Early this morning the City of Toronto finally reached a tentative agreement with striking CUPE workers. Pending union approval, that means that garbage removal may resume as early as Thursday. That’s great news for my ‘hood, which in the last two weeks has developed charming tumbleweeds of KFC buckets and McDonald’s wrappers. It’s also great news for the thousands of striking employees who can now return to doing what they love. Well, that’s the funny thing about work: even though it may not be what you love—I doubt garbage removal is a passion for anyone other than five-year-old kids—there’s still some satisfaction in the doing. Today’s post is the first in a two-part series dedicated to poems about the agony and the ecstasy of work.
Margaret Thatcher hit on something very true when she remarked that a good day was one in which “you’ve had everything to do and you’ve done it,” not one in which “you lounge around doing nothing.” Workaholics are bad sources of advice (just ask Carol Thatcher), but I think she’s right that there’s something entirely satisfying about accomplishing what’s put before us. Marge Piercy, one of my favourite living poets, wrote a great work about those people who roll up their sleeves and get it done called “To Be of Use.”
The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals bouncing
like half submerged balls.
I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to
move things forward,who do what has to be done, again and again.
The simple joys of manual labour and its charactering-building effects was a theme John Updike wrote about in his aphoristic “Hoeing.” But while he writes about a common activity, his language can’t help but hit at a loftier metaphor.
I sometimes fear the younger generation will be deprived
of the pleasures of hoeing;
there is no knowing
how many souls have been formed by this
simple exercise.
The dry earth like a great scab breaks,
revealing moist-dark loam--
the pea-root's home,
a fertile wound
perpetually healing.
How neatly the green weeds go under!
The blade chops the earth new.
Ignorant the wise boy who
has never performed
this simple, stupid, and useful wonder.
Why would poets so often write about work that they themselves rarely do? I suspect it’s because the greatest satisfaction is in the completion and not merely the doing. Manual tasks end in something “real,” as Piercy goes on to say. Intellectual work, however, is always partial, tentative, and open to debate. It’s much more like humans are: works in progress. The sage Robert Frost put a haunting image to this idea in “The Wood-Pile.” (Hint: it’s not just a woodpile.) Out for a walk in a “frozen swamp” one winter day (how Frostian!), he comes across this sight:
It was a cord of maple, cut and split
And piled--and measured, four by four
by eight. And not another like it could I see.
No runner tracks in this year's snow looped near it.
And it was older sure than this year's
cutting, Or even last year's or the year's before.
The wood was grey and the bark warping off it
And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis
Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle.
What held it though on one side was a tree
Still growing, and on one a stake and prop,
These latter about to fall. I thought that only
Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks
Could so forget his handiwork on which
He spent himself, the labour of his axe,
And leave it there far from a useful fireplace
To warm the frozen swamp as best it could
With the slow smokeless burning of decay.
I think that image is incredible. It’s not only so palpable (I swear I can smell the peat with my red nose and feel the damp in my bones), but I think immensely powerful. I can’t help thinking about “God” when I think about that Woodpile. Did he turn to fresh tasks, leaving his creation to warm the forest as best we could? I realize this post has turned heavy fast. But Frost gets to the heart about work. For a while it’s satisfying enough that we do it. But in the end, we all want it to mean something.
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