What's In a Drop of Dew

““There is more glory in a drop of dew,
That shineth only for an hour,
Than there is in the pomp of earth’s great Kings
Within the noonday of their power.””

— Alexander Posey

If you follow my morning walk series, you may have noticed a slight obsession with water droplets clinging to petals and leaves. The number of them I passed before noticing the first one (at the end of this post) has to be approaching infinity. But once I saw the way in which they hold the light — not tightly as we do with our treasures, but in a way that softens it while simultaneously adding to its brilliance — I couldn’t stop myself photographing them. A dam within me burst.

There are (or, were before the burning began) 16 dew drop images included in Fire Sale, nearly 1 in 5 images from the collection have as their subject this majesty “that shineth only for an hour,” and yet is more glorious than “the pomp of earth’s great kings within the noonday of their power.”

SEE TODAY’S FIRE SALE IMAGE

Just recently, I came across the Alexander Posey poem from which come these words, well into the one-a-day exhibition phase of Fire Sale. But, on hearing it for the first time, I felt I’d found some kindred spirit speaking in these 113 year old words. Quite naturally, I went in search of him.

ALEXANDER POSEY, THE CREEK INDIAN POET

If his words were not enough to pique my interest (they were), his heritage would certainly have pulled me nearer. Posey, born in Mcintosh County, Oklahoma, was Muskogee Creek — as are my wife and children. So, it seems I arrived at the poem with a kind of profound understanding.

Through my father-in-law’s side, you can draw a direct line from my kids to Chief William McIntosh, one of the eight tribal leaders who signed The Treaty of Indian Springs which led to the Trail of Tears. For the role he played in that ill-fated treaty, William was murdered by his people, having ceded all remaining Creek lands in Georgia, along with about 3-million acres in Alabama to the U.S. Government. Tears born of tyranny stain the cloth of everything we, today, would call liberty.

It was with this sense of history, Alexander Posey penned these words, and by the gift of marriage that I heard them:

The Dew and The Bird
There is more glory in a drop of dew,
That shineth only for an hour,
Than there is in the pomp of earth’s great Kings
Within the noonday of their power.
There is more sweetness in a single strain
That falleth from a wild bird’s throat,
At random in the lonely forest’s depths,
Than there’s in all the songs that bards e’er wrote.
Yet men, for aye, rememb’ring Caesar’s name,
Forget the glory in the dew,
And, praising Homer’s epic, let the lark’s
Song fall unheeded from the blue.

Speaking about the poem on the brilliant Poetry Unbound podcast, host Pádraig Ó Tuama points out the defiant survivance concealed in Posey’s use of high English in these lines, which for a man who spoke and wrote brilliantly in his tribal tongue stands out as an arresting choice. By “using the language of elevated formal English,” Ó Tuama suggests the poet was undoing “some of the aspects of elevated formal power” that had been used to control and subdue his people, and by extension the family I married into.

Posey’s meditation on beauty, serves as an artfully constructed, irrefutable rebuke of the folly of those who worship at the Altar of Legacy. It seems steeped in the legend of Alexander the Great’s encounter with the great philosopher of his day, Diogenes. As Plutarch tells it, the conquerer searched out the philosopher and found him sunbathing. When Alexander offered to fulfill any wish for him, Diognese replied, “move out of my sunlight.”

Philosopher, like photographer, regards as precious that thing to which conquering men are blind. Across the ages wisdom reminds us again and again, that which we regard as power reveals itself as nothing more than an annoying shadow.

Posey’s twelve lines, like the dew drops and the lark songs they celebrate, contain a hint of Diogenes’ white-hot, scathing brilliance. Time, the poem seems to suggest, does not prize man’s petty valuations; and since time, not man, is everlasting, we might do well to heed the warning in Posey’s poem: