The Sweetness of First Fruits

 

    In April the crocuses appear early, wandering further into the lawn.  Before long they will be rivaled by multi-colored hyacinths and trumpeting daffodils, and I know that soon the pear and apple trees will be spreading petals around the neighborhood in their extravagant springtime display of reproductive energies.  Every year these early manifestations of growth and warmth bring a particular delight,  precious and irreplaceable by the later pleasures of languorous dog days and then fruition’s fulfilment.  We feel a remnant yet of those old regreenings of the world that were greeted with such joy by the medieval poets after suffering the discomfort and privations of winter.    

     First fruits have always held an appeal.  Babies have a charm and a beauty of a sort quite different from that of later life, and, even among fair-minded parents, the first child may retain a special status unavailable to younger siblings.

     For that reason first children have often been considered the most effective offering to deity.  Cain brought “the firstlings of his flock” while Abel brought his grain, and, though the Lord seems to have preferred the younger brother in that primordial sacrifice, blood sacrifices were regularly conducted by the ancient Hebrew-speaking people.  Isaac was a first son with Sarah, and the story of his binding surely implies not only the use of animal offerings but also an earlier practice of human sacrifice.  In later times the “dedication to God” of first-born sons came to mean priesthood (until the establishment of the role of the Levites) though the first-born livestock continued to be ritually killed.  Jehovah did not entirely lose a taste for “first-born sons,” however.  As it happens, I write during Passover, a holiday that celebrates the magical slaughter of the elder sons of the Egyptians and the contrasting survival of the Israelite children.   

     Zeus-worshipping Greeks had similar customs.  In a striking parallel to the story of Abraham, Agamemnon’s first-born daughter Iphigenia was to be sacrificed until, in some versions of the myth, she is replaced by a deer.  The first reaping of wheat and barley made the customary sacrifice to Demeter and Persephone in ritual of the Eleusinian Mysteries.  Celebrants at the Thargelia in honor of Apollo and Artemis offered the first loaves after the threshing, though the festival had earlier involved human sacrifice,.  The Christian Greek-speaking authors of the New Testament used the same term as their pagan kin to denote a sacrifice of first fruits (ἀπαρχή) as well as using the word in a figurative sense, speaking for instance of early Greek converts as “Achaia’s first fruits.” 

     The medieval poems celebrating winter’s end often turn then to thoughts of love, and for many people a first love, though usually supplanted, is never replaced.  For them an initial erotic experience is sufficiently momentous that no subsequent love, however profound, can compare.  Quite commonly, an intense flame burns before the altar of that first love though it may be in an obscure side-chapel of the lover’s psyche, unknown perhaps to friends or spouse. 

     In fact, we become dulled to all experience over time.  A toddler will gape open-mouthed at scenes that have become all-but-invisible through familiarity to their elders.  The first bite of a radish, lick of a dog, the epic of an insect creeping along the ground, any sensation can inspire wonder and delight in a fresh and receptive consciousness.  Even during a single meal the first bite of any dish – roasted lamb, seafood risotto, or chocolate mousse – inevitably brings more pleasure than any subsequent taste. 

     Later, one must reach further afield to recapture similarly affecting experiences.  Travel can make one once again a child with no obligation beyond keeping eyes and ears open, relishing the moment.  If Europe comes to seem less exciting, the traveler may move on to North Africa, then Asia, then the wilds of the upper Amazon. 

     As with travel, so with literature.  To be sure, rereading a text has unique rewards as well, but a first encounter with, say, Midsummer Night’s Dream or “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” can, even if only partially digested, be intoxicating.  The same principle seems operative for writers as well as readers.  The first exemplars of a fresh tradition often exhibit a power and energy that fades even as later writers develop more sophisticated and perfect variations.  The primordial power of Gilgamesh, set down not so long after the dawn of writing, the melodies of the archaic Greek poets, the songs of the first Troubadours and Minnesingers, the earliest sonneteers, the original Beats, all possess a special appeal which charms in a way that is lost to their followers.

     In the careers of individual poets, the early work sometimes has an extraordinarily internal impetus that may fail in later works.  How many writers have received prestigious awards for mediocre books decades after their really influential volumes in a kind of belated recognition?  While a relationship between youth and creativity is unproven, in part because of the difficulty of measuring the novelty of either a scientific idea or a poem, a number of studies have tended to confirm that major innovation, whether in science, art, or even in business, is likely to be the province of the young. 

     I confess I find myself rereading the early work more often than later of a sizable list of authors: Ginsberg, Snyder, Bly, Lowell, and Merrill among them.  Those who had once crafted solid striking and beautiful poems later fell (by my lights) into tendentiousness or self-indulgence.  Historically, Wordsworth is an emphatic example of literary decline with age.  Few there are who have read the work of the years of his laureateship without compulsion, while every student has encountered a few early lyrics.  

     This is not to say that everything slides toward devolution.  To be sure, gardens offer rewards in midsummer and fall, transformative love affairs may occur in later life, a gourmet may both refine and broaden tastes as time goes on, we understand poetry more with experience and in general continue to make imaginative discoveries even in later life, and yet none of these facts can steal the fresh bloom of the new, the sprout just pushed through the soil to the warmth of the sun, bedewed in early morning.