Tag: forgiveness

Dayspring Mishandled – “Remember Not the Sins of My Youth”

“Dayspring Mishandled” is a short story by Rudyard Kipling, and is also a phrase in a pseudo-Chaucer poem (“Gertrude’s Prayer”) that Kipling wrote to go with that tale.  The first stanza of that poem is as follows:

That which is marred at birth Time shall not mend,
Nor water out of bitter well make clean;
All evil thing returneth at the end,
Or elseway walketh in our blood unseen.
Whereby the more is sorrow in certaine—
Dayspring mishandled cometh not agen.

Dayspring is an old word for dawn, for the early part of the day, and Kipling’s point is that things we did, mistakes we made, in our early life cannot be corrected and may have consequences for the rest of our life.  This is both a fairly negative attitude and perhaps also a fairly true one.  How unfair it seems that decisions that we made when we were nineteen about marriage or education or conduct should have repercussions for the rest of our lives!  “Remember not the sins of my youth,” cries the 25th Psalm.  The Psalmist is talking to God, but he might as well have been talking to himself.  Who wouldn’t want to forget the transgressions of their youth?  Who can?

There are two kinds of “dayspring mishandled” that bother us, I think, as we look back from our old age.  First, we acknowledge missed chances, like not taking full advantage of our educational opportunities.  Regrets like these are ours alone, and we can usually remediate, atone, or come to peace in some way within ourselves.  Second, there is the guilt of doing things (or not doing them) that affect other people as well as ourselves.  This is a harder kind of remorse – even if we felt that we had no choice (if we wanted to survive) when we did whatever caused the pain.  Nevertheless, parents, children, spouses, friends – suffered.  I have always taken some solace from the words of Mary Oliver:

But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Of course, Mary Oliver had no children.  Your children live longer than you do, and they never forget.

Literature has often addressed this idea of coming to terms with “dayspring mishandled;” one thinks of Oedipus the King or Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge. Of special interest in this regard are works written by older authors, who are looking back at a long past. I recently reread T.S. Eliot’s play The Elder Statesman, his last major work, written when he was seventy and about six years before his death.  It is all about the mistakes of youth – and how they can destroy the rest of life if left to fester.  Lord Claverton (the elder statesman) laments:

Those who flee from their past will always lose the race,

I know this from experience.  When you reach your goal,

 Your imagined paradise of success and grandeur,

 You will find your past failure waiting there to greet you.

And yet, Eliot gives us a relatively happy ending.  Old Lord Calverton ends up in a rest home full of people who know the secrets he has tried to keep hidden for so many years.  The secrets come out, the children forgive, and the old man dies in peace: “I’ve been freed from the self that pretends to be someone;/In becoming no one, I begin to live. /It is worth dying, to find out what life is.”  I recommend The Elder Statesman; I think Eliot learned much between “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and his last play.

We would like to forget our instances of dayspring mishandled, but we cannot.  Not only are the consequences very real, but as the wonderful Haruki Murakami says, “You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them. If nothing else, you need to remember that. You can’t erase history, or change it. It would be like destroying yourself.” Ah, yes.  Not easy.  But is it at least worth hanging the dirty laundry on the line with the hope that, after all these years, sun and time will bleach out the stains?

Like all of us, I have my share of regrets, of daysprings mishandled.  Besides acceptance (easily said, nearly impossible to live), the thing that helps me is to remember that dayspring is something that happens every morning.  Each day we get a new chance and an older and wiser self with which to face the challenges and the gifts.

I am not going be specific about my regrets here. But I have often written fiction about people who are trying to realize the “ideal” of the poet James Fenton:

This is my past
Which I shall not discard.
This is the ideal.
This is hard.

Since it is Lent, you might look at my story, “Shrove Tuesday.”

Forgiveness and Remorse

Forgiveness is different in old age. In the hurry of youth and middle age, we often either push forgiveness aside or bestow it hastily in order to get on with things. In our latter years, old resentments drift out of the silence, out of the memory that cannot remember the word for that thing over there, but can recall all unkindnesses in great detail – the ones we received as well as the ones we perpetrated. Often those we want to forgive (or seek forgiveness from) are not available; they have passed out of our orbit through time, through death, through dementia.

Old age is teaching me many things and one of them is that the human condition is universal. Sympathy is replaced by empathy. There is no time or heart left for enemies. We are all friends in our common human afflictions. And David Whyte says that friendship is all about forgiveness. He says it “is a mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness. Friendship not only helps us see ourselves through another’s eyes, but can be sustained over the years only with someone who has repeatedly forgiven us for our trespasses as we must find it in ourselves to forgive them in turn.”

And then there is the issue of forgiving ourselves.

Yeats wrote a poem that is a dialogue between the Self and Soul. Unlike similar medieval dialogues, the Self gets the final word here and it is about forgiveness:

I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.

“Casting out remorse” is easier said than done, but the result, according to Yeats, is a recovery of the innocence of Eden. In his “We must laugh and we must sing, / We are blest by everything,” the old Irishman sounds almost like Blake. Heaven all around us! But can we “cast out remorse” without doing something about it? David Whyte refers to the section of the Lord’s Prayer that implies in order to beg forgiveness ourselves, we must forgive “those who trespass against us.” It is a package deal. Of course, often the hardest person to forgive is oneself. I know.

I also find myself contemplating the need to beg forgiveness from this earth that we have been blessed with, out of which our kind was spun and nurtured. How it and its creatures have been abused in my lifetime! How can we ever atone!

Isak Dinesen too references the Lord’s Prayer in her sad story of watching giraffes from her beloved Africa being shipped to Europe:

The giraffes turned their delicate heads from the one side to the other, as if they were surprised, which they might well be. They had not seen the sea before. They could only just have room to stand in the narrow case. The world had suddenly shrunk, changed and closed round them.

They could not know or imagine the degradation to which they were sailing. For they were proud and innocent creatures, gentle amblers of the great plains; they had not the least knowledge of captivity, cold, stench, smoke, and mange, nor of the terrible boredom in a world in which nothing is ever happening….

As to us, we shall have to find someone badly transgressing against us, before we can in decency ask the Giraffes to forgive us our transgressions against them.

The giraffes and the polar bears and the elm trees and the monarch butterflies. Who can we forgive that will reciprocate the forgiveness we need from the world we are destroying? These are not easy questions, but they are on my mind.

Yeats says he is “ content to follow to its source /Every event in action or in thought; /Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!” Measure first. A good carpenter will tell you to measure twice. Maybe realization is enough, but I’m not sure. I think I rather feel, with Dinesen, that more is needed before we can “in decency” throw off all remorse.

This week’s story is “The Iscariot” and references the most infamous sinner of all and describes a woman who sometimes feels like she is running a close second. And, perhaps, a different way to look at remorse and redemption.