Lord Byron's Birthday Week

Week Four, January 2008

Over the years I have noticed that weird things always seem to happen on the poet Lord Byron’s birthday. This year stock markets all over the world did a major melt down. My retirement fund is now barely sufficient to load my Starbucks card and pick up a bag of cat food. Ah well, life goes on.

Byron Birthday happenings in prior years included the birth of the CIA, the Roe v. Wade decision, the introduction of the Apple Macintosh at the 1984 Super Bowl, and KMart declaring bankruptcy in 2002. In addition to Lord Byron, 22 January was the birthday of Grigori Rasputin, D. W. Griffith - also the death-day of England’s Queen Victoria, American President Lyndon B. Johnson, and actor Telly Savalas. And, sad to say, this week the death of brilliant actor Heath Ledger.

I read somewhere that the last major tsunami to hit the west coast of America occurred on 22 January 1788 - the day Byron was born. It wiped out many coastal villages, killing hundreds of people and sweeping miles of sandy real-estate into the Pacific. How the exact date is known puzzles me - there were not a whole lot of people running around with day timers on the Olympic Peninsula back in 1788. Another Byron’s birthday mystery.

This week I offer an excerpt from “Darkness” by Lord Byron (in keeping with this week’s gloomy mood):

“And others hurried to and fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and look’d up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world; and then again
With curses cast them down upon the dust,
And gnash’d their teeth and howl’d . . .”

The poem was written in July of 1816 - a year known as “The Year Without a Summer”, when the eruption of Mount Tambora plunged the entire planet into a volcanic winter. And we think we have weather problems!

The International Byron Society has sent word of a fund-raiser to restore/preserve the western facade of Newstead Abbey in Nottingham, England, Byron’s family seat (though my Apple has refused to read the attachment so I cannot forward the link). It has been an uphill battle keeping that half-ruined structure together. A number of years ago a coal mining operation threatened to snake a network of tunnels under the fragile twelfth-century building. Byronists all over the world raised a hue and cry - digging halted before it began. The power of the pen!

I am proud to say I did my small part to get the word out (Byron would have taken full credit for stopping the machines but I am a much more modest individual). Inspired by Byron’s poem “Darkness”, I wrote a poem called “Dark Dawn” in which I imagined how Byron might have reacted to the destruction of Newstead Abbey. I will reprint it following this week’s Office Plant Care Lowdown (so that you won’t have to read it to get to the plant care, “Dark Dawn” being one extremely long poem).

Byron’s Birthday Office Plant Care Lowdown: I cannot think of a more Byronic office plant than the ficus benjamina (also known as “weeping fig” - though usually it is the plantlady who ends up weeping) - gorgeous, moody, high-maintenance, classy and ultimately doomed.

The trick to these prima donnas is to recognize that their root systems are delicate threadlike antennae responding almost instantly to each change in their environment. Move the tree to vacuum and it drops leaves. Speak harshly and it drops leaves. Open a window and it will drop leaves (they hate drafts and heat vents.). To sum up, if they are displeased in any way they will drop buckets of leaves on your floor. Actually they do a bit of that year ‘round just for the hell of it. They are semi-deciduous - which is a fancy way of saying they shed like flea-bitten cocker spaniels.

If the leaf-drop color is yellow things are probably okay - that is either normal shedding or the tree is telling you it is a bit on the dry side. Water it. If the dropping leaves are green, however, it means trouble in the roots - the tree is telling you its roots are drowning/rotting/having-a-bad-root-day. In this case green is not good. (Note that this leaf color communication system holds true only for ficus benjamina - all other ficus types have their own body language. Ficus do this to drive you insane.)

You can prune ficus benjaminas at any time of year to keep them tidy . In fact it seems to be one of the few things they actually enjoy. It is better to prune lightly more often than to chop it radically when you suddenly notice branches lifting the ceiling tile. If you prune this tree hard it will send up wild shoots in all directions. Not a good look.

