As on a Darkling Plain

Coming home late Wednesday night, I ran into a friend in the Winthrop courtyard. It was cold and very clear. Orion, one of three constellations I can identify, hung in the southwestern sky, his belt and sword bright. We could see our breath. I started to push my friend on the tire swing, and he asked whether I knew “Dover Beach.”

“Not by heart,” I said, “but it’s one of my favorite poems.” So he began reciting it as he swept back and forth over the frozen ground of the courtyard, the tire swinging all out of rhythm with the meter—“The sea is calm tonight./ The tide is full, the moon lies fair/ Upon the straits.” My breath made little quick-dissolving clouds in front of my face. Every now and then a car passed on Memorial Drive. Ice had started to form along the banks of the Charles. It is dangerous to recite poetry, because it is so easy to sound pretentious or uncomfortable and thus to ruin it, but my friend recited in a low clear fine voice. “Oh, lovely,” I said. High above us, the tire swing rope creaked against the tree branch, sighed, and creaked again. He said: “But now I only hear/ Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,/ Retreating, to the breath/ Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear/ And naked shingles of the world.”

It was one of those small moments of surreal beauty that sometimes strike you in college. You will be sitting in your common room, having come back from a series of parties, and there will be a pause in the conversation, and you will look up at your roommates and be blindsided by your love for them; or you will be walking down the street, talking, and look up at the blue of winter sky over brick; or you will be eating in dining hall and the conversation will run on, absurdity piling on absurdity, as though by some momentum of its own. It was one of those moments born of the forced intimacy of college, an intimacy unique and bizarre and at times heartbreakingly lovely.

Like many people I know, I still live with some of my freshman-year roommates. I do not know whether this is a testimony to the sagaciousness of the Freshman Dean’s Office or to the unifying power of freshman year, of collective anxiety over Expos papers and finals and parties. But I know that I may never again share with anyone the sororial bond I share with them. We have applyled makeup in front of the same mirror, shared clothes, dryed each other’s tears, softened each others’ depressions, nestled together on futons. And there is some of this intimacy even with acquaintances, even with people living on your hall, in your House. You have shared bathrooms with them; they have seen you stagger down to breakfast in your pajamas, bleary-eyed; you have held the doors for each other, hurrying between classes or returning home at the end of a long night. It is an intimacy forced by the presence of so many young people living together, studying, absorbed in the same sort of arcane activities. It is as unnatural as a zoo or a game preserve.

In the Winthrop courtyard on Wednesday, as the tire swayed back at me and as I pushed it away again and again, my friend swinging up into the dark of the winter night, he said: “Ah, love, let us be true/ To one another! for the world, which seems/ To lie before us like a land of dreams,/ So various, so beautiful, so new,/ Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,/ Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;/ And we are here as on a darkling plain/ Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,/ Where ignorant armies clash by night.” It is not a heartening ending. It is especially disheartening for a senior preparing to leave college. For all of its faults, Harvard has been a refuge from the world at large. Standing in the cold Wednesday night, looking up at the stars over the dormered roofs of Winthrop House, my heart ached with the loveliness of the poem and of the night, and with the pain of leaving it.

Phoebe Kosman ’05 is a history and literature concentrator in Winthrop House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.