Glory to the Little Things or “Boy Wandering in Simms’ Valley”
By: Ksenia Panova-Bishop
Tags: Poetry Analysis, Poetry, Little Things, Christian Living, Literary Criticism

What does it mean to be sick, tend a home, and care for another? What of those obscure little moments which fill our days, the tedium of breakfast the repetition of which is matched only by the sun’s cycle? We live in a world that is loud and bright. It is played on social media where only the best and worst instances from our lives are allowed to be seen, as though the days between diagnosis to remission are nonexistent, as though the coffee you made for your husband for the thousandth time does not matter in the least. God moves the earth through seasons and will continue to do so so long as the earth stands. Genesis tells us that “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” In those repetitive greenings and emberings there is growth and death and little-by-little we move, as does the earth, through time. More moments will not be shared on Facebook than will be and you are charged with seeing the glory in those small instances and perform them with the faith that they are important when no one else is privy.

The poem which is a fine example of such a gentle passage of time is Robert Penn Warren’s “Boy Wandering in Simms’ Valley” which moves the reader from the consideration of a life lived and an observation of the aftermath. The poem is a testament to movement and each alive moment to be found in the progression of every single day. The beginning of this piece is riddled with lurid details: the boy is “well blooded by blackberry thorn,” the light is the “molten” variety of late summer, the cedars are in a tangle, and the boy’s movements are so animal that his breath turns up “spit white” on his lips. This assortment of details are so vital that when we are told he moved through “the lone valley, called Simms’ Valley still/Where Simms, long back, had nursed a sick wife till she died,” we are primed to consider the essential components of Simms’ days. They held decisions and acts until he “took down his twelve-gauge, and simply lay down by her side.” They bore no children and the farm “went to wrack with the old lady sick,” and the couple saw no company through the illness. When the speaker comes to this place, years after both Simms spent their lives, “the furrows were dim,” their trees, “a span thick,” while the yard went to wilderness. What must have transpired in this partnership of a marriage to keep the place well-ordered; for it must have been quite the helpmate that Simms had to have tamed the land such that its disordered state is noticeable to passersby.

The boy examines the agrestal land and the wildness creeping into the home: the spiderwebs, the inevitable creep of the outside through broken windows and, even among the ruin and the logical conclusion of man’s decline, he “thought what there had come to pass.” Helped out of his reverie by the setting sun, he begins to wake to his need to leave for home, presumably, until his roving eyes land on “the old enameled bedpan, high on a shelf/[he] stood still again,” taken with the meaning of its presence and “stood wondering what life is, and love, and what they may be.”

The presence of the bedpan proved to the boy that there indeed was someone sick in this place and, with the last of the sun slipping behind the horizon, the reader is invited to wonder at the rhythms of care and concern, soiling and cleaning might have occurred. It is interesting that the speaker of the poem leaves the readers with this meditation in tandem with the presence of the bedpan. There were no witnesses to the wife’s illness save the husband’s vigil and care and none to affirm his love for her as well as her efforts in maintaining the property. What rhythms had they moved in?

Structurally, the poem does not have a stable meter and yet every other line rhymes. When read aloud, the rhyme is hardly noticeable. Especially when metric stability is nonexistent, why bother with rhyme? One may argue that it is through this metrically disobedient verse combined with the barely-perceptible disturbance of rhyme are those details on which the meditation on life and love are parallelled; that is, the cadence mirrors the sometimes-pleasing sometimes-choppy rhythm of days which are not our own. The lines are irregular, long, and complex. The details are thick and rich. The rhymes serve to delicately punctuate and give structure to an entire piece that is devoid of any other structure. They are reminders that the meandering lines serve a purpose; that is to say, the rambling text carries the reader to each delicate insistence on the current which carries us, the reader, as well as memory along our days.

Our quotidian lives are filled with such a rhythm: complex, meandering, replete with seemingly irrelevant and common details as the daily sunset. They are filled with the daily dramas of illness and degradation and death but also in the noted details of cobwebs and ripe berries. Ultimately, though, we see that it is about the everyday details which accompanies this passage. We wonder what our lives are moment to moment, what is meaningful, and what we might give glory to. They are the details of illness and care, the ebb and flow of marriage, and death, journey and arrival, observation and memory.

The kingdom of God is full of small moments that allow us to use small words like “love,” “marriage,” and “care” with all the depth each act implies. For what is love without the acts which prove it or marriage without the sacrifice? The small things which we are entrusted matter immensely. As it is written in Luke, “One who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much, and one who is dishonest in a very little is also dishonest in much.” And what of faith which is as small as a mustard seed? Displaying trust in the common act of a seed of faith growing to a great tree which is our salvation is a culmination of such small moments: they are made up of faith that the sun will rise and that the plants will grow when we water them; they are the acts of care you show your spouse which allow you to say the word “love” and understand that it is too much and too long to define.This is a piece of poetry which displays the importance of the quotidian and punctuates the recollection of a life softly, almost imperceptibly, and yet carries the reader to its end.

“Boy Wandering in Simms’ Valley”

By Robert Penn Warren

Through brush and love-vine, well blooded by blackberry thorn

Long dry past prime, under summer’s late molten light

And past the last rock-slide at ridge-top and stubborn,

Raw tangle of cedar, I clambered, breath short and spit white

From lung-depth. Then down the lone valley, called Simms’ Valley still,

Where Simms, long back, had nursed a sick wife till she died.

Then turned out his spindly stock to forage at will,

And took down his twelve-gauge, and simply lay down by her side.

No kin they had, and nobody came just to jaw.

It was two years before some straggling hunter sat down

On that porch-edge to rest, then started to prowl. He saw

What he saw, saw no reason to linger, so high-tailed to town.

A dirt-farmer needs a good wife to keep a place trim,

So the place must have gone to wrack with his old lady sick.

And when I came there, years later, old furrows were dim,

And dimmer in fields where grew maples and such, a span thick.

So for years the farm had contracted: now barn down, and all

The yard back to wilderness gone, and only

The house to mark human hope, but ready to fall.

No buyer at tax-sale, it waited, forgotten and lonely.

I stood in the bedroom upstairs, in lowering sun,

And saw sheets hang spiderweb-rotten, and blankets a mass

Of what weather and leaves from the broken window had done,

Not to mention the rats. And thought what there had come to pass.

But lower was sinking the sun. I shook myself,

Slung a last glance around, then suddenly

Saw the old enameled bedpan, high on a shelf.

I stood still again, as the last sun fell on me,

And stood wondering what life is, and love, and what they may be.