Asleep

I am easy to please.  Or so I like to think.  Perhaps this is merely a matter of growing old, evidence of a fond mind.  "Or else I'm gettin' soft."  Recently, for instance, I have spent a fair amount of pleasurable time mulling over various English translations of a six-line fragment (all that has been recovered) of a Greek poem written by Alcman, who lived in the late 7th century B. C., and who may or may not have been from Sparta.  Mind you, my preoccupation has not been a scholarly endeavor:  I find the lines lovely, and I have been loath to quickly leave them.

The mountain-summits sleep, glens, cliffs and caves,
     Are silent -- all the black earth's reptile brood --
     The bees -- the wild beasts of the mountain wood;
In depths beneath the dark red ocean's waves
     Its monsters rest, whilst wrapt in bower and spray
     Each bird is hush'd that stretch'd its pinions to the day.

Alcman (translated by Thomas Campbell), in Adrian Poole and Jeremy Maule (editors), The Oxford Book of Classical Verse in Translation (Oxford University Press 1995).  The poem was originally published in 1821 in The New Monthly Magazine.

Walter John James (1869-1932), "Troughend near Otterburn"

I am always bemused and puzzled when I hear someone proclaim that our age is one in which we are witnessing "the death of poetry" or, more broadly, "the death of culture."  How can poetry and culture be in their death throes if we can read Alcman or Simonides today, Bashō or Saigyō tomorrow, Robert Herrick or Thomas Hardy the day after that, and T'ao Ch'ien or Wang Wei the day after that?  Enough of this death business.

In fact, the creation and preservation of Beauty and Truth by means of poetry and other works of art has always been -- and will always be -- a near run thing.  At any given time in the history of humanity, the survival of Beauty and Truth has depended upon the love and good offices of a few thousand, a few hundred, or even a few dozen people.  These people are not saints, nor are they in any way superior to their fellow human beings.  They have simply (to their surprise and delight) stumbled upon something of the greatest importance.

                              Night

The far peaks sleep, the great ravines,
The foot-hills, and the streams.
Asleep are trees, and hivèd bees,
The mountain beasts, and all that dark earth teems,
The glooming seas, the monsters in their deeps:
And every bird, its wide wings folded, sleeps.

Alcman (translated by H. T. Wade-Gery), in T. F. Higham and C. M. Bowra (editors), The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation (Oxford University Press 1938).  Wade-Gery added the title "Night" to the fragment.

There you have it:  by reading six lines of verse written over 2,500 years ago, you have prevented the death of poetry.  All is now well with the World.

George Reid (1841-1913), "Evening" (1873)

Please bear with me as I state the obvious:  the best poetry is timeless. When I read Alcman's fragment, I do not feel that I am reading something that is alien to the World as I know it.  And here is something marvelous:  a good poem's timelessness is directly related to the fact that it is the product of a fleeting moment of revelation.  "Now is the all-sufficing all/Wherein to love the lovely well,/Whate'er befall."  By virtue of poetry, a vanished moment becomes imperishable.

"In old-fashioned novels, we often have the situation of a man or a woman who realizes only at the end of the book, and usually when it is too late, who it was that he or she had loved for many years without knowing it.  So a great many haiku tell us something that we have seen but not seen.  They do not give us a satori, an enlightenment;  they show us that we have had an enlightenment, had it often, -- and not recognized it."

R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 322.

Although Blyth's observation relates to haiku in particular, I would suggest that it is applicable to all forms of poetry, in all ages and in all places.

The mountain-tops are asleep, and the mountain-gorges,
     Ravine and promontory:
Green leaves, every kind of creeping things
     On the breast of the dark earth, sleep:
Creatures wild in the forest, wandering bees,
Great sea-monsters under the purple sea's
Dark bosom, birds of the air with all their wings
     Folded, all sleep.

Alcman (translated by Walter Headlam), in Walter Headlam, A Book of Greek Verse (Cambridge University Press 1907).

Walter John James, "Evening" (1913)

As I was thinking about poetry as enlightenment or revelation, as the product of an evanescent moment, this appeared out of the blue:

   Dust of Snow

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

Robert Frost, New Hampshire (Henry Holt 1923).  (A word of caution:  I am not suggesting that "Dust of Snow" is "about" poetry.  I am merely reporting its unexpected arrival on the scene.)

But let us return to a night in Greece two millennia ago.  Which is tonight.

