Today’s Poem: Never Enough of Living

Léonie Adams seizes the day

Claude Monet, Willows in the Setting Sun, 1889 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Never Enough of Living

by Léonie Adams

Never, my heart, is there enough of living, 
Since only in thee is loveliness so sweet pain; 
Only for thee the willows will be giving 
Their quiet fringes to the dreaming river; 
Only for thee so the light grasses ever 
Are hollowed by the print of windy feet, 
And breathe hill weather on the misty plain; 
And were no rapture of them in thy beat, 
For every hour of sky 
Stillborn in gladness would the waters wear 
Colors of air translucently, 
And the stars sleep there. 
 
Gently, my heart, nor let one moment ever 
Be spilled from the brief fullness of thine urn. 
Plunge in its exultation star and star, 
Sea and plumed sea in turn. 
O still, my heart, nor spill this moment ever.
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On the baldest level, “Never Enough of Living,” from the 1925 debut collection, Those Not Elect, by the American poet Léonie Adams (1899–1988), is a poem about treasuring the moment, because we have so few of them. This is of course a familiar idea: Carpe diem. We know it from of old, or at least from the seventeenth century and the Cavalier Poets. In Adams’s poem, the variation is more like habe diem — hold the day and don’t let go of it — but the idea is still fundamentally that old, familiar trope.

The writer’s challenge, of course, is not necessarily to conceive new ideas, but to make something new of the perennial ones. What has Adams made of this idea? She has made, first of all, two stanzas of mostly pentameter lines in an intricate rhyme scheme, abaccdbdefef in the first stanza, cgfgc in the second. Though the meter isn’t strictly iambic throughout, but rather more fluid — line 2, for example, reads as iamb-anapest-iamb-anapest-iamb — most of the lines begin on an iambic foot, with some notable exceptions.

The first line of each stanza begins with an emphatic trochee, back-to-back with the iambic phrase, “my heart.” The word “plunge,” in the third line of the second stanza, also initiates that line with an emphasis that mimics the word’s action. There are, too, those contractions of the meter, the variously strict or loose trimeter of lines 9, 11, 12, and 16, whose contrast with the prevailing meter generates more drama and sense of movement in the form.

Léonie Adams, c. 1945 (Wikimedia Commons)

Within the temporal boundaries the meter marks out, as well as the strictness of the rhyme scheme, the poem’s rhythms exhibit a remarkable freedom of movement — which is the point. No, there is “never enough of living.” Yet what time there is, for this person conscious of being alive, is stuffed full of experience. Within the scaffolding of the form, a whole world of intense feeling has room to expand, revealings its landscapes with their hills and plains and vistas, their willows, winds, and waters. In other words, the poet has created a composition, with a structure and order. And within the confines of that composition, the old idea achieves its measure of unrepeatable life.

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