Tuesday, January 6th, 1976

FOUR BELOW ZERO today and the sea was steaming so, as the sun rose, it looked as though it were on fire. Now at nine o’clock there is just a faint white fog on the surface below cold blue sky. I have been rereading a little of last year’s journal and am amused to discover that it seems chiefly concerned with the weather. That is one of the joys of living in New England—if ever boredom sets in there is an immediate weather change that would rouse the dead. Today, for instance, will warm up, we are told, and it may rain tomorrow.…

The first week of the New Year is nearly over, and what has been accomplished? A little work every day at purely descriptive poems. The pleasure is very great. I can work at a few lines for hours, lose all sense of time passing, like someone working at a difficult puzzle or a gambler at the tables, and it resembles both those occupations. So far I haven’t hit the jackpot, a real poem, but I do have a wonderful sense of freedom, of being in my element like a fish in water, of relief from pressure. I had so hoped for this, but since the gods enter into the writing of poetry and it cannot be done on will, I started off on January 1st in fear and trembling.

I suppose I am still in a transition between two years. Last year was not a good one, not from any point of view, the world or my world … except that I did finish A World of Light, and then started the new year knowing that Norton will publish. It was a year of loss, too many deaths, and the increasing senility in Judy. For six months or nearly between February and July I felt ill with a low-grade nose and throat infection; the summer was as hot and damp as summer in Florida; a lot of gardening work did not get done because Raymond was exhausted by his sister’s depression and by anxiety over his ninety-five-year-old mother. It was a year of effort, and I’m glad it’s over.

I feel now very much at peace, even happy, as I start a new year with poetry. It is the first time in three years that I have dared look down into the depths or play records while I am working. Until now music has been too painful … if I opened that door I began to weep and couldn’t stop. I had been traumatized by the final year at Nelson.

My experience with senility has been gentle with Judy, but it was traumatic with Dr. Farnham. For mental torture the paranoia of one’s psychiatrist directed against oneself is pretty bad. I was accused of trying to murder her. Lawyers were involved. But at least some of the anguish was transformed into As We Are Now, so it was not all waste. What deep experience, however terrible, is? And I think I came out stronger and more sure of my own powers than I have ever been.

The sea has erased the pain. I have never been so happy as I am here, and I welcome the new year with great expectations. Since they are expectations that I can myself fulfill and have to do with inner life and with the beauty of the world around me, I dare to say this. Peace does not mean an end to tension, the good tensions, or of struggle. It means, I think, less waste. It means being centered.