GOD’S IN HIS HEAVEN AND ALL’S RIGHT WITH THE WORLD...

The year's at the spring,
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in his Heaven -
All's right with the world!

The famous quote is from the end of Robert Browning’s “Pippa’s Song,” a poem within a longer piece, “Pippa’s Passing.” It is the song of an exploited orphan girl who was abused by her employer and by society generally. She had to work long hours under terrible condition. I’m not sure what Browning is trying to say. Perhaps he is saying that even though there are people living in terrible conditions, despite all the injustice and evil in the world, we should still believe that God is with us and, therefore, all is right with the world. If that is indeed what Browning believes, I disagree with him.

Why does this matter to me? Today, for the first time in my life, I called 911... not for my own safety but because I came upon a disturbing situation as I approached the entrance to the Linda Vista Public Library. A woman, perhaps in her mid-twenties, was sitting clutching her knees to her chest; her head was thrown back and her face was contorted in at least sorrow if not pain. She was howling and crying over and over words which I thought were, “Why do you hate me?” A man whom I thought to be perhaps twice her age was standing nearby looking as if he didn’t know what to do. A little boy of perhaps eight was standing near the man.

People were passing on their way to and from the library. Everybody looked but nobody approached the man and child and crying woman. I parked my bicycle and waited for a minute trying to decide what to do. Then I heard the woman’s words more clearly, “Why do you hurt me? Why do you hurt me? Why do you hurt me?” Over and again she howled, “Why do you hurt me?” The man stood unsmiling, even sorrowful, but quite still. The boy clung to the man’s leg and said, “Let’s go home.”

I couldn’t pass them by without doing something, so I went to them and asked if there was something I could do. The woman looked up at me, held out her arm and pointed to her wrist and said, “He hurts me. He abuses me. He hits me. He threw me down.” I didn't see bruises. The silent child looked at me. The man’s expression didn’t change. He didn’t become angry. He didn’t look down at the woman. He looked at me and raised his hand to his head and made the circles we use to express craziness in someone else. I asked again if I could help. He shook his head, No. I asked if the boy was the woman’s son. He shook his head, Yes. I said to him, “Someone should do something. This isn’t good for anybody, especially for the boy.” The man shook his head in agreement.

I left them and went into the library where business seemed to be going on as usual. I asked the first librarian I saw if he knew about the situation outside. He said he did. I asked of anybody had done anything. He said they had not. I told him I thought it would be irresponsible to ignore a woman crying that she has been and is being abused. He agreed. I called 911 on my cell phone. The operator took the information... first who I was and where I was, whether a fight was happening as we spoke. She asked me to describe them. She said she would send a police car. I went back outside and waited. The police car came within five minutes, and I got on my bicycle and rode down the hill to where I live. As I rode, I couldn’t shake the phrase, “God’s in his heaven - All’s right with the world.” I couldn’t shake the heavy sense that all is not right with the world. At the time I didn't want to think about whether or not God is in his heaven.

Then I remembered where I first came across the Browning quote. I was the only person who signed up for a college poetry course, and assumed the class didn't make, but the professor insisted on doing the course if I was willing. I was. We met twice a week in his office. At first he talked and I listened. Then he read poetry and I listened, and then I read and he listened. Then we both talked and we both listened, and the course was absolutely as good as college courses ever get. One of the poems was Robert Browning’s "Pippa Passing." I must confess that probably the reason I have remembered the poem so well and the discussion so exactly after all those years (at least fifty) was that he told me about Browning’s mistake in another passage, the one that goes like this:

But at night, brother Howlet, far over the woods,
Toll the world to thy chantry;
Sing to the bats’ sleek sisterhoods
Full complines with gallantry:
Then, owls and bats, cowls and twats,
Monks and nuns, in a cloister’s moods,
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!

Mr. Malloy explained to me that Browning misunderstood a line from a 17th century rhyme that goes like this: "They talk’t of his having a Cardinal’s Hat/They’d send him as soon an Old Nun’s Twat." Browning assumed that the line following Cardinal’s hat must have been a reference to some article of clothing in a nun’s habit. No, indeed. 
“Twat” in the seventeenth century was a vulgar reference then as it is today.

So, as it usually happens in order for us to get through the day, my tears coming down the hill had turned to lighter thoughts by the time I got home. But I won’t forget the crying woman, the stoic man, and the frightened child outside the library just up the hill from my house.

By the way, you may know a town in Kentucky called Pippa's Passing. I haven’t a clue how it got its name... probably from an English teacher who didn’t know any more about twats than Browning did. I hasten to say the reason I know the town is that I rode through it once on a bicycle trip from Pacific to Atlantic. Of course, I thought of Mr. Malloy. Pippa's Passing is not all that far from Hazard, Kentucky, which surely must have a good story behind its name. Neither Mr. Malloy nor Robert Browning, as far as I know, had anything to do with Hazard.

Ruth and Bill Derisi found these leaf skeletons and thought I might like to photograph them. They were right. I stopped trying to make a connection between my writing today and the leaves.