Then he promises to stop loving when, ‘the clover has lost its perfume.’ Like the Spanish Inquisition, nobody expected genetic engineering to go to work taking the scent out of such flowers as it continues to do.
As a clincher, he promises to love, ‘till the poets run out of rhyme.” Anyone in the fifties would feel safe in thinking this could never happen. Yet a recent Six Chix cartoon has Mother Goose being told by an English department: “No one will take you seriously as a poet if you rhyme.’ Just ask poets whether anyone publishes rhyme anymore.
The world was a different place back in 1957 when Webster chose bluebells, the scent of clover and rhyming couplets to prove eternal love, as they’d been around as long as human memory.
I heard the Twelfth of Never on the radio when it first came out, sitting on a blanket to admire the buttercups which seemed to button down our dry Okanogan soil like a vast tweed coat. It was spring and nature seemed a pretty solid thing in those days. Wild flowers came up reliably, year after year.
Nobody fiddled with nature then except for a little light testing of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico, just twelve years before Webster sat down to write. Is it significant, this twelve year gap? Is it yet another indicator that he meant the song to convey a hidden message? Given the declining bluebell, the genetically altered clover and poetry now a series of anagramic slams, was The Twelfth of Never meant to predict our doom now less than two years away? Listen to Webster.

“Whatta ya doin’? Standin’ in the middle of the street at THIS hour?’ my tenant calls to me, startled as she opens her door. “Photographing the morning,” I say, and being an artist, she sees this is worthwhile and comes out to talk in the morning dark that is more palpable than twilight.

My husband reminded me when I got home that this was the only doctor in his life he’d threatened to punch in the mouth (on an entirely unrelated matter involving our son), my gentle, non-violent, pipe-smoking husband. So it wasn’t just me, since he believes in the essential goodness of everyone and provocation that would cause him to say something like that had to be extreme -

So here I was, alone in a room with him. (Imagine him in the empty chair, knee to knee) I no longer lie helpless and undressed in bed. Now we were equals, except I am still younger and I had the advantage of memories. And, for pete sakes, I find myself feeling SORRY for the guy, grown older, greyer and thinner. I see him just as a misguided human being with a big mouth. I would make a lousy executioner. I tell him my version of what happened and how I’d disliked him since.

“And now?” he says, as though he doesn’t care about the answer.

“And now I see you’ve mellowed,” I said weakly. Not quite the gunfight I’d envisioned. Still, he decides to put me off on another colleague in the future, dim memories of some of our encounters probably seeping back. Good to have done it, gotten through it with no unkindnesses or malice. Glad it didn’t come down to throwing things or shouting (though I had a whistle in my pocket and was wearing a bracelet with minature covers of banned books to remind me of all the pain writers have had, standing up before me).

Staring our villians down, only to see them diminish, maybe never actually the threats we first believed.