Fertilizing: easy does it is the rule. Feed once a month but only in Spring and Summer using half what it says on the package. If they get too much fertilizer they will drop leaves (surprise, surprise).

GOOD LUCK WITH THAT!

And now to the optional, extra-credit poem:

DARK DAWN

From the peaceful slumber of Eternity
I woke into a nightmare world.
A century and more my weary spirit
Had reposed within the healing halls
Of Death’s sweet palace, prisoner
No more to mortal cares and chaos.
When thunder like a million planets grinding
From their ordered orbits rent my sleep,

And I awoke upon a silent, ravaged hill.
The rotten stumps of ancient oaks
Like broken tombstones slumped
Beneath a shroud of brown and withered
Ferns, the sky a raven’s wing, the pallid sun
A corpse light rising from a vast depression
Stretching far beyond the limits of my view.
The only living thing a cloud of iridescent

Insects whirling at the crater’s rim.
The depths were sheathed in shadow, yet
I knew whatever I’d been roused from death
To witness waited there within the maw
Of that abyss. So, as the feeble light increased,
Seeping slowly like a fetid fog into the pit,
I followed it. The earth was rubble underfoot
As if an antique temple had been toppled

By horrific quake or cataclysm, stones
Like skulls upon the weed-grown path.
What noble place was this, brought down
To such profound destruction, as a carcass
Worried by a pack of famished dogs until the bones
Beneath the flashing teeth are cracked to jagged
Fragments, losing all resemblance to that light hart
That lately graced the forest with its bounding life.

With trembling spirit I descended deeper still,
A Dante into Hell without a guide to steer
My course or tell what scene of horror spread
Before my gaze. Alone and wary I descended
Into that black wilderness. Then deep
Beneath my feet I heard the ghosts of vast
Machines, worm gears grinding in the stygian
Streams of ancient coal seams, blind, voracious
As some monster of the Earth’s primordial infancy,
A mindless juggernaught devouring, devouring.

My soul then knew despair. For there
Upon the edge of that great gaping maw
I saw a fractured slab of stone, a poem carved
And but a single name. A stone I’d set a life before
To mark the grave of Boatswain, faithful friend.
When this forsaken piece of land was still my own,
My heart, my Newstead Abbey. So beloved
From when I stepped, a tender boy in rented coach,
To weedy yard to be a lord of dust and devilry.

It stood above a reedy lake, its gardens wild
With golden gorse, the stately oaks of Sherwood
Sold for Byron debts. But to the boy I was
It was a fairy castle in the purity of morning
Light, its broken walls enchanted battlements,
A child’s fantasy realm, my kingdom. Flawed,
As every human artistry is flawed, yet
The dearer for a sweet fragility, a beauty

In decay. To the last day of my troubled life,
When exiled far from native soil, Newstead
Was the lodestone of my soul, a well of peace
Within the chaos of existence. In truth,
The only one true home I ever knew. And now,
After near a thousand years, now for the sake
Of man’s base greed, for a few sad lumps of coal
The lake, the house, the gardens --- gone.
Gone into the abyss. Why bring me back,
Thought I, to break my heart upon this stone?

What had I done to bring this horror on?
Or was it after all impersonal, indifference,
Neglect - demons human-spawned. No
God I could believe in brought such beauty down
To punish faults as petty as my own. No,
What I looked upon was man’s damnation
Of his own best nature - a suicide of spirit,
A cancer nurtured on a meal of shame.

It was a dream. I stood within the welcome shade
Cast by morning sun through the transept’s
Filigree. The silver lake was wreathed in mist.
And Newstead Abbey stood tranquil and whole,
As it has ever been within my mind. A dream.
And not a dream - a warning, the mind’s reminder
Of how close we stand to the crumbling rim,

A hell hand-crafted to our own design,
Creation and destruction ever vying
For the upper hand, a fragile balance
In our power to defend or topple. And lacking
Constant vigilance, comes real this my nightmare.
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