From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.

Prof. Beach Langston’s insistence that I had not properly analyzed the meaning of this verse (the penultimate from Algernon Swinburne’s “In Proserpine’s Garden”) was one of the final nails in the coffin of my appreciation of poetry. (Langston might have been correct; I have never been good at “analyzing” poetry, at least to destruction, I prefer to enjoy it). Luckily, the next year I read Rossetti’s Pinta Krajono and the Angla Antologio 1000-1800 and the coffin fell apart … Nowadays, I carry the whole poem in my handheld. I must confess that the metaphor in the last two lines is often a great comfort to me. Let Prof. Langston analyze it.

The poem might have appealed to the Tuck family, a group of Scottish immigrants making their way into what was then the American west (now the southeast) back in the 1830s, but in practice it would have been fairly irrelevant to them. Somewhere in what is known as the “howling wildnerness” (euphemism for someplace so quiet that you can hear yourself think), they stopped by a small spring welling up between the roots of an ancient oak, watered themselves and their horse (though not, I fear, their cat), and traveled on to homestead somewhere a bit further out into the wilderness. It took them some years before they realized that none of them were growing any older, and that they and the horse (though not the cat) were immune to natural causes of death such as rifle bullets. The discovery was not without its price; elder son Miles (Scott Bairstow) had gotten married and fathered two children, and his wife, finding that he was not aging, fled with the children, eventually to die in an insane asylum muttering about her husband’s dealings with Satan. The family eventually returned to the forest with the spring, built themselves a new home there, and Angus and Mae Tuck (William Hurt and Sissy Spacek respectively) made their home there while their sons wandered the world, coming home to visit every ten years. Then, shortly before the start of World War I, on one of those visits home, Jesse Tuck (Jonathan Jackson), biologically about seventeen years old but chronologically 104, meets young Winnie Foster (Alexis Bledel, of The Gilmore Girls), cosseted daughter of the man who now owns the forest containing the spring, and falls in love with her. The movie is about the events surrounding their romance and about her need to make a decision about what to do with her life — to extend it forever, or to let nature take its course.

A finely done movie, for Disney. It seems to have been aimed at teen-age girls, which is what the audience primarily consisted of. ⁽¹⁾ It is also, I am told, based on “the classic American novel by Natalie Babbitt”, of which I had never before heard. Whatever happened to Johnny Tremain and The Yearling, which were the classic American novels for young people when I went to school? Or, for that matter, to the collected works of Horatio Alger?

One also wonders how well the designated audience understood the interesting philosophical questions raised by the film, primarily during Angus’s discussion with Winnie about her options. I would hope that it would have made some kind of impression …

Catch it when you can.

⁽¹⁾ I counted four middle-aged men in the audience, including myself, if I may be allowed the conceit of considering myself still middle-aged; the rest were teen-age girls and their mothers. The upside to such movies is that, when they get out, the men’s restroom does not suddenly fill up and generate a long line.

i really liked the poem at the top of the page it was great!!