                                     Vesper

Now sleep the mountain-summits, sleep the glens,
The peaks, the torrent-beds; all things that creep
On the dark earth lie resting in their dens;
Quiet are the mountain-creatures, quiet the bees,
The monsters hidden in the purple seas;
And birds, the swift of wing,
Sit slumbering.

Alcman (translated by F. L. Lucas), in F. L. Lucas (editor), Greek Poetry for Everyman (J. M. Dent 1951).  Lucas added the title "Vesper."

Reginald Brundrit (1883-1960), "Nightfall"

Wind

Is there anything as peaceful and as pleasurable as the soft buffeting of a warm wind in your ears as you walk abroad on a sunny day?  A steady, yet gentle and enfolding, wind.  A blue and gold day in late spring, summer, or early autumn.  There is no reason to pine for a future Paradise:  we abide within it now.

Late in his life, A. E. Housman declared:  "In philosophy I am a Cyrenaic or egoistic hedonist, and regard the pleasure of the moment as the only possible motive of action."  A. E. Housman, letter to Houston Martin (March 22, 1936), in Archie Burnett (editor), The Letters of A. E. Housman, Volume II (Oxford University Press 2007), p. 528.  "In a world of steel-eyed death and men who are fighting to be warm," there is something to be said for Housman's philosophical inclinations.  The word "hedonism" has taken on a pejorative cast in modern times:  it has come to imply licentiousness or immorality.  But, after all, it simply means (according to The Oxford English Dictionary) "the doctrine or theory of ethics in which pleasure is regarded as the chief good, or the proper end of action."

When it comes to the beautiful particulars of the World, I am an unapologetic hedonist.  But I would hope that my pleasure is not "egoistic" (or "egotistic" either).  And I do my best (subject to constant failure) to combine my pleasure with gratitude.

Hence, for instance, the wind.

            Nobody Knows

Often I've heard the Wind sigh
     By the ivied orchard wall,
Over the leaves in the dark night,
     Breathe a sighing call,
And faint away in the silence,
     While I, in my bed,
Wondered, 'twixt dreaming and waking,
          What it said.

Nobody knows what the Wind is,
     Under the height of the sky,
Where the hosts of the stars keep far away house
     And its wave sweeps by --
Just a great wave of the air,
     Tossing the leaves in its sea,
And foaming under the eaves of the roof
          That covers me.

And so we live under deep water,
     All of us, beasts and men,
And our bodies are buried down under the sand,
     When we go again;
And leave, like the fishes, our shells,
     And float on the Wind and away,
To where, o'er the marvellous tides of the air,
          Burns day.

Walter de la Mare, Peacock Pie: A Book of Rhymes (Constable 1913).

James McIntosh Patrick (1907-1998), "A Castle in Scotland"

But hedonism remains at the surface of things.  Whereas, as de la Mare says, "we live under deep water."  This is where immanence comes in: glimmers and glimpses and inklings of something within, behind, and beyond all of those beautiful surfaces.

One either has this sense of the World or one does not.  I do not say this in a judgmental fashion, nor do I claim that those who have this sense are "wiser" or more "enlightened" than those who do not.  How we find ourselves in the World is, for each of us, a matter of mystery.  It is not a case of true or false or of right or wrong.

De la Mare again:  "Nobody Knows."  Exactly.  No explanations are necessary.  Nor are they forthcoming.  We should leave it at that.

In the meantime, we have the wind.  And poems about the wind.

                    Providence

White roses shatter, overblown,
by the breath of a little wind undone,
yet the same air passing scarcely stirs
the tall dark green perpetual firs.

John Hewitt, Scissors for a One-Armed Tailor: Marginal Verses 1929-1954 (1974)

"Providence" feels like a haiku:  a report on experience.  (To borrow from Edmund Blunden.)  However, a word such a "providence" would likely be avoided by a haiku poet.  Too subjective.  Of course, I am completely open to the possibility that what the wind does may well be "providence":  I am not in any way criticizing Hewitt's use of the word.

Hewitt, like a good haiku poet, tells us exactly what he saw.  The difference is that he gives us a hint.  A haiku poet would leave us to draw our own conclusions.  Or, better yet, would leave us to draw no conclusions at all, but only see the World as it is, or, perhaps more accurately, as the haiku poet saw it in a moment of passing time.

