Behind A Pane of Glass

In 1992, the English poet Elizabeth Jennings was awarded the Commander of the British Empire (CBE) by Queen Elizabeth II for “highly distinguished and innovative contribution on a national level.” By this time, Jennings, a fragile and eccentric woman and a brilliant poet, was beginning to show stress marks. She was increasingly reclusive and erratic, and perhaps many of her friends thought she was fantasizing when she told them that she would receive the CBE from Her Majesty, the Queen.

On the day of the ceremony at Buckingham Palace, Jennings’ sister Aileen helped her dress for the event. She wore a flowered skirt, knitted sweater, red wool beret, black oversize duffel coat, tights, and lace up shoes. Miss Jennings was in the habit of hauling several “carrier bags” with her at all times, the sort of plastic tote bags we get at the grocery stores, filled with various things the poet considered needful to have with her at all times. She reportedly had a full collection of the bags gripped in her fists when she attended the reception dinner for her CBE about a week after the ceremony. She was referred to in the British press as “the bag lady poet,” with that arch venom that they can manage so well. It seems likely that many of her acquaintances were shocked to find out that Jennings really did receive the CBE from Queen Elizabeth II, and were dismayed at her appearance and demeanor for such a plummy event.

Elizabeth Jennings has for many years been one of my favorite poets. She was a quiet, devout lady with tender feelings and was poorly armed against the hatefulness of this world. She lived her reclusive life and wrote her poems compulsively, feeling that they kept her sane and saved. She was highly regarded as an artist, but pitied and whispered about as a human being. Whenever I read her poems, I like to imagine that she is aware that I’m doing so, that we’re connected on some level, that she’s aware of my interest in her work the same way that a hidden fish is aware of a disturbance on the surface of the water above. I like to think that she smiles over my shoulder and blushes in delight when my finger pauses on a particular line and I stare through the page and burn through the thoughts that have come to me as a result of another encounter with the lady. I love her.

~ S.K. Orr

Poem In Winter

Today the children begin to hope for snow

And look in the sky for auguries of it.

It is not for such omens that we wait,

Our world may not be settled by the slow

Falling of flakes to lie across our thought.

 

And even if the snow comes down indeed

We still shall stand behind a pane of glass

Untouched by it, and watch the children press

Their image on the drifts the snow has laid

Upon a winter they think they have made.

 

This is a wise illusion. Better to

Believe the near world is created by

A wish, a shaping hand, a certain eye,

Than hide in the mind’s corner as we do

As though there were no world, no fall of snow.

By Elizabeth Jennings