On Eloquence

One of my favorite colleagues and I were talking in the hallway of our office building on Tuesday. He mentioned that in his 19th-century American poetry class the night before he had taught, among other things, Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Threnody," a poem of mourning written for the poet's son Waldo, who died in 1842 at the age of five years and three months.

In one passage of the poem, Emerson writes,

I hearken for thy household cheer,
O eloquent child!

meaning that he listens for the child's playful voice and playful noises but can no longer hear them. Discussing overstatement as one of the conventions of such poems, my colleague suggested to the class, by way of example, it's unlikely that even Emerson's son was eloquent in speaking or writing (the kind of eloquence we usually think of) at less than six years old.

But then we realized that "eloquent" might be applied to other things--facial expressions, body language, actions that "speak" and so on.

And so I started thinking about eloquence recognizing it in unusual but important places:

some are eloquent in their exuberance (Dennis, for example);
some are eloquent in their empathy for others (John, for example);
some are eloquent in their passion for God and baseball (Mark, for example);
some are eloquent in their music;
some are eloquent in their movements;
some are eloquent in their laughter;
some are eloquent in their touch.

We are surrounded by all sorts of harsh and ugly people and things, but we are also surrounded by eloquence and beauty. Which of these we choose to focus on determines the kind of lives we lead.

I'm trying to practice living in the moment--a "crabgrass contemplation," as Wilkie Au calls it in The Enduring Heart--so that I can come closer to living an eloquent and beautiful life.