Enough of that.  I do not wish to create the impression that I am quibbling about "Providence":  I think it is a lovely poem.  As is this, another poem about the wind of Ireland.

                              Afterpeace

This wind that howls about our roof tonight
And tears live branches screaming from great trees
Tomorrow may have scarcely strength to ruffle
The rabbit's back to silver in the sun.

Patrick MacDonogh, Poems (edited by Derek Mahon) (The Gallery Press 2001).

James McIntosh Patrick,"Boreland Mill, Kirkmichael" (1950)

Of course, poets cannot help but bring humans into their apostrophes about the wind.  Thus, for instance, they say that the wind "sighs" or "moans" or "cries."  This is to be expected.  All poetry, all art, is an attempt to place ourselves into the World in the hope of making sense of things, however briefly.  It is not surprising that, in doing so, we see ourselves (or come upon ourselves) in the World.

Moreover, we mustn't forget that the beautiful particulars of the World include human beings.  The wind.  People.

            The Wind Shifts

This is how the wind shifts:
Like the thoughts of an old human,
Who still thinks eagerly
And despairingly.
The wind shifts like this:
Like a human without illusions,
Who still feels irrational things within her.
The wind shifts like this:
Like humans approaching proudly,
Like humans approaching angrily.
This is how the wind shifts:
Like a human, heavy and heavy,
Who does not care.

Wallace Stevens, Harmonium (Alfred A. Knopf 1923).

We are the wind and the wind is us.  The wind is us and we are the wind.

But we mustn't go too far.  Despite the pretensions of the so-called "Age of Enlightenment" (also, risibly, known as "the Age of Reason"), we are not the measure of the World.  Our conceit may be boundless and shameless, but we are not in a position to make claim to the wind.

This past winter and spring have been, even for this damp part of the world, unseasonably rainy.  As a consequence, the wild grasses in the meadows are more than four feet tall in places, taller than I have ever seen them.  As I pass by them on a breezy day, I am inclined to think that they are whispering as they sway, falling and rising, in the wind.  But the beauty of that sound has absolutely nothing to do with the name I place upon it.

            Thesis and Counter-Thesis

-- Love of God is love of self.
The stars and the seas are filled by precious I
Sweet as a pillow and a sucked thumb.

-- It would be most unflattering for adoring men
If the grasshopper chirping in the warm grass
Could glorify that attribute called Being
In a general manner, without referring it to his own persona.

Czeslaw Milosz, City Without a Name (1969).

James McIntosh Patrick, "Downie Mill" (1962)

As I suggested here recently, wisdom does not necessarily come with age.  I can attest to that.  But growing old does provide an opportunity to pare your life down to essentials.  Think of all the things you once thought were important and that now mean nothing.  The length of that list will depend upon the length of your time upon the earth, dear reader.

One day you will realize, out of the blue, that you have lived more years than the number of years that remain to you.  On that day, life becomes simpler.  You may turn your attention to the wind.

                                                    Autumn

Cathedral of my enchantments, autumn wind, I grew old giving thanks.

Czeslaw Milosz, Road-side Dog (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1998).

James McIntosh Patrick, "Braes o' Lundie"

"The Falling Of The Leaves"

The two autumn poems by Arthur Symons in my previous post got me to thinking of autumn poems by another turn-of-the-century poet:  W. B. Yeats.  As I age, I find myself drawn more and more to the Yeats of the Celtic Twilight period.  Although Yeats's egotism and haughtiness have always been a stumbling block for me, I have never lost my fondness for the romantic, dreamy, love-struck poems of his early years (say up until about 1903, when In the Seven Woods was published).

Many of us went through a period of youthful infatuation with the poems of the younger Yeats.  And though the years have taught us a few things (as they taught Yeats), the poems are redolent of the time when I first read them.  They can still make the heart skip a beat -- for the poem itself and for what it brings back.

William Jay, "At the Fall of Leaf, Arundel Park, Sussex" (1883)

            The Falling of the Leaves

Autumn is over the long leaves that love us,
And over the mice in the barley sheaves;
Yellow the leaves of the rowan above us,
And yellow the wet wild-strawberry leaves.

The hour of the waning of love has beset us,
And weary and worn are our sad souls now;
Let us part, ere the season of passion forget us,
With a kiss and a tear on thy drooping brow.

