Ode to an earthworm.

Responding to our recent post, “The Fallow Way,” Benjamin of The Deep Middle (http://deepmiddle.blogspot.com/) noted that he couldn’t think of a single poem praising winter. Our friend Ben couldn’t either, so I quickly pulled one of my favorite books off the shelf and started paging through. The book is Friends, You Drank Some Darkness, a collection of poems by three great Swedish poets, Harry Martinson, Gunnar Ekelof, and Tomas Transtromer, in the original Swedish with English translations by Robert Bly. Our friend Ben figured the Swedes would know a thing or two about winter.

Though I found several poems that were set in winter, notably Martinson’s “No Name for It” (“Namnlost”) and one of my favorites, Transtromer’s “Solitude” (“Ensamhet”), I found no poems about winter. But I did find a great poem about earthworms.

Like, I suppose, all gardeners, here at Hawk’s Haven we’re earthworm-worshippers. We rejoice to find an extra-fat earthworm wending its way through the leafmold or the compost, or looking disoriented when we trowel up the soil in our raised beds. (“Oh, thank God! We didn’t hurt it!”) We lovingly feed kitchen scraps to the earthworms in our earthworm composter—a gross extravagance we stopped trying to resist after lusting for one for at least ten years—and we haul the composter, box by box, into the greenhouse for the cold months and out into the shade of the roofline during the warm months so the earthworms who live there will be comfortable. Call us ridiculous. Call us gardeners.

At least, as John Lennon says, we’re not the only ones. From the time of Charles Darwin, whose book The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms is something of a cult classic, scientists have observed earthworms with fascination. Their ability to regenerate when severed, their pragmatic procreational abilities, and their ability to transform the structure of soil while unlocking its nutrient content have all generated both interest and respect (and, in the case of their regenerative powers, at least, no small degree of envy). Our friend Ben was not totally surprised that a Nobel prize-winning poet would turn his talents and attentions to writing a poem about earthworms. But I was surprised, I confess, that a Swedish poet would write about earthworms. Cold as it is, I didn’t even know that there were earthworms in Sweden. The things poetry can teach us!

I’ll give you Martinson’s earthworm poem in a second, I promise. But first, our friend Ben would like to say a few words about weather. That human life, that all life, would be shaped by the weather in areas of extreme climates such as our own desert Southwest, the Sahara, or the Arctic Circle, is not surprising. But the truth is that wherever we live, our lives are shaped by our climate. Its extremes determine our activities and emphasize the difference between rich and poor. (In extreme cold or heat, the elderly poor die in their unheated, unairconditioned tenement apartments while their wealthy counterparts head to Florida or the Caribbean or Monaco to escape the cold or to the great ski resorts and spas to escape the heat.) The general population may pretend, or even believe, that weather is trivial, and continue their routines as best they can however hot, cold, rainy, snowy, or dry it is outside. But the rising cost of fuel oil and electricity may bring us all back to our senses in a way that the sensational coverage of wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, and other natural disasters has not.  

As gardeners, we are acutely aware of the weather. But, unless we move to a dramatically different area, we may not be as aware of climate and its effects in general. That’s where garden blogs come to the rescue. To read about the garden adventures of, say, Tyra in Sweden (http://waxholm.blogspot.com/) as opposed to Chaiselongue in the Languedoc, basking in the glorious Mediterranean climate of the Midi in France (http://olives-and-artichokes.blogspot.com/), is an education, to say the least. I almost wept last night to see Chaiselongue’s beautiful lemon tree being planted outdoors and the great buckets of tree-ripened olives her friends were giving them from their abundant harvests. Our friend Ben resolves to a) be kinder to our potted lime and lemon trees in the greenhouse and b) bribe someone into giving us a potted olive tree for Christmas. 

But about those earthworms. Here is Martinson’s poem. I’ll give it to you in Bly’s translation, and in the original Swedish for any Swedish-speaking readers who happen by. But alas, being a Luddite, our friend Ben can’t figure out how to reproduce the accent marks over the letters, so the Swedish will probably look ludicrous to you all. However, it seemed better to give the original than to ignore it, since I always love to see the original words spill out, to compare them, their sound and sense, to the translation, even when I don’t speak the language. And in this case, it’s also a reminder of how much English owes to the languages of the Vikings who conquered and settled the British Isles. Finally, let me just note that, for gardeners in general and earthworm lovers everywhere, the answer to Martinson’s “who” is a resounding “us!”

 

        The Earthworm

Who really respects the earthworm,

the farmworker far under the grass in the soil.

He keeps the earth always changing.

He works entirely full of soil,

speechless with soil, and blind.

 

He is the underneath farmer, the underground one,

where the fields are getting on their harvest clothes.

Who really respects him,

this deep and calm earth-worker,

this deathless, gray, tiny farmer in the planet’s soil.

 

     Daggmasken

Vem vordar daggmasken,

odlaren djupt under grasen i jordens mull.

Han haller jorden i forandling.

Han arbetar helt fylld av mull,

stum av mull och blind.

 

Han ar den undre, den nedre bonden

dar akarna kladas till skord.

Vem vordar honom,

den djupe, den lugne odlaren,

den evige gra lille bonden i jordens mull.

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