Anne Porter's "Getting Up Early"

Thoughts on humility and astonishment.

Getting Up Early

Just as the night was fading
Into the dusk of morning
When the air was cool as water
When the town was quiet
And I could hear the sea

I caught sight of the moon
No higher than the rooftops
Our neighbor the moon

An hour before the sunrise
She glowed with her own sunrise
Gold in the grey of morning

World without town or forest
Without wars or sorrows
She paused between two trees

And it was as if in secret
Not wanting to be seen
She chose to visit us
So early in the morning.


from Living Things (Zoland Books, 2006)

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Most mornings these days, I get up around five and get ready to run in Central Park before I go to teach. When the time changed not long ago (an odd phrase: when the time changed), the mornings became — once again, as happens — these far-more-darkened-things. Now, I step out of my apartment, look up to see the sporadically yellow-lit squares in the massive building across the street, and look up even further to see a sky so dark I wonder if it is even morning. I walk for a block or two to remind my legs that they are, in fact, legs. And then I pull my body into a shuffle that becomes a jog that becomes a run. I arrive in Central Park at almost-first-light, and, as I wake into my body, morning becomes the morning. I don’t see the sun because of the buildings. I see the purple-pink alpenglow on the city’s broad, expansive brick. I see the silhouette of a bird awaking and ascending and alighting through and into and upon the orange. And I see, sometimes, the moon. It is a hidden thing. It is, yes, almost as if it lingers there in secret. I see it all: the arrival of morning and what is left of the night. I see it all coming, and I see it all not wanting to leave. And I feel myself moving through it. It is in this way that I know that I am alive.

One of the great joys of the past month has been reading — for the first time — the work of Anne Porter. Anne Porter’s first book — An Altogether Different Language — was published in 1994. It is the book where today’s poem was first published. In 1994, Anne Porter was 83. She had been writing almost her entire life, but her marriage to the painter Fairfield Porter, along with the work of raising five children, pushed her writing to the margins. She wrote, but she didn’t publish. Fairfield Porter died in 1975. In 1994, when Anne Porter was 83, An Altogether Different Language was nominated for a National Book Award. Porter passed away in 2011, just a month before turning 100.

In his Foreward to Porter’s collected poems, which he addresses to Porter herself, the poet David Shapiro writes:

You are known by everyone for your poetry, but as with Emily Dickinson, a tremendous amount of your life has been to welcome the stranger, in a radical hospitality that is now celebrated in many books as a minor fact, but was really part of building an amazing life. You and Fairfield gave us a car for a summer for a dollar, a canoe as a gift…And you gave what was obviously the most intense part of your goodness: your attention.

That attention is what is so striking about Porter’s work. It is the work of attention for its own sake, not for the sake of publication or glamour or even transcendence — though the attention does offer a doorway to the transcendent. Porter’s work gives its attention as a kind of love. It’s the kind of attention, I imagine, that, whether publishing her poems or not, Porter most likely modeled her whole life.

Here’s Porter’s poem, “Old in the City”:

You grow geraniums
And crochet baby-bonnets
But you walk slowly
Every day more slowly
As if there were a rock
In your poor belly

You stay away from doctors
They'd send you to the hospital
Where pieces are cut out of you
And after that you die

Instead you walk to the park
Where there are oaks and elm trees
That stream up to the sun
With triumph in their branches

Where there's a secret nation
Of squirrels who find it convenient
To set up their nests in the treetops
Like vendors who set up their stalls
By the steps of a great cathedral

And sometimes you sit in the playground
Waiting for the children
Who come when school is out

They rush in all together
Throwing their books on the benches
And racing to the swings

Over and over again
Their feet in their battered sneakers
Fly up into the air
And their hair too is flying
A wordless and intent
Delight is in their faces.

And here are the first four lines of Porter’s poem, “Boxwood”:

When one is very old
And close to dying
There are so many fellow-creatures
To say good-bye to

The delight and pleasure in reading Porter’s work has been in encountering a voice that moves as slowly and as deliberately through the world as hers does. It is a voice that recognizes the many fellow-creatures / To say good-bye to. A voice that sees such creatures in the first place. That acknowledges them. That stops to talk to them, to say hello. To listen and be listened to.

Such slowness — you walk slowly / Every day more slowly — is what begins today’s poem:

Just as the night was fading
Into the dusk of morning
When the air was cool as water
When the town was quiet
And I could hear the sea

There is something startlingly deliberate about these five lines, absent of punctuation but still punctuated by the implied pauses of the slowness brought on by attention. Porter lines up clause after clause after clause. She leads us slowly into the avenue of her attention by reminding us that this world, when you look at it, becomes filled with its own wholeness. This opening is like staring at one spot of sky and feeling your periphery become consumed with light, with stars, with the widening nature of things. If you read it aloud, too, this stanza has the breath of song. There’s an awkwardness, a bridge of rhythm, brought upon by the second when clause — When the town was quiet. But then Porter resolves that awkwardness with the subtly rhythmic line And I could hear the sea. Taken as a whole, this stanza is a praise song of sorts.