W. B. Yeats, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889).

Alexander Docharty, "An Autumn Day" (c. 1917)

                            Ephemera

'Your eyes that once were never weary of mine
Are bowed in sorrow under pendulous lids,
Because our love is waning.'
                                                      And then she:
'Although our love is waning, let us stand
By the lone border of the lake once more,
Together in that hour of gentleness
When the poor tired child, Passion, falls asleep:
How far away the stars seem, and how far
Is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart!'

Pensive they paced along the faded leaves,
While slowly he whose hand held hers replied:
'Passion has often worn our wandering hearts.'

The woods were round them, and the yellow leaves
Fell like faint meteors in the gloom, and once
A rabbit old and lame limped down the path;
Autumn was over him:  and now they stood
On the lone border of the lake once more:
Turning, he saw that she had thrust dead leaves
Gathered in silence, dewy as her eyes,
In bosom and hair.
                                      'Ah, do not mourn,' he said,
'That we are tired, for other loves await us;
Hate on and love through unrepining hours.
Before us lies eternity; our souls
Are love, and a continual farewell.'

W. B. Yeats, Ibid.

Well, well.  Whew.  Sigh.  There was a time when I had the whole thing by heart.  It's a laundry list of youthful romantic melancholy, isn't it?  "How far away the stars seem, and how far/Is our first kiss . . . Passion has often worn our wandering hearts . . . our souls/Are love, and a continual farewell."  My favorite is:  " . . . the yellow leaves/Fell like faint meteors in the gloom."

Thomas Hardy certainly got it right in the closing stanza of "I Look Into My Glass":

But Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide.

Or, as a troubadour was newly singing in those long ago days when I was immersed in Yeats: "Either I'm too sensitive or else I'm getting soft." Another heartbreaking ode on the same theme:

Sundown, yellow moon, I replay the past.
I know every scene by heart, they all went by so fast.

John Milne Donald, "Autumn Leaves" (1864)

How To Live, Part Twenty: "The Foggy Lane"

There is something to be said for winnowing, for paring down.  The culture around us encourages short attention spans and hyperactive grasping after chimeras.  Don't get me wrong:  I am in no position to judge.  I don't have the strength of character to be an anchorite.  I am easily seduced by chimeras.  "Garlic and sapphires in the mud/Clot the bedded axle-tree." "Jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule."  Or something like that.

But you have to start somewhere.  Thus -- speaking of mud -- it is always a good idea to keep an eye to the ground.  For instance, this week I saw quite a few crocuses (white, yellow, pale purple, deep purple), as well as the first daffodils.

George Charlton, "Well Walk from New End Square" (1930)

          The Foggy Lane

The houses seem to be floating
in the fog, like lights at sea.

Last summer I came here with a man
who spoke of the ancient Scottish poets --
how they would lie blindfolded,
with a stone placed on the belly,
and so compose their panegyrics . . .
while we, being comfortable, find nothing to praise.

Then I came here with a radical
who said that everything is corrupt;
he wanted to live in a pure world.

And a man from an insurance company
who said that I needed "more protection."

Walking in the foggy lane
I try to keep my attention fixed
on the uneven, muddy surface . . .
the pools made by the rain,
and wheel ruts, and wet leaves,
and the rustling of small animals.

Louis Simpson, Adventures of the Letter I (1971).

What Simpson says is nothing more nor less than what the Chinese T'ang Dynasty poets and the Japanese haiku poets have been saying for centuries:  pay attention.   Pay loving attention.

     The spring day closes,
Lingering
     Where there is water.

Issa (1763-1827) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 2: Spring (Hokuseido Press 1950), page 38.

Herbert Victor Tempest (1913-2003), "View of Leicester Museum"

Life As A Work Of Art, Part Five: "Grand Opera"

I have a confession to make.  A confession that does not reflect well on me at all.  Here it is:  I have never been able to develop an appreciation for opera.

For this bit of cultural ignorance, I beg the indulgence of any readers who are fond of the art form.  The fault is all mine.  I realize that there are opera devotees who will travel the globe to experience the latest version of The Ring Cycle in Bayreuth.  I can only envy them their good taste and their passion.  I, however, fell asleep during the last opera that I attended (Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, a couple of decades ago).

