The Hive of the Saints
Ok, it has been a long time, I know, but I finally have something to post. This is a paper I wrote for my Creative Writing class about my instructor Dr. David Craig’s book of poetry - The Hive of the Saints. I only used one poem out of the book, mostly because I was lazy, but he ended up liking it so it worked out. Enjoy!
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In his poem “California,” from the collection of poems entitled The Hive of the Saints, Dr. David Craig suggests that life on earth is ephemeral: it is impossible to find our true home among men, and therefore we are made for a far better home elsewhere. With a vision that is both introspective and incredibly perceptive he illustrates that the places we miss and the homes we long for are illusory and only once we leave that place do we conjure up the feelings we come to associate with it. The truth is that, while we are in these places, we find ourselves again wishing we were somewhere else. These realizations serve to bring us to his main point – that our true home is not on this earth, but in the afterlife.
Craig begins his poem with a reflection on the speaker’s time in Goletta, California with its “low-tide winter beach[es],” and its “wet-suited surfers” (Craig 87). His words carry a heavy sense of melancholy as he talks about his friends Craig and Gary, how they vied with each other for the honor of making the best screw, living a sort of “manufactured madness”, while hoping for a “holiness which might transform them” (87). In these two characters Craig gives us humanity. It is indicative of the human condition to live monotonously, to desire something more, and in the end to settle “for a kind of show” (87). Too often we settle for what we can get here and now, and forget that our fulfillment waits for us on the other side of death.
The speaker seems to sense this calling to something more and is restless, eventually leaving his mediocre friends for yet another place to call home: Queen Mary, California. And yet he finds himself uneasy still: “[A] place no more my own than home,/ than all the people there I never spoke to,/ than what moved me through those places” (87). What is it that moves him through these places? It is a desire for a peace which nothing on this earth can give. We are all “too far from home” (87). After telling us that his friend Craig had killed himself years later, the speaker flatly states that California was always “other” for him (88). By “other” he means that California was always something other than what he was searching for, something abstract and distant.
In light of this tireless search for peace he asks himself: What is home? Craig affirms, “[T]here’s no fiction like home–” (88), putting clever spin on the words of Dorothy in L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. He uses the word “fiction” to state even more clearly that there is no such place as that memory we consider home. He goes on further to say:
Still, I’d give a lot to be back there:
in Cleveland, near those friends who were never
as close or real as I would have liked,
near the memories we never shared, the places
that didn’t exist (88).
In this passage Craig reminds himself that what he misses is an illusion: a quaint mental image conjured to provide a sense of comfort. He looks to the familiar for contentment, realizing that he has idealized it and yet at the same time refusing to let it go. And when all is said and done, the comfort it provides is passing and the speaker finds himself still yearning for a place to call home.
To express this desire, Craig tenderly paints us a vivid picture of Lake Erie, “vast in steel blue or grey” and of “evening’s huge orange sun/ beginning to settle down, squeezing/ between blue clouds,/ and to the left, tinted skyline” (88). The speaker remembers his home in its most ideal setting, as an artist remembers a scene when he begins to paint. He draws out the best colors and composes his work from the most appealing angle, creating something exquisite from the ordinary. If only life were a painting, and those scenes that we treasure were frozen in acrylics or oils.
At the end of his poem, Craig begins to ask more explicitly the question which has been underlying the entire poem – are we really at home here? As we look back we find ourselves wishing that those places we love had never been left behind, and we long for the feelings we imagine we had when we were there. To this Craig poses the question: “Do we ever really like the places where we live/ when we’re there?” (89). Is it possible to be truly content here? Craig gives us our answer. “For a while maybe,/” he says, “but then the wishing starts all over again…” (89).
After all his introspection the speaker comes to the gradual realization that he can never find complete peace in either California or Cleveland because there can be no home for him here and moreover he will never find one. “In most traditions, this is called a grace,” he says, referring to the Christian belief that we are meant for life in heaven (89). It is a sort of blessing to be as restless as we are, for it is indicative of our ultimate purpose and the true reason for our creation, which is to dwell in the presence of God forever.
