Hannah’s aging poet-grandfather stands in for Tennessee Williams’ poetic view of human nature and the human story and recites the following ‘last’ poem before he dies:
How calmly does the orange branch
Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer,
With no betrayal of despair,
Sometime while night obscures the tree
The zenith of its life will be
Gone past forever, and from thence
A second history will commence.
A chronicle no longer gold,
A bargaining with mist and mould,
And finally the broken stem
The plummeting to earth; and then
An intercourse not well designed
For beings of a golden kind
Whose native green must arch above
The earth’s obscene, corrupting love.
And still the ripe fruit and the branch
Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer,
With no betrayal of despair.
O Courage, could you not as well
Select a second place to dwell,
Not only in that golden tree
But in the frightened heart of me?
The same might be said for many of Williams’ flawed or tragic characters as well as for many of us who might survive, adapt, or make significant change if we only had the courage and confidence that goes with that important quality.
“We are stardust, we are golden/And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”–Joni Mitchell, “Woodstock”