                                                        Stanley Spencer
                                 "Swan Upping at Cookham" (1915-1919)

To demonstrate the depths of cultural depravity to which I have sunk, I shamefacedly admit that the opening lines of a song that I have been listening to off and on for over 40 years still give me a thrill each time I hear them:  "They're selling postcards of the hanging/They're painting the passports brown/The beauty parlor is filled with sailors/The circus is in town."  In contrast, the sublimest moments of opera leave me cold.  (An aside which further demonstrates my Philistinism:  when I discover that a poet whose work I admire has written a libretto, my heart sinks like a stone.)

Again, I am solely to blame for this blind spot.  But I fear that it is too late to be remedied.  I have sometimes toyed with the idea of learning ancient Greek in my autumn years.  But, attend another performance of Die Meistersinger?  I'm afraid not.

                            Stanley Spencer, "Scarecrow, Cookham" (1934)

All of this leads in a roundabout way to the following poem by James Reeves.  Opera may not be to my taste, but it may nonetheless be a mirror of Life.

                         Grand Opera

The lovers have poisoned themselves and died singing,
And the crushed peasant father howls in vain.
For his duplicity, lubricity and greed
The unspeakable base count is horribly slain.

After the music, after the applause,
The lights go up, the final curtain drops.
The clerks troop from the house, and some are thinking:
Why is life different when the singing stops?

All that hysteria and those histrionics,
All those coincidences were absurd.
But if there were no relevance to life,
Why were they moved to shudder and applaud?

Though they outlived that passion, it was theirs,
As was the jealousy, the sense of wrong
When some proud jack-in-office trampled them;
Only it did not goad them into song.

The accidents, the gross misunderstandings,
Paternal sorrow, amorous frustration
Have they not suffered?  Was the melodrama
An altogether baseless imitation?

James Reeves, The Questioning Tiger (1964).

                      Stanley Spencer, "Mending Cowls, Cookham" (1915)

"Virtue"

There is something to be said for staying the course.  (While being mindful that "everything passes and vanishes," as William Allingham writes.)  Or does staying the course only seem admirable from without?  Perhaps what is seen as faith and fortitude from the outside is resignation and habit from the inside.  On the other hand, this line by Bob Dylan has haunted me for quite some time (since 1975, to be exact):  "And old men with broken teeth stranded without love."  ("Shelter from the Storm," Blood on the Tracks.)

The following poem by Bernard O'Donoghue is, along with Norman MacCaig's "Old Couple in a Bar," offered as a further commentary on (i.e., an attempt to escape from) Charlotte Mew's "frozen ghosts" of Brittany.

                              George Bellows, "The Lone Tenement" (1909)

                           Virtue

He had been unfaithful once, unlikely
as that seemed when, silver-haired and blind,
he let her lead him up the aisle each Sunday.
Some Jezebel, the story was, had lured him
off to Blackpool one weekend, long in the past.
I went along to Mass when I came home,
and enjoyed hearing the praise on every side
of such an exemplary grandnephew.
After he died, she moved to sheltered housing
somewhere near Parbold in the scenic north
of Lancashire, but we sometimes still went
to take her to Mass, tearfully sniffing
into her scented hankie, recalling George
and how she missed his arm upon her shoulder.

Bernard O'Donoghue, The Times Literary Supplement (November 19, 2004).

                                George Bellows, "Blue Morning" (1909)

No Escape, Part Five: "Some Unhaunted Desert"

For this visit to the realm of the ideal place, a place that always comes up against the "wherever you go, there you are" problem, I wish to consider a poem written by Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex (1565-1601).  Caught up in the wars and court intrigues of Elizabethan times, Devereux had ample reason to long for a simpler, less dangerous life and land.

Happy were he could finish forth his fate
   In some unhaunted desert, most obscure
From all societies, from love and hate
   Of worldly folk; then might he sleep secure;
Then wake again, and give God ever praise,
   Content with hips and haws and bramble-berry;
In contemplation spending all his days,
   And change of holy thoughts to make him merry;
Where, when he dies, his tomb may be a bush,
Where harmless robin dwells with gentle thrush.

"Some unhaunted desert":  that phrase alone is worth a lifetime of writing, as far as I am concerned.  (But perhaps I am easily pleased -- "or else I'm getting soft," to quote Bob Dylan.)

Alas, Devereux's wish was not to be fulfilled:  he was beheaded on February 25, 1601, for his alleged involvement in a plot against Elizabeth.  His fate certainly adds poignancy to the poem, especially to: "then might he sleep secure."