I have been thinking of Porter’s work nearly each morning this past week as I run. I just started my second season of coaching my high school’s track team, and I hold morning practice a couple of times a week. We meet at a track in the South Bronx not long after dawn. On the mornings where I do not run in Central Park by myself, I strap a little bag on my back, run to practice, coach for an hour, and then run to school and change and teach. Just this morning, running to practice, I crested the high point of the Willis Avenue Bridge, which connects Manhattan to the Bronx. To my right, the sun was throwing a little bit of its melted-orange across the river. But, even while running, I felt slow. The bridge is essentially a highway, and cars — beating or becoming the morning rush — streamed endlessly by in their race to catch the Deegan or the Bruckner and zoom along to the endpoint of their zooming. And, along the widened pedestrian path, I was passed near constantly by motorbikes and scooters with their electric motors, each one shooting past at 20 or 30 miles an hour. I felt impossibly old and impossibly slow, as if I had missed a deadline to apply to the world that sped right past me. And though I felt beauty, I also felt terror. I wondered about those lines from today’s poem:

World without town or forest
Without wars or sorrows

Where is that world today? That world where the moon watches us from? That world of the moon, a world of shadows and light — empty of us and yet still beautiful?

Today’s poem is a poem about choosing to see and allowing oneself to be seen. I think about this final stanza:

And it was as if in secret
Not wanting to be seen
She chose to visit us
So early in the morning.

In this tender, almost adorable personification of the moon, I feel in Porter’s words a sense that the moon is a deeply vulnerable character. Shy, even. The kind of character who might only allow herself to be seen by someone she trusts. And so, as such, Porter becomes a figure of trust. We trust her vision, her attention. The moon trusts her, too. Why, I wonder? Perhaps it is because, as Shapiro writes, Porter does not “strain after high things.” I think it is also because Porter’s words have both the affect and effect of someone who is allowing things to be exactly as they are. There is this quiet astonishment and acknowledgement in today’s poem, a wonder that we are even able to see what we are allowed to see at all.

This feels best illustrated to me in the final lines of Porter’s poem “For My Son Johnny,” written for her son who died in middle age:

While your mother, who sometimes did get bored with your puns,
Cries here on earth

And asks you, now that you're one of the greatest,
To grant her a portion of your littleness.

What a miraculously beautiful thing to request. For littleness. That’s all. Littleness in the aftermath of loss. Littleness as a way to live a life. It’s that littleness that allows Porter to see in the moon a neighbor: trembling, maybe; even scared, perhaps; a wonder-filled thing, simply watching. It’s that littleness that allows Porter to see in all things not just delight but community, to share in some kind of radiant fragility.

At school, my AP class just finished reading Their Eyes Were Watching God. We spent the final class doing a seminar discussion of the book’s characters and themes — all sorts of things. I sat silent and listened to my students wrestle with Janie’s idea of love, of the way she was forced to conform with the world, and how — in the midst of all of that — she managed to maintain some level of her individuality. I think that it is Janie’s belief in love that ultimately alienates her from the world, a world that does not seem to recognize or acknowledge her vision of what love might be, which is a love that seems so simple, one taught to her by nature, by a pear tree she sat under as a child. She cannot seem to find the wholeness of that love anywhere. She encounters a world that has stripped itself from the world.

Listening to my students, I thought of something. I thought of how it is the belief in the unlimited that causes one to live — whether they recognize it or not — a limited life, a life devoid of any encounter with mystery. And I thought of how acknowledging the limitation of the world and the self as a starting point — the world’s fragility and frailty, along with our own — is what allows you to find and live in the unlimited and imaginative wonder the world offers. It is the stance of humility that offers, I think, astonishment.

Lately, I’ve been reading the work of Byung Chul-Han — the contrarian anti-digital-age philosopher. In his short book, In the Swarm, translated by Erik Butler, he reinforces this contrarian stance and seeks to illuminate the ways in which our increasingly digitized moment enforces our isolation, and how new virtues — such as transparency and efficiency — do great harm to the prospects of solidarity and community. In one particularly striking passage, he writes:

Human perception achieves total efficiency thanks to digital optics. Prey is seized not just with a click but with every look. Seeing the world and grasping the world coincide. Google Glass totalizes the hunter’s way of seeing, which disregards everything that offers up not prey—that is, information. And yet, the real joy of the senses, including sight, is a matter of inefficiency. It means casting a gaze that lingers among the things of the world without preying on them.

That final sentence, right? It’s that work and that joy — the joy of casting a gaze that lingers among the things of the world without preying on them — that I think I admire not just in Porter’s work, but in all the poetry I have come to love. It feels too painful to look at the world in any other way. Too brutal, too isolating. It feels — and must be — violent. But it is how we look at the world, often when we are paying the least attention. It is how we become subjects of achievement and the alienation that is a consequence of being such a subject. To resist the normalized way of looking at the world is to look at the world with the humility of lingering and the generosity of paying attention. It has become a radical thing to look inefficiently at the world. To look, in other words, out of love.

Porter’s short poem, “On a Maine Island,” reads in full:

Fog pours into the sprucewood
And now they're all printed in dew
Cobwebs all over the moss
We never knew were there!

That exclamation point, right? That’s the unlimited wonder that comes as a result of acknowledging one’s limitations in the world. Humility does not have to be something devoid of astonishment. It can be an exclamatory, excitable thing. It can lead to joy. When I see the moon in the morning, I sometimes let out an audible gasp. I sometimes talk to it. I say hey hey, what’s going on. I call it adorable. I say it’s a pleasure to see you here. Sometimes the world conspires to make me feel alone. The moon in the morning never does.

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