This is the year I’ve declared I’ll send no more Christmas cards by mail. It’s too much, too hard. Too many people to send messages to. I love them all, miss them all, but they don’t all have to hear from me at the moment. I’m in no physical shape this year, and I refuse to pay to have cards automatically addressed and sent. What’s the point of that?
Certainly, I’m all for the message of hope in the darkest part of the year, the promise of light and warmth. But William Stafford’s little poem is so very personal, I’ll take it as my own. From me to you. It’s about the simple joy of being human, of lying on the couch and humming in your head. It’s about the stolen moments when no one is judging you for harboring that basic happiness even when the world is full of trouble.
Eventually you’ll get up and act busy. Not “be” busy, but “act” busy. In your head you may still be drifting contentedly, who knows?
You can save little moments like this, Stafford says. This is the richest stanza. You pick up the small pieces of joy, “light and easy to hide.” This is the child-you, the you that appreciates the world just as it is, that carries a basic happiness tucked away from the serious world of adults who shake their heads and frown.
William Stafford got used to rising early every morning to write during the 1940s when he lived with other conscientious objectors in work camps in Arkansas and California. That’s the only time he had free. He says he wrote down whatever occurred to him, following his impulses. “It is like fishing,” he said. He needed to be receptive and “willing to fail. If I am to keep writing, I cannot bother to insist on high standards … I am following a process that leads so wildly and originally into new territory that no judgment can at the moment be made about values, significance, and so on…. I am headlong to discover.”
Stafford’s collection, “Traveling Through the Dark,” won the National Book Award in 1963. He was the U.S. Poet Laureate from 1970-1971.
As someone commented, “Stafford generally has been appreciated as a plain talking but remarkably effective and influential American poet, one who has paradoxically fashioned a part of the mainstream of American poetry by keeping apart from its trends and politics.” I recommend Stafford’s poems if you want a voice of “radical quiet” as it’s been called, but “also of great clarity like a whisper without the hoarseness.” Like the quiet of the winter solstice. Like “Silent night, holy night.”