavors can surpass mankind's "naked frailty," we who must ever die and rot like that poor animal on the golden fields. The fiercest struggle is not simply the struggle to survive—instead, we who wall the world with wisdom, withering, strive for immortality. Yet, ironically, in the attempt—an attempt to have meaning—still meaning may be lost.

THE GROUNDHOG

In June, amid the golden fields,

I saw a groundhog lying dead.

Dead lay he; my senses shook,

And mind outshot our naked frailty.

There lowly in the vigorous summer

His form began its senseless change,

And made my senses waver dim

Seeing nature ferocious in him.

Inspecting close his maggots' might

And seething cauldron of his being,

Half with loathing, half with a strange love,

I poked him with an angry stick.

The fever rose, became a flame

And Vigor circumscribed the skies,

Immense energy from the sun,

And through my frame a sunless trembling.

My stick had done nor good nor harm.

Then I stood silent in the day

Watching the object, as before;

And kept my reverence for knowledge

Trying for control, to be still,

To quell the passion of the blood;

Until I had bent down on my knees

Praying for joy in the sight of decay.

And so I left; and I returned

In Autumn strict of eye, to see

The sap gone out of the groundhog,

But the bony sodden hulk remained

But the year had lost its meaning,

And in intellectual chains

I lost both love and loathing,

Mured up in the wall of wisdom.

Another summer took the fields again

Massive and burning, full of life,

But when I chanced upon the spot

There was only a little hair left,

And bones bleaching in the sunlight

Beautiful as architecture;

I watched them like a geometer,

And cut a walking stick from a birch.

It has been three years, now.

There is no sign of the groundhog.

I stood there in the whirling summer,

My hand capped a withering heart,

And thought of China and Greece,

Of Alexander in his tent;

Of Montaigne in his tower,

Of Saint Theresa in her wild lament.

            —Richard